JJ is known as one of the fiercest competitor’s in the league , how did he get this way you asked ? Well a lot of hard work and dedication but also by training smart and paying attention to what he eats (and it’s a lot ) This is how to Train like a Football Player!
This all started as a joke for JJ Watt. That’s what Taylor Jannsen thought, at least. Jannsen lives with an old friend in his hometown of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, in a two-bedroom, third-floor walk-up of an apartment building about five miles from town. He’s 25, a basketball personal trainer and coach just getting his business off the ground. It’s postcollege living at its purest: 1,000 square feet, beige appliances about his age, wall-to-wall carpet, and a pair of recliners in front of the TV. So when J.J. Watt mentioned he might want to crash on Jannsen’s floor, he didn’t take it seriously.
A few days later this spring, the Texans’ superstar defensive end was knocking at the door of apartment 3A, carrying a mattress and not much else.
Jannsen doesn’t know why he was surprised. He’s known Watt for the better part of a decade. A spot on the floor at the Manor1 gave Watt exactly what he wanted: a place to sleep while he wasn’t working out. Twice a day, Watt drove the 10 minutes to the gym he’s visited since he was 16, a place called NX Level, in a business park next to a machinery company. Watt’s parents live only a few minutes from the Manor. They thought his move home would mean seeing their son for dinner almost every night; they barely saw him once a week.
Suburban Wisconsin became Watt’s version of Rocky’s Siberia. The only traces of him were half a closet of button-down shirts, three printer-paper boxes of belongings, and a few pairs of size-19 chukkas and sneakers thrown in a corner. It was everything he needed.
“If you’re an outsider looking into my life, you’re thinking, That dude is crazy. He’s literally crazy,” Watt says.
Watt’s routine has always been maniacal, but the pains of last season are what pushed him to a spartan existence. Calling Watt’s 2012 season historic doesn’t do his performance justice. In his second year, he finished with a league-best 20.5 sacks, 39 tackles for loss, and 56 — the highest total in the 17-year history of the stat. He was named Defensive Player of the Year, and many believed he was the league’s rightful MVP. It was a type of dominance not seen since the days of Lawrence Taylor.
Repeating that was going to be next to impossible, but Watt came closer last year than most think. He was again a first-team All-Pro and could still lay claim to the title of best defensive player alive, but after three months without a win, blame becomes a virus. “When you’re 2-14,” Watt says, “you have moments of doubt.”
That’s why Watt is here, on this Wednesday in mid-June, having just finished another workout at NRG Stadium.2 As he sits down at a table in a half-lit room used for press conferences, his gray sleeveless T-shirt is soaked through with sweat. Four drinks — two waters and two small protein shakes — sit in front of him. It’s the Texans’ day off.
He’s here for the same reason that mattress was on the floor — because doubt was an unwelcome guest he would rather never see again.
“When it comes down to that moment,” Watt says, “when it’s me against you, you know in your head whether you worked hard enough. You can try to lie to yourself. You can try to tell yourself that you put in the time. But you know — and so do I.”
If the Texans would have had their way in 2011, Watt wouldn’t be in Houston. The plan with the 11th pick was to take an outside linebacker, someone who would ease the transition to Wade Phillips’s 3-4 defense. But when the linebacker options were off the board, Phillips offered up a contingency plan: If a quality defensive lineman was around, they could move former no. 1 overall pick Mario Williams to outside linebacker. There were two choices, with the room split nearly down the middle. Eventually, they landed on Watt.
