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ΎdŚĞ ϮŐ ŽĨ ƉůĂŶƚ ƐƚĞƌŽůƐ ŝŶ ŽŶĞ ŚĞĂƉĞĚ ƚĂďůĞƐƉŽŽŶ ŽĨ &ůŽƌĂ WƌŽ ĐƟǀ ƉĞƌ ĚĂǇ͕ ŚĂƐ ďĞĞŶ ĐůŝŶŝĐĂůůǇ ƉƌŽǀĞŶ ƚŽ ƌĞĚƵĐĞ ǇŽƵƌ ĐŚŽůĞƐƚĞƌŽů ďǇ ƵƉ ƚŽ ϭϬй ŝŶ Ϯϭ ĚĂǇƐ͘ ŽŶƟŶƵĞ ƚŽ ƵƐĞ ŽŶĞ ƌŽƵŶĚĞĚ ƚĂďůĞƐƉŽŽŶ ƉĞƌ ĚĂǇ ƚŽ ŵĂŝŶƚĂŝŶ Ă ůŽǁĞƌĞĚ ĐŚŽůĞƐƚĞƌŽů ůĞǀĞů͘ /Ĩ ǇŽƵ ŚĂǀĞ ĞůĞǀĂƚĞĚ ĐŚŽůĞƐƚĞƌŽů ǇŽƵ ƐŚŽƵůĚ ƐĞĞŬ ŵĞĚŝĐĂů ĂĚǀŝĐĞ͘

The all-new Audi Q8.

Enough said.

Audi Vorsprung durch Technik

There’s a time for restraint. But this isn’t it. The all-new Audi Q8 is style, substance and performance – all powerfully ampliﬁed. It holds back nothing, so that you can experience everything.

audi.com.au Model with optional equipment shown.

CONTENTS

0 4.19

COVER GUY: TRAVIS BOAK PHOTOGRAPHED BY

Three titans of the AFL spill their secrets to leading from the front.

menshealth.com.au

PHOTOGRAPHY: JAMES GEER; GROOMING: SYLVIA URA; CLOTHING BY LULULEMON

JAMES GEER

CONTENTS

0 4.19 INSIDE THIS ISSUE

H E A LT H

p31 Alexa, Am I Dying?

The pros and cons of asking tech to diagnose your ailments.

p88 Live to 180

See biohacker Dave Asprey’s elaborate plan to defy death.

TACT I CS

p26 The Comeback Kid

How champion surfer Julian Wilson eschews victimhood for victory.

p108 Fighting Shadows

One man’s plan to punch his way through a nightmare illness.

N UT R IT I ON

p32 Welcome to 30/10! Building muscle in the kitchen is about to get a whole lot simpler.

p54 Liquid Fuel

Is drinking ketones really the next breakthrough in fuelling for sport?

M I ND

p46 Death Becomes You Say Adios to Slow Starts Here’s H ’ a post-workout k morning i refuel f l that will blow your socks off.

Hell’s Bells The world’s best kettlebell exponents – Russians, of course – tell all.

Style Tips For Big Guys MH’s resident beast, Todd Liubinskas, models looks to suit your ripped rig.

For this guy, glimpsing the other side crystallised the point of living.

p50 Get Grit

Guys who show guts everyday reveal the keys to hanging tough in testing times.

MUSCLE

p122 Gym-Free Gains

What better time to take your quest for size into the fresh air?

p128 Build Footy Muscle

MH fitness director Todd Liubinskas shows you how to build a battle-ready body.

102 10

The Effects of Steroids Thinking of turning to the dark side in pursuit of muscle? Read this now.

menshealth.com.au

E D I T O R’S L E T T E R

Men's Health Australia

@MensHealthAU

menshealth.com.au

WHY SPORT MATTERS As a Men’s Health crew gathers in a South Melbourne photographic studio to shoot this month’s AFL feature, it’s hard to believe we’re already on the cusp of arguably the best six months on the sporting calendar: footy season. It’s a sweltering 40 degrees outside as our trio of AFL greats assembles to discuss the finer points of leadership. The prospect of cheering on our favourite teams seems a whopping 25 degrees away. They say sport reveals the character of a man. Well, the same can be said for a Men’s Health cover shoot. The three AFL titans in attendance – Travis Boak (Port Adelaide), Jack Viney (Melbourne) and Scott Pendlebury (Collingwood) – all live up to their reputations as noble leaders. In manner and bearing, they’re professional, inspiring and true to the values of MH. It’s immediately obvious why they hold positions of authority in their respective clubs. The trio, along with another Aussie sporting great featured in this issue, surfer Julian Wilson (p.26), embody the interdependence of sport and health, both physical and mental. Sure, regular, intense training does wonders for the physique. But beyond the physical, sport at its best teaches us invaluable life lessons, while inspiring us to find the very best in ourselves. I’ll let Nelson Mandela bring this point home: “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.” So while we mightn’t be quite ready to rug up in our supporter scarves, let the season inspire you to take charge of your health and fitness - and maybe to get behind your local league. Your body and mind will thank you.

Scott Henderson menshealth@pacificmags.com.au

SCOTT HENDERSON Editor BEN JHOTY Deputy Editor DANIEL WILLIAMS Associate Editor DAVID ASHFORD Creative Director JASON LEE Deputy Art Director KATE FRASER Head Of Pictures – Fashion and Health ALEX DALRYMPLE Multimedia Content Producer LAUREN WILLIAMSON Digital Content Manager – Health ALEX PIEROTTI Digital Content Editor TODD LIUBINSKAS Fitness Director CHIEF BRABON Transformation Coach JEFF LACK Style Editor ERIN DOCHERTY Grooming Writer

CLARISSA WILSON

Head of Health JESS LAY

KATHY GLAVAS

Marketing Director – Health COURTENAY McDERMOTT

Brand Partnerships Manager

Marketing Manager – Health

CATHERINE CHOMYONG

Marketing Coordinator – Health

KAYLA CHAPMAN

Production Manager

Brand Manager

Brand Executive – Fashion & Health

CALVIN SIMPSON

Advertising Coordinator – Beauty, Fashion & Health

ELEANOR FLETCHER PAUL KING

SAM MAGUIRE

Print Operations Coordinator

GEREURD ROBERTS Chief Executive Officer, Pacific Magazines MYCHELLE VANDERBURG Retail Sales and Group Marketing Director NICOLE BENCE Commercial Strategy & Solutions Director MARK BOORMAN Group Production Manager

RICHARD DORMENT

KIM ST. CLAIR BODDEN

Editor in Chief, Men’s Health US

SVP/Editorial & Brand Director

SIMON HORNE

CHLOE O’BRIEN

SVP/Managing Director Asia Pacific & Russia

Deputy Brands Director

RICHARD BEAN

Executive Director, Content Services

Director of International Licensing and Business Development B Best of Boak worlds: Port’s cover guy showed P Henderson the strength of H the sport-health union. t

JEREMY SUTTON

Group Subscriptions Manager

SHELLEY MEEKS

Pacific Magazines, Media City, 8 Central Avenue, Eveleigh, NSW 2015 Phone: (02) 9394 2000 Fax: (02) 9394 2319 Subscription enquiries: 1300 668 118 Printing Bluestar Web, 83 Derby Street, Silverwater NSW 2128. Distribution Gordon & Gotch. Published 12 times a year. Registered business name Pacific Magazines Pty Ltd, (ABN) 16 097 410 896. All rights reserved. Title and trademark Men’s Health © Hearst Magazines International. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission. Men’s Health is a registered trademark and the unauthorised use of this trademark is strictly

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ASK MH

POUR OVER OUR ADVICE TO TIP THE SCALES IN YOUR FAVOUR.

IS YOUR BELLY A HEART THREAT?

To determine your risk, here’s how to calculate your waist-hip ratio

THE BIG QUESTION

PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL HEDGE

I’mdrinkingagain.Doesthatmean I’mdestinedtoregainmybeerbelly? Alcohol contains kilojoules and carbs, so increasing your intake may well cause weight gain. But then, so could upping your intake of anything else. Studies generally suggest that those who drink within their limits – a couple of beers a day, say – don’t carry around any more weight than abstainers. Indeed, a review in Current Obesity Reports found that drinkers tend to weigh less than teetotallers. Still, weight isn’t everything. According to researchers at the Mayo Clinic, extra fat around

your middle, synonymous with beer drinkers, makes you up to four times more likely to develop metabolic disorders than leaner types. That’s the real risk you run by returning to boozy nights. To safeguard your longterm health while still enjoying the odd ale, hit the weights room. “Muscle is ‘active’ in ways that counteract visceral fat,” explains PT Emma StoreyGordon: it raises your metabolic rate. And, although your body is hard-wired to preserve its fat stores by

I/ ROUND THE WAIST RW

increasing your appetite, you can prevent weight gain by confining kilojoule consumption to a window of time (try 16 hours of fasting, eight hours of eating – not continuously, of course). “You’ll be able to enjoy bigger meals, which are more satiating,” says Storey-Gordon, without exceeding your kilojoule allowance. Finally, fill up on fibre, aiming for 30g per day. This creates a healthy microbiome in your gut, reducing inflammation and your likelihood of obesity. We’ll raise a glass to that.

Measure your waist midway between your lowest rib and the top of your hips.

II/ ON THE HIPS

Then measure your hips around the widest part of your glutes.

III/ SUM TOTAL

Divide waist by hips. If it’s 0.9 or higher, it’s time to take action.

April 2019

ASK MH ANCIENT SOLUTION TO A MODERN PROBLEM

AVOIDING THE USUAL SUSPECTS CAN DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD.

I know it’s good for me, but I really can’t cop yoga. Is it really worth the stretch? SK

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. Aristotle, ancient Greece

TEXT A PT Hi. I’ve cramped up on my run, and I’m still a few kays from home. What are my options? The ﬁrst thing to do is stop. Then, stretch for 30 seconds per leg – it’ll help ease the pain.

OK. I’m determined to ﬁnish my run, though. What can I do when I set off again? Try starting slower to see how you feel, then switch to minute-long, on-off intervals.

DOES IT WORK?

Dairy, gluten, sugar, red meat … should I really be cutting it all out? CD

Will do. Incidentally, this isn’t the ﬁrst time this has happened. What’s causing it? The most common reason is dehydration, but it could also be muscular fatigue. So, try to be sensible with your training load before a big run.

I’ll try. Anything else I can do? It’s a tall order, but avoid salty food and caffeine. Good luck!

Andre Bates, @i.am.fitness.ldn

menshealth.com.au

We understand your scepticism, CD – every few weeks, a new food group is vilified. But this paranoia can do more harm than the foods themselves. “By unnecessarily eliminating foods from your diet, you risk becoming deficient in nutrients,” warns nutritionist Chris Lowe: the fibre in wholegrains, say, or vitamin B12 in red meat. It can be a psychological problem, too. You’ve heard of the placebo effect? Well,

there’s also a “nocebo” effect, in which you experience side-effects from something benign. In one study, people who complained of glutenrelated symptoms were asked to consume a muffin. Some ate one containing 11g of gluten; others unknowingly ate a gluten-free treat. Yet both groups reported feeling worse afterwards. So, “suspect” foods needn’t always be avoided. Instead, try consuming them at smarter times (see right).

KITCHEN CLOCK

Nutritionist Lowe on the best times to eat or avoid certain foods

RED MEAT

Avoid eating a lot of meat before training. It has a slower rate of digestion, leaving you with a busy stomach.

SUGAR

Carbs drive your performance, so get your sweet fix before or after your sessions. Or during if they last 90mins.

DAIRY

Milk is excellent after training for the three Rs: repair (protein), replenish (carbs) and rehydrate (fluid).

GLUTEN

If you feel fine eating bread, enjoy a post-gym sanger. If you think it’s bloating you, get checked to be sure.

PHOTOGRAPHY: JOBE LAWRENSON

MAXIMISING LIFE’S GREATEST LUXURY AS MANY AS 45 per cent of men experience male pattern baldness before the age of 35. Sure, some men – such as a certain Mr Statham – can pull off a grade one but, for others, it results in a severe confidence knock that can even lead to body dysmorphia. Yet there’s an alternative to the bank-breaking “full-Warnie” transplant. While you now rely on lotions and creative styling, new research suggests that a simple tweak to your grooming routine could breathe new life into your hairline. Scientists at the University of Manchester found that hair growth is promoted by the smell of sandalwood, which imbues a lingering, rich base to Oriental fragrances. Because of its high concentration of olfactory receptors, the nose is, of course, the region of the body that is most closely associated with scent, but similar receptors are found in the skin around your hair follicles. Here, cells produce an olfactory receptor called OR2AT4, which plays a vital role in many physiological responses, including the promotion of follicle growth. When the researchers submerged hair follicle cells in a synthetic sandalwood odorant, they found a 25-30 per cent increase in the secretion of growth hormone, enough to stimulate a hirsute response. To beat your top-line recession, keep a new bottle of Aesop’s Marrakech Intense ($85; aesop.com) in your desk drawer and take a few seconds to freshen up before work drinks. Two sprays will do it. But remember, for everyone’s sake, less is more.

A NEW, FRAGRANT WAY TO REFOREST YOUR THINNING HAIRLINE.

SECONDS TO SNIFF OUT THE CURE FOR A RECEDING HAIRLINE April 2019

BREATHE SOME NEW LIFE INTO YOUR WEIGHT TRAINING.

MINUTES TO RAISE HGH AND ACHIEVE PEAK MUSCLE GAIN EXPECT TO SEE hypoxic chambers in your gym soon, as they cross over from the professional to the recreational athlete. They work by simulating the lower oxygen levels of high altitudes, promising to elevate your endurance and shift your kilojoule burn up a gear. Now, new research suggests that they can give your strength gains a lift, too: reducing your supply of O2 could be the fastest way to spike your levels of growth hormone, which means it’s well worth out-muscling the lean longdistance athletes hogging the valuable real estate inside the chamber. Sports scientists asked test subjects to complete the same workout twice – once in a “normal” atmosphere with 21 per cent oxygen, then again in a far thinner 20

menshealth.com.au

atmosphere with just 13 per cent oxygen concentration – equivalent to an altitude of 3.7km. Subjects completed five sets of 14 reps of bench presses and leg presses at 50 per cent of their one-rep max, resting 60 seconds between sets. While the subjects reported no difference in fatigue – which, crucially, means they can train at the same intensity and complete the same volume of work – levels of HGH in their blood sky-rocketed when they trained in hypoxia. Once released, HGH stimulates your liver to make IGF-1, which triggers the growth and repair of muscle tissue. So, take a barbell into the chamber and spend 15 minutes working through compound lifts such as deadlifts and squats. You’ll return to sea level with new heights of strength.

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SECONDS TO RAISE YOUR CHANCES OF SETTING NEW PBS

IN THE 1990S, researchers confirmed what many already believed: an athlete’s strength and endurance rise with encouragement. It’s why training with a partner increases your likelihood of lifting a PB. It’s also why the camaraderie of a workout class can keep you running on fumes. When you’re pounding the pavement at dawn, however, encouragement can be hard to come by – and it’s precisely at this moment that science says you need a good talking to. Bangor University researchers sounded out a simple solution by taking two groups of test subjects and measuring the length of time for which they were able to exercise at 80 per cent of their max power output. Over the following two weeks, one group was taught a

menshealth.com.au

number of phrases its members could use to encourage themselves, alongside the protocols for using them. The other group was taught nothing. When they repeated the test, members of the self-talk group improved by an average of 15 per cent on their previous times. In much the same way as Ronnie Coleman shouts, “Light weight!” before pressing 100kg overhead, the self-talk focused on persuading your brain that the exercise was entirely manageable. So, remind yourself that this morning’s run is easier than last week’s, before taunting the hill at kilometre six as “Easy work!” You’ll edge ever closer to the hallowed 40-minute 10K, no extra morning runs required.

TO CLOCK UP YOUR BEST RESULTS, BE YOUR OWN MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER.

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OUT-THINK WEIGHT GAIN WITH OLDSCHOOL TRAINING.

WEEKS TO DROP SOME BELLY FAT AND RELIVE YOUR 1ST XV PRIME

MAINTAINING AN overhaul of both your exercise and your eating plans is no mean feat. Go all in on a new gym routine and your ensuing hunger will know no bounds – a problem when you’re training for weight loss. Science, however, suggests a solution: it’s time to dust off your old rugby boots. By embracing the spirit of Super Rugby and spending your Saturdays on the pitch (and in the clubhouse bar afterwards, watching the games), you’ll be better able to fend off any wobbles

menshealth.com.au

in your willpower. Researchers at Cornell University discovered that exercising for fun – for sporting glory, say, rather than performing monotonous dumbbell reps – can counter-intuitively make you far less prone to overeating. The scientists led volunteers on a 2.2-km walk, telling half of the subjects that the purpose was exercise, while selling it to the rest as a scenic stroll. After the excursion, they were all offered a selection of snacks. Intriguingly, though the two groups had exerted

themselves to the same degree, the exercise set consumed 124 per cent more kilojoules than those who thought they had walked for fun. The exercise group had somehow developed a larger perceived energy-expenditure debt, which they quickly sought to balance. Even if your rugger renaissance lasts only for the weeks of the tournament, that’s enough time to tackle your weight-loss goals and reboot your resolve to stick to any eating plan for months to come. Think of it as the crash-ball diet.

