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OF EVERYDAY

STRENGTH
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Check 2.0
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❑ Online
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in the Mail
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GLOBAL EXCLUSIVE

“MY LIFE

TRANSFORMED
”
BEFORE
MY
EYES
JOSEPH BAENA on
Fitness, Family, and
Learning He Was
Arnold’s Son

YOURR
NO-CRUNCHH
PLAN TOO
CRUSHINGG

YOUR
R
CORE
E
Did

COVID

Make You

KINKIER?
37 Takeaways
(and Tips)
from Our
Exclusive Sex
Survey

©2020 Tyson Foods, Inc.

“One of the big
things I learned
from Dad was not
to have the tenrep mentality. It’s
getting those half
reps till you’re
basically dying.”

03.2022

—JOSEPH BAENA, P. 48

FEATURES

Joseph Baena
photographed exclusively
for Men’s Health by
Eric Ray Davidson.
Styling by Ted Stafford.
Grooming by Sussy
Campos/Art Department.
Set design by Wooden
Ladder. Styling
assistance by Emily
Cavari. Production by
Alicia Zumback/CAMP
Productions. On the cover:
Tank top by Todd Snyder;
jeans by Levi’s Made &
Crafted; watch by
Bell & Ross. This page:
Towel by Lands’ End.

48 YOU DON’T
KNOW JOE

The son of fitness
culture’s greatest
icon is on a quest
to build his best
body and a career
of his own.
BY ANDREW
HEFFERNAN, C.S.C.S.

54 THE FIVE
SUPERPOWERS
OF FUNCTIONAL
FITNESS

Five extraordinary
strivers are
redefining strength,
mobility, stamina,
stability, and grit.
Plus: Take our fivepart test to gauge
your true fitness.
BY MICHAEL EASTER

PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC RAY DAVIDSON

64 STEVE-O
FOREVER!

The Jackass star
has had his PortaPotty Slingshot
highs and lows.
He’s now in his
40s, sober, and
trying to lead the
franchise that
almost killed him.
BY ANNA PEELE

70 THE
QUIET HOUSE

Sudden allergies.
Panic attacks.
Blinding headaches.
A mysterious
decades-long
illness nearly broke
one man’s body and
his spirit. Then he
built the house that
just might save him.

78 INTO
THE WILD

We surveyed more
than 1,200 men
to discover how
their sex lives have
changed during
the pandemic.
Spoiler alert: Whoa!
BY JORDYN TAYLOR
AND MILAN POLK

BY MIKE BENDER
MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

1

CONTENTS
ING 20
2

2

Man of
Action

PR

GUIDE
TO
STYLE

S

Crush spring with the
best new activewear.
Sam Heughan, rugged
star of Outlander,
shows you how. p. 40

LIFE
21 The good, the bad,
and the Red Skull ugly
of superhero mania.
24 Home Front:
Turn your living room
into the home theater
of your dreams.
26 The 2022 MH CBD
Awards! Featuring the
best (lab-certified)
products to help you
relax and reenergize.
28 Hit refresh on your

scent: We picked 15 of
the best new colognes.

29 The Stream: Why
e-sports are exactly
what you need to be
watching right now.
30 30/10: Upgrade
boring chicken
breast with these
seven sauces.
HAVE WE REACHED
PEAK SUPERHERO?
We asked the experts
what all the Spider-Mans
are really doing to us.
(See page 21.)

MIND
33 The MH Guide to
Drive: Harness, foster,
and maintain the
power of motivation.
36 #NoRegrets is no

BODY

6 Your superhero

9 YouTube’s fitness

ride-or-dies, what
to actually do to
optimize your
mental-health day,
and your thoughts
on a UFC
champion’s fridge.

myth buster wants
to change the way
you forge muscle.
12 Workout: Faster!
Now slower! How
building strength and
protecting your joints
comes down to speed.

14 Blast your abs, back,
and shoulders with
one kettlebell—and
one smooth move.

2

MARCH 2022

|

MEN’S HEALTH

15 What an endocrinologist (and pasta lover)
does to keep his blood
sugar steady.
16 Should you really

“click here” to boost
your health?

18 Diet Decoder: Calories
In Calories Out. Is losing
weight that simple?

38 In the era of algorithms, trusting
your own judgment
is even more critical.

+

84 Six Pack:
Rapper Lil Uzi Vert’s
favorite stuff.
Prop styling: Miako Katoh

MH WORLD

way to live. Just ask
these three guys.

19 Embarrassed to talk

about your prostate? Meet
Nathan, your friendly
neighborhood bot.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LEVI BROWN

Scan for better sex.

Get $15 off your first month of ED treatment (if prescribed)
at getroman.com/menshealth

Personnel Question:

What’s your
favorite winter cardio?

TEAM

Nancy Berger

Richard Dorment
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Jamie Prokell Creative Director
Ellen Payne Executive Managing Editor

“I love to
bundle up and
run trails with my
brother and
sister when we
visit our parents
in Ohio.”

EDITORIAL
Ben Court, Mike Darling Executive Editors
Ebenezer Samuel Fitness Director
Ben Paynter Features Editor
Nojan Aminosharei Entertainment Director
Jordyn Taylor, Spencer Dukoff
Deputy Editors
Marty Munson Health Director
Paul Kita Senior Editor
Brett Williams Fitness Editor
Taylyn Washington-Harmon Health Editor
Evan Romano Associate Editor
Joshua St. Clair, Milan Polk Editorial Assistants

ART
Nathan Sinclair Contributing Art Director
Chloe Krammel Digital Designer
Jose Carneiro Design Assistant
Jason Speakman Associate Digital Visual Editor
Matthew Montesano Digital Imaging Specialist
HEARST VISUAL GROUP
Alix Campbell Chief Visual Content Director
Sally Berman Visual Director
James Morris Contributing Visual Director
Scott M. Lacey, Dangi McCoy
Deputy Visual Directors
Giancarlos Kunhardt Visual Assistant

with my
black Lab!”

“Sprinting
to the corner
store when
it’s too cold
to walk.”

COPY
Janna Ojeda Assistant Managing Editor
John Kenney Managing Copy Editor
Alisa Cohen Barney Senior Copy Editor
Connor Sears, David Fairhurst
Assistant Copy Editors

HEARST MEN’S FASHION GROUP
Nick Sullivan Fashion Director
Alfonso Fernández Navas Market Editor
Rashad Minnick Fashion Associate

INTEGRATED MARKETING
Stephanie Block, Melissa Macaleer
Executive Marketing Directors
Ariel Kaye Marketing Director
Alesandra Ajlouni, Bonnie Blue
Associate Marketing Directors
Moira Smith Marketing Director, Research
Kelly Roma Marketing Director, Special Projects
Rhyan Kelly Senior Marketing Manager
Caroline Hall Associate Marketing Manager
Grace McLoughlin Associate
Marketing Manager, Events
Lulu Zeitouneh Creative Director
Paula Prado Senior Art Director
Flannery Wilson Sales & Marketing Coordinator

CIRCULATION
Rick Day VP, Strategy and Business Development

“Ice skating!
Bundle up,
tone your legs
and butt, then
treat yourself
to a hot
chocolate.”

ADMINISTRATION
Caryn Kanare Editorial Business Coordinator
Mariah Schlossman Editorial Business Assistant
MEN’S HEALTH
INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS
Australia, China, Germany, Italy, Japan,
Korea, Latin America, Netherlands, Poland,
Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, UK

Kathy Riess Group Executive Financial Director
Leslie Picard VP, Sales
Stacy Nathan Group Executive Director
Kristina McMahon VP, Marketing
Marnie Braverman, Marianne Civiletto
Group Marketing Directors

PUBLIC RELATIONS
Jaime Marsanico Senior Director, Public Relations

RESEARCH
Jennifer Messimer Research Chief
Nick Pachelli Assistant Research Editor

VIDEO
Dorenna Newton Executive Producer
Tony Xie, Elyssa Aquino Video Producers

SVP, GROUP PUBLISHING DIRECTOR

INTEGRATED ADVERTISING SALES
Andrea Foster, Doug Zimmerman
Executive Directors, East Coast
Jee Ahn, Margot Becker Giblin
“Moguls.
Executive Directors, West Coast
Snowboarding
Nicole Shuldiner, Julia Whalen
down a long
Sales Directors, East Coast
mogul run feels
Hope Agase, Nikki Giovannoni
like any HIIT
Sales Directors, Midwest
workout. Except
Alexis Herder Sales Manager
it’s actually
Dawn Franco Direct Response Manager
fun.”
Patty Rudolph PR 4.0 Media, Southwest
Andrew Kramer Kramer Media, Pacific Northwest
Bintou Camara, Paulina Carrillo,
Angela Martinez Sales Assistants
Karen Ferber Business Manager
Paul Baumeister Research Director
“Taking
Alison Papalia Executive Director,
a brisk
Consumer Marketing
morning jog
Chris Hertwig Production Manager

FASHION
Ted Stafford Fashion Director
Christian Gollayan Senior Style & Commerce Editor
Dale Arden Chong Gear & Commerce Editor

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Milo F. Bryant, Michael Easter,
Philip Ellis, Garrett Munce,
Zachary Zane

MEET THE

PUBLISHED BY HEARST
Steven R. Swartz President & Chief Executive Officer
William R. Hearst III Chairman
Frank A. Bennack, Jr. Executive Vice Chairman
Mark E. Aldam Chief Operating Officer

HEARST MAGAZINES, INC.
Debi Chirichella President,
Hearst Magazines Group, and Treasurer
Kate Lewis Chief Content Officer
Kristen M. O’Hara Chief Business Officer
Catherine A. Bostron Secretary
Gilbert C. Maurer, Mark F. Miller Publishing Consultants

INTERNATIONAL
Jonathan Wright President, Hearst Magazines International
Kim St. Clair Bodden SVP/Editorial & Brand Director
Chloe O’Brien Deputy Brands Director

4

MARCH 2022

|

MEN’S HEALTH

A DV I S O RY
PA N E L

We know a lot about
health and fitness, but we don’t
know as much as the doctors,
scientists, and trainers who
keep us honest and up-to-date.
BRAIN HEALTH:

P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D.

CARDIOLOGY:

John Elefteriades, M.D.
Foluso Fakorede, M.D.
David Wolinsky, M.D.

DERMATOLOGY:

Brian Capell, M.D., Ph.D.
Corey L. Hartman, M.D.
Adnan Nasir, M.D., Ph.D.

EMERGENCY MEDICINE:
Jedidiah Ballard, D.O.
Italo M. Brown, M.D., M.P.H.
Robert Glatter, M.D.

ENDOCRINOLOGY:

Sandeep Dhindsa, M.D.

EXERCISE SCIENCE:

Martin Gibala, Ph.D.
Mark Peterson, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.*D
Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.

GASTROENTEROLOGY:

Felice Schnoll-Sussman, M.D.

INTEGRATIVE HEALTH:
Brenda Powell, M.D.

INTERNAL MEDICINE:
Keith Roach, M.D.

MENTAL HEALTH:

Gregory Scott Brown, M.D.
Thomas Joiner, Ph.D.
Avi Klein, L.C.S.W.
Drew Ramsey, M.D.

NUTRITION:

Dezi Abeyta, R.D.N.
Chris Mohr, Ph.D., R.D.
Brian St. Pierre, R.D., C.S.C.S.

PAIN MEDICINE:

Paul Christo, M.D., M.B.A.

SEX & RELATIONSHIPS:

Debby Herbenick, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Shamyra Howard, L.C.S.W.
Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D.

SLEEP MEDICINE:

W. Christopher Winter, M.D.

SPORTS MEDICINE:

Michael Fredericson, M.D.
Dan Giordano, D.P.T., C.S.C.S.
Bill Hartman, P.T.

TRAINING:

HOW TO REACH US: Customer Service: To change your address, pay a bill, renew your subscription, and more,
go online to menshealth.com/service, email mhlcustserv@cdsfulfillment.com, or write Men’s Health Customer
Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-1500. Editorial offices: 300 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10019. Feedback:
mhletters@hearst.com. Licensing & Reprints: Contact Wyndell Hamilton, Wright’s Media, hearst@wrightsmedia
.com. Absolute satisfaction guaranteed. Scent-free subscription available on request. From time to time we make our
subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers.
If you would rather not receive such mailings by postal mail, please send your current mailing label or exact copy to:
Men’s Health, Mail Preference Center, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-0128.
Men’s Health carries the latest health, fitness, and nutrition reporting to provide you with
useful information about your health. But every body is different; individual diagnoses and
treatments can come only from a health-care practitioner. Printed in USA.

MEN’S HEALTH

Men’s Health is a
registered trademark of
Hearst Magazines Group, Inc.

Lee Boyce, C.P.T.
Mike Boyle, M.Ed., A.T.C.
Ben Bruno, C.F.S.C.
Alwyn Cosgrove, C.S.C.S.*D
David Jack
Mubarak Malik
David Otey, C.S.C.S.
Don Saladino, NASM

UROLOGY:

Elizabeth Kavaler, M.D.
Larry Lipshultz, M.D.

WEIGHT MANAGEMENT:

David Katz, M.D., M.P.H., FACPM, FACP
Fatima Cody Stanford, M.D., M.P.H.,
M.P.A., FAAP, FACP, FAHA, FTOS
Jeff Volek, Ph.D., R.D.

From the Editors of Men's Health

No More Excuses.

Get Stronger, Smarter, Better with

PREMIUM ALL ACCESS
Introducing the all-new MVP Premium membership tier from Men’s Health, designed
to help readers like you dominate your fitness routine by offeringbest-in-class
workouts anytime, anywhere. Premium membership offers personalized expertise
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ENJOY ALL THE BENEFITS OF PRINT AND DIGITAL MEMBERSHIPS, PLUS:

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WORLD

BEHIND THE SCENES
WITH THE EXPERTS,
ADVISORS, AND
READERS WHO BRING
MEN’S HEALTH TO
LIFE, AND THEN SOME.

S U P E R H E R O S M A C K D OW N
Between DC and the MCU, we’ve never had so many crime fighters
trying to save the day. So we asked our social followers:

IF YOU COULD BE ANY SUPERHERO,
WHO WOULD YOU BE?
Black
dude is kin Panther:
g, r
on earth, c ichest person
peak huma ool as hell,
advanced fin ability, most
g
and the listhting skill,
goes on.
Sohail Khi

d
ys improve
Goku: Alwah hard work and
it
his status wd soul/heart.
a kin
rime

lji

@soulp

Can touch books
and absorb knowled
ge.
Yes please. Meteor Ma
n.
@treestopper

Hulk. That wayanner
s of B
I have the braingth of Hulk
n
and the stre gry. I’ve
when I get an d that.
te
always wan
.becker

The Punisher,
like a Native
American version.

Prop styling: Miako Katoh. Opposite page: Courtesy subject (Macio).

@Kyle.beeg

@storm

Superman ..
.c
incredible st an fly,
re
ngth,
practically in
destructible
.
@ni
ck.colin1

6

MARCH 2022

|

MEN’S HEALTH

PHOTOGRAPH BY LEVI BROWN

WORLD

GOALS

MVP

MEMBER

INSIDE THE

PREDATOR’S TRAINING PLAN

OF THE

MONTH

MEN’S HEALTH MVP

members have
access to some of
the best health,
fitness, and entertainment coverage around. Each
month, we pick
one MVP whose
story catches our
eye. Sign up at join.
menshealth.com
and you could see
yourself here.

Before UFC heavyweight champion Francis
Ngannou’s latest fight, we knocked on his
door to see how the champ stays strong.
In a “Gym & Fridge” video on our YouTube
channel, he talks about what motivates him
in the gym. Here’s what viewers had to say:

WAYNE
MACIO
STATS
AGE: 60

MY FITNESS GOALS
Work up to running
20 miles a week.

LOCATION:

Sugar Loaf, NY
OCCUPATION:

IN MY GYM BAG

IT director

Earbuds, water bottle with
BCAAs, protein shake, towel,
shampoo, hair gel, brush,
deodorant, toothpaste,
toothbrush, work clothes.

WHY I WANT TO LIFT
WITH SPARTAN BOSS
JOE DE SENA
Workout advice from an
endurance athlete and
business advice from a
company CEO.

MY PUMP-UP
JAM

Competing in Spartan
races. I lost 40 pounds
training for my first one.

Anything by the
Cure. I’m a child
of the ’80s.

ASK AN
EXPERT

Q. I need to

take a mentalhealth day. But
what should I
actually do on
my day off?

@TheEagle
Who can hate this dude
“coming from the bottom” so
innocent and still can send
you to another planet

Spartan
races gave
Macio the
drive to get
back into
the gym.

I STAY
MOTIVATED BY...

@NikhilNair
height of humility: when
this man says he doesn’t like
wasting food. Respect

@WaizShaikh
Francis is that kind of guy who
protects his own bodyguards

MY MOTTO
Life is all about making
choices and living with
the consequences of
those choices.

WHAT MAKES ME
FEEL STRONG IS...
The inspiration and encouragement I receive
from my wife of 32 years.

@MasterFatness
When I’m not in training camp,
what I like the most would be like . . .
PANCAKE

A.

Look after yourself. I also like the
term “self-care day.” That might
mean tackling your to-do list around the
house; not having things loom over you
can ease stress. It could mean doing
activities that make you feel good—taking a yoga class, reading a book, going for
a walk. You can also start forming habits
to carry into the future, like meditating
or journaling. A mental-health day
doesn’t always mean there’s something
seriously wrong with your mental health.
Still, if you feel that a day’s not enough, it
might be time to seek help. Use your
mental-health day to find a therapist.

@AnasShahid
So humble and down to
earth, yet a beast inside the
octagon Francis

@SemLapa
Thank you Champ, been following
your career from beginning, wish
you all the best

—AVI KLEIN, L.C.S.W., MH MENTAL HEALTH ADVISOR

+

Have a question for Rich? Tweet us at @MensHealthMag with the hashtag #AskMHRich and ask away.

@MDavis
My boy francis getting the
shine he deserves

MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

7

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BODY
VITALITY STARTS HERE

THE

S
S
E
N
T
I
F
W
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N

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T
C
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le an -X)
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BY EBE

I USED TO DO the dumbbell fly in almost
every chest workout, because it’s one
of those chest exercises that everyone
tells you is essential. Never mind that
it hurt my shoulders just a bit; bro
science dictated I had to do the move.
Then came Athlean-X’s YouTube video
titled “HOME CHEST WORKOUT
MYTHS: The Chest Fly Fallacy!”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIACOMO FORTUNATO

MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

9

BODY

CYBER-MUSCLE

In the video, from September 2011,
trainer Jeff Cavaliere explains that the
dumbbell fly doesn’t actually “stretch”
your pecs the way bodybuilders claim.
Your chest, it turns out, can’t stretch much
more than it already does when you do
dumbbell presses. When you try to stretch
it beyond that, as many do when performing dumbbell flies, you actually take
tension off your chest. You begin to stretch
other muscles and tendons (part of the
pain I’d feel), and you open the door to injuries. It was a take I’d never heard, and yet
it made sense. I haven’t done a traditional
dumbbell fly since then, and yet my chest
is bigger and stronger. I’m now the Men’s
Health fitness director, but once a week I
giddily transform into a student, logging
on to the Athlean-X YouTube channel
like 12 million other people to watch and
learn from Cavaliere’s latest video.
Such is the impact of Cavaliere. Thirteen years ago, he emerged on the online
fitness scene with a grainy one-minute,
18-second YouTube video shot in a friend’s
basement. Since then, his Athlean-X
YouTube channel has swelled to more than
1,400 videos, and there’s a good chance
that his takes on fitness have influenced
the way you train. His methods of teaching the basics and his subtle tweaks to
classic exercises fuse physical therapy
and traditional strength training. That
approach appeals to everyone from
fitness newbs to experienced trainers to
the elite athletes he consults with, like
NFL receiver Antonio Brown and the
WWE’s Jinder Mahal. “When it comes to
learning, knowledge, and actual training
science,” says trainer Bobby Maximus,
“Jeff is one of the world’s best.”
Cavaliere’s ability to thrive in the
jammed online fitness space is powered by
his background (he’s a certified strength
and conditioning specialist and a physical
therapist) and an insistence on educating
his fan base/clients instead of simply
telling them how to fitness. He explains
exactly why you should do whatever he
advises. His bedside manner is measured,
thoughtful. For instance, in one 2017
video, he spends three minutes and 50
seconds breaking down why you should do
the face pull, a physical-therapy-derived
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ATHLEAN-X’S

FOUR BEST TIPS

FOLLOW THE MUSCLE
A SIGNATURE part of Cavaliere’s videos is his “muscle markers.” He uses the
markers to draw lines on his own body, showing the direction a muscle travels. From
your pecs to your biceps to your quads, nearly every muscle in your body starts at
one bone and connects to another. A muscle can contract only by bringing those two
joints together. “Bringing your body closer together along the line of those fibers is
going to give you the strongest and most efficient contraction,” Cavaliere says.

TRY IT! He uses this principle frequently in his arm training, and it’s why he’s a fan
of the “no-money curl,” which he’s demonstrating above. Much as you do in a biceps
curl, start standing, holding dumbbells at your sides. But as you curl upward, try to
turn your palms to the ceiling while keeping them outside your shoulders. Doing so
challenges your biceps to squeeze extra hard, says Cavaliere. Do 3 sets of 8 to 10.

exercise you’ve probably never heard of,
for your midback muscles and rotator
cuffs after every workout. The video has
more than 4 million views. “Educating
people is our main driver,” he says. “I truly
want to educate. And if they learn it from
me and they go on [without buying something], then fine.”
Years before he was Athlean-X,
Cavaliere earned his master’s degree
in physical therapy from the University of Connecticut. He joined the New
York Mets as the team’s head physical
therapist in 2006 but did that for just

three seasons, eventually growing weary
of baseball’s constant travel demands.
That’s when he created his YouTube channel, although it wasn’t initially meant to
teach people about chest flies. Because
Cavaliere continued to work with several
Mets, including third baseman David
Wright, he needed a way to send them exercise videos. He began uploading these
clips to YouTube.
Soon he realized the platform had more
potential—and could reach a much wider
audience. He began filming YouTube
videos for the public in 2009, starting

MANIPULATE YOUR RESISTANCE
TO BUILD muscle, you want to challenge the targeted muscle as much
as possible during the move. Sometimes that means evolving the exercise.

ADJUST IT! The classic pressdown (below) isn’t the best way to
blast your triceps. By keeping your
torso steady, you make the end
of the move easy. Cavaliere’s fix:
“Rock” your torso backward at the
end (right), forcing your tris to face
more resistance as you finish the
move. Do 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps.

BUILD EXPLOSION WITH JUMPS
CAVALIERE INJECTS athletic moves into all his routines, so while you’re building muscle, you’re also honing the
ability to move explosively, a skill that erodes with age.

FINISH WITH IT! End your workout with an explosive
bodyweight exercise. Do 4 sets of 6 box jumps (pictured
above) at least 3 days a week.

SKIP RISKY MOVES
“JUST BECAUSE you’ve never gotten injured doing an
exercise that is biomechanically bad doesn’t mean you won’t,”
says Cavaliere. That’s why, in one of his most popular videos, he
outlawed five exercises: chest flies, behind-the-neck shoulder
presses, good mornings, leg extensions, and barbell upright
rows (as he’s demonstrating in the image here). His issue with
the row: It places your shoulders in internal rotation, a position
that can lead to rotator-cuff problems.

