“Don’t be a wuss.”
It’s a phrase I repeat to myself two or three times a day. Sometimes it’s to check my middle class privilege at the door, but more often, and this is more germane to the topic at hand, I’ll repeat it to myself when I want to be lazy and spend any rare down time curled up on my couch with my dog, air conditioning blowing in my face and a book in my hand. There’s really nothing better than a good book and my dog lolling, Snoopy-like on his back eagerly anticipating a scratch of the belly. But last month, Nike was kind enough to invite DIME and a few other sports outlets to Texas to get us started on their “Limitless Potential” training in the lead-up to the 2016 Olympics in Rio, and shirking what that entails is what a wuss would do. The toughest part of the Nike training is actually motivating myself to — all written puns are intentional — “just do it.”
Except, that’s Nike’s own slogan. My mantra isn’t as ubiquitous. It’s more masochism as a way to motivate. My interior monologue goes as follows (it likes to curse):
“Don’t be a wuss.”
“Who you calling a wuss?”
“You, you wuss.”
“F*ck you.”
It’s around then I work out, just to spite that figurative voice in my head.
You see, denigration is the best way to get me to do something. Comfort breeds laziness, and aside from all the work basketball editors have to do this time of year — the playoffs, draft and then free agency come one after another, lickety-split — I’m pretty comfortable. Most people just wanna zonk out after a long hard day working and I’m no different. But I also hate when someone says I can’t do something.
Almost everyone in my life told me I wouldn’t ever be able to quit drinking; I haven’t had a drink in over five and a half years (2007 days as of this writing, but who’s counting). Not a soul thought I’d then be able to quit smoking cigarettes cold turkey. My last one was in early May 2015. I’m a professional quitter at this point, but you shouldn’t let me quit this Nike training.
Voice in my head: “Don’t be a wuss.” “F*ck you, I’m not.”
Rinse, repeat.
But this rare opportunity to train like an Olympian does for eight weeks has been wasted so far, and any extra motivation calling me a wuss in the comments will really help. I haven’t gone full throttle and I’m in danger of embarrassing myself further when we all meet up again in a month’s time.
Let me go back a bit, so you can get a better appreciation for what Nike is trying to do with those of us asked to participate.
In mid-May of this year, right in the throes of the NBA Playoffs, Nike flew me and other basketball writers (as well as a soccer and track and field contingent) down to nowheresville, Texas (it was actually McKinney, Texas) to congregate at the Michael Johnson Performance Center (MJPC). The state-of-the-art facility is where Nike got a baseline on our physical fitness. There’s a pic of our basketball group above, and here’s my smaller squad for the assessments.
(I told them to do a dead serious face for the pic, but I couldn’t follow my own instructions)
When I say they got a baseline on our fitness, that’s a severe undersell. They measured every single thing you can measure, including our brains — where I didn’t fare so well. I’m halfway convinced they would have evaluated how I can inhale chicken wings and cheeseburgers, and the only reason they didn’t is because they had us eat a healthy diet when we were in Texas (note: I was pretty hungry). But the following 12 tests are the same assessments Nike gives to all their Olympians, and now you get to see just how out-of-shape I really am.
Functional Movement Screen (FMS)
This was bonkers, if only because even the Nike trainers were alarmed at how poorly we all were performing. It’s a 10-minute unweighted assessment of seven exercises developed by a physical therapist near the turn of the millennium and it is very hard.
The hardest exercise was when they had us on our hands and knees. With our hands perpendicular to our torso, we were asked to lift and reach out our left hand and left leg, simultaneously. We asked our incredibly flexible and strong girlfriend to try this when we got back, and she did it, but the trick is doing it on the board, where you can’t wiggle your other side to help support yourself. No one could really do it on the board. That’s the point, we guess. You’re using muscles you don’t usually give any time to.
But that wasn’t all I sucked at. Here are the results:
Before you totally make fun of me for the push up issue, I can do a push up just fine, many of them in fact, but not how they wanted. We can have a push up contest later, but it shows just how badly I am at the stability push up and the overhead squad. Scores of 1 are really bad.
Physical Therapy Evaluation
They were making fun of me because my hamstrings are so tight. The FMS and Y-Balance tests are important, but this interview and physical examination process can pinpoint why things are the way they are. It was here where one of the trainers first realized how much I favored my left foot because of the shredded ligaments and screw in my right one.
Y-Balance Test
This one was less drastically awful, at least for me, but it did expose how badly my right ankle supports my weight. The Y-Balance test is a part of the FMS, but it has more to do with flexibility and a body’s equilibrium, which can let trainers know how susceptible you might be to an injury or re-injury.
