How Kirk Cousins is preparing for a critical season ahead of uncertain future

EAGAN, Minn. — Kirk Cousins can hear his body clock ticking. The quarterback will turn 35 later this month. His current team isn’t sure it wants him back next season, and there are no guarantees any team will want him as its 2024 starter. So after reporting to Vikings training camp for what could be his final summer in Minnesota and facing an uncertain future, Cousins has produced a tornado of energy, whimsy and determination to make the most of whatever is left to come.

“I used to sit there in middle school and look up at the stars in the summer,” Cousins said. “[You would] see a shooting star and everyone would make a wish. My wish was to be a pro quarterback. So I’m going to do all I can to maximize that, and shame on me if there was more out there to get and I didn’t do all I could. So even if it ends after this year, I have to feel like I walk away with peace of mind that I did everything I possibly could, left nothing out there.”

Cousins spoke those words during a pre-camp meeting with reporters, and then articulated a longer version of the message — at the behest of coach Kevin O’Connell — during a 30-minute speech to the team after the second day of practice. And as he enters the final season of his contract, Cousins revealed that he has hired longtime consultant Chad Cook as a full-time performance coach, comparing their arrangement to the one retired quarterback Tom Brady shared with his friend and business partner Alex Guerrero.

If nothing else, Cousins is demonstrating he won’t go down without a fight as the Vikings mull whether to re-sign him or find a new quarterback in 2024.

“We’re taking a very 360-degree view on Kirk,” Cook told ESPN. “From recovery to performance to nutrition to biomechanics to sleep, and teaming up with everyone else around that to make sure we’re not leaving any stone unturned, because every single one of them interrelate with each other. … There are short-term goals and long-term goals. The short-term goal is to produce to the best of his ability for the Vikings this year. That creates a win-win situation for everybody involved.”

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COUSINS AND COOK have been working together since the mid 2010s, when a mutual acquaintance connected them. They would meet in person during the offseason in Atlanta, where Cousins’ wife Julie is from and where Cook is director of performance at the Players Performance Institute. For in-season work, Cook would prescribe recovery and enhancement treatment from afar.

Over that span, Cousins has missed only two games, one in 2019 when the Vikings rested their starters for the playoffs and one in 2021 after a COVID-19 diagnosis, even as he absorbed one of the highest totals of hits for a quarterback in the NFL. As he has aged, however, Cousins began to crave more help in mitigating the damage.

In his classic dad-vernacular, Cousins said that long-distance treatment via Cook’s instructions was “for the birds.”

“I was tired of doing the deal, you know, ‘Send me an email, let me know what I need to do, I’ll try to do it,'” Cousins said. “I was like … ‘You got to just hold my hand all the way through it, all season long, and I can just show up. I have too many other things on my plate.'”

Neither man directly connected the timing of the decision to Cousins’ expiring contract, and Cook emphasized the frequency of their work together has increased every year. But Cook traveled to Minnesota in June for a test run, and the pair agreed on an arrangement in which Cook will spend almost every day there during the season, with the exception of weekends when the Vikings are on the road.

Cook takes a different philosophical approach than Guerrero, whose focus with Brady was on pliability. Cook’s emphasis is on creating stability with muscular activation techniques (MAT), and while Cousins refers to him jokingly as his “body guy,” Cook said he describes himself as a performance specialist, a MAT practitioner and a human movement specialist.

“The whole idea is first we want to identify limits in range of motion, stability and strength,” Cook said, “and how that’s impacting his nervous system, neurological system and neuromuscular system. So we mess a lot with those systems to make sure we’re optimizing his performance on and off the field.”

Cousins’ appearance in the Netflix documentary “Quarterback” illustrated some of the recovery and enhancement steps he takes, from chiropractor visits to brain training via neurofeedback. Cook will pull it all together in a streamlined program while also using his own hands-on techniques to mitigate the possibility of future injuries. As Cook described it in an interview, his approach seeks to familiarize the body with the stressors it is likely to experience during a game.

“We do a lot of unique things that span a lot of areas,” Cook said, describing some of them as “out of the box” but within Cousins’ demand that everything is “safe and morally correct for the long-term health of his body.” Also, Cook said, Cousins will not take any “short cuts for short-term gains that could comprise his body, health and family long term, or violate anything that he’s doing with his dream and his career.”

