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On Saturday, the Los Angeles Lakers opened the doors to their practice facility in El Segundo for the first time since March 19. While teams practices won’t resume yet, players will have limited access to the facilities at the UCLA Health Training Center for private workouts, which is a lot more than they’ve had for the last two months.
Before the Lakers’ practice facility re-opened on Saturday, the team’s training staff sent players workouts to do at home. However, some players, like Dwight Howard, took extra steps to stay in shape.
During the hiatus, Dwight Howard has been at his home in Georgia working out every morning (he has a routine of boxing plus 100 pushups/100 situps/100 squats/running 2 miles), and spending time with his 5 children: in the pool, on his court, playing hide-and-go-seek on 23 acres.
— Mike Trudell (@LakersReporter) May 15, 2020
If the “100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and 100 squats” workout sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s a variation of the workout Saitama does in “One Punch Man.” According to Saitama, he got his strength from doing 100 push-ups, 100 sits-ups, 100 squats, and running approximately six miles every day for three years. To Howard’s credit, he’s doing everything but the six-mile run, and even then, he’s making up for it by doing other cardio activities.
However, during an Instagram Live Q&A with Jared Dudley earlier this week, Howard said that he’s not doing the workout solely for fitness purposes:
“It’s more so about the discipline of doing the workout every day, which was the reasoning behind One Punch Man saying he did this every day. It’s more so discipline because, it’s like, every day you’ve got to get up and do this workout no matter what’s going on at home, no matter how you feel. It’s kind of like how we have to be: we’ve to be disciplined with our training, with our foods, and stuff like that.”
If Howard is successful in his training, he’ll come back from the hiatus bald like Saitama — and if Howard comes back bald, the Lakers should be unanimous favorites to win the title. As good as Giannis Antetokounmpo is, he’s no Saitama — he’s more like Boros.
For more Lakers talk, subscribe to the Silver Screen and Roll podcast feed on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or Google Podcasts. You can follow this author on Twitter at @RadRivas.