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A+ TACTICS

The Comeback Kid Find out how world No. 2 surfer Julian Wilson uses adversity as a springboard to his finest achievements BY SCOTT HENDERSON

OFTEN, WHEN YOU’RE INTERVIEWING a guy and hoping he’ll open up to you, a compliment goes a long way. Hinting that as well as being a hard-nosed journalist you’re also a quiet admirer can have the effect of relaxing him. On this clear-skied morning at Red Bull’s Sydney headquarters, however, it takes me all of 60 seconds to realise that in the case of Julian Wilson, the ol’ fan-with-atypewriter approach isn’t going to work. Decked out in cap, striped top and jeans, at once friendly and dreamily detached, Wilson gives the impression that he couldn’t be any more relaxed had he just returned from a monthlong meditation in the Himalayas. What’s more, the only thing that appears to disturb his uberchilled state is any attempt to praise him. Remark on his persistence, say, or his courage – and there are telling examples of both – and Wilson becomes palpably uncomfortable. Chances are you’d get a better reaction grabbing him in an affectionate headlock and calling him a doofus. Wilson’s unease with praise can be traced to two things. One, he’s modest.

April 2019

A+ TACTICS

season that brought him tantalisingly close to a maiden WSL championship. Clearly, getting pipped by Brazilian Gabriel Medina stung the Australian, who returned from Hawaii nursing a disappointment that ran every bit as deep as his fatigue. But experience tells you that these are the very preconditions for his next triumph. In the past, every major success Wilson has enjoyed has been borne of hardship. Want a lesson in resilience? You’ve come to the right man.

JUMP THE SHARK Wilson’s most celebrated resurgence followed close mate Mick Fanning’s encounter with a Great White at Jeffreys Bay, South Africa in 2015. Fanning and Wilson were going headto-head in the final of the J-Bay Open when the beast loomed beside Fanning as he lay prone on his board. Acting on instinct, Fanning punched the shark before using his board as a shield.

“Believe in yourself rather than worrying about someone else having to believe in you. You’ve got to believe in yourself to achieve anything” And two, he doesn’t need it. “Believe in yourself rather than worrying about someone else having to believe in you,” he says. “That’s the biggest thing for me. Take all the advice and information you can get – that’s great – but at the end of the day you’ve got to believe in yourself to achieve anything.” The boy who grew up in a tightknit family of surfers on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast is now 30 and has done great things on many of the world’s most famous breaks, even if outside of the surfing fraternity few could put a name to the handsome face. Perhaps that’s partly because Wilson lacks the outrageous flair of some of the great local pros of yesteryear – Occhilupo, Fanning, Parkinson. Or his relative anonymity might say more about surfing’s profile in an increasingly cluttered sporting marketplace. Whatever the case, Wilson is class: on the brink of the 2019 World Surf League (WSL) season, he’s the secondbest surfer on the planet. First stop: defending his title at the Quiksilver Pro at Coolangatta’s Snapper Rocks from April 3-13. Wilson is backing up from a 2018

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“I saw the whole thing,” a teary Wilson told a news conference in the days afterwards. “I saw him get knocked off his board, and then a wave popped up and I thought, ‘He’s gone; he’s gone under’.” Ever wondered how you’d respond if a mate were fending off a man-eater a short paddle away? For Wilson, there was no internal debate. “I felt like I couldn’t get there quick enough. I was like, ‘I’ve got a board – if I get there I can stab it.’ And then [Mick] started screaming. And I remembered that the boats were there and we both started screaming. I was paddling for him.” A response team scared off the shark before scooping Fanning and Wilson, both unharmed, out of the water. Organisers promptly cancelled the final. Trauma experts predicted the ordeal could trigger PTSD in both Fanning and Wilson, and many wondered whether either would compete again, at least anytime soon. Yet both were back in the water within weeks. Fanning’s resilience can be sheeted home to his various welldocumented struggles, including the untimely deaths of his brothers Sean and Peter. Wilson’s ability to bounce back can likewise be attributed to an unusually close acquaintance with hard times.

SONNY RAMIREZ & CHANTEL DE SOUSA/ILLUSTRATIONROOM.COM.AU

KEEP YOUR HEAD ABOVE WATER

NO PAIN

Not long before the shark encounter, Wilson and his family were fighting their own battles on land as he dealt with one of his most challenging years on the tour. “I struggled that year [2014],” remembers Wilson. “I came home from Pipe [the Pipe Masters, Hawaii] and mum had breast cancer for the second time.” That was on top of a prostatecancer diagnosis recently handed to Wilson’s dad, John. “As the year unfolded, my head was at home,” he says. “I was struggling to prioritise what I was doing, and maybe feeling a little selfish. I got to the end of the year and I’d had a rubbish year. I was no good to anybody.” Heading into the season-ending Pipe Masters, a string of early exits behind him, Wilson needed to produce a career-defining performance to save his spot on tour and avoid having to watch the 2015 season from the beach. True to form, he found his best when the stakes were highest. “It all came together on the very last wave of that year,” he says. “I won the Triple Crown on that wave and I won the Pipe Masters – and there was about a minute-and-a-half left in the final. That was the biggest win of my career.”

At the end of 2017, disaster struck again for Wilson, this time in the form of a shoulder injury sustained while mountain-biking in the Glenrock State Conservation Area, near Newcastle in NSW. The ruptured AC joint would plague him during competition for most of the year. Faced with a choice of surgery or conservative treatment, Wilson opted for the latter, which involved an extensive rehab program aimed at strengthening his shoulder to a point where he could compete. “Instead of going to the gym, which I couldn’t really do, I focused on breath work, mobility and getting the right techniques so the shoulder wouldn’t break down,” Wilson explains. The other priority was maintaining his aerial confidence and proprioception, both of which can plunge during a period out of the water. “I went back to skateboarding to get my ‘airs’ back,” he says. “It was so nice to reconnect with something that I’d done my whole life, and it opened up my mind and got my confidence back really quick.” Alas, another challenge was about to hit. Five days out from the first event of the 2018 season – his local Quiksilver Pro – Wilson found himself in hospital when his first daughter, Olivia, arrived four weeks early. The new father had no choice: he continued his rehab on the floor of the maternity ward, and in the process drew inspiration from his wife, model Ashley. “I was there with her when she was giving birth,” Wilson says. “And after seeing her go through that experience I was like, ‘Well, I can suck it up and just see how things go. Yeah, I’m not 100 per cent. And yeah, the shoulder’s painful and stuff. But it’s good enough to have a go’.” Rising above the discomfort of the injury and a bad case of new-baby sleep deprivation, and having barely surfed for a month, Wilson shocked everyone bar himself by winning his home title. He backed that up last October with victory at the Quiksilver Pro France, cementing his status as Australian sport’s comeback king. Wilson, who believes passionately in helping the next generation of surfers, mentors a bunch of them. What does he tell them? The same message he delivered to me: stop relying on other people to give you selfconfidence. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, push and challenge yourself at every turn. And then give your next project a red-hot go.

WILL WILSON BECOME ONE OF THOSE ‘BEST SURFERS NEVER TO WIN A WORLD CROWN’? NOT IF HE CAN HELP IT.

FORTIFY YOUR FRAME AME This ‘prehab’ routine from Sydney et chiropractor Luke White will targe muscular imbalances and promote y joint mobility to prepare your body for the movements to come – and keep you off the injured list. Do 1-2 sets of each move daily,

Upper Body 1. Face Pull Tie a resistance band around a door knob so you have an end to grasp in each hand. From a kneeling position, pull the band down and towards your face, feeling the tension at the back of your shoulders. Do 15-20 reps.

2. Push-up to Downward Dog Perform one strict-form push-up. From the top position, walk your feet in until your hands and feet are flat on the floor, and your butt’s in the air. Hold for 10 seconds. Your legs should be at least almost straight.

Lower Body 1. Squat into Monster Walk With a band pulled snug around your ankles, arms held straight out in front, sink into a squat. Rise to a half-squat and, holding that position, walk 12 big steps backwards, then 12 big steps forward.

2. Glute Bridge Lie on your back, knees up. Squeeze your glutes and lift your pelvis off the floor, holding at the top for 10 seconds while squeezing your glutes. Do 10 reps.

Lower Back/Core

1. Dead Bug Lying on your back, your arms extended above you, bring your hips and knees to 90 degrees. Your core braced, alternate between simultaneously extending your left arm and right leg, and vice versa. Perform for 30 seconds.

2. Pallof press Tie a resistance band around a door knob and kneel side-on to the door. Pull the band into your chest, then push it out until you feel your upper body wanting to rotate towards the door. Hold and resist for 5 seconds. Then draw the weight back to your chest. That’s 1 rep. Do 15.

April 2019

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A+ HEALTH

ALEXA, AM I DYING? Wh th it’s Whether it’ a mark k on your skin or a weird feeling in your chest, one of the most common things people want to know about their health problem is, “Am I dying?” Matt Jancer decided to find out how good tech would be at telling us what we most want to find out

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is elbowing its way into the doctor’s office, and medics are nervous – especially since studies have found AI better than dermatologists at diagnosing skin cancer, and it boosts the fracture-diagnosing accuracy of doctors alone. It’s promising enough that the consulting firm Accenture predicts the value of AI technology will climb about 40 per cent a year, turning into a $6.6 billion industry by 2021. Closer to home, people are a little more excited about AI’s role in medical care, by which they mean shouting into their living room’s voice-activated smart speaker, “Alexa, here’s what’s going on with me”, and receiving a competent response that tells them what’s wrong and what to do. I wondered how well the at-home AIs might do at that, so I decided to test them. I gave a second-generation Amazon Echo Dot and a Google Home Mini a couple of medical scenarios to see if I could trust my life to either of them. (I didn’t use Siri, which is more like a voice-activated Google search.) I downloaded the WebMD and Mayo Clinic First Aid skills to the Echo Dot. Google Assistant can give answers directly, so the Home Mini didn’t need apps. These devices are pretty good at giving first-aid answers, so I

skipped those and started in with some tougher stuff. Right off the bat, I could tell there were going to be problems. For the first scenario, I had gastroesophageal reflux disease. GERD can have a lot of symptoms that don’t involve a burning gut or spicy burps, so I told the AIs I’d had a pain in my chest for two days, shortness of breath, and difficulty speaking. Google Assistant went straight to lifethreatening heart attack and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Alexa’s Mayo Clinic app told me to call 911 – and then suggested I ask it further about CPR and sunburns. “When people interact with these AIs, they expect answers that are one, maybe two sentences. Unfortunately, things are rarely that simple in medicine,” says Dr Christopher Kelly, a cardiology fellow at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He and his colleague Dr Marc Eisenberg wrote Am I Dying?!, a new book about how to self-diagnose without driving yourself into a panic. “If you say the magic words ‘chest pain’, anyone is going to think of your heart,

“COMPANIESARE DOUBLINGDOWN ONIMPROVINGAI” including any doctor,” says Kelly. “The difference is that the doctor will ask a lot of questions to determine if that’s probable.” I raised the degree of difficulty in the next test, so much so that I had a simulated panic attack. I was cold but also sweating, and my hands were tingling. My heart was racing so fast I thought I was going to faint. The Mayo Clinic app said only, “You may request an appointment at Mayo Clinic by phone or by using our secure online form,” but some other apps came close by landing on hyperventilation as a possibility. They also floundered around with low blood sugar and arrhythmia, because so many conditions have the same racing heartbeat and tingling hands. “Many people present with symptoms that turn out to be anxiety related,” says Kelly, “and it would be very hard for an AI, as they’re currently designed, to get at those.” After a few more tests and confusing answers, that was as clear to me as it is to Kelly, who noted that as they exist today, voice-activated AIs take an already inexact system – self-diagnosing online – and

make it worse by speeding up the process and giving catchall answers while often obscuring or oversimplifying how they came to their conclusions. In the interest of a streamlined experience, they can leave you sceptical and burned out, he says. Someday we’ll look back on these stumbles as quaint. Companies are doubling down on improving AI so it can become a common household reference. Rumours are floating around that Amazon is building a healthand-wellness team for Alexa, although the company hasn’t commented publicly. Improvements will happen. And they need to: a Northeastern University study found that when 54 people posed symptoms of common injuries and illnesses to these assistants, Alexa (equipped with the WebMD, Mayo Clinic First Aid and American Heart Association skills) failed to provide any relevant information 92 per cent of the time. (Stop a man on the street and he’d likely beat that.) Google Assistant did better, but still missed on more than half the questions. You could try to avoid a visit to your doctor with an AI, but you’ll likely end up with a slim portion of the iffy advice already floating around the Internet. Plus a headache.

April 2019

A+ NUTRITION

WELCOME TO 30/10! Here’s how it works: you eat 30 grams of protein per meal to build muscle. Then you add ten grams of fibre to reap its digestive, heart and satiety benefits, says dietitian Chris Mohr. You’ll have everything you need to feed your appetite and fuel your workout recovery. Here’s your go-to grocery list to get you started BY PAUL KITA

Things to do with a supermarket rotisserie chicken

Shred it atop tomato soup. Top with fresh coriander, crumbled queso fresco, cubed avocado, crushed tortilla chips and freshly squeezed lime juice.

Reheat shredded chicken in a pan with butter and hot sauce. Tuck into a wrap with crumbled blue cheese, thinly sliced iceberg lettuce and celery leaves.

Throw a few leaves of chopped kale in a bowl. Add a pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon juice. Massage until the leaves are softened. Toss in shredded chicken and top with freshly grated Parmesan.

THE PROTEIN There’s a big reason dedicated lifters love chicken. One 170g roasted skinless breast from a broiler or fryer contains 49 grams of protein for only 1350 kilojoules. The same amount of meat from a skinless thigh has 42 grams of protein for 1270 kilojoules. So whether you pick up a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store or roast your own at home, the fowl has your muscle fuel covered.

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Top a reheated chicken breast with a few spoonfuls of warmed tomato sauce, a piece of pan-crisped prosciutto and a slice of fresh mozzarella. Broil till melted. Remember to use a knife and fork.

Reheat a shredded chicken breast in a large pan coated with olive oil over medium heat. Add a handful of grapes, a handful of pitted olives, some chopped rosemary and a squeeze of lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper.

THE FIBRE Serve your bird with one of these easy make-at-home side dishes. They each carry the target ten grams of gut-filling fibre. Feeling ambitious? Double the recipe. They both taste great cold as leftovers the next day. Pile a large slice of sourdough bread with a leaf or two of romaine lettuce, shredded chicken, sliced avocado, sliced tomato, crumbled bacon and chipotle mayo.

CHARRED BROCCOLI WITH L E M O N A N D PA R M E S A N

In a large bowl, toss the trimmed florets from 1 large head of broccoli, plus the chopped stalk, with 2 Tbsp olive oil and a big pinch each of salt and pepper. In a cast-iron pan over medium high, add the broccoli and cook, stirring occasionally, until it is well charred and al dente, 3-5 minutes. Top with the zest and juice of a lemon, plus freshly grated Parmesan to taste. Feeds 2 Per serving: 920 kilojoules, 11g protein, 18g carbs (10g fibre), 15g fat

HOW TO P

IC K A W I N

Follow the senior c advice of Alan uli Morgan , Market: nary director for Who a global “I look a le t the leg cooked Foods s begun t the most, to se , since they ge o pull a t e if the way fro meat ha good in m s t h d e icator bone. overcoo ked and that the bird h That’s a as is birds w ith exce dried out. And been s avo s juice in a clear sign all the con id any o f tainer t h a t chicken f . A grea lavour has left – t colour a the golden -brow nd sh indicate iny and glossy n skin a tas rotisser ty and moist ie chick en.”

NER

CHOPPED RED CABBAGE Q U I C K S L AW

In a pan, reheat shredded chicken with your favourite barbecue sauce. Transfer to an onion roll and top with coleslaw and hot sauce.

In a large bowl, toss ¾ of a head of red cabbage, finely chopped (you can use a food processor); 2 carrots, finely chopped; 1 apple, cored and finely chopped; 1 Tbsp distilled white vinegar; 1 tsp olive oil; and salt and pepper to taste. Feeds 2 Per serving: 790 kilojoules, 5g protein, 42g carbs (11g fibre), 3g fat

April 2019 33

A+ MUSCLE

FIND STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

SWING AWAY: NOTE EVERY KILO FOR A HORMONAL HIGH.

Monitoring and celebrating every PB will spike your ‘T’ levels and supercharge muscle growth. Knowledge is power

THE FIRST FEW WEEKS of a new workout regime can be precarious: sore muscles and visions of instant results can cause your commitment to falter. However, rather than expecting Gosling abs by Friday, research suggests it’s celebrating your small victories in the gym that will enhance your progress. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology revealed a link between the sensation of winning and a surge in the production of testosterone – a hormone essential for building muscle and preventing unwanted weight gain. Scientists asked 177 subjects to identify which of their team members they considered the most successful, skilled and respected, then tracked testosterone levels for the next two months. Those considered to be winners by their peers enjoyed an increased testosterone profile, while those who ranked lower experienced a decline in the hormone. This was dubbed the “winner effect”. While you can’t rely on fellow gym-goers to celebrate your every success, a simple solo technique could have the desired effect. Track your progress: by monitoring every rep, set or kilo added, you’ll register even the smallest of improvements. The buzz you feel as you leave the gym will spike your testosterone levels, speed recovery, maximise muscle growth and make hitting yet more personal bests easier. You could call it a compound benefit. We say it’s a winning strategy.

DATA BANK

CASH IN ON THE WINNER EFFECT WITH OUR EDIT OF THE BEST APPS TO TRACK EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR FITNESS

NUTRITION

MyFitnessPal An app for all your foodtracking needs: record your diet using its database, containing the nutritional information of millions of different foods.

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STRENGTH

Centr, by Chris Hemsworth This boasts input from the experts behind the Thor physique, including S & C specialist Joseph Sakoda. Less a workout app than a life overhaul.

