Christian McCaffrey’s Quest for Speed, Strength, and Calm

This story is part of Men’s Health‘s Get NFL Strong package, a series of stories that explore the different kinds of physical and mental fitness it requires to succeed in the toughest sport on earth. Read all the stories here.

EVERY OFF-SEASON for the past seven years, Christian McCaffrey, the San Francisco 49ers’ All-Pro running back, has met up with Brian Kula, C.S.C.S., a trainer he’s worked with since eighth grade. They talk about any injuries and any niggling pain from the previous season, do a battery of strength and movement tests, and then create a program “to turn CMC back on.”

What they’re turning on is primarily strength and speed and, when combined together, power. “We try to hit everything on the force-velocity curve,” explains Kula. “On one end, you’re emphasizing force—think slower moves, like heavy deadlifts and sled pulls and pushes. In the middle, it’s plyometrics, sometimes with weight, and on the top end it’s sprint drills without weights.” For each touch point on the curve, there are various exercises, and Kula curates a four-month program to gradually raise McCaffrey’s levels.

We connected in mid-June, just before the 49ers’ training camp, and Kula told me the five-eleven, 210-pound McCaffrey is as strong as ever. Although he “doesn’t chase numbers in the weight room,” McCaffrey is deadlifting in the mid-500-pound range, the same as when he entered the league in 2017. Even more important for a running back than brute strength or straight-line speed, says Kula, is something somewhat nebulous, what he calls “being twitchy.” “That good quick twitch is when you apply force, driving hard to the ground, and then fire off the ground rapidly,” he says. “Christian is firing on a different level right now.”

When I ask the 28-year-old McCaffrey a few days later if he feels like he’s currently at his peak, he seems taken aback. “I’ve never thought of it like that,” he says during a Zoom from his home in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I know I feel great, I feel fast, I feel strong. You can call it twitchiness or bounce, and it’s because your nervous system is firing on all cylinders. Every athlete knows what that means. It’s when you feel like you’re you.”

McCaffrey is wearing a white Nike T-shirt and white shorts, and with his closely cropped hair he looks like a gridiron G. I. Joe. He’s introspective and intense when talking about the kinds of strength that playing running back demands. “Whatever that play requires, you need to be able to tap into whatever you need to tap into in order to get more yards,” he says. “That’s why it’s such a beautiful position, because each play has a life of its own. I think the game is very deep. I really do. It’s much deeper than what you see on TV. There’s an emotional part. Each player is going through some sort of mental battle to win that rep against the opponent. And a physical part. Sometimes you have to be elusive and to be light on your feet and to make people miss and avoid contact or move with contact. But sometimes you have to put your head down and run through a motherfucker’s chin.”

WHEN MCCAFFREY IS McCaffrey, he’s him.

Last year was his best season ever—and one of his healthiest. He finished with 2,023 total yards and 21 touchdowns and earned offensive player of the year, becoming a dual threat as a runner and a receiver. Currently his career-average total yards per game of 115.5 is fourth all-time behind legends Jim Brown, Billy Sims, and Barry Sanders. ESPN recently surveyed nearly 80 league executives, coaches, and scouts, asking them to rank the NFL’s top ten running backs. McCaffrey was number one, earning more than 80 percent of the first-place votes. He also became the first running back to be on the cover of a Madden video game since Sanders a decade ago (“I’ve been playing Madden since I was a young kid with my brothers, and so it was such a full-circle moment”), and he married former Miss Universe Olivia Culpo (“She always encourages me to do whatever needs to be done in order to accomplish my goals, so that’s made it easy to continue to train hard”).

Despite the trend that compensation for running backs in the NFL has been decreasing (it’s a passing league now), McCaffrey extended his current deal for two more years at $19 million per year through the 2027 season, which would be his eleventh in the NFL. The average career for a running back is 2.6 years, and though McCaffrey may be an outlier, and perhaps at his peak, his window to win is likely starting to close. Last season’s Super Bowl loss to the Kansas City Chiefs stung. “I legit cried,” he says. “The goal is to win a Super Bowl. My job is just to put my body, my mind, my spirit in the best possible position that I can so that I can help my team win it all.”

KULA AND MCCCAFFREY’S fitness partnership started at Valor Christian High School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, where McCaffrey starred on the basketball, football, and track teams and Kula, a former college decathlete, coached track. “Christian always moved really well, really efficiently,” says Kula. “I saw him dunk a basketball in eighth grade.” (Later, McCaffrey corrects the record and says, “It was actually the summer of seventh grade.”) The two paired up again after McCaffrey graduated from Stanford and was drafted in the NFL, and they’ve worked together ever since.

While their workouts are generally track and speed inspired and they do three high-impact sessions per week focused on acceleration, max velocity, and three-dimensional movement, they have added elements to help McCaffrey build even more strength. “All the years they said Christian couldn’t run between the tackles,” says Kula. “We’ve all seen him do that, because he’s strong, he’s powerful, and he’s also got breakaway speed. That’s a rare combination, right? We can all think of guys that are big and strong but not necessarily fast. And he has the ability to catch and run, too.”

