BALTIMORE _ When Jacob Rice met D.J. Fluker this spring, two things about the new client he'd agreed to train at his Seattle-area facility struck him, one obvious and one less so.
The first: "He's a huge dude. Huge. That dude is just a monster." The second: "He didn't understand food at all."
This was the Duality of D.J. that Rice came to grasp. Here was one of the nicest guys he would ever get to know, one of the smartest, one of the most athletically gifted, a 6-foot-5 frame you would dream up in a lab for an NFL interior lineman. And here was someone who seemed almost willfully ignorant of what his body needed to survive in professional football. There was something still to unlock in his game.
So long before Fluker arrived at Ravens training camp looking every bit the part of the team's starting right guard, before he cut almost 50 pounds from his hulking physique with eight-hour workouts, before he could do a single sit-up, he would show up to Rice's studio in Mercer Island, Wash., not having eaten much. Fluker wanted to get in shape, after all. A caloric deficit was an important piece of the puzzle.
Then the workouts would start. "Terrible," Rice called them. Because when Fluker was undereating, maybe it was just 1,200 calories per day, but they were "terrible" calories, too. To revitalize his career, Fluker would have to remake his body. And to remake his body, he'd have to reframe his thinking about what it required to run. He needed better fuel, better food.
"It's a challenge for any big guy," Fluker said in an interview Wednesday. "But what it came down to is really about mental toughness and having someone on your ass that cares about you as a person, more than just a player _ as a human being, for your own health. I think that really helped me. I had more of a structured way of doing things, and that helped. Structure helps. I don't care what you do. Structure helps, and it helps you to understand why you're doing what you're doing."