STAMINA

MapMyRun An app that tracks and maps every run, while offering feedback and stats to lift your performance. That includes alerts on shoe replacement.

SLEEP

Sleep Cycle This monitors your sleep cycles by analysing sound and movement, before waking you up at the best part of the cycle to reduce grogginess.

A D V EAR T EI RSTIINS G UURR E I NF G EFAET AT

TOP DROPS

THESE ROBUST, HIGH-ALTITUDE BEAUTIES BY THE MCWILLIAM’S WINE FAMILY MAKE THE PERFECT DINNER COMPANION TO MATCH WITH YOUR HEARTIEST DISHES

PINOT NOIR:

VIBRANT & VELVETY A lively, vibrant wine displaying heady aromas of black plum and subtle spice. Light to medium bodied, this Pinot Noir leaps from the glass with ﬂavours of sappy red cherry fruits, earthy spices and complex mushroom notes caressing the palate for a long and satisfying ﬁnish.

CABERNET SAUVIGNON:

INTENSE & BOLD

An alluring Cabernet with sophistication plus! Stunning varietal aromas of blackberry, bay leaf and chocolate mingle seamlessly with graphite oak followed by silky cassis fruit and dark chocolate on the palate, ﬁnishing with ﬁne tannins.

SHIRAZ:

COMPLEX & RICH The McW Reserve range is from cool climate grapes, grown at an average of 660 metres above sea level, which contributes to their intense flavour.

McWilliam’s Wines encourages responsible drinking. Get the facts at www.drinkwise.org.au

A fragrant fusion of black cherry, violets and toasty oak draw you to an unmistakably elegant wine. Medium bodied with supple tannins, this Shiraz showcases balance and poise through integration of juicy red fruits and spicy oak.

MH BOSS

HIT REFRESH: TODAY’S JOB MARKET REQUIRES CONSTANT EVOLUTION.

REBOOT YOUR CAREER

Millions of Australians are watching the career path they were on slowly disappear. To carve a new one that feels urgent and monumental, you have to know the new rules of reinvention. Ross McCammon helps decode them UNTIL A FEW YEARS AGO, I bought into the same idea that my parents and grandparents had about how a career should unfold: if you worked hard, you would be taken care of. You’d get to buy a house, a couple of cars. You’d retire at 65ish. The dream. I had always been grateful to have a job – particularly the “dream job” I had in my 30s. I was loyal to it, and to my industry. And my job and my

industry, I thought, were loyal to me. And then I was laid off. I got another job pretty quickly, and then, after two years, I was laid off again. I was the sole earner in my family. I had two young kids and a mortgage. Let me tell you: that will clear the mind. My reaction? Once I truly accepted a less stable reality, I stopped trying to walk down a “path”. It was as much a mind-shift as it

was a career strategy. I began to feel younger and more nimble. But I got a lot of advice from people who specialise in reinvention, like the ones I spoke with for this story. These experts regularly work with the most reluctant reinventors – people far along on their professional journey – and help them navigate change. Here’s how they think you should approach it.

April 2019

A+ MH BOSS

MEET THE NEW RULE INTERPRETERS Stacey Staaterman Career and leadership coach Dorie Clark A marketing strategist and author of Reinventing You Bill Burnett An adjunct professor and executive director of the Design Program at Stanford and coauthor of Design Your Life

“THERE’S NO REASON YOU CAN’T CREATE A RELATIONSHIP WITH A CEO IF YOU WANT”

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Admit That It Sucks, but the Time Has Come to Do Some Reinventing

Of course it’s scary

But not acting is worse

You expected that you would surf this wave all the way to the beach and jump off and have a great retirement. But the surf changed. Now you’ve got choppy, short waves and you’re going to fall off the board. Your job now is to get back on the board and anticipate wipeouts. Today, being adaptive and flexible is critical. – SS

You can kind of hunker down and hope against hope that the storm blows over, but it’s not going to blow over. You really only have two choices. Accept the default reality: “Whatever happens, I’ll just scramble.” Do you want the default reality? Or the one you design? Because those are your only two options. –B B

Treat LinkedIn as the New Headhunter (Because It Is)

You’re only what your digital profile says about you Our culture around job searching and careermanagement behaviours mirrors dating and courtship. Nobody has a blind date anymore. Nobody. Even if you have an introduction to another human being, all of the humans involved go to the Internet and scope each other out. If I had two hours to spend on doing something to help somebody’s career and job search, I would invest that time on LinkedIn. Get your profile in good shape first. –SS

Make your profile about what you can do, not just what you did Peel back the layers of your résumé. Think about your transferable skills. I do a lot of work with transitioning members of the military and some of them come in and have skills like they’re a tank driver or they defuse bombs, and obviously that doesn’t seem remotely transferable to civilian life. So how do you

take someone like that and make their skills transferable? Understand that it’s not about your literal job description. There are meta skills that you developed along the way, like understanding how to lead a team or learning what makes for a great story and how to capture people’s attention. Things like that could be applied anywhere. –DC

Don’t paywall your email address Many people (including recruiters) use free accounts on LinkedIn, so they cannot access your information in the “Contact” section. Include it in the “Summary” section instead. –SS

You have to jump in LinkedIn is not a giant digital address book. It is a 24/7/365 networking event. Those who share, comment on and publish content are rewarded with connections and visibility. Lack of participation negatively affects how your profile will rank in recruiter searches. –SS

NEW ADDICTION ALERT! You’ve probably seen YouTube videos with impassioned speakers like entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk and half of all TED Talkers gassing on about working really hard (getting up early, never quitting, generally crushing it but never saying what “it” actually is). So, what is the result of all this effort? For peddlers of “hustle porn”, who revere and promote extreme effort as a virtue, the work is the result. Which is obviously weird! Kind of sick, actually! And, more important, counterproductive. Ignore those who say you should work harder than anyone else. (A) That’s impossible, because Dwayne Johnson walks the earth. (B) You deserve (and need) a personal life. (C) One man’s motivation can be another man’s self-esteem killer. Hustling nonstop, as Reddit founder and hustle-porn hater Alexis Ohanian says, “has deleterious effects not just on your business but on your well-being”. The only people seeing any benefits from this twisted philosophy are the people reaping YouTube ad dollars espousing it. – RM

Don’t Wait Around to Get Noticed

Today, everybody’s in your network

Make yourself easy to know

As long as you’re on the Internet, you can reach pretty much anyone who’s worth connecting with. It’s completely wide open. I’ve struck up a friendship with somebody who’s been a leader in personal development for 40 years, all because I commented on some of his content. There is so much access to people at superhigh levels – there is no reason you can’t create a relationship with a CEO if you want. Once you’ve built that network, you’ve got to keep up with it. People often don’t do that. They ping folks once in a while or may have lunch, but that’s not enough. They don’t keep them up to speed and treat them like a board of directors. These people should be getting a twice-a-month update: “Here’s how the search is going.” Express how much you value their support, and ask for specific introductions to people. –SS

If you blog or are sharing relevant content on social media, then people look at you as a thoughtful curator of ideas. That can matter. Even if you’re in a company where there are constraints on what you can share publicly, you can share things in places like your company intranet. Or put in applications to speak at industry conferences. It takes extra effort, but these things ensure you’re perceived as credible. –DC

Authenticity wins I had a client write an article about gratitude – gratitude after being laid off! The piece was vulnerable, personal and unexpected. It raised his visibility and led to a ton of new conversations. He’s found a job since then, and he’s doing great. It actually turned up the heat on his search and pulled him out into the light. –SS

As Long as You’re Inventing, Make Something Great

Go for the big win Get out of the false binary of “It’s either work or life”. It’s just life and life. You’re living life at home, you’re living life on the commute, you’re living life. Whenever you

make things a dichotomy, you’re going, “It’s either A or B, and if I have more of A, I have less of B”. There’s no way to win that game. –BB

April 2019 39

A+ MIND

“Crazy” Misunderstood Joshua David Stein unpacks what “crazy” really means in a world where it’s everywhere

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AS FAR AS SPECTACLE GOES, the image of Kanye West embracing Donald Trump in the Oval Office this past October fell somewhere between Australian cricket’s sandpaper scandal and the series finale of The Sopranos. It was confusing. It was compelling. It was unhinged. It was, in short, irresistible. The rapper’s widely broadcast 10-minute soliloquy was as rambling as it was enticing, touching on everything from male energy to Montessori to the 13th Amendment. West in the West Wing was the perfect storm of celebrity, power and – for lack of a better word – content. You would not be alone if you periodically said, “Man, he’s crazy!” as you watched.

And you wouldn’t be wrong, either. In fact, you might be a little too right. West, who not too long ago discussed his diagnosis of bipolar disorder with the world, joins a list of celebrities who are open about their struggles with mental health and also struggle with their mental health openly. They include SNL’s Pete Davidson, who courageously (and hilariously) mined his borderline-personality-disorder diagnosis for material before engaging in a public, brief and somewhat torrid love affair with Ariana Grande; Tesla cofounder Elon Musk, who tweeted about the corrosive effects of stress on his mental health even as he bore those out in a series of ill-advised (and possibly illegal) tweets about

THE LIFE HACKER

“CRAZYDESERVESOUR COMPASSION,NOT JUSTOURCLICKS”

By Adam MacDougall

THE GOAL BEAT THE BLUES THE OBSTACLES LONELINESS. TEDIUM. PURPOSELESSNESS. HACK 1: PRETEND YOU’RE HAPPY

his company; and Roseanne Barr, who was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder years before she sent a racist tweet in May that scotched her comeback show. Their struggles have played out in the white water of popular culture, and it’s been a crazy ride indeed. But when used to describe a person, crazy is halfway between a common adjective and an informal diagnosis. Toss it out with little thought and it’s fun and flirty. Think about it more – what it really means, what’s really going on when we say it, and what’s going on with those we say it about – and the word becomes heavier and heavier. For the tens of thousands of Australians who, like me, live

with mental illness, crazy is a heartbreaking and terrifying reality. Living in the tide pools of sanity, I can confidently say that whatever glimpse of crazy you catch in public is vastly outstripped by the private suffering you’ll never see. That’s the suffering that rends the fabric of primary relationships, that barges into the cockpit of the self and messes with the dials; it’s a suffering that doesn’t care if you’ve got a blue verified badge on Twitter, a sitcom, Yeezys or millions in the bank. If you know what that suffering is like, there’s no way just to sit and watch a public meltdown with popcorn. But that’s not to say we should simply look away, change the channel or fasten ourselves to a different trending hashtag. Any of these episodes can be an opportunity to spur a genuine and much-needed discussion about mental health. Granted, this is a whole lot less fun, and it pries open a can of morally slippery worms. Does the fact that Roseanne has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder absolve her of her racism? Does the fact that Kanye may be bipolar render his opinions about minorities invalid? This conversation becomes even more difficult in light of the silence of US mental-health professionals, who, bound by what’s called the Goldwater rule, are barred from offering a professional opinion about the mental health of individuals they have not

examined personally. Thus an illness goes unnamed and, in the silence, dangerous and dismissive confusion grows. These incidents and others like them also provide an opportunity to develop empathy. You don’t have to suffer from mental illness to have compassion for those who do. There’s a Buddhist practice, meant to foster loving-kindness for all creatures, in which one visualises that all sentient beings were, at some point, your mother or will, at some point, become your mother. Now, you might have a complicated relationship with your mother, and you might not believe in rebirth. But that way of thinking, of considering another person as a loved one, even for a second, is like catching a glimpse of a set of keys that fell into the footpath grate. It’s heartbreaking. And it’s eye-opening. Ultimately, no one can deny the brilliance of the sparks as someone – especially a highprofile someone – runs off the rails. Such a spectacle will never be ignored and probably shouldn’t be. But try not to marvel at the sparks and then ignore the passenger in danger. What’s there isn’t just a celebrity self-immolating but a person suffering, too. Take it from one who has also suffered. Crazy deserves our compassion, not just our clicks. And we owe it to ourselves to see through the spectacle to the human – on both sides of the screen.

Push yourself to engage in what psychologists call “outgoing behaviours” – phoning a mate to catch up, smiling at a stranger – that typically only contented people can manage. Researchers at Washington State University found people who dug deep to express their sociable instincts reported raised feelings of happiness. And joy begets joy, they added: people are drawn to those who exude it.

HACK 2: SHOUT A MATE A BEER

A study published in the Journal of Science found spending money on others will lift your mood more than spending the same amount on yourself. Bonus: your sense of happiness will receive an extra boost if you shout yourself a beer. That’s because beer contains the molecule hordenine, which stimulates the brain’s reward centre.

HACK 3: TAKE A BATH

A hot soak will do more than soothe sore muscles. A study in New Scientist found it could boost the mood of depressed people more than the proven mood-enhancer exercise. It works by triggering a sudden rise in core body temperature, which ups production of serotonin, the hormone most closely aligned with positive mood. Adam MacDougall is founder and CEO of The MAN Shake (adammacdougall.com.au)

April 2019

A+ NUTRITION

GAINS OR LOSSES? The virtues of a nutrition and exercise overhaul are obvious. But when your time and need for results are of the essence, which transformative tactic is the surest route to a new you?

EXERCISE RCISE

UTRITION

The reduced risk of dying from an ny disease for th hose who exercise regularly is impossible to o ignore

Thee extra amount the average A Australian is spending per year in pursuit of ‘healthy eating’, according to a 2017 report commissioned by Choosi

The average kilojoule burn from an hour of weightlifting is a hard-won reward. However, all that graft can easily be nullified by just one McDonald’s double cheeseburger

1860

LIGHT IDEAS

KILOJOULES

According to the American Heart Association, regular exercise has the power to cut your risk of heart disease (responsible for 43,000 deaths each year in Australia) by almost half

40%

2090 KILOJOULES

LONG GAMES

Cut this from your daily intake and you can drop almost half a kilogram per week. Just swap your cheddar baguette and chips with California rolls

An International Journal of Epidemiology study found that eating 10 portions of fruit and vegetables a day can reduce your odds of suffering a fatal stroke by a third

33%

EXTRA CREDITS Relieves stress

Slows ageing

Strengthens bones

A Neurology study revealed just 30 minutes of vigorous daily exercise can stave off 10 years of premature brain ageing, with those who train less suffering faster cognitive decline Exercise is key for muscle, but go slow for progress. The body can handle only 20 per cent more weight than what you lifted the previous month

Reduces inflammation

BRAIN GAINS

YEARS

0.2X

11 YEARS

MUSCLE-UPS

Improves mood

Sharpens focus

One serving of leafy greens per day, however, has a more potent impact on your cognitive powers – just. Extra spinach keeps your brain one year younger than a cardio commute

2.2G

THE MH VERDICT: IT’S A DRAW!

This much protein per kilo of lean body mass will support growth. Multiply your LBM by 2.2: the result is your daily protein target in grams – Christian Finn, personal trainer

It’s too close to call. For physical transformation, it’s true that food offers the greater potential for short-term results, but fad diets fail and research proves that if you want to keep the weight off, exercise is your best ally. Forget half-measures – for success this year and beyond, double down.

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WEEKEND BRUNCH SORTED. For eating spots that care about farm animal welfare and are serving cage-free eggs search choosewisely.org.au

choosewisely.org.au |

@RSPCAchoosewisely

A+ MUSCLE

Why This Is Crunch Time For Your Abs

THE BEST EXERCISE YOU’RE NOT DOING

FLYING V

Balancing on your glutes, lean your torso back and raise your feet off the ground, extending your legs up and out in front of you under control. Find your balance – this is the starting position.

IN’N’OUT

Keep the weight to your shoulder and hold your core tight to avoid wobbling, then contract your abs and breathe in, crunching your knees to your chest. Exhale and reverse the move.

WHAT YOU’LL GAIN

+ POPPING ABS

COR E C ONTR OL

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SITTING COMFORTABLY

Sit on the floor, your knees bent, holding a kettlebell to your shoulder with your right hand. Bring your left arm out to the side to steady yourself when the hard part kicks in.

IF YOUR FAT-LOSS PLANS ARE ON SCHEDULE, STEP UP THE PACE WITH THE V-UP AND PRESS. AS AN UPGRADE ON THE SIT-UP, IT’S TRULY HARD CORE

IT’S ALL TOO EASY to fall back on the classic moves when desperately trying to rework your abs. But relying on sit-ups earns you only half the benefits. For a truly ripped middle – which, let’s be honest, is your ultimate aim after a summer of clean-eating – you need to target your entire core, not just the abdominals that sit at the front. “The hollow body position forces you to engage your obliques,” says celebrity trainer Ben Bruno. “The key is to keep a steady torso and try to avoid twisting or falling.” It’s the instability that targets your deeper core for a functional strength pay-off, while the feet-elevated tuck will work the superficial rectus abdominis muscles, which will, at last, make your abs truly pop. Finally, pressing the kettlebell up slowly will not only widen your silhouette, but also force your obliques to work overtime to keep you upright. To achieve six of the best, do three sets of 10 per arm, twice per week. Consider them your next reps to the abs you want.

START HERE

+ B OUL D ER S HO UL DE R S

GYMNAST BA LA N CE

PRESS TO IMPRESS

Finish the rep by slowly pressing the kettlebell overhead. Pause, then lower it under control. Finish your set, rebalance, and then repeat on the opposite side.

Over 1,500 exercises, workouts and training plans Ideal for any ﬁtness level Download now for free!

