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THE NUTTY PROFESSOR B WORDS. SEAN SWEENEY ACK BEFORE ALL of this hap- pened, Sid Sharma once asked Chip Schaefer a question. He wanted to know about the tests Schaefer used with his players, those players who just so hap- pened to be Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, and Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Michael Jordan before them. So the long- time NBA strength trainer for both the Lak- ers and Bulls told Sharma about preseason medicine ball tosses. The goal was to hit the ceiling, or at least toss them as high as possible. He watched Shaq do them, 350 pounds of explosive muscle. And yet Kobe always threw it higher. "That kinda verified what I've always known," says Sharma looking back. It's not that Sharma is some Kobe fanboy, rather he's a biomechanical engineer whose methods are so unique, so inventive, so unorthodox and yet so effective, that they shoot right through the collective ceiling of most trainers' brains. Strength is all relative to your body weight. Bryant threw it higher because he correctly fine-tuned his upper body strength. Sharma says he can get you there too. "Nobody else is using this data analysis the way that I'm doing it, using a lot of mathematics I've learned over the years," says Sharma. "I can then pinpoint a player's exact weaknesses." Amazingly, Sid Sharma was never an athlete – at least not once he reached high school. He was overweight, a bookworm, and also analytical. While majoring in bioengineering at Arizona State, he kept himself in shape with power lifting on his own time. It was in the rec center that some of the school's athletes took notice of his strength. "They came up and asked me about it," he says. "So that's when I started to do more of this training. I started to show them some of the stuff I do. Some of them kept coming back to me for more, with more results. Then a lot of the people started coming after that." Now as the founder of Explosive Athletes In- stitute (EAI), Sharma works with NBA players like Josh Childress, dunk extraordinaires like Kenny Dobbs and even older players like Jake DIME πππππππππ πππππππππ TRAINING Voskuhl – and he trains them all in scientific ways. At his 2,500 square foot training center in Phoenix, Ariz., Sharma puts his athletes through more sport-specific exercises than you'll find anywhere else. Some of the equip- ment is basic. Other stuff Sharma built on his own using products he bought at Home Depot. It's the way he uses them that makes him different. "It's a lot of physics," he says. "We utilize that knowledge of physics and the world we live in and apply it to sports and being able to take a given situation in a sport or game – it could be a violent collision between two players in football or it could be a player changing direc- tion in basketball or jumping. We mimic those in training, and not wasting your time with an exercise that doesn't simulate the game. You're not training to be a ballerina. You're training for something specific." How many other performance trainers do you know have a Bachelor's in bioengineer- ing and a Master's in mechanical engineer- ing? Sharma is an expert in stress and force, analyzing how it'll affect the body in a cer- tain situation. He compares his program to building a car. If you take a V-2 engine and try to supercharge it, it still only has so much potential. But if you take a V-8 en- gine and do the same thing, its potential is vastly greater. Sharma's program starts with weights to build this bigger engine – lay the body's foundation – and then fine-tune those muscles with unique exercises he created for more dynamic situations. No matter what, for Sharma, he always wants to find quantitative, numerical data. Often- times, trainers attack an imbalance between the strength of one leg to another by con- centrating more on one side. But because of his background, Sharma has specific data he finds through sensors that can tell him the exact amount of weight he should be using in any given situation with any part of the body. "We don't waste time doing all of these other exercises unless we have scientifically proven they can get you the results," he says. Sharma is convinced he can help any player in the world. How convinced? He thinks even LeBron needs to spend some time with him. "He's only using 20 percent of his potential," says Sharma. "There's things I see that I don't know if anybody else sees in his game." 33 PHOTO. EXPLOSIVE ATHLETES INSTITUTE