Longoria choosing flexibility over bulking up

Third baseman Evan Longoria feels he best serves his team when he's on the field every day.

So in an effort to avoid muscle injuries (hamstring, quadriceps, oblique) that knocked him out of the lineup the last two seasons, Longoria changed his offseason routine to put more of an emphasis on being flexible than being bulked up.

He will come into camp 10-15 pounds lighter than last spring, and he's feeling good about it. "I feel great, so I hope it pays off," he said.

To do so, he parted ways with the Athletes' Performance Institute, where he'd spent the previous two offseasons, and worked out at a smaller facility where he could structure his workouts to include more of an emphasis on flexibility.

"At Athletes' Performance everybody focused on your weight and intake and what you're putting in your body, and there's no right or wrong there, but it just wasn't right for me," he told the Tampa Bay Times.

Longoria didn't do much weight training, focusing instead on plyometrics (muscle stretching and explosiveness) and movement prep, "more strengthening the smaller muscles in my body and not just doing biceps and bench and all the heavy stuff. It's just as intense of a workout. It's just a different workout than you're used to, a lot of core strengthening."

Longoria strained his oblique in the second game of the 2011 season, missed a month and struggled for another couple before having a big second half. He also battled a painful condition in his left foot called a Morton's neuroma that he had surgically removed in early November.

"I don't want to deal with what I had to deal with last year," he said. "I did as much as I could to try and strengthen all those muscles so I'm as close to 100 percent as I could be coming in."

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