He is 15 years old, 5-foot-9 and 185 pounds of cartoonish muscles on top of muscles. He had six-pack abs when he was 6. Today, he bench-presses one-and-a-half times his body weight and can leap from a standing position to the top of a car. He averages four touchdowns per game and hasn't lost a wrestling match since 2012, making him the nation's top-ranked football player and wrestler for his grade. And even though he doesn't begin high school for another two weeks, he already is one of the most talked about athletes in New Jersey. His name is Josh McKenzie. But people just call him Man-Child, D-Train, Animal, Machine or Beast, and he is a once-in-a-lifetime physical specimen who looks like he was engineered in a lab, each piece meticulously sculpted, tested and refined.Josh also embodies the runaway free-for-all youth sports have become. Specialized training. High school coaches lining up to woo players. Working out to the point of total exhaustion. Repeating a grade for athletic advantage. Bouncing from team to team. It's all part of his family's all-in, college-scholarship-or-bust gamble.
Sound extreme? Consider: This past year, Josh's family spent more than $15,000 on specialized training and thousands more to parade him around at showcases, tournaments and all-star events from Florida to California. With access to 10 private trainers and coaches — at an annual cost of more than $15,000 — Josh McKenzie, 15, trains at a level professional athletes might find overwhelming. Josh, a rising freshman at Bergen Catholic, even wears a specialized breathing mask when running to simulate training at high altitude. Most of the 10 specialized personal trainers he will see during the year — that's right, 10 trainers — rely on state-of-the-art techniques and put Josh through futuristic workouts. He takes it a step further by wearing a Darth Vader-like elevation mask to restrict breathing and simulate training at elevations. Josh's stable of experts includes a mindset coach, an isokinetic performance trainer, a nutritionist, three sprinting specialists and a power-lifting guru. He also has a family friend who acts as his public relations guy, although Josh already speaks like someone who has had extensive media training. Even his most mundane activities are meticulously planned and closely monitored. So, for example, he will record every morsel he eats in his iPhone app or log book, making sure to consume exactly 4,500 calories and 175 grams of protein each day.
"In this stage of my life, football's my main focus," Josh says. "My friends and all that partying can take a side seat for now."
― Meta Forksclove-Liebeskind (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, 15 September 2015 23:01 (eight years ago) link