TWEAK IT! Try the exercise with light dumbbells. Your shoulders will feel less restricted, and you’ll still develop your rear
delts. Do 4 sets of 10 reps. “When alternative exercises exist that
not only accomplish the same end goal but do it safer,” he says,
“why would you not explore them instead?”

with a resistance-band exercise meant
to enhance pitching velocity. The clip
racked up more than 400,000 views. For
a few years, his wife, Michelle, did all the
filming. He branded himself Athlean-X
because it fused two popular goals: building athleticism and adding lean muscle.
He attached the X because he believed his
focus and training style would be the “X
factor” for his followers.
Cavaliere quickly shifted away from
baseball, refocusing on muscle-building
tips and tactics that promote longevity and
athleticism, too. “Training like an athlete

is taking your body and your performance
seriously,” he says. “I want you to know
your anatomy. But every guy wants to
build muscle. Even more than they want to
lose fat, they want to build muscle.” That
approach led to rapid growth.
Each year, Cavaliere releases a 12-week
fitness program—think Total BeAXst or
MAX Shred, for $97 with a meal plan—
and he also now sells his own line of
pre- and postworkout proteins. In 2015,
he launched an annual in-person fitness
convention, Athlean Live. “There were
so many stories of people having success

with my programs,” he says. “I wanted to
have a way to meet them.” He also created
a multiday event that includes sciencefocused seminars. The first Athlean Live
drew 30 people; in 2019, more than 200
(me included) attended. That business is
still thriving.
Cavaliere continues to thrive, too, in
part because he understands what you
want and need from your routine. In a
fitness landscape that constantly pushes
beginner ideas, he offers next-level
muscle-building knowledge. Tapping into
that wisdom can push you to new gains.
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CHANGE YOUR PACE

SLOW DOWN, SPEED UP, AND

BUILD MAJOR MUSCLE!
Slow and controlled. It’s a phrase you hear often in the gym. Thing is, you can move fast, too.
And to develop muscle and insulate your joints against injury, you need to challenge your
body to be explosive on some exercises, then flex your patience and move slowly on others.
That’s the game plan with this workout: Do it three or four days a week. BY JOHN RUSIN

DIRECTIONS: Complete the warmup,
then do the exercises in order. Rest 60
seconds after each movement.
WARMUP

WORKOUT

1
SINGLE-ARM SPLITSTANCE SNATCH

(a)

Start standing, holding a dumbbell in your left hand. Push your
butt back slightly and bend your
knees. Explosively stand, squeezing your glutes and jumping off
the floor slightly. As you do this,
pull the dumbbell up to your chest,
keeping it close to your body.
Punch it overhead, squeezing your
abs and glutes; land with your right
leg in front of your body and your
left leg behind, both knees bent.
That’s 1 rep; do 5 per arm. Rest 30
seconds; do 5 sets.

(b)

2

KICKSTAND
SPLIT SQUAT

REVERSE LUNGE TO
REACH AND ROTATE
Start standing, arms at your sides, then step back
with your right leg and lower into a reverse lunge.
Let your back knee touch the floor. Reach both arms
overhead, stretching your back and chest (a). Then
put your hands together and rotate your shoulders as
far to each side as you can (b). Stand and repeat on
the other side. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 5.

Start standing, feet shoulder width apart, holding a
dumbbell at your chest. Step
your right foot back so your
toes line up with your left
heel, then lift your right heel
off the floor; the majority of
your weight should be on
your left leg. Push your butt
back and bend your knees,
lowering into a squat. Press
back up explosively. Return
to the start and repeat on the
other side. That’s 1 rep; do 6.

shirt by fabletics; shorts by fourlaps; shoes by nike.
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY T YLER JOE

F E A T U R E D T R A I N E R : J O H N R U S I N , P.T. , D . P.T. , C . S . C . S . , is a

sports-performance specialist who has trained pro athletes from
11 sports. His new book, Functional Strength Training, is out now.

P I C T U R E D H E R E : D AV I D O T E Y, C . S . C . S . ,

is a veteran personal trainer and a member
of the Men’s Health advisory board.

TIMING KEY
FOCUS ON SPEED
SLOW IT DOWN

3

GLUTE BRIDGE
ALTERNATING PRESS

Lie on your back, dumbbells directly over your shoulders, feet near your butt. Squeeze your glutes and abs,
lifting your butt off the floor. This is the start. Without
moving the left dumbbell, lower the right dumbbell to
your shoulder; press it back up. Repeat on the other
side. That’s 1 rep; do 10. Rest 40 seconds; do 3 sets.

4

PAUSED ROMANIAN
DEADLIFT

Start standing, feet shoulder
width apart, dumbbells held at your
sides. Keeping your abs tight and
the dumbbells close to your body,
push your butt back and lower your
torso toward the floor. Stop lowering when you feel your hamstrings
tighten or if you begin to feel your
back round, whichever comes first.
Take 3 seconds to lower, then pause
for 1 second. Stand and squeeze
your glutes. That’s 1 rep; do 10. Rest
60 seconds; do 4 sets.

5

ALTERNATING DEADSTOP STEP-BACK ROW

Start standing, feet shoulder
width apart, a dumbbell on the floor
between your legs. Push your butt
back and take a step back with your
right leg. Your left shin should be
perpendicular to the floor. Keeping
your hips and shoulders square, grasp
the dumbbell with your right hand,
squeeze your shoulder blades, and
row it to your rib cage. Lower, reverse
the movements, then repeat on the
other side. That’s 1 rep; do 8. Rest 60
seconds; do 4 sets.

6

PRONE PULSING
SUPERMAN

Lie on your belly, arms and legs outstretched. Squeeze your glutes, raising your thighs off the floor. Squeeze
your shoulder blades and mid-back
muscles, raising the top of your chest.
This is the start. Squeeze your back
and glutes harder, raising your torso
and legs higher. Return to the start.
That’s 1 rep; do reps for 45 seconds.
Lower all the way to the floor and take
2 deep breaths whenever your form
slips. Rest 30 seconds; do 3 sets.

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#TRYTHISMOVE

THE
ULTIMATE

CORE
FLOW

BEGIN HERE

1.

KNEEL AND DELIVER

Start in a half-kneeling
stance, right foot in front of
you. Grasp a kettlebell with your
right hand. Tip it toward you;
tighten your abs and squeeze
your shoulder blades.

2.

SWING FOR STRENGTH

Keeping your core tight and
your hips and shoulders square
to the front, aggressively pull the
bell back between your legs. Push
your butt back as you do this.

S

ITUPS AND PLANKS are fine,
but there are far more dynamic
and effective ways to train your
core. It has a clunky name, but the
Half-Kneeling Kettlebell Snatch to
Windmill is a smooth, fast flow that
will work your abs while redlining your heart rate and building
critical back and shoulder muscle,
too. “This is a total-body move
masquerading as a core move,”
says MH fitness director Ebenezer
Samuel, C.S.C.S. “If your core is
weak, you’ll really struggle to complete the flow.” The more you do it,
however, the stronger your core will
become—and it’s a helluva lot more
fun than another 90-second plank.

3.

EXPLODE UPWARD

Swing the bell forward, thrusting your hips forward, then aggressively pull it toward your shoulder.
Punch upward as it reaches shoulder
height, straightening your arm.

WHO’S THIS GUY?

based trainer who first fell in love with
fitness while in college after battling
an eating disorder. Last year, Taylor,
32, joined Men’s Health’s Strength in
Diversity Initiative, a growing program
that aims to help trainers from marginalized communities jump-start their
fitness careers. Through the program,
Taylor obtained his C.S.C.S. certification, as well as his Precision Nutrition
and Functional Range Conditioning
certs. He’s now working to establish
himself as a go-to fitness trainer
in the LGBTQIA community. Follow
him on Instagram at @tyriek_taylor,
and expect to see more of him in
Men’s Health in the future.
tank by ten thousand; shorts by
fabletics; shoes by nike.
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4.

BRACE AND TWIST

Keeping your eyes on the bell, push
your butt back and rotate your torso until
your left hand touches the floor. Squeeze
your shoulder blades. Then brace your abs
and glutes and drive your torso back to upright. That’s 1 rep; do 6 per side. Do 3 sets.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY T YLER JOE

Grooming: Azra Red/Honey Artists

TYRIEK TAYLOR is a New York City–

T H E E X P E R T : G R E G O R Y D O D E L L , M . D. , is the owner

of Central Park Endocrinology in New York City.

BODY

FRONT LINE

A DOCTOR’S GUIDE TO

BLOOD SUGAR

EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT

among
the more than one in three Americans
with prediabetes, it’s smart to try to
keep your blood-sugar level steady.
Spikes from quickly digested sugar
and carbs, plus the crashes that follow,
can tank your energy and predispose you to diabetes. If you have the
disease, it can do all kinds of damage
to your nerves and organs. Here’s how
endocrinologist GREGORY DODELL, M.D.,
41, works to prevent the disease he
sees in the patients he treats all day.

EAT WHAT
YOU WANT, IF
YOU REALLY
WANT IT.

If I’m in the mood for
pasta, I’ll have it. Nutrition
shouldn’t be about taking
things away. Instead, eating well is about intuition
and mindfulness. If I had
diabetes, simple carbs
like pasta might cause
my blood sugar to spike.
But you don’t have to cut
them out entirely. I argue
that people with diabetes
can have pasta if they
pair it with protein (like
chicken), fiber (from
vegetables), and some
fat (olive oil or cheese),
all of which dampen the
rise in blood sugar.

FIND YOUR
TENSION—AND
BUST IT.

There’s a list of nearly
40 things that affect
blood sugar, and stress
is one of them. I’ve
learned that I hold stress
in my right glute—I get
this clenched-up, tight
feeling. So if I’m stressed
and anxious because I
have a lot going on, I’ll
stop and check in with
my body, then take a
deep breath and relax.
Managing stress is a
large component of
managing blood sugar.

POSE, SPIN,
WALK.
SCRAP THE SCALE.

I don’t get on a scale, and I don’t encourage my patients to weigh themselves. Instead, I focus on behaviors, and weight is not a behavior—it’s a surrogate
marker for changes in behavior. You can’t wake up and
say, I’m going to weigh five pounds less. But you can
wake up and say, I’m going to try to take a walk every
day or I’m going to try to incorporate more vegetables
in my diet; both help control blood sugar.

Andre Rucker

CHECK YOUR INTERNAL TRACKER.

My body processes food pretty well. But if you crash or your blood sugar is high
from a meal or a snack like a granola bar, pay attention to your body and make a different behavior choice next time. We’re so programmed now to listen to external
sources about what we should be doing for our health and having trackers for sleep,
heart rate, and calories. But we have the best tracker ever invented—our bodies.

Being active is important: When you have diabetes, moving around
may make your body
more sensitive to insulin
so that blood sugar enters your cells better. I do
yoga, take indoor cycling
classes, and walk to and
from work, about 25 minutes each way. I do it because I enjoy it. I used to
run on the treadmill, and
ten minutes in, I’d be miserable. I stopped doing
that. I tell patients to do
what feels good, not
what you think you
should do. —AS TOLD TO
LaSHIEKA HUNTER

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BODY

ONLINE MEDS

NO MATTER WHAT

you need in the
next minute or ten—sheets, coffee, razor
blades—there’s a sleek-looking startup promising to have the best product,
the easiest ordering process, and the
smoothest delivery. But should you really
be clicking on all those ads in your social
feeds for free medical consults and cheap,
easy meds? “It’s good and bad . . . it’s complicated,” says Ateev Mehrotra, M.D., an
associate professor of health-care policy
and medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Consider this before you click.

THE PERKS
FIRST, THE BIG ONE: If you don’t have a

BEST HEALTH
CLICK
A

AWAY?

It’s easier than ever to hit up one website for
your allergy meds, another for antidepressants,
and yet another for an acne prescription.
But that doesn’t always mean you should.
BY ALICE OGLETHORPE

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THE DRAWBACKS
FOR ALL THE EASE, you’re likely

missing expertise. “You’re supposed to
go see a doctor, tell them what’s going on,
share some medical history, and then the
doctor tells you what you have and what
you should do to treat it,” Dr. Mehrotra
says. But with prescription sites, you’ve
already decided what your problem is—
depression or allergies, for instance—
and you’re looking for a med to treat it.
“Are you being diagnosed correctly?
That’s what I wonder,” he says.
ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE KRAMMEL

Getty Images

IS YOUR

doctor or don’t have time to wait around
to see the one you have, a click on these
sites promises to take care of that. You’ll
have an easier time finding potential
treatment for health problems—especially those that carry a stigma, such as
anxiety and hair loss.
And the sites could save you money,
too. Even with health insurance, a
specialist visit can cost you $50 or more
in copays. “Your local doctor has to rent
an office with a waiting room, pay for a
receptionist at the front desk, and can
only see around 20 patients a day,” says
Dr. Mehrotra. “But doctors at these sites
can sometimes review the information
for hundreds of patients in a day, so they
can charge a lot less.” Sometimes the site
won’t even charge for the consult, just
for the treatment. While many such
companies don’t accept insurance,
their prices for meds are often less than
what you’d typically pay at a brick-andmortar pharmacy.

WHO’S SELLING YOU
WELLNESS NOW
What’s worse, experts worry these
sites will dole out drugs to anyone who
asks. “They are using their screening
questionnaires to weed out people who
can’t use the drug, but they aren’t asking
if someone should use it,” says Suzanne
Bollmeier, Pharm.D., of the University
of Health Sciences & Pharmacy in St.
Louis. Not to mention the fact that
behind the curtain, venture capitalists
have become very interested in health
care and new business models, says Dr.
Mehrotra. “They want to grow rapidly,
get lots of VC funding, get a good valuation, and get acquired.” That’s a very
different approach from, say, that of a
Hippocratic-oath-taking M.D.
All this means that the onus is on you
to monitor what’s going on. “A lot of sites
say you can access them whenever you
want, but there’s no follow-up being done
to make sure your body is handling the
medications correctly,” says Bollmeier.
In fact, many sites encourage you to set
up subscriptions for your meds, so you’re
likelier to just keep them coming. Automatic reordering is great for dog food but
maybe not for controlled substances.

WHAT TO KNOW
IF YOU HAVE a single issue with a clear
medical solution, clicking may be fine.
“But if you have multiple medical problems, my concern about this goes way up,”
Dr. Mehrotra says. “When you have one
company for mental illness, another for
hair loss, and another for allergies, you
have a lot more people who aren’t talking
to each other.”
If you fall on the “I’m relatively
healthy and want to give it a try” end of
the spectrum, make sure you’re asking
these questions:

CUREX
HOW IT WORKS: Not sure if that stuffy
nose is due to ragweed or your pup?
Curex will mail you an allergy-test kit to
find out. Just prick your finger, take a
blood sample, and mail it in for analysis.
Then chat with one of Curex’s clinicians
to go over the results and get any meds.
Note: This type of test detects only indoor and outdoor allergens (so you won’t
discover a shellfish allergy, for example).

THE COST: $129 for the kit; meds start
at $65 per month with a three-year plan.
KNOW BEFORE YOU TRY: The results
can be misinterpreted. “A positive test
may not mean you have that allergy,”
says Jay Portnoy, M.D., at the University
of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. That might be okay if you just need
sneeze-control meds. But see an allergist before you give away your dog.

KEEPS
HOW IT WORKS: Pick your baldness
pattern, send some pics, fill out a healthhistory questionnaire, and every three
months, Keeps sends you meds to give
your hair new life. Some states require an
Rx from your own doctor before you get
meds; others let you use the on-site docs.
Products include finasteride and minoxidil, which are both relatively safe to use
long-term, according to dermatologist

Annie Gonzalez, M.D., at Riverchase
Dermatology in Miami.
THE COST: The first doctor consult is
free and follow-ups are $5; meds start at
$10 per month.
KNOW BEFORE YOU TRY: Make sure
you talk about follow-ups. “You want
your PSA-level baseline before you start
finasteride, and it should continue to be
monitored,” says Dr. Gonzalez.

APOSTROPHE
HOW IT WORKS: This dermatological
service has you send photos of your
problem areas and answer questions
about treatments you’ve tried. Within
two days, it’ll send over a plan. Medications include creams like tretinoin (an
acne and wrinkle fighter) and metronidazole (for rosacea) as well as oral meds.

THE COST: $20 for the initial consult,
which is credited toward your prescription; meds start at $10 per month.
KNOW BEFORE YOU TRY: AI is generally considered to be pretty good at
diagnosing common skin issues—but
you’ll still need a live derm if your spot
needs a biopsy.

MINDED
HOW IT WORKS: This company wants
you to stop putting off getting refills of
your antianxiety meds or antidepressants. Fill out an assessment, then chat
with a psychiatrist or nurse practitioner
to see what you might need.
THE COST: The assessment is free;
membership is $40 per month, not
including meds; currently only available
in CA,FL, IL, NJ, NY, PA, and TX.

KNOW BEFORE YOU TRY: Our
experts don’t love your getting these
meds online. They can have side effects
and serious complications, says MH
psychiatry advisor Gregory Scott
Brown, M.D. Don’t be tempted to replace
your doc with a service like this. Also,
some of these drugs can be hard to discontinue, so be sure to talk about an exit
strategy before you begin.

WHO’S DOING THE PRESCRIBING?

“A lot of these sites have big, famous
doctors linked to them, but they are often
advisors, not the ones doing patient
care,” says Chad Ellimoottil, M.D., the
director of the Telehealth Research
Incubator at the University of Michigan.
Check that there’s more than an algorithm that determines whether you pass
the screening. You should always be able
to access a real person.

WILL YOU BE MONITORED?

“It’s really important to have some
longitudinal care—like if you’re taking
testosterone, you need your PSA levels
and your hemoglobin checked,” says
Dr. Ellimoottil. Be sure there’s someone
who determines when you need certain
tests and when you need to change or
come off the meds.

CAN YOU KEEP TRACK OF
YOUR OWN MEDICAL CHART?

Some of the drugs available through
these sites can have major interactions
with other ones. For instance, alpha
blockers taken with Viagra can create a
dangerous dip in blood pressure. Your
primary-care provider should know
everything you’re taking.
MEN’S HEALTH

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BODY

SO, W

DIET DECODER

E
H
T
S
’
HAT

W
L
A
E
D

.
.
.
ITH

DI E

T

T HE
There’s no way this
popular diet is as simple
as counting calories, right?
Men’s Health nutrition advisor
DEZI ABEYTA, R.D.N., weighs in.
THE PROMISE

Run a calorie deficit
and you’ll start to drop
pounds. All you have
to do is calculate your
current calorie needs,
activity level, and target
weight. Websites like
niddk.nih.gov/bwp and
apps like MyFitnessPal
can do this. Their formulas
will spit out a lower total
number of calories—your
new goal for daily intake.

THE VERDICT

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WHAT YOU
CAN’T HAVE

Everything is on the
table. So if you wanted to
drink beer and eat wings
every day, you could—
as long as you either
consumed less of those
things or exercised more
to maintain a calorie deficit. Given all the calorie
counting, you’ll want to
keep a diet journal or use a
calorie-tracking app.

THE GOOD

CICO doesn’t ban any
foods, so you don’t have
to suffer restrictions.
And it’s great to know
how many calories you
eat daily. If you’re selfmotivated and know that
a good diet includes lean
proteins, colorful produce,
quality fats, and fiber-rich
carbs, well, then CICO can
help you lose weight and
improve your health.

THE NOT
SO GOOD

By laser-focusing on
calories, you may forget
about filling fiber,
muscle-building protein,
and disease-fighting
micronutrients. And
you can obsess about
tracking. If you ever
find yourself “running off”
indulgences or skipping
meals for the sake of
CICO, that’s a signal flare.

CICO is what you make of it. Because the strategy doesn’t tell you what you can and can’t eat, you’re
more likely to stick to it. Running a calorie deficit for weight loss works, we know that—but you also have
to consider the quality of your calories for overall health. My recommendation: 75 percent of the calories
you eat should come from high-quality whole foods, and that’s regardless of whether you’re on CICO.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX LAU

Food styling: Tyna Hoang. Prop styling: Sophie Strangio.

WHAT IT IS

There’s no real plan with
CICO; you just consume
fewer calories (calories
in, or “CI”) than you burn
(calories out, or “CO”)
every day. And, honestly,
any diet—be it keto, paleo,
Whole30, or otherwise—
can be a complicated
method for consuming
fewer calories than you
burn. CICO attempts to
simplify everything.

BODY

CHECKUP

NATHAN
WANTS TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT

YOUR PROSTATE
If you’re still putting off that exam, there’s someone—
or something, rather—you should listen to.
BY MIKE ZIMMERMAN

YOU’LL FIND HIM

CDC-NACDD-Kognito (Nathan). Getty Images (background).

on a park bench.
It’s a virtual park bench, but that’s the
point. He’s always there, every day, like
a benevolent NPC waiting to give you
advice on your gaming quest. Or better
still, a male version of The Matrix’s
Oracle. His name is Nathan; he lives
inside the Internet; and even though he’s
only a bot, he just might save your life.
Nathan stems from a collaboration
between the CDC and the National
Association of Chronic Disease Directors,
brought to life by Kognito, a tech firm
that specializes in virtual interactions.
“Talking” with him on your computer
screen or smartphone is largely multiple choice—no fancy AI yet—but when
you pick and click, Nathan answers in a
warm, genial tone. “We wanted to offer
a tool that could be a nonthreatening
entryway to the questions that a lot of men
might have about prostate health,” says
David Siegel, M.D., a CDC oncologist who
helped develop Nathan. “It’s a taboo
topic in some ways because it affects a
man’s health in a very sensitive area.”

The “sensitive” part is what makes
Nathan so necessary. The word itself—
prostate!—conjures uncomfortable
thoughts about a doctor’s lubed-up
finger, limp penises, and adult diapers.
The kinds of thoughts that might lead
you to simply ignore the whole subject.
Reality check: Prostate cancer is the most
common type in American men besides
skin cancer. (One in eight men will get
it during his lifetime, and there were
an estimated 34,000 prostate-cancer
deaths in 2021.) It isn’t just an old man’s
disease—40 percent of cases hit before
age 65. Your risk is doubled if you have a
family history. Black men have double
the risk of dying from low-grade prostate
cancer and tend to get it younger.
Yes, it’s scary, but that’s why Nathan,
comforting and knowledgeable in a
grandfatherly way, is here to help. Though
his total number of visitors has been in
the low four figures since his launch in
August 2020, 93 percent of users
said Nathan helped them. Also:
Before the Nathan simulation, only

YOUR
P R O S TAT E
ORACLE
Nathan’s the
go-to guy for
awkward
questions.

46 percent said they’d feel confident
talking to a doctor about prostate-cancer
screening and treatment. After? That
number leaped to 88 percent.
By now you’re thinking, Okay, how
would talking about prostate cancer
actually keep me from getting it? And
how’s it going to keep me from getting ED
or incontinence from treatment? “Men
aren’t inclined to discuss anything they
think makes them appear less-than,”
says Heather Goltz, Ph.D., a professor of
social work at the University of Houston
who counsels prostate-cancer patients
and couples. “Anything that contradicts
your narrative of feeling in control makes
you say, ‘Yeah, I can’t really think about
that right now. I’ve got bills to pay. I’ve
got kids to take care of. I’m planning my
vacation in June,’ ” she says.
However, addressing your risk and
talking to your doctor now—or hitting up
a resource like Nathan—is an immediate
way to keep the power in your hands, says
Goltz. Answers give you control; even difficult conversations (“I’m worried about
ED after treatment”) give you control. The
more you know, the more you’re in charge,
no matter what your prostate decides to
do. Here’s what we mean:
• IF YOU HAVE A HISTORY OF PROSTATE
CANCER IN YOUR FAMILY . . .
GET CONTROL BY: Devising a lifelong
screening plan with your doctor. If you
have more than one relative who was
diagnosed with prostate cancer before
age 65, you’re in the highest-risk group.
But nearly 99 percent of cases are treatable if caught early.

• IF YOU HAVE AN ELEVATED PSA SCORE . . .
GET CONTROL BY: Not panicking. Most
men with an elevated PSA turn out not
to have cancer. Work with your doctor to
monitor your level. If you have to have a
biopsy, keep in mind that only 25 percent
of prostate biopsies find cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute.

• IF YOU HAVE ED AFTER TREATMENT . . .
GET CONTROL BY: Knowing your options.
There are more medical strategies than
ever, and many are good ones, says Goltz,
including pills, injections, and other
penile-rehab solutions. Also consider it
an opportunity for you and your partner
to figure out how to change up sex and
make it just as satisfying.

MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

19

BRING YOUR

A GAME

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CHALLENGE: ABS
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The ultimate warm-up hoodie is also the perfect
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Taking your workout on the road? This set will
guarantee you’re maximizing results—even
when you can’t make it to the gym.

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the Men’s Health Shop. Find these must-haves and more
at menshealth.com/shopnow

LIFE

CHANGE FOR THE BETTER

THE
OVERWHELMING,

CHANGE FOR THE BETTER

EXHILARATING
& KIND OF
COMPLICATED
WORLD OF

PEAK
SUPERHERO
DC and the MCU have
commandeered our theaters
and homes. But what’s
all this bang-boom-kaplow
doing to the minds of boys—
and men? BY PAUL KITA
RIGHT AROUND THE time my threeyear-old son started having behavioral problems—kicking, hitting,
biting—at daycare, I stupidly took
him to the comic-book store for
the first time. That’s when, rifling
through back issues of Batman, I
realized that my favorite childhood
superhero was kind of an asshole.
Even though the Bat vows never to
kill anyone, he does do almost everything I was trying to teach my son
not to—using violence to solve problems, holding in his emotions, and
employing an elderly butler my wife
and I clearly couldn’t afford.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LEVI BROWN

MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

21

LIFE

MARVEL THIS

“IT ALWAYS
ENDS IN A FIGHT”

—The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War

THE AVERAGE SUPERHERO movie has 41
acts of violence per hour, according to a
2020 study in the journal Cureus. More
surprisingly, the “good” guys committed
23 of those violent acts, while the baddies
issued 18.
Fighting, shouting, impulsivity—
maybe my son likes superheroes because
they’re grown-up three-year-olds? I ran
this by Robert Olympia, M.D., a pediatrician and the lead researcher on the
Cureus study. “I think so,” he says. “A lot
22

MARCH 2022

|

MEN’S HEALTH

The Thinking Man’s

Superhero
Entertainment
Spectrum

STEVEN UNIVERSE
(HULU, HBO MAX)

SPIDER-MAN: INTO
THE SPIDER-VERSE
(HULU, YOUTUBE,
GOOGLE PLAY)

These movies and TV
shows combine comicbook action with a
dose of self-reflection.

