THE DURABILITY KING
You might not know him (yet), but JONATHAN TAYLOR is one of American football’s most innovative and relentless players. Here’s how the running back trains for total athleticism – and side-steps injuries in the process
No player took more of a pounding last season than 23-year-old Jonathan Taylor. The 5ft 10in, 16st Indianapolis Colts running back covered the most distance on the field for his team in 2021, carrying the ball 332 times (the second-highest total in football since 2015) and rushing (a running play without a forward pass) 552 yards further than any other athlete. And Taylor didn’t miss a single game either. This season, he’ll be expected to do the same thing.
Taylor knows this won’t be easy. He – and the rest of the NFL (National Football League) – is well aware of the ways in which running backs like him inevitably break down after just a few seasons of big hit after big hit. New York Giants star Saquon Barkley started his career with back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons but hasn’t played a full season since. And then there’s Christian McCaffrey of the Carolina Panthers, too – he’s only played 10 games over the past two seasons due to injury. Big-time running backs in today’s NFL don’t last long.
Then again, Taylor’s never been broken, not in three years at the University of Wisconsin
(where he twice ran for 2,000-plus yards) and not in his last two seasons with Indy. And he doesn’t plan to let that change either, which is the reason why he’s borrowing from the NFL’s original innovator of wellness, Tom Brady, and rethinking what he requires from his training plan.
Bigger, stronger and faster have long been the goals most players have had in the off-season – and they’re the traits that draw the most attention at every training camp. But five years ago, when Brady released his bestselling book, The TB12 Method: How To Achieve A Lifetime Of Sustained Peak Performance, the league began to change. Instead of just training until exhaustion to make quick fitness gains, Brady chased longevity, focusing on band and core work to stabilise and strengthen injury-prone joints and emphasising recovery. This shift in training has been duplicated across the league (and in all sports, really), with more players prepping with long-term goals in mind.
Taylor was paying attention, and his take on longevity has him chasing a quality that increasingly eludes those who play his position: long-term durability. ‘We all know the sport we play – [the] injury rate is 100%,’ he says. ‘So being able to be flexible, be mobile, you hope everything you’re doing in the off-season, all the work you do, mitigates your chance of injury as much as possible.’
On this mid-summer morning, Taylor is seated on a massage table at a gym in Weston, Florida. He takes a deep breath, then twists his torso, rotating his chest to the left. He holds for five seconds, then returns to the centre and repeats the motion on the other side. Taylor barely blinks during the entire process. ‘He doesn’t have an emotional response,’ says Jermaine Gordon, Taylor’s massage therapist. ‘JT knows what we’re doing.’ It was Taylor who prompted Gordon to work this movement into his training. Early in the off-season, Taylor had approached the therapist to discuss his core muscles. Gordon discovered that there was room for improvement in the superstar running back’s ability to rotate his torso. And Taylor was excited to address this. So trunk-rotation training became a point of emphasis. ‘JT knew exactly what he needed,’ Gordon says.
Don’t worry: this story isn’t all about trunk rotations – Taylor’s bulletproofing summer involves more. It’s 7am, three
hours before trunk-rotation time, and he’s on a turf field on a humid day that’s only going to get hotter.
Part of his pursuit of longevity involves maintaining both his unique breakaway speed and strength. So, for about three hours a day, six days a week, he trains. There are classic weightroom sessions, where he benches as much as
170kg, and plenty of sprint drills to help him preserve (and maybe even improve) his electric 4.39-second 40-yard-dash (36.58m) speed.
The length of Taylor’s sessions seems to run counter to his objective of durability, especially in this fitness era. More and more, trainers encourage clients to work through shorter sessions and focus on recovery to make their greatest gains. But Taylor’s trainer, Adam Boily, sees training duration differently. On Sundays, Taylor will take to the field for three to four hours. His body needs to understand those rigours.