Your Reliable Training Partner. The Men’s Health Personal Trainer App. Search for Men’s Health Fitness Trainer in your favourite app store

A+ MAN2MAN

DEATH BECOMES YOU

Fate gave this guy a glimpse of the other side – and greater clarity about how to live the rest of his days

BY STEPHEN BARRIE

I’M WRITING THIS a few weeks after passing away. That’s right: for 90 seconds my heart stopped and I was dead. Does that sound frightening? Well, it’s probably not for everyone. But in a perverse way it’s proved to be one of the most illuminating experiences of my life. Let

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me take you back. It was a Wednesday, around lunchtime. I’d spent the morning on the golf course before heading home and having coffee with my wife. Then I began the short drive to my office. I felt great, except for one thing: there was a dull, persistent discomfort in my left arm. Nothing severe – one out of 10 on the pain scale – but troublingly familiar: seven years ago, when I was in my mid-40s, the same sensation had led me to a cardiac ward, where doctors found blockages in my coronary arteries and inserted a stent. All things considered, I decided to make a detour to hospital. I paid the 12 bucks for parking and wandered over to Emergency. I was in the process of telling someone why I was there when I felt suddenly dizzy. Then . . . nothing. I went down like a sack of spuds, apparently. Medical staff, I’m told, rushed over to find a dead 54-year-old man. CPR failed. Out came the defibrillator, which zapped me back to life.

I remember waking up to see a bunch of faces looking down at me. It struck me what goodlooking people they were. I even said that, out loud. You’d think the act of dying would knock you around a bit. Strangely, I felt fine. It was as though I’d woken from a nap. The staff were amazed. Various tests returned readings that were way too normal for a guy whose heart had just packed it in. Still, the doctors insisted I climb into a hospital bed and stay there for 24 hours. Mostly, I followed orders. And doing nothing for that long gives you a chance to think.

LIFE IS NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL Here’s the first thing you’ll want to know about death: it seems to be final. Lying there without a heartbeat, I saw no bright light, no tunnel, no deceased loved ones; nor did I feel any sense of peace or love for all humanity. Instead, I saw and felt nothing. By coincidence, a few weeks earlier I’d been reading Stephen Hawking’s posthumously

I don’t want to hang around for the sake of breathing. Honestly, I reckon most of us linger too long

released book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, which includes this: Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think when we die we return to dust. Even before my episode, that would have been a fair summary of my own thinking about what lies beyond. And now, having had a sneak peek, I’m even more sure that it’s right. So, what now? Family and friends seem to think I must have had some kind of epiphany, that my temporary exit will be a turning point. And look, certain things have

become clearer to me. But little of what I tell people seems to be what they were expecting to hear. Here’s what’s not going to change about my life: my diet or approach to exercise. I’m not going to start devouring a lot of broccoli and kale. I’m not going to begin rising at dawn to lift weights or pound the streets. I know that’s not a typical Men’s Health message, but there it is. My brush with death did nothing to change my view that life is something to be lived, not prolonged. I look at the elderly people in my life, at how they structure their lives around doctors’ appointments, and think the way I almost checked out – suddenly, cleanly – has a lot to recommend it. In a nutshell, I don’t want to hang around for the sake of breathing. Honestly, I reckon most of us linger too long. Our distant ancestors survived on the African savannahs only for as long as they retained the agility and wherewithal to avoid being eaten. Mostly, they would have hung around long enough

to reproduce and assist in raising their progeny to maturity. I’ve done that. My youngest now is a teenager. My wife and kids like having me around. But they don’t truly need me anymore.

ARE YOU A SUCCESS? So many guys I know are restless, if not miserable. Beneath a veneer of contentment they’re concealing all manner of regrets. What I’ve realised is that I’m happy with my life. I have an amazing wife, a bunch of great kids, and, for someone who left school at 16, a healthy career. I also happen to Iike the person I’ve become: from an angry young man messed up by his parents’ divorce, I’m nowadays the biggest peacemaker I know. I’d ask yourself this: is your life truly crap, have you really made a mess of it, or can it just seem that way in the dead of night? Maybe it’s not that you’ve achieved too little. Maybe you’re just expecting too much. My mini-death rocked one of my sons. A few days

after it happened, I was watching television when he appeared in front of me. Without a word this 25-yearold man bent down and hugged me, sobbing on my shoulder for five minutes. It confirmed for me that in the interests of sticking around a little longer I would commit to taking, every day, the cocktail of medicines prescribed to prevent another attack. But apart from that I’ll simply do more of the things I love. Golf. And sharing meals with family and friends, eating the schnitzel and chocolate mousse because those things give me pleasure, and a life without them would be a life compromised. I’ll dutifully swallow my meds for 10 years. After that, from 64 onwards, I’ll take my chances. And should I drop dead one day, having lived my life on my own terms, having wasted neither time nor energy worrying about how and when it might all end, and without having been a frail, drooling, depressing burden on my family, then I’ll go without regrets.

April 2019

A+ RELATIONSHIPS

Wham, Bam, Bye Now So that was great. But as Lauren Larson explains, sometimes the best nights end in separate beds

I bought the next round and tried to forget. For a few days, I’d been badgering male acquaintances about the sleep habits of the women in their lives. By the time I confronted my ex, I’d heard enough stories of drooling and sleeptalking to know that everyone does something. I have my own encyclopedia of nighttime horror stories. I once watched a man sleepwalk across my bedroom, pee in and around my wastebasket, and then sleepwalk out of the room. I was too spooked to follow him, so I don’t know where else in my home he peed that night. When I mentioned it, he laughed and said that

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ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR

I RECENTLY summoned a trusted ex to a bar. I wanted to ask him a question, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. It took me one round of drinks to get to it. “Have I ever done anything . . . weird? Or gross? Like, in bed? But not, like, in bed,” I added. “Like, sleeping.” He pretended to think about it, but I could tell he already had something in mind. Finally, he began to speak. I drained my whiskey ginger. He told me the story of a night right out of Paranormal Activity. A story that laid bare the true evil that I’ve always suspected exists within me. I won’t repeat it here, because I am a lady/because my parents read Men’s Health.

“ BE SPECIFIC, HONEST AND, IDEALLY, SELF- DEPRECATING ABOUT WHY YOU DON’T WANT TO SLEEP OVER” it’s “just something that happens when I drink whiskey”. We’ve reevaluated so many things about dating. We’ve changed our tune on how we meet (Tinder!) and how we ask for consent (often!), and I move that we change the rules for sleepovers, too. Nobody sleeps well with a new partner, and some of us even have trouble sleeping with people we’ve been with for a long, long time. I used to think that if I didn’t sleep with someone after we had sex, the sex would be somehow cheapened. But curling up together for half an hour after sex can be just as pleasant a capstone as spending the night together, and you won’t spend the next day feeling destroyed. But before you barrel out of your lover’s apartment under the banner of enlightenment, it can help to understand some of the anxieties at play here.

NIGHT TERRORS

IF YOU’RE NOT SPRAWLED BESIDE HER SNORING, SHE’S FREE TO DREAM ABOUT YOUR LUMBERJACK ARMS.

I, for example, have always harboured a fear that I’ll unknowingly do something unattractive in slumber. When I’m on a date, I may appear charming and relaxed – even smooth, if I’m on my third drink – but actually every organ is engaged in an effort not to do anything ugly. When I’m lying next to someone, as much as I want to fall asleep, I’m also battling the temptation to remain awake and totally in control of my faculties. Maybe the Christmas-dinner-level fatigue men get after they ejaculate overwhelms these concerns, or maybe I’m just extra self-conscious. When you regard it as a sex act, sleeping next to someone is as intimate as it gets. My body might betray me in any number of ways, or my mate might study me in the dead of night – drooling, hair akimbo – and decide that I am hideous. We like to believe in a social contract that prevents us from judging each other for things we do while sleeping, but I did judge the sleep-pisser. And even if my ex didn’t judge me per se, the incident clearly carries an outsize weight in his memory of our time together. On the other hand, I was relieved to learn that my worst sleep infraction,

horrifying as it was, was an isolated occurrence (or so I hope). A much greater fear is that I habitually do something that disrupts the sleep of my bedfellows: if my ex had told me I snored, I would have spiralled. Like many women, I often struggle to balance my own needs with my pathological courtesy. (One time on a plane, a man asked me if he could sit in my aisle seat, because his legs were “too long for the middle” – they weren’t – and I said yes, even though I’d paid extra to sit on the aisle.) The thought of someone else losing sleep on my behalf literally keeps me up at night. When I said as much to a light-sleeping friend, she nodded somberly. “I haven’t slept well in two weeks because I feel bad kicking out the guy I’m dating,” she said. “He lives an hour away, and I don’t want to inconvenience him.” A martyr for the ages: she would rather subject herself to six hours locked in sleepless torment than subject a man to one hour on public transport.

HOME FREE Especially early on, there’s a good chance that your mate will be secretly relieved if you don’t stay over, but you still have to be delicate about leaving (and even more delicate about asking someone to leave). Because of the stigma rom-com culture has placed on leaving after sex, broaching the subject deserves a larger discussion. Be specific, honest and, ideally, selfdeprecating about why you don’t want to sleep over. Saying, “I snore and I don’t want to keep you up, so I probably won’t stay over” makes you seem respectful and responsible, whereas saying, “I have to get up really early tomorrow” as you’re putting on your clothes makes you seem like a jerk. Even if you really do have to get up early tomorrow, the context makes it feel like a rejection. If there’s a window, deploy your excuse earlier, precoital, when you’re on your way up to her apartment or your apartment – when, in short, you’re sure it’s on. When you move to leave later, it won’t feel like a slap in the face. It will feel like the plan.

April 2019 49

A+ MIND

GET GRIT

What you need to know in order to get on, hold tight and power through it all

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WHAT IS IT AND WHY DO YOU NEED IT? Grit is all around us. At work retreats. On the tennis court. In your grandmother’s book club. It’s a buzzword now, the parlance of education advocates and businessschool books in the past several years thanks to the work of Angela Duckworth: “A combination of passion and perseverance for a singularly important goal.” Wait. That’s grit?! But that’s so . . . big and profound and lofty. We think grit is small and dirty and face-in-the-mud. It’s situational courage. When you need it, you need it right now. But how do you access it? How do the people who grit it out for a living do the things that seem undoable – too hard, too messy, too much? Here’s how.

PEOPLE WITH GRIT

The Crisis Counsellor

WHEN YOU...

HAVE TO GET STARTED Six-time Ironman Triathlon world champion Mark Allen once completed a race in eight hours and seven minutes. That included 3.8km of swimming, 180km of biking, and a full 42.1km marathon – averaging one kay every 2.1 minutes. Finishing wasn’t, it goes without saying, easy. But before he ever finished a race, he had to start training, and that can be just as difficult. Here’s how he pushed Play.

ARSE. IN. SEAT. “The grit is in the very beginning. It’s in taking the first step. You need to give yourself a little block of time to dive in – to be able to say to yourself, ‘I am going to do this. I am now sitting down. I’m starting on it.’”

FACE YOUR FAULTS “You need to have awareness of the things you draw back from – the more you’re aware of this happening, the less frequently you’ll draw back. Start small: the simple practice of affirming to yourself that you have the ability to do the things that are difficult.”

AND REPEAT “We often resist starting something, but once you’re in and doing it, it’s almost always fulfilling. Every morning, I go exercise. My whole day has huge potential as a result. When it comes to doing things over and over, think this way: if you do one run in your life, you’ll feel good. But if you do a thousand runs, it’ll completely transform you.”

When we train counsellors for crisis work, one of the things we talk about often is that you need to take care of yourself if you want to be able to take care of others. If you let your own self-care become secondary, you’re not going to be able to serve people as well. The things other people bring to you are going to become too much to bear. If I’ve been working with hurricane survivors or witnesses to a shooting, at the end of my time that day, I’m going to sit down with another counsellor and say, “This is what I did; this is how I’m feeling about it”. That allows another person to lay eyes on it and weigh in on whether I need to take a step back. It’s using somebody else to help me be accountable to myself. It also makes sure that we’re keeping an eye on what works well for the people who need our help, because that’s ultimately my focus. I want to make sure I’m bringing them the best that I have.

GERARD LAWSON, an associate professor in the counsellor-edu cation program at Virginia Tech (as told to Matt Goulet)

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April 2019

A+ MIND

WHEN YOU...

HAVE TO KEEP GOING Say your boss hates you. You’ve been professionally humiliated. Or you’ve gone viral like a starlet’s sex tape. You’ve still got to show up the next day. Or, more likely, work straight-up sucks. What do you do when you are in a crummy situation that is ultimately negative and harmful?

“THEBODY’SGREATEST CHALLENGEISTHEFINAL MOMENTSOFAWORKOUT”

TALK TO YOURSELF Stop and ask yourself one simple question: “What do I need?” Posing the question to yourself gives you the courage to do whatever you’ve got to do next, whether that’s standing up and saying no or finding ways to get a new job. It’s part of something called selfcompassion, giving yourself the encouragement you’d offer a friend in a similar situation.

AND BUCK UP The trick is to think about the best coaches you’ve had in your life or, better, Eric Taylor from Friday Night Lights – the ones who build you up with a certain recognition of your limits and encourage you to work past what you perceived them to be. If you can get yourself in a conversation with your inner Coach Taylor, the setbacks will seem more like steps on the way to something better.

WHEN YOU...

JUST CAN’T FINISH

CHRISTOPHER GERMER, a clinical psychologist atHarvard Medical School and cofounder of the Mindful Self-Compassion program

“Why did I even start this if I wasn’t gonna finish?” I begin every single workout thinking about this. The internal voices are at their chattiest in the final minutes or reps of any workout, and it’s convenient as hell to listen to them and mail things in. So I head them off before they even get going: “I’ve started this workout, so I’m going to own the finish.” It’s when your lungs

are burning and your heart’s beating out of your throat and your muscles are on fire that you’re getting the most out of the session anyway. The body needs to be challenged to adapt (and gain size, strength, and endurance), and its greatest challenge is the final moments of a workout. Struggling through the end is why you’re in the gym. Grit begets more grit.

Once committed to the finish, I think of “slow aggression” and “keep ploughing forward”. Take one deep breath, then muscle out a few good reps. Then take another deep breath and bang out a few more. You’re pacing the hardest part of the workout so you can do good work again later. That’s what keeps you in shape. Ebenzer Samuel, MH fitness writer

A (TruNcaTed) cUltUraL hIstOry of grIt ConTinUed David Beckham Legitimises exfoliation for men 1998

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David Blain ne Spends 63 hours encased in a block of ice 2000

Big Brother Birth hs unkillable reality TV 2001

Beaconsfield Miners Endure 321 hours 925m underground – only to get Kochied.

A Aron Ralston Trapped for days in a Utah T h caanyon, cuts off his right arm to escape. 2006

PEOPLE WITH GRIT

The ER Doctor

GRIT CAN MEAN JUST TRUDGING THAT LAST MILE.

WHEN YOU...

JUST CAN’T STOP ONE FINAL PEP TALK: to stop doing something that ultimately isn’t all that good for you, but in the moment is just amazing, sucks. And requires a form of perseverance that isn’t that different from getting through, say, a triathlon or finishing a tough workout.

QUIT LIKE YOU’D START

Putting down the doughnuts. Dialling back on the porn. It takes mental planning. Carve out a moment to acknowledge what you’re doing. Note how it’s affecting you. (“It’s bad for me if I do this; it’s good for me that I don’t.”) And push on through.

I’ve had cases with very difficult patients, unruly patients, where we had multiple security guards at the door, restraining them. I go in there with no ego and a little bit of patience, and I sit down with this particular person. First of all, I show them I understand where they’re coming from. You walk into a room where there are security guards, and some part of me says, ‘You know, this person is probably more scared than anything’. We learn techniques about sitting down at a patient’s eye level. I tell them, “I’m the person in charge of what happens to you today, and if I’m on your side, you’re gonna be okay”. But I give them only one chance. It’s amazing the amount of de-escalation that occurs when you give them a little bit of empowerment. And give them a sense of humanity. It’d be easier for me just to tell security to restrain them. But then I’d lose a little part of my humanity, because I know I could have done better. As much as I talk about difficult cases or patients and having to deal with them, it really is the most enjoyable part of the job.

HAFEZ BAZZI, an ER doctor at Ascension St. John Hospital, Detroit

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April 2019

A+ NUTRITION

nutrition. Its 500-kilojoule, 65-ml vial promises to upgrade athletic performance with a dose of fuel from ketones. So your body gets a boost not from the usual nutrients – protein, carbs and fat – but from these ketones, which are thought to be extra-powerful, long-burning sources of energy. That’s seriously appealing to anyone who’s been on the sagging back end of a tough endurance workout. Until recently, though, the only way to get a high level of ketones in your body was to make them yourself – you produce them when you don’t have enough carbohydrates to burn, as keto-diet followers well know. Figuring out how to create a safe, effective ketone that you could swallow eluded scientists for decades. But researchers have finally been able to develop the molecular-chemistry techniques to produce them in a lab – and then market them to you.