KID-FRIENDLY

of these superheroes were children exposed to violence. I think a lot of it has to
do with living [it] out or maybe even justifying it as an adult. That’s why I think a lot
of adults relate to superheroes as well.”
Based on their studies, Dr. Olympia
and his colleagues concluded that the
best thing parents can do is watch superhero movies with their kids and talk
them through the consequences of bad
behavior. So, in the case of Thor: The Dark
World, I’d simply explain to my son that
it’s totally not okay to sweep-kick your sibling—and then I’d interject that roughly
80 more times throughout the movie.
Although this approach assumes
that I know what the hell I’m talking
about. While there have been no studies
conducted on the effects of violence in
superhero movies on men, Dr. Olympia
says, “I’m almost 100 percent sure that
this affects adults the same as it affects
children.” Meaning, my judgment about
what’s right and wrong might be tinged
by how wildly entertaining I find these
films. I needed to figure out if my bullshit
detector was J.A.R.V.I.S.-calibrated
enough before I could ever help my son
sort through what makes a “hero.”

“WE CREATE OUR
OWN DEMONS”
—Tony Stark, Iron Man 3

TONY STARK’S FAIL-UPWARD stubbornness,
Star-Lord’s prove-himself mentality,

Captain America’s at-all-costs mindset,
T’Challa’s “I never yielded!”—superheroes largely share one trait: ego. “There’s
no sense of atonement or consequences
for betrayal, violence, or, like, ‘Oh, hey,
remember when I killed all those people
before?’ ” says Kara Kvaran, Ph.D.,
a professor of women’s studies at the
University of Akron who has researched
superhero movies. “That’s so counter to
reality that it’s very frustrating.”
Even as the Avengers form and the
team attempts to work together, they are
often thwarted by their own ego-driven
manipulations—frequently in the name
of “protection,” says Kenneth S. Michniewicz, Ph.D., an assistant professor in
the department of psychology at Muhlenberg College, who researches gender
stereotypes. (Son, it’s okay to lie, but
only if you’re trying to trick your friends
into signing the Sokovia Accords.)
So if superheroes are violent, narcissistic, half-apologetic, go-it-alone liars,
what makes them so compelling? Kvaran
argues it’s the myth of self-sacrifice—
something I respected about Batman in
my youth: that he alone solved problems
for others. It’s a common “hero” trait.
Stark tinkers until he dies from
his egotism, leaving a wife and child
behind. Thor punishes himself until he
becomes borderline alcoholic. Batman
actually lives a torturous double life of
self-isolation. “We see this in fitness
culture; we see it in sports culture,” says
Kvaran. “Play through the pain. Take the

Previous page: Prop styling: Miako Katoh

Regardless, I bought my son a few
books that day, and I told him that it’s all
pretend. His behavior did not improve—
maybe because I was too late. Fifteen
or so years ago, superhero worship was
a subculture confined to those dusty
comic-book stores, Comic-Cons, and
other geek gatherings. Now it’s everywhere. Credit the Marvel Cinematic
Universe, the money-amassing empire
that started with Iron Man in 2008. Since
then, the MCU has kaboomed into 27
movies and five TV shows and brought
words like Groot, Mjolnir, and Thanos
into the average guy’s lexicon.
And it is guys who are watching these
films. “The whole tone and tenor of these
movies skews male,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore.
For the 21 superhero movies released since
2016, men bought about 59 percent of the
tickets, reports Comscore. And there’s
no endgame in sight. This year, DC’s The
Batman swoops into theaters March 4,
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of
Madness comes out May 6, Thor: Love and
Thunder lands July 8, and Black Panther:
Wakanda Forever debuts November 11.
As one dad up against seemingly
invincible forces, I pulled a Tony Stark:
I took charge. Up until the end of 2021,
the last superhero movie I had seen was
2012’s The Dark Knight Rises. To catch
up, I watched 24 superhero films in 23
days. And what started as a marathon
prescreening session to see if any of them
were appropriate for my son turned into
an epiphany: Maybe superhero movies
aren’t suited for kids—but maybe they
aren’t great for grown-ups, either.

ETERNALS (DISNEY+)

THE BOYS
(AMAZON PRIME)

DOCTOR STRANGE
(DISNEY+)

Courtesy Warner Media (Steven Universe). Courtesy Sony Pictures (Spider-Man). Courtesy Alamy (Doctor Strange).
Courtesy Marvel Studios (Eternals). Courtesy Amazon Prime (The Boys).

JUST FOR GROWN-UPS

punishment. That’s how you prove your
masculinity.” You see it passed on in fatherhood culture, too. My son is tough—
he’ll figure all this out on his own.
“Oftentimes the self-sacrifice story
line exists because these men can’t imagine anyone else being capable of solving
this problem or coming up with a different solution, or they’re unwilling to reach
out and ask for help,” Kvaran says. And
who wouldn’t—in this age of political
turmoil, superstorms, and plague—want
to be reassured that there’s a quick fix?
There are, however, exceptions to all
this bad behavior. The MCU is not Hydra,
after all. There are positive actions and
relationships—and the genre is undergoing an evolution.

“SOME THINGS JUST
CAN’T BE FIXED”
—Christine Palmer, Doctor Strange

DOCTOR STRANGE (2016) stands as the
most un-Marvel movie in the whole
MCU. Though the film begins with
another sports-car-driving egomaniac,
Dr. Stephen Strange goes on to dismantle almost every stereotype about what
makes a hero and a man.
Strange, determined to rehabilitate
himself from a hand injury that’s left
him powerless, trains under the Ancient
One, who tells him: “Silence your ego and
your power will rise.” Only when Strange
relents does his relic—a source of power

outside his control—find him. Through
his transformation, he makes amends
and asks for something most heroes
don’t think they need: help.
Strange lacks the superhuman size
of Thor or the Hulk, the tech of T’Challa,
and the invincibility of Captain Marvel.
In the final battle against his foe
Kaecilius, Strange spends much of it
defending himself and puts the world
back together. And when our hero faces
the totally psychedelic Dormammu, he
wins by forever submitting.
“He’s a different kind of hero,” says
Sean Parson, Ph.D., an associate professor of politics at Northern Arizona University who coedited the essay collection
Superheroes and Masculinity. “He has
to solve his problems through other ways,
which makes him have a more complicated masculinity, too. In fact, physical
power is not his forte at all. His cape hits
people more than him.”
Parson says there are other positive
exceptions beyond Strange. There’s the
vulnerability and intimacy between
Vision and Wanda. There’s the torment
and regret of Spider-Man hurting those
around him. There’s the tear-inducing,
ride-or-die relationship between Groot
and Rocket Raccoon. Last year’s ShangChi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
focused on family and friendship. Eternals tackled gender and race. Whether
Strange continues to grow in Multiverse
is up to its new director, Sam Raimi.
I’ll watch the first Doctor Strange film

with my son in a few years, no doubt, and
hopefully a few more films if superhero
movies continue to evolve. (I will also tell
him that I’d rather have a Flerken claw
out my eye than rewatch Age of Ultron.)
And I’ll tell him that superhero movies
are complicated.
As Kvaran says: “Superheroes represent the best we can possibly be as
humans—they choose to use their power
to try to make the world around them
better. That is incredibly inspiring: I
want to be powerful enough to have a
powerful impact on my community.”
But that message is often corrupted by
ego, stoicism, and competitiveness. Of
course, collaborating, reaching out, and
creating new institutions don’t make for
movie magic. (“Like, Tony Stark goes
to a board meeting and gets everybody
in Flint, Michigan, clean water is not a
fun movie to watch,” Kvaran says.) We
watch movies to escape the gear grinding
of real life, relieve stress, and maybe,
maybe take away something about the
human condition.
That last part—watching movies
with a more critical eye and a more
empathetic heart—is what I hope I can
pass on to my son. I can ask him the
same questions I’m asking myself as we
watch. Perhaps not 41 times an hour, but
certainly more than none.
His behavioral issues did dissipate, by
the way, when we started packing him
more snacks. Maybe what Bruce Wayne
really needs is a cheese stick.
MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

23

LIFE

HOME FRONT

LEVEL UP YOUR

LIVING ROOM

With March Madness around the corner and the NHL,
the NBA, and so much more to watch right now,
isn’t it time you upgraded where you watch it?
We got you. BY CHRISTIAN GOLLAYAN

Your New TV:

LG G1 65-Inch Gallery Design 4K Smart OLED TV
Loaded with 4K resolution, HDR settings, and a brisk refresh rate
(see “TV-Buying Lingo to Know,” below, if this makes no sense),
the G1 delivers—and the video processor makes even non-4K content
look amazing. Plus, its slim frame suits any room. $2,399; lg.com

TV-BUYING
LINGO TO
KNOW
24

MARCH 2022

“8:1”
To avoid eyestrain, for
every eight inches of your
TV’s size (measure the distance diagonally between
the screen’s corners), you
should sit one foot away.

|

MEN’S HEALTH

“REFRESH RATE”
Measured in hertz, this refers to how fast the picture
can change per second.
Sixty hertz is standard,
but flip the setting to 120
for buttery-smooth fastpaced sports.

“4K”
This is the screen’s resolution—the number of pixels
that make up the image.
The old standard was
1080 HD, but now Netflix,
Hulu, and Amazon Prime
run 4K content.

“HDR”
This set of features
provides higher contrast,
more colors, and greater
brightness. You’ll whoooah
at nature docs like Planet
Earth, whose images look
almost real.

Your New Charger: Tully

Power March Madness command central with this
multiport device, which fits down into your sofa.
Two USB and two three-prong power outlets mean
you can three-screen your bracket on your laptop while trash-talking on your smartphone. $99;
roomandboard.com

Your New Soundbar: Sonos Beam (Gen 2)

You don’t need an armada of speakers for surround sound.
This 26-inch bar has five amps and four midwoofers that
bring crisp sound from multiple angles. Bonus:
The Beam is voice enabled and plays
nice with Alexa and Google Assistant.
$449; sonos.com

Your New
Diffuser:

Vitruvi Move
Most good-smell
distributors look
like the pods from
Alien. This lightweight unit doesn’t
glow or pulse (or
hatch facehuggers,
thankfully), and
it operates on a
charge, so you can
move it with you, no
cord needed. $179;
vitruvi.com

Men’s Health
Endorses

Your New Recliner: Article Ellow

Courtesy brands (products). Getty Images (basketball game).

Overstuffed La-Z-Boys hog valuable floor space. Leave them in the ’80s
where they belong and modernize with this recliner. With walnut
legs and a comfortable three-point push-back reclining system, it’s as
sleek as your new TV. $1,099; article.com

Your New Robot: Neato D10

Most cleanup bots lack one key thing: power. Behold the
Neato’s “Max Mode,” which couples über-powerful suction
with a HEPA filter. The D10 uses laser technology to map
your home to more efficiently hoover up dust and dander.
$699; neatorobotics.com

HIRING
SOMEONE TO
WALL-MOUNT
YOUR TV
NO, IT IS not as easy
as hanging a framed
picture on a wall.
Unless you’re skilled
with a stud finder and
a power drill and can
hold sustained squats
of 60-plus pounds for
as long as an ESPN
SportsCenter Top Ten
segment, you should
farm out this afternoon project. Avoid
the risks (a shattered
screen, a hole in the
wall, a tweaked lower
back). Most electronics stores offer a
mounting service for
a totally-worth-it
extra fee. Just go on
and pay for it.

MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

25

LIFE

UNWIND

REENERGIZE!

IT’S THE
2022 MH

RECOVER!

BEST FOR
PAIN RELIEF

RELAX!

CBD AWARDS!
YOU KNOW THAT cannabidiol (CBD), a compound derived from marijuana, won’t get
you high. You also know that CBD is now in everything, including drinks, snacks,
creams, and dog treats. But what you may not realize is that even though the FDA
can clamp down on companies selling CBD illegally, it has approved only one CBDderived product to treat a disease or condition. That leaves you on your own—and
that’s why we’re here to help. Our team searched for third-party-certified products,
then a small army of us tested everything to see if each delivered what’s advertised:
deeper sleep, less pain, or a chiiiillll vibe. Here are our 15 favorites.

PEELS
Peels’ is bioidentical to other
CBD isolates, but it’s extracted
from orange peels, not hemp. So
there’s no THC in these taste-free
oral drops. $95; peels.com

BEST FOR SLEEP
MEDTERRA PAIN
RELIEF CREAM
This topical cream combines CBD
with menthol to provide cool,
soothing relief wherever. (Okay,
maybe not around your jock.)
$60; medterracbd.com

CHARLOTTE’S WEB
CALM SPRAY

RAW BOTANICS RELAX
CBD + CBC SOFTGELS

THERAONE SOOTHE
CBD MASSAGE OIL

This fast-acting spritzer
combines CBD with another cannabinoid called cannabigerol
(CBG) to promote sound sleep
cycles. $50; charlottesweb.com

Pop a slow-release
capsule at the end of your
workday so the relaxation
kicks in before bed.
$103; rawbotanics.com

This blend of USDA certified
organic CBD, lavender, eucalyptus, and jojoba oil helps
you achieve your goal: bliss.
From $65; therabody.com

OUR PROCESS When it comes to sourcing CBD, testing is key. Of the 200 products we tire-kicked, we
picked the 30 best. (You’ll find 15 more at MensHealth.com/cbd-awards-2022.) Each winner was also tested by a thirdparty lab for CBD content and heavy-metal toxicity, with results available on the company’s website—keep your eyes
peeled for a certificate of analysis, or COA. We leaned toward organic, U. S.-grown CBD. To make sure they worked,
we sampled every one based on its purpose: to fight stress, boost sleep, ease pain, or improve appearance. And yes,
the dog treat had a (canine) tester, too.
26

MARCH 2022

|

MEN’S HEALTH

PURESPORT CBD,
TURMERIC, GINGER
The pills mix CBD with anti-inflammatory ingredients to bust headaches. $96; puresportcbd.com

BEST FOR STRESS

BEST FOR
YOUR SKIN
RESET BALANCE
CBD DRINK DROPS
Too many CBD drinks come packed
with empty calories and weird flavors. These unflavored drops are
water-based, which means your
body can absorb them quicker and
the effects come on faster. $65;
resetbioscience.com

FLOYD’S OF LEADVILLE
CBD-INFUSED COFFEE

DIXIE BOTANICALS CBD
INFUSED SHEER TOUCH

This dark roast performs wizardry
as it elevates your energy level
without causing the palm sweat or
jitters of regular ol’ coffee.
$30; floydsofleadville.com

This SPF 50 sunscreen
may fight inflammation.
$22; swansonvitamins.com

GREEN GORILLA
CBD FACE CRÉME
This cream stimulates collagen
production with a blend of hempbased CBD and resveratrol, an
antioxidant that helps lessen the
effects of skin aging. $50;
ilovegreengorilla.com

JOY ORGANICS FULL
SPECTRUM CBD OIL
This tropical-tinged oral
tincture gives off the relaxed-butnot-out-of-it vibes of a quick
beach trip. It contains full-spectrum
CBD (the highest quality).
$70; joyorganics.com

FEALS MINTS
They’re small but mighty, with 20 milligrams of
full-spectrum CBD per mint. That’s enough to level
you out while you freshen up. $50; feals.com

Courtesy brands (CBD products)

PLUSCBD RESERVE
COLLECTION GUMMIES
LUME CBD PET TINCTURE
Add this peanut-butter-flavored
oil to the dog bowl and help your
pet chill when you host a party,
leave the house, or (yelp) head to
the vet. $30; lume-cbd.com

Sure, there’s a little THC in here,
but just 0.3 percent, which only
enhances the deeply calming
effects of the CBD. Plus, the amount
of CBD is listed on the label, so you
can bump down to half a gummy if
needed. $50; pluscbdoil.com

For the rest of the winners, visit MensHealth.com/cbd-awards-2022.

SOCIAL REST CBD
BODY LOTION
Lock in moisture pre-bed with this
mix of shea butter, coconut oil,
and CBD. You’ll wake up Benjamin
Button-ing. $30; socialcbd.com
MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

27

LIFE

GUY SMELLS

SPRING SCENT
UPGRADE
1

IF YOU LIKE CAMPING . . .
GO WOODSY
Sandalwood and cedar are cologne
mainstays, but they can often leave
you smelling like a smokehouse.
Try Tom Ford Ébène Fumé ($263), a
well-balanced scent that builds its
base from palo santo—a lighter wood
that brings a little smoke and a whole
lot of mystery.
LESS WOODSY:

MORE WOODSY:

Gucci Guilty
Parfum pour
Homme ($125)

Ermenegildo Zegna
Javanese Patchouli
($250)

Nothing like a few months of winter
to make a guy feel (and maybe even smell)
a little musty. Here are five of our favorite
spring colognes to freshen up your scent.
BY GARRETT MUNCE

3

IF YOU LIKE GARDENING . . .
GO FLORAL
Scents from this style often layer
lavender, narcissus, and rose atop
earthier wood and musk. Scotch
Porter the Porter House ($56)
mixes sweet vanilla orchid and
violet leaf with fresh greens and
warm spices. It’s like a cologne
greatest-hits collection.
MORE EARTHY:

MORE FLORAL:

Malin + Goetz
Strawberry
($95)

Maison Francis
Kurkdjian
Lumière Noire
Homme ($285)

4

IF YOU LIKE THE BEACH . . .
GO AQUATIC
This category smells like
salt water (in a good way). Montblanc Explorer Ultra Blue ($78) is
a great example: the cologne
carries a subtle shoreline
scent that lasts but never
overpowers. It’s refreshing.

IF YOU LIKE TRAVELING. . .
GO SPICY
Warm, spicy colognes are
the olfactory equivalent of
the open road—primed with
potential. Acqua di Parma
Oud & Spice ($285) is about
as adventurous as it gets:
deep, musky oud mixed
with cinnamon and clove.
LESS SPICY:

Byredo Mumbai
Noise ($190)

28

SPICY AND
WOODSY:

Burberry Hero
($78)

MARCH 2022

|

MEN’S HEALTH

LESS BEACHY:

MORE BALANCED:

Prada Luna Rossa
Ocean ($95)

Boss Bottled Marine
Eau de Toilette ($90)

5

IF YOU LIKE COCKTAILS . . .
GO FRESH
In fragrance-speak, “fresh”
means citrus, like bergamot
and lemon, or herbs, like
vetiver; both lend a light,
natural vibe to cologne.
Versace Eros Parfum ($139)
is as refreshing as a mojito
and contains blasts of
sage and tart lemon.
LESS CITRUSY:

MORE HERBAL:

Dior Homme
Sport ($110)

Cartier
Déclaration
Haute Frachîeur
($108)

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX LAU

Prop styling: Sophie Strangio

2

LIFE

THE STREAM

IT’S TIME YOU WATCH

E-SPOOO0RTS!

Getty Images (all)

Accept that competitive video gaming is a sport—
and you’ll enter a world of escapist fun you didn’t
know you needed. BY JOSHUA RIVERA
WATCHING PEOPLE PLAY video games has
existed ever since man first huddled
around a Pong cabinet. But watching
people play video games on a global scale,
via social networks built for the purpose,
as they compete for purses of up to
$40 million—this is relatively new.
E-sports are huge, and if you’ve been
ignoring them because you don’t think
they qualify as a sport, or you think this is
(yet another) weird teen thing, or whatever, stop shaking your fist at a cloud and
open a Twitch account, because e-sports
are exactly the refuge you need now.
The universe of e-sports is vast. There
are the intense tactical shoot-outs of
Rainbow Six: Siege, the old-school fighting of Street Fighter V, the cartoony battles of Overwatch. Few games, however,
match the might of League of Legends.
Watching LoL would explode the
heads of Pong players of old. Two teams
of five fantasy characters each defend a
base; winning involves blowing up your
opponent’s base before they do yours.
Achieving this is difficult: There’s the
other team, obviously, but also booby
traps to avoid and aids to collect. Precision reflexes, 3-D-chess-level planning,
Top Gun–worthy levelheadedness—you
need it all to pull off a win. Teamwork is
vital, but individual players can still
steal the show with their exuberant displays of bravado.
Then there are the real-life players who
control those fantasy characters from

a computer—Lee Sang-hyeok, 25, from
South Korea, the man behind the unstoppable Faker; Carl Martin Erik Larsson,
25, from Sweden, who embodies the tactical Rekkles; Robert Huang, 22, from the
U. S., the cutthroat Blaber. Each player
has their own style, highlight reel, and
beefs. Each team practices, strategizes,
and scrimmages. And the best teams all
converge yearly at the League of Legends
World Championship. Better known as
Worlds, it’s returning to America this fall
after six years abroad, and the midseason
invitational event (a sort of mini-championship tournament) is going down in
May. At these big-league contests, home-

town pride reigns, Cinderella stories
throw power rankings into disarray, and
dynasties are made and unmade.
In other words, following e-sports is
like following any normal sport—but it’s
also more. Watch one of the countless
“pop off” greatest-hits clips on YouTube
and witness the unbridled enthusiasm of its players. Behold entire teams
embracing (with real tears, no less) after
a stunning upset. Hold your breath along
with the gamers, camera zoomed in close
on their concentration-squinched faces,
and then feel the catharsis of victory or
defeat. E-sports—for all their screens
and avatars—are authentically human.
It’s hard not to root for authenticity,
especially during these Instagramfiltered, politically spun times. Maybe
this purity comes from the fact that
e-sports haven’t crossed over quite yet.
Maybe it’s that the sport is still so young—
or its players are. Regardless, there’s too
much joy (and anguish) to miss. Don’t we
all deserve more things to root for?
J O S H U A R I V E R A is an entertainment

writer at Polygon and a cohost of the
Wild Wild Tech podcast.

Your 2022 E-sports TUNE-IN GUIDE
LEAGUE OF
LEGENDS SERIES

DATE

WHAT

WATCH

May 2022

Hosted at NRG Stadium in Houston, this
event will drop you into the thick of the
lead-up to Worlds. Tune in for darkhorse upsets and budding rivalries.

youtube
.com/c/LCS

July 15 to 17

If first-person shooters are more your
style, Cologne offers Counter-Strike
combat in all its fast-paced glory.

pro.eslgaming.com/tour/
csgo/cologne

August 5
to 7

This event features fighting games
exclusively, from Tekken to Mortal
Kombat to Street Fighter.

evo.gg

Fall

It’s the Super Bowl of e-sports—with
way fewer commercial breaks.

lolesports.com

MIDSEASON
SHOWDOWN
ESL ONE CS:GO,

COLOGNE 2022
EVO

CHAMPIONSHIP
SERIES
LEAGUE OF
LEGENDS

WORLDS

MEN’S HEALTH

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MARCH 2022

29

LIFE

30/10

B L AC K B E R RY
Balsamic
1 cup frozen or fresh
blackberries + 1 Tbsp
shallots, chopped +
1 garlic clove, minced +
2 tsp balsamic vinegar +
1 tsp honey + 1 tsp lemon
zest + ¼ tsp cinnamon

7 WAYS TO AWESOME-IFY

CHICKEN BREAST

It’s every lifter’s go-to high-protein meal, and for good reason:
Just three ounces of roasted chicken breast has 27 grams of the muscle-building
nutrient. But why suffer through another dry, bland cutlet when you can
have a juicy-as-all-get-out, deeply tasty one? Here’s how to
cook chicken breast the right way and then serve it with a fast, flavorful sauce
and a filling high-fiber side. BY MATTHEW KADEY, R.D.

THE PROTEIN
Step

1

30g

COOK IT

Grilling or roasting
chicken breast quickly
dries out the meat.
Instead, try poaching,
which gently eases
the chicken into
juicy tenderness.

W H AT YO U ’ L L N E E D :

H O W T O M A K E I T:

2

(6 TO 8 OZ) BONELESS,
SKINLESS CHICKEN BREASTS

1

SMALL ONION, HALVED

2

GARLIC CLOVES, SMASHED

1. In a large pot, add all the
ingredients and enough water to cover the chicken by
2 inches. (For more flavor,
replace ¼ of the water with
white wine or hard cider.)
2. Bring the water to a very
slight simmer over medium

3 SPRIGS THYME
½ LEMON, QUARTERED
½ TSP SALT
1

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TSP WHOLE PEPPERCORNS

heat. Cook the chicken,
partly covered with a pot lid,
until the internal temperature reaches 165°F, about
20 minutes. Remove the
chicken, allow to cool to the
touch, and slice. Top with a
sauce. (See next page.)
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEX LAU

Step

2

SAUCE IT

While the bird cooks, make one of these sauces in a saucepan. Heat all the ingredients
over medium low for 5 minutes, stirring a couple times. Each recipe sauces 2 breasts.

