LOS ANGELES – Rams defensive end Braden Fiske fondly refers to the area where his locker resides in the team's practice facility locker room – near veterans like quarterback Matthew Stafford, offensive lineman Rob Havenstein, tight end Tyler Higbee and former wide receiver Cooper Kupp – as the "suburbs."

"We've got a good group of vets over there," Fiske said with a laugh as players arrived to Rams Training Camp presented by UNIFY Financial Credit Union on Tuesday. "They've done their time. They're living life, lavish."

One of the most important neighbors he spoke with regularly last season was Kupp – conversations that would later have a direct influence on his approach to this offseason and the time leading into training camp.

"Cooper was a big one last year I would talk to," Fiske said. "Just (ask) how did he make that jump in Year 2 of his career, what was stuff that elevated his game. And a lot of that was the diet. That's a lot of what I implemented into my offseason."

That focus on diet, and getting up to his preferred playing weight, mark two of the biggest steps toward Fiske making that leap from his first season to his second.

Pre-refined diet and body composition, Fiske already had an impressive foundation to work off of entering this year's training camp.

His 8.5 sacks as a rookie led the team, landed him among the five finalists for NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year (the award went to teammate Jared Verse). He was a key cog in a young defensive front that showed positive growth over the second half of the season.

While Fiske spent the early portion of this offseason rehabbing the knee injury he sustained in Los Angeles' divisional round playoff loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, by June he was full-go.

He also spent the offseason working with a dietician to change his diet and and get his weight around 292-293 pounds, where he's currently at and says he feels "most comfortable, most dominant."

"That's where I feel the best at," Fiske said. "Last year I kind of floated under 290 which was fine, but I feel a lot better when I'm a little bit heavier and ain't getting moved around too much. So it feels a lot better at that weight."

With his knee injury rehab behind him and a year of experience under his belt, Fiske feels much better going into his second training camp compared to his first, ready to reap the rewards of taking better care of his body.

"I think it was easy last year to get kind of lost in just all that's going on, as you lose the amount of focus that needs to go into your body to be ready for an NFL season, to be able to attack it the way I wanted to," Fiske said. "And then, I mean, there's things on the field that we're working on, but, I mean, that's practice, that's just getting better, but we'll take care of that as camp goes on, as the season rolls."