GREEN BAY, Wis. — Find some wood and knock on it, because MarShawn Lloyd is feeling good. Or, as he puts it, really, really good.There’s being injury-prone, and then there’s whatever Lloyd is. The Green Bay Packers running back, a 2024 third-round pick out of USC, has played in just one regular-season game over two seasons.His list of injuries looks like a CVS receipt. Hamstring, hip, ankle, groin, calf and even appendicitis. Longtime Packers running backs coach Ben Sirmans put it best when discussing Lloyd earlier this offseason.“We’re very optimistic, but we’ve all been optimistic before,” Sirmans said. “So we just gotta wait and see what’s going to happen.”Why should Packer fans still care about Lloyd, whose career stat line includes six carries for 15 yards and one catch for 3 yards? Take it from Sirmans, who said Lloyd is the fastest and quickest running back on the team. Ideally, he’s the backup to Josh Jacobs, offering a unique change of pace and explosiveness.“He can do things that the other guys can’t,” Sirmans said.Lloyd’s confidence in his body right now started with a call from his agent, Doug Hendrickson, to Dr. John Meyer last October. Meyer is the Chairman of Performance, Health and Wellness for the Los Angeles Clippers and the Director of Player Health and Performance for the Los Angeles Kings. He runs the Meyer Institute of Sport in El Segundo, Calif., and Lloyd spent multiple months this offseason living with his girlfriend in an Airbnb and visiting Meyer’s facility to fix his body.Lloyd and the Packers took extra measures to solve his injury problems before, most notably sending him to the University of Wisconsin’s Director of Athletic Performance, Bryan Heiderscheit, two offseasons ago. It was time for a more extensive examination this offseason, however, to ensure Lloyd’s career in Green Bay didn’t go to waste.Meyer, who spoke with The Athletic and provided insight into his work with Lloyd, said he began with a comprehensive evaluation of Lloyd’s lower-body range of motion and his lower-body and lumbopelvic strength (lumbopelvic refers to the connection of the lower spine and pelvis). Lloyd did two-leg squatting, single-leg squatting, jumping, running, cutting and deceleration exercises in a three-dimensional motion capture lab that identified where Lloyd was placing stress during those activities. Meyer found Lloyd was overcompensating at his ankle and hip, in part due to residual deficits in his knee from a 2020 ACL tear suffered while playing for South Carolina. He also had less quad strength stemming from that injury six years ago, too.Meyer said most of Lloyd’s injuries with the Packers have happened during deceleration events when he was planting to cut.“It’s getting him to load those joints of his knee, ankle and his hip in a coordinated fashion to execute all the different cuts and change of direction that he needs to do,” Meyer said. “And after you suffer not only the knee injury but then the subsequent soft-tissue injuries, because of the totality of those injuries and some of the compounding factors and time, he just was compensating in some of these patterns. I think both mentally and physically, he had to train himself to get through that and that’s what takes time.”A typical day for Lloyd at Meyer’s facility began with manual treatment to his foot and ankle area and hips to improve mobility. He’d then do a dynamic warmup, strength exercises and work on his cutting, deceleration and running mechanics. Lloyd and Meyer incorporated the Packers’ offseason running and field program into their work in Southern California, and Meyer has collaborated with the Packers during his time working with Lloyd.“He’s super motivated, super diligent, puts in the work, was here every day on time doing everything he could do,” Meyer said of Lloyd. “We’ve been in contact and continuing to provide him programming as he’s gonna stay the remainder of the offseason in Green Bay, but we’re gonna continue to support him with more work. … He had definitely lost some confidence and so I think him training here, getting comfortable and then also just the time he had, the changes that he saw, reinforcing the work that he’s doing with the data and the assessments that we were routinely doing and showing the progress, I think gave him confidence to trust his body.“The smile came back.”“He is amazing,” Lloyd said of Meyer. “We figured out what we needed to do, figured out what I needed and we just attacked it the whole offseason. I didn’t really get to see my family as much as I wanted to because, yes, my family’s important, but my family knows how important this is to me. … I knew that John Meyer was the place I needed to go to get my body where it needed to be.”After being drafted by the Packers in the third round in 2024, MarShawn Lloyd hopes this is the season he’s healthy and becomes a consistent contributor. (Tork Mason / Imagn Images)Lloyd’s comfort in his body was evident at the annual Green Bay charity softball game earlier this month, when he perfectly executed a backflip while approaching home plate. His burst, even when doing the most mundane of running back drills during practice, is evident. Lloyd said this is the first time in his career that he hasn’t had a physical setback during OTAs, perhaps in part due to the Packers managing his workload and making sure, as head coach Matt LaFleur said, that Lloyd doesn’t get hurt again from going “100 miles an hour all the time.”Lloyd has a nickname at Lambeau Field, quarterback Jordan Love revealed recently — “Yeet Cannon.” It was given to him by offensive coordinator Adam Stenavich. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, “yeet” is a slang word “used to express surprise, approval or excited enthusiasm.”“He’s very explosive, and he does some really good things, but he’s just one of those guys that’s kind of just got that freaky twitch ability that is just God-given,” Love said. “You catch yourself watching him practice — we watched him in some of the preseason games last year — and you get excited.”For as much as Packer fans are anticipating and hoping for Lloyd’s long-awaited breakout, Lloyd himself might be even more eager. He began his career wondering why the injury bug kept targeting him, but Jacobs and the other running backs helped shift Lloyd’s focus from feeling sorry for himself to, as Lloyd said, “Now it’s, let’s go.”Only time will tell if Lloyd’s work with Meyer actually pays off and, if he manages to stay healthy, whether he lives up to the on-field hype still following him after so much time on the sideline. For now, though, there’s plenty of reason for cautious optimism as Lloyd tries to finally prove why the Packers have stuck by him.“Usually in the NFL … you don’t play for two years, you’re gone. That’s just how the league works,” Lloyd said. “I don’t want to be a player that’s just here. I want to be able to contribute, and I will. … I know when my time comes and it’s time to go, I’ll show a lot of people why the Packers drafted me almost three years ago now. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re coming.”