CENTENNIAL, Colo. — The bright orange boombox gives Justin Simmons away, his No. 31 stenciled in white into the back. Those beats cover Monday morning’s ad hoc training space: a baseball outfield at Challenger Park, just south of Denver. It’s a soundtrack to the work that’s helped Simmons grow from a mid-round Denver Broncos pick eight years ago to a four-time All-Pro, two-time Pro Bowler and team captain.

A dozen players join the 8 a.m. acceleration session, from practice squad talent to the NFL’s leading tackler the past three seasons. They work joint angles and body lean, chunking parts of sprint movements, getting granular in mid-July before they scatter to NFL training camps. From a distance, the workout’s intent is hardly obvious, with paired resistance band sprints and players’ active recovery done barefoot. Outside the fence, a recreational biker pedals by and asks what all the stretching and sprinting is about.

“Football,” answers Chris Jarmon, a coach at Landow Performance, the facility that still bears the name of the guy charged with preparing Notre Dame for a College Football Playoff run and a potential 16-game schedule.

Even if Loren Landow is 1,000 miles away in South Bend, Ind., the modus operandi of Notre Dame’s director of football performance is here at Challenger Park. It will follow the players to the Landow Performance facility afterward for a weight room session, a 15-minute drive that snakes past the Broncos facility.

Landow didn’t write this day’s script, but his devotees keep coming back because he once did. Landow Performance employs nearly 30 coaches, a dozen full-time. They train NFL, UFC and NHL talent, sometimes in the same day. On the facility’s wall hangs a game-worn Christian McCaffrey jersey next to a Missy Franklin swimsuit. Tim Tebow and Brian Dawkins jerseys feature, too. And that’s on top of a clientele that’s mostly youth athletes who are more construction jobs than the high-level maintenance work required by athletes like Simmons.

It’s this variety that attracted Marcus Freeman’s interest last year after the abrupt resignation of strength coach Matt Balis on the eve of preseason camp. Landow’s five seasons as the Broncos’ strength coach made for a strong resume line. But knowing how to train gold medal swimmers, champion fighters and the NFL’s best running back captured Freeman’s imagination.

If Landow could customize training on an individual basis for some of the world’s best athletes while also building high school talent from the ground up, what could he do for the Notre Dame football program?

“Loren’s attention to detail and how he goes about it is top-notch. It matches up with the best in the country,” Simmons said. “What you need done, they’re structuring and tailoring those workouts to exactly what you need. I don’t want to be dramatic, but I think it changed and shifted my career to what it is right now.”

Landow trained Denver-area athletes at the Steadman Hawkins Clinic from 2008 until he founded Landow Performance in 2016. Two years later, the Broncos hired him to lead their weight room, which included Simmons, a third-year defensive back coming off two seasons limited by injury. Simmons didn’t miss a snap during the next two seasons, availability turning into productivity and eventually a four-year, $61 million contract. Simmons is now a free agent.

Asked to explain how Landow changed his game by changing his training, Simmons breaks into a squat position, feet wide, toes angled out. He used to squat like this, putting too much pressure on his knees. He used to go too low, putting pressure on his back. Then Simmons narrows his feet to shoulder width, turns in his toes and shallows the squat, just like Landow taught him. Landow ran a diagnostic on how the safety worked instead of just checking the box that he did.

“Not that I was always hurt, but things were hurting. My body still felt off. It didn’t feel like it should, like, when I’m 26,” Simmons said. “Before, we’d just come in: ‘Here’s a piece of paper, here’s a workout, do it.’ You look up at the board — I could be doing this wrong; I could be doing it right. Unfortunately, a lot of teams in the league, at least from what I’ve heard, operate that way.”

Chris Jarmon hears the question but wants more context. On a tour of Landow Performance, he’s asked how its training programs can help prevent hamstring injuries. Jarmon needs to know who he’s training. Range-of-motion issues could trip up a power player, which is why Landow will sometimes train Notre Dame’s offensive linemen barefoot. Imbalances in quads or hamstrings could put a skill position at risk.

Last season, Notre Dame’s wide receivers were decimated by hamstring strains. The Irish had three healthy scholarship wideouts by the end of September. They never fully recovered. Neither did the offense.

So let’s talk about receivers.

Jarmon clicks on the facility’s dual force plate trainer to explain. He steps on and does a static squat, followed by a dynamic one. The first motion begins at a low point before exploding upward. The second motion begins with Jarmon decelerating into the device, a countermovement, before elevating.

On the iPad attached to the device, a red line displays the force applied by Jarmon’s left leg. A blue line details the right. There’s always some imbalance, but if it’s more than 10 percent, then “we have to have a conversation.” It’s not just about getting stronger. It’s about balancing that power.

Next is the NordBord, which can measure and train hamstring strength. The athlete hooks into the device around the ankles, maintains a solid core, then lowers forward before pulling back to the starting position. The board can train at different angles, a bespoke approach by athlete.

