How ‘The Bowl’ Became Clayton Kershaw’s Secret Weapon in His Stunning 18th Season Comeback

Eric Yavarone had already guessed where the conversation was headed before the question even fully landed. I mean, picture this: he’s just wrapped up moving a pile of training gear back to the Dodgers’ clubhouse after a grueling pregame session, and a reporter wants to unpack how Clayton Kershaw, at 37 years young, has completely revamped his workout routine to fuel a remarkable comeback in his 18th MLB season.

Yavarone’s chuckle was quick — “The bowl?” he threw out. Yep, you read that right. The “bowl” isn’t your run-of-the-mill sports science term. It’s a quirky, unofficial nickname for the hip, pelvis, and lower back region that Kershaw and his trainers use to describe the key to his physical revival. Curiously enough, this simple concept sparked a seismic shift in the way Kershaw approaches his body care—shedding old habits and embracing a new mindset that has helped him enjoy his best form in years.

Fast forward past back surgeries, joint pains, and the usual wear-and-tear that ages an athlete. Kershaw might not be throwing heat like back in the day, but with a 9-2 record and a solid 3.06 ERA this season, it’s clear he’s mastered the art of savvy pitching — all while his ‘bowl’ is operating smoother than ever. The journey has been anything but easy, but it’s a testament to how smart, subtle adjustments — and the right team behind you — can extend greatness well beyond its expiry date.

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Eric Yavarone knew where the question was going, before it was even fully asked.

When stopped by a reporter near the dugout recently, in the midst of hauling an assortment of training equipment back to the clubhouse at the end of a Dodgers pregame workout, the team’s athletic development coordinator began to be queried on the evolution of Clayton Kershaw’s training routine — and how, at age 37, it has helped the future Hall of Famer manufacture a renaissance performance in his 18th MLB season.

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With a laugh, Yavarone quickly interjected.

“The bowl?” he asked.

Yes.

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The bowl.

For the uninitiated, the “bowl” is essentially a player’s hip/pelvis/lower-back area. It is not an official medical term. You won’t find it in any anatomy or biology textbooks. Yavarone can’t even remember exactly when, or how, he first coined the phrase.

But when it came to working with Kershaw, the idea of the “bowl” helped trigger a profound physical breakthrough.

For a player long reluctant to changing his old vigorous training routine, it provided a different way to think about maintaining his body.

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“The bowl is like your hip, this stuff right here,” Kershaw said recently, while circling his hands around his hips and midsection. “[The training staff told me], ‘Your bowl doesn’t move the way it should.’ And they were like, ‘Hey, we can fix that.’”

After years of back problems, then surgeries the last two offseasons on his shoulder, foot and knee, Kershaw has produced a resurgent 2025 season — thanks in no small part to how well his “bowl” is now moving.

He might not throw as hard as he once did, barely hitting 90 mph with his fastball even on his best days. He doesn’t overpower opponents the way he could in his prime, relying more on consistent command, pitch sequencing and veteran guile to post a 9-2 record and 3.06 ERA in 17 starts this year.

What is different now, however, is how much better his body feels on a daily basis, and how open he has become to new ways of maintaining it.

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“I’ve changed a lot over the years, and our guys have really helped me see what I need to work on and get better at,” Kershaw said at this year’s All-Star Game, when he was the most senior selection to the Midsummer Classic. “My hips and my back have never felt better … That’s a credit to our guys. They’ve really helped me with that.”

Once upon a time, Kershaw adhered to a strict routine in the weight room. It revolved around rudimentary weightlifting; first and foremost, sets of back squats the day after he took the mound. It was predicated on high intensity, unwavering regimentation and, above all else, strenuously heavy reps.

“You always lift heavy,” Kershaw said, recounting his longtime approach to off-the-field training. “You always put weight on your back. You always move it, no matter how you feel.”