Mojo
⅓ cup OJ + juice of ½ lime + 1 tsp lime zest
+ 1 Tbsp olive oil + 2 Tbsp cilantro,
chopped + 1 Tbsp fresh oregano, chopped
+ 1 Tbsp jalapeños, chopped + 1 Tbsp
garlic, minced + ¼ tsp cumin + ⅛ tsp salt

Spiked BBQ
2 Tbsp barbecue sauce + 1 tsp bourbon +
1 tsp yellow mustard + ½ tsp chili powder
+ ¼ tsp garlic powder + 1 Tbsp scallion
greens, chopped

THE FIBER

10g

Each of these nutrition-packed
sides will help you get the
10 grams of fiber you need at
every meal to fight hunger.
Each pairs well with any of
the sauces and feeds four.

Port Wine A N D C H E R R I E S
⅓ cup port wine + ½ cup frozen cherries,
halved + 2 tsp balsamic vinegar + 1 tsp
fresh thyme + 1 tsp orange zest + 1 tsp
honey + ¼ tsp allspice + ⅛ tsp salt

Maple Butternut Lentil
Pear Salad
Roast 3 cups butternut squash
(cubed) with 2 tsp olive oil and ¼ tsp
salt at 400°F, 30 minutes. In a bowl,
whisk 2 Tbsp olive oil, 1 Tbsp maple
syrup, 2 Tbsp cider vinegar, 2 Tbsp
horseradish, 2 tsp thyme, 1 tsp Dijon
mustard, 1 garlic clove (minced),
and ¼ tsp salt. Divide 6 cups baby
kale among 4 plates. Add squash,
⅓ cup black lentils (cooked), ½ pear
(sliced), 1 Tbsp pecans (sliced),
and the dressing.

AP P L E Mustard
¼ cup chicken stock + ¼ cup hard apple
cider + 2 Tbsp almonds, chopped
+ 2 Tbsp dried cranberries + 1 tsp dried
sage + 1 tsp Dijon mustard + 1 tsp maple
syrup + 1 tsp cornstarch + ⅛ tsp salt

Food styling: Tyna Hoang. Prop styling: Sophie Strangio.

Farro Zucchini Cakes
In a colander, mix 1 lb zucchini
(grated) and ½ tsp salt. Let it sit 10
minutes; squeeze to drain. In a bowl,
mix the zucchini, 1 cup farro (cooked),
1 cup quick-cook oats, ¼ cup scallion
(minced), juice of ½ lemon, 1 tsp Italian seasoning, ½ tsp salt, and 3 eggs.
In batches, cook ⅓ cup in an oiled
pan on medium, 4 minutes per side.

PUMPKIN PEANU T Satay
⅓ cup pumpkin puree + 2 Tbsp PB + 3 Tbsp
coconut milk + 2 Tbsp peanuts, chopped +
1 tsp ginger, minced + 1 garlic clove, minced
+ 2 tsp soy sauce + 1 Tbsp rice vinegar + 1 tsp
Sriracha + 1 tsp sesame oil + 1 tsp brown sugar

Muhammara
1 Tbsp pomegranate molasses + 2 tsp
lemon juice + 2 tsp tomato paste + 1 Tbsp
garlic, minced + ½ cup roasted red peppers, sliced + 2 Tbsp walnuts, chopped +
½ tsp paprika + ¼ tsp cumin + ⅛ tsp salt

30g
10g

WHAT’S 30/10
ANYWAY?

Experts agree that you need 30 grams
of protein per meal to help you build and
maintain muscle. The 10 grams of fiber
help you stay full. For more 30/10 meals,
head to MensHealth.com/30-10.

MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

31

INSIDEOUT

EVENTS &
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MAKE THE FIRST MOVE (AGAIN).

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And right now, get $15 off your first month of treatment.

Based on a true story. Richard Williams, father of legendary
tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams, shows family and
perseverance can achieve the impossible and impact the world.
facebook.com/KingRichardFilm

getroman.com/menshealth

© 2021 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

MIND
WHERE STRENGTH MATTERS MOST

WHERE STRENGTH MATTERS MOST

DRIVE!

DRIVE!

DRIVE!

Stuck in neutral or
spinning your wheels
in the mud of 2022?
We’ve got five steps
to finding the motivation
you need to kick your
life into high gear.
BY EMILY SOHN AND MARTY MUNSON

Simon Davidson

YOU KNOW THE GUY:

He’s up at 5:45 A.m.,
runs a quick 10K before making Instagram-worthy
breakfasts for his kids, is working on launching
another company, and spends his evenings checking on the craft beers he’s brewing in the basement.
And yet he’s the opposite of exhausted. Meanwhile,
there are too many days these days when you’re
stuck in a rut or unable to get things in gear while
watching other people speed by you, and you can’t

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MARCH 2022

33

M O T I VA T E !

quite work up the power to do whatever
it is you really want to do. No matter
where you think your drive is—or isn’t—
right now, these simple steps can rev up
your motivation.

1. DO SOMETHING—
ANYTHING

DRIVE ISN’T something that only lucky

people have, like good hair or fast feet.
Anyone can develop drive (or motivation—experts use them interchangeably) if you know how to go about it.
“People often think of motivation and
drive as the big flame that happens if you
take lighter fluid and spray it all over a
grill,” says Steve Magness, coauthor of
the book Peak Performance. “A better
way to think about drive is that you get
some coal, light the fire, and let it slow

burn over time. That allows us to sustain
and cook whatever we’re trying to cook.”
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits,
writes that “one of the most surprising things about motivation is that it
comes after starting a new behavior, not
before.” In other words, you don’t get
motivated, then do something. You do
something, and that gets you motivated.
“Getting started, even in very small
ways . . . naturally produces momentum,”
he writes. If starting out, even in a “very
small way,” feels like anything from a
minor sticking point to a monumental
obstacle, he recommends making the
first few steps so easy that you waste no
energy thinking about doing them. So
instead of waiting “until you feel like it”
to overhaul your LinkedIn profile to get
the job you want, block out ten minutes to
play around with the first entry. Instead

of “meaning to” get back to your leanest,
give yourself a head start by planning
what you’ll have for breakfast most days
and buying the ingredients.

2. REMOVE BARRIERS

EVEN PRO athletes sometimes have a

tough time getting started, says Magness, who has worked with NBA players
and Olympians. “What saves these
athletes is that their environment is set
up in a way that lowers the bar—there’s
less activation energy that’s needed to get
out the door.” They have trainers devising their workouts, training partners
depending on them to show up. Their systems are organized to minimize hurdles.
You can do the same.
During a rough period when Magness
says he himself was working too much

Simon Davidson

MIND

and finding excuses not to exercise,
he added five minutes to his evening
commute to get to a park where he liked to
run. The easy choice would have been to
take the faster way home. But by going a
few minutes out of his way and seeing his
running shoes on the passenger seat, he
removed the barrier to taking that run.
“It’s almost like your brain sees running
as the easier decision now. Those cues are
inviting you to take that action, and you
don’t have to think about it,” he says.

3. LET YOUR
DRIVE CHANGE

“THE PANDEMIC altered the lives of
nearly everyone and led millions to
reevaluate and clarify the core of what
is important, essential, or meaningful in life—which may not be climbing

You don’t get motivated,
then do something. You
do something, and that
gets you motivated.
the corporate ladder,” says James
M. Diefendorff, Ph.D., a professor of
industrial/organizational psychology at
the University of Akron. What sets you
on fire can be a moving target, since we
become interested in different things and
develop different values over the course
of our lives, he adds. To understand what you care about, try
thinking about what happens
on your best days—what gives
you energy and excitement. If
you don’t want to switch jobs
or goals to feel a sense of drive
again, “try to structure your
day to ensure that some of those
‘best day’ activities can be
experienced at least some of the
time,” Diefendorff says.

4. CREATE
MICRO-GOALS

DAVID ZALD, PH.D., has
watched motivation die. He’s
the director of the Center for
Advanced Human Brain Imaging Research at Rutgers, and
his research has found that it
happens when the workload you
shoulder seems too heavy or the
rewards too far off. The obvious
but hard-to-see-when-you’rein-it solution is to break that big
goal into smaller tasks.
“Below your goal are subgoals, each of which has its own
subgoals, cascading all the way
down to specific behaviors,”
Diefendorff says. Goals closer to
the top of the hierarchy explain
why you’re doing what you’re
doing and reflect your values,
and goals further down the
hierarchy explain how the goal

will be met, he says. Subgoals help you
understand the steps you need to take
and give you tasks to succeed at along the
way—both of which help make long-term
goals more manageable. Feeling like
you’re making progress, by the way, also
feeds your drive.
So below “take all my vacation days
this year,” subgoals might be: “narrow
down Airbnbs to two,” then “email
options to friends,” and finally “book
it.” Similarly, if you’re having a hard
time getting excited about a 15-mile
run, Zald says, promise yourself
you’ll run a mile, then take a break,
and repeat that pattern until you’re
finished. Key in on the phrase “take a
break,” too. You’re more likely to stick
to a goal if you earn immediate rewards
for steps you take rather than delaying
rewards until you’re finished, according to research by Ayelet Fishbach,
Ph.D., author of Get It Done: Surprising
Lessons from the Science of Motivation.

5. STOP ONE REP SHORT

IF YOU’RE driven, you’re always pushing

yourself hard . . . right? Magness’s Peak
Performance coauthor, performance
coach Brad Stulberg, wants to change
your mind about that. In his new book,
The Practice of Groundedness, he makes
the case that “anyone can crush themselves and do an Instagram-worthy
workout or all-nighter. That’s actually
pretty easy. What is hard is maintaining
drive for longer periods of time.” To keep
it going, “force yourself to stop the equivalent of one rep short, day in and day out.
Doing that is all about going a little slower
today so you can go faster tomorrow.”
Close the laptop at 7:00 instead of 8:00.
Sit down to eat lunch. Drive runs on sustainable energy. Feed it right.
MEN’S HEALTH

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MARCH 2022

35

!??!
@
@
**

MOVING ON

#NOREGRETS
# N OTSOS M A RT
Learning to live with the regrets you have
is better than not having any at all.
BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN

WHEN YOUR TEN-YEAR-OLD sits on the
top bunk of his bunk bed, looks at you,
and yells, “Eff you!” then refuses to
stop no matter how many privileges are
revoked or threats are leveled, you have
a lot to think about. But not very much
time to do it. School starts in 20 minutes.
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No one is fed, no one is dressed, and the
dog still needs walking. Plus, cursing is a
bright-red line. A real effing bright one.
So up the ladder you scramble as your
son freezes and in his eyes you see a look
between terror and defiance, because this
isn’t the first time you’ve gotten angry or

grabbed his spindly wrist and dragged
him down from his perch. But that’s the
look you’ll remember through the day and
the days and months after. Because grabbing your child in anger is also a brighteffing-red line, and that look of reproach
is the same one with which you fixed your
own father years ago.
It fills you with a feeling so dark and so
painful that the only tolerable thing is
to banish the thought and slam the door.
This is regret.
Out there in the wilderness of unacknowledged feelings, the regret grows.
It has good company. At 40, my list of
regrets is long: how I behaved in my
marriage, how I spent money when I had
it and (even worse) how I spent it when I
didn’t, all the dumbass things I thought
were important and weren’t. . . . Most of
them are what Daniel Pink, author of
the new book The Power of Regret, calls
“closed door” regrets. That is, they can’t
be undone. But my son is only ten and
repair is still possible. So that is what
Pink calls an “open door” regret. I’m
finding these open doors much more
difficult to cop to, because you can’t loiter
before an open door. You have to walk
through it.
The first step, whether the door is
open or closed—whether the damage
can be redressed or simply must be
accepted—is that you need to acknowledge regret. For me, and for many men,
I believe, this seems like weakness at
worst and self-sabotage at best. What can
be gained from the bummer Pep Boys
of Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda? Shame
and dissatisfaction? Better to heed the
wisdom of a thousand terrible tattoos
proclaiming “No regrets!”
This is exactly the type of thinking
Pink wants to undo. “Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the
steady path to happiness,” he writes. “It
is healthy and universal, an integral part
of being human. Regret is also valuable.
It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it
needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.”
To defang regret, Pink outlines a
method of digesting it: self-disclosure,
self-compassion, and self-distancing.
It seemed easy enough—especially the
self-disclosure part—so I tried it. After
school drop-off, I took a moment to do
what any middle-aged man would do

Millennium Images/Gallery Stock

MIND

Courtesy subjects.

when he’s feeling upset. I called my
mom—yes, it was 6:00 a.m. in California,
but she’s used to this kind of thing—and
told her what happened. “By acknowledging the regret to ourselves,” Pink
tells me, “we already lighten some of
its burden.” Once the regret is in the
room, Pink suggests instead of trying
to salve ourselves with indiscriminate
self-esteem—I am a great person!—a
more useful approach would be building
compassion for ourselves, or, as Pink
writes, “replacing searing judgment
with basic kindness.” I might not be the
greatest person, but that’s okay. I’m still
worthy of love.
Sounds simple but isn’t. Loving the
person who hurts the person you love is
a tall order. But not surprisingly, if you
don’t have compassion for yourself, it’s
nearly impossible to have compassion
for anyone else. So I tried to reframe my
regrettable actions not as evidence of
my inherent irremediable crumminess
but rather as just another flaw, of which
I have many.
The third step, self-distancing, allows
the regretter the space to analyze and
strategize about what happened. You can
do this a lot of ways—through time, narrating the experience as if it happened
years ago, or through space, recasting the
experience as if it happened far away—
but the method that worked best for
me, as a writer, was through language. I
made a dash from the first to the second
person. Thus, “When your ten-year-old
sits on the top bunk of his bunk bed, looks
at you, and yells, ‘Eff you!’ ”
It’s tempting here to write, “suddenly,” as in “Once I embraced regret,
suddenly my relationship with my son
transformed!” but nothing is sudden.
Reorienting the feeling from a weight
pushing me down to an engine pushing
me forward has been a slow conversion.
But that’s the gist of what’s happened.
And it has pushed me in unfamiliar,
uncomfortable ways, like apologizing
to my son, like weathering his tantrums
without throwing my own, like taking a
few f-bombs for the family’s sake.
As I made cautious friends with regret,
I wanted to know how other guys felt
about it, too. I found a group of men with
experience wrestling with regret and
asked how they were processing it.

REAL GUYS, REAL REGRETS
AQUIL ABDULLAH, 48, rower

Missed the Olympics by 33/100 of a second.
MY REGRET: FOR PRETTY MUCH all of 1999 leading
up to the Olympic trials in 2000, it was looking like I
was going to the Olympics. I was the fastest person
competing in the single sculls. I was poised to become
the first African American male to represent rowing at
the Olympics. Then, during the selection trials in Camden, New Jersey, I lost the final by 33/100 of a second.
If I had lost by a large margin, I wouldn’t have had so much regret about
the way I trained. I felt like I could have controlled something that could
have changed the outcome. Did I eat the right thing? Did I lift enough?
Did I put in the miles? Or was I mentally weak? I’ve held on to the memory of that terrible feeling. I’ve returned to it, to never wanting to feel
it again, to push me forward. I finally made the Olympic team in 2004,
winning my qualifying heat by nearly three seconds.

KENNETH WADDELL , 30, car salesman

Cocreator of the viral Milk Crate Challenge,
which caused injuries.
MY REGRET: LAST SUMMER, me and my friend Jordan [Browne] were hanging out in Kobacker Park
in Columbus, Ohio, when I came up with the idea
of stacking up milk crates and challenging people
to climb on them. Jordan filmed it and posted it on
Facebook. It found its way to TikTok and went viral.
People around the world started trying to do the Milk Crate Challenge,
and I know a lot of them have been injured. Obviously, we didn’t want
anyone to get hurt. That wasn’t our intention. It was just something we
did for fun, having kids engage in competition as opposed to violence.
I don’t regret creating it, to be honest. My only regret is that we didn’t
patent it and get an LLC and obtain the copyright. Now there’s a Milk
Crate Challenge video game and Milk Crate Challenge merchandise,
and we aren’t capitalizing on it.

RON SHEPPARD, 73, retired

Most married—and divorced—man in the UK.
MY REG RET: I’ VE B E E N MARRI E D and divorced
eight times, starting in 1966, and I was most recently
divorced in 2013. The best thing about living on me
own is that I’ve got the television control and I can
have me music on when I want. Sometimes I go to
the beach and watch the waves, letting seagulls eat
me sandwich, and think, I wish I had someone to grow
old with. I don’t regret any of the marriages, and I would like to be married again before I die. But what I dearly regret is that I never told anyone about the childhood trauma and sexual abuse I went through
as a boy. For 47 years I carried it in my head. Finally I saw a psychologist
who said I was addicted to love because I didn’t get the love I needed
when I was younger. If only I had sought help earlier, my life could have
been so different. But I’ve had a good life. At least it’s been colorful.
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MIND

TRUST YOURSELF

WHY YOU

SHOULD BELIEVE
YOUR EYES

Was DEREK JETER really as bad a fielder as advanced
baseball number crunching suggests? This excerpt from
The Eye Test: A Case for Human Creativity in the Age
of Analytics examines the Jeter Gulf and what it tells us
about our own judgment in the era of algorithms.

T

BY CHRIS JONES

THE CONFLICT between baseball’s analytical hive mind and its hopeless
romantics is best captured in, or by, the Rawlings GG Gamer 11.5-inch glove
of one Derek Jeter, the Hall of Fame shortstop for the New York Yankees.
Over the early years of his career especially, Jeter was considered a superlative shortstop. In the seven seasons between 2004 and 2010, Jeter won five
Gold Gloves, the award given each year to the player deemed the best at his
position. During the 2010 season, his fielding percentage—the traditional
defensive metric—was .989, better than every other shortstop in baseball.
He committed only six errors. By those numbers, at least, he was easily tops.

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He also had a knack for making spectacular plays when his team needed him
to perform miracles. If clutch hitters
no longer existed, Jeter made it seem as
though clutch fielders still did. No fan will
forget his headlong dive into the stands
after he caught Trot Nixon’s fly ball in the
12th inning against the hated Red Sox in
2004. (The Yankees won in the 13th.) His
flip to home in game 3 of the 2001 American League Division Series against Billy
Beane’s Oakland A’s, when he somehow
teleported to foul territory on the firstbase side to nab Jeremy Giambi at the
plate, is considered one of the greatest
defensive plays ever made.
Jeter’s gifts seemed both statistically
significant and immeasurable. Ah, but
then—then a different defensive metric
began gaining favor: Ultimate Zone Rating, or UZR. Its value is given in runs,
either saved by a good defensive player or
yielded by a poor one. A player with a UZR
of zero is a perfectly average fielder; plus
or minus 15 runs is about the extent of
the expected season-long outcome. The
purpose of UZR is to give a more complete
picture of a player’s defense than fielding
percentage. It, too, considers errors, but
ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO

T H E E X P E R T : C H R I S J O N E S is the author of Out of Orbit and Falling

Hard: A Rookie’s Year in Boxing. Excerpted from THE EYE TEST: A Case
for Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics, ©2022 Chris Jones, and
reprinted by permission from Twelve Books/Hachette Book Group.

it also tracks an infielder’s ability to turn
double plays and his range relative to other
players at the same position.
Fielding is much more difficult to quantify than hitting, and even statistical zealots concede that UZR, for which tracking
began in 2002, is imperfect. It requires
a huge sample size; it doesn’t account
for positioning or the widespread use of
shifts; whether a play is considered a hit
or an error is up to the individual scorekeeper in each ballpark. Still, UZR is considered—indisputably, it just is—a more
complete assessment of a player’s defense
than fielding percentage alone. When it
comes to Derek Jeter, UZR and its proponents wish for us to forget what we think
we know about him.

Getty Images (Jeter [3])

R

REMEMBER THAT 2010 Gold Glove season, when he made only six errors and
shined like a diamond? According to UZR,
you’re remembering it wrong. Jeter’s UZR
was –4.4, third-worst among American
League shortstops and about 15 runs behind Alexei Ramirez of the Chicago White
Sox. Ramirez committed 20 errors against
Jeter’s six, and errors are obvious and look
bad. But in exchange for each of those additional errors, Ramirez gave the White
Sox five more putouts and ten more assists, an easy trade. Compared to the best
shortstops in the game, Derek Jeter was a
defensive liability.
Supporters of a rigorous analytical
approach use Jeter’s post-career reevaluation as proof of the limits of human observation. We didn’t see a shortstop with
grossly limited range; we saw balls go past
him untouched and assumed no player
would have reached them. That wasn’t
true: Dozens of times over the course of
the season, Alexei Ramirez would have
made a play on the same ball. It took UZR
to correct that record. If we could be so profoundly wrong about someone as closely
watched as Derek Jeter—if the divide
between what we swear we witnessed and
the dispassionate statistical reality could
be so wide—then imagine how often our
eyes deceive us.
We tend to glorify analytics even when
they tell us something we already know,
every small finding treated as an intellectual breakthrough. The Jeter Gulf, so
widely used to illustrate the gap between

perception and reality, is in fact an outlier and not just a moderate one: It is an
extreme deviation. In 2018, Joe Posnanski, the metrics-minded baseball
journalist, compared actual defensive
statistics against the surveyed opinions
of the readers of Fangraphs.com. They
were asked to rate players based on seven
fielding categories: reaction, acceleration,
sprint speed, hands, footwork, throwing
strength, and throwing accuracy. Those
rankings were converted into runs, so they
could be compared against the painstakingly quantified likes of UZR. Joe, normally a proponent of advanced statistics,
found that “the eye test and the defensive
numbers almost always are very close.”
Far more often, however, there is little or
no measurable difference between our
perception of a player and statistical fact.
“We’ve been led to believe because of a few
examples that the numbers and the eyes
see defense in entirely different ways,” Joe
wrote. “It just isn’t true.” When it comes
to evaluating baseball defense, our eyes, in
fact, are nearly perfect instruments.
Was Derek Jeter an all-time great
fielder? No, he was not. The analytics
are indisputable. Did he possess a Hall of
Fame understanding of the game—like a
strain of clairvoyance—that still allowed
him to change the course of it? Absolutely, he did. That play against the A’s
isn’t lessened by what we now know about
Jeter’s fielding abilities. It’s all the more
remarkable, as well as proof of the heights
to which devotion will lift you. Maybe he
had limited range, but the special way he
saw the game made him capable of greatness all the same.

N

NUMBERS ARE OFTEN portrayed as indisputable, as though statistics never lie.
When we get complacent about data, we
can reach wrong, even dangerous conclusions, including about our fellow human
beings. Statistics sometimes reveal things
that we might not otherwise see. They can
confirm suspicions with harder evidence
and occasionally furnish corrections to
the record. But when an answer is hard to
find, why would we choose to search for it
with a single method? That so often seems
to be the argument for analytics: It is the
one best way. Why shouldn’t we be more
like astronomers and search for solutions

Young
statisticians
and old scouts
both love
baseball, and
95 percent of
the time, their
eyes reach
the same
conclusions.
in every conceivable way, to make sure
we’re seeing what we believe we’re seeing?
What’s the advantage of having everyone
looking through the same set of lenses?
Young statisticians and old scouts both
love baseball, and 95 percent of the time,
their eyes reach the same conclusions.
When it comes to those blurry margins,
why wouldn’t I still want multiple looks?
Why would I ever refuse another perspective? Maybe there is something you can
divine more clearly than anyone else—
whether a movie is good, or whether a dish
needs more or less salt, or whether a cancer
is the killing sort. Isn’t it better, for you and
for us, if you champion your differences in
perspective, and seek opportunities where
your gifts might be best applied, and try to
use your methods more creatively?