There are four VertiMax trainers, which help train going up and being stable coming down. When the device’s bands catch the athlete at the top of their vertical jump, it acts as a rubber band, putting pressure back into the board as the athlete lands. The concept of training deceleration is key for Landow, who sees little use in adding strength if an athlete’s movement capacity doesn’t follow the curve.

And because Landow believes it, his staff preaches it.

The squat racks are wired, similar to Notre Dame’s weight room, where moving weight can be as much about velocity as mass. The dozen NFL players and hopefuls here on this Monday morning have a dozen targets to hit. If mass equals strength, velocity helps measure twitchiness, which is what the group of mostly skilled talent is after. There are four VersaClimbers, popular with the NHL crowd, and four curved treadmills to work on speed training. In the back is the Proteus, a trainer to measure and enhance rotational power, like a UFC fighter’s punch combinations.

“He knows how to develop. I’ve seen him work with youth athletes to the highest of the high,” said Augustine Agyei, who specializes in NFL Scouting Combine prep for Landow Performance. “In the college space, he’s going to be able to develop guys. And the ability to have time to develop guys is his superpower.”

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Jarmon has worked with Landow for almost seven years, even co-authoring a book on NFL combine training. McCaffrey provided the forward. Agyei goes back further, training with Landow as a draft prospect in 2010, then joining his staff three years later. Both worked through Landow’s absence when he left for the Broncos — “30 seconds away but gone,” as Landow puts it.

They were there when Landow returned after parting ways with the Broncos, their old boss observing the staff for a solid month before challenging them to be better. And they were there when Landow departed last December for Notre Dame, hardly surprised their boss would be back in demand.

“When I first met him, I knew he was gonna be gone and I had to learn as much as I can,” Agyei said. “There was no way he was going to be here very long.”

Landow believes he reset the facility’s “north star” during the year between the Broncos and the Irish. After getting let go by Sean Payton, Landow said several Broncos players texted him, asking when they could train. This summer, Landow Performance even drew a few Broncos who had joined the organization after Landow’s tenure.

When Denver’s facility closed the week of July 4, former Notre Dame All-American Mike McGlinchey reached out to train there too.

Foye Oluokun led the NFL in solo tackles last season. (Peter van den Berg / USA Today)

Foye Oluokun needed an edge; he just didn’t know where to find it.

A high school teammate of Ezekiel Elliott’s in St. Louis, Oluokun went to Yale and played safety and linebacker. He turned a few heads, making second-team All-Ivy League as a senior. But he didn’t earn an NFL combine invite. There was no pro day. Oluokun polled his high school coach, former Denver quarterback Gus Frerotte, for advice. Oluokun thought about staying in Connecticut and maybe doing an internship while training. Frerotte connected him with Landow, then told Oluokun to get to Colorado.

That’s how a 218-pound college defender started working himself into a 240-pound linebacker who has started 17 games in each of the past three seasons, leading the NFL in tackles in 2021 and 2022 and finishing fourth last year. After four years with the Atlanta Falcons, Oluokun signed a three-year, $45 million contract with the Jacksonville Jaguars before the 2022 season.

To put Oluokun’s NFL career in recruiting jargon, a two-star athlete developed into a top-100 prospect. Oluokun did the work to get there, but Landow Performance made the syllabus.

“I became a more twitchy athlete,” Oluokun said. “I was always strong, could push weight. He wanted me to do it the right way. When I started training, it wasn’t even heavy lifts. I had to gain a lot of weight, got a meal plan. Everything was down to a science. I saw progress in two weeks.”

Oluokun made this summer his first in Colorado after offseason wrist surgery. He arrived three weeks ago concerned his suddenness had dropped, knowing he needed a summer intensive to get it back.

“They get me right,” Oluokun said. “I come here and get my explosion back, get my twitch back. You can tell by the way you’re moving the weight. If it’s coming off slow, you’re strong but you’re not twitchy.”

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Notre Dame bet on these development stories when Freeman picked Landow to lead the weight room. The Irish setup doesn’t look exactly like Landow Performance, which has more turf space than Notre Dame’s weight room, but the output from suburban Denver feels replicable. If Landow can grow Oluokun from an undersized defender into a prototype inside linebacker, what can he do with Jaylen Sneed or Jaiden Ausberry? If he can help Simmons discover a new level of availability, what does that mean for Benjamin Morrison and Xavier Watts?

And can Landow do it all for Notre Dame’s entire roster at the same time, even with its mixture of training ages and growth curves? It’s nothing Landow hasn’t seen before. It’s just a different mixture of material to train.

“I think the hardest things in college is the intentionality, knowing what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. What made Loren special for me was his intentionality and purpose, not just for me but every single guy on our team,” Simmons said. “I feel like Loren’s biggest strength could be his biggest challenge because he loves on his guys so much. That goes a long way. I learned so much — how to lead, how to do things right away.

“He’s been a big impact on my career.”

(Top photo of Loren Landow: Greg Swiercz / USA Today)