In his prime, that system served Kershaw well. It helped build his internal “engine,” in the words of Brandon McDaniel, the club’s former head strength coach and current major-league development integration coach. It honed the lower body and core strength that drove his powerful delivery — a behind-the-scenes bedrock in his rise to becoming a three-time Cy Young Award winner and generationally dominant left-handed star.

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“Back-squatting gives you a certain feel,” McDaniel said. “It makes you feel your butt, it makes you feel your core, it makes you feel like you can push on the ground and do a lot of really good things.”

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But as Kershaw got older, his routine also came with increasingly damaging physical side effects.

He admittedly lacked great form at the squat rack, which put his back under constant stress. And when he’d pitch, all the force his internal strength created would be absorbed by the same part of the body. Without knowing it, he was suffering from a bad “bowl” that was compounded by his annually heavy innings workload. Eventually, the toll of it all caught up with him.

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“That’s one of my biggest regrets in life,” Kershaw told author Andy McCullough in his biography, “The Last of His Kind,” “that I back-squatted for as long as I did.”

Starting in 2016, Kershaw’s back issues began keeping him off the mound.

That season, he missed more than two months with a herniated disc, one that nearly required a major back surgery. Over the next six years, he endured five more injured list stints for back-related ailments.

Even when he was “healthy” over that span, Kershaw would often wake up in the morning with a stiff back or aching hips. Pushing through the persistent pain only caused him more mental exhaustion.

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“When you don’t feel good, that’s all you think about,” Kershaw said. “That type of mental energy — like, ‘Oh gosh, am I gonna feel good?’ — it’s not conducive to pitching well.”

Over the years, Dodgers trainers had tried to help Kershaw adapt. When he was still strength coach, McDaniel preached the importance of supplementary traits, such as hip mobility and core stabilization.

“Kersh has always been open to the next thing or the new thing,” McDaniel said.

Changes, however, came slowly. Alter his routine too much, Kershaw worried, and his pitching might suffer.

“I was just stubborn,” Kershaw said. “It was just the routine of it.”

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This is where the “bowl” comes in.

After re-signing with the Dodgers following MLB’s 2022 lockout, Kershaw reported to Dodgers camp as an “open book” to training staff, current major league strength coach Travis Smith recalled.

Yavarone remembered one conversation with Kershaw specifically.

“People have told me to do this before,” the pitcher told him. “So I probably need to.”

Thus, the Dodgers staff brainstormed ways to get their message across, and have the steadfast Kershaw to buy-in to their suggested changes.

From that process, Yavarone came up with the “bowl” as an analogy — providing Kershaw a more tangible way to understand how all the smaller muscles in his midsection interacted, and how a more holistic training program could pay dividends to his health and his pitching.

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“It was giving him more of the ‘why,’ showing him the anatomy part of it,” Yavarone said. “I think with him, if he feels you believe in what you want him to do, if you’re convicted when you tell him what you got for him, I think he likes that.”

The first modifications were small, right down to new breathing patterns for Kershaw to try during his core work.

“He would get a little frustrated in the beginning, trying to figure out how to do it,” Yavarone said with a laugh. “But even if he gets frustrated, or can’t figure it out at first, he’s like, ‘It’s all right. Let’s come back the next day and do it.’”

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As the days started stacking up, so did the new techniques that the Dodgers’ staff introduced.

Kershaw would still lift heavy, and push the intensity in his gym work. But now, it was paired with other tactics too: Isometric holds in the middle of reps, as a more static way to build muscle strength. Mobility drills between his most strenuous exercises, which increased his core stability and the range of motion in his hips. They even incorporated alternative training equipment into his workouts, using water-bags and 3D straps as less taxing complements for barbells and heavy weights.

“I think with injury comes wisdom,” Smith said. “He’s able to see, ‘Man, I continue to get injured. What is it that I can do differently?’”

Slowly but surely, Kershaw’s back started feeling looser. His hips started feeling freer. And his “bowl,” Yavarone now proudly declares, is moving the way they long envisioned.