Ultimately, Cousins and Cook are working toward the same goal as Brady and Guerrero.

“The older [Brady] got,” Cook said, “the more the body work became a priority to make him stay young. That’s the whole mission we’ve had since Day 1 with Kirk, to have him feel great and optimize his performance to see if he can reach his full potential and play as long as he wants to play. My goal is to make him feel younger every year versus what is typical of people, and that is feeling older each year.”

Said Cousins: “I just feel that this is something serious enough — my health, staying on the field, being around a long time — it’s not worth cutting corners. Let’s go all in. Let’s overcommit if we have to. If I’m guilty of that, I can live with that.”

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COUSINS INTRODUCED A touchy subject when he compared his work with Cook to what Guerrero did with Brady — who long credited Guerrero for creating the training program that helped him play until he was 45, and the two now market the program commercially as the “TB12” method. But Guerrero’s presence in the New England Patriots‘ facility created tension within the franchise, according to ESPN reporting.

Cousins made clear he won’t assimilate Cook into his work at the facility, at least at the outset, saying “I’m self-aware enough to keep it separate.” He added: “I don’t want to get too much where it’s like, ‘Who’s this guy? He’s not part of the team. What’s going on?'”

“Even if it ends after this year, I have to feel like I walk away with peace of mind that I did everything I possibly could, left nothing out there.”

Kirk Cousins

For the time being, Cousins will work with Cook mostly at his house before and after the work day, or perhaps during breaks between meetings and practices.

“The Vikings have an amazing program,” Cook said. “They have amazing leadership. Staff, medical, fitness, everything. We are absolutely not trying to replace or override any of that.”

At some point, Cousins said, he might ask O’Connell if Cook can “dip into a room here or there” at the team facility. Asked whether he would sign off on that, O’Connell said it would “absolutely” be possible to collaborate with Cook “from a time-management standpoint” as long as communication is clear.

“It is on us to make sure our players know that that’s something we are not against,” O’Connell said, “but at the same time, with anything, there’s got to be some level of restriction. It can’t just be free-flowing access to the building, and they understand that. Once you establish a routine, we are right along there with them.”

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SIMILAR BIG-PICTURE topics surfaced during a summer meeting between O’Connell and Cousins. O’Connell shared some of his plans for messaging specific themes during training camp, and Cousins mused about the knowledge advantage that veteran players develop over time. They began discussing possibilities for Cousins to share his insights and perspective as a nearly 35-year-old player who has found remarkable durability during his career. Cousins suggested a brief post-practice talk or perhaps some words to the offense. O’Connell upped the ante.

“I thought, ‘No, you’re going to stand up in front of our guys in our team meeting room,'” O’Connell said.

For nearly 30 minutes, according to people who were in the room, Cousins spoke passionately about his routine, his work outside the building and the level of dedication that viewers of “Quarterback” got a glimpse of.

“You could hear a pin drop in there,” O’Connell said.

“An unbelievable message just about as what he defines as success,” special teams coordinator Matt Daniels said, “what it takes to be in the league for a such a long time and what you need to do to stay in it.”

Receiver K.J. Osborn said the speech imparted “how serious he is about his craft” and added: “Seeing him every day makes me want to elevate my game as well.”

Quarterbacks coach Chris O’Hara said he has come to believe that one of Cousins’ best attributes is “his belief that you’ve never arrived, and are always trying to get better.” It’s a theme that appeared repeatedly in “Quarterback” and has clearly followed Cousins to training camp as well.

“I believe whatever you do, you work at it with all your heart,” he said, “and that’s what I’m trying to do, and we’ll see how far we can go.

“Being a starting quarterback in this league is a privilege and it’s a platform. You get an opportunity to use that to impact people. I might never have an opportunity, as big a platform as I have now, to impact people so let’s maximize this platform that we have right now to really use what I have to impact people, rather than the other way around, which is so tempting in this league — to use the people around you to get to where you want to go. Let’s use where we are and the platform we have to go impact people.

“I want to make the most of that.”