I

I BELIEVE THERE is a new kind of Eye
Test that we should seek to pass, and people who do pass it are perhaps more valuable today than ever—in sports, but also
across so many fields of work and play.
Experience, creativity, taste all matter
more than ever. The margin between
success and failure has become so impossibly fine, a good beholder can be all the
difference between them. Who should
play third base? How hard will it rain? Is
this person lying? Numbers alone won’t
tell us. People will. Human creativity and
imagination will. I don’t want to make
the case for palmistry. I want to make
the case for taste, for curiosity, for openmindedness, for expertise, for love. If
beauty isn’t a virtue, a good eye still is.
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40

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G BY T

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SP

RING 20

2
2

GUIDE
TO
STYLE

BLAZE

NEW ILS
TRA

If the pandemic led you to do more hiking, trail
running, and biking—good on you. And good on
menswear brand Bonobos for its new Fielder line, a
collection of durable, outerwear-inspired staples that
are purpose-built for those wild treks in the woods.
This jacket-vest-shirt combo comes in a crinkled nylon
fabric that’s water resistant, lightweight, and machine
washable, so you can tackle pretty much anything.
Don’t miss these tough-as-nails Merrell boots, which
have a plush, shock-absorbing midsole cushion that’ll
endure even the most rugged of hikes.
Reversible fleece vest ($30), T-shirt ($16), and jogger pants ($24) by
Bonobos Fielder; sneakers ($110) by Merrell; Series 800 watch ($1,295)
by Movado; bike by Serial 1, powered by Harley-Davidson.

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S

P

RI

NG 2022

GUTOIDE
STYLE

KEEP IT

REEL
Take a look at any
department-store shelves or
clothing website and you’re
bound to see fisherman’s
sweaters: thick, corded
knits that are incredibly
warm but—yeah, we know
what you’re thinking—also
notoriously itchy. Except
not this Donegal cable
crew from Buck Mason,
constructed from moisturewicking merino wool
blended with polyester.
That means the sweater
is formfitting, great for an
après-ski warm-you-up, and
as soft as fresh snow at a
five-star mountain resort.
Sweater ($195) by Buck
Mason; T-shirt ($45) by Polo
Ralph Lauren; Rec Utility pants
($88) by Dockers; boots ($150)
by Sperry; watch by Luminox.

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TOUGH

TIMES

Today’s outdoor watches have
sturdy straps, impregnable
cases, and outdoor-friendly
tickers that can take a licking.

Black Bay watch
($3,575) by Tudor.

Prospex Black Series 1968
watch ($1,200) by Seiko
Watch of America.

SET

YOUR BASE

Stay-at-home sweats are great—until you have to head out in
public. Armani Exchange has you covered with this fitted pimacotton T-shirt, which pulls double duty on comfort and style, so
you won’t be embarrassed to wear it outside. Ditto these cotton
cargoes, featuring an elastic waistband and utility pockets that
make them equally suited for dash-out errands and weekend treks.

T-shirt ($30) and
stretch cargo
pants ($150)
by Armani
Exchange; Star
Wars Boba Fett
watch ($263)
by Citizen.

Standard chronograph ($109)
by Timex x Todd Snyder.

S

P

RI

NG 2022

GUTOIDE
STYLE

SLAY

Old-school flannels
are thick and tough but
don’t provide much in the
way of breathing room.
Rails’ Lennox shirt fixes
that with sleek brushedcotton rayon that’s
rugged but super easy to
move in. Pair it with some
do-it-all Rag & Bone
jeans and you’re outfitted
for taming the property.
Shirt ($128) by Rails;
jeans ($250) by Rag &
Bone; boots ($400)
by Wolverine; gloves
($95) by Filson.

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Grooming: Joanna Ford/the Wall Group. Production: Photobomb Production.

YARD
WORK

TAKE

THE
HIGHER
ROAD

A road trip (or saddle
ride?) calls for a jacket
that’s easy to layer and
comfortable enough
to wear for hours. Todd
Snyder’s Dylan jacket
ticks both boxes and looks
amazing, thanks to its luxe
Italian calf-suede finish. Its
slim fit hits just above the
thigh, kind of like a blazer.
If temps turn colder, throw
this over a Todd Snyder x
Champion sweatshirt with
a hoodie-like interior.
Jacket ($998) by Todd
Snyder; sweatshirt
($98) by Todd Snyder
x Champion; jeans
($250) by Rag & Bone;
Prospex Black Series
1968 watch ($1,200)
by Seiko Watch
of America.

S

P

VEER

OFF

COURSE
RLX, Ralph Lauren’s
golf-clothing brand, also
makes clothes you can
wear in less manicured
pastures. Its Gore-Texlined, water-repellent
parka and matching
joggers are loaded with
pockets, which make
them especially clutch
for stashing all your
fuel for long weekend
runs. Strap on these
all-weather, waterproof
hiking sneakers from
the North Face if you’re
pounding the trails
instead of the pavement.
Jacket ($698) and sweater
($298) by Ralph Lauren
RLX; pants ($188) by Polo
Ralph Lauren; boots ($169)
by the North Face.

Back to the Present
Sam Heughan, Outlander’s strapping leading man, is set
to make 2022 his best year yet.

ONSCREEN, Sam Heughan is used to living in uncertain times. After all, the 41-year-old actor leads Starz’s
hit series Outlander, on which he plays an 18th-century
Scottish warrior who falls in love with a 20th-century
time traveler (Caitriona Balfe). It’s a bodice ripper of a
show that’s probably your aunt’s not-so-guilty pleasure.
But off-screen, filming the show’s sixth season (premiering March 6) during lockdown, in the middle of a
freezing Scottish winter, was a challenge. “At least we
were able to work, so we just feel really fortunate,” says
Heughan. “[Working] got me through the pandemic.”
His hustle these past two years is paying off. Beyond
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Outlander, he launched an award-winning whisky
(the Sassenach), released two best-selling books and
a travel show about Scotland, expanded his online
wellness program (My Peak Challenge), and starred in
three movies. Up next, a new rom-com, Text for You,
opposite Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Céline Dion(!?).
His work ethic also brought him to our shoot, where
he showed up limping with a knee injury after a recent
bike accident—and still pushed through. He had just
signed up for an ultramarathon in Scotland.
“I don’t know if it’s foolish,” he says. He will not, however, admit to using time travel for a stronger finish.

RI

NG 2022

GUTOIDE
STYLE

AHEAD OF

THE
PACK

STAY READY FOR
ANY ADVENTURE
WITH THESE
WATER-RESISTANT,
MULTI-POCKETED
BACKPACKS THAT
ARE MADE TO
LAST A LIFETIME.

600D backpack ($69) by
the North Face.

Adventurer trail pack ($129)
by Eddie Bauer.

Pioneer top-clip backpack
($95) by Hunter.

TACKLE

RAIN OR
SHINE

Name Tktktk Tktktk

Spring brings showers
and unpredictable
temperatures. To stay
layered for in-between
weather, turn to Billy Reid’s
Mini Waffle crewneck
sweater. It’s the rare
thermal shirt that holds up
through the seasons, due to
a cashmere-cotton blend.
Pair it with Vuori’s stretchy
performance pants
and Skechers’ Go Run trail
shoes and you’ll be
ready for warm days and
chilly evenings.
Thermal shirt ($195) by Billy Reid;
Ponto performance pants ($84) by
Vuori; Go Run Pulse trail sneakers
($95) by Skechers; Reflective
Large Climb backpack ($180) by
Epperson Mountaineering; Duck
watch ($650) by Shinola.

YOU
KNOW
By ANDREW HEFFERNAN, c.s.c.s.

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P h o t o g r a p h s b y E R I C R AY DAV I D S O N

DON’T

JOE

JOSEPH BAENA , t h e s o n o f f i t n e s s c u l t u r e ’s

greatest icon, is on a quest to become an
a c t o r, b u i l d h i s b e s t b o d y, a n d b e t h e s t r o n g e s t
v e r s i o n o f h i m s e l f, o n e r e p a t i m e .

IT’S RUSH HOUR at Gold’s Gym

in Venice, California. Athletes
and musclemen and actors of all
shapes are gathered for their Tuesday lift: curling, benching, posing,
flexing, taking refuge from an unusually cold and rainy evening.
Over by the weight rack, aspiring actor/bodybuilder/real estate
player Joseph Baena—Joe to his
friends—is manhandling a couple
massive dumbbells as an MH video
crew jockeys for its best angle.
As the camera rolls, Baena wrestles the weights onto his lap,
lies down on an incline bench, kicks the weights into position,
and executes eight dumbbell presses with expert precision. “Go
for a stretch at the bottom,” he instructs as he pumps the weights
up and down. “Come all the way up and squeeze.”
The way he sells it, you’d almost believe that holding a few hundred pounds of steel over your face, then lowering and raising
them until the fibers of your pectoral muscles feel like they’re
going to separate from your sternum, is the most fun a guy can
have on a drizzly evening in SoCal in late December 2021.
He’s a natural—at lifting weights, holding center stage, working an audience.
The setting is rich with history: Nicknamed the “mecca of
bodybuilding,” Gold’s is the stomping and lifting and squatting
ground for all the sport’s greats, made famous in 1977’s Pumping
Iron, the semifictional documentary that set a young muscleman
from Thal, Austria, on course to become the institution known
as Arnold Schwarzenegger. The same guy whose massive, fading
photo hovers on the wall, just above our heads.
The same guy who also happens to be the father of the man
genially banging out dumbbell presses in front of me. If you’ve
heard the name Joseph Baena, you probably know a bit about his
history: how his mother, Guatemalan-born Mildred Baena, was
the housekeeper for Arnold and his then wife, Maria Shriver,
when Joseph was born in 1997. How his mother kept the truth of
his paternity a secret throughout his childhood. And how, in 2011,
when the resemblance between father and son became impossible
to ignore, it came out publicly that Joseph was the child of one of the
most famous and successful men on the planet. Mildred described
exactly how her son found out his dad’s identity in an interview
that year: “When [Joseph’s] grandmother sat him down to explain
that Arnold Schwarzenegger was his father, he exclaimed, ‘Cool!’ ”
And then . . . silence. Baena and his mother declined to elaborate
further on their radically transformed lives, leaving the public
guessing about how he handled the sudden revelation. Until now.
Over the four hours we spent talking about those turbulent times
and his evolving relationship with his dad, it was clear that the
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trials of his first 24 years have forged a powerful
sense of self. He’s proud of his Latino heritage, and
he hopes people will see past his childhood and get
to know and respect him for his own accomplishments as he crushes his day job selling houses at
Aria Properties, a Marina del Rey real estate office,
and establishes himself as an actor. First up is the
action pic Lava, in which he has a lead role, and
the low-budget sci-fi thriller Encounters is on the
way. Hey, you gotta start somewhere.
Of course, people scoffed at Arnold when he
started out—and then he became one of the
highest-paid actors in Hollywood, living proof that
ambition, faith, and unshakable confidence can
take you pretty far. For many men, especially guys
born in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, Schwarzenegger
has always loomed large as an exemplar of what’s possible if you
work hard and make good on your talents and steadfastly refuse to
take no for an answer. As inspiring as that life has been for many of
us, it’s also a hell of a legacy to live up to—enough to deflate someone. In this, we’re all Baena’s brothers. Whatever alchemy of genes,
upbringing, and training brought it on, Joseph Baena is wrestling
through a condition that everyone from Sophocles to Shakespeare
to Freud has told us is unavoidable. It’s right there in the scratchy,
tinkling opening theme song to Pumping Iron: Every man wants
to be bigger than Dad.
But what happens when an oversize picture of your dad towers
over you on the wall of your gym—one of hundreds if not thousands of gyms in the L. A. area and an interesting choice of training (and interview) venue for a son who says he doesn’t want to live
in his father’s shadow? Can anyone ever be bigger than this dad?

IT’S BEEN MORE than ten years since that day when all
hell broke loose in his family, and those years have brought enough
perspective that Baena’s now willing to open up about it. “Those
are really big parts of my life that no one really knows,” he says.

Styling: Ted Stafford. Set design: Wooden Ladder. Grooming: Sussy Campos/Art Department.
Style assistant: Emily Cavari. Production: Alicia Zumback/CAMP Productions.

Their home under siege, Mildred and Joe took a road
trip, hiding out with relatives in Texas. Through it all—
the probing eyes of the press, the ongoing pressure to
stay incognito—mother and son stood strong: “She was
Pages 48–49: Tank by
Todd Snyder; shorts by
really the only person I had, and I was really the only
Ron Dorff; sneakers by
person that she had,” he says. “No one knew, and everyPuma; watch by Apple.
This page: Tank by Todd
one wanted the details. We had each other’s backs.”
Snyder; jeans by Levi’s;
(Baena declined to share exactly when he first talked
BR V2-93 GMT Blue
to his dad after the revelation, and Schwarzenegger
watch by Bell & Ross.
could not be reached for an interview.)
In his freshman year at Frontier High, Baena discovered that people looked at him differently: “The trust
Bakersfield, California, where Baena grew up with his mother
and older siblings, is just 100 miles north of L. A.—but the subur- factor became really difficult.” He couldn’t tell who his friends
ban desert community, sometimes disparaged as the “armpit of were. Athletically inclined but chubby, he was cut from the basketCalifornia,” couldn’t be farther from the glitz of Hollywood. “It ball and soccer teams, and he considered giving up on sports.
The turning point came when his buddy Cesar tried to badger
was a humble home, and we didn’t have much,” Baena says.
Still, the early years were happy: learning to cook with his mother him into joining the swim team. Baena balked, worried about how
(now a culinary-school graduate and a chef), speaking Spanish with he’d look in a Speedo. But Cesar was relentless, and swimming
his siblings (there are four on his mom’s side, ranging in age from 32 had one big advantage over the other sports: “There was no tryto 42), celebrating his Guatemalan heritage through food, culture, out,” he says. Baena’s long arms and powerful upper body engenand music. “That’s a huge part of me,” he says. “My mom’s whole side dered a fortuitous pairing of athlete and sport. “I was born for
is Guatemalan; we have a lot of Colombian family. Nearly everyone the water,” he says. Along with trophies, recognition, and a sleek
on that side is Latin American.” The music of Vicente Fernández physique came confidence, focus, and a new willingness to engage
plays—loudly—at every family gathering, where Mom’s take on with fellow students; in his senior year, he was president of Frontamales, baked in banana leaves instead of corn husks, is a favorite. tier High. “That was a real honor,” he says—the first indication
Into this period of relative tranquility, Baena recounts, the that he could thrive on his own and be a leader.
media frenzy came. “I remember the day very vividly,” he says. “I
was in the eighth grade. Fifth or sixth period. And I get called out
of class to leave. And my mom’s there, and she’s like, ‘We gotta go— HANGING OUT WITH Baena, you notice quickly that his
everyone is finding out about you and who your father is.’ ” News pronouncements practically overflow with positive hyperbole.
trucks swarmed the house. Photographers hounded the family. Guatemalan food isn’t just good; it’s amazing. He is so fortunate to
“I’m 13,” he remembers. “Your body’s transforming; your mind have had his college experience at Pepperdine University. Latino
is transforming. And now my life transformed before my eyes.”
culture is so proud. He doesn’t drink much, and he barely curses—at
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51

one point, he even apologizes for using the word ass. If it sounds
grating, however, it’s not—it’s endearing.
The unabating positivity is just one of many ways in which his
bearing and behavior call to mind his father, and for a stranger
who’s been a Schwarzenegger fan for decades, interacting with
Baena is almost a time-traveling experience: One moment you
forget whose son you’re talking to; the next, he’ll gesture widely
with both arms—“I’m obsessed with schnitzel!”—and you’re
watching Arnold plug The Terminator on The Tonight Show.
Baena is close with Schwarzenegger—photos of them socializing or exercising together are frequent media fodder—but he’s
wary of talking about Dad too much. He does tell me, though, that
they eventually bonded over fitness. Schwarzenegger gave Baena
The Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding (which he coauthored)
to guide his training. “Even though I could call him anytime, I
was too proud,” Baena says. “I went straight to the book. I wanted
to figure it out myself.” Later, he reached out for tips on building
his shoulders, and they started training together around his 18th
birthday. Naturally, it involved a trip to Gold’s. “I was so nervous,”
he says. But he took it all in—the rituals, the routines, and, perhaps most important, the demeanor. “I was being observant,
trying to see what he was doing and the way he was acting,” says
Baena. He learned to grip the bar on bench presses properly, turn
his wrists on dumbbell curls, drop deep into the hole on squats. He
learned to feel the stretch in his traps, the squeeze in his pecs, the
deep burn in the muscles that signals growth.
Through it all, he developed an understanding that the gym—

Tank by Vuori; shorts
by Ten Thousand;
sneakers by Nike,
available at Foot Locker.

loud and rough-and-tumble though it is—can be a crucible for
transformation. When he got serious about lifting in college, he
says, “I was able to acquire a bodybuilding mentality—that I could
shape my body however I want.” After having success as a swimmer, Baena found that with similar effort and discipline, he could
build up, shred down, or do a combination of both. “I made insane
progress,” he says of his college years.
His current regimen is, to say the least, involved: lots of sets,
plenty of isolation moves, two hours, six days a week, plus 20
minutes of fasted cardio in the morning. “One of the big things I
learned from Dad was not to have the ten-rep mentality,” he says.
“It’s pushing yourself to the limits and going that extra mile, getting those extra reps and half reps till you’re basically dying.”
To the uninitiated, it sounds miserable, but Baena lights up as
he talks about lifting. Research from the University of Missouri
suggests that particular individuals may have an unusually high
pleasure response to exercise, and Baena appears to be one of
them. Though he stops short of equating it with sex (“as satisfying
to me as coming,” Arnold once declared of lifting weights), he’s
rhapsodic nonetheless: “Since I started working out seriously in
college,” he says, “it was instant gratification.”
You might think, given his love of the gym and the genetic gifts
lurking in his double helix, that Baena might feel pressure to jump
into physique competitions. But he doesn’t. His saner, or maybe we
should just say sane, attitude toward fitness ensures that his physique—six-foot-one and 190 pounds—while impressive, remains
more approachable and athletic than that of most bodybuilders,
more wide receiver than offensive lineman. His Instagram feed, @projoe2, which has a healthy but hardly
A-list 351,000 followers, is more like a primer on living
a happy life than an endless homage to bigorexia.
“There are so many other things that I care about
more than fitness,” he says. “My lifestyle, my family,
my friends, having fun at work. There’s a balance. It’s
not just fitness all the time.”
It’s a blessedly un-Arnoldian sentiment.
With a new slew of actors getting Marvelized by the
month, muscles are necessary for the types of roles
Baena wants, but he knows that it takes more than that
to scale the Hollywood sign. Given the shifting landscape of the entertainment industry, he was initially
unsure how to proceed when he started considering
acting as a career path.
“My dad is old-school; he doesn’t believe in handouts. He believes hard work pays off, and so do I,” says
Baena. “I love the word honor, and I’m very prideful in
the sense that if I use my dad’s contacts or ask him for
favors, I wonder what honor is that gonna bring me?”
The same impulse drove his decision not to take a
last name that might open doors for him in Hollywood:
“When I go to auditions, they don’t know who I am,
because we don’t have the same last name.” When he
books a gig, he says, “I know it’s all me.”

DAD HAD THREE words of acting advice,
Baena says: Do the reps.
The on-the-nose counsel struck Baena as funny
at first. “I was like, Really? Like in workouts? What
are you talking about?” With time and experience,
however, he discovered the wisdom in Arnold’s simple directive. Acting can seem like alchemy—the
magical act of becoming—but as with building your

body, much of it is a Zen-like matter
journey, with his own specific obstaof putting in the hours. You have to
cles. He’s beautifully evolving. As
get the shit done. If a scene requires 20
he matures and gets more training,
pages of dialogue, Baena says, “I say the
he’ll take on more complex roles.”
lines over and over again—with a scene
Asked where he sees himself in ten
partner, an acting coach, or just by
years, Baena doesn’t hesitate: “I’m
myself—repeating, repeating, repeatan award-winning actor with lots of
ing until it’s muscle memory. To a point
real estate experience, and I’m on
where you can wash your clothes, do
a boat in Miami, sipping a mai tai
your dishes, basically do anything—
with my buddies, getting ready for
and spit the lines out.” About as glamor- Arnold Schwarzenegger with Joseph Baena, then around
the next movie.” Okay, he’s got big
ous as lateral raises. But as in the gym, 18 months old, at Joseph’s christening in 1999.
dreams—he’s 24, after all.
repetitive work is the price of success.
Perhaps the real takeaway is that
Another invaluable piece of Arnoldian guidance Baena took Baena is seemingly unafflicted by rage, resentment, or pathologto heart: Find a mentor. Four years ago, while still in college, ical ambition, the kind that sometimes derails the children of the
Baena reached out to Eric Morris, the storied acting coach who had famous. “It took a little bit for me to realize that I don’t have to
guided Schwarzenegger to a Golden Globe for 1976’s Stay Hun- do what my dad did,” he says. “I don’t have to get into acting or
gry. As his father had a half century before, Baena hit it off with bodybuilding. I’m very motivated and driven. I’m happy about my
Morris, and he has worked with him three or four days a week ever relationship with my dad. But I’m more happy that I am finding
since. “When Joseph first came to me, I called him Mr. Smiles-a- joy in what I’m doing and that I’m doing exactly what I’ve always
Lot,” says Morris, sharp and perceptive at 90. “That’s all he did dreamed about.”
onstage. Over time, though, he learned that it was okay to express
As he speaks, I think about all the men I know who have terrible
his frustration, his anger, his vulnerability—he became more relationships with their dads—abusive ones, remote ones, absent
affectable and expressive.”
ones. And I think about Baena, together with his dad, cycling
Baena admits that his early efforts in student films were clunky around Santa Monica, sharing a beer, working out at Gold’s, doing
and self-conscious, but he found his stage legs in class two years curls on the preacher bench. “A lot of guys struggle with trying to
ago playing Biff, the conflicted son of the title character, in make their dad proud or trying to get out of their dad’s shadow.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Tearing up the ’40s-era dia- But as long as you’re doing what you want to do, then that all
logue—“Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!”—he uncovered comes. Of course, maybe those guys don’t have such nice dads.”
new depths of feeling and tapped into experiences from his life.
If you shook a Magic 8-Ball to learn more about Baena’s next
The process helped him psychologically, too, he says, “almost like chapter—in fitness, in real estate, in the uncertain carnival ride
therapy.” “That was game changing for me,” he adds, noting that that is the entertainment industry—you’d get a definitive Cannot
he was able to draw on the same intensity in Lava. “Getting that predict now. But we like his chances.
end of my range made me realize I can be a serious working actor,”
he says. Morris is reluctant to compare elder to younger, but he’s andrew heffernan, c.s.c.s., is a writer, trainer, and Feldenkrais
enthusiastic about his student’s promise: “Joseph is on his own practitioner living in Los Angeles.

SUPERSIZEYOUR
SUPERSIZE YOUR ARMS

When Joe Baena wants to pack muscle onto his arms, he goes old school, relying on classic bodybuilding exercises structured into pump-inducing supersets. Do 4 sets of each of
these pairings to blast your biceps and triceps. —EB EN EZER SAMU EL , C.S .C.S .

Ben Mounsey-Wood (illustrations). Splash News (Schwarzenegger and Baena).

SUPERSET 1

SUPERSET 2

EZ-BAR SKULLCRUSHER

CLOSE-GRIP BENCH PRESS

ROPE CABLE CURL

ROPE TRICEPS PRESSDOWN

Lie on a bench, a loaded EZ bar
held directly above your shoulders
with a shoulder-width grip. Bend
only at the elbows and lower the
bar toward your forehead. Pause,
then press back up. That’s 1 rep; do
10. Then, without resting, do the
next exercise.

Lie on a bench, a loaded EZ bar
held directly above your shoulders
with a shoulder-width grip. Bend
at the elbows and shoulders, lowering the bar toward the bottom
of your chest and keeping your
elbows close to your torso. Press
back up. That’s 1 rep; do 10.

Stand near a cable pulley with
a rope attachment. Grasp it and
tighten your abs and glutes. Keeping your elbows close to your torso,
curl the rope up, turning your palms
to the ceiling as you do. Lower back
down. That’s 1 rep; do 10. Without
resting, do the next move.

Stand near a cable pulley with a
rope attachment. Grasp both ends
and tighten your abs and glutes,
then pull it down until your forearms are parallel to the floor. This is
the start. Flex your triceps, straightening your arms. Slowly return to
the start. That’s 1 rep; do 10.
MEN’S HEALTH

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53

The Five

Superpowers
of Functional
Fitness
“Functional” anything
sounds boring—we get it.

But in fitness, functional is one of the most exciting
adjectives out there. It’s a catchall word to describe
the moves and exercises that prep your body for
real-life activities. The pandemic forced people
away from gyms and led to a surge in outdoor exercise. We quickly realized that our workouts hadn’t
exactly prepared us for wild environments. That
extra muscle we’d built in the gym only weighed us
down on trail runs and hikes. We rolled ankles and
injured knees because we’d only trained on perfect
gym surfaces and lacked the right combination
of mobility and stability. The 72 degree indoor
environment hadn’t readied us for temperature
swings, the elements, and the general unpredictability of the outdoors. It’s time to make your fitness
truly functional again by lifting heavy awkward
objects, climbing and crawling and jumping more,
redlining your cardio, and engaging in other
total-body sweat shenanigans. Nobody knows and
appreciates this more than these five people—the
World’s Strongest Man, an ice climber with his eyes
set on Everest, a UFC legend, an animal-movement
specialist, and a backcountry survivalist—who
each define one of the superpowers at the heart of
the New Functional Fitness. Master their lessons in
strength, mobility, stamina, stability, and grit and
you’ll have fun getting in the best shape of your life.

