Make Your Workout Work Out

"You've got to hold your body straight," barks Mark Verstegen, director of the International Performance Institute (IPI), as we launch into a warm-up for yet another workout. "If I pat the top of my head like this" -- he taps his prickly crew cut with the flat of his hand -- "that means 'Check your posture.' Think to yourself, 'I am hanging from a meat hook.' "

A meat hook is an apt image. After my three-day stay at IPI, they'll need a hook of some kind to haul me off the floor of the Dome, a 70-by-40-yard indoor playing field that's carpeted with springy, Flubber-like synthetic green turf. Here, Verstegen and his staff spend most of their time transforming genuine jocks into world-class athletes. But during IPI's off-season, he and his team take on weekend warriors like me.

At the other end of the Dome, roughly two dozen major-league baseball players, including Red Sox all-star shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, are enduring spring-training prep -- the sports equivalent of the pre-SAT.

An hour from now, a group of future NFL draft picks will arrive -- fresh from Notre Dame, Texas, Nebraska, Michigan, and UCLA -- to train for the NFL Combines, in which every attribute that's possibly related to playing professional football is tested, measured, evaluated, and calibrated, and the players' fate as people who either make a lot of money (second-round pick) or a whole lot of money (first-round pick) is more or less sealed.

So why am I here? A consummate desk jockey, I'm about as far from being a professional football player as someone can be without hailing from another planet. I'm actually tagging along with a team of twentysomethings from adidas-Salomon, who come to IPI once a year to gain inspiration and to walk a mile in the shoes of the people who wear their shoes professionally. The adidas crew includes the kind of folks who pat themselves on the back for simply showing up at the gym: They are students of the "I went, therefore I worked out" school of fitness. In other words, they are a lot like me.

Verstegen doesn't care that we're not all-world. His goal for all of his clients -- rookie and pro alike -- is disarmingly simple: to build a better athlete. Verstegen doesn't do sport-specific drills: IPI features no batting practice for baseball players, nor does it offer roadwork for marathoners. What the pros who come here do, and what the people from adidas and I will do, is work on getting stronger, faster, quicker, and more agile. Our mission: to become masters of movement -- because the basic requirement of any sport is to move.

So pro baseball players at IPI perform hundreds of lunges to improve their agility and quickness -- skills that will ultimately make them better fielders. And, to get more explosive power into their running stride (the better to steal a base), they do dozens of 40-yard dashes while harnessed like big dogs to 120-pound sleds.

For amateurs who simply want to see real progress in their sport of choice, the message is this: There's physical fitness, and then there's movement fitness, in which the training regimen aims to make you run faster and jump higher -- and to give you the balance you need to land on your feet. While your current weight-and-cardio workout might make you fit, it won't make you a better weekend skier or tennis player. And that's where Verstegen can help.

The Warm-Up: Doin' the Worm

Verstegen has an undeserved reputation as being a bit of a drill sergeant. No doubt it stems in part from his neo crew cut and his freshly pressed gym clothes, which look as if they're from another era -- one that ended before the trend toward little socks and giant shorts made jocks look like circus clowns in training. While Verstegen is no brute, a casual attitude won't cut it with him.

The meat-hook minilecture kicks off a 20-minute warm-up exercise that Verstegen calls the "worm," an excruciating little tune-up that requires us to run single file around the perimeter of a tennis court. The last person in line then breaks into a sprint, snaking slalomlike between the people who are jogging ahead of her (with the exception of one lone man, all of us are women) until she reaches the front of the line. Then it's the new last-person-in-line's turn to sprint.

Verstegen leads the warm-up at such a fast clip that I'm ready to hit the Gatorade before we've even started the actual workout. It's only 8:30 a.m., and I'm already sweating from parts of my body that I didn't even know had sweat glands. Jane Fonda, wherever you are, the burn is back.