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“You don’t have to go in [the weight room] and kill yourself, but you gotta go in there and reposition your body in a way that you feel good the next day,” Kershaw explained. “I don’t know what the answer is, but our guys do. And I just listen to them.”

It took a while for Kershaw to reap the benefits of such changes.

Just as his back began to improve, he suffered a shoulder injury in the second half of the 2023 season that led to his first-ever surgery that winter. After spending the first half of 2024 rehabbing from that, he returned for seven starts last year before again being shelved by a long bothersome toe injury, leading to another offseason procedure.

At either point, he could have called it a career, and not subjected himself to the long road of getting back in pitching shape.

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But all along, he felt he still had something in the tank. Which is why, as soon as he could this winter, he was back in the gym at a training center near his home in Dallas, doubling down on the workout alterations that, like the Dodgers, his personal offseason trainers had also been urging him to make.

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“He’s done a great job of allowing us to, not forcefully push him into that, but say, ‘Dude, you don’t have to squat. You don’t have to deadlift all this weight. You don’t have to do these things,’” said Jason Kharman, who has worked with Kershaw since 2017 as the co-founder of Corpus Performance in Dallas. “As he got older, he just realized, ‘Yeah, I don’t need to do this heavy stuff anymore. I know how to pitch. I know how to handle everything on the mound. I just need to be healthy.’ And you see that this year.”

That doesn’t mean the quality of Kershaw’s stuff on the bump is back where he wants it. In the wake of his shoulder, foot and knee surgeries, syncing up his mechanics has been more of a challenge.

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“I used to be able to just throw a ball perfectly every time, and not even think about it. Just perfect backspin. Just roll out of bed and do that,” Kershaw said. “Now, I’m kind of searching for that a little bit. I can still do it. It’s just not as consistent. So it takes a lot more focus to throw a baseball.”

But now, that focus isn’t being sidetracked by worries about his body, or limitations to his “bowl.”

On multiple occasions this season, he has noted how fresh he physically feels.

“You can tell, when he’s more approachable, when he’s not as edgy, he’s in a better spot physically,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “Obviously, when he pitches, he has that edge still. But yeah, I haven’t heard boo about anything as far as any physical kind of thing, outside of just the grind of the season.”

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The grind, of course, is what Kershaw enjoys most. And this season, he has gotten better the more he has pitched.

In August, he posted a 5-0 record with a 1.88 ERA that ranked third among National League starters for the month. In his last start, a five-inning, one-run victory over the Cincinnati Reds last week, he recorded his second-most strikeouts this season (six) even after moving up in the team’s rotation to pitch on four days’ rest (something he has done three times this year, more than any other Dodgers starter).

“I’m in awe, to be honest,” McDaniel said. “Every time he gets done, I just want to walk up and thank him. I know he would find that extremely odd. But I’m extremely grateful and blessed just to get to watch him. And I know all of our guys feel the same way.”

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Amid it all, Kershaw and Yavarone have also struck up an inside joke. Whenever they’re together on the field or in the gym, Kershaw will often inquire about the “bowl” of other players.

“He’ll be like, ‘How’s this guy’s bowl? How’s that guy’s bowl?’” Yavarone said with a chuckle. “Or if he sees any of us doing some hip mobility stuff, or some core breathing stuff [with someone else], he’ll be like, ‘Bad bowl?’ It’s kinda created a little bit of its own thing.”

It’s yet another small reflection of Kershaw’s newfound perspective on training, physical maintenance and how — even deep into his 30s — he has changed his once-staunch outlook on how to care for his body.

“It takes the right kind of people to get through to me, because I’m stubborn, and I’ve done it — or did it — one way for a long time,” Kershaw said. “But the group that we have here is special … They know how to get through to you. They know how to talk. They’re just smart, and they’re good at what they do. So it gives me buy-in, because they’re so bought in.”

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.