The Tennessee Titans are doing things differently with their offensive and defensive linemen in 2026, and the specifics of that difference sent me on a small journey of discovery this week as we gear up for the first game of the season.

It started on Wednesday, when I was kind of taken aback by how few players were out for the initial warmup at the first practice of the week. Now, we had already noticed a different cadence throughout training camp. All non-linemen would come out first and do their stretching period. Then certain starters like Cam Ward, Calvin Ridley, and Wan’Dale Robinson would get additional individual work while the rest of the skill players handled special teams drills. That first special teams period is when all the linemen would suddenly come pouring out of the training room to do their own round of stretching, the same stretches the group used to do together. I found that a bit strange throughout camp but never thought much of it until Wednesday, when the 53-man roster made the thin crowd extra odd to look at.

What’s happening inside that training room?

What are they cooking in there?

I started asking around. The general message I received was simple: it’s to maximize time, to not waste any of it. My natural follow-up was obvious. If they’re not wasting time in there, what exactly are they doing besides stealing one last vestige of AC before the hot Tennessee summer sun?

I asked Titans coach Robert Saleh one-on-one before Wednesday’s practice, and he started describing something I had to research to find a name for: contact adaptation. He couldn’t remember the exact term off the top of his head at the moment, but he talked about how they got it from rugby and how he puts his offensive and defensive linemen through it before they warm up for practice. He demonstrated it to me, taking his hand and forcefully knocking my elbow, then my shoulder. Not a slap, not a punch, somewhere in the middle. The idea is to, well, kind of slowly tenderize the linemen before they stretch and then get after it in pads, because there is reason to believe it helps activate the joints in a way that is both protective and armoring.

Contact adaptation is the idea that repeated low-level impacts toughen the tissue around a joint so that players handle real collisions better. It is popular in rugby, where it shows up as partner slaps and taps on the shoulders, knees, and feet during warmups, followed by progressive contact drills ramping up to full contact. The infamous All Blacks rugby squad in New Zealand even run an upper body program they literally call “collision armor” that implements this concept. Saleh said he wasn’t sure if any other NFL team did it. He thought Tennessee may be the only one in the league.

The clinical science behind contact adaptation is thin and relatively inconclusive. At worst, it’s a contact sport wives’ tale. At best, it’s a natural remedy rooted in practical experience. But if the All Blacks do it and the Titans feel it’s helping them, it may be one of those things that, at the very least, helps cognitively with bracing and contact preparation.

The linemen’s perspective tells a fuller story

I went into the locker room on Thursday fixed on asking these linemen what exactly they get up to in the training room. In speaking with a couple of the more candid members of the offensive and defensive line, they took the conversation in a different direction. They revealed that contact adaptation was something they did a lot throughout the summer until the pads came on a couple of weeks ago. Since then, they have done less and less of it.

So what are they doing in there now instead?

Some of these linemen, whose comments I will relay without quoting them directly, talked about how this is simply a different approach to the way their practice day is handled. But a majority felt it was a better use of their time. It all revolves around the more team drill-centric practice structure that Saleh and his staff have implemented.

Paraphrasing their own words: instead of baking in the sun doing individual drills for 45 minutes, the linemen are inside doing body activation and more static stretching to get loose before joining the universal team-wide stretching routine during the special teams period. I asked whether this amounted to double the stretching. They said it was more body activation work than straight stretching for all that time. The heart of the reason behind the change is that some of the work in the traditional approach felt unproductive for the linemen. Under the old setup, everyone would come out, everyone would stretch, and then everyone would do individual period or special teams period for 30 to 45 minutes before team period. The linemen would head to their trench pit at the end of the three fields and beat on dummies, beat on each other, and beat on pads that trainers were holding. One starter put it bluntly: We’d just be hitting a pad for 45 minutes and honestly run out of things to do.

Some players were more critical of the old approach than others. Certain respected members of the team described it as two different ways to achieve the same goal, a personal preference. Others said they felt the new structure was better overall, that they got more substantive teamwork, were able to take care of their bodies more intentionally by warming up longer, and cut down on pad drill work that had grown redundant and felt unproductive.

There are certainly some linemen coming out of the Bill Callahan era, with all its different dummies and pads, who did not like that approach (in hindsight, at least).

Is developmental work being sacrificed?

So what’s the trade-off? Are they skimping on fundamentals and development work in favor of team period reps that benefit the starters and rotational players? While those I talked to admitted this structure does emphasize more real football work and scheme-specific muscle memory, they felt they weren’t actually losing out on development time for younger or more developmental players. Those guys were getting team reps too. It was described as an everybody-eats kind of approach.

The bottom line is this team is emphasizing no wasted time during practice and emphasizing body activation in a way that rings true for a coach like Saleh coming from the San Francisco 49ers’ substation hellscape. One member of the offensive line told me they’ve heard this is just the way most teams around the league are doing it today, focusing more and more on actual team period work and doing more team drills. For the Titans, it may simply be a matter of getting with the times.