I have a screw in my right ankle from a decades-old soccer injury I sustained in high school. Both the trainers and the evaluators doing the tests were able to suss out my resulting improper body balance almost immediately. If you want to know more about the Y-Balance test, check out their official site. If I think too much about it, my confidence will be shot even more.
Firstbeat Heart Rate Assessment
The first night we were all gathered in McKinney, we were asked to put on the Firstbeat heart rate monitor, which was — by far — the most awkward thing we were asked to perform over the three days. We wore it at all times except when we were sleeping This little baby tracks EVERYTHING, including your sleep patterns. As you can see from my results, the first night I did really well, and earned over a 90 percent recovery despite my limited sleep (I almost never sleep more than five hours on most nights). The second night it dropped A TON, all the way to 14 percent, which is really really bad. I have no idea what could account for the change except that I was pretty hopped up that second night from the conference finals game and all the measurement testing I did that day. That’s really the only explanation I have. The sleep didn’t feel any better or worse at the time.
InBody Body Composition Analysis
After getting strapped up to the InBody 770 Body Composition Analyzer, I found out I’ve got about 15 percent body fat, which isn’t so bad. Huzzah! Except, I’m naturally svelte (I’ve been 6-foot-3 and around 180 pounds for over a decade), and it could be a lot better considering my gift of a metabolism.
The InBody 770 doohickey measures fat, muscle and water levels by attaching electrodes to your hand and foot and sending low-level currents through your body. It’s a lot better than a simple BMI measurement which doesn’t take into account muscle mass.
The whole thing sounds a lot weirder than it feels, except the guy doing the test was a former NFL adonis who had me and every other guy there feeling like we were the worst physical specimens in history.
7-Point Skin Fold Test
Unlike the InBody test, this one was somehow more humiliating, because the caliper they used to measure specific areas on your body were incredibly judgmental. Most of the people in attendance were in pretty good shape, considering they were all some form of journalist or writer, but this still wasn’t fun at all, and I scored pretty poorly. (No, I’m not showing my results, or my pictures. Have some decency!)
Foot Biomechanics
This was fun. The MJPC has an in-house research lab with two full-time staffers manning and tracking 3-D images of your foot. Besides the 3-D imaging we had done, sensitive pressure plates were used to track how we actually walked. We don’t need to explain how important your gait and the way your feet interact with the ground can have on your performance as an athlete. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but this level of granularity can help Olympic athletes immeasurably if the difference between a gold and fourth place is just a fraction of a second.
This was probably my favorite station because I’m pretty standard, and walking is easy. Here are my pressure points during a casual walk:
Aptus Mental Assessment
Whoops, hold that last thought. I was very bad at this. I was one of the last people to finish and I didn’t really understand what they were doing for the first five to 10 minutes of the station. I’m also not that smart. I mean, I can web log about the NBA pretty well, but no one has ever accused me of being very smart.
This was a 30-minute exam with 10 exercises performed on a tablet. It’s about defining and showing how the test taker processes instructions in multiple different venues. Towards the end of the test they even pump in crowd noise to your headphones as the exercises get increasingly more difficult.
Here were their general observations, which weren’t as bad as I first thought:
-Adjusts well to coaching during execution of assignments
-Executes assignments well throughout the entire competition
-May worry about executing too quickly once instructions are retained
-Extremely quick when illustrating concepts
But then I’d get stuff like this:
“You tend to struggle with memorizing complex concepts and/or mastering complex skills.”
And this doozy that I might have framed as extra motivation to stop being such a knucklehead:
“You tend to struggle with memorizing straightforward concepts.”
And, well, I already feel like a dumb dumb, so let’s not exacerbate it further.
This felt like an IQ test, and I didn’t do well. Moving on.
Omegawave Readiness Test
This ties into the sleep patterns because we were asked to wear a diode and then told to get as comfortable as possible and even fall asleep if we could. Because this came directly after the Aptus Mental Assessment, I spent the entire time trying to feel better about my mental acuity by remembering a specific poem I had known by heart in high school. Instead of helping, I just grew increasingly frustrated at what time and too many chemicals in college had done to my already limited cerebral cortex.
So I didn’t sleep and didn’t even achieve a trance-like “om” state I was hoping to arrive at. The Omegawave measures how rested you really are, rather than relying on your own feelings. As we saw with my sleep patterns, I had no idea my second night of sleep was infinitely worse than my first one. The Omegawave can more accurately pinpoint how recovered you really are using heart rate and brain waves to measure the sympathetic, parasympathetic and metabolic systems. As you can guess, my score was below average.