BEHIND THE BUZZ

LIQ UID FUE L

Some scien tists think you can drin k keton es and take yo ur performance to a new level – ed. no low-carb diet requir verage? e b t u o k r o ust-have w m t x e n e h tried it Is this t a i c s a M Kristen ANY PRODUCT using the words keto and performance will turn people’s heads right now. Especially if it comes in a sleek, shot-like bottle with a chiselled cyclist on the front – at the we’re-not-just-playing-around-here price of $99 for three doses. Doesn’t hurt, either, that it’s billed as such potentially powerful fuel for your body that even NASA is exploring a similar supplement for astronauts on future missions to Mars. Which explains the chatter around HVMN Ketone, a new energy drink that aims to be the SpaceX of sports

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As fuel, ketones are efficient. They produce more ATP – the intracellular currency that powers cell activity – per molecule than glucose does. When burned, ketones yield zero lactic acid (the compound created when glucose is used, causing the burning feeling at

the end of a sprint). If they were cars, glucose would be a coal-rolling ute; ketones an electric-powered Tesla. Proponents say that when supplemental ketones are on board, you use them as your primary fuel instead of stored glucose – which you can hold about 8000 kilojoules of – helping you go longer and recover better. That’s why the keto diet has been an obsession for runners, cyclists and other endurance enthusiasts looking to hack time off their PB. The problem is that arriving at and acclimatising to ketosis through food can take weeks, during which athletic performance suffers. (And you do too, with what’s known as the “keto flu”. Temporary, but unpleasant.) Small surprise, then, that scientists tried for years to synthesise ketones to be used as an energy supplement. Mostly, they failed. Ketone salts have been around since the 1960s, but they’re different – they’re dietary supplements created with sodium, potassium, calcium or magnesium, and their ability to raise blood-ketone levels is limited. In 2003, the US military’s secret research branch DARPA got things rolling more quickly when it wanted to develop a fuel to keep soldiers mentally sharp and physically strong during long missions in extreme conditions. After 12 years and $10 million in funding, two of the world’s foremost ketosis researchers – Kieran Clarke, a professor of physiological biochemistry at Oxford University, and Dr Richard Veech, of the National Institutes of Health – created a liquid serum that seemed to do just that. Their ketone product, DeltaG, was cleared for use in bars, gels and beverages in March 2015. Not long after, DeltaG caught the attention of HVMN cofounder Geoffrey Woo, a computer scientist turned biohacking entrepreneur fascinated by ketones. Within months, he secured a licensing deal whereby DeltaG would be available in his product alone, making it the only liquid ketone on the market – and raising questions about whether it’s a useful product or just a potentially lucrative idea.

SCIENCE WEIGHS IN Research on this – as with any new science – has been back and forth. A study led by Clarke’s team (before the HVMN licensing deal), published in Cell Metabolism, found that a group of elite cyclists who took DeltaG along with a carb-rich drink before a half-hour workout rode 2 per cent further than when they were given only the drink. It’s

SPORTS-NUTRITION GAME CHANGERS Could HVMN Ketone be the next entry in this timeline?

’80s BCAAs

Research on branched-chain amino acids became popular in this decade. With strength training really taking off (thanks, Arnold), the promise of muscle growth made BCAA supplements a popular choice.

’90s Whey Protein

Building on BCAA research, the focus shifted to whey – a complete protein found in milk that’s often used in energy bars and proteindrink mixes. Today, the whey-protein market is worth more than $8.2 billion globally.

a no-big-deal stat for your average park cyclist or runner, but it could be the difference between silver and gold for Olympians. Yet when researchers from the Australian Institute of Sport conducted a similar study with a different ketone, there was no such success. Riders performed worse than they did on a placebo and reported side effects from dry retching to nausea to prolonged vomiting. Brianna Stubbs, lead researcher at HVMN, blamed the use of a different ketone compound for the failure. To shut down naysayers, the brand is currently working with elite Italian cyclist Vittoria Bussi, who in September used HVMN Ketone and broke the women’s hour-long cycling record – set in 2016 – by 27 metres.

WHAT THEY (MIGHT) DO BEST So could liquid ketones be the biohack you’re looking for – assuming they don’t make you sick first? If you want to make your mark in anaerobic activities like HIIT and sprints, no. Since ketones blunt your body’s ability to tap into carbohydrate reserves, they limit access to the quick energy you need to perform at a high intensity, explains Chelsea Burkart, a sports dietitian at Texas State University. Even in endurance sports, the effects may not guarantee you a win. “The initial goal was to help the military on multiday missions, when they were in gruelling conditions without a food source,” says Burkart. So if your objective is purely distance, and not pace or time, they may enhance your performance, she says. But let’s face it,

Creatine

The public caught on to creatine supplements in the ’90s, especially after many athletes at the 1996 Olympics attributed their success to creatine use. A 2018 market report expected the industry to grow through 2025.

2010s Ultra-CarbDrinks

Top marathoners like Eliud Kipchoge and Galen Rupp have been using a higher-carb drink called Maurten during races. (They’re not sponsored by the brand.) It forms a hydrogel in the stomach, and users say it causes less digestive upset.

most athletes want signifiantly more than that.

IN REAL LIFE While the debate rages, I have the chance to make up my own mind. In San Francisco, I meet with Woo and Stubbs for a crash course in ketone biochemistry. At the end of our twohour meeting, Woo slides six bottles of ketone toward me across the conference-room table. A week later, I’m prepping for a run. When I prick my finger to measure my ketones, as directed by Stubbs, my levels are low, hovering at just about zero. I take the drink. It’s clear, and thick like syrup. The taste is nauseating. Fruit-flavoured nail polish. Some 45 minutes later, my ketone levels have shot up – Stubbs says that’s on par with what I might see after four to six weeks’ strict adherence to the keto diet. I set out at a steady pace, with the intention of running for as long as I can, but I’m unable to discern a difference from my usual self, except for the overwhelming sensation of a burning in my esophagus. After barely getting into a rhythm, I have to turn around – the ketone is burping back up, and it kind of hurts. With research exploring the potential of lab-made ketones to improve recovery and enhance cognitive function, it at least feels . . . exciting. If I were a pro athlete, I’d be watching this space. And hoping HVMN brings some flavour chemists on board. But until I become an ultramarathoner (unlikely), I don’t think spending $33 on a bottle of the stuff makes sense.

What Performance Fuel Smells Like Bitter and chemical-y to the tongue, but treacly to the nose: our staff testers likened the scent of HVMN to cough syrup, pink Starbursts and “the raspberry vodka I threw up on in university”. Tempted anyway? Three bottles for $US99 at hvmn.com

April 2019

menshealth.com.au

STYLE

Milder tempe era atures are yo ourr cu ue to ramp p up the styl ye Clothes may maketh the man. But when you’re sweltering through summer, “there’s only so much you can do,” says MH style editor Jeff Lack. Which is another reason to celebrate the arrival of autumn: it’s a chance for self-expression through your choice of apparel.

ABOVE

Hugo Boss turtleneck, $319 Hugo Boss leather pant, $1999 H&M shirt, $44.99 LEFT

STYLING BY JEFF LACK PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID COLLINS

Calibre shirt, $239 Calibre blazer, $599

April 2019

The wonderful world of layering is now at your fingertips – “as well as a diverse range of textural options,” says Lack. In cooler weather, corduroy, leather and even velvet are all sane and fashionable options. ”Army green is a colour of the moment,” says Lack. And paisley prints and polos bearing prominent logos are similarly on trend. Braver souls could show up for dinner in a kimono-style blazer. Because fall favours the brave. RIGHT

BELOW LEFT

Zegna mesh-knit shirt, POA Barenia Venezia jacket, $400, from matchesfashion.com Farage chinos, $329 Lacoste Sideline sneakers, $129.95, from TheIconicMen.com.au

Aldo Aluer sneakers, $79 TheIconicMen.com.au Levi’s camo pants, $149.95 Loewe T-shirt, $415, from matchesfashion.com Zegna blazer, $5455 MIDDLE

Prada shirt $840, and Raye jacket, $837, both from matchesfashion.com Farage chinos, $329 FAR RIGHT

BELOW RIGHT

Moncler top, $385 Moncler spray jacket, $1420 Ermenegildo Zegna trousers, $2245 Adidas Originals sneakers, $200, from TheIconicMen.com.au

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Puma Thunder Spectra sneakers, $180, from TheIconicMen.com.au H&M pants, $24.99 H&M striped shirt, $44.99 Zegna couture leather outerwear, POA

STYLE

April 2019 59

BRUSH UP ON YOUR GROOMING

THE LATEST NEWS,TRENDS AND EASY HOW-TOS FOR YOUR HAIR,FACE AND BODY + TRIAL PRODUCTS FOR FREE

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STYLE

STY LE FOR BIG GU YS That imposing frame you’ve built by sweat and toil fills out a T-shirt nicely. Here’s how to showcase it away from the gym, with MH fitness director Todd Liubinskas “We’ve all seen footballers stuffed into suits, and it’s not pretty,” says MH style editor Jeff Lack. Any heavily muscled guy needs to be careful when he sheds the T-bar singlets for dressier ensembles. The key, of course, is fit: you want your clothes to reveal the silhouette of an athletic body, but without a hint of button-popping, collar-strangling pressure. “Every man can look great in a suit,” says Lack, who’s inclined to steer bigger guys towards a tailor. You might be able to pull something off the rack that looks good. But no one ever regrets spending a little more to achieve a perfect fit.

RIGHT

Suit Supply: Suit, $699 Shirt, $119 Tie, $69 Pocket handkerchief, $49 Waistcoat, $169

April 2019

Adidas Perfomance jacket, $150 from TheIconicMen.com.au

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STYLE

Big and bulky works on the footy field and in the shot put circle. In civilian life, however, consider employing techniques that have a slimming effect, such as rolling up the hems of your chinos to expose relatively slender ankles. “Monochromatic looks in dark colours, such as navy or charcoal, can also take 10 kilograms off your appearance,” says Lack. You’re not trying to hide that you’ve got a killer rig. You’re simply hinting at the fact rather than sceaming it from the rooftops.

TOP LEFT

Nudie Jeans jacket, $359 Staple Superior T-shirt, $14.95 Nautica pants, $89.95 Nike sneakers, $220 All from TheIconicMen.com.au

TOP RIGHT

Staple Superior T-shirt, $14.95 Nike pants, $95 Nike sneakers, $220 All from TheIconicMen.com.au

LEFT

Polo Ralph Lauren blazer, $649 Polo Ralph Lauren shirt, $149 Polo Ralph Lauren pants, $269 Staple Superior loafers, $89.95 All from TheIconicMen.com.au

April 2019 63

While they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, waistcoats can be a stylish addition to the bigger man’s wardrobe. Aside from providing extra warmth, eye-catching interest and elevated smartness, the waistcoat can be slimming for the guy whose ample musculature is accompanied by a little extra padding around the middle. Waistcoats will help conceal a little overindulgence. Always wear it under a jacket, though. Unless you’re a waiter.

TOP LEFT

Farage suit, $1299 Farage shirt, $229 Declic tie, $129 & pocket square $89.95 BOTTOM RIGHT BOTTOM LEFT

Puma pullover, $120 Puma pants, $80 Both from: TheIconicMen.com.au

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Polo Ralph Lauren sweater, $299 Staple Superior pants, $69.95 Both from: TheIconicMen.com.au

STYLE

Staple Superior T-shirt, $14.95 Moncler Sportivo pantaloons, $540 Moncler sneakers, from $640

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April 2019 65

WA T C H E S

DRIVE TIME

Get into gear with a chronograph inspired by the high-octane energy of the track BY LUKE BENEDICTUS

TAG Heuer Carrera Calibre Heuer 02 Automatic

CHRONOGRAPHS AND MOTORSPORTS are as closely intermeshed as the black and white squares on a chequered flag. “People who like car engines generally like watches,” admits Andrew McUtchen, the founder of the watch website Time and Tide (timeandtidewatches.com). “A mechanical watch is essentially an engine on your wrist.” At the track meanwhile, watch and car brands have also been close ever since Jack Heuer struck a deal with Enzo Ferrari in 1972 to provide timing equipment to Ferrari. “Motorsports have been connected to watch brands since the James Hunt era,” McUtchen adds. “The timing of motorsports has always been taken care of by watch brands rather than an independent timing authority.” Given that both worlds remain obsessed with split-second precision and continuous technical innovation, it’s a relationship that’ll never run out of gas.

Ayrton Senna is widely regarded as one of the greatest Formula One drivers of all time. This chronograph was made in the Brazilian’s honour and features his signature “S” on the bezel and sub-dial.

$7800

Tissot T-Race MotoGP 2019

Tissot is the timekeeper of the MotoGP and this latest chrono trades on the sport’s high-performance tech. The watch’s black ring is forged from carbon fibre, a material widely used in motorcycles for its lightness and resilience.

$1775

In 1963, a legend was born: the Jaguar Lightweight E-type racer. That’s the inspiration for Bremont’s MKII model that bears the Jaguar heritage logo and hour markings in the style of the numerals found on E-Type instruments.

Bremont Jaguar MKII/WH $8800

Omega CK2998 $7825

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Crafted from thin leather for added sensitivity, driving gloves are studded with ventilation holes so your hands don’t sweat. Omega’s vintage-inspired stunner echoes this tradition with its panda dial nestling on a perforated strap.

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YOUR HEALTHIEST YEAR EVER

HEALTH

2019

Jessica Migala

Illustrations By

Matt Needle

Sagging energy, climbing cholesterol, mounting worries and gut trouble are so 2018. Now is the time to turn your health around. While your friends will be eating overpriced salads and working out for three hours a day, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be taking the smarter, easier route to total wellness. This is how to get there, no DNA test or wholebody scan required April 2019

YOUR BRAIN

SUPERCHARGE YOUR FOCUS TEST YOURSELF

HOW DID YOU DO?

Go somewhere you can talk out loud. Then read the words in colour twice: First Read: F Red G re en Ye llow B lu e O ra ng e Ye llow G re en Red Pu rp le 72

Ye llow B lu e O ra ng e Pu rp le Ye llow O ra ng e B lu e G re en Red

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G re en B lu e O ra ng e Ye llow G re en Pu rp le Ye llow Red O ra ng e

S the names of the Say colours aloud (so you’d c say the word red as “red”) and record your time.

Second Read: S

R Read the list aloud again, but this time say the b colour each word c iss printed in. So if the word red is printed in w green, you’d say “green,” g not “red.” n

Compare your two times. If there’s little difference between them, you can focus well and think quickly. Your attention, processing speed and flexibility are all high. If you stumbled over the second reading, your overtaxed brain may just need some tweaking.

THE TUNE-UP Flex your concentration muscles with brain-training games like those from Lumosity, says Sanam Hafeez, a neuropsychologist. Or try giving a conversation all of your attention, says Chris Bailey, author of Hyperfocus. That means focusing less on what you’re going to say and more on what the other person is trying to express.

HEALTH

YOUR HEAD

LIGHTEN YOUR MOOD TEST YOURSELF

HOW DID YOU DO?

Ask yourself this: over the past two weeks, how often have I had the following problems? 1. Had little interest or pleasure in doing things

An answer of several days or more on both items means you may be experiencing depression, as nearly 1 million Australians do each year. Depression can be a stealth bomber. It can lie to you and tell you that your boss’s bad management style, your partner’s mood or your neighbour’s barking dog is causing what you’re feeling. (Anger and

Not at all

disorganisation can be signs of depression in guys.) When men think there’s something else to blame, they “feel like they only need to endure or compensate, which explains why they’re less likely than women to seek help,” says psychiatrist Dr John Sharp of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and author of The Insight Cure.

THE TUNE-UP

Several days More than half the days Nearly every day

2. Felt down or hopeless Not at all Several days More than half the days Nearly every day

We won’t sugarcoat it: you may need to talk to a therapist or other professional. Depression is a treatable medical problem, and like a leaky pipe, the earlier you address it, the easier it is to manage. You’re not always in for drugs or years of therapy – some forms of counselling involve only several weeks of concentrated work. But for a lot of men, “that first step into therapy is kind of a doozy,” Sharp says.

If it’s easier to talk yourself out of it than to go, try the gym: exercise can help lift mood. If that’s not going to happen, either (not easy, we know), the digital world may offer some reprieve via apps like MoodMission (moodmission.com) or This Way Up (thiswayup.org.au). Or search for others on Psyberguide.org, a nonprofit affiliated with Northwestern University in the US that reviews mental-health apps.

YOUR BLOODSTREAM

STEADY YOUR BLOOD SUGAR TEST YOURSELF

THE TUNE-UP

Check the box next to each item you consume in a given day and add up the points Packet of instant flavoured oats

375ml soft drink +10 points

+3 points

180ml container of flavoured yoghurt

½ cup of ice cream +3.5 points

+3 points

Three biscuits

Flavoured latte

+3.5 points

+4 points

Energy drink

+9 points

Tablespoon of tomato sauce +1 point

Packet of sugar in coffee

Two tablespoons of bottled salad dressing +0.5 points

Energy bar +5 points

+0.75 points

HOW DID YOU DO? If you scored: 0–9 points: Nice. That’s where you’re supposed to be. 10+ points: Overload! But you probably knew that already.

Each point represents about one teaspoon of sugar, and the upper limit of added sugar for guys is nine teaspoons a day. (That’s 36 grams of added sugar, or 600 kJ. So, not a lot.) Our quiz may not substitute for a blood-sugar test at the doctor’s office, but can be a major eye-opener.

Even when you’re generally eating what you think you should, too much sugar may still affect your body, says exercise physiologist Jim White. Beyond adding lard around your waist, sugar overload can devastate your insides, raising heart disease and diabetes risk.

Nix the sugary drinks first. “These are the number-one source of added sugar,” says White. Soft drink is a prime target, of course; a single can contains 89 per cent of a day’s sugar. But there are so many other ways you may be downing sugar, like in sweetened coffee (eight grams in two teaspoons of sugar) and bottled cold coffee beverages (as many as 32 grams per bottle). You don’t have to go into taste-bud deprivation and shift straight to tap water, (although that would save you money.) Flavoured waters have really upped their game, says White. Get a sweet taste with zero sugar from bottles like Mount Franklin lime water.

