Minutes after losing to LeBron James and the Cavs in the first round of the NBA playoffs, Indiana Pacers' star Victor Oladipo texted his trainer, "When do we start? I'm ready to take it to another level." That trainer is David Alexander, who serves as fitness guru to Oladipo and, previously, James. Alexander owns DBC Fitness in Miami, which features a long list of high-profile clients that also includes NFL stars Von Miller and Antonio Brown.

The gym's underlying fitness philosophy is based on "biomechanics" and begins with a detailed assessment of a new client's body that includes 60 orthopaedic measurements, including knee flexion, curvature of the lumbar, and thoracic extension. Then, Alexander and his team apply math and science to create a program designed to optimize movement for that athlete's specific body. And if that seems like it's over your head—don't worry, it's over ours, too—just consider the results: Victor Oladipo had a breakout All-NBA season this year, and LeBron James, in his fifteenth season, might still be at the peak of his powers. (LeBron's current personal biomechanist is Donnie Raimon, the Movement Analyst and Academic Director of Alexander's DBC Fitness.)

Alexander has some advice for mere mortals, too, particularly when it comes to recovering from the worst things you put your body through. In the event you ever face the Sisyphean task of having to drag a bunch of subpar teammates to your eighth straight NBA Finals—or you just don't want to hurt as much when you roll out of bed in your thirties—listen up.

GQ: So you’re the one responsible for the viral Instagram of Victor Oladipo's text message.

David Alexander: It was crazy. I'm sitting there with my wife and kids, watching the game. The game's over, he and ‘Bron hug, they share a few words. I think they're doing LeBron’s postgame interview, and my phone buzzes. It's been literally three minutes. He texts me, “Yo, when can we start?”

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He's a special, special athlete. A lot of athletes talk about having a work ethic, but they really don't. Victor has that work ethic. If he could have, he would've flown to Miami that night and gotten a workout in. That was my motivation behind doing the post. I wanted every athlete out there to see that, like, while LeBron's still getting an interview, this guy's texting his trainer. “Hey, when can we start?”

What did you say back to him?

If you see his postgame interview, he goes, “I had someone tell me take some time off and enjoy life”—that was me. I wrote back to him, “Brother I'm so proud of you. Take a week or two, go enjoy being you. Go pick an island you've never been to and go to it.” He goes, “This is my life.” And I said, “Well, I'll see you in two weeks.” He's been back for over a week already.

Watch:Behind the Scenes with LeBron James

Having worked with some of these premiere athletes, is there one story or memory that sticks out, where you’re like, “Man, you won’t believe what this guy came and did"?

We had AJ Bouye, a Pro Bowl cornerback for the Jaguars—what I like to do is always challenge the athlete at the end of a workout, to simulate the fourth quarter. This guy box-jumped 60 inches five times at the end of a workout. The whole facility, every athlete that was in there, stopped to watch it. And this guy was just going at a 60-inch box. I've been doing this for 20 years. That blew my fucking mind.

What are some of the most common mistakes that guys make when they visit the gym?

The most common mistake I see nowadays are people doing workouts they see on Instagram, and they have no idea why they're doing it, or how to do it. They just see someone do it, or they see another athlete do it. They're not getting assessments, and they're not working with a trainer that really knows biomechanics. If you're a pro athlete, this is your job. Your body is your job. And the reason why LeBron is so great, and what people don't see, is that LeBron is always working on his body.

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What's that exercise he does where he's balancing on the exercise ball?

That's a lot of core—a good neuromuscular thing. It's a great way to get your system completely firing. There were so many people out there trying to hate on ‘Bron, talking about, “Who puts a 100 million-dollar athlete kneeling on a ball with kettlebells? He could get hurt.” Well, we didn't do it overnight. This was a progression.

LeBron's been working off the ball since 2012. I have photos of him just learning how to hold onto a pole and try and get his knees on the ball—he would fall off. And that goes back to your last question. People who have no business getting on a ball saw that and then grabbed kettlebells and tried to hold them. The trainers are just doing it now to mimic something LeBron's doing. What they don't realize is that LeBron's been working on that four or five years.

And he makes it look so easy.

He does make it look easy, and people don't know how hard that is. The whole purpose of that is to give an athlete a greater sense of his or her body. When you get on that ball, there's no way to cheat. You have to fire your entire system, your entire kinetic chain—muscles, cells, nervous system—all components have to fire in order to do that without holding onto something. When they come in the first day, we have people kneel on a ball, and they can't do it.