Lately they’ve gone even deeper on force and velocity, and McCaffrey says he’s “learning how to have a positive relationship to the ground. I’m working on falling, rolling, elasticity, recoil, and different movements to improve my relationship with the ground.” He’s added more barefoot work, animal-inspired flow moves like gorilla walks and bear crawls, and more single-leg lifts and hops as well as gymnastics drills that have him jumping and rolling on a trampoline. It’s a lot, but there’s a method to the movement mayhem.

To understand why a running back’s relationship with the ground is critical, consider the dynamics of speed. “To run faster, you don’t move your legs faster; you exert more force on the ground,” says Jay Dicharry, Ph.D., a professor of physical therapy at Oregon State University and the author of Running Rewired. It’s the same idea as throwing a ball with increasing force against the ground—each time it bounces back faster. But you don’t just slam your feet into the ground harder, because that can lead to injury, he adds. You have to work on that relationship with the ground and imagine propelling yourself or pushing away from it.

Stability comes into play because as a running back, McCaffrey needs to be able to generate that force on a single leg to cut, jump, accelerate, decelerate. For most people, says Dicharry, the nervous system is going to put the brakes on because they’re wobbly and not stable on one leg. “You can’t put a jet engine on a paper airplane,” he says. “Strength without stability doesn’t help you on the field. Stability builds the chassis.”

Despite all of McCaffrey’s athletic traits—speed, stability, power—Kula says his greatest strength is actually something else, his mindset. “That’s the captain that drives the ship.”

WHEN ASKED HOW he developed what Kula calls his “extreme discipline and dedication to his craft,” McCaffrey says it stems from his mom and dad (Ed McCaffrey won two Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos; Lisa Sime McCaffrey played soccer at Stanford) and from growing up with three brothers in a competitive household. (His youngest brother, Luke, was drafted by Washington this year.) “We were told at a young age, if God’s given you any gifts, it’s important to honor those gifts and to do everything in your power to become great at that and to maximize your potential.”

It may sound a little Hallmark-y, but talk to McCaffrey about training and about football and you get the sense that’s exactly what he’s doing, trying to master the position of running back and maximize his potential. All the sweaty lifting, all the wild exercises, all the exploration of space and speed and movement boils down to a moment when it’s a running play for number 23 and the ball is snapped. I ask McCaffrey to explain his mental process, the cuts he anticipates, potential holes opening up or closing, and what’s actually going on in his head.

“I would love to give you an answer, but I have no idea,” he says, laughing. “That’s the beauty of the position. The more you think, the worse you are. The work is put in in the off-season, in training camp, during the week of practice. That’s when you test things. That’s when you experiment. When it comes to the actual game, that’s when you just let it loose.”

He’s on a roll and runs with it.

McCaffrey had a busy off-season, signing a new contract, marrying Olivia Culpo, and getting into the best shape of his life.

“I look at playing running back as kind of an art, like a painter. When they’re going to paint something, sometimes they don’t always know what they’re going to paint. They just let their mind and instincts lead the brush. That’s kind of like being a running back. You have rules with your footwork, and your aiming point matters, and there are different intricacies, but once you get to that second level, it’s completely mindless. Every move you make, it’s a dance. You’re trying to make people go the way that you’re not going in order to score, and you’re doing it in split seconds while people are trying to take your head off. It’s instinctual. It’s about fighting for those minuscule percentages of winning and losing or of getting four yards rather than three on a specific play or making that guy miss or getting tackled by an arm.” And just when you think you have the answers, you get hit in the ribs by someone running 22 miles an hour. “Football is a very humbling game, because you can try hard to do everything right and still fail.”

McCaffrey has had his share of hard hits and injuries, but he says he’s never had a concussion. “Whether you get hit or not, you go through stresses throughout the season that can alter your brain’s performance, sleep, focus. So I go for brain imaging twice every year,” he says. Same approach for blood work and other testing. “I’m constantly reading data so that if I do have to make an adjustment to fix something, I’m able to do it and I’m not just guessing.”

As you’d expect of someone who gets hit a lot, McCaffrey is somewhat of a recovery aficionado, having tried everything from dry needling and cryotherapy to hands-on massage and compression. “I look at recovery like the Cheesecake Factory menu,” he says. “You have a million different things and you have to order carefully and choose exactly what’s best based on the circumstances. You have to be careful not to over-order or under-order—finding that balance is important.” His most trusted recovery order is sleep. Despite recently getting married (or maybe because of it), he says he goes to bed as early as possible, often between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., and he gets up at 6:15 a.m. “Sleep is the most important thing you can do for your body. You can train all you want and treat all you want, but if you don’t sleep, your body is going to break down.”

It was partly that fear of breaking down that led McCaffrey to train with big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton in 2021. Hamilton does battle in the trenches with a different kind of giant and has developed his own pool-based breath work and fitness program. Some of the drills are intense—weighted swims clutching one dumbbell while holding your breath to teach your lungs how to operate without air. “For big-wave surfers, who operate in an unpredictable environment, it can be life or death,” says McCaffrey. “I just try and keep up.” But it gives him an edge, too: “Everything is energy. If you can conserve energy better than the opponent, you can run longer, last longer. The fourth quarter is when games are won, so that’s a big deal.”

McCaffrey also learned to use breath work, inhaling through his nose to calm his nervous system. The guy with the twitchy body, the elite power, and the fierce desire to constantly improve found that water provides a different sensory benefit. On recovery days, he likes to perform gentle exercises that relieve pressure on his spine and joints. He told me about one of his favorites, which he often does in his pool at home: Grab two ten-pound dumbbells, inhale through your nose, and sink 12 feet down. When your feet touch the bottom, you jump up lightly and do a jumping jack. Then you breach the surface, take another breath, do a slow backflip, and let the dumbbells pull you back down. “I do five or ten reps for three or five sets, depending on how I feel,” he says. “I find so much peace in the water. It’s relaxing, quiet, meditative almost. My dad always told me between plays, ‘Breathe, focus, explode.’ On my off days in the water, it’s the breathe and focus state. I’m mentally, emotionally, and physically unwinding, so the next day I can explode.”

CMC Muscle Factory

These moves from McCaffrey’s long-time trainer Brian Kula, C.S.C.S., build functional total-body strength and stability.

3D Lunges

CMC does a lunge series in eight directions, but doing three variations that target multiple planes of movement—forward and back, side to side, and transverse—is a good start. First do a forward lunge, then do a lateral lunge. Follow with a transverse lunge: Open your hip and step diagonally back to the right, leaning into your right foot. Do 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps for each variation on each side.

Animal Flows

To train his core as well as foot and hand grip, McCaffrey does dynamic animal movements like bear-crawl jumps and donkey kicks, sometimes on a trampoline. A good place to start is with an inchworm-bear-crawl flow: From standing, bend over and touch the ground, then walk your hands out until you’re in a plank. Next, shift forward on all fours, like a bear, and crawl 10 yards. Reverse the movement back to standing. Do 10 reps.

Bounce Fire Drills

The key when working on speed is to do low volume at peak intensity. Warm up with 3 sets of 20 yards of hops, skips, high-knees, and butt-kicks, going 35 percent to 50 percent max. Next, sprint in place as fast as you can for 3 seconds and then do a 20-yard dash as fast as you can. Rest for 2 minutes and repeat 4 times.

Explosive medicine ball work helps McCaffrey build the core strength to absorb punishing tackles.

Lightning Round

Frenemy exercise?
“Early in the off-season true track workouts, two hundreds, one fifties, those are very difficult. But I know it’s worth it.”

Gym tunes?
“My music’s all over the place. Anything from Biggie to Beethoven, EDM, country, rock. Lynyrd Skynyrd is one of my playlists. It’s all over the place. I like the randomness. That’s kind of how my mind works.”

Stress-busting activity?
“I’ve played piano since I was 14. There’s definitely a peace that it brings me that’s hard to replicate. It’s really good for your brain too, and just synching sound with your brain and your hands and your feet. But that’s not really why I do it. I just enjoy music, I enjoy playing it. It’s something that a good escape for me.”

Cheat meal?
“Panda Express or Chick-fil-A.”

Meal you cook for your wife?
“Anything on the grill, I’m good with the proteins. We make a really good tandem, though. She’s a much better cook than I am. She’s comes from a big Italian family, and I let her do most of the cooking or baking or anything that you want to taste good.”

Euphemism for sex?
“I probably shouldn’t answer that. My wife would get mad at me! (laughs).”

Heroes?
“My family: I always wanted to play football because of my dad—he got me into the game. My mom is the mother of four boys and she’s the rock of our family. I couldn’t have asked for a better older brother on the planet. My younger brothers who pushed me so much. And of course my wife who I met when I was 23 years old. She’s one of my heroes too. I see the kind of work that she puts in every day, she inspires me all the time.”

Any shout-outs?
“The Christian McCaffrey Foundation: We have two big initiatives. One’s called 23 And Troops. The foundation strives to help veterans recover from things like PTSD, traumatic brain injuries and any kind of physical and mental struggles that they have post-service. The second is the Logan Bowl. We put gaming consoles in hospitals across the country for kids who are going through cancer treatment. I was inspired by a young boy named Logan Hale, who unfortunately passed away. Logan played sports, was in the arts, was a great kid, and he was a big fan of mine. That’s how found out about his passing, he was buried in my jersey. That hit me like a ton of bricks. Then I read his obituary and it said he wanted to start a foundation where he can put gaming consoles in hospitals because that was one of his favorite things to do when he was going through one of the worst things a kid can go through. He loved playing video games with his friends. I thought that’s a no brainer.”

This story appears in the September-October 2024 issue of Men’s Health.

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