April 2019

YOUR HEART

BUILD A HEALTHIER HEART TEST YOURSELF

Grab a tape measure and locate your waist. (It’s at belly-button height, not the undergut spot your belt may have migrated to.) Pull the tape measure around you, exhale, and get the digits HOW DID YOU DO? There’s only one right answer: less than 102 cm. No matter how tall you are. “More than 102 cm is associated with a whole bunch of problems, like diabetes or high blood pressure or cholesterol – if you don’t already have those,” says Dr John Higgins, a sports cardiologist with McGovern Medical School.

THE TUNE-UP Don’t just reflexively reach for a baby aspirin. If you don’t already have heart disease, says Higgins, its benefits likely won’t outweigh the risks. Of course, your waist (and risks) shrink when you eat well and exercise, but try sleep, too. People who went from six to between seven and eight hours a night gained less abdominal fat over six years than short sleepers, says a study in Obesity.

BONUS TUNE-UP LENGTHEN YOUR LIFE Sit on the floor, then get back up. People ages 51 to 80 who could do this without using their hands or knees for help, without having to place their hands on their knees, and without losing their balance had lower death rates over an average of six years than people who had to give themselves help. Practise! 74

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YOUR BLOOD VESSELS

TUNE UP YOUR ARTERIES TEST YOURSELF

Sit on the floor with your back flat against a wall, legs straight out in front of you. Place your hands on top of your legs and slide your fingertips toward your toes. (Bending your knees is cheating.) I can touch my ankles and/or toes My ankles are too far away

HOW DID YOU DO?

THE TUNE-UP

If you can reach your ankles or beyond, it means good things for your arteries. People with more flexible bodies likely have more flexible arteries, according to a 2017 research review in The Journal of Physical Fitness and Sports Medicine. “This test might uncover someone who has untreated cardiovascular disease or high blood pressure,” says Higgins, as stiff arteries are related to both issues.

The test is the cure. The act of stretching may actually help your arteries become more elastic, Higgins explains. If you want to do more than just reach for your ankles, you can reliably increase flexibility with a couple minutes of foam rolling before and after a workout, says trainer Michael Conlon, owner of Finish Line Physical Therapy. But there’s more to it than simply rolling up and down on a muscle a few times. Ideally, you should roll in two different directions. For instance, if you’re working on your quads, don’t just move the roller up and down them; move your quads side-to-side on the roller, too.

HEALTH

YOUR INTESTINES

SOOTHE A GRUMPY GUT TEST YOURSELF

Do the turn-around test – look before you flush. Where would your poop land on this chart? (Not literally.) Types 1, 2: Separate,

That means:

Types 3, 4, 5: Sausageshaped, but with cracks on the surface (3); sausage- or snakelike, smooth surface (4); soft blobs with clearcut edges (5).

That means: It’s all good—any of these is ideal. (Transit time: about 24 hours or less.)

Types 6, 7: Fluffy with ragged edges or mushy (6); entirely liquid (7).

That means: Diarrhea.

hard lumps, like nuts or sausages.

Constipation. (Transit time: 55 hours or more.)

(Transit time: about two hours or less.)

HOW DID YOU DO?

THE TUNE-UP

The “type” you fall into “is a reasonably accurate predictor of colonic transit rate,” says Dr Michael D. Brown, director of the GI/Hepatology Fellowship Program at Rush University Medical Center. That’s the time it takes for food to move from bite through bowel, and it’s an indicator of your gut’s health. The longer it takes, the more time bacteria has to feed and create harmful by-products, says researcher Tine Rask Licht of the National Food Institute at the Technical University of Denmark. And those by-products, she says, may be associated with colon cancer.

Eat more fibre. Most guys consume less than half their quota of 38 grams a day. Getting fibre from foods like whole grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables is preferable to taking supplements, says Brown, as real foods contain a host of vitamins and phytonutrients that are also good for you. To hit your daily mark, you’ll probably need to work for it. A cup of oatmeal has three grams; an apple has five – but that gets you only about a fifth of the way there. To pile it on, turn to legumes for help. For instance, one cup of kidney beans contains a whopping 16g of fibre, over half your daily needs.

YOUR GOODS

PROTECT YOUR PENIS TEST YOURSELF

Although not TGA approved, online STI kits are available in Australia. Pee, drip some blood from your fingertip or swab. Send in the sample and wait . . . or just go see your GP HOW DID YOU DO?

THE TUNE-UP

STIs are on the rise. According to health data from the Kirby Institut, 18,588 cases of gonorrhoea were detected in Australia in 2015, up from 8388 cases in 2006. Similarly, syphilis cases have more than tripled, while cases of chlamydia have increased by 43 per cent. “If you’re sexually active, you should get an STD test once a year,” says Dr Jamin Brahmbhatt, a urologist at Orlando Health. (Testing after every partner is even better. ) “Don’t assume you’re fine if you don’t have signs. Not every guy will have symptoms like burning with urination, discharge or pain.” All the more reason to get checked. Yes, it’s a pain in the arse but it beats the potential pain elsewhere down the line. “You’re avoiding problems like scarring in your urethra, chronic pain and fertility issues,” says Brahmbhatt.

Glove up. Cool condom companies are changing the game with nicely packaged products you can order from your sofa. Some to try: • The LELO Hex has a premiumvodka-style logo and a superthin feel ($46 for 36 at lelo.com). • My One is available in 60 different sizes (starting at $10 for six; myonecondoms.com). • Sustain Condoms are fair trade and vegan. Honestly, the company markets its condoms to women – but they’re vaginafriendly, and you get bonus points for being vagina-focused ($15 for 10 Ultra Thin or Large Comfort Fit; amazon.com.au).

BONUS AT-HOME CHECK:

DO YOU GET MORNING WOOD? Yes?

Good. Start your day.

No?

Well . . . something’s going on. This is one of the first questions urologists ask guys with erectile dysfunction, says Brahmbhatt. If you’re hard upon waking, everything’s working under the hood. If not, there may be a lifestyle problem – ”things like stress, anxiety, lack of sleep and relationship issues factor in,” he explains – or a medical problem. “Even if you have the biggest penis, it still has some of the smallest blood vessels in the body.” Heart disease can affect blood-vessel function all over your body. If there’s not enough blood flow, you’ll be limp. “We found early heart disease on a couple guys this year because they came in with erectile dysfunction,” Brahmbhatt says.

April 2019

JACK VINEY MELBOURNE 24

FOLLOW THE LEADER BY LUKE BENEDICTUS PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES GEER

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LEADERSHIP

Leadership is the ability to translate vision into reality. It’s about unlocking a team’s potential and inspiring them by word, deed or a banana-kick from the boundary. On the brink of the new AFL season, three of the game’s most respected skippers reveal their most important leadership lessons and why modern captaincy involves more than just tossing a coin

TRAVIS BOAK PORT ADELAIDE 30

SCOTT PENDLEBURY COLLINGWOOD 31

April 2019

JACK VINEY

MELBOURNE 24

R O F S E R A P E R P E N “NOT EVERYO ” Y A W E M A S E H T L FOOTBAL An evolving grasp of man-management has turned the Demons midfielder into a true leader of men March 31, 2013. Deep in the bowels of the MCG an inquisition has begun. Demons coach Mark Neeld is red-faced with anger. He’s just watched his team get smashed by Port Adelaide in their first-round match. The losing margin: 79 points. Any newseason optimism is already dead. Now Neeld wants answers. Shut in the locker room, the Demons players sit around looking sheepish and avoiding eye-contact with the coach. Co-captain Jack Grimes says a few words, urging his teammates to step up and raise their game. Then there is a long and uncomfortable silence. Finally, Jack Viney raises his voice. Input from this source is completely unexpected. Viney, after all, is a callow teenager who made his senior debut only today. What’s he got to offer a roomful of grizzled pros with hundreds of games behind them? Today, Viney smiles at the memory. “I’ve always been taught if I see something then say something,” he recalls. “I thought we were playing for ourselves rather than working together as a team. And that we weren’t going to get too far unless we started trusting each other a bit more.” That Viney, now the Demons’ skipper, had the balls to fire up his team as an 18-year-old rookie is a reflection of his natural authority. Not that his motivational tirade did any good. In the next round, Essendon walloped Melbourne by 148 points and his team proceeded

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to win just two games all season, limping to 17th place on the ladder that season and the next. “My first couple of years in the system were brutal,” Viney sighs. “Fans were throwing their scarves at us, we were getting booed off the field and I’m seeing my teammates – who were 28-year-old men – cry in the change room. Yeah, that was a pretty shocking introduction into AFL football.” At this point, a lot of players would look for an escape. Viney reframed the situation, opting to view it as an opportunity. The son of former Demons great Todd Viney has never ducked a challenge and bristled with ambition from an early age. Carlton legend Chris Judd met him when Viney was just 16 and was struck by his single-minded intent. “He was super-impressive even when he was a young kid,” Judd told The Age. “You could tell how focused he was and how he appeared to have traits that showed him to be more driven than your average player.”

PREPARE FOR SUCCESS Yes, the Demons were a shambolic mess during Viney’s first two seasons. But what the young player clung to was the potential for transformation. “I knew Melbourne wasn’t where it wanted to be and was looking for strong leaders and strong characters . . . I wanted to be that person.” Viney certainly had the determination to give it a crack. As Rob Jackson, the Demons’ former strength and conditioning coach once said: “Jack’s very aggressive in the pursuit of becoming excellent.”

LEADERSHIP

By the age of 12, Viney was already pumping out sets of pushups every night before bed. He recruited a sprint coach to train with before he even played in the TAC Cup. By the time he reached the Demons, Viney’s mindset had become pathologically competitive. He pursued a torturous regimen of ice-baths, carb-loading and teetotalism to make sure he extracted the most from his athletic potential. “Whatever I did, I always did it to the nth degree and became kind of anal about it,” he admits. That beserk commitment paid off. By his third season, Viney was dubbed “the new Brett Kirk” by former Brownlow Medallist Gerard Healy. The 2016 season saw him inducted into the Demons’ leadership group and named Best and Fairest. The following year he was unveiled as co-captain of the club.

TRIDENT TESTED How Viney got strong Viney is a beast in the gym. “He’s second to none,” says James McGeoch, head of athletic development for the Demons. “He’s naturally pretty gifted with physical attributes, but he’s also got the work ethic to go with it. He’s always striving to find other new ways to get better.” Measuring up at 178 centimetres and 84kg, Viney isn’t especially big, but is capable of explosive power. “He already benches 165kg,” McGeoch says with

approval. “That’s essentially double his bodyweight.” Viney got into this phenomenal shape by sticking to one training principle. “For me, the number one thing is just consistency,” he says. “Long-term consistency will trump short-term intensity. You can’t just expect to go into the gym and lift really hard for a short period of time and expect to get gains. You’ve got to do it consistently.”

EMBRACE DIFFERENCE But while Viney’s dedication fast-tracked his ascent as a player, it had an unexpected drawback for him as a leader. Ultimately, he plays a team sport and few (if any) players attack their day-job with the same zeal. “I was such a raw leader that whenever I thought something didn’t meet those standards, I would say it – I would hit you on the head,” Viney concedes. Those standards were skyhigh – Viney had no time for shortcuts. After training, he would stay at the club every night to 6pm, putting in extra hours to fine-tune his body in preparation for the next session. He’d shake his head in bewilderment at anyone who failed to match his commitment. The turning point for Viney as a leader was the realisation that different players train in different ways. For some of his teammates taking time off to hang out with their families is the pressure-release valve that allows them to summon the required intensity for game day. Other players have injuries to manage and must nurse their

bodies through training to ensure they’re in optimal shape for the next round. “You’ve got 45 different people on our list and everyone’s got different things they like to do to put themselves in a better mindset to perform,” Viney says. “You’ve got to take a step back and not be as judgemental. I’ve been learning how to do that.” Understanding and accepting different players’ methods has made Viney a more effective leader and builds on the respect he already commands. As his teammate Dom Tyson points out: “He’s our captain and you walk that little bit taller when he’s on the field with you.” Last season, Viney roused the Demons to the brink of greatness, taking them to the finals for the first time since 2006. This season, he’s determined to propel them even further. “I want to be someone who influences people on game day through my actions, my communication and my encouragement,” he says. “That’s the kind of leader I want to be.”

SUPERSIZE YOUR STRENGTH

USE JAMES MCGEOCH’S WORKOUT FOR DEMONS’ DRAFT PICKS TO BULK UP FAST Repeat each superset four times. Your rep range should be between 5-8 reps. Once you hit 8 reps increase the weight and drop back down to four sets of 5 reps

SUPERSET 1

SUPERSET 2

Exercise 1 Bench press Exercise 2 Medicine ball chest throw

Exercise 1 Wide-grip pull-up Exercise 2 Band pull-apart. “Hold a resistance band and try to pull them apart so you’re retracting through your shoulder blades,” McGeoch says.

SUPERSET 3 Exercise 1 Dumbbell bent-over row Exercise 2 Hang-toughs. With two hands on a pull-up bar, take your feet off the ground and just hang. Aim for 30 seconds.

SUPERSET 4 Exercise 1 Farmer’s walk Exercise 2 Pallof press. Attach a resistance band around a pole. Kneel or stand about a metre away from the pole and pull the band to your chest. Now while bracing your core, push the band straight out, so it stays directly in front of your chest. Slowly return the band to your chest.

April 2019

TRAVIS BOAK

PORT ADELAIDE 30

Y L E T E L P M O C E R ’ U O “ONE THING Y ” F L E S R U O Y S I F O L IN CONTRO Want to become a better leader? What Travis Boak learnt is that you need to start by tending to your own backyard After six seasons, Travis Boak is stepping down as the Port Adelaide skipper. He’s made the decision in the hope that freshening things up at the helm will benefit the team after a difficult season (in 2018,the Power slumped to six losses in their last seven games). Yet while he’s convinced it’s the right move to make, the decision is still tinged with regret. “Leading your boys out when you’re walking onto the MCG or the Adelaide Oval in front of a full house . . . ” Boak lets out a wistful sigh. “That is the best feeling. I’ll definitely miss that.” On a daily basis, not much will change, he suspects. Sure, he’ll no longer rally his men with a pre-game pep-talk. But beyond that he retains a key role in the leadership group and remains devoted to the club’s progress. Conceding the captaincy, though, does have one tangible benefit: it’ll lighten his personal load. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, or in Boak’s case, Port Adelaide’s famous No.1 jersey. Speaking with rare candour, the 30-year-old admits that while leadership was a huge privilege, there were times when it could also feel like a burden. The 2017 season was particularly hard. There was huge pressure on Port to make the finals after disappointment the previous two years, but they responded to the challenge with conviction. Boak adapted to a new forward/midfield role and things started to click for the Power. They made the last eight and took on West Coast in the

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first preliminary final. The game was a titanic struggle that went into extra time. With 20 seconds left on the clock, Port led by four points while the Eagles looked out of gas. Then everything unravelled. “There was this stoppage at the end of the game,” Boak recalls. “We didn’t set up correctly. I was around that stoppage and I wasn’t able to make the right decisions as a leader. I struggled in that moment as a captain. I wasn’t able to lead as best I could in that situation.” Luke Shuey promptly slotted the crucial goal that would send the Eagles through. Boak was haunted by what happened. Wracked with regret about his self-perceived failure, he was besieged with doubt and began to pore over the preceding seasons in morbid detail. As a captain, had he begun to focus too much on the big picture at the expense of his own form on the field? “I questioned myself a lot. You know, ‘Am I a good leader? Am I not in the right head-space anymore to lead the club?’ In that moment you doubt yourself a lot.” How Boak responded is instructive to anyone who’s battled against stress or stared down a crisis of confidence. Refusing to hide from the problem, he actively sought help.

BUILD INNER STRENGTH Ceri Evans is the Port Adelaide psychologist who famously helped the All Blacks overcome their reputation as big-game chokers to win the 2011 World Cup. Boak underwent a number of sessions with the mental-skills coach and, he admits, it wasn’t always pretty. These one-to-

LEADERSHIP

CORE VALUES

“HAVING A REALLY STRONG CORE AROUND YOUR LEGS, HIPS AND GLUTES IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN OUR GAME BECAUSE WE GET PUSHED OFF THE BALL”

To build an iron core, Boak regularly does circles of split-squats Hold a heavy medicine ball at chest height. 1 Step forward into a split squat and return. 2 Take a sideways step to the right moving into a lateral lunge and return. 3 Step backwards into a reverse split squat and then 4 Do a lateral lunge on the left side. Repeat four times.

SONNY RAMIREZ/ILLUSTRATIONROOM.COM.AU; CLOTHING BY LULULEMON

TAKE YOUR MEDICINE: BOAK REBOUNDED FROM SETBACKS BY REFRESHING HIMSELF MENTALLY.

ones were personal and highly confronting. “What Ceri was able to do with me was unlock all the pain and anger that were in my body and in my mind that I’d probably just buried,” says Boak. “A lot of it was based on what I went through with losing my dad when I was 16. “I was starting to overthink a lot of things. I just felt like I had so much going on in my head, and he was able to clear a lot of that. The sessions were definitely intense. But I walked out feeling lighter, a completely different person.” That wasn’t all Boak did to re-energise. In the post season, rather than kick back on holiday, he travelled to Santa Cruz in California to train with

biomechanical coach Austin Einhorn, who helps elite athletes from the NFL to the NBA learn to move more efficiently for optimal performance. Boak also went up to the Gold Coast to seek out Nam Baldwin, a stress-control specialist, who’s worked with a long list of sporting pros including Mick Fanning, Steph Gilmore and Pat Rafter. “One thing you’re completely in control of is yourself,” says Boak of these extra-curricular sessions. “Whether it’s how you cope with pressure situations, how you deal with your movement, how you deal with your emotional issues. “Doing those things reminded me, ‘Hang on, I’m putting so much in – I’m trying to improve

myself more than anyone, I’m setting a good example, I’m still in a position to be a good leader’.” In any leadership role your energy is mainly directed outwards. Your focus is on motivating your team and hitting your targets. Along the way, it’s easy to overlook the importance of self-care. Extra stress and long hours are part and parcel of leadership, but they also take their toll. Failure to look after yourself mentally and physically can impact your performance and even raise the spectre of burnout. What Boak realised and took decisive steps to correct is that leadership starts from building a solid foundation within. After all, he explains: “It’s extremely hard to lead a group of 45 blokes when you’re struggling yourself.”