It's like getting in a car that doesn't have four-wheel drive but you're going to take it up a mountain in snow anyway. You just saw someone else do it, so you’re like, ”Huh, well I'm going to drive up the mountain in a Toyota Corolla.”

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I’m 28—if I want to have a long-term exercise regimen and be able to stay active, what are the things I need to start doing now to put myself in a position to be able to do that?

Number one: You've got to know what's going on with your body. That's always going to go back to getting a proper assessment. Number two is that your recovery has to match the training. Every time you train—even if you're training perfectly for your body's wants and needs—you're going to cause some imbalances, some muscle trauma. So you're going to need body work. You have to make sure you're getting the proper stretches in line for your body, and tissue work, and the right food. Sleep, staying hydrated. All of this goes hand-in-hand. It's like if you have a Formula One car or a fighter jet, you're not going put a bunch of bad gas and shitty oil in it. There's a system in place to make those two pieces into the machines they are, and the human body is the same way.

So if we take a guy like Draymond Green, or LeBron, or Oladipo, it’s such a grueling season. From the end of one game to the start of a next, how do you prepare to get your body back in top shape?

The three components I always suggest to my athletes: Number one, get in a cold tub after long games to calm the body down and get as much inflammation out of the body as possible. And some even like to do contrast: the hot and the cold. Number two, get the right food, and get hydrated. And then number three, sleep.

For example, this is kind of the protocol I was using with Oladipo during his playoff run: The minute you get off the court, get in that cold tub. After that, you need to get at least 1.5 liters of water in you. And then get a good meal in you. Stay away from the flour, stay away from the refined sugar, stay away from the gluten. Those are things that will cause internal inflammation. Lastly, you've got to get eight hours of sleep, at a minimum.

Especially with these athletes who are taking four- or five- hour flights on their day off—flying dehydrates you. A dehydrated muscle is like a dried sponge on the sink. If you take that sponge and you run it under water, you're creating a bunch of fluid. So you have to get as much new fluid to these areas as possible.

When you say "do contrast," does that just mean going from cold tub to hot shower?

We like to use five minutes hot, five minutes cold, five minutes hot, five minutes cold.

If someone doesn't have a cold tub available, is that a thing you can do just by taking a hot-cold shower?

No, not at all. You've got to have an ice bath. A lot of athletes—I'm sure you've seen it on social media—will go to the ice machine at the hotel and start filling up that bathtub with ice water. We'll try to get them in the bathtub for seven minutes of ice water—whenever their threshold is, four, five, six minutes—and then drain it and get them in a hot shower. But yeah, the ice is going be better than the hot. If you can handle the contrast, it's great, because the hot water brings the blood in, and the cold water takes the blood out.

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I know, conceptually, that inflammation in the body is bad, but I'm curious if you could walk me through the granular steps of why it is bad.

So for someone like Vic, I think one of the things that went kind of viral was his before and after photos in the three weeks of training. There was a photo of in which his body was super inflamed, with no abdominal muscle tone. He just looked bloated, and then three weeks later you saw what we were doing to him.

That was because of a few components. When you have the wrong diet in place, you're taking in a lot of flour, a lot of sugar, or alcohol—whatever it may be. You body is not alkalinized, and then you're also putting processed foods in it. What happens is you create inflammation throughout your organs, your intestines, your gut, and your stomach. Your pH levels are coming up. And even though you may feel okay—it's not like you feel sick—your body is exerting a huge amount of its energy to try and get rid of this inflammation. This is all energy that could be going towards performing at a higher level.

Now, imagine that you calm your inflammation down, right? You're not eating refined sugars, and you're not eating processed foods. Now, your body is going, “Wow, look at all this extra energy I have! I'm going to give it to the muscles instead.” People who feel sluggish and tired—maybe you see that they have bags under their eyes or whatever—that's just from a poor diet. That's from their body having too many processed things in it.

With hydration, is it useful to put salt in your water to help you absorb it? I've heard that before, but is that true?

That's kind of an old thing. Back in the day, there wasn't a lot of great water out there, so people would put a little Himalayan sea salt in to help, since sodium helps hydrate.

The optimal pH level for water is 7 to 8.0, and has a high bicarbonate count. What bicarbonates do—selenium, magnesium, sodium, things of that nature—is help the water get into the muscle and hydrate it. Distilled water is basically what they clean machines with. There are no bicarbonates in it. If you're drinking bad water, you're actually not hydrating your body—you're stripping your body. That's where that salt-in-the-water thing came from, but nowadays you don't need to do that. There's a lot of great water out there that you can access that's going to hydrate you.

Would something like tap water suffice, or do you really need something with biocarbonates?

Oh, tap water is horrible.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQLeBron James