If a player was going to adjust his offseason routine, this was definitely the offseason to do that.
With no OTA or minicamps, staying in football shape was solely the responsibility of the player. Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin had praise for his team in how they handled themselves in isolation. “[I’m] continually impressed with the things that were important to us coming into this environment,” he said in a press conference last week. “The overall conditioning of the group, they are continuing to display good preparedness in that area.”
That includes wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, who said in a pre-camp press conference on Monday that he spent most of the offseason working Corey Calliet, a high-performance personal trainer.
“I wanted that one-on-one session where I could tone down my body, get more lean, get more ripped, become stronger,” said Smith-Schuster. He added that he’s lightest he’s been in his career so far and “also a little quicker”.
“I wanted him to gain muscle, but I wanted him to be able to learn how to use that. Because you can gain muscle and get slower,” JuJu’s trainer Corey Calliet told Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Brian Batko in May. “We gained the muscle and got faster, so we knew he was using the body right. That was one of the biggest things. And he was able to see his transformation, day after day after day.”
In the past, the wide receiver typically worked out in a group setting, but due to the virus, things were different this year. JuJu said that, although it was he took a new workout route this offseason, his level of commitment is no different.
“I think every year, you always find something new. … I pretty much trained with my trainer for a couple months, then I came to the Steelers about a month early just to get some work in, show face, and I don’t think I did it for a contract. It’s more so, every year I’m learning something new and how I can become better as a player for the team.”
