HARRISONBURG — Lifting weights isn’t enough to improve the strength of a punter, at least according to Harry O’Kelly.

The James Madison sophomore punter has added yoga to his offseason regimen, so don’t be surprised to spot the Australian native working on his downward-facing-dog pose at classes inside the campus’ student recreation center.

“Usually I’m the only guy in there,” O’Kelly said. “I’m not complaining and normally everyone in there is very flexible, and I’m just trying to touch my toes.”

He said before spring football began he was going to yoga classes three times a week and that since JMU started practice last month, he makes it to yoga once or twice a week.

It’s all in an effort to increase flexibility. The more fluidly O’Kelly can move his legs, the more distance he thinks he can get on his punts.

“It has a lot to do with the mechanics of the leg swing,” O’Kelly said, “and also with the carry through.

“Instead of my knee bending too early, which takes away from my follow through, the leg stays straight through my follow through, which generates a lot more power through the swing.”

O’Kelly said he’s noticed the yoga is benefiting both his rugby-style kicks and his traditional punts this spring.

Coach Mike Houston and special teams coordinator Roy Tesh said they’ve had players in the past take yoga. Houston said he even had a yoga instructor come work with his teams at The Citadel.

“Yoga helps football players in general,” Tesh said. “The more flexible you are, the more fast you can be, and with [O’Kelly], the more flexible he is, the more he can bend and the more he can extend and it’s the more crazy things he can do with his legs.

“And he’s a young man that can do a lot of different things. The more he can increase his flexibility, the more dangerous he is with being able to put the ball where he needs it repeatedly.”

And the Dukes are expecting more from O’Kelly in his second season of playing American football.

As a freshman this past fall, he was an All-Colonial Athletic Association second-team choice while averaging 41.3 yards per punt. He could kick on the run or while standing stationary and he also successfully executed three fake punts, including a 24-yard run on the final drive of the FCS national title game against North Dakota State on JMU’s last attempt at completing a comeback.

“We’ve got to be prepared for some new looks,” Houston said. “But also we’ve got to have some new things prepared for our opponents. We get paychecks, too, and we get to make things up as well, so we’re going to spend a lot of time this summer researching.”

Tesh said he’s already started to look back at all the ways opponents tried to play against O’Kelly in 2017 and how they could try to adapt to defend him in 2018.

“We’ve got to stay one step ahead because he is so unique,” Tesh said. “We’re going to see a lot of different ways people attack us, we saw it every week.

“I joked with Coach Houston that we were running the option at other schools and we’d see different stuff every week and we’ve kind of become like the option. We see a different punt rush every week, so we’ve got to try to stay one step ahead with crazy scheme things that folks can do and hone back in with our fundamental rules to protect Harry. If we can protect him, he can operate, get it out on the edge and really put it where we need it.”

Throughout the spring JMU has rotated personnel on the punt team around O’Kelly, using some of the same special teamers that played on the unit this past season and others that could join the group this fall.

O’Kelly said whoever Houston and Tesh want to place on the unit and however the staff has to adjust the scheme to be ready for opponents, he’s ready to embrace it.

In the meantime, he said he’d keep going to yoga classes to make sure his individual skills are improved for the fall.

“I go by myself and I wouldn’t want [my teammates] in there catching me do that,” O’Kelly said with a laugh. “I do a little more different stuff than the rest of the team and it’s more legs than upper body and then it’s flexibility. Flexibility is a big part of kicking the ball further.”