The KC Chiefs’ defensive line has a ‘secret weapon’ in this Overland Park studio
Andy Reid’s training camps in St. Joseph are known to be spartan and severe. After all, as the Chiefs coach put it in July, “there is a certain toughness this game requires.”
Defensive linemen Tershawn Wharton, Derrick Nnadi, Malik Herring and Truman Jones, who is currently on the team’s practice squad, collectively have survived about 20 of those tribulations. And they have otherwise demonstrated their grit many times, many ways.
But none of that quite girds them from the harsh demands of Pilates, as administered by Kahley Schiller at her studio in Overland Park, where the four of them appeared Tuesday in what has become an in-season routine for all.
They’re there willingly, it should be noted … despite a few primal yells and some huffing and groaning best enunciated in Herring’s hilarious venting.
Like when he had a ball under his back and was scissoring his legs on the reformer apparatus and sang a high-pitched “I will survive” as if to convince himself.
Or on his stomach atop a box on the reformer in the so-called Superman pose. With his chest and chin up and pulling straps back on the side, he let out a distress signal: “Mayday, mayday, mayday!”
Any past dreams of being Superman vanished.
Now, he said as he persevered, he’d settle for Batman.
Nearing the end of the hour-long workout, he invoked The Hulk as he looked in the mirror.
Referring to the 2003 movie after his battle with mutant dogs, Herring suggested to Schiller he related to the defeated aura of the green giant staring at his reflection in the water.
“That’s how I feel right now,” he said.
With a smile, Schiller dismissed his protest and said, “You should feel empowered right now.”
‘The GOAT of Pilates’
In truth, the Chiefs’ Pilates crew will say they feel more powerful, flexible and even complete after the workout punctuated by Schiller’s constant admonitions and a couple of her philosophies.
“You always have more,” she told them at one point.
At another, she said, “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”
Her credibility and sway stems from her own upbeat passion and expertise: In 2023, she completed the Pilates Master Mentor Program of Lolita San Miguel, one of just two people founder Joseph Pilates officially certified, and now she holds the rare distinction of being a Second Generation Master Pilates teacher.
“The GOAT of Pilates,” says Nnadi, who says even his instructor in Florida raves about Schiller.
You can “tell by how she works us,” Herring said, “that she’s a very strong woman.”
Including her story of being given 90 days to live in 2019 before she received a liver transplant — a chapter of her life that Wharton believes enables Schiller to “pick us up when we’re down.”
“Everybody has a story we never really know,” said Wharton, who has been working with Schiller since his rookie year of 2020 and has compelled more than a half-dozen Chiefs to do so, too. “It’s something that’s touching.”
That sentiment helps explain why Schiller, the mother of two boys, thinks of Wharton as practically another son.
And the connection is why one of Wharton’s Super Bowl jerseys is framed in the studio and embellished with his words: “Best pilates studio ever!!! … The best is yet to come.”
‘You just kind of feed into it’
As it happens, “the best is yet to come” is coming true for the 26-year-old Wharton, who met Schiller through massage therapist Jessica Revelle at Schiller’s studio.
Wharton’s fourth-down sack of Las Vegas’ Gardner Minshew last Sunday completed an epic goal-line stand — in which Herring and Nnadi also played key roles — and reiterated what already has been the best season of his career.
“Nobody practices harder, nobody works harder than ‘Turk,’” said Reid, using Wharton’s nickname. “He’s not the biggest guy (6 foot 1, 280 pounds). But he’s physical and very strong and has a great lower body for playing inside there and utilizes all of it — along with his quickness.
“I would tell you from where he came from to where he is today, there has been a lot of work that has gone into it by him, and persistence, and it’s paying off for him.”
A key part of that has been through Pilates, which Schiller likes to call the “secret weapon” for the Chiefs players she’s worked with.
That also has included George Karlaftis, Mike Danna, who returned to practice from injury on Wednesday, Charles Omenihu (still rehabilitating from an ACL tear last season) and Nikko Remigio, who, like Jones, currently is on the practice squad.
If you detect a pattern, you’re right:
With the exception of Remigio, a receiver, all are defensive linemen weighing between 250 and 320 pounds.
