Written by Connor Orr at NFL.com
New head coaches are typically allowed a certain amount of leeway when it comes to interior decorating at a team’s facility, but the Ben McAdoo era looks and feels similar to what came before at first glance.
The clocks are still five minutes fast — former coach and current NFL senior advisor Tom Coughlin told McAdoo not to mess with them on McAdoo’s first day as the team’s offensive coordinator in 2014 — and the Lombardi Trophies are still polished and on display in the main lobby. The corridor between the cafeteria and the locker room is still lined with pictures of the team’s most legendary players on one side and silver-plated versions of newspaper articles from their championship runs on the other.
But continue north, down a hallway that leads to the player parking lot, and you’ll finally realize that day-to-day management has changed hands.
Welcome to the Giants’ new weight room.
“All great athletes are great movers,” head strength and conditioning coach Aaron Wellman, hired this year after McAdoo’s promotion, said during a tour of the facility early Tuesday morning. “Not all great athletes are the strongest guys, but they’re all efficient and they move well. Our mission is to maximize their strength, speed and power and minimize the amount of orthopedic stress we put on the body.
“Obviously, we’re going to stress their bodies, but when we talk about orthopedic stress, we’re talking about joint stress. We’ve put together a room that allows us to do all of that efficiently.”
The 35-yard-long open-concept workout facility is the most definitive evidence that the team is moving into another era. Rows of new Keiser machines — hulking, multi-use racks where players can perform anything from squats to gravity pull-ups — line the area from end to end, with removable plyometric boxes at the foot of each contraption. Players have certain lifts customized by speed to their position. There are charts measuring perceived exertion. More space between machines means more room for dynamic warm-ups to protect players against strain.
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