Gaining 60 pounds in two years sounds like something that anyone could do with an endless supply of Twinkies and a vat of gravy.
Frank Clark had to use a slightly different method.
The Michigan defensive end has been working hard in the weight room and even harder at the team table in order to transform himself from a lanky freshman into the ripped junior that has been turning heads.
"The coaching staff and the people in charge of nutrition are incredible here," he said. "They have all of this planned out, and I just have to follow what they tell me to do. That's a lot of hard work, though."
The results seem to have been worth it. When the Wolverines signed Clark in 2011, he was a 6'2", 210-pound linebacker at Glenville Academic High School in Cleveland, and he wasn't generating any headlines. He wasn't listed in the top-50 prospects in Ohio, and he wasn't even a blip on the national radar.
In high school, Clark wanted to be a safety, so that's where he was originally projected as a Wolverine. His size and 4.5 speed would be enough to generate a lot of hitting power. That would have made him a handy player in the Big Ten, but nothing spectacular. As a high-school senior, his head coach, Ted Ginn Sr., finally convinced him to move to outside linebacker, where he could use his speed to get after quarterbacks.
That worked, but no one can play rush linebacker at 210 pounds in a BCS conference, so when he got to Michigan, the strength and conditioning team got right to work. Two years later, they've got something close to the finished product. The 210-pounder from Cleveland is now a defensive lineman at more than 270 pounds, and he's still got the 4.5 speed.
"I look in the mirror, and I really can't believe what I see," Clark said. "There's no way I would have believed that I would be playing football at 273 pounds and still be able to run the same way I was running at 210. That didn't even seem possible, but that's how good the staff is at Michigan."
In the age of Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun, there will always be skeptics when a player changes his body in such a drastic measure, but A-Rod and Barry Bonds didn't start their transformations when they were still in their teens. Clark is a player who kept himself smaller to play a speed position, and has now taken advantage of science and work to build into the body that his high-school saw all along.
As far as his coaches and teammates at Michigan are concerned, Clark is nothing more than one of those one-of-a-kind athletes that make things look easy.
"He's a freak," said starting quarterback Devin Gardner. "He jumps, he runs and it's kind of ridiculous. He's huge, and he's doing the same things that I do. I like to think of myself as a great athlete, so it is hard to see someone that size doing the same things I can do. He's going to be All-Big Ten or All-American or whatever he wants."
Defensive coordinator Greg Mattison also thinks Clark has unlimited potential.
"He's running down the field alongside our ballcarriers -- 40 yards down the field," Mattison said. "He's not chasing them, we are in a drill where you are hitting guys, and he's just running with them. This is a guy that used to be 217 pounds and now he's 274 and a rush end, and still runs like that."
Clark's last remaining obstacle might be himself. He was arrested for home invasion during the summer of 2012, sat out the first game of the season and had to serve probation.
"I was immature when I got here, and I didn't fix that as quickly as I needed," he said. "I did some stupid things, and I ended up in court, and that taught me that I needed to grow up in a hurry. That was something I had to fix on my own, and I've done it."
If Clark has conquered his own maturity, the Big Ten might be next.