April 2019

SCOTT PENDLEBURY

COLLINGWOOD 31

E V A H D L U O W E W , Y L “IDEAL . R E H T E G O T D E T A R B E L CE ” R E H T E G O T T R U H NOW LET’S After your team has suffered a crushing blow, how do you pick up the pieces to come back stronger? As the siren blared, Scott Pendlebury looked bewildered. The Collingwood skipper stared at the MCG turf and shook his head, trying to process what the hell had just happened. After the Magpies had led the 2018 Grand Final for almost the entire game, West Coast snatched victory with only minutes left on the clock. “I was shattered,” Pendlebury recalls. “It was five minutes where we weren’t in front for the whole Grand Final. They were just the wrong five minutes.” As the Eagles players whooped in triumph, Pendlebury surveyed the scene. His teammates were scattered around the field. Some lay facedown on the grass, their bodies convulsing with sobs. Others squatted on the turf, head in hands. Pendlebury wasn’t having it. Snapping into action, he called his teammates into a huddle ahead of West Coast’s trophy presentation. “When I looked around the field it was like we were a segregated group,” the 31-yearold explains. “There were all these people mourning in different ways and I wanted to get everyone together and 82

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say: ‘Our journey doesn’t stop here. I know we didn’t get what we wanted today. But the strength of our group all year has been how tight we are and how much we stick together. And we’re going to need each other more than ever in the next 24, 48 hours, so stick tight. Ideally, we would have celebrated together. Now let’s hurt together.’”

FOSTER TEAM SPIRIT It’s telling that before he’d even digested the shock of defeat himself, Pendlebury was already focused on his team’s welfare. Thinking like a captain is now second nature to him after being fast-tracked into the club’s leadership group at the tender age of 19. Back then, Pendlebury concentrated on letting his football do the talking. The midfielder has kicked on to become a hugely influential player who many believe could even eclipse his coach Nathan Buckley as the greatest Magpie of the modern era. What makes Pendlebury special are his vision and poise that enable him to float around the field almost in slowmotion amid crashing tackles and flailing limbs. His durability also reflects his intense professionalism and meticulous approach to his preparation. But Pendlebury has come to realise his role is about more than simply leading by example. Today, it’s more about creating the framework for success by mentoring younger players and boosting collective morale. His support last year of his young teammate Jordan De

LEADERSHIP

Goey was emblematic of this mindset. De Goey was banned by Collingwood after being caught drink-driving – his second offence in a year after breaking his hand in a bar fight. Suspended by the club, the 21-year-old was made to do labouring work and weekly shifts delivering food to homeless people at the Salvation Army. But he didn’t do it alone. Pendlebury and other senior players regularly turned up at the Salvos to serve two-hour shifts alongside De Goey. “As captain, as a leadership group we drove that,” Pendlebury says. “It was to show that we’re in it together, that we’re not going to isolate one guy while he was serving his penance. We’re still here for him. We’re still going to help him. We’re still going to guide him through.” That tactic paid off with interest as De Goey responded by coming back to become the Pies’ leading goal kicker for the season. But providing this support hasn’t just helped his teammates. Pendlebury insists that forging these connections has made him a better communicator and a more effective leader.

STRENGTHEN YOUR RESOLVE: BUILDING TEAM BONDS REQUIRES DEDICATED EFFORT.

CONNECT TO CONQUER “My evolution as a captain over the last few years has been about learning: how can I get the most out of this player? How can I get through to guys as quick as possible on the field. And how can I open myself up so they feel that they can get through to me.” Different players, he accepts, respond to different styles of communication. During a game, for example, De Goey happily responds to blunt simplicity (“I can have these almost barbaric conversations with him and we both get it”). Others require a more nuanced approach. How do you figure out the best way to connect with a team-mate or colleague? There’s no shortcut, says Pendlebury. The only way to develop that understanding is by spending “meaningful time” – going for coffees, catching up

for dinners, getting to know them off the field. “Once you’ve got a relationship it’s pretty easy to give feedback whether it be positive or active, whatever.” Results, of course, are the ultimate feedback and moving into the new season, Pendlebury faces a new challenge. How do you pick up the pieces after your team has suffered such a huge blow? The scar tissue from that Grand Final loss remains tender (“It still bloody hurts,” he admits). But Pendlebury wants his team to view the result in context. Yes, they could obsess over that final quarter and agonise over Sheed’s winning goal. But that would ignore the fact that last season was almost perfect for the Pies. “We didn’t miss a step,” he insists.

The important thing now, Pendlebury reasons, is to keep faith in the process that almost delivered and not let one dud result blow them off course. “It’s like if you lost out on some business,” Pendlebury says. “Did you do the best presentation you could? And if you did, then you can walk away regardless of the result, knowing that you gave it everything and that’s what you stand for. You don’t want to bend and find a different way if it’s not true to your core values. There’s games we lost last year that we were actually happy with how we played and there’s games we won where we weren’t.” Next season, Pendlebury’s men are going to refine their plan and stick to it. Collingwood have unfinished business to attend to.

TURBOCHARGE YOUR ENGINE To build match-winning stamina, try Pendlebury’s 5km challenge. Start your stopwatch and run 1km as fast as you can. Your rest time is however long you have left until the clock hits five minutes (so if you ran 1km in three minutes then you get a two-minute breather). “Then you go again. Five times,” Pendlebury says. “Your legs are cooked by the end of that.”

April 2019 83

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MIND

THE MEN’S HEALTH GUIDE TO

Muscle. Fat loss. Enlightenment. Whatever you’re searching for, there’s a person with an arsenal of hashtags and inspirational quotes, plus a sprinkle of science, to help you find it. But how much can you really trust them? PHOTOGRAPHY BY EDDIE GUY

WHAT ARE WE EVEN LOOKING FOR? Confessions of a guru junkie BY NATE GREEN

I REMEMBER WHEN I found the bodybuilding website Testosterone Nation. I was a 17-year-old skinny kid with shitty grades and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I devoured every article from every fitness expert on the site. They told me to train hard, eat big and try to make something of myself. I got to work. That was 16 years ago. In that time, I gained 14 kg of muscle, became a personal trainer, started a popular blog and scored a book deal to write a workout guide called Built for Show. I began receiving

thousands of emails from men around the world asking for my advice. One was from a guy who wanted to know if having sex with his girlfriend would reduce his testosterone levels and wreck his ability to gain muscle. I told him no, it wouldn’t – I’d Googled research that said as much. Even if it did, having sex was way better than having big biceps. I still stand by that. I soon found myself uncomfortably straddling two worlds – those of the seeker and the sought-after. Just like my idols, I had become a fitness guru.

Guru. Everyone I know – including me – hates that word. And yet there’s truth to it. When you witness the influence of some bloggers and podcasters, it can feel like a kind of religion. Call it the Church of SelfImprovement. We are all disciples and we worship daily: two-hour podcasts, YouTube videos, Instagram stories. What are we looking for? Salvation, of course. But we’re also looking for meaning. We know we’re going to die, and, dammit, we want to live our #bestlife before we do. April 2019 85

TIM FERRISS

ROBB WOLF

MARK SISSON

DR JOSEPH MERCOLA

Known as: Early

Known as:

The reach: 300 million downloads of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show; five New York Times bestsellers.

The reach: Two NYT bestsellers, including The Paleo Solution.

investor, author, self-experimenter.

Former research biochemist, author.

Take your cue from evolutionary biology and anthropology and eat and move the way humans were supposed to.

Adopt the strategies of the world’s most successful people and maximise your time, output, fitness, life.

The solid advice:

YOU CAN GURU, TOO! Just about anybody can do it. Here’s how:

1 2

Find a podcast studio. Or at least set up a microphone in your bathroom.

Spout platitudes and speak in Instagram quotes, like “We’re all human beings; we’re all just trying to figure it out” and “Find something you love and chase it,“ from the podcast Live Life Better with Scott Eastwood (son of Clint).

3 4 5

Get an Instagram following. Post photos of yourself, in your glory, working out, hawking products. Take ideas from studied-only-inanimals science and posit their application to listeners.

Have other gurus, experts, “experts” and authors on the show, whether highly qualified medical researchers or self-appointed sex-andrelationship authorities.

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The reach:

The message:

“What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.”

Emphasise unprocessed foods in your diet and get lots of varied exercise.

The suspect:

Ferriss has touted metformin for glucose control. According to Katz, metformin is effective for treating diabetes, but it has no benefit in healthy people and can injure the kidneys.

His claim that the paleo diet is the best way to be healthy remains scientifically unfounded, says Katz.

Aimed at: Proteinforward-diet junkies.

25 million monthly page views (self-reported).

The message:

Follow the guidance of this ripped 65-yearold to return your health to its genetic roots (by buying his products).

Take on Big Pharma and target the causes rather than the symptoms of ailments, often via alternative medicine.

The solid advice:

Sisson helped popularise paleo, which rejects processed foods, especially fast food and soft drink.

He’s been ahead of the medical community in touting the benefits of nutrients like omega-3s and CoQ10.

The suspect:

He’s selling paleo in a box, including ingredients like coconut oil, despite limited evidence of its long-term health benefits, says Katz.

Mercola has been ordered by the FDA to cease making false claims regarding his own products, sold on his website.

Aimed at: Health-

forward-diet junkies who can’t cook.

looking for an extra hour in the day.

( ( PERCEIVED BENEFITS

The reach:

600,000 monthly visitors to his blog, Mark’s Daily Apple (self-reported).

Aimed at: Protein-

Aimed at: Those

TIME SPENT LISTENING OR READING

Osteopathic physician, naturalhealth expert, debunker.

Triathlete, the Google of ancestral health.

conscious conspiracy theorists.

THE PAYOFF EQUATION

Is following a guru’s advice worth it? Do the math to find out!

ACTUAL PHYSICAL BENEFITS

MONEY SPENT

PSYCHIC ENERGY EXPENDED

WORTHINESS SCORE

PHILLIP FARAONE/GETTY IMAGES (FERRISS), JOHNSTONE STUDIOS (WOLF), COURTESY MARK SISSON (SISSON), TAYLOR CASTLE (MERCOLA) COURTESY JOSH AXE (AXE), MICHAEL STEWART/WIREIMAGE (ROGAN), SEAN ZANNI/PATRICK MCMULLAN/GETTY IMAGES (CHOPRA), IAN GAVAN/GETTY IMAGES (PALTROW), COURTESY ONNIT (MARCUS), ASTRID STAWIARZ/GETTY IMAGES (HOWES)

So we wake up early, put butter in our coffee, meditate, do burpees and dream of starting a travel blog while drinking ayahuasca and living in a refurbished van in Peru. Or whatever. We live in a time when anyone can get into the business of giving advice. Following that advice could change your life. That’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is who’s worth listening to. There are a lot of people doing good work out there. But there are also a lot of frauds. I don’t give much straight-up advice anymore. It’s presumptuous and we’re different people with different histories. I can’t tell you what to do. But I can share my experience. And that’s this: the people I’ve found who are worth listening to are the ones who’ve had success in some part of their life but who don’t perpetuate the idea that every part of their life is amazing. Yes, the gurus can help us change our lives. Sometimes we simply need a shot of inspiration and someone to show us the path. But we also need to be willing to pause the podcast and start walking on our own.

MIND

They sell books, promote supplements, preach from the podcast pulpit. Who are these people? Get to know the wide world of gurus with insight from nutriti nutrition ion n expert Dr David Da L L. Katzz

JOSH AXE, Known as: Doctor

of natural medicine, clinical nutritionist, health nut.

The reach: 1.4 million subscribers to a YouTube channel featuring Dr Chelsea, his wife; authored the bestseller Eat Dirt. The message:

Whole foods and natural remedies, like essential oils and herbs, can make you healthier and happier.

The solid advice: Natural before artificial. Organic before modified.

The suspect:

Katz notes that Axe is perhaps overly reliant on supplements and trendy foods like broth. “There’s no evidence of the health benefits of bone broth,” he says.

Aimed at: The

family that ketos together.

JOE ROGAN

DR DEEPAK CHOPRA

GWYNETH PALTROW

AUBREY MARCUS

LEWIS HOWES

Known as:

Known as: Actress,

Known as: CEO

Known as:

The reach: 10 million+ podcast downloads (self-reported); one NYT bestseller.

The reach: 80

Comedian, UFC commentator, podcaster.

The reach: 30

million+ monthly downloads of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.

The message:

Listen to mindexpanding conversations with guests like climber Alex Honnold and a stoned Elon Musk, covering topics from supplements to space-time.

The solid advice:

“Be nice to people. And do what you really want to do in this life.”

The suspect:

Rogan doesn’t sell his own line of supplements, but he’s endorsed ones from other guru types, like Aubrey Marcus (see right).

Aimed at:

Enlightened sportsradio listeners.

Physician, integrativemedicine expert.

The reach: 3.28

million Twitter followers; more than 85 books authored or coauthored.

The message: The

OG of alternative medicine and the new age fuses mind and body, Vedic science and Western medicine, to reduce stress and improve diet.

The solid advice:

Chopra was an early proponent of mindfulness as a salve for everything from stress to sleep to eating.

The suspect:

Suggesting that some of the supplements associated with him can help with mindfulness “hints at an effort to ‘cash in,’” says Katz.

Aimed at: The

spiritually minded.

entrepreneur, founder of Goop.

The reach: 2.4 million visitors per month to Goop.com (valued at $250 million). The message:

Let a beautiful movie star share her unbiased travel, shopping and health advice while giving a platform to her own cadre of mentors and experts.

The solid advice: High-quality aromatherapy products and sex toys are selfcare, too.

The suspect: The

site recently settled a consumer lawsuit over the veracity of health claims about its vaginal jade eggs.

Aimed at: Those with disposable income looking to buy a gift for a girlfriend.

and founder of Onnit, psychedelicmedicine advocate.

The message:

With the right training and supplements, a normal guy can do everything better.

The solid advice:

The Onnit Gym’s specialty leader is functional training, promoting fun ways to boost muscle and mobility.

The suspect:

Taking pills to be your “best” is a worrisome concept, says Katz. Many formulations offer vague promises like “boost athletic performance”.

Aimed at: Fitness buffs with a newage bent.

Podcaster, author, mentor, former pro athlete. million podcast downloads (self-reported).

The message: If a small-town boy can make it big and achieve his dreams, then so can you. Listen to inspiring authors, athletes and influencers to start believing in yourself, champ. The solid advice: The actionable motivational talks will get you taking on new goals.

The suspect:

Sometimes he’ll host questionable health and dietary authorities, including Goop’s Dr Steven Gundry, whose claims about lectin have been discredited.

Aimed at: Those who wish Tony Robbins were more affable.

