The Vikings had just bowed out of the NFC divisional playoffs in January 2020 when Adam Thielen sat down with longtime personal trainer Ryan Englebert for their annual planning session. The item atop both of their lists: How to keep injuries like the hamstring strain that bothered Thielen through much of 2019 from becoming a regular occurrence.
Thielen first injured his hamstring on a touchdown pass from Kirk Cousins in a Week 7 win against the Lions, and would miss nearly two months after a pair of setbacks that prolonged his absence. He tried to return from the injury two weeks later against the Chiefs, but played just seven snaps before aggravating his leg, and would miss another four games, with his return date postponed by two weeks after another setback in a December outdoor practice.
“I kind of stepped back and just addressed my nutrition, strength training, performance, all that,” Thielen said. “Just kind of looked at it from an outside perspective and tried to figure out what I could do better, what I was doing well from a recovery standpoint.”
In a way, Thielen’s consternation over the injury did something else for the receiver as he approached his 30th birthday: it gave him a head start on some of the questions he’d have to answer in order to remain productive into the latter stage of his career. He shifted to a high-protein diet to aid in muscle recovery and took a firmer line on his diet, cutting out some of the unhealthy choices he’d find himself tempted by after a long day of training.
At least based on his durability during the 2020 season, Thielen said he believes the changes he made worked. He played 985 snaps last season, just 47 short of his career high even though he missed a game while in the NFL’s COVID-19 protocol. Three days after the season ended, he said, he was ready to start working out again.
“There’s a lot of factors that led into this, but after the season last year was the best I’ve ever felt in my entire life,” Thielen said last month, in appearance for Gone Rogue All-Natural Turkey Bites, the high-protein snack he’s added to his regimen. “Mentally, physically, I just felt really good. I’m just trying to keep that going this year. There’s things that we adjusted, things that we wanted to work on, but for the most part, we just made sure we were doing the things that helped me get to that point.”
More than eight years after the Vikings brought him in on a rookie camp tryout, Thielen is the second longest-tenured player on the team, behind only Harrison Smith. He turned 31 in June, and after a 14-touchdown season last year, he needs only eight scores to have more receiving TDs in his 30s than any receiver in Vikings history other than Cris Carter.
The Vikings converted $10 million of his base salary to a signing bonus in a cap-savings move this spring, pushing $7.5 million of cap costs into the final three years of his deal. They would save $5.845 million by cutting Thielen after the season, but would incur $11.1 million of dead money charges, in addition to whatever goodwill they’d lose by parting with the popular Detroit Lakes native.
Still, the market for receivers in their 30s can dry up quickly. Thielen and Julio Jones are the league’s only 30-something receivers still playing on deals that average more than $10 million per season. The key to Thielen continuing his run on his terms, in his home state, will be his production. He doesn’t seem afraid of the prospect.
The training sessions he’s built in the east metro with Englebert in recent years continued to swell this summer. Thielen was the dean of a workout group that included Vikings rookies Ihmir Smith-Marsette and Kellen Mond, Chad Beebe, Alexander Mattison, C.J. Ham, Nate Stanley, Jackson Erdmann, former Gophers receiver Tyler Johnson, North Dakota product Travis Toivonen and, for brief stretches, Dalvin Cook and Rashod Bateman.
He has in some ways crafted his own version of what Larry Fitzgerald had for so many years at the U, where receivers from around the league came to train with the future Hall of Famer. Thielen was among those players early in his career; he still counts the 37-year-old Fitzgerald as a mentor and a role model for what he can do over the next several years.
“I’ve seen him a few times this offseason, and I’ve been able to pick his brain,” Thielen said in July. “He’s always so open to sharing and always trying to help me. He did it for a long time — I don’t think I want to do it as long as Larry did it, but I’m pretty impressed with what he was able to do. Relationships like that, and seeing guys I played with early in my career, I’ve picked a lot of pieces from a lot of guys.”
The 2021 season could see teams focus on Justin Jefferson as much or more as Thielen, who said the Vikings started to notice that shift even toward the end of 2020.
“I’m sure there’ll be new wrinkles and different things teams are doing,” he said, “but the great thing about that is, we have a ton of playmakers on this team, at every level. It’s pretty exciting to know that when they try to take something away, there’s a guy that’s pretty dang good that’s going to have a one-on-one.”
When the 31-year-old is in position to benefit from that dynamic, he’s confident he’s set himself up to stay on the field and take advantage of it.
“I’m not joking when I say this is the best I’ve ever felt in my entire life,” he said. “I feel better right now than I did in college. I don’t really want to change anything; as of right now, I feel like I have a pretty good plan to handle recovery, nutrition, performance and all that. It’s just trying to make sure I stay on top of it. When I get tired at camp, and it’s been long days, strenuous on the field and off the field, making sure that I’m sticking to my plan and not leaning away from it as I’m tired. That’s the biggest focus right now.”