By Michael Easter

Photographs by Roddy Scott
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STRENGTH

Tom
Stoltman

TH I N K YO U ’ R E S TRO N G E N O U G H TO LI F T
U N B A L A N C E D LOA D S A N D
B I GAS S RO C KS W ITH TH E 2 0 2 1 WO R LD ’ S
S TRO N G E S T M A N? TH I N K AGA I N .

TOM STOLTMAN HAS

seen it happen over and over again. The
408-pound strongman, a co-owner of
Stoltman Strength Centre in Invergordon,
Scotland, will watch some gym bro walk
into his facility and instantly expect to lift a
200-pound Atlas stone. The guy might talk
up how he deadlifts 300 pounds and benchpresses 225 umpteen-million times.

Then he’ll grab at the Atlas stone—essentially an
oversized, rounded piece of rock—and barely get it to
budge. “Many people will come into our gym and think
that because they can easily deadlift 200 pounds, they
can lift a 200-pound Atlas stone,” says Stoltman. “It’s
so much harder and weirder than people think.”
Most real-world lifts are harder than you think, even
if you’ve spent years and years honing your strength
and power in the gym. Gym loads are almost always
perfectly symmetrical and balanced. But pumping all
that refined iron doesn’t necessarily teach your spine
to account for the randomness of picking up a FedEx
package in real life, or holding a flat-screen TV steady
against the wall so a friend can mount it.
Handling unbalanced loads is Stoltman’s specialty.
Last year, the 27-year-old, who stands six-eight, set the
world record for Atlas-stone lifting over a bar, picking
up a 630-pound version. He’s been training with oddly
shaped weights almost exclusively for the past decade,
ever since he started strongman training at 17. “When
you go into a normal gym, you see people lifting barbells
and dumbbells, and it’s quite boring,” he says. Strongmen are “superhuman. Flipping cars, lifting logs,
lifting Atlas stones—that’s what I wanted to do.”
And sure, it might look like he’s destroying his spine
whenever he rounds his back (a longtime gym no-no!)
to reach down and pick up another massive stone, but
the exact opposite is actually taking place. By training with Atlas stones and other strange weights, like
sandbags and kegs, Stoltman is teaching his back to
stay tight and strong no matter the situation. A recent
study in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning
Research found that, because Atlas-stone lifts often
require bending the back to scoop a load directly from
the floor, the strongmen in the study were able to move
weights more efficiently, and the body position of the
lift demanded that they lock down their entire torso,
which protected their spine.
It’s a form of total-body strength that’s applicable
to the challenges of your everyday life. And for Stoltman, strongman training has had other benefits, too.
It hasn’t just transformed him into one of the world’s
most massive humans; it’s also calmed his mind. Stoltman was diagnosed with autism as a youngster, he says,
and like many people with the neurodevelopmental
disorder, he struggled with social interaction.
But the regimented, focused training necessary to
compete as a strongman has helped him manage his
autism. Walk into the gym to do biceps curls and your
mind can drift. But when Stoltman has to lift, say,
the back end of a Jeep, he must calmly work through a
prelift routine and can’t miss a step. “The positive is
that autism makes you OCD, and you need a routine,”
he says. “Strongman is my routine. I write everything down—sets and reps and meals. And once I get
winning World’s Strongest Man in my head, it’s like
tunnel vision.”
Stoltman claimed the World’s Strongest Man title
last year. And he’s always ready to help you move a
piano, too.
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GET

STRONG

LIKE

STOLTMAN
—

NO GIANT ATLAS STONES IN
YOUR BACKYARD? Don’t want to
bench-press your car? No problem. Start with the most classic of
strongman events, the farmer’s
walk, a Stoltman favorite. It’s also
been proven effective: Researchers in Canada discovered that
strongman carries may help
improve performance on regular
gym-based lifts. Add one twist to
the strongman formula, though:
Unbalance the load. Instead of
using your favorite pair of heavy
kettlebells or dumbbells, hold the
heaviest weight you can lift in one
hand—and a weight 20 pounds
lighter in the other. Stand holding
both weights at your sides and
tighten your abs, working to keep
your hips and shoulders square
despite the weight difference.
Then walk 30 steps. Switch hands
and walk 30 more steps. Do 3 to 4
sets. Make sure to go as heavy as
you possibly can each set, aiming
to carry your bodyweight—for
example, if you weigh 180, hold
100 pounds in one hand, 80 in
the other.

Get an Edge

The imbalanced bells won’t just
challenge your strength; they’ll
challenge your core’s ability to stabilize as you walk. Your shoulders
will naturally tip toward the side
holding more weight; offset this by
squeezing your oblique and shoulder blade on the opposite side.

MOBILITY

Manoah
Ainuu

H OW TH I S C LI M B E R W ITH H I S E Y E S O N
E VE RE ST FINALLY B LE N D E D TOTAL- B O DY M O B ILIT Y
W ITH H I S M O U NTA I N - R E A DY M U S C LE .

Indoors in the gym,

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MASTER MOBILITY LIKE AINUU

—

your palms against the wall,
hands far apart. Squat down
as low as possible, aiming
to let your hamstrings touch
your calves. Stand up. Try
the move once a week, aiming to improve your performance each time.

Get an Edge

BATTLE THE WALL SQUAT,
which demands knee,
ankle, and hip stability and
flexibility. Stand facing a
wall, feet slightly wider than
shoulder width, toes a few
inches from the wall. Place

The wall-facing squat
challenges your spine’s
ability to arch, as well as
your shoulder and hip
mobility. To address your
hips, do 1 minute of Spiderman lunges daily: Start in
pushup position, shift your
right foot to beside your
right arm, then reach your
right arm to the ceiling.
Repeat on the other side. To
improve shoulder and spine
mobility, do 1 minute of
Superman holds per day.

Nikki Smith

outdoors on the
mountain, or even at home, contorting yourself to
crawl under a bed to retrieve a toy, mobility matters. Not sure what “mobility” is? It’s your joints’
ability to be both flexible and stable at once—and
it’s a quality that allows you to stay strong no matter how you twist and turn. Without it, everything
from catching a football to sitting cross-legged
becomes a challenge.
Manoah Ainuu, 26, understands this struggle.
A former football player, he took up climbing after
moving to Bozeman, Montana. The sport agreed
with his long, lanky frame. But at the start, he’d
climb for days on end without loosening his wrists
and ankles. He was soon battling elbow tendinitis.
Ainuu could muscle himself up a wall, but he’d
wear himself out more quickly than his less muscular peers. Climbers often rely on a technique called
“stemming,” which has them splay their legs wide,
essentially standing against the wall, giving their
upper-body muscles a break. Ainuu could barely do
this. “I would pretty much have to pull my groin and
hips to get into the stemming position,” he says.
His fix was a combination of rest and mobility
training. Every three climbing days, he took one
rest day. And a few times a week, he took a yoga
class. Moves like downward dog loosened his hamstrings, and postures like the chair pose relaxed his
calves and quads. Soon he could stem. “Being limber is definitely ideal when climbing,” Ainuu says.
Yes, oversized arms and legs help CrossFitters
move big weight, but that muscle does little good
during tasks like climbing, which requires you to
move quickly, not just be strong. Ainuu arrived in
Bozeman weighing 180 pounds; he’s down to 160
now. “I didn’t necessarily get weaker,” he says. “But
my endurance definitely went up.”
That pound-for-pound strength will aid Ainuu in
his next endeavor: In April, as part of the Full Circle
Everest Expedition, he’ll be one of ten climbers who
hope to be the first all-Black team to summit Everest. To train for that, he’s been pushing for even more
lightweight strength—loading up a heavy backpack,
hiking, and searching for new pitches to climb. His
goal: gain strength without packing on too much
excess muscle. And keep his mobility gains, too.

Elijah Gutierrez (5)

STAMINA

Nate Diaz

A LL YO U R ATH LE TI C I S M I S N OTH I N G
W ITH O U T TH E A E RO B I C CA PAC IT Y TO S U S TA I N
IT—AND ONE UFC LEGEND SERVES AS PROOF.

Weight-room conversations often focus on mus-

cle and strength, but stamina is the true difference maker. It’s your secret weapon in everything from rec-league basketball games to intense
AMRAP workouts. Nate Diaz has understood this for years, which is
why his UFC training has long defied convention. A championship UFC
bout is five 5-minute rounds of all-out effort—striking, grappling, and
kicking for your life. Most UFC training programs mimic this rhythm,
pushing you through five-round circuits with kettlebells, battle ropes,
and bodyweight. Diaz, 36, utilizes a different approach. Sure, he spends
time perfecting his explosive punches and high kicks. But he’s carved
his UFC legend—and 21–13 record, including an epic win over Conor
McGregor in 2016—by embracing stamina training.
“Endurance has been a big part of my success,” he says. Diaz and his
older brother, UFC fighter Nick, learned the virtues of endurance training long before they entered the octagon, competing on the swim team
as kids. Diaz fell in love with fighting at age 15, taking jujitsu classes at
Cesar Gracie Academy in the San Francisco Bay Area. Soon after that,
he was boxing and kickboxing. “And it developed into a fighting career
real quick,” he says. Diaz turned pro in 2004. But he never forgot his
endurance roots. Five days a week, he and his brother do 75-minute trail
runs, mountain bike rides, and swims, building massive reservoirs of
cardiovascular fitness.
The extra cardio helps him outlast opponents. Diaz typically sets a
savage pace and watches as his adversary wilts. “It’s just like a race,”
he says. “You win with the steady pace. So then I’ll turn it up.” Science
backs Diaz’s strategy. Researchers in Canada found that having better
aerobic fitness—which you build on long runs, rides, and swims—may
not only help you recover more quickly from high-intensity exercise,
but it also enables you to continue to produce power when you’re tired.
Translation: Diaz’s regimen leaves him with energy when it counts.

STRENGTHEN YOUR STAMINA LIKE DIAZ

—

DIAZ HAS DEVELOPED HIS OWN
SIMPLE WAY TO TEST HIS STAMINA:
a five-mile run. “Since I was training
for tournaments when I was 16, I’ve
always liked to be able to get a fivemile run finished in 37 minutes,” he
says. “If I can do that a couple times

a week, I’m ready to rock.” The time
isn’t blistering, but honing your endurance isn’t about electric times.
It’s about maintaining a steady yet fast
seven-minute-mile pace. Try chasing Diaz’s 37-minute benchmark; it’s
more attainable than you may think.

Get an Edge

Use this 4-week plan to build the endurance needed to ace Diaz’s test.
Each week, repeat that run 3 times.
WEEK 1:

WEEK 2:

Run 4 miles;
aim for 32 min.

Run 6 miles;
Run 5 miles;
aim for 50 min. aim for 40 min.

WEEK 3:

MEN’S HEALTH

WEEK 4:

Rest for 2 days,
then go for it.
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STABILITY

Da Rulk

S IT U P S A N D P L A N KS ? YAW N . TH I S E LITE
TR A I N E R ’ S FAVO R ITE M OV E , TH E B E A R C R AW L , W I LL
U N LO C K YO U R C O R E ’ S TRU E P OTE NTIA L .

2. FLAT BACK

Tighten your abs, working to keep your back
as flat as possible, as if balancing a glass of
water on your lower back. This will force your
abs to kick into overdrive and take pressure
off your hips and arms to stabilize your body.

FOLLOW THESE THREE
CUES TO PERFECT YOUR
BEAR CRAWL.

3. BUTT DOWN!

Don’t let your hips rise
higher than your
shoulder blades. As you
fatigue, you’ll feel your
butt begin to rise. Flex
your abs hard and
squeeze your glutes to
prevent that from
happening; this will help
relax your lower back.

1. GENTLE SQUEEZE

Keep light tension in
your shoulder blades;
imagine squeezing
them halfway
together. Doing so will
allow your shoulders
to move freely, no
matter the size of the
step you need to take.

If you’re wondering why stability matters,

get on all fours, shins off the ground, and start crawling. This
exercise, known as a bear crawl, is trainer Joseph Sakoda’s
go-to. Better known as Da Rulk, Sakoda, 47, earned a stellar
reputation working with elite military units, and his bear
crawl is an underrated core move, especially when done outside the gym. Crawling along varied terrain challenges your
hips, abs, and other muscles to work together to fully stabilize
your torso. Da Rulk himself hasn’t quit crawling. When the
Californian needs a quick workout, he frequently heads to the
beach near his house and just starts crawling. In the process,
he’s exposing his body and mind to the unique stressors that
come from outdoor training. “Crawling also helps build our
dexterity,” he says. “You’re building the kind of core strength
that helps correct your posture and reduce back pain.”

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THE HARDEST -CORE STABILITY

CHALLENGE
—

TAKE ON THE RULK CRAWL: Bear-crawl
a full mile outdoors. Yes, really. Whether
you do this on a track or in a park or you
simply do laps up and down your driveway
until you’ve hit a full mile, you’ll challenge
your core in a new way. Your core muscles are meant to stabilize your spine all
day—not just for a quick ab workout—and
they tackle that challenge during the Rulk
Crawl. If you get tired, rest in child’s pose
for 60 seconds, then get back to work.
Start with a quarter mile and gradually
work up to a mile. Do this once a month
and aim to finish the full mile in an hour.

Get an Edge

Dominate the bear
crawl with the aroundthe-clock bear hold.
Get into bear-crawl
position. Lift your left
hand. Return it to the
ground, then repeat
with your right hand.
Repeat with your right
leg, then your left leg.
Do three 60-second
sets. Rest 30 seconds
between each.

GRIT

Laura Zerra

TR A I N I N G CA N ’ T P R E P YO U FO R TH E U N K N OW N — U N LE S S YO U G E T C O M FO R TA B LE
TR A I N I N G I N TH E U N K N OW N , LI K E TH I S E X TR E M E S U RV IVA LI S T.

Laura Zerra understands how

you normally work out: You know the exact number of
reps and sets you’ll do. “People aren’t used to not being in control today. Everything is according to plans
and schedules,” says Zerra, a 36-year-old survivalist
who spends months alone in the backcountry. “But
then you go into the wild . . . . The steps on the mountain are not as perfectly spaced as the StairMaster,
and it’s not the perfect temperature.”
While you might not be planning a backcountry
expedition, you still want to build dynamic grit, the

ability to tough out any unknown situation. You know
about grit if you’ve pushed through an extra rep or
two of pushups or squats. But you need more than
this to thrive in triple overtime during pickup hoops
or stay the course after taking a wrong turn on your
morning vacation run. That’s why Zerra trains in
random circumstances, often working out while fasting or on just a few hours’ sleep. “If you don’t know
how your body is going to react in those situations,”
she says, “you don’t want to be finding out for the first
time when you’re on top of a mountain.”

Frank Fontanilla (Da Rulk). Heath Helgert (Zerra). Ben Mounsey-Wood (illustrations).

THE DYNAMIC-GRIT GUT CHECK

—

THE BURPEE IS ONE OF FITNESS’S MOST LUNGDESTROYING EXERCISES. Here you’ll use it to build
mental toughness. Your goal: Do burpees (dropping your
chest to the ground, standing, then jumping) for 5 minutes
without stopping. The kicker: You can’t look at a timer.
(Have a friend track your time but give you no verbal or nonverbal indication of how much time is left.) Continue doing
reps until you think 5 minutes are up. Expect to “finish”
early your first few times, more because of negative selftalk than lack of ability. Take the test once every other week.

5 MIN.
NONSTOP

Get an Edge

(a)

(b)

The test is designed to mess with your mind: You think
of the burpee as something you do for only a brief burst,
except you’re doing it for endurance here. Keep a number
(and a fairly large one, like 150—yes, really) in the back
of your mind as you do this. Don’t stop until you’ve completed that many reps.

michael easter is the author of The Comfort Crisis and the forthcoming The Scarcity Brain.
MEN’S HEALTH

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63

Steve-O Face The
stuntman and Jackass
star spins himself up
yet again during a tour
stop in New York City
in December 2021.

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By

ANNA PEELaEfael Rios

phs by R
Photog ra

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MEN’S HEALTH

STUNTMAN WALKS

onto
a stage with a problem. “I’m in a
terrible position,” he says. “I’m
Steve-O in my 40s.”
As always, Steve-O is the punchline. The 47-year-old begins his touring comedy show The Bucket List
with a joke highlighting the unlikelihood of his being here to deliver it.
He didn’t die jumping off a balcony and lying
unconscious in a pool of his own blood trying to impress a woman
as a young “attention whore”—his accurate term, with which he liberally seasons his continuous “diatribes” (also his accurate term).
Steve-O did not perish getting sepsis from stapling his scrotum to
his thigh for his Don’t Try This at Home video or blowing himself up
by shooting fireworks out of his ass on Jackass or inhaling 600 canisters of nitrous oxide a day—and filming the whole thing—during
a period of drug use so prolific he spent his time communing with
hallucinated friends inside his apartment and sending hostile
email missives to a group of corporeal friends he rarely saw and
who in 2008 had him involuntarily committed to a psych ward
after he informed the entire “Rad Email List” that he was planning to throw himself out of his third-floor bedroom window.
“Most people would be delighted to hear that they’re actually not
going to die in their early 30s,” Steve-O says now, almost 14 years
into the sobriety wrested from what he believes is a familial predisposition to addiction. “It came to me as a crisis. I was confronted
with the most terrifying possibility: I was only like halfway through
my life.” He had little money and no idea how to make more, having
alienated his personal and professional connections and seeming
to possess few skills beyond inspiring people to shout, “Oh shit, it’s

Steve-O!” when they saw him. “The ultimate fear for me would be
to be a recognizable personality and totally broke,” he says.
But in a series of events as improbable as surviving his attempts
to destroy himself for our entertainment, Steve-O transformed
himself into someone who is a credible model of men’s health.
After taking the novel steps of “changing my lifestyle and actually taking care of myself and being concerned with my health,”
he began doing stand-up, mainly comprising compellingly selfdeprecating stories about stunts he then shows video of. He wrote
a 2011 memoir called Professional Idiot, which sold more than
170,000 copies and is revealing even for someone whose rectum
we have become acquainted with. Its follow-up is a self-help book,
A Hard Kick in the Nuts, which will be published this September.
Steve-O has since appeared in the Jackass movie Jackass 3D
and stars in this month’s Jackass Forever. He began a podcast and
a hot-sauce line and a merch fulfillment center that works with
Tony Hawk. He stopped eating meat for animal-welfare reasons
and became engaged to stylist and designer Lux Wright, who
has both appropriate boundaries and a stomach that allows her
to unflinchingly hold a camera and film Steve-O shitting into a
box fan. He has traded in fuck-your-knees Vans for a style of white
Asics you could describe only as “tennis sneakers” and moves nimbly for a man who has inflicted so much bodily trauma on himself,
evident only in the slight quiver of his hands as he texts Tommy
Lee to let him know he’s wearing a Mötley Crüe T-shirt for his
interview. Only a vestigial I remains of the shit fuck tattoos he
had lasered off the traditional love hate positions on his fingers.
So despite the joke, being Steve-O in his 40s is actually quite a
nice position. “But if I go out there and say, ‘I’m in a terrible position. I’m Steve-O in my 50s . . .’ ” he says with clear concern, “I
think that’s a considerably less funny joke.
“Maybe the more I grow, maybe I just want to get out,” he says.
Then Steve-O identifies the problem with escaping himself:
“I don’t know how to get out.”

Steve-OMG The

star relaxes in a
mask with jalapeños
over his eyes.
Because why not?

BEFORE TAKING ON

This page: Robe
by Brooklinen.
Previous pages:
Bike by
NordicTrack.

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the role of Steve-O, he was Stephen
Glover. In sixth grade, Glover’s teacher wrote something on his
report card that would both explain and inform this transformation. “Socially, Steve’s attempt to impress his peers frequently
has had the opposite effect,” it read. His (often literally) naked
pleas for attention mostly involved self-harm: making himself
bleed, setting himself on fire. Glover would do anything and do it
on camera, with hopes that others would be interested enough to
watch, which made him problematically useful in the punk-stunt
subculture he wound up on the periphery of. After dropping out of
the University of Miami, he balanced his desperation to be seen,
even with derision, with a desire for legitimacy; he enrolled in the
elite Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown school in 1997. But
a true vessel didn’t exist until Jeff Tremaine, editor of the skateboarding magazine Big Brother, partnered with Johnny Knoxville
and future Oscar winner Spike Jonze to create Jackass for MTV.
The prank and stunt series premiered in 2000 and was a tremendous hit, begetting six spin-offs and four films, the first three
of which collectively grossed $336 million. The Joe Rogan–led
Fear Factor followed less than a year later, and Ridiculousness,
the illegitimate child of Jackass and America’s Funniest Home
Videos, now airs in virtually every time slot on MTV. Erin Buckels, a professor of psychology at the University of Winnipeg, says
of these shows’ popularity, “There’s something primal in seeing

Previous spread: Set design: Michael Sturgeon/Monday Artists. Styling: Ted Stafford. Grooming: Erica Whelan using Augustinus Bader.

