The day after the Nuggets won the championship, Nicodemus Christopher received a text that he knows shouldn’t have surprised him. But it was the day after the Nuggets won the championship, so yeah, it kind of did anyway.
“Mike is blowing me up,” Christopher recalled, “about getting in the weight room: ‘Bro, offseason started. Let’s go.’”
Christopher has been Michael Porter Jr.’s strength trainer for eight years, dating back to a wayward season of injury frustration when Porter was a top draft prospect at Missouri. Perhaps fittingly, that was the year that set off the chain reaction leading to Porter’s text. Three back surgeries later, in June 2023, he was craving a workout because he couldn’t allow himself to break the habits that enabled him to stay healthy during a championship season.
Michael Porter Jr. (1) of the Denver Nuggets takes the court against the Oklahoma City Thunder during the first quarter at Ball Arena in Denver on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
“People always talk about your body needing rest and your body needing a day off,” Porter told The Denver Post. “I don’t really believe in that. … A lot of things that for other people may just be icing on the cake, for me, those things have become necessity because of my injuries. I’m not able to take days off and let my body just chill. I’ve gotta keep things firing, keep things active, keep getting stronger to support my body after the injuries I’ve been through.”
This has been Porter’s dogma for years. It’s how an athlete known for his injury history played more games than anyone else in Denver’s starting lineup last season: 93 out of 94, including the playoffs. It’s how he has emerged as the team leader in total minutes once again this season, averaging 36.5. That’s almost five more than his previous career high.
The Nuggets are leaning on Porter more than ever, and he’s coming through with 18.6 points, 7.2 rebounds and 2.9 assists per game. He’s doubling as a starting three and a backup four, running with the second unit when Michael Malone’s roster is at full strength. And he’s operating more with the ball in his hands, averaging almost 14 more touches per game and navigating to the rim to score 39.2% of his points in the paint — 10% more than last year.
“The same drive that propelled me before injuries to be the best in the world is the same drive that now enables me to even be on the court post-surgeries,” Porter told The Post after finishing a pregame shootaround last week in Memphis. “I don’t know if my ceiling is quite as high after the injuries and everything, but I think that I have the drive. Like, a one-of-one drive. It’s what propelled me to be the No. 1 (recruit) in the world at one point. … If I didn’t have that drive, I would not be playing most of the games. I would not probably be playing in the NBA.”
To understand how Porter is still upgrading as a player — and how he has transformed into a pillar of durability — one must comprehend his training regimen behind the scenes.
The 26-year-old works out six days a week during the offseason, a “non-traditional” schedule including drills on the court and weight-room exercise, according to Christopher. There’s an upper-body day, then a lower-body day, then a “gap day,” when Porter analyzes how his body has reacted to previous workouts and tailors the next one to his immediate needs. Autonomy over how to use the time is vital.
“He’s hyper-aware of how his body feels,” Christopher said. “When you have that many conversations with specialists, you have that many conversations with doctors, you have that many conversations with your sports medicine staff … you’re talking to medical professionals every day for, at minimum, a period of eight months after each surgery, you start to get a mini-course in physiology. So I think it’s fair to say Michael has taken quite a few mini-courses in physiology.”
That means if Porter isn’t feeling as bouncy as he should be on Monday, he’ll work on minimizing his ground contact time during his next gap day. Go up to seize a rebound, come down, go back up as quickly as possible. If Porter’s back feels a little stiff in the morning, he might devote an entire gap day to hip mobility and core stability. (Maintaining core strength is a regular cornerstone of his workouts anyway, in order to be proactive against his history of spine issues.)
“I think anytime you’ve been through multiple injuries to your body, you start to learn the medical terms,” Porter said. “You start to learn the names of different parts of your body, and you start to just really become just familiar with your body in a way you wouldn’t have if you never got injured. … A lot of the stuff is just me knowing what I need. It’s just me knowing my body and becoming almost like my own rehab therapist. My own trainer in the weight room.”
Porter takes pride in that self-anointed job title. And it’s not just limited to the offseason. On the road, he says, “I do stuff in the weight room in the evening time when nobody’s in there.” It has become a mental reflex, a way to occupy dead time. Denver’s younger players have taken notice. “He’s got one of the best work ethics in the league,” Peyton Watson said. Zeke Nnaji was inspired to establish more consistency in his shooting workouts after observing Porter’s habitual presence in the practice gym. When Porter and Christopher disagree, it almost always involves Christopher wanting him to take a rest day and Porter declining.
Denver Nuggets forward Michael Porter Jr. gets up after getting called for an offensive foul after charging rookie Christian Braun during the team’s training camp at the UCSD campus in La Jolla, California on Friday, September 30, 2022. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)
“Most people have no idea the motor Michael Porter Jr. has,” Christopher said. “And this is not to diminish anybody else. There’s a select less than 0.1% of people who can go through three surgeries as a professional athlete and come back better afterward. They have no idea how mentally defeating, how physically defeating, three back surgeries are.”
In seeking to understand that motor, Christopher has even tried tailoring certain off-season workouts to the results of a psychological exam Porter took. The dominant neurotransmitter in his brain, according to the test, was dopamine. “Once we understand what your brain craves, because your brain is the thing that sends the signal to the body, now we can develop your workouts based off the things that your brain is craving,” Christopher said.
For Porter himself, those nuances aren’t really on his mind in the context of a basketball drill or training session. He’s more concerned with understanding himself off the court. “Dopamine-driven, I mean, a lot of people are,” he said. “You know, just trying to stay off of quick dopamine hits. Trying to stay off your phone. Trying to stay off of TikTok. All these things that I think you can save some of that for the game. And I do good at that sometimes; bad at that sometimes.”
Still, the use of neurological testing in the first place speaks to the specificity with which Porter interrogates himself as an athlete. He has also invested significant money in health-related devices: a hyperbaric chamber, a cold plunge, an infrared sauna.
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“When I’m at home and I’m chilling, I try to get in my chamber, if I’m just chilling, taking a nap,” he said. “And I try to get under my red light when I can. I don’t really know what helps, what doesn’t help. I just kind of do as much as I can.”
It’s all in the name of durability. Porter played 62 regular-season games the year Denver won the championship. Then after a short offseason, only one game separated him from an Iron Man season that would have seemed unimaginable in December 2021, when he underwent the third back surgery. The brace he’s required to wear over his left foot as a result is well-documented.
After coming so close, does he aspire to play all 82 games in a season eventually, to ice the proverbial cake that is his resilient career?
That, he’ll try not to concern himself with too much. All the time and effort he has devoted to recovery still doesn’t necessarily guarantee him anything.
“It’s whatever,” Porter said. “I try to be able to play as many games as I can. But if you roll an ankle or something, you never know. A lot of that is up to God and up to chance.”
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