Shawne Merriman once had an interesting experience in the weight room. (YouTube/ViceSports)
Shawne Merriman once had an interesting experience in the weight room. (YouTube/ViceSports)

There's a lot of ways to build camaraderie in the NFL. For some teammates, that means going bowling together or playing in a softball game together.

For other players though, it means taking your clothes off in the weight room so a teammate will walk in and see you doing naked squats. 

That's what former Chargers center Nick Hardwick did once during his playing career. 

In a story for the Players Tribune, Hardwick's former teammate, Shawne Merriman, recounted the time that he ran into a naked Hardwick in the weight room. 

From Merriman: 

It's the middle of a game week, and we're at the Chargers facility early for team meetings. Our defensive meeting ends early, so I decide to go hit the gym for a few minutes.

I'm walking to the gym, and it's pretty much a ghost town. It's about 8 a.m., and most of the guys are still in other meetings. I walk past the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look into the gym, and just like the rest of the facility, it’s pretty much empty.

Except for one guy: our then-300-pound center, Nick Hardwick.

And he's literally butt-ass naked, wearing nothing but tennis shoes and his tattoos, doing squats.

So does one react to seeing a naked teammate?

I freakin' lose it. I'm literally on all fours laughing, crying so hard I can barely stand up. I never even make it into the weight room. I just run to tell the other guys, 'Yo, go check out your boy Nick.'

Hardwick actually had a reason for being naked, which he shared that in his own story for the Players Tribune.

I found nudity was usually a really great way to break the ice. Not even break the ice, but break the monotony of the day and the season. During the season, the weeks just get so long.

In this instance -- I think it was in between meetings or something -- I walked by the weight room and thought, I'm just gonna go in here and get naked. I went in and stripped my clothes, like it was the natural thing to do, and started squatting as guys were passing through the weight room. The only thing I was wearing were my tennis shoes because you gotta squat with shoes on, right?

Hardwick and Merriman were teammates for five and a half seasons in San Diego (2005-10). As far as we know though, this is the only time that one them caught the other one doing naked squats.