And all believe their work with Schiller has helped in numerous ways — such as recovery, balance, fluidity of movement and strengthening key smaller muscles that aid explosiveness.
While the first Chiefs player Schiller worked with was quarterback Trent Green some years ago, the prevalence of defensive linemen now began with Wharton, who on Tuesday worked out in an “In Spags We Trust” tribute T-shirt (a nod to KC defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo).
As a rookie, Wharton was persuaded by Chiefs superstar Chris Jones that Pilates could be a pivotal workout for his growth. (Jones leaned heavily on Pilates in the past but is said by teammates to be more dedicated to yoga now.)
“When you see somebody as successful as Chris tell you that,” Wharton said, “you kind of just feed into it.”
In his case, that’s self-evident.
Back to its roots
Over the last four years, which included rehabbing an ACL injury, Wharton has become an ardent practitioner in both the offseason and in-season.
In addition to the group session with teammates on Tuesdays, he also has a private lesson every Thursday.
Along the way, he’s become so adept that Schiller figures he could teach Pilates by now. Which, in fact, he tried with Herring on Tuesday when Schiller was focusing on Nnadi.
Along the way, too, Wharton and Schiller’s families even have gotten to know each other.
Wharton, a St. Louis native, has brought his sister and her children to the Pilates studio; Schiller has taken her boys to St. Louis for his football camps and met Wharton’s mother and father.
Because of his embrace of Pilates and advocacy for it, Schiller tells him that he is helping “change the persona of what Pilates is. Pilates, people think, is like a female, girly thing. …
“He is helping bring it back to its roots.”
As it happens, when he arrived in New York from Germany in 1926, Joseph Pilates emphasized developing “Manly strength” for males as much as building up “a strong and beautiful body” for females in an advertisement that Schiller has on a wall in her studio.
For that matter, in that ad Pilates touted exercise that could enhance boxing, self-defense and wrestling.
‘That’s why I’m here’
More broadly, what Pilates intended to cultivate was “complete coordination of the body, mind and spirit.”
Certainly, his work helped instill that in Schiller, who recently was featured in Women’s Health magazine and told her story at a Gift of Life KC event.
Pilates proved a refuge when the Lee’s Summit native was told as a dance major at UNLV that she needed surgery on both knees.
Instead, that diagnosis essentially was overruled by her Pilates instructor, Dolly Kelepecz, who started Las Vegas’ first Pilates studio.
She developed what Schiller called a Pilates-based protocol that alleviated her issues. With Kelepecz’s guidance and encouragement, that revelation set Schiller on a trajectory to opening her own studio back here in 2005 at age 25.
It also took a complete coordination of mind, body and spirit for Schiller to navigate the sudden dire news of acute liver failure end-stage from autoimmune hepatitis. in 2019. In an abrupt span, she went from suffering nausea and fatigue to having tremors, gaining 30 pounds of fluids and having her eyes turn bright yellow at what she called “the point of death” without a transplant.
Five weeks after the diagnosis, she got the call that a donor had emerged.
She immediately wept.
Not because she was happy, but because of the stark reality that someone had died to make that possible.
After a harrowing set of surgeries because of clotting, a pulmonary embolism, strokes and other complications, she gradually recovered.
That included through the physical and emotional help of Pilates.
And through a relationship with the family of the donor, Jason Sherfick, who was 29 years old and died in Columbia, Missouri.
Since she wrote the Washington-based family a few weeks after the transplant in October 2019, she’s seen the donor’s parents several times and remains in regular contact with them.
“They’re my family,” she said, later adding, “I always include him (in her story) no matter what, because that’s why I’m here.”
Her gratitude to Jason and his family also is part of why she’s so appreciative of her life.
And the chance to do for others through the work she believes resonates beyond physical benefits.
“Pilates is putting symmetry and balance back into your body,” she said, “and that’s the key to life: balance.”
At its best, the “mind-body connection” during Pilates also teaches practitioners to love what’s in the mirror “when you look at yourself straight in the eyes.”
Even if you might think you see The Hulk in defeat.
“I feel my whole body intact, my feet up under me,” Herring said in a time of repose last week. “It made me feel my whole body as one. When I leave, I feel put-together, refreshed and just feel like a new person.”
This story was originally published November 1, 2024 at 5:30 AM.