The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [145]
The fumes were so strong that they cleared my sinuses from 10 feet away. I weaved around trainees to get to the shelf where the bottle stood on end.
“McTarnahan’s Absorbent Blue Lotion”
Methyl salicylate 3%
Menthol 1.7%
Camphor 1.7%
There was a huge horse head on the front of the label, mane flowing in the wind. It was, after all, racing horse liniment.
In Joe DeFranco’s gym, slotted invisibly in the back of an industrial park next to a Chevy dealership, the tools are chosen without regard to popularity. If it works and it’s legal, it’s fair game.
The Science and Business of Running Faster
The NFL Scouting Combine is the ultimate job interview.
Once a year in February, the 330 best college football players are invited to Indiana’s Lucas Oil Stadium, and the top NFL coaches and talent scouts spend a week determining their worth. At the top of the list in importance are the “measurables”—physical tests that allow each of the 330 players to be measured against every other. These tests include a vertical jump, the 40-yard dash, a three-cone agility drill, and the bench press for repetitions with 225 pounds.
The NFL draft, later held in Radio City Music Hall, is the first time the teams can make offers and negotiate contracts with potential players. Players are picked over seven rounds, and with rare exceptions, the earlier you are picked, the more you are paid.
How much can Combine results affect ultimate pay? A lot. One inch or one-fifth of a second can make the difference between millions of dollars and nothing at all.
Almost all of the players come into the Combine signed with sports agents, whose job it is to make sure their clients are worth as much as possible. The sales pitches of many top agents, intended to snag the cream of the crop, include a name: “If you sign with me, I can get you trained with DeFranco.”
Joe DeFranco, the Yoda of the Combine, is best known for creating monsters who jump higher and run faster than they should. The NFL has had to change the rules to keep up with him. To wit: the three-cone drill.
The rules of the three-cone drill are straightforward. First, the athlete must get in a three-point stance (both feet and one hand down) behind the line, just like the start of a 40-yard dash. Second, the athlete must run five yards, touch the far-side line with his right hand (not left), then immediately run back and touch the starting line with his right hand, after which he sprints across the opposite line.
One of Joe’s athletes, Mike Richardson of Notre Dame, ran the fastest three-cone drill ever recorded at an official NFL Combine or Pro Day:1 6.2 seconds. Joe explains how he did it:
Since the rules of the test dictate that you must touch both lines with your RIGHT hand, I discovered that it would be much more efficient to get in a less-common “left-handed” stance when performing this test.… Simply put, the left-handed stance enables the athlete to cover the 1st 10 yards in two fewer steps; when you’re talking about TENTHS of a second, two steps makes a huge difference! Taking 2 less steps can shave up to 4 tenths of a second off of this test. And when we’re talking about the NFL Combine tests, 4 tenths of a second is an eternity that can mean millions of dollars for an athlete.
Some of the NFL scouts now disallow left-handed starts at the Combine. This is amusing since some athletes are, well, left-handed. Unhindered, DeFranco continues to produce record-breakers, always one step ahead. Pros on all 32 teams have been through his machine.
But was DeFranco really that good? Or was he using the favorite trick of PR-savvy trainers: babysitting genetic freaks for a year and then basking in their performances?
Amid 600-pound tires and chains, I had come to his storage facility to find out.
Forty-eight hours later, I had:
• Increased my vertical jump three inches (matching the gym’s single-session improvement record)
• Improved my 40-yard dash by 0.33 seconds (beating the previous single-session record of two-tenths of a second)
This chapter and the next will explain how