Taylor and Boily have revamped his three-hour sessions, though. Increasingly, they spend time helping the running back’s body recover. ‘Back in the day, we trained hard: we were out in the sun, we were doing three hours a day, then recovery, then medical, then nutrition,’ Boily says. ‘Now, the workouts are getting more efficient. But that should only mean you have more time to do more work.’
Taylor doesn’t mind. Clad in a long-sleeved windbreaker, he starts with a 25-minute (yes, that long) warm-up that includes barefoot footwork drills and sled drags to hone his running technique. He finishes with movement prep: six small yellow squares are lined up, with the corners touching to form a circle. Every few seconds, Boily points to a square. Taylor must quickly step one foot into it, then back to the centre, all while continuing to shuffle his feet.
The drill, which Boily calls the ‘in-place, multidirectional edge work’ exercise, represents another innovative shift in Taylor’s training.
Yes, plenty of players do footwork drills, but few do them as frequently as Taylor does. Boily’s programme has him taking them on several times weekly – and with them, he’s accomplishing more than honing his agility. Whenever he pushes off his foot, he’s teaching his ankle muscles and tendons to absorb the force of his body at a different angle, insulating a key joint against injury.
Taylor does this near flawlessly for three 30-second rounds. In between, Boily watches Taylor’s three training partners slip during the demanding sequence, which serves as a reminder that the Colt is a special athlete. ‘His body is biomechanically set up for athleticism,’ says
Boily. ‘The way his feet and ankles are, the way his hips and bone structure is… the structure of the way he’s set up is built for power and speed.’
Taylor knows he needs more – and he has known that since he started working with
Boily three years ago. Boily prides himself not merely on working out players but also on educating them. That ethos agreed with the curious Taylor, who wants to understand every adjustment that his trainers make. Boily enjoys focusing on the little things, too, so he has happily worked with Taylor to correct his oblique imbalance. He has also worked to improve Taylor’s ankle mobility, teaching him to dorsiflex, or upwardly flex his feet, more effectively. This just might make Taylor harder to tackle in 2022 – and it’ll help to safeguard his ankles against injury, too. ‘Ankles,’ Boily says, ‘are of the utmost importance to athletes.’
These are the tips that Taylor really appreciates, the adjustments that can simultaneously keep him healthy and help him squeeze a little more athleticism out of his already optimised body. And after three years with Boily, he’s learned plenty of others. When there’s a lull in the session, Taylor talks about his love of body-weight isometrics, such as push-up holds and squat holds. They’ve helped him strengthen his ‘end range of motion’, he says, essentially ensuring that his muscles and joints can maintain stability when, say, his knee is bent to its max or his shoulder is stretched overhead at an awkward angle.
Taylor slips into full-on trainer-speak when explaining his final speed drill, the overspeed sprint. He straps a band to his waist and hands one end to Boily, who lines up around 9m away. Boily starts running away from Taylor, as fast as he can, practically dragging the player behind him. Taylor starts sprinting all out, faster than ever, thanks to the momentum Boily’s created. ‘It allows
‘WE ALL KNOW THE SPORT WE PLAY – THE INJURY RATE IS 100%’ JONATHAN TAYLOR
you to run faster than you necessarily can on your own,’ Taylor says, ‘but it trains or programmes the body to get used to that speed. So now, you do it with enough repetitions, your body is like, “Oh, I can move that fast.”’
Three sprints later (with plenty of rest in between), Taylor changes shirts, then hits the weight room, working through heavy bench-press reps. Once he’s done with that, he saunters over to the training table so Gordon can put him through those trunk rotations and several other stretches. And as always, Taylor asks Gordon questions the entire time. ‘He’s a student of his body and willing to try new things,’ Gordon says. ‘Yes, there are players like that, but
I’d say usually later in their career.’
But for Taylor, the chase for longevity means asking those questions now. Because trunk rotations and ankle dorsiflexion are just as important as speed and strength work. ‘Some guys are crazy good and talented, even without all those things that can benefit them,’ he says. ‘Then imagine them doing all these things. It’s insane to think about.’
Or it’s Jonathan Taylor, circa 2027 – and still holding on to the title of the best running back in the league.