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D’Aguilar, too, has an ACL reconstruction on his resume from last off-season — it was revealed to be an old injury from his high school days, so it isn’t included in Tsoumpas’ stats — and it sidelined him well into the 2015 season.

After a winter of rehab last year, D’Aguilar is back to a functional movement focus heading into his fourth CFL campaign.

“The majority of the off-season, the only competition guys will encounter is the squat rack,” D’Aguilar noted. “When you’re playing in a game, you’re playing against another elite athlete who’s highly trained, so I don’t understand just going in and pushing a bar or pulling whatever, and then (on the football field) you have someone who’s trying to grab you.

“Football is not controlled at all. When we train, traditionally, it’s all straight ahead or side to side. In football, you can’t control anything. And even if you can control your own body, you’ve gotta control it with a 300-pound guy trying to block you, hold you, whatever.”

While there’s always going to be a weight training aspect to every off-season, it’s far from the focus these days, especially with Tsoumpas’ statistics showing a Stampeders team with less man games lost to injury over the past two seasons.

“I feel a lot of injuries come from not being used to using those ranges of motion,” said D’Aguilar, who decided against testing the free-agent market this winter to sign a new one-year deal with the Stamps. “When you use them explosively and with other people’s resistance, you’re asking for trouble and you’re going to get hurt. We’re trying to take that aspect out to where we’re not getting hurt by those little things.

“It’s about being able to adapt on the fly, because that’s what football is. If you can do that with jiu jitsu, gymnastics, all these different things that are all a lot more functional that football training, that’s the goal.”

smitchell@postmedia.com

On Twitter: @Scott MitchellPM