NASCAR Sprint Cup Series

You would be wrong.

According to Mike Lepp, who oversees the pit crew organization for Joe Gibbs Racing’s fleet of Toyota Camrys, there is no rest for the weary, and next year has already begun.

“Good pit stops for next year start right now,” he says, with the dust barely settled from the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Lepp is not your typical strength and conditioning coach. He’s the modern version of the football coach who drills his kids year-round, always seeking that edge, the slight difference that sets one group above the rest in order to obtain glory on the field of battle.

“I’m the athletic director in what would be a college environment, which involves coaching, recruiting, administrative…I spend a good bit of time on that,” Lepp says. “I don’t have to go to parents’ homes and visit them (laughter), but I do have to do a lot of meetings behind haulers and taking people to dinner as part of the recruiting process, because it is a very precise, athletic movement that has become extremely important in the sport, from a competition standpoint, and you don’t leave anything to chance.”

Nearly every action is recorded for later review, and Lepp takes a page from team owner Joe Gibbs, whose preparations as an NFL head coach were legendary.

“I spend a lot of time watching film, what do we need to do to be better now, and I’m also thinking…I have rosters for 2012 already, what I anticipate, knowing who is a free agent next year, knowing who is on my team now that I might not be able to re-sign, those types of things. I kind of cover everything.”

Now that the season is over for all three series, there’s a recovery period for the crews, but this week is about all they’ll get, Lepp says.

“The training part, I spend a lot of time seeing where guys are now,” he explains. “This is the time of year where we take a break…recovery is a big part of it. There is no more brutal, long season than this. We were caught a little off-guard at Homestead; into the fall, you kind of lose your heat acclimation, and all of a sudden you show up on an 85-degree day with 85 percent humidity. Your recovery starts how good you’re going to be next year.

“I can’t tell you enough about the recovery process. This thing wears you out.”

The fun part of the offseason comes around about now.

“About the second week of December, we’ll start training again in terms of whatever weaknesses people might have. We do a very individualized program; not everybody needs the same thing.”

It’s broken down by position and then by individual.

“Some people need more strength, some need more power, some need agility, some people need to lose weight,” Lepp says. “We kind of do a report card at the end of the season and customize training programs for them. That’ll be in a week or two, and then we’ll get back into the skill things in January, continuing some of those remedial things that we do for guys that need it.”

What Lepp really does is provide direction and methodology for a stylized ballet…one that involves speed, power and adrenaline and can cost you big if one of the cast members puts a foot slightly wrong. To that end, it’s about philosophy.

“Our philosophy is maybe a little different,” Lepp says. “With Coach Gibbs coming from his background in football…a good many of them [pit crew members] came from professional sports backgrounds, and while we have a professional football player on our team (a jack man), it’s really not as applicable. I always tell people that hockey players might be better pit crew members, or second basemen or shortstops, if you’re looking at X kind of athlete.

“I come from a background where there’s been a lot of changes in the last five or six years in terms of training. The term ‘core’ is used loosely. This is a core-dominant sport. There’s a lot of rotation, a lot of high-to-low, there’s a lot of explosive power-type movements. We use progressive movement-based strength training.”

What that means is, there’s not a lot of guys standing around watching someone bench-press the race cars, Lepp says.

“We do a lot of movement-based core things, and a lot of the training when it comes to weights came from body-building, which is a very static activity. It’s a posing sport, and a lot of the old training techniques like who can bench-press what…I can’t think of anything less applicable to what we do than the bench-press. Our movements require a very fine, precise movement.”

One example of this is Nate Bolling, who is the jack man on Denny Hamlin’s No. 11 FedEx Toyota Camry. He was a defensive end at Wake Forest University, and that meant he took off after the quarterback and dealt with 300-pound-plus offensive linemen.

“Our No. 11 crew had a really good year this year, closing it out at Homestead with three sub-13-second pit stops, which is unheard of with these new (wheel) studs,” Lepp says. “Nate Bolling played college football at Wake Forest and played in the NFL for two years with the Dolphins and the Ravens. He’s a jack man, and he’ll tell you this is a much more precise movement, precise strength, versus brute, gross strength.