people get hurt. It’s arousing. And that could be
a negative or positive experience.”
Buckels uses the term “everyday sadism” for
normal people who get pleasure out of others’
pain; she likens the impulse to laugh when the
Jackass guys run through a hallway of Tasers
Steve-Overload From
dangling on strings—deemed “vicarious
left: The comedian taking
an extra-dirty mud bath,
sadism,” versus gratification from inflicting
and chugging green juice.
suffering—to the excitement some get from
pornography. (Glover, who went to rehab for
Track pants by Fila.
sex addiction after getting sober, doesn’t watch
porn because he believes it’s detrimental to
relationships.) Either way, you like what you
But as Glover became more well-known, his behavior—and
like, and then your brain comes up with excuses for why it’s okay.
Glover chose to do this. He was having fun with his buddies. He substance use—went from bad to unbearable. He began urinating
was making money off it, starting with $1,500 for the first season on red carpets and terrorizing his neighbor. He recorded a hardof Jackass—paltry, but still significantly more than he had been core comedy-rap album, which inspired him to try, and repeatearning selling drugs in the parking lot of Grateful Dead concerts. edly fail, to get arrested. Cops would recognize him and let him
“We make sure that you don’t have to feel bad about your everyday go. Was it not a crime that Steve-O had drugs on him, or was it
sadism, because we’re inviting you to enjoy it,” Glover says after simply a benefit of being a famous white guy?
Glover denies this was some grand design. “I don’t know about
learning of the concept. “So it’s completely permissible to enjoy
it, because it’s understood that the reward is your attention; you’re cultivating douchiness to make it permissible for [audiences],”
actually being generous when you enjoy it.” In other words, you’re he says, allowing “perhaps that was part of my subconscious.” He
has another theory: “Maybe it was that I had some kind of low selfallowing the Jackass cast to have careers.
One other justification an audience might have for being esteem or something, and I felt like I deserved that.” He often felt
amused by the pain inflicted upon the Jackass guys is that these as though his Jackass costars were superior to him. “These guys
people deserve to be punished for the qualities that have made just had this charisma on camera, and they could make anything
them famous. Bam Margera is cocky and torments his parents; funny without risking their bodies or making some huge thing.
Knoxville is the sicko who put this thing together; and Glover is [Chris] Pontius is that way. He’s just a genius. For them it came
Steve-O, the man whose less egregious acts of spotlight chasing more natural; they’re just talented. I feel like to get footage and
include getting his own face tattooed on his back. “It’s schaden- to get screen time, I always had to work harder.”
Knoxville led the team of people who, physically and very much
freude,” Buckels says. “We like to see deserving, high-powered
people get hurt. And if they have a certain persona that’s almost against his will, forced Glover into rehab. The process of getting
antisocial, maybe that does help us release any kind of hesitance sober through Alcoholics Anonymous involves moving the focus
we have to laughing at that.” Part of the brilliance of Jackass was away from your own fears and grievances and excuses and onto your
the cycle it created: The shittier the cast acted, the more celebrity impact on others. (Glover forgoes the Anonymous part because
and money they gained from that shittiness, and the more fun we Steve-O doesn’t do anything anonymously.) “The fourth step is
an inventory, where we go through our resentments,” he says. “It’s
had watching them treat themselves like shit.
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pretty clever the way it’s designed, because it’s really easy to start
out making a ‘fuck you’ list. ‘Fuck this person! This person fucked
me!’ So I did that, and then when I sat down with the inventory,
what was so crazy is that I had written down a list of people I treated
horribly. And I’m talking about how I’m mad at them. Recovery is so
much contingent upon smashing the ego. And a career in attention
seeking . . . like, it [seemed as if it] wouldn’t even work.”
Still, when Glover was invited to be part of Jackass 3D in 2010,
fresh out of a halfway house, he said yes. “I was afraid,” he says. “I
was exposed. I was super uncomfortable.” In that film, he appears
to be physically recoiling even when not being shaken inside a
bungee-cord-powered, feces-filled portable bathroom. He hides
behind the cast he feels inferior to, smiling nervously and silently
because he’s too afraid to throw out jokes and have them not land
without the cushion of intoxication. One of his costars, Ryan
Dunn, would die in a drunk-driving accident a year later.
With Jackass Forever, Glover felt secure in what he could bring
to the film. He’d spent a decade touring—“My comedy career has
been considerably more lucrative for me than my Jackass career,”
he says—and accruing the most social-media followers of any of
the castmates, including Knoxville. With the producers feeling
like Margera couldn’t safely take part, Glover is the indisputable second lead of the film. So he went to Knoxville, Jonze, and
Tremaine and asked for an amount of compensation commensurate with what he calculated to be his worth.
Glover eventually got a producer credit. But he did not get a
dollar more than Dickhouse Productions initially offered him.
He claims he’s fine with it. The film is great, he projects as much
onscreen charisma and confidence as one could ever imagine from
a man whose testicles are being stung by bees, and, he says, “the
fact is that I have multiple other revenue streams, which all benefit
[from Jackass]. So I would have been cutting my nose off to spite my
face if I wasn’t in the movie because I didn’t get the deal I wanted.”
It also would have meant cutting ties with Knoxville, whom
Glover says he admires like no one except his own father and praises
as reflexively as someone else might spit to ward off the evil eye.
Knoxville calls while we walk through Washington, D. C., looking
for a preshow Covid-vaccine booster with Wendy, the stoic service
dog trained to help with Glover’s psychiatric and mobility issues.
(Besides his exact Jackass film earnings, the precise conditions
that require Wendy’s service are the only topic Glover declines to
further discuss.) He immediately puts Knoxville on speakerphone.
“Cap!” Glover says. “Dude, you’re on the record right now
because I’m being followed around by Men’s Health magazine for
my feature article.”
I ask Knoxville if he’s ever had a conversation with Glover that
wasn’t documented.
“Well, you never know what you’re going to get when you call
Steve-O,” Knoxville says in his bemused drawl. “Usually, you’re
going to be on record. There’s some kind of filming going on.
There’s always some type of shenanigans, but he always is very
up-front about letting you know.”
Glover confesses we’d just been talking about him: “I said, ‘I
don’t fucking like Knoxville getting in front of bulls. I totally
worry about his brain.’ And then I said, ‘My dad is 78 years old,
and I pay such close attention to every correspondence and every
conversation because I’m so terrified of Dad not being so sharp
anymore and any kind of dementia creeping in. It’s tragic as fuck
to say, but I do the same thing with Knoxville, you know? Looking
at his texts, talking on the phone, whenever we’re hanging out,
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just [wondering], Has the brain trauma fucked up the captain?’ ”
Knoxville seems less than thrilled that Glover is speculating
about his potential cognitive decline to a national magazine.
“Well, that’s very sweet, Steve-O,” he says. “But unlike your father,
I was never that sharp to begin with; otherwise I wouldn’t be doing
what I’m doing for a living, okay?” He excuses himself from the conversation he didn’t sign up for and asks if Glover can call him back.
“I absolutely can,” Glover says, beaming his giant veneers at the
phone. “And bravo, brave captain, for putting yourself down, and
in the same stroke proving that you are, indeed, so fucking sharp
and my concerns are unwarranted.”
“Oh, yeah, sharp as a butternut,” Knoxville says. “All right,
well, I love you guys. I will speak to you later.”
“Love you, Knox,” Glover says.
Later, Glover will tell me, “I know that it’s counterintuitive to
describe Jackass as something that’s wholesome, but I feel strongly
that it is. . . . There’s just nothing mean or dark.” I trust him so
deeply I almost forget that he parses his captain’s text messages
looking for signs of CTE from the movies they make together.

“THIS WHOLE SHOW

is all about existential panic, this race
against the clock to do the most spectacularly dumb shit possible before it becomes creepy to watch,” Glover says of his Bucket
List tour. “Knoxville believes that the older we get, the funnier it
is”—that one day Bad Grandpa and the other prosthetics-enabled
elderly characters featured in Jackass can just be the actual geriatric cast. Glover is “not so sure.”
With the meticulous dedication Glover once put into chronicling
his self-destruction on video, he is constructing a miniature empire
to escape to once he’s done with all this. The Wild Ride! podcast,
YouTube videos with names like “My Ten Worst Stunt Injuries” and
“Breaking Down Every Drug I Ever Did,” the merch distribution,
plans for an animal-sanctuary eco-lodge and maybe a tattoo shop.
“I’m not that great at giving tattoos, but I’m shockingly better than
you would imagine,” he says. “And the reality is there’s pretty crazy
demand for a shitty tattoo from Steve-O. I’m mindful about thinking of ways to support myself without being an attention whore.”
To get to this oasis, Glover has mapped out what he calls a “delusional vision.” First, Jackass director Tremaine will watch The
Bucket List and agree to help him present it to Netflix, which will buy
and distribute it, enabling Glover to play his next shows in arenas.
“That felt grandiose and kind of crazy, but I can’t help it,” he says of
dreaming aloud of something on that scale. His final outing will be
the Gone Too Far tour and will feature, among other stunts, Glover
receiving breast implants (“huge, hairy man titties,” as he says);
getting a penis tattooed over his eyebrow; and having a bullet shot
through his open jaw, which will cause comedy “purists” like Marc
Maron to take him seriously as a stand-up. Then he will finally be
free from the blessed trap of being Steve-O: generating enough
attention to fulfill his primal need but in a way that keeps him from
garnering the esteem he truly craves. It’s an issue he was conscious
of before it ever came up; in an unpublished memoir he wrote while
serving a ten-day sentence for a DUI in 1996, the unfamous 21year-old neatly penciled, “They call me Steve-O. I’m thinking about
switching back to Steve Glover, because now I’ve kind of begun a
career and I don’t know if I want a nickname when I’m famous.”
When I gently point out that his way out of seeking attention is
to get the attention of a major entertainment corporation, the top
tier of stand-up comedians, and an entirely new and much larger

Steve-Ohhhm The
man behind the shtick—
real name Stephen
Glover—relaxes with his
loyal service dog, Wendy.

Location: 1 Hotel, Brooklyn

Track pants by
Sergio Tacchini.

audience, Glover takes it in. “I agree,” he says. “There’s something
inherently paradoxical about my pitch.”
Wright, Glover’s fiancée, says she told him, “You’ve already
proven your worth in the entertainment industry. Your work isn’t
corporate driven, so it’s not surprising if it doesn’t happen. At the
same time, you don’t need them. You don’t need validation from
anybody. You and all the Jackass guys did this thing: You created
this genre that nobody else had ever done. And because you guys created it, you are that legacy. That’s never going to change.” (Wright
also told me Glover will not be shooting a gun into his mouth.)
Glover calls me a few days after our time in D. C. to clarify the
plan. “I imagine a time, say, five years down the road, where I’ve
done my thing,” he says. “I’ve now had my fake boobs and then
gotten them removed. I’ve had the dick on my forehead, and I’ve
gotten it lasered off. I’ve gone back to my current status quo: a
deteriorated guy pushing 50 years old. And maybe it all worked
out the way I thought; maybe I really hit that big home run I was
looking for. Then I’m in a position of saying, ‘Okay, do I really want
to keep trying to raise the bar?’ ” Though no accomplishment has
ever satiated him in the past, he thinks the answer will be no.
While we’re on the phone, I tell him I got in touch with his sixthgrade teacher, the one who’d come up with the assessment Glover
has repeated so many times. The one who wrote the story Glover
always tells about himself: “Socially, Steve’s attempt to impress
his peers frequently has had the opposite effect.” I quoted the Mrs.
Iacuessa of around 35 years ago to the present-day Mrs. Iacuessa.
She was shocked. She wouldn’t have said that to a sixth grader!
Besides, she’d adored Steve. “He was starting to decide who he was
and what he wanted to be,” she said. “He had the biggest smile. He
was a boy!” Then I reminded her of the second part of the reportcard note, which Glover does not quote in interviews. “Perhaps if
he had more empathy . . .” she wrote.
Mrs. Iacuessa responded that I should ask Glover about his
father, a retired packaged-foods and tobacco executive who trav-

eled with his family around the world and then left them in larger
and larger homes as he went on longer and longer business trips.
While he was away, Glover’s mother began saying she was sick and
staying in her bedroom to get drunk, eventually telling the family
she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that she was undergoing
chemotherapy. It was a lie.
I asked Mrs. Iacuessa what specifically I should inquire about
Glover’s dad, and she replied with one phrase: “his anger toward
Steve as a young lad.”
I tell Glover what she said and posit a theory: What if the thing
that had acted as something between a career blueprint and doomsday prophecy wasn’t ever meant to be either? What if Glover wasn’t
even supposed to read the message? What if his teacher had been
trying to help him by nudging Glover’s lone capable parent, a man
whose absence created a black hole of need and who became angry
when his son filled the emptiness by acting out to get attention?
“It’s kind of piercing to hear,” Glover says quietly. He pauses for
his only break in speech in any of our interactions. “That’s pretty,
pretty heavy.”
We talk a little more. About the book, about Glover’s father,
whom he’s now close enough with to have him join in shooting fake
semen out of multiple dildos at an effigy of Johnny Knoxville—the
two men Glover fears losing the most, bound by a simulation of
bukkake. Then Glover contemplates the kind of attention this article will bring. His publicist warned him, among other things, not
to take his dick out in front of the Men’s Health photography team.
“For all of the publicist’s concerns, like ‘Oh, be careful, you’re on
the record, they’re always going to be super nice, and then they’re
just gonna write . . . .’” He trails off, indicating all the unflattering
potential stories one could tell about Steve-O. “And I was like,
‘Cool, man. Great. There’s absolutely nothing that I intend to try
to hide.’ ” Glover isn’t ready to stop exposing himself just yet.

anna peele has written for Esquire, GQ, and New York magazine.
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There’s getting sick,
and there’s what
this guy had:
a decades-long struggle
with a mysterious
illness that shortcircuited his nervous
system and ransacked
his body, testing his
patience, his marriage,
and his resolve.
Then he built the
house that just might
save his life.
By Mike Bender
Photographs by

Emily Shur

(The Quiet House)

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71

I was driving

along Mission Ridge Road, the afternoon
sun shining in a brilliant blue sky. Fanning
out below were sweeping views of Santa
Barbara and the Pacific Ocean beyond.
Some people might have been inspired
to pull over and take a photo. Me, I was
overcome with the thought of turning
the wheel and Thelma & Louise–ing it off
the side of the road. I wondered if I would
feel pain as the car flipped and spun into
a twisted, mangled wreck, or if I would be
knocked unconscious and numb to it all.
It was September 2021. The house wasn’t
done. The house in which I was supposed
to heal from the strange affliction that was
scrambling my body and destroying my life.
I had blown through our budget and was
steadily chipping away at our savings, trying to cover every last detail. The advanced
air system, the whole-house water filtration,
the special flooring free of formaldehyde,
the special wiring to reduce electromagnetic fields, the special fucking caulk.
And yet now it seemed likely that I would
not be able to live in our new house at all.
That the very place designed to make me
healthier might in fact make me sicker. I
looked at the houses as I drove, imagining
the people inside were happily Zooming
and making sandwiches. I couldn’t so
much as touch my phone or eat a macadamia nut without launching into a panic.
I’d felt pressure before—about our

finances, our marriage, my career, our
kids, my health. Everyone does. Now all of
those stresses were bombarding me at once.
Just the thought of driving off Mission
Ridge into oblivion gave me the one thing I
needed most in that moment: relief.

I

used to be normal.
By all accounts, I was a healthy
child. I was breastfed, received
countless lollipops for acing childhood
physicals, and was so obsessed with tennis
that I would practice my swing in my bedroom late at night, dreaming of becoming
the next Agassi.
I was bitten by a deer tick at age 11 in
Florham Park, New Jersey, where I grew
up. I don’t remember feeling much at the
time except for my mother pulling it off
my testicle with tweezers. That stays with
a boy. But aside from that, it was an afterthought. An afterthought when I started
to collect trophies at local tennis tournaments. When I spent four years at college
in Vermont studying English and falling
in love for the first time. When I sold my
first screenplay as an intern at New Line
Cinema in Manhattan, leading to a successful screenwriting career in Los Angeles and my first produced film, Not Another
Teen Movie, in 2001.
The tick was ancient history.
Then, in my mid-20s, odd things start-

ed to happen to my body. I would get a
massage and feel flulike symptoms afterward. I traveled to Argentina and picked
up a severe case of viral conjunctivitis
that caused my eyelids to swell up for three
months. I was encouraged by friends to
“detox” by getting a colonic, but instead I
lost weight, developed brain fog anytime
I ate carbohydrates, and was diagnosed
with one of the least desirable overgrowths:
small-intestinal-bacterial overgrowth.
Through all the soft-serve diarrhea
and night sweats, I managed to keep my
life moving forward. In 2009, I cofounded Awkward Family Photos, a hit website that led to a number-one New York
Times best-selling book. I married my
ex-girlfriend, SuChin, a driven and
accomplished journalist, the first Asian
American person in the newsroom at
MTV. She challenged me, and she made me
laugh, something I needed more than ever.
We started a family and settled in Los
Angeles. The health scares came and went,
and SuChin got used to it, but she also grew
increasingly uneasy every time I shared
the details of my latest physical anomaly. I grew up in a Jewish household where
oversharing was the norm. She grew up in
a Korean home where, she often told me,
emotions were rarely discussed. She started having insomnia. We began to sleep in
separate beds, which was just easier.
I saw doctor after doctor—conventional,
integrative, alternative—and spent thousands of dollars on initial consultations,
chasing some kind of explanation. I took
extended courses of antibiotics. I shoveled down scoopfuls of Chinese herbs. I
saw a naturopath in Beverly Hills who sent
me home with a $200 bottle of shark’stooth powder. My medicine cabinet was

Far left: The kitchen,
gutted. Kitchens are
particularly hard to make
human-healthy, given the
typical premade
cabinetry and toxic
finishes. Left: Joshua Lee,
a local cabinetmaker,
helped create a kitchen
with safe materials like
PureBond plywood.

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Opposite: Courtesy Mike Bender

a supplement graveyard. I became a whiz
at stool samples and new-patient intake
forms, timing myself to see how quickly I
could fill them out.
I was dismissed by many doctors as difficult or “sensitive, for a man.”
Even my family questioned whether the
ailments were “in my head.” My older brother gently attributed my symptoms to stress,
and then there was the afternoon SuChin
and I sat on our patio and she mentioned a
social worker on her side of the family who
suggested I might have psychosomatic
syndrome. As I look back now, it’s all understandable, but at the time it made me feel
like some kind of hypochondriac loon.
The rains were heavy in Los Angeles
that summer of 2019, and after I had a
headache for a week straight, an air test in
my garage/office revealed an astronomical spore count of Aspergillus and Penicillium. Opening the wall revealed drywall
caked in a black sludge.
I had been seeing a gastrointestinal specialist, Sam Rahbar, M.D., who suspected
that something systemic was underlying
and referred me to a doctor in Los Angeles specializing in Lyme disease. Tests for
Borrelia, as well as a coinfection, Bartonella, came back positive. That incidental
bite on the balls at 11—that afterthought—
suddenly became very important indeed.
I learned that the combination of Lyme
and mold is particularly potent because
the body loses its ability to detoxify and
clear out the mold.
With a new diagnosis came new hope. I
began treatment for the Lyme and charcoal capsules to bind the mold, a natural therapy that seemed worth a try. But
like everything else I had attempted, they
both backfired.
I was stuck.

detergents and deodorants, became overpowering. I could smell the perfume on my
son’s crossing guard from across the street
and had to hold my breath to avoid it.
I was prescribed a low dose of Klonopin, which eventually increased the panic
attacks, baffling my doctors. I was told to
stop. This sent me into benzodiazepine
withdrawal. I experienced chills, tremors, premature ventricular contractions
that felt like my heart was stopping, and
rolling panic attacks, each one sending
me speeding to the hospital in search of
answers that never came.

W

W

e sold the house and moved to a
mold-free, newer-construction
rental. Things settled down for
a bit—until a dentist visit in September
2019, when I was given a shot of anesthetic
that contained epinephrine (adrenaline)
to repair a cracked tooth. I awoke at 3:00
a.m. the next morning with my first acute
panic attack, a rapid fight-or-f light
response causing your heart rate to shoot
up so fast and so high that you are convinced you’re dying.
In the days that followed, I also noticed
a skin-crawling sensation and pressure at
the back of my head when I touched my cell
phone or keyboard. Odors, especially from

e moved again, this time because
of Covid: to a rental house in Santa Barbara, about 90 minutes up
the coast from L. A. It was calmer, cleaner,
close to the ocean—an ideal place not only
to quarantine but also, we hoped, to help
me get better.
I got sicker.
I was down to 126 pounds—at six feet
tall—and was now having pronounced
allergic reactions to foods. First almond
butter. Then avocados, then spinach. They
made me itchy and lightheaded. They were
all on high-histamine lists—the symptoms of histamine intolerance matched
mine exactly. But then I started to get

terrible mig raines
after eating radishes,
broccoli, and blueberries: low-histamine
foods. I discovered
that these foods were
high in salicylates—migraines were a
symptom of that kind of intolerance. It
seemed like my body was becoming sensitized to everything.
SuChin was doing all she could think of
to help me, and yet nothing was working.
The sicker I got, the more helpless she felt.
I didn’t have the energy to help her with the
kids. And I now couldn’t even look at a computer screen. I had to stop working.
My father arranged a consultation call
with an M.D. named Neil Nathan, who had
been practicing medicine for almost 50
years and earned his reputation working
with patients who had not received a clear
diagnosis from conventional medicine. He
reviewed my history and labs and listened
as I told my story. He then said something
no other doctor had ever said:
“It all makes sense.”
I was wary. I had built up a healthy distrust
of doctors. But not only did Dr. Nathan have
decades of clinical experience with others
like me; he seemed to have the first comprehensive explanation of why I felt what I felt.

Bender, an author,
screenwriter, and
website founder, with
his wife, SuChin Pak,
a journalist and
cohost of the podcast
Add to Cart.

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73

AIR

“Building biology” is the field of
healthy construction, including
fixes like these. Learn more at
buildingbiologyinstitute.org.

KILL
SWITCHES

Kill power
to outlets,
eliminating
electric fields
and reducing
“dirty”
electricity.

FLOORING

Formaldehyde is still found
in many flooring products.
The author used the safer
GeoWood series from Cali
Bamboo, which is easy
(read: inexpensive) to install.

He said that given the Lyme, mold
exposure, and decades of trauma, I
was experiencing something ca lled
mast-cell-activation syndrome, in which
the mast cells (which are immune cells)
become hyperreactive to everything, inappropriately releasing inflammatory chemicals in response, including histamines.
(In the case of Klonopin, he explained that
I had been reacting to the inactive ingredients like the dyes and fillers, and that
most mast-cell patients have to compound
their medicines.) The brain’s limbic system, which regulates our behavioral and
survival responses, begins to interpret
everything as a threat. I was spending day
and night in a state of fight-or-flight that I
couldn’t control.
See, everyone? I’m not crazy.
Next question: What do I do?

T

he answer, like the condition itself,
was complex. Before I could take
the medicines that would stop the
histamine responses, begin to detox the
mold, and eventually address the Lyme, I
had to get my limbic system to calm down
and get out of the way. This was the essential piece that had always been overlooked.
Dr. Nathan recommended a science74

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MEN’S HEALTH

A HEPA filtration system keeps
air clean, and a ventilation
system pulls in filtered outdoor
air to enhance oxygen levels and
reduce CO2.

Dr. McCann referred me to Zack
Pelzel, founder of the Purified Home
and a building biologist, a profession most people don’t even know
PAINT
Some “green”
exists. The practice of building biolproducts are
ogy seeks to create a relationship
eco-friendly but
between the built environment and
not you-friendly.
health in humans, with nature—
Safecoat is free
rather than just “eco-friendly” mateof VOCs and can
match any color.
rials—as the standard.
Zack performed a comprehensive
home analysis that included water
quality, air quality, and the four most
common forms of electromagnetic
fields (EMFs) in homes: 1) electric
fields due to unshielded electrical
wiring; 2) radio-frequency radiation
(RF), which exists near cell towers and
wireless technologies like WiFi and
Bluetooth; 3) “dirty electricity,” which
is a deviation from the 60 Hz wave
INTERNET
caused by dimmers, LED lighting,
Wired shielded Ethernet
solar panels, and the variable-speed
means no need for
motors found in most appliances; and
WiFi, which can
aggravate people with
4) magnetic fields created by wiring
sensitivities. Bonus:
errors, power lines, or stray current.
faster speeds and more
According to the building-biology
dependable signals.
guidelines, the rental failed across
the board.
I had heard of EHS (electrical
based program called the dynamic neural hypersensitivity) and largely associated
retraining system (DNRS), a daily routine it with that guy wrapped in tinfoil, but the
of steps that involved tai-chi-inspired fact was when I used my cell phone, it felt
movements, verbal cues, and positive like my head was in a vise. Yes, the convenvisualizations, which are supposed to cre- tional medical community is still debating
ate healthier neural pathways. I practiced EHS, but according to Dr. Nathan, “When
my steps every day at the beach, and after the limbic system becomes hypervigia few months I could steer myself out of an lant, it starts to react to things in minute amounts, and that includes EMFs.” I
impending panic attack.
The next crucial step was to assess stopped using my cell phone, shut down
my living environment to see how it was the WiFi, and slept on a couch in the living
room, which tested low for EMFs.
impacting my nervous system.
I learned from Beth that in addition
Dr. Nathan referred me to two practitioners: Kelly McCann, an integrative to chemical smells, even natural scents
M.D., and Beth O’Hara, a functional natu- like lavender, mint, and tea tree could
ropath serving exclusively mast-cell cli- be a problem for me. I had to ask SuChin
ents. With guidance from Beth, I had the to stop using her shampoo. I felt guilty
rental air-tested for mold and confirmed and would sometimes just suffer through
that I was still being exposed at higher it. She didn’t want to make things worse
than normal levels. (Side note: I love test- but was frustrated that the rules were
ing. Maybe a little too much, but for me, always changing. And the thing was, she
that knowledge is power. SuChin finds it was right. Every week brought some new
stress inducing. We have a game we love to awareness of an innocuous thing that was
play called What’s Your Autobiography? suddenly problematic. It was madness.
But I can tell you this: With each thing
In this case, she would say mine is Hey,
Let’s Test It!, by Mike Bender. I’d respond we stopped, I would feel better. What would
with I’d Rather Not Know, by SuChin Pak.) you have done?
I continued to drop foods. I was down to
We removed the rugs and stopped wearing shoes in the house, simple ways to reduce just chicken and salmon for proteins, and
both had to be flash-frozen and shipped on
the amount of mold and bacteria.

Getty Images

HOW TO MAKE
A QUIET HOUSE

dry ice to keep histamines low. Then there
was sushi rice (nothing aromatic), brownrice pasta, kale, carrots, Brussels sprouts,
pears, mangoes, and ghee. The same ten
foods, every damn day. It took incredible
self-control not to go full Wreck-It Ralph
when SuChin would come home with food
for the kids from a taco truck or In-N-Out
while I stood in the kitchen steaming kale.
Despite all we had done, there was
still an active mold problem behind the
bathroom walls and wiring issues that
required extensive work. Both Beth and
Dr. McCann independently told me that if
I didn’t get out of the rental into a cleaner
environment, this would be my life.
We needed a place of our own.

