Kirk Cousins might be entering the final season of his contract with the Vikings, but that doesn’t mean the veteran quarterback is planning to walk away anytime soon.
Cousins, who will turn 35 on Aug. 19 and is entering his 12th NFL season, made that clear Tuesday, telling reporters he has hired a personal full-time trainer for the first time.
“We’ve never done that, and I felt like, ‘You know what? I’m going to go all in,'” Cousins said, a day before the Vikings open training camp at TCO Performance Center. “Tom (Brady) had Alex Guerrero, and I just felt that there was a lot of merit in saying, ‘I have a small window here to maximize and if I play one year more than I otherwise would have because I took it this seriously, then that’s well worth it.’ … So, every free moment, I’ll be running home to get work. … Time will tell, but I’m excited about, not only the benefit of the health, but the peace of mind it gives me. I know that I can just show up, turn my brain off, and he’s going to handle it. I think that’s a big help.”
Guerrero was Brady’s longtime trainer and friend who taught the future Hall of Fame quarterback about pliability and what he needed to launch his TB12 health and wellness brand.
Cousins said he has worked with his trainer, Chad Cook, “for a long time” but felt that he needed to increase his commitment to his training away from the Vikings’ facility. Cousins’ dedication to keeping his body right was a significant part of the Netflix documentary series “Quarterback” which debuted this month and also featured Patrick Mahomes and Marcus Mariota.
“I was tired of doing the deal, you know, ‘Send me an e-mail, let me know what I need to do, I’ll try to do it,'” Cousins said. “I was like, ‘This is for the birds. You have 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. We did it the whole month of June together and that worked really well, so we’ll just keep that going.”
Just as Cousins has every intention of keeping his career going well beyond 2023, whether that’s in Minnesota or elsewhere. Asked about his comment that hiring Cook could enable him to extend his career by a year at some point, Cousins acknowledged he has given that plenty of thought.
“I think I’ve been given a gift and I’ve lived this my whole life. I used to sit there in middle school and look up at the stars in the summer, 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.
“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 and it’s been a long journey to get to this point, let’s take it as far as we possibly can, give everything we have. I believe whatever you do, you work at it with all
your heart and that’s what I’m trying to do. We’ll see how far we can go, but certainly, I want to play long enough for my boys to be a part of it, remember it.“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.”