Jim Owczarski

jowczarski@enquirer.com

WAUKESHA, Wisconsin – The thin stainless steel needles in the base of the skull wiggled, rising slightly with a roll of skin as Kevin Zeitler lifted his face out of the padded cradle. Forehead and cheeks flush, he squinted.

“It’s crazy when you’re 300-plus pounds and you’re running around all the time, what it does to your body.”

Positioned above Zeitler on the table, the acupuncturist’s knowing smile pushed his glasses up his face as he tapped more steel into Zeitler’s lower back. As he carefully perforated Zeitler’s left calf and down into the ankle, the Cincinnati Bengals’ 26-year-old right guard let out such a deep exhalation that it filled the room.

Zeitler, at 6 feet, 4 inches and 315 pounds, filled much of the small, windowless area in the NX Level performance-training facility in Waukesha, a southwest suburb of Milwaukee.

It was the start of an eight-hour workday in mid-March, one of many in the offseason in which Zeitler is preparing his body to play in residential traffic once a week for a minimum of 20 weeks with the happy goal of doing it for another four.

He isn’t getting paid, either. The checks won’t come until the games start.Zeitler is alone in this, away from the team. There is no supervision. By rule, he’s not allowed to have contact with coaches.

From the end of the season until the resumption of team workouts, any activity a player participates in is strictly of his own volition. It’s usually a time for rest, recovery, and the slow build back to the near impossible; to prepare a body for an activity in which the force of impact equals the collisions of cars.

In 2015, Zeitler logged 1,152 snaps over the 16 regular season games and the Bengals’ 18-16 wildcard loss to Pittsburgh on Jan. 10. After that he gave his body four weeks of much-needed rest. He started his workouts in earnest in February.

This particular week in March, Zeitler conducted his self-prescribed “double days” in the ramp up to the first voluntary workouts at Paul Brown Stadium. It began with the acupuncture, followed by 30 minutes of stretching the back and shoulders on firm foam rollers; a bright yellow softball in the lower back and two hours of what he calls a “holistic” approach to upper body conditioning.

That approach was developed by NX Level owner Brad Arnett, and Zeitler was part of a group of seven that included former Bengals teammates Dan France and Emmett Cleary, an NFL defensive lineman and several draft hopefuls.

This was Cleary’s second trip to the facility with Zeitler.

“It made me a better player,” Cleary said. “NX Level is a good, no-frills training environment. The program is functional and pragmatic and we really push each other."

NX Level is in an unmarked building set behind several baseball diamonds and could be dismissed as a housing facility for tractors. The Range Rovers, Denalis and a blue Maserati in the parking lot the only hint as to what is really going on inside, and who is doing it.

It’s huge – you could work on your golf short game if they put a green in. There is a sand pit, Sisyphean stones and tires fit for a bulldozer. Cardio equipment is confined to a corner, obstructed by a floor-to-ceiling curtain. It’s austere, cold.

NX Level is open to public memberships, but you don’t go there to exercise.

There is no whistle, no call, but at 10:30 a.m. Zeitler and the six other athletes rise from the stretching area and fall in line, shuffling their feet through ladders on the new turf as the first part of the workout.

Sixty minutes into the session, Zeitler headed to one of the walls spotted with dull marks, like the stain left after gum is pulled off the bottom of a shoe.

He picked up a medicine ball and chest passed it off the concrete.

Medicine balls don’t bounce.

Or, they’re not supposed to.

Zeitler’s was 45 pounds. He was essentially throwing two cinder blocks in a pillowcase to himself.

As an aide wiped the sweat off the ball, Zeitler returned to the weight rack and looked at his left forearm. “Well, that was exhausting.”

He inhaled deeply.

“Geez.”

And the day was just reaching the halfway point to halfway for Zeitler.

Yes, halfway.

After the medicine ball workout he participated in a tiered routine on the bench press – sets of eight, five, three and one, and then again with more weight. The 30-plus reps totaled more than 8,000 pounds. The first set alone Zeitler tossed the equivalent of a 1979 VW bus up with such ease it looked like he was pushing thin branches out of his view.

Then it was shoulders, triceps, back to shoulders, and then to the field for shuffles, turns and sprints.

The session ends unceremoniously – again, no whistle, no call – and Zeitler heads to his backpack and breaks out two plastic bottles.

“You see that?”

Zeitler’s massive shoulders heaved, his light grey Bengals shirt charcoaled with sweat.

