Eli Jackson needed to keep preparing for his college football future. Nick Hunter needed to keep a hold on his chance of a lifetime.

The two former Grayling High teammates and a few of their friends needed to lift weights and exercise, with area gyms and fitness venues closed. So together they improvised and created what they have dubbed the “Farm Boy Workout.”

“It's a good workout,” said Hunter, who joined Michigan State’s football team as a walk-on during the 2019 season. “It's basically a CrossFit kind of workout, because it's not terribly heavy weight. … You don't have a lot of weight, so you got to make it harder somehow.”

[ Michigan high schools were their breeding grounds. Now they're on the verge of an NFL dream ]

If necessity is the mother of invention, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has turned football players into the Frank Zappas of working out.

MSU’s Justin Stevens – an early enrollee from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia – posted a video to Twitter in March of himself lifting four massive tires. A teammate said fellow offensive lineman A.J. Arcuri is using cinder blocks and a wooden stick as weights, and defensive back and special teams standout Dominique Long lifts gallon water bottles.

Add Hunter to that list.

A Free Press first-team Division 5 all-state selection in 2018, Hunter finished his Grayling High career with 129 catches for 2,034 yards and 20 touchdowns. He went through MSU’s walk-on tryouts last fall but did not make the team. But days after Cam Chambers entered the NCAA transfer portal in October, Hunter was invited to join the Spartans. He did not play and took a redshirt.

The 6-foot, 180-pound wide receiver in January and February went through offseason conditioning with outgoing strength coach Ken Mannie and his replacement Jason Novak in preparation for new MSU coach Mel Tucker’s spring practice debut March 17.

“It was definitely different than high school,” Hunter said. “In high school, I never got pushed hard like that before.”

That all got canceled, as did the spring game. Instead, Hunter returned to Grayling from East Lansing on March 13 when his second semester on campus was cut short, and needed to find a way to keep up his intense training.

Enter Jackson, his former teammate and a senior fullback/linebacker at Grayling who will head to Division III Alma this fall.

When Grayling and the rest of the state schools learned March 12 they would be closing indefinitely, Jackson and his father began plans to convert areas inside a barn on their property, which used to be a dairy farm in the 1930s, into a makeshift workout facility. It includes a weight bench, a weight bar, about 225 pounds of plates and a punching bag, but that is not enough for a full-body workout.

So they improvised with things laying around – a sledgehammer to hit a tire to work shoulders and side muscles, jump-ups onto hay bails to work the legs, converting a crossbeam for pull-ups and dips, then using other beams for log press and toss. They are using the weight set to do power clean and snatches and lifting them on old, rubber horse mats to absorb the impact when they drop them.

“I would say the motivation is definitely Rocky IV, watching him work out in the snowy mountains of Russia,” Jackson said. “I was, like, 'You know what? We could we could get creative with this.’ ”

Hunter said Novak sent MSU players workouts to do, and he and Jackson have blended that together with the equipment they have.

“We took an old tractor tire and some sledgehammers and hit it for 20 reps as the warm up one day, and a warm up a different day was a truck push for 30 yards, do like three or four reps of that,” Hunter said. “Then we go into the barn, where he's got the bench and squat setup and we either do bench power clean or squat. Then we take some different, smaller tires and tie them around our waist (with hay twine), kind of like a parachute to have resistance and do some sprints with that. And we don't have dumbbells or anything, so for curls and stuff, we took these old feed bags and filled them up with rocks and stuff – we have like no idea what the weight is, but we just filled the bags up with stuff and just started curling them. …

“A lot of this we just created. I just tried to think of like stuff that we would do that we were doing for like the first week that we had coach Novak, and I was thinking like what muscle groups you're trying to hit. And then I talked to Eli and his dad about it, because him and his dad know about lifting.”

Jackson is supposed to report to Alma in August, though like Hunter’s return to MSU, school remains in limbo. But they both have seen early benefits from their ingenuity and hard workt.

“I guess since you're working with those logs, they're really, really thick," Jackson said. "It really tests your grip a lot more. So I'd say your forearms get activated more. And it kind of gets you swoll. … It's been pretty awesome.”

Contact Chris Solari at csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari. Read more on the Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Spartans newsletter.