By MIKE TAKEUCHI
NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

Like poet Robert Frost once penned, sometimes you just have to take the road less traveled. Whether it was concocting raw egg shakes as a kid, or declining to practice traditional medicine after graduating from the most prestigious medical school in the land, Marcus Elliott has always bucked tradition.
And that has made all the difference in his career as a physical trainer for elite athletes.
Elliott, 36, recently finished helping Pittsburgh Steeler offensive tackle Marvel Smith prepare for training camp. He is also working with former local and current minor league baseball pitcher Matt Vasquez and professional beach volleyball player Dax Holdren. Elliott has relied upon a unique combination of proven methods and cutting edge physiology to apply his own stamp of helping an athlete reach his or her potential.

A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Elliott said he always had an interest in the scientific aspect of sport. He pored over medical journals, thinking of new ways to train, and even went as far as drinking raw egg shakes like the Sylvester Stallone character Rocky Balboa did in the first “Rocky” movie.
Elliott’s natural curiosity paid off as he excelled in football, baseball and track at Cloverdale High in Marin. He got his first taste of practical application when he suffered an injury that left him with a tear in all four ligaments in his knee.
Faced with an extensive rehabilitation process to try to get him back to play baseball in college, Elliott began experimenting with different training methods. Using swimming and biking for rehab, Elliott started competing in triathlons in 1986.

Soon people began asking him to help them train.It was the impetus that would help him decide to not just go to a medical school but the top one, Harvard, in 1992.
“I thought that Harvard would give me an unusual broad-based information system in training athletes, introduce me to unique people, and be a lot of fun along the way,” Elliott said. “While although I could say that the first two were true, the last one definitely was not,” he laughed
Under the tutelage of Bertram Zarins, the head of Harvard’s Sports Medicine Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, Elliott said that he gained valuable first-hand experience while working with winter Olympic athletes and the NFL’s New England Patriots. It was the latter experience where he learned a lot about the specifics of the skill required in athletes in their respective sports.
“Football, more than the others, is a sport where the fastest, strongest and most powerful guy almost always wins over the other,” Elliott said. “Because of many things like contact, they get injured the most frequently. I learned that a lot of the non-contact injuries can be prevented by being able to identify weaknesses in their kinetic chain (makeup) or dysfunctions in their movement pattern.”
In 1997 Elliott traveled to South Africa to learn more by participating in a study of African runners with Dr. Tim Noakes, a running expert in South Africa who wrote the book “The Lore of Running.”
In this study, Elliot found the basis of his own principle of training, plyometrics.

Plyometrics are any exercise where the muscle is stretched or loaded before it is contracted. An example may be in the form of box jumping. After jumping on top of the box, athletes jump down. The leg muscles are elongated and loaded by the downward force of the body. Upon impact on the ground, the athlete immediately contracts the muscle to push back up on the box. The latter movement is the basic theory of plyometrics.
In the years following his time in Africa, Elliott worked with professional cyclists, Olympic athletes, football players and baseball players. In 2000, he was hired by then Patriots (and current Dallas Cowboys) coach Bill Parcells to work with the team on devising a program to decrease hamstring injuries. In the previous year, the players had suffered over 20 major hamstring injuries and did not make the playoffs. The next year, with players only suffering two such injuries, the team won the Super Bowl.
“Even though Parcells is old school, he is smart,” Elliott said. “He knew that I could be of some assistance. That is why he brought me in over the strength coach’s protests.”

Vasquez said that a lot of the credit of his success goes to Elliott.

“Now that the season has started, we still have a program,” Vasquez said. “A starting pitcher usually only pitches once a week ,so we gear our workouts for that one day. Hard workout days of lifting, throwing and some sprints usually follow my starts and then it tapers off the closer I come to pitching so I will be ready when it’s my turn in the rotation. It has been great to work with Marcus because not only is he my trainer, he has become my friend.”

On the football field at Santa Barbara City College, Elliott’s theory was put to practice by the lineman Smith.
Over the course of four weeks, Smith went from barely being able to do the plyometric exercises of jumping off the ground, to fearlessly launching himself on and off a stool that was two feet high following major amounts of sprints and agility exercises.
After the growling, groaning, and swearing were done, there were smiles and hugs all around.
Smith was ready for training camp.