Ben’s Blog: A day in my shoes

By former Cyclone lineman Ben Lamaak

Jan. 18, 2011 –

Cincinnati – Hello again Cyclone fans!  I hope you all enjoyed my first blog and continue to read the rest of them. Last time, I wrote about the whole agent process and how that works.  In this blog, I’ll go a little more in depth and break down what has been going on in Cincinnati.  I arrived here on Monday, Jan. 10th and got settled into my temporary home at the Townplace Suites by Marriot.  It is a really nice apartment style setup, where I have my own lounge area, full kitchen, bathroom and my favorite, a king size bed.

As far as the training facility, it is a really nice place called Ignition.  Ignition has trained several people like me who are preparing for the NFL and also many current pro players.  Here is their website if you’d like more information, http://ignitionapg.com/.

I started working out on Tuesday morning and it was fun to get back into the gym.  The workouts here are very intense, but the atmosphere is great.  There are 12 other guys here working out, so it’s nice to have people to compete with.  The other people working out from here are from all over the country.  They are guys from the University of Cincinnati, New Mexico, Illinois, Florida International, Northwest Missouri State, Norfolk State, Texas Tech, Virginia, and Union College.

Our training schedule goes like this. We wake up around 7:30 a.m. and have breakfast prepared for us at eight.  We get to the gym around 8:30 and start stretching and foam rolling around nine. The morning consists of some type of running, whether it is speed work, agility stations or breakdowns of the drills we have to do at Pro Day.  We always end our morning runs with conditioning, my favorite….

We usually finish up around 11:30 and have lunch catered to us at noon.  We have some off time until around two, when we start stretching and warming up for our afternoon lift.  Monday and Thursday are upper body lifts, where Tuesday and Friday are lower body days. We usually lift for about two hours.  After our afternoon lift, we head to a place called Lifetime Fitness.  It is by far the coolest workout facility I have ever been to.  It has a spa, cafe, basketball courts, every type of workout machine and even a pool with water slides.  We usually just chill out there, hot tub and shower.  After that, we go to a local business where we have dinner prepared for us.  The food is always healthy and very tasty for that matter.  After dinner, we usually head back to the hotel to hang out and relax. That sums up my normal day.

Tune in next time as I am going to write about some of the fun stuff we do on our free time, the position work we do with some of the Bengals players and some other things that Cincinnati has to offer.  Thanks again for checking out my blog and as always, GO CYCLONES!