WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. — One of Jimmy Garoppolo’s great laments is that quarterbacks can’t be weight-room monsters.
Garoppolo, after all, grew up one of four defense-loving boys in a suburb of defense-loving Chicago. His oldest brother, Tony Jr., was a lineman, Mike was a linebacker and Billy, the youngest, played cornerback.
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Jimmy wanted to be like Mike, the biggest of the bunch and the one who got a scholarship to play linebacker at Western Illinois. So Jimmy played linebacker, too, until his junior year of high school when he moved to quarterback. Even after switching to offense, he didn’t stop lifting like a linebacker until he reached the NFL.
“In college I was obsessed with it,” he said this week. “There was a little too much weightlifting. Once I got to the NFL, I had to tone it back a little bit. To throw every single day — you can’t be jacked up and rocked up. You have to be pliable and be able to do all these stretches and things.”
This season, however, has been different. This is the year Garoppolo returned to the weight room. His early March shoulder surgery meant he couldn’t do much upper-body work or any throwing for the next few months. So the 49ers quarterback worked on his bottom half in a way he hadn’t been able to do in his first seven years in the league.
“I got to lift a little more weights in the lower body, more running, dropbacks, things like that,” he said. “Yeah, I think it was kind of a blessing in disguise. I got to beef up in some areas and make the best of it.”
The extra muscle has helped him compensate for the shoulder surgery, which has led to more soreness and arm fatigue than he’s ever experienced before. But on some throws, he said, he actually has more zip this season. He attributes that to having a stronger base.
“Because I’m a ground thrower,” he said. “All my power comes from my legs and everything. Some guys are 6-(foot)-6 and they throw it like a baseball. I don’t have that ability. So I’ve got to transfer from the ground. So I think that does play a role. Some throws have more (zip), some have less. It all depends.”
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It’s all part of Garoppolo’s strangest season to date.
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It began with the surgery, which he thought he might be able to avoid when the 2021 season ended. It got weirder when he signed a reworked contract with the team he’d all but said goodbye to earlier in the year. Even at that point, he thought there’d be time for his right arm to regain its strength and stamina.
It turns out that arm was needed after just 4 1/2 quarters of the season. As Garoppolo told Tim Kawakami last week, he initially thought Trey Lance had a concussion after he ran into 238-pound Seahawks linebacker Cody Barton in Week 2 at Levi’s Stadium.
But as trainers and team doctors attended to Lance, Ryan Donahue, the 49ers’ rehabilitation director with whom Garoppolo had spent training camp, said he thought Lance might have dislocated an ankle. That’s when it began sinking in for Garoppolo that he wouldn’t be merely an in-game replacement that day, that everything had changed for the rest of the season.
Was his arm ready? After his first start in Denver, he wasn’t sure. He’d never dealt with postgame arm soreness in his career. After his start in Denver, the arm was tired and in pain.
“I think the big thing is the amount of throws you do on game day — your warmup, pregame throws, in-the-game-throws, the sideline throws,” Garoppolo said. “Those add up. You’re actually doing almost double the amount in a game than in a practice.
“It’s hard to describe,” he continued. “Because you’re in the game and you’re so locked in that you don’t even notice, really. But after the game, you just feel it. I’ve never been sore after games from throwing. I’ve been sore for other reasons. But now, it just feels different.”
The arm still isn’t back all the way, he said. The good news is that there’s nothing structurally wrong with it and that it’s gotten less bothersome with every outing. Both his arm and the 49ers’ offense seem to be repairing themselves as the season progresses.
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“It’s coming along,” he said. “That’s the best way to put it.”
His best outing so far was his most recent one against the Panthers, and with defensive starters Arik Armstead and Emmanuel Moseley likely missing Sunday in Atlanta and Nick Bosa questionable, the 49ers might need to lean even more on Garoppolo and the offense.
The quarterback certainly doesn’t look like he’s struggling, unhappy or in pain. In fact, he’s seemed as lively as ever during the team’s three practices in West Virginia. At one point during Thursday’s session, he challenged running back Jeff Wilson Jr. to a race from one end of the field to the other.
Garoppolo made the running back step on the gas — they were even for the first several paces — before Wilson pulled ahead. Wilson, after all, reached nearly 21 mph in the Week 4 win over the Rams. Garoppolo, meanwhile, is still more Buick than sports car. It seems lower-body training only goes so far.
“I think Jeff’s got me beat in that one,” he said with a smile. “But yeah, it’s fun out here, man. I know it’s a new environment for everybody, but (we’re) just trying to make the best of it and enjoy West Virginia.”
(Photo: Eakin Howard / Getty Images)
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