“We lost a guy. He was pukin’.”

“That was great,” Zeitler said, exhilarated, shaking the bottles filled with supplements and protein. It had been nearly two hours of intense, incessant, work. The refrains of Metallica, Fun, Eminem, Katy Perry (yes), and Linkin Park comingled with intermittent vocalizations of encouragement and exertion, reflecting off the steel that, in turn, clanged against the structures that required it.

“I needed it.”

After a cool down, Zeitler slid his black backpack over a shoulder, climbed into his white Chevy Tahoe and headed home, just eight minutes away, to put away two meals in a four-hour window in preparation for getting after it again.

In order for Zeitler to do any of this, his body needs fuel. Massive amounts of it. But this sustenance isn’t just pumped with little regard to what’s in it. Zeitler’s regimen in this regard is as finely detailed as his lifts. He knows exactly what, and how much, he’s putting in to his body and the results that come of it.

Breakfast

Three whole eggs

Six whites

One cup of oatmeal

Add turkey to the eggs

One tablespoon of coconut oil

Preworkout powder mix

Caffeine, organine, beta and creatine

Postworkout

Protein shake (60-75 grams of protein, 40-50 grams of carbohydrates)

“Recover mix” (creatine, glutamine, BCAA)

Meal 2

8-10 ounces of protein (chicken, pork loin, steak, beef or turkey)

One cup of rice with eight ounces of sweet potatoes and one cup of quinoa

Vegetables (broccoli, asparagus)

Meal 3

8-10 ounces of protein

Vegetables

Nuts (macadamia, almond)

During a double day, Zeitler repeats his pre- and post-workout mixes before and after the second workout and two scoops of protein are added there.

Meal 4

8-10 ounces of protein

Vegetables

Nuts

Before bed, Zeitler downs a final two scoops of protein.

“It’s just nice, general guidelines,” he said of his nutritional list. “But if you do, let’s say go to Boca and stuff your face in out in Cincy, you know what to do to fix yourself. The biggest thing is you don’t want to just lose control of yourself because there’s things here or there. I just like being able to stay on top of stuff like that.”

The Princeton Club, a public gym in a low-slung building with blue trim in the suburb of New Berlin about eight miles southeast of NX Level, is home to the second half of the day.

It’s for normal people, for exercise and resolutions.

Zeitler, France and Cleary had to turn sideways to slide between the compact spacing of machines and moved entire racks of weights to the whir of the after work elliptical sessions.

Their mass caught sideways glances. So did the relative ease of the nearly 300 pounds they moved on every machine they touched.

Planks

Center, right, left, about 13 total minutes

Lat pulldown: 4 x 8

Seated row: 4 x 8

Fly super set

Fly machine: 3 x 8

Dumbbell flys: 3 x 8

Pullover: 4 x 8

The day ended on a “pull-up negative,” where they hung in a pull up position but brought their knees to the chest, holding for as long as possible.

“There’s not a lot of guys during this time that will do double days; there’s not a lot of guys that will do double days even getting ready for camp,” NX Level owner Brad Arnett said. “There’s not a lot of guys that will commit to that.”

This too was work, but less workmanlike than the earlier workout at NX Level. It contained a bit of unspoken competition but there was more conversation and camaraderie. As France pulled an 80-pound dumbbell over his head, steadied above his face, Zeitler and Cleary began rhyming for a “Dr. Suess of Gains” children’s book idea, making France laugh so hard his arms shook, nearly violating Zeitler’s first rule of that exercise: “Don’t break your nose.”

The day ended with a required cardio session, which was a spirited game of 3-on-3 with Zeitler gleefully setting picks on the spindlier opponents who learned, quickly, to pay him more mind than the ball handler.

That was it for Monday.

“They’re a blast,” Zeitler said of the double days. “It’s a tool. You can’t do it constantly, otherwise you do hit (a wall).

“That’s just me. It’s also fulfills a need I have. I love lifting and bodybuilding for the sake of it. I really enjoy getting a secondary boost to the body during the day. It’s never too crazy. It’s like five, six exercises, blast out.”

In his mind, Zeitler isn’t special when it comes to all this. He refuses to say he does anything more, or better. He shakes off the question that he can tell in April, or August or November, that he has put in more effort than another.

Part of what motivates him is the feeling that others are doing what he’s doing; especially those gifted with a more impressive genetic code.

