Frozen Lupul stronger than ever
They call it the off-season, a time for rest and recuperation. But for a full month of Joffrey Lupul’s alleged vacation from the rigours of NHL life, the Maple Leafs veteran spent his days in relative agony.
Bent on changing the fortune of a career that has too often been waylaid by injuries, Lupul enlisted a new performance coach to armour his body for the grind of 82 games. But when the coach, Scot Prohaska, agreed to design a training regimen for Lupul, it came with a promise of sorts.
“I told him he was going to go through hell and back,” Prohaska said in a recent phone interview.
So on most days, after Lupul laboured through hours-long sessions pumping weights while Prohaska pushed his limits, the exhausted NHLer made a beeline for the painnumbing respite of a cryotherapy facility. There, he would pay the attendants to submit his body to a three-minute stint in a liquid-nitrogen deep freezer. In the midst of the sublime weather of a California summer, Lupul found comfort at minus-130 C.
“I was looking for any way to not be quite so sore,” Lupul said. “(The cryotherapy) actually gave me a lot of energy.”
A few months later, Lupul has been earning favourable reviews at Maple Leafs training camp. If his form has looked impressive in the estimation of head coach Mike Babcock, perhaps it hasn’t hurt that Lupul arrived in Toronto carrying more muscle than ever before, weighing in at 216 pounds. The hope, said Lupul, is that the extra mass packed onto his lower body and torso will help him “just stay healthy throughout the year.”
“Just stay healthy,” of course, has amounted to the impossible for much of Lupul’s career. In his most recent six NHL seasons, the 32year-old winger has played in just 62 per cent of available games — an average of 51 games per year in a typical 82-game season. Some of his maladies have been more serious than others. A 2009 surgery on a herniated disc led to a medical tailspin that saw Lupul contract a blood disease, lose about 40 pounds and go 362 days between NHL games. And while he recovered admirably enough to become an all-star after being traded to Toronto for the 2011-12 season, he hasn’t gone a full campaign without having his year interrupted by some ailment or another. He’s weathered a broken forearm, a separated shoulder, a grade 2 groin strain, a torn meniscus.
A couple of years ago, he missed a handful of games with what the team diagnosed as an “upper-body injury” that Lupul later acknowledged was a concussion. Last year, it was a broken hand and a “lowerbody injury” that kept him out for weeks at a time.
He has been, in some ways, the victim of a vicious circle. His injuries, along with the accumulated wear and tear of the 655 career NHL games for which he’s been well enough to be in the lineup, were making it difficult for Lupul to get himself into shape for peak performance.
That, at least, was the opinion of Prohaska, a Niagara Falls, N.Y.-bred coach now based in Lupul’s offseason home of Newport Beach, Calif., who made his name working with NFLers and MMA fighters. Prohaska, who was introduced to Lupul by Anaheim Ducks goaltender Frederik Andersen, whom Prohaska has also trained, said that when he learned of Lupul’s injury history and previous off-season training habits, he saw an athlete who’d fallen into a pattern common to veteran pros.
Lupul had become accustomed to “training around” various injuries, Prohaska said. A pair of back surgeries, for instance, had convinced him he couldn’t lift heavy weights in traditional training movements like, say, the barbell squat. In lieu, Prohaska said Lupul had come to favour core training and bodyweight exercises — the bodyweight lunge was a favourite. None of it, in Prohaska’s opinion, was the optimal route to NHL excellence.
“It’s not unusual. (Veteran pros) get banged up here, so they avoid this exercise. They get banged up there, so they avoid that exercise. They modify and modify their training. And before you know it, the training is so modified that it’s not even training anymore,” Prohaska said.
Prohaska said Lupul was in dire need of increasing his lean muscle mass, the benefits of which ideally include improved power, speed and injury prevention. Prohaska said he’s done research with his clients that indicate a reduction in lean muscle mass of just five pounds on a typical 200-plus-pound athlete reduces power output by 25 per cent while increasing the incidence of injury by 30 per cent.
Lupul said that in the pursuit of more muscle, Prohaska put him through a torturous array of weighttraining exercises. One example: Instead of the barbell squat, where the weight rests on the upper back, Lupul did variations like the Zercher squat, where the loaded barbell is inserted in the crooks of the elbows, in the fashion one would carry a pile of logs. And if Lupul shuddered a little as he recalled the training, he’s not alone.
Said Troy Niklas, a 23-year-old tight end with the Arizona Cardinals who also trained under Prohaska this past summer: “There’s days when Scot just crushes your legs and you feel like you want to die. You’re just like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ You come in the next day hardly being able to walk. And then he somehow finds a way to give you (another) good workout.”
After that onerous first month, Lupul was far enough along that Prohaska suggested the NHLer come along for an out-of-gym workout that involved running uphill sprints with NFL linebackers and running backs.
“At first (Lupul) was like, ‘No way. I can’t do that kind of stuff anymore in my career,’ ” Prohaska said.
But Prohaska convinced him that he had become strong enough to run alongside the physical freaks of the gridiron. Niklas, for one, said Lupul’s athleticism was impressive.
“I’m always impressed at how strong (hockey players) are for how skinny they look,” said Niklas, sixfoot-six and listed at 270 pounds. “A lot of times when hockey guys try to run on land, they look like they’re ice-skating still. But Joffrey runs pretty good on land, too.”
Prohaska also had Lupul work with a boxing coach, not to hone his skills for possible on-ice fisticuffs, but to see Lupul react to fight-or-flight situations “without favouring his back, without favouring his ribs, without favouring some of the injuries he’s had.”
Said Prohaska: “The boxing coach said, ‘This kid could be a pro boxer. He’s so snappy and explosive and talented.’ And I said to Joffrey, ‘Do you think you could have done that before we trained like that?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely not. I would have never ran with the NFL guys, because I would have pulled my hammy and my lower back.’ Then he was hooked. Then he was the first guy in the gym every day.”
Will his off-season discipline lead to on-ice production?
As Mike Babcock told reporters the other day: “If you work as hard has he has this summer, you’re way more likely to be more fortunate injury-wise.”
Staying in the lineup will require in-season vigilance, including regular planned phone consultations with Prohaska and a maintenance program that Lupul acknowledged will be onerous.
Lupul, for his part, has been around long enough to know the random chaos of the NHL cauldron is never easy to navigate. But he figures he is better equipped than ever to enter the fray.
“We’ll see,” said Lupul. “This is certainly the strongest I’ve ever been. Hopefully it translates into a little more power and speed on the ice . . . and lots of injury prevention.”
“I’m always impressed at how strong (hockey players) are for how skinny they look. A lot of times when hockey guys try to run on land, they look like they’re ice-skating still. But Joffrey runs pretty good on land, too.”
TROY NIKLAS NFL PLAYER