Vikings safety Husain Abdullah returned to the Twin Cities last week from his offseason home in California because, in his words, he wanted some "normalcy."

With the NFL lockout ongoing, players are not allowed to visit their team's facility, but Abdullah said he wanted to keep his offseason routine as close to normal as possible.

"Literally this is about the time we come back for offseason program and the OTAs," he said. "It's like, 'Let's just go ahead and go back and I can start working out there. I can work out with E.J. up here at his place.'" Abdullah said he will train at teammate E.J. Henderson's facility in Eden Prairie while waiting to see what happens with the lockout. "I'm trying to keep a similar routine with my workouts," Abdullah said. "Normally you would be working out with the team and watching some film. I'm just trying to recreate that on my own. Just go about the offseason as I normally would. But it is very different. I'm just trying to stay in shape because we don't know when we're going to get called back." The Vikings gave Abdullah a second-round tender this offseason. In his first season as a starter, Abdullah tied for team-lead with three interceptions and collected 98 tackles with nine pass breakups. Abdullah said he felt more comfortable as the season progressed. "There were some parts in the game where you're looking at stuff and you're trying to process all the information and then at some point it's overwhelming and you're thinking too much," he said. "That was happening early but toward the end of the season, you can just see it. You know the down and distance. You know the personnel. You just have a better feel for what they're going to run and how they're going to attack you based off the formation. Toward the end of the season I was able to pick it up a lot faster and I think I played better down the stretch. "The more you're out there and the more you see stuff, when you get back out there, you don't feel nervous. You don't feel like, 'Oh, I've never seen this before.'" Abdullah said there also was a physical adjustment going from primarily a special teams player to starter. He said his body took a little longer to recover this offseason. "After the first week, I wanted to go start working out," he said. "My body was like, 'No, not yet.' It definitely took a different type of beating. You go from playing mainly 15 to 20 or maybe 25 special teams [snaps] during the game the first two years and then in your third year you're playing every snap on defense plus half the special teams. So it's 75, 80 snaps a game. It's completely different." By the way, Abdullah has joined twitter -- @HAbdullah39 -- for those who want to follow him.