“’Zeit’ is being modest,” said Cleary, who now plays for the New York Giants. “A lot of guys work hard, but most aren't doing double sessions in February, and almost nobody is as disciplined and intentional about the diet and recovery parts of the job.”

Arnett agrees with Cleary, and his base of comparison is a bit wider: Arnett has been training Olympians and professional athletes for two decades.

“There are a lot of guys in the NFL that take this entire time off,” Arnett said. “They don’t really do anything until they go back to their team for OTAs. And, the things that he does with me here, things he does on his own outside of here, the attention to detail he puts into his diet and taking care of his body, whether it be active recovery to soft tissue work, to all the things that go into keeping yourself at 100 percent, you’re going to find a small percentage of guys that pay that much attention to detail.”

Zeitler uses the “true offseason” of February, March and early April as a build up for voluntary workouts mid-to-late April, organized training activities in May and minicamps in June. There, he works out with the team.

July is off for the players, and that is when Arnett admits he’ll “check their fortitude.” to get them ready for training camp. But it’s calculated carefully, programmed, timed, and all movements mimic game play.

“We can increase intensity, play with the volume, get them practice ready,” Arnett said of that next step. “That’s a concept people sometimes forget about: they’re still not playing a game right away.

“They’re still going to use practice time and training camp as a further conditioning tool to get ready for the game. But there’s one thing that you can’t prepare for somebody for, or try to mimic, that’s contact. The only way you’re going to get ready is, guess what? You’ve got to have contact.”

This Tuesday at NX Level, “leg day,” began as Monday did with the dynamic warm-up, but there were subtle changes to the routine – like the addition of bear crawls and standing on one foot, shoeless, on a blue foam pad, slowly extending the other around like hands on a clock.

Zeitler wanted to focus on his foot speed this offseason, his quickness.

“I’m a big guy – gotta be a dancing bear out there,” he laughed. “Gotta get moving.”

There were explosive drills such as jumping off a box into an underhand toss of a small medicine ball – an exercise that quickly turned competitive.

The fullback from the day before walked away from his first set saying “We should be timing these. I’ll kill everyone.”

By the end of the set one of Arnett’s assistants was timing the last few throws for hang time, which ended with a college lineman besting an NFL player’s.

“You prick,” the lineman said, shaking his head with a grin.

This workout was to a soundtrack that was distinctly harder than the day before – Zeitler put up his hands and head banged to System of a Down’s “Mesmerize” as he waited his turn to push the weighted sleds down the field.

It’s the one exercise where Zeitler didn’t know the weight: “Whatever it is, I’m going to push it.”

Standing near the wall of open-faced lockers at NX Level, just after he pushed that sled across the turf field to conclude his workout, Zeitler wouldn’t – couldn’t – say all of this work, the acupuncturist, the chiropractor, the masseuse, the pre-hab from the physical therapist, was strictly so his body could hold up.

Yes, it is about being able to play in traffic every day, but it’s also about being able to push each compact car – and the occasional crossover – to the end of the block when you’ve already done it 65 times. And once there, you have to have enough left to do it again. And again.

That is necessary.

But at some point it has to be for more than that. It has to transcend from the purely physical to quixotic. Signing a new contract, building a dream home. Winning the playoff game, the Super Bowl.

“Dreaming is always fun,” he said. “It keeps you going.”

He paused.

“As long as you get your work done, dreaming is always fun.”

There is something to be said about what pushing your body to new levels means in the long run – when it’s late in the year in the fourth quarter in Denver and you have to move 290-pound Malik Jackson for a first down. But to do that, Zeitler says he has to continue to build on that offseason foundation once he’s in season.

“I’m a big believer in ‘if you maintain, you lose’ in season, so the goal…”

The acupuncturist tapped a needle into his left calf.

“Ah! Fudge! That was pure electricity. Oh my gosh!”

He exhaled.

“If you maintain you lose,” he began again. “The goal is you can get stronger in season. So when we lift, on Mondays, I lift hard. Yes, maybe I’m dinged up in such a way that maybe I can’t do a pure squat, but if I’m going to go do leg press I’m going to go hard on the leg press. Or if I’ve got a messed up elbow and I can’t bench for real, I’m going to go hard on the chest press or the dumb bells.

“I believe in ‘attack it.’”

Face down in the cradle, he exhaled deeply again. Zeitler took pride in being able to “talk with needles in my neck,” but his breathing slowed, the needles in his neck and back wobbling in unison. The acupuncturist silently motioned to the door. The day was just beginning.