Spencer measured a 3 out of 7 for overall readiness. Central Nervous System readiness was suppressed and all 4 windows of trainability (endurance, speed, strength, and skill) were not compromised. These measurements indicate that Spencer had a low readiness to train at a high intensity that day. Some modifications would have been needed to his plan for that day.
Jumping and Landing Mechanics Assessment
Again, a pretty easy one because they asked us to drop down from a small distance and immediately jump again. Then there was a one-foot jump, toe touches, standing vertical, moving vertical etc. Jumping isn’t just one thing, but they over-analyzed how we jumped because it plays a large role in how we’ll fair on a basketball court. Obviously the recovery time once you land is important; I kept screaming about an Enes Kanter rebound because he’s so damn bouncy on the offensive glass.
Wingate Bike Test
One of my personal favorites because all you gotta do is pedal as hard as you can. It’s not complicated, and it doesn’t require a lot of brain power; I have a pretty good wind and very little between the ears. Plus, they let us scream bloody murder while we were doing it, and I took full advantage to show off my arsenal of angry exclamations. DON’T BE A WUSS SPENCER.
Others were less enthused because the 30-second Wingate involves an expensive stationary bike. The bike offers up some resistance — this isn’t that cool 10-speed you got when you were 12 — that’s calibrated for your specific body weight. You pedal against this resistance as hard as possible for 30 seconds. Afterwards, they actually measure how quickly your heart rate returns to its normal measurements, but the data compiled by the bike is an impressive window into your anaerobic power and capacity. Here’s what they said about me on the bike (of course I’m gonna quote the stuff where I wasn’t awful).
“Spencer recorded a 12.46 peak power relative to his body weight during the 6s max effort test. This is slightly above the average of 11.81 relative peak power for athletes tested at MJP. Spencer also achieved 12.28 relative peak power during the 30s anaerobic power test. This is slightly above the 11.54 average relative peak power during the 30s test for athletes tested at MJP.”
I’m obviously amazing.
The Beep Test
This is simple to explain, but it was perhaps the least pleasing non-brain or rest focused endeavor of the day for me. Basically, you have a certain amount of time to traverse 20 meters. After each interval of time, the runners will hear a beep, which means they’re to head the other way for their next 20 meters. The time between beeps gets shorter and shorter as you keep going. It’s basically a stress test measuring your peak oxygen intake (or VO2 Max).
I did better than some of the other basketball media folks in my group, but I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought. I was below average when I saw the final numbers. By how much, I’d rather not say, but it was the stopping and starting that did it for me.
I can run forever and not get that tired. Sure, I can’t sprint full out or anything, but a brisk jog is something I can maintain for well over 10 miles and could probably run a marathon if someone challenged me to complete one. Remember, people telling me I can’t do something is my best motivation tool. Running long distances has never been my problem though, at least since I quit smoking those delicious Camel Lights. No, for me it’s the circuit training, the stopping and starting; It just kills me. My recovery and rest are so bad that I just can’t keep up. That’s why I look like I’m about to hurl in the above photo after this station.
At this point I’ve brought you through all the things that were measured during Nike’s Limitless Potential opening week, but in the ensuing five weeks after we were measured, I’ve grown increasingly lazy about working out. I’ve missed multiple one-on-one training sessions with my amazing coach, Armond Jordan, and I’ve even missed one of the team workouts Nike was kind enough to throw in New York. In a word, I’ve been a wuss.
I put nearly all the blame for this on the Western Conference finals and NBA finals going seven games this year, followed immediately by the draft. Then, of course, there’s free agency, which hasn’t even started yet, but already has me worried we’ll miss important developments. That’s why I’m letting y’all know about what I’m doing so late after our initial assessment in Texas.
Except, those are just excuses. I got lazy and my eating and sleeping habits were already awful, so that just compounded the laziness. I’m trying to change and really train like an Olympian, but there are only so many hours in the day, and it’s been made increasingly clear that not only am I not an Olympic athlete, but I’m barely passable as just a regular old athlete.
I played multiple varsity sports in high school, and I like to think I’m a little bit more adept at the whole sport thing than most of my peers, but that’s just hubris at this point. The empirical data Nike gathered on me says otherwise.
Enough b*tching and moaning. I just gotta stop being a wuss and get back at it before it’s too late.
