SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Loren Landow hands me a towel, but it’s not for the sweat.For the past hour, Notre Dame’s director of football performance has put this 48-year-old reporter/non-athlete through a workout inside the Guglielmino Athletics Complex, pulling back the curtain on how he has helped build a team that played for a national title in the 2024-25 season and another that won its final 10 games by double digits last fall.I got a taste of Landow’s meticulous warmup, a routine that former players take with them to the NFL. There’s been some lifting and a lot of holding.Now it’s time for the towel. No weight. How hard can this be?“If I pull out the towels with guys, it’s sneaky terrible,” Landow said. “When you want to put it on somebody and humble them a little bit, it’s a good way.”I grab the hand towel with my palms up, pulling it taut. Then I do a bicep curl, then an overhead press, then a lat pulldown, then bring the towel to my waist while flexing my triceps. I need to do 10 reps. By the sixth, my upper back feels like it wants to explode out of my shirt. I finish the set, grunting through the final two reps.After a one-minute break that feels more like five seconds, Landow tells me to go again.I finish the set more out of a need to avoid embarrassment than because I want to.Landow mentions that former swimmer Missy Franklin, the five-time Olympic gold medalist whom he helped train at the performance center he directs in Colorado, would do three sets of 50 reps of this particular towel drill.And on that note, we’re done.Here’s what I learned from working out with Landow, who’s trained NFL players, Olympians, UFC fighters, MLB players, NHL players and now a former third-string soccer goalie who never played above junior varsity.1. You’re warming up. He’s watchingAt the start of every Notre Dame practice, players line up by position in a grid that spans the width of the field and goes about 40 yards deep. They perform a series of 100 movements over the next 10 minutes that target mobility, stability and activation, in that order. Landow puts me through the middle third of the series, assessing my stability on the turf field inside Notre Dame’s weight room.Some of the movements are easy, like bodyweight squats or inchworms — basically holding a push-up position and walking your feet forward until you can stand up straight. Others reveal what I already know, but Landow doesn’t: I have terrible balance. Any movement where I’m on one leg while holding up the other produces a wobble. Maybe he didn’t notice.“Funny enough, you’ve got real good mobility; ankle, hips are really good,” Landow said. “Your hamstrings are limited. Your stability is the problem. Your ankle stability is something that’s really challenging.”So he noticed. That’s the entire point of the warmup, at least for Landow.During his first few practices after coming to Notre Dame in 2024, Landow walked between the players, trailed by an assistant with a notepad, taking notes about who could stretch and who needed help. The warmup isn’t hard to learn; the incoming freshmen master it before their first fall camp. What they probably don’t understand is how much Landow tracks the part of practice when players are most likely to zone out.