article with a little insight into Fernando’s pre-season training in Las Vegas with Gil Reyes :)
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Fernando Verdasco was the man bearing the weight, straining against a leg-press machine as he lifted more than 600 pounds here last month. And yet the man making the most noise was his strength and conditioning coach, Gil Reyes, who was hunched forward in front of Verdasco and bellowing in two languages (“Beauty!” “Yesss!” “Si, puedes!”) as the Spanish tennis star raised the massive 270-kilogram load not once, not twice, but 14 times until Reyes finally shouted at him to stop.

“He’s a beast,” said Reyes, looking genuinely shaken. “I stopped him because I didn’t want him to break down. If he totally maxed out today, there’s a good chance it would throw him off stride tomorrow or the next day.”

Reyes’s gym occupies the ground floor of a residence inside a gated community on a road named after Agassi, who had the house and court next door built for his parents. Reyes lives in the community, too, and his carpeted weight room is filled with machines he built himself. He designed them for Agassi to be tennis specific when nothing specific enough existed.

For a reporter to enter the room requires the signature of a non-disclosure agreement, because Reyes wants to protect the confidentiality of the inventions he may commercialize.

“You can’t find some of these anywhere else,” said José Verdasco, Fernando’s father, who followed his own lifting routine as his son pushed his limits, exchanging embraces and fist bumps with Reyes during his intense training and bonding sessions.

Training with Reyes intermittently over the past 15 months, Verdasco has gone from 190 pounds to approximately 210 and added muscle. But Reyes said he spends more time strengthening Verdasco’s lower body than his upper body. One of Reyes’s many mantras is, “Weak legs command, strong legs obey.”

Verdasco, he of the monumental leg presses, is clearly seeking obedience along with a second home in Las Vegas to be closer to Reyes and his weights.

“If this is the future, I don’t really know,” said Verdasco of the Adidas program. “But of course it really helped me a lot, because I really found Gil that I have this strong connection with. Maybe if Adidas took another guy, maybe I wouldn’t have that same connection, and maybe I wouldn’t like it as much.”

(via nytimes)