T

he housing market in Santa Barbara had exploded during the
pandemic, so when our agent got a
scoop on a house in our neighborhood, we
made an offer slightly over the asking price
to seal the deal.
The next morning they came back asking for another $75,000.
SuChin was outraged and wanted to
back out. I was upset, too, but I didn’t
want to wait any longer. I couldn’t. I went
into sales mode—knowing that if my plan
to heal wasn’t successful, our marriage
might never recover from it. She reluctantly agreed, and our offer was accepted.
Days before our close, SuChin and I
snuck over to the house for an after-dinner
“What the hell did we just buy?” session.
While we strolled through the backyard
sharing our landscaping visions, I felt an
intense headache and nausea.
No no no no no no no.
My pulse was racing. Something on the
property had triggered me. I had brought
in Larry Gust, a home inspector and a
certified building-biology consultant, to
inspect the inside of the house thoroughly
but never thought to test the yard.
I said nothing to SuChin.
That night at the rental, as I lay on a
lumpy leather couch, my son, Kai, faithfully sleeping beside me on a floor mat, I awoke
from a nightmare around 3:00 a.m. (always
3:00 a.m.) with a racing, pounding heart.
If I didn’t do something quickly, it would
progress to a full-blown panic attack.
Whenever this happened, I would drag
myself outside in the moonlight of our
driveway to run through my DNRS steps.
After 20 minutes or so, I’d feel a yawn coming on, a sign that I had brought myself
back to rest-and-digest. (To this day,

yawns are a golden gift.) But then I would
feel the start of a blood-sugar crash, and
even though eating was the last thing I
wanted to do at 3:27 a.m., I’d make myself
an unappetizing bowl of plain oatmeal
and ghee. Kai was sensitive to light and
made us lock the house down at night
like Will Smith in I Am Legend. SuChin,
meanwhile, was as sensitive to noise as the
monsters in A Quiet Place. So I would try to
prepare my food silently in the dark, like
playing a game of Operation.
The next morning, I felt hungover
and didn’t want to mention anything to
SuChin until I had retested. I returned
around the same sunset hour and stood
on the concrete deck in the backyard, like
Scrooge waiting to see if the next ghost
would come.
Within minutes, there it was again.
Shit.
I have experienced many degrees of discomfort over the years. It can range from
mildly annoying to kill me now. This was
closer to kill me now.

to have a beer with, if I could have beer.
By dusk, he had compiled a list of possible
causes of my discomfort, most of which
were too complex for my compromised
brain to follow. I asked him how many
times he had ever finished a job with
an issue unresolved. He said, “Twice,”
in a way that told me he was still haunted
by them.
That night, I had to tell SuChin what
was happening. It was excruciating, and
reminded me of all those times I spent
trying to convince everyone around me
that what I was experiencing was real. She
got quiet, looked down, and nodded, saying, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” When I
floated the idea of stopping everything and
selling the house, she gave me a dead-eyed
look that snarled, “Not a chance.”

I

f I was going to pull off a complicated
renovation, I needed to assemble a
crack team, very Ocean’s Eleven.
In addition to William (electrical and
yard-poltergeist detection) and Zack
(water filtration and air quality), I brought
few days later, a white pickup on Vince Cord to design the HVAC and
truck plowed through the early- ducting system. I knew I would need someone to source the
morning fog and pulled into
healthiest buildthe driveway of our home-to-be. The author’s second freezer holds
ing mater ia ls.
Emerging from the truck: a tower- the only two proteins he can
tolerate: chicken and salmon,
Larry, who was
ing figure wearing knee pads and a flash-frozen to prevent an overload
president of the
headlamp.
of histamines.
William Holland, founder of My Quiet Home, had
become a legend in sensi-circles as the electrician
you call in to investigate
unexplainable symptoms
that might be EMF-related. He has a gap between
his front teeth that makes
him light up like a devilish kid when he smiles. He
almost never wears shoes—
grounding, of course.
The bed of his truck was
full of Mission: Impossible–style hard cases full
of cool gadgets—his prize
possession was a customized oscilloscope, which
displays the sine waves, or
“electrical heartbeat,” of
the house. William spoke
electrish and could orate
for hours about millivolts
and nanoteslas. He was
also a wiseass in the best
kind of way, a guy I’d love

A

AIR QUALITY
Zack recommended the IQAir Perfect 16,
a whole-house air-filtration system with
a medical-grade MERV 16 rating. And
because we live in fire country, I added a
Pure Air Systems 600HS Plus, which uses
five pounds of custom carbon blend to filter
out smoke, odors, and VOCs (carbon compounds that are emitted as a gas at room
temperature). Not all VOCs are dangerous,
but according to the EPA, symptoms associated with exposure are headaches and
damage to the central nervous system, and
some are known to cause cancer.
A ventilation system was installed to
pull in filtered outdoor air to enhance oxygen levels and reduce CO2 accumulation.
Beth O’Hara, the naturopath, suggested the final touch—a whole-house dehu-

midifier (I chose the Santa Fe Ultra98) to
thwart my mortal enemy, mold.
WATER QUALITY
Zack recommended Environmental Water
System’s CC-1467, a whole-house system
made in the U. S. that uses the highest
quantity and quality of catalytic carbon to
filter out contaminants including VOCs,
pesticides, and pharmaceuticals.
I chose to add the Essential Drinking
Water System from EWS under the sink to
filter impurities from the plumbing.
ELECTRICAL
William replaced more than 95 percent of
the unshielded Romex wiring with shielded MC, steel metal-clad cable, which
blocks electric fields.
He installed kill switches in the three
bedrooms. These look like light switches
and are connected to the breaker, killing
power to the outlets and any electric fields.
To address the radio frequency from
WiFi, we installed hardwired ports at
work stations throughout the house. This
gets rid of any need for WiFi, and provides
a much faster connection and, according
to SuChin, more cords to trip over.
MATERIALS
• Formaldehyde, classified as a “probable carcinogen” by the EPA, is often
used in the manufacture of flooring.
Andy’s threshold is 20 parts per billion;
we chose the GeoWood series from Cali
Bamboo (zero ppb!). It uses a rapid-locking system, so it’s easier (and cheaper) to
install. It’s also attractive, and we were
determined not to sacrifice aesthetics.

• Next was paint. There’s a difference
between “green” products, which may be
good for the environment, and products
that are actually healthy for humans.
Andy recommends only Safecoat, a paint
created in the 1980s by a paint chemist
who developed cancer working in his
own industry and made it his mission to
come up with a safe alternative. Safecoat
doesn’t use ammonia, acetone, or any
other VOCs and can match any color.
• Premade kitchen cabinetry typically
contains formaldehyde and other harmful VOCs in the wood and the finish. I
found Joshua Lee, the passionate founder of Joshua Tree Custom Construction
in Goleta, California. He used unfinished white-oak plywood from Columbia Forest Products PureBond, made
without formaldehyde. I had the cabinets
finished with Ecolacq, a lacquer product made by American Formulating &
Manufacturing, the same company that
produces Safecoat.

I

t was August. William had identified a problem known as a high-resistance neutral. Basically, it means
the wire in the utility lines has deteriorated and cannot carry the current it should,
dumping that current into the earth.
The only fix he knew was for the power
company to repair the lines, but it refused
because everything was technically working fine. William had come to the end of
what he could do for me. I had suddenly
become his third unresolved case.
I hit a new low. Just the thought of telling
my kids that they may never get to live in
the new house crushed me.

Far left: Geobiologist JP
clears a geopathic stress
line by burying copper
staples in the soil. Left:
Electrician William
Holland spent countless
days on the property,
obsessively searching for
the cause of the author’s
EMF aggravation.

76

MARCH 2022

|

MEN’S HEALTH

Courtesy Mike Bender (Holland)

board of the Building Biology Institute,
suggested I reach out to Andy Pace, the
founder of the Green Design Center in
Waukesha, Wisconsin, a kind soul who
had been helping sensitives like me for
more than 25 years.
The final piece was securing a general contractor. Juan Gomez of GM Construction met me at the house on a sunny
afternoon in a T-shirt and sneakers. I
warned him that this would be different
from anything he’d ever done, and without
hesitation he said, “You tell us what to use.
We use it.”
Anyone attempting a project of this
kind has a choice: aim for perfection and
lose your mind or accept that some toxic
shit will make it inside and prioritize getting the big stuff right. I chose the latter.
Here are four of the areas we focused on:

I took my usual afternoon
drive to Whole Foods to walk
through aisles of foods I
couldn’t eat, but as I drove down
scenic Mission Ridge that day, I
was mesmerized by the notion
that if I turned the wheel ever
so slightly and launched myself
into the abyss, all the problems
would just disappear. SuChin
would be able to use her lavender shampoo, and my children
would be able to sleep in their
new bedrooms. Life would go
back to normal—no more tests,
no more inspections.
It was tempting to indulge
these fantasies, believe me. But
after decades of challenge after
challenge, nightmare scenario
after nightmare scenario, one
thing was certain: I was really
fucking strong, and I had developed a kind
of unbreakable self-love. I had come to recognize these thoughts not as suicidal but as
my limbic system searching for some solace
from the suffering. Peering over the cliff, I
said something to myself that might sound
counterintuitive. But it was genuine. What
I said to myself was “Thank you.”

W

hen you’re in a small club like the
hypersensitives, people help each
other out. And I wasn’t giving up.
I had recently finished a book called EHS
Warrior, by Brian Humrich, Ph.D., which
details how he overcame Lyme, mold, and
electromagnetic hypersensitivity. I wrote
to him about the situation in my yard and
he wrote back immediately.
“Have you looked into geopathic
stress?” he responded.
A new lead.
Some quick research revealed that, like
EHS, geopathic stress has been the subject of debate in the scientific community.
According to Deborah Sullivan of Healthline, “The concept of geopathic stress
seemed to originate in the early 1900s and
shares a lot of similarities with long-standing practices like feng shui and dowsing,
both of which many people find helpful.”
The idea is that there are natural energy
lines that form a grid across the earth, and
their intersections can create a negative
energy that is harmful to the body. It’s easy
to be skeptical about anything that you
can’t see, but I saw no harm in exploring
it. I reached out to William, who connected
me with a geobiologist named simply JP.

When I showed up at the house to meet
JP—a short, sturdy, 71-year-old cross
between Jack Palance and Peter Pan—he
had already marked several points on the
property where he said the geopathic lines
intersected underground.
They were the exact places on the property where I had experienced the worst
headaches.
JP used a dowsing tool called an L-rod,
which possesses a natural sensitivity to
the earth’s magnetism, and placed copper
staples at the edges of the property to clear
the invisible energy. He said my property
had the second-most intersecting lines he
had ever seen, and that the voltage from
nearby transformers and power lines also
traveled across geopathic lines.
I mentioned the high-resistance neutral—the lines the power company didn’t
want to fix—and he asked me if I knew a
guy named Larry Gust. (Larry, who did
my inspection!) Larry arrived a few days
later, and when he disconnected the neutral from the main panel, we could see
the high-voltage spikes disappear on an
electronic meter he carried. He suggested
installing an isolation transformer, which
would essentially isolate the utility company’s neutral from mine. At $8,000, it
wasn’t cheap and it sure as hell wasn’t easy
to explain to SuChin, but she could sense
my hunch that this could be big. Instead of
an “Uh-huh,” I got a “Go for it.”
A few weeks later, after JP completed his
clearing and the isolation transformer was
installed, I walked onto the property. My
head didn’t ache. No nausea. There have

been ma ny events
along my journey that
I can’t fully explain or
might not make sense
to others, but I’ve
learned to embrace that. I had followed my
intuition and found relief. William could
officially mark my case as “resolved.”
The author with
his family on the
property that
once made him
physically ill.

S

uChin had planned an autumn trip
to Paris with some close friends.
She hadn’t ventured far from Santa Barbara since Covid began, and we both
thought some time away would be healing
for her. After all the delays, she was set to
leave exactly as we would be moving in. It
was a lot for me to take on but also strangely fitting: I had sold her on the house five
months earlier, and now it was up to me
to complete the journey. I was feeling
inspired by the headaches falling away,
but because I hadn’t actually been inside
the house during construction, I had no
idea how I would feel walking in the front
door for the first time.
On Wednesday, October 6, 2021, I
stepped into our new home with Kai and
Soe, our daughter. There I was, inside the
place I had only known pressed up against
the windows. I watched my children run
to their rooms, excited about the future.
I thought about SuChin laughing with
friends, biking through Paris.
Me, I was still eating ten foods. My doctor visits were far from over. But as I stood
there looking into the backyard, quietness
all around me, for the first time I felt like
the healing could finally begin.
MEN’S HEALTH

|

MARCH 2022

77

27%

of guys have had
sex in a position they
hadn’t tried before.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT,

FRENCH KISSING USED TO BE KINK Y
A S H E L L . T O D AY, I T M AY S E E M
LIK E JUST A NOTHER B OX TO CHECK
O N O U R WAY TO B E D, B U T A S
JOUR NA LIST SHERIL K IRSHENBAUM
WRITES IN THE SCIENCE OF
KISSING, AMERICANS WEREN’T
MASHING TONGUES TOGETHER
U N T I L A F T E R W O R L D WA R I .
(“ F R E N C H K I S S ” E N T E R E D T H E
V E R N A C U L A R I N 1 9 2 3 .)

Turns out it took another global crisis—like, say,
a pandemic—to usher in another big shift in what we
consider kinky. Men’s Health asked 1,229 American
men a bunch of questions about how they’re
getting it on these days, and our survey
results reveal that the past two years
have been a hotbed of sexual and
romantic experimentation.
You might think you’re alone in having
shelled out for a sex toy (or three),
discovered the wonders of butt play,
or braved your first threesome.
But our SurveyMonkey data proves
such choices are increasingly
vanilla. “What’s ‘taboo’ is going
to be different now than it was
before,” says MH advisor
Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D.,
a researcher at the Kinsey
Institute. But how
different, exactly? And
what even counts as
kinky? Let’s dive in.
JORDYN
TAYLOR AND
MILAN POLK

BY

78 MARCH 2022 | MEN’S HEALTH

Since
the pandemic
began . . .

25%

have dabbled
in role play for
the first time.

9%

have been on
the receiving end
of butt play for
the first time.

1/3

of American men

are feeling

MORE SEXUALLY
EXPERIMENTAL
now than before
the pandemic.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

RYAN OLBRYSH

13%

have changed
how they
label their
sexual
orientation.

10%

have had their
first group-sex
experience.

ONE REASON
FOR ALL THIS
WILD SEX?
STRESS.

22%

have been more
comfortable
sharing their kinks
with a partner.

36%

have purchased
at least one new
sex toy.

“When we’re stressed, it’s
often harder to feel desire or
to stay in the moment, because our mind is distracted
and wandering,” Lehmiller
says. “Trying something
new can create this
immersive experience that
lets us be in the moment
and raises sexual arousal.”
Boredom might have
played a role, too. (There
are only so many backyard
sheds one man can build.)
For those who suddenly
had less busy schedules
during lockdown, the
free time “gave them this
opportunity to really
engage in some sexual
liberation,” he says.

IT PAYS OFF TO GET
DOWN IN NEW WAYS.
GUYS WHO’VE EXPERIMENTED in the bedroom during the
pandemic—from BDSM to hooking up with someone of a different
gender—rate themselves as more satisfied both carnally (on a basic
sexual level) and emotionally (as in feeling more romantic).
FIRST-TIME
ACTIVITY

% WITH HIGHER
SEXUAL SATISFACTION

% WITH HIGHER ROMANTIC
SATISFACTION

THREESOME

34%

42%

BUTT PLAY
(RECEIVING
END)

40%

47%

BUTT PLAY
(GIVING END)

34%

Of the

9% of men who

received butt play
for the first time,
34% are more
comfortable with it
now than before
the pandemic.

FIRST
TIMERS’
CLUB

HERE’S HOW MANY GUYS
TRIED SOMETHING
FOR THE FIRST TIME—
WHAT ABOUT YOU?
ROLE PLAY: 25%
DIRTY TALK: 20%
SEXTING: 17%
USING A SEX TOY
WITH A PARTNER: 13%

47%

VOYEURISM: 12%
BUTT PLAY
(GIVING END): 12%

USING A SEX
TOY WITH A
PARTNER

30%

COMBINING FOOD
AND SEX: 11%

46%

USING A SEX TOY
ALONE: 10%
THREESOME AND/OR
GROUP SEX: 10%

SEX-TOY SALES
BOOMED DURING THE EARLY
MONTHS OF LOCKDOWN.

28%

of men have bought one
or two new sex toys
since the pandemic
began, and 8% have
bought three or more.

BUTT PLAY
(RECEIVING END): 9%
PLAYING WITH BODY
FLUIDS: 9%

HOW PEOPLE USED THEIR NEW TOY(S):

23%

Solo

22%

Gave to a
partner

34%

Together as
a couple

21%

Some or all
of the above

HOT TIP: HOW TO TELL A PARTNER YOU WANT TO TRY SOMETHING NEW
Remember to put them first, says Shamyra Howard, L.C.S.W., an MH advisor, who suggests
asking a playful, open-ended question like “If we were to role-play a sexy situation, what would
you want to do?” Think of it like foreplay: Go slow, don't push, and no judgment.

80 MARCH 2022 | MEN’S HEALTH

AGE PLAY: 8%
BDSM: 7%
EXHIBITIONISM: 6%
ANIMAL
ROLE PLAY: 4%
CUCKOLDING: 3%

NOT ALL SEX AND
RELATIONSHIPS HAVE TO
BE BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE.
EVEN IF GUYS aren’t exploring ethical nonmonogamy
(aka open relationships) in droves, a bunch are at least curious.
Trying it could have benefits: Men who took up ENM during the
pandemic report increased sexual and romantic satisfaction.

8%

ENM, BY THE NUMBERS

56%

I’m doing
ENM right
now!

Hard pass,
now and
forever.

Of all
the guys doing
ENM right now,

43%

started exploring
it during the
pandemic.

17%

Haven’t
done it, but
maybe
someday?

19%

I’ve done it—
just not
right now.

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN
TRYING ENM BUT HAVEN'T, WHAT’S
HOLDING YOU BACK?

Of the

8% of guys

who’ve hooked up
with someone of a
different gender than
they typically go for,
40% have
started using new
labels to describe
their sexual
orientation.

46%

41%

32%

ARE NOT SURE
HOW TO BRING
IT UP WITH A
PARTNER.

ARE
AFRAID
OF
JEALOUSY.

ARE
WORRIED
ABOUT
STIs.

A partner and I have
had a threesome,
foursome, or other
form of group sex.

30%

A partner and I
have hit up a
sex party.

27%

A partner and I
have swapped with
another couple.

36%

A partner and/or
I have independently
seen other sexual
partners on the side.

36%

CURIOUS
ABOUT ENM?
HIT THE BOOKS.
“Don’t just go on a chat room and
see what they’re saying,” Howard
says. “Get some real professional
advice from people who are
actually in sustainable, ethically
nonmonogamous relationships.”
She recommends these reads:

WHAT FORMS
OF ENM
HAVE
YOU TRIED?
39%

I’ve had multiple
romantic relationships
at the same time.

12%

OPENING UP,
BY TRISTAN
TAORMINO

THE ETHICAL SLUT,
BY JANET W. HARDY
AND DOSSIE EASTON

I’ve been in a
throuple, quad,
or other
polyamorous unit.

ONE MAN’S TABOO IS
ANOTHER MAN’S MAINSTREAM.
50%

“One metric some sex researchers have used to categorize sexual
interests and behaviors as ‘common’ is whether they are shared
by more than 50 percent of the population,” Lehmiller says.

THE POPULARITY of interests varies
between groups. For instance, RECEIVING
BUTT PLAY WOULD BE NBD for 18% of white
men, 12% of Asian American men, and 11%
of Black men. MH advisor Howard says the
act can be linked to “being gay” in Black
communities, which may lead to underreporting.
“BUTT PLAY HAS NO SEXUAL ORIENTATION,”
she says. “A BUTT IS A BUTT.”

WHAT’S HOT AND
WHERE TO FIND IT
YOUR REGIONAL GUIDE TO KINK.

THE MOUNTAIN
REGION

IS DOWN FOR USING
A SEX TOY ALONE (27%)
AND CUCKOLDING (12%).

WEST SOUTH
CENTRAL

IS DOWN FOR BEING
ON THE GIVING END
OF BUTT PLAY (31%).

EAST
NORTH CENTRAL

IS DOWN FOR
ROLE PLAY (35%), BDSM (20%),
AND THREESOMES (17%).

EAST SOUTH
CENTRAL

IS DOWN FOR
DIRTY TALK (44%).

METHODOLOGY: Men’s Health surveyed 1,229 men in the U. S.
from November 16 to 17, 2021, using SurveyMonkey. Data is
nationally representative in terms of race and region.
82 MARCH 2022 | MEN’S HEALTH

TABOO AND MAINSTREAM
MEAN DIFFERENT THINGS TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE.
80% OF GUYS DESCRIBE THEIR SEXUAL INTERESTS AS MAINSTREAM—BUT
HERE’S WHAT THESE SUPPOSEDLY VANILLA GUYS ARE REALLY WILLING TO DO.
(THE BIGGER THE WORD, THE MORE GUYS WHO SAID THEY’D BE OPEN TO IT.)

AGE
PLAY

USING A SEX TOY SEXTING
WITH A PARTNER

PLAYING WITH BODY FLUIDS

THREESOME OR OTHER
FORM OF GROUP SEX

ORAL SEX

BUTT PLAY
(GIVING)

TRYING A NEW COMBINING
FOOD AND SEX
SEX POSITION
BDSM

USING A SEX TOY ALONE

ROLE PLAY
49%

Percentage of
30-somethings who have
embraced the joys of
sex toys and bought
at least one new toy
since the pandemic started.

More than four
in ten men in their
20s and 40s also
invested.

DIRTY TALK

BUTT PLAY (RECEIVING)

50-SOMETHINGS
ARE THE FREAKIEST
GUYS IN THEIR 50s are more likely than
those in any other age group to be down
for using a sex toy with a partner (39%),
BDSM (18%), and receiving butt play
(23%). They’re also more likely to be doing
ENM right now (10%). Howard says older
Americans report happier sex lives because they’re able to communicate their
needs better than younger people and
“they’ve been around the block,” so they
have a better sense of what they’re into.

WHEN IT COMES TO INCOME, high rollers, it seems,
are the most likely to be show-offs. Here’s what guys are
into if they make . . .
MORE THAN $200K A YEAR

$100K TO $149K A YEAR

LESS THAN $50K A YEAR

EXHIBITIONISM

USING A SEX TOY
WITH A PARTNER

DIRTY TALK

MOST LIKELY TO
BE DOWN WITH

(21%).

MOST LIKELY TO
BE DOWN WITH

(39%).

MOST LIKELY TO
BE DOWN WITH

(38%).

SIX

THE STUFF WE CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT

3. Chanel Chance Parfum

Uzi previously used drugstore body sprays until he
found Chanel’s warm and spicy
fragrance. Now he keeps
at least two of these bottles
on hand wherever he goes.
$130; nordstrom.com

PACK

4. Polo Ralph
Lauren Jersey
Crewneck T-Shirt

LIL UZI VERT

Everything the rapper does seems
to catch fire: posting pics of his wildest outfits,
releasing new music, even sharing a video
of himself deadlifting 260 pounds. Here are
six things that help him bring the heat.
—CHRISTIAN GOLLAYAN

When it comes to gym
shirts, Uzi likes to go simple
with this roomy tee from
Polo Ralph Lauren. “These
shirts fit me really well,”
he says. “I work out in
them since they’re so
easy to move in.” $45;
ralphlauren.com

5. Dove Antiperspirant Deodorant
Dove’s Invisible Solid in Original Clean
is Uzi’s standard antiperspirant, because it
doesn’t compete with his signature scent. “It
doesn’t smell strong and keeps me feeling
fresh.” $6 for a pack of two; walmart.com

1. Gotham Gym
Sweatpants

2. Vaseline Intensive Care
Cocoa Radiant Lotion
Like most guys, Uzi works up a
sweat during his training sessions, and
Vaseline’s cocoa lotion has been his
go-to for staying moisturized after a
post-exercise shower. $3; target.com

6. Adidas x Prada Men’s Superstar 450
Tonal Leather Sneakers

Uzi’s athletic shoes? They’re high fashion, of
course. “These are really lightweight. . . . It feels
like I’m barefoot, which is a good thing while I’m
boxing.” $525; bergdorfgoodman.com

Men’s Health (ISSN 1054-4836) Vol. 37, No. 2 is published 10 times per year, monthly except combined issues in January/February and July/August and when future combined issues are published that count as two issues as
indicated on the issue’s cover, by Hearst at 300 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019. Steven R. Swartz, President & Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Mark E. Aldam,
Chief Operating Officer. Hearst Magazines, Inc.: Debi Chirichella, President, Hearst Magazines Group, and Treasurer; Kate Lewis, Chief Content Officer; Kristen M. O’Hara, Chief Business Officer; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary.
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84

MARCH 2022

|

MEN’S HEALTH

Courtesy brands (products). Getty Images (Lil Uzi Vert).

After taking a boxing
class at Gotham Gym
in New York City, Uzi fell
in love with the sport—
and the gym’s sweats.
“They’re really comfortable, and they’re pretty
stylish,” he says. $40;
gothamgymnyc.com

IMPROVED SLEEP

BLUE LIGHT BLOCKING FRAMES
M E N S H E A LT H .C O M / E Y E W E A R

BELK BLOOMINGDALE’S DILLARD’S MACY’S

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