“He has to hit a quarter-inch jack post, he has to be looking right and left to see where the changers are, he has to release and run around the car with a 35-pound jack in a very tight space with other cars trying to knock him off his game, in about three seconds. That requires what we call movement-based strength, core. We use a lot of physio balls, medicine balls…we have a lot of really flat-out strength equipment, and I call that kind of base and foundation strength, but we have to refine it down to a movement-based strength. That’s where the core, functional – and that’s the term we use – strength training comes about.”

It’s been a big change, Lepp says. “Ten years ago, you wouldn’t have seen that. Five years ago, you wouldn’t have seen that. You’d be seeing a lot of bench pressing, a lot of things like that. It’s evolved with us, but I can’t speak to what other teams do. I see the changes in how we train when it comes to the strength standpoint. Yoga…range of motion has a lot do with power application, so we’ll dabble in things like yoga and functional stretching and movement-based things.

“We had a yoga instructor come one time and the guys thought this was just the stupidest thing in the world. She annihilated them.”

What use does a tire changer have for the Lotus position? As it turns out, it’s the basis for what he does, Lepp says.

“A tire changer goes down in that very low position, has to apply very precise movements and then has to explode out of there and get around that car in three seconds,” Lepp explains. “It’s like speed golf; you have to have the precision of a golfer in hitting a golf ball with your heart rate at 180 beats per minute. We use heart monitors a lot, and now golfers are getting caught cheating by taking these beta blockers to get their heart rates down into the 40s and 50s.

“Here’s a tire changer, who has to have that same precision as a golfer in his stroke and then move in a massive anaerobic manner. It’s a hard thing. I’ve dealt with a lot of sports, and being a tire changer is one of the hardest, most pressure-packed things you can do. There’s the noise level…all of our tire changers on the three teams this year have made contacts with another car at 40-50 miles per hour this year.”

Lepp isn’t above using technology and resources in unique ways to get his guys better.

“FOX Sports Science brought in a lot of equipment and spent a couple days with us,” he says. “They have super slo-mo cameras and such, and they determined that a typical pit stop requires 71 different movements among seven guys.”

OK, so those 71 movements are what he develops training sessions to improve.

“We actually break down those 71 movements,” Lepp says. “I spent last week breaking the season down into 12-race segments. Every Monday we break down pit stops, where we were good, where we were bad, that kind if defines what practice is going to look like that week. But now we take a step back and look over 12 races and that helps us define our weaknesses and that defines what guys are going to do [in the offseason].

“We give the guys their individual numbers, give them an individual report card on their timed variables for a stop. ‘Our standard for getting around the car is 2.5 seconds, and yours was 2.6 seconds. How do we make that better?’ That’s going to require some more hit strength, take some power work, some weight loss because you’re going from high to low. We base everything on numbers and with video. We film a lot of practices.

“It seems overkill, but a tenth of a second or two is, on this car, which isn’t as competitive…you lose two spots on pit road and those might never get regained. The 11 car won at Homestead on pit stops. We put him out first three times. We take it very seriously.”

Lepp says that in early December, time would be spent on analysis and development, and then it is back to the gym, practice area, bike trail and weight room.

“This time of the year, we want to build that foundation of a good thing and then get specific in January and February,” he says. “This past year we were thrown a major change with the stud length, and that caused pit stops in the whole sport to be the center of attention for the first two or three months. We don’t see anything coming this year like that.

“A typical week our pit crew spends is four days during the season and, depending on the program you’re on, it can be two to three in the offseason. We’re a lot like the NFL in that we do a lot of testing. We do debriefs where we say, ‘here’s your program, this is what it’s going to require.’ For some people, that might mean a two-day program. We use downloadable heart rate monitors where he can go out, do a prescribed workout on the mountain-bike trail – we like to get them on bikes to get away from the pounding on their legs – and we can download that to make sure they did what we wanted them to do. It’s less formal.

“We have some people who have some remedial things they need to do. If they’re 10-15 pounds overweight, that’s kind of by their own doing, and four or five days of working out if they want to maintain their livelihood… On the other hand, if we have a guy who maintains optimum body fat, then that’s kind of a reward. We don’t try to solve that problem during the season, because there’s an energy factor involved, but during the offseason, that’s when we address it.

“Unfortunately, our offseason comes at a really hard time to lose weight. The average American gains seven to 10 pounds during the holidays…”