Future stars: millions of dollars are on the line-not to mention childhood dreams-as the nation's top college football players prepare for the annual NFL scouting combine. Ensuring success means training on the cutting edge

Muscle & Fitness, July, 2008 by Joe Wuebben

It's a cattle call, a meat market, say its observers.

Three hundred or so young men, one at a time--often half-naked--stand before dozens, maybe hundreds, of middleaged men with clipboards and discerning stares, They're potential employers eyeing their prospects. National Football League coaches and scouts hope to find their next franchise quarterback, big-play wide receiver or run-stopping defensive tackle in this group of athletes, all fresh off their final season of college ball.

You wouldn't know whether there are dozens or hundreds of NFL personnel because you're not invited. The annual NFL Scouting Combine leading up to the NFL Draft is closed to the public--at least for now. Rumor has it the NFL will sell tickets as soon as next year to the RCA Dome in Indianapolis so fans can sneak a peek at their team's next superstar.

That's how big the NFL Combine has become.

Each player who's invited to participate is expected to complete a number of drills that measure everything: topend speed, lateral quickness, joint integrity and even IQ via the 40-yard dash, 20-yard shuttle, 60-yard shuttle, the "3-cone drill," standing broad jump, verticaljump, a 225-pound bench press test, position-specific drills, one-on-one interviews with team personnel, physical exams from doctors and the Wonderlic (IQ) Test. The faster your 40 time, the quicker your speed around the cones, the farther and higher you jump, and the more reps you bench, the higher you're likely to be drafted. The higher you're drafted, the bigger your signing bonus and the greater your annual salary.

And where there's money, there's painstaking preparation. Since the college football season ends in early January, players have as little as a month and a half to prepare for the Combine (this year it was held Feb. 20-26, more than two months before the April 26-27 NFL Draft in New York). And some of the drills they're expected to perform they may have never done before. (Players aren't required to participate in all drills; they can pick and choose.) Once an NFL hopeful signs with an agent--which must happen after his last college football game--he's typically sent off to begin intense Combine preparations with a trainer or, in many cases, a team of trainers and coaches.

Where teams of Combine training professionals are concerned, none have done it with more success than Athletes' Performance Institute (API). Founded in 1999 by renowned sports performance trainer Mark Verstegen, API's flagship facility is located in Tempe, Arizona--where a majority of its Combine clientele trains--but facilities are now up and running in Florida and Los Angeles as well. Since 2001, more than 40 athletes who trained for the Combine at API have been selected in the first round of the NFL Draft--including Mario Williams (the No. I overall pick in '06), JaMarcus Russell (first overall in '07) and Adrian Peterson (last season's NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year)--and more than Ioo others have gone in the second and third rounds.

API's major selling point is its "all under one roof" mantra. Not only are football players in the Combine program guided through six days of two-a-day training sessions per week (including both lifting and speed/agility work) by a team of strength and conditioning coaches, but also on-site is a full staff of registered dietitians and cooks (the "culinary team") to ensure each player is properly fed according to his individual goals and bodytype, soft-tissue massage therapists, chiropractors and individual position coaches. When you've got only two months to get stronger, faster and more agile, no detail is overlooked.

"About 10 years ago, [Verstegen] was one of the pioneers of taking Combine training and making it a real prep period so that players can shine at this," says API performance specialist Luke Richesson, who oversees the weightlifting portion of Combine preparation. "And not just with training, but from the Wonderlic scores and interviews, nutrition and the proper background on how players should train the rest of their careers. It has taken on an identity of its own.

"There are things specific to the Combine that we work on, whether it's with the short shuttle or the cone drill or specifically the 40-yard dash," he continues. "But I like to think that everything we're preparing the guys for is making them better football players overall--improving their movement skills, body awareness, strength and power output by giving them better mobility in their ankles, knees and hips, and reducing their risk of injury, giving them an awareness of how they should eat and how they should recuperate."

Last winter we visited the API facility in Tempe, and three future NFL players caught our eye, each for different reasons. One of them, a mammoth of a man, will make his living in the trenches; another is lean, shredded and wreaks havoc in the secondary; and the third, long and slender yet powerful, will earn his keep in the red zone. For two months, all three shared a common workplace: the gym.