Carson Wentz stretching for any edge with warm-up routine

Twenty minutes before the start of practice, Carson Wentz takes the field. He's the first Eagles quarterback to begin his warm-ups on this day, but the last to begin throwing a football.

Wentz runs through a series of intricate exercises that has him swinging, twisting, and raising his arms and hands from a variety of positions.

He paces forward and backward 50 yards with his arms raised in a "U" shape like some Pentecostal worshiper. He repeats the walk, but this time, he bends his elbows back and forth. A photographer who has watched this routine for weeks calls it "The Robot."

Wentz then mixes in a few lower-body stretches before attacking his shoulders and wrists. He extends his arms and turns his hands. He flaps his wings, rotating his sockets so aggressively that even Michael Phelps might be impressed. He does so from various arm slots.

Quarterbacks Matt McGloin and Dane Evans, meanwhile, begin tossing to each other on a separate field. Wentz picks up a resistance band and straightens his arms out behind his head. He stretches the rubber as he loosens various muscles.

After approximately 15 minutes, he puts his helmet on, picks up a football and starts soft tossing to a ball boy.

"A lot of people think you warm up by throwing. You got to warm up your shoulder, your elbow, everything, before you throw," Wentz said Tuesday. "Hopefully, I'll be playing this game for a long time, so I'm going to do everything I can to keep my arm in good shape all the time."

Wentz said he's always warmed up before throwing, but his new routine is different and more detailed. He adopted it during offseason workouts in Southern California with quarterback guru Adam Dedeaux.

Much has been made of the mechanical changes to Wentz's delivery, but the stretching program – referred to as "activation protocol/arm care and recovery" – may have been the most significant alteration he underwent before his second NFL season.

"It's just some different things just to kind of get the shoulder going, get the arm going, some rotational things that I've kind of implemented from them," Wentz said. "That's a big part of the offseason what I did learn – maintenance, arm care."

Wentz was just the latest notable name to train with 3DQB – the quarterbacking mecca that former major league pitcher Tom House founded in 2005. Tom Brady, Matt Ryan, Drew Brees and Eli Manning are among the tens of throwers who have enlisted House and Dedeaux to help maximize the physical and mental approaches to their jobs.

Brady and Ryan were devotees later into their careers, but the 24-year-old Wentz is hoping that his early commitment will pay off in the long run.

"That's kind of the goal," Wentz said.

He tossed 607 passes last season – the second-most ever for a rookie. Wentz missed three preseason games last August, but he had never thrown as much as he did in 2016. He was fatigued by the end of the year, mostly, he said, because of the grind of his first NFL season. But team sources told The Inquirer in February that he had also experienced minor elbow soreness.

The Eagles suggested that Wentz take a month off from throwing – which he did in January – but they haven't held him back since the start of workouts in April. In fact, Wentz has been taking more repetitions than recent starting Eagles quarterbacks. Not only is he taking every first-team snap, but he is also sharing time with the second unit.

"Do we monitor how many throws he gets? Yes, we do," Eagles coach Doug Pederson said when asked about Wentz being on a pitch count. "But we don't pull him out after he gets an 'X'-amount of throws."

Wentz, for the record, said recently that his arm felt great. The proof has been in his performance thus far in training camp. His passes have been more accurate, especially on the deep ball. Ryan, who first trained with Dedeaux before last season, said at the Super Bowl that there was a correlation between the significant increase in his yards per pass attempt and 3DQB's stretching program.

"I love the discipline of it and the consistency of it," Eagles offensive coordinator Frank Reich said. "I think it does all of the physical things that it's supposed to do. Strength, balance, shoulder integrity. Shoulder integrity's very important, so you get the blood flowing. And I think it's a frame of mind and it's a discipline to do that."

Dedeaux declined to be interviewed for this story out of respect to Wentz, who has asked for discretion from those who know him well outside the Eagles. But the philosophy behind the "activation protocol" for rotational athletes such as quarterbacks and pitchers is relatively self-explanatory.

"As a thrower, you have a lot of internal rotation, and it's really important to keep these back muscles stronger," Reich said as he grabbed just behind a reporter's shoulder. "There's push exercises and there's pull exercises. As a thrower, you want to do more pull exercises because, on push exercises, you're working internal rotation and you already get a lot of that throwing."

The resistance-band exercises, Reich said, are designed to strengthen the back muscles and to stretch all the capsules in the rotator cuff.

"It's very well-thought out and systematic," Reich said. "All the band stuff — it's all time-tested. There's nothing funky about it."

Wentz is the only quarterback on the Eagles roster to employ the 3DQB method of warming up. Each has his own routine before practice. Nick Foles said he never had to stretch his arm. He would just warm up by throwing. But a recent elbow injury could have him reconsidering his approach.

"This is first time I've had issues like this," said Foles, who has been out for almost two weeks. "Going forward, I'll probably have to implement more stretching, more recovery stuff. I've been fortunate that the arm's always sort of been OK. It might just be over the years not doing that stuff and it finally added up."

McGloin said he's never had an arm issue. He stretches before throwing, but said that he focuses on his legs and lower back.

"That's where I generate a lot of my power — my legs, my core strength," McGloin said. "Everybody has something different that gets them activated, and gets them moving before practice. With Carson, it's obviously a very elaborate warm-up routine. I don't think mine is as extreme."

Reich, who played quarterback in the NFL from 1985-98, said that many of his peers would spend far less time stretching before throwing – if at all.

"I've been around guys whose routine is just give me the ball and let's go," Reich said. "I was more in the Foles camp. Just give me 10 throws and I'm ready to go. Back in the day, we didn't understand all the sports science. I think what you see [Wentz] doing now is a lot more common these days."

A quarterback's arm is his livelihood. And many are looking for any edge to help them prolong their careers. House has conditioned his clients to believe they can play until they're 45. Brady has publicly said he wants to play until that age. The reigning Super Bowl champion quarterback turned 40 last week.

"Seems so far away," Wentz said.

jmclane@phillynews.com
@Jeff_McLane