THE MOST BATS#%T THINGS SAID ON THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE PODCAST “You can eat human meat – it doesn’t do anything. It’s human brains that is the real issue.” “Stilettos . . . I see women walking in them, and this is so crazy that this is a choice. I can’t imagine wearing something that would physically compromise me to the point where I literally can’t run away.” “There’s an equal number of things that people would say that are like the harmonica. Like you should be able to do slam poetry. . . . I can feed myself; I can house myself. I can do slam poetry.” “I struggle on the toilet. I’m not judgmental. I eat a lot, man. I take some horrific shits.” “I’ve shaved my butt. . . . I just had this conversation about this with someone the other day. . . . It changes the sound of your farts; they become more ducklike.” “ ‘I want you to spank me because I want you to spank me.’ ‘I don’t want you to spank me because you want to spank me.’ Big difference.” April 2019

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HEALTH

RENOWNED BIOHACKER AND BULLETPROOF COFFEE FOUNDER DAVE ASPREY IS ON A QUEST TO

LIVE TO

180 IS HE ON TRACK TO UNCOVER THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH? OR IS HE DREAMING? BY RACHEL MONROE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY IAN ALLEN

April 2019 89

Ten days before I met him at his home in British Columbia, Dave Asprey went to a clinic in Park City, Utah, where a surgeon harvested half a litre of bone marrow from his hips, filtered out the stem cells and injected them into every joint in his body. He then threaded a cannula along Asprey’s spinal column and injected stem cells inside his spinal cord and into his cerebral fluid. “And then they did all the cosmetic stuff,” Asprey told me. “Hey, I’m unconscious, you’ve got extra stem cells – put ’em everywhere!” Everywhere meaning his scalp, to make his hair more abundant and lustrous; his face, to smooth out wrinkles; and his “male organs,” for – well, I’ll leave that part up to your imagination. 90

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According to Asprey, what he’d just endured was “the most extensive stem-cell treatment that’s ever been done on a person at one time”. All told, it was an expensive and invasive procedure, which is particularly striking considering that there’s nothing wrong with him. Nothing wrong, that is, other than regular old human aging, which is not part of Asprey’s plan. As he’s fond of saying, he has no interest in being average. Asprey, who is 45, has made the widely publicised claim that he expects to live to 180. To that end, he plans to get his own stem cells injected into him every six months, take 100 supplements a day, follow a strict diet, bathe in infrared light, hang out in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and wear goofy yellow-lensed glasses every time he gets on an airplane. So far, Asprey says he’s spent at least a million dollars hacking his own biology, and making it to 2153 will certainly take several million more. Currently, Asprey is best known as the founder of Bulletproof Coffee; he’s the reason everyone started slipping a pat of butter into their coffee a few years back. At least one of the Kardashians is a fan, and Jimmy Fallon has extolled the virtues of the highfat beverage on The Tonight Show: “It’s the most delicious thing ever. But it’s actually good for you. It’s good for your brain.” Asprey estimates that people have drunk more than

150 million cups of the stuff since he first posted the recipe online in 2009. Various bottled versions are now the three highestselling ready-to-drink coffees at Whole Foods. But while the coffee is what put Asprey on the map, his aspirations are much bigger than that – and having the longest human life span ever recorded is just one part of his plan. Asprey has parlayed the success of the coffee into one of the most coveted roles in 21st-century America: he has become a lifestyle guru. Over the past decade, he’s published five books on subjects ranging from fertility to “how to kick more ass at life”, including Game Changers, which came out in December. His podcast, Bulletproof Radio, has been downloaded more than 75 million times. He tweets inspirational messages, tagged #BeBulletproof, to his 332,000 Twitter followers. Asprey happily shares his opinion on how often men should ejaculate (once a week, but have sex more often) and how long they should sleep (six hours is good; eight hours is too much). He thinks you should go to Burning Man (because it’ll activate your creativity) and stop eating kale (because it contains trace amounts of oxalic acid). This eclectic advice all falls under the general umbrella of biohacking, which Asprey defines as the use of “science, biology and self-experimentation to take control of and upgrade your body, your mind and your life”, or “the art and science of becoming superhuman”. At a period of American history when mistrust of institutions seems endemic, Asprey is a man suited to his times. He has no medical degree or nutritional training. Depending on whom you ask, this makes him either a visionary willing to explore bold new frontiers or a huckster who overstates the

HEALTH

BULLETPROOF COFFEE (LEFT) IN SANTA MONICA IS THE BRICK-AND-MORTAR EXTENSION OF ASPREY’S BUTTER-COFFEE EMPIRE. NEXT DOOR TO THE CAFE IS BULLETPROOF LABS (CENTRE AND RIGHT), WHAT THE COMPANY CALLS “THE WORLD’S FIRST HUMAN UPGRADE CENTRE”, WHERE YOU CAN TEST-DRIVE THE VERY BIOHACKING TECHNOLOGY ASPREY HAS INSTALLED IN HIS OWN HOME.

COURTESY OF UPGRADE LABS

results of mouse studies. Where the gurus of the 1960s promised access to arcane spiritual secrets, Asprey cites research and sells supplements. But the underlying appeal is not so different: your life needs to transform, and this guy is the one who can tell you how to do it. A FEW YEARS AGO, Asprey and his wife, a physician he met at an anti-aging conference, concluded that the Bay Area wasn’t the best place to raise kids, so they relocated to Canada, where they live in bucolic splendour (and where Asprey can take a short flight to the Bulletproof offices in Seattle). The property features an extensive vegetable garden, a small flock of sheep and two charming pigs – Brussel Snout and Sven – whom I tried not to get too attached to, seeing as they were due to be butchered in the near future. His home office, which he’s nicknamed Alpha Labs, features a number of gadgets and gizmos that he uses regularly: a cryotherapy chamber, a bed of infrared lights, a platform that vibrates 30 times per second, an atmospheric cell trainer that virtually transports you from the top of Mount Everest back to sea level within a few minutes. Alpha Labs also has high-tech versions of exercise machines, including a recumbent device fitted with cooling compression cuffs that leads you through a high-intensity interval circuit and promises to deliver two-and-a-half hours of exercise in 21 minutes. In person, Asprey is a dimpled, affable guy with an undercurrent of intensity, like a dad you might meet at a BBQ who casually mentions that he runs ultramarathons. (Not that Asprey would run an ultramarathon; it’s an inefficient use of time. Plus, as one of his podcast episodes

warns, “Aerobic Exercise May Be Destroying Your Body.”) He speaks with an unflappable confidence born of years of self-study. To hear him tell it, he’s been adjacent to many major developments of the Internet era. At uni, he was “the first guy to sell anything over the Internet,” he told me. (It was a T-shirt that said CAFFEINE IS MY DRUG OF CHOICE, which he listed for sale over Usenet; buyers faxed him checks.) He says he “taught working engineers how to build the Internet” via a teaching job at the University of California-Santa Cruz’s Silicon Valley extension. He worked for the company that hosted Google’s first server. He did ayahuasca “20-something years ago, before it was cool.” (It was actually in 2003.) At the same time, Asprey didn’t feel like his best self. Over the years, he’d been variously diagnosed or self-diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, arthritis, fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s disease, chronic Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome and chronic strep throat. At his heaviest, in college, he says he weighed 135kg. At first, Asprey followed the standard medical advice for losing weight – restrict kilojoules, exercise – but even when he was working out for 90 minutes and eating 63007500 kilojoules a day, he wasn’t dropping weight. “I got healthier, I was probably

stronger, I could max out every machine but two at the gym,” he says. “But I still weighed the same amount.” Doctors were no help; they took one look at him and assumed he was sneaking Snickers bars. Asprey comes from a family of experimenters – his grandmother was a nuclear engineer who worked at Los Alamos. “There seems to be strange inventor genes on that side of the family,” he says. “The other side’s from Roswell. So I’ve got aliens and radiation. That explains a lot of it.” Fed up with his conventional options, Asprey decided to experiment on himself. He tried out a lowcarb diet he’d read about in a bodybuilding magazine and lost 20kg. “That taught me that what I eat matters more than how much I exercise,” he said. “And from there I started learning.” He ordered $1200 worth of smart drugs from Europe, which pepped him up just as he had hoped they would. He promised himself that he would learn more about these miracle medications: “Every night after I finish work, I’m going to go home and just read about this stuff and study. I’m going to troubleshoot this myself, because I am not getting help from the medical establishment. And I did that for four years. Every night, I would just study.” Eventually, Asprey’s roving curiosity about how to optimise his body and mind led him to the Silicon Valley Health Institute, a collection of Bay Area residents who met

“Asprey defines biohacking as the use of science biology and self -experimentation to upgrade your body mind and life” April 2019

who knew how to help you get a better return on your meditation investment; who claimed he could feel when his mitochondria were underperforming; who promised strategies for turning humans into superhumans. Bulletproof initially launched as a food and beverage company, selling coffee, collagen and supplements. Asprey also opened a flagship coffee shop in Santa Monica where the baristas are called coffee hackers. The products took off, and Bulletproof was soon doing a brisk online business. In 2015, Bulletproof got $9 million in initial funding from Trinity Ventures, an early investor in Starbucks and Jamba Juice. Another $43 million from other investors followed in the next few years. Asprey’s biohacking empire was on its way to greatness. BEYOND HIS OWN goal of life extension,

ASPREY ESTIMATES HE’S SPENT ABOUT $700,000 ON ALPHA LABS, HIS HOME “GYM”, WHICH INCLUDES AN ATMOSPHERIC CELL TRAINER.

to discuss health, nutrition and longevity. By the time Asprey came on the scene, most members were decades older than him, but they found common ground nonetheless. As Asprey continued to experiment on his body, downing a daily cocktail of supplements bolstered by modafinil (a so-called smart drug for “wakefulness” that was originally developed to address narcolepsy) and testosterone, he was also experimenting on his mind. He took personal-development workshops, explored his traumatic birth (his umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck), and used an EEG machine to train his brain to be less reactive. In the mid-2000s, Asprey was still working for various tech companies; in his spare time, he began putting some of the information from the health institute online. Many of Asprey’s preoccupations – biofeedback, the 92

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dangers of fluoride in drinking water – were familiar, fringy New Age ideas. His genius was adapting them for a tech-obsessed world. After feeling like an outsider for much of his life, Asprey was thrilled to discover that the rest of the world was beginning to catch up with him. In the hypercompetitive environment of Silicon Valley, people were looking for whatever edge they could get. Tech executives began touting the benefits of meditating: it improved productivity! It boosted creative problem solving! Psychedelics and pills were no longer the domain of hippie losers. Suddenly everyone was talking about nootropics and microdosing. Jeff Bezos got swole. Mark Zuckerberg started training for a triathlon. Everyone was desperate to upgrade. Biohacking was the perfect ethos for the moment. It took Silicon Valley’s obsessive preoccupation with productivity and disruptive technology and added a dash of LA. in the form of herbal supplements, vague spirituality and self-help. Finally the time was ripe for Asprey, a guy who had been tweaking his own internal systems for years;

Asprey speaks of biohacking as empowerment. As wearable devices become increasingly sophisticated, even those of us who aren’t wealthy and who aren’t scientists have the ability to turn our bodies’ confusing signals into clean, personalised data. Asprey dreams of a world where, instead of deferring to medical experts and profit-driven drug companies, we become experts in our own systems and experiment on them at will. Unsurprisingly, this has made Asprey suspicious of regulation. “Regulation got us the food pyramid that causes heart disease, cancer,and diabetes in unprecedented numbers of people,” he told me. “It got us an incredibly slow-to-innovate medical system that’s now being disrupted. It is anti-human to tell someone that they do not have the choice to put whatever they want into their bodies. It’s a basic human freedom. I think it’s unethical that I need to spend $150 and an hour of my life to get a permission slip to take a substance. There is no, no reason for that.” (Asprey’s wife disagrees.) All this self-experimentation is not without risk. Asprey once took a nap surrounded by ice packs, since cold exposure has been said to correlate with increased resilience; he woke up with first-degree burns over 15 per cent of his body. Another time, he zapped himself with infrared light to test the assumption that it would help him learn faster; instead, his speech was garbled for hours. Some of Asprey’s more extreme interventions, such as the stem cells he gets injected into his brain, are not yet supported by studies in healthy humans. Two weeks after my visit, some of the most widely celebrated evidence of stem cells’ effectiveness in treating heart failure turned out to be a large-scale fraud.

HEALTH

Most of Asprey’s acolytes aren’t likely to take things as far as he does, but even lowkey biohacking has potential problems. The Bulletproof Diet advises getting 50-70 per cent of your kilojoules from fats, compared with the 20-35 per cent that regulatory bodies generally recommend. While nutritionists have begun to back away from the 1970s-era assertion that saturated fats are harmful to the heart, that doesn’t mean that going to the opposite extreme is necessarily a good idea. For every online anecdote about a devotee who lost 20kg on the Bulletproof Diet, there seems to be someone else who received alarming results on their lipid panels after they began putting two tablespoons of butter in their coffee every morning. In any case, there’s a lack of largescale, long-term research in humans to back up Asprey’s more grandiose claims about his diet. Fad diets tend to succeed based on blackand-white, anxiety-stoking pronouncements, and Asprey’s is no different: he asserts, for example, that olive oil is a suspect food, that kale can be toxic, that legumes are inflammatory, that gluten should be avoided by everyone, not just those with celiac disease – ideas that are disputed by mainstream dietitians. “This follows the same pattern as every fad diet. They all say the same thing: oversimplifying the situation, promising a life-changing experience, making unrealistic weight-loss claims,” says dietitian Abby Langer. “Part of the appeal is psychological. People like to feel like they belong to a group with access to secret knowledge.” If you follow Asprey’s advice to a T, you’ll be spending a hefty amount on dietary supplements with names like NeuroMaster and Unfair Advantage. The evidence for their ability to “provide brain-enhancing energy” or make you “feel cognitively sharper” is not as clear-cut or definitive as Asprey makes it sound. The nootropic smart drugs that Asprey touts aren’t problem-free, either; some users report jitteriness, difficulty sleeping and addiction issues. “Cognitive enhancement is most likely a zero-sum game,” says Dr P. Murali Doraiswamy, a brain scientist at Duke University. “When you enhance certain cognitive functions, it usually comes at the expense of others.” Langer points out that Asprey’s lack of official credentials benefits him in two ways. “There’s a huge distrust of mainstream medicine now, so not being a doctor probably actually does him favours,” she says. “Also, it’s hard to make false claims when you have a licensing body overseeing you. If I said some of these things, I’d be investigated.” To critics like Langer, Asprey points to his track record: “Whether or not you have a piece

Whether the science is robust or reproducible matters less than whether a product delivers results. “The bottom line,” he says, “is if the risk-reward ratio is pretty good, why not try it?” of paper isn’t a great indication of whether you’ll help hundreds of thousands of people.” Whether the science is robust or reproducible matters less than whether any given product or strategy delivers results. “The bottom line,” he says, “is if the risk-reward ratio is pretty good and you want to be in control of your own biology, why not try it?” Asprey’s enthusiasm can make it difficult to determine where his desire to educate ends and the sales pitch begins. In his books, podcasts and blog posts, he is a proponent of several companies he either owns or has a stake in: the one that sells yellow-tinted glasses that protect you from “junk light”; the one that sells stickers you put over your devices’ lights; the one that sells five-day, $15,000 brain-training retreats that promise to raise your IQ and put your mind in the same state as that of a Zen monk who’s been meditating for 40 years. It’s not always easy to parse which of the many biohacks Asprey touts are scammy or overstated, which are plain old common sense, and which are poised to become the hot new thing. Back in my hotel room that evening, I sipped on a Bulletproof Fatwater and tried to determine whether my mitochondria felt any perkier. It was hard to say. Here’s the thing: a lot of what Asprey says makes sense. So many of us have lifestyles that could use a little hacking. We’re tethered to our electronics, anxious and overworked and not sleeping enough; we self-soothe with the very processed foods that are likely to end up making us feel worse. It’s not so wild to feel that something is wrong with the way we’ve been incentivised to live our lives. At the same time, we’re unhelpfully inundated with information about what that wrong might be. The Internet is chock-full of studies and articles and dubious Facebook posts. The process of sorting out what’s bullshit from what’s legitimate is, frankly, exhausting. If you opt into the current trend – intermittent fasting or krill oil or cryo – are you a sucker? If you opt out, will you be left behind? I’ve felt it myself, the desperate desire to have someone just tell me what to do. Doctors hem and haw; they speak in hedged

probabilities and avoid making bold claims. Asprey, in contrast, is happy to tell me that there are “absolutely” several ways to reverse Alzheimer’s, that he can more than double the average life span, and that we are all able take control of our own biology and make our bodies do exactly what we want them to. IN 2017, Asprey opened Bulletproof Labs, a

gymlike facility in Santa Monica where you can play around with his favourite biohacking tools. I went a day after meeting Asprey. I got cryogenically frozen for two minutes. I climbed inside a float tank that was supposed to help me meditate faster through a combo of high-frequency sound waves and strobing lights, but that mostly just stressed me out. I was zapped with electromagnetic pulses by a PEMF machine that was supposed to activate my cell regeneration, improve my circulation, promote bone healing and relieve the symptoms of depression. I spoke to a bald, affable man there who assured me that he’d been into biohacking since the late 1990s, way before Asprey made it trendy. He went to the conferences, read the research papers, swallowed the supplements. So when he was diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer in 2016, he developed a plan that incorporated both conventional and alternative treatments. He went into remission, started a website, and began to be featured on blogs and podcasts: “How Eric Remensperger Cured His Own Cancer.”He started writing a book; maybe he, too, could be a lifestyle guru. But then a few months ago, the cancer came back – in his bladder this time. He had a new treatment protocol and was feeling optimistic. Still, it had been a humbling journey. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, your biology won’t behave. Sometimes the superhumans turn out to be humans, too. I spoke to Asprey one last time, a few days after his forty-fifth birthday. He was choosing to look at aging in the most positive way possible. “I think of it as, I’m now 25 per cent of the way to my minimum goal [of living to 180],” he said. “So I’m officially a young adult. Is living a long time a kind of superpower? Yes. Although I might die trying.” April 2019 93

HEALTH

The stories of three guys (you may recognise them) who’ve completed epic fitness journeys, battling addiction and obesity – or both at the same time. Here’s what they’ve learned by leaving their own lives – and a whole lot of kilos – behind. (Plus: Rob Freakin’ Lowe!)

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PHOTOGRAPHY: STEVEN LIPPMAN

TRANSFORM YOUR

LIFT YOUR SPIRITS

WHAT (EVER) IT TAKES How DAN REYNOLDS, frontman of Imagine Dragons, uses exercise, diet and therapy to battle an inflammatory disease and depression BY WILL COCKRELL

BODY AND MIND IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN one of the happiest years of Dan Reynolds’ life. In 2012, his band Imagine Dragons inked a deal with Interscope Records and his wife gave birth to their first child. Soon the band would release the single “Radioactive”, the moody rock anthem that would be downloaded more than six million times. Yet a painful reality almost paralysed Reynolds. For years, the lead singer had been living with a rare autoimmune disease called ankylosing spondylitis (AS), which causes inflammation in the spine and can lead to pain in different parts of the body. It had become so painful that he was having trouble lifting his newborn daughter and could barely perform live. “I’d hobble onstage and just stand perfectly still,” says Reynolds. And AS wasn’t his only health issue – Reynolds had already been dealing with April 2019 95

ulcerative colitis for several years and had faced periods of depression since his teens. But instead of derailing his dreams, the pain ignited a top-to-bottom transformation that has left him ache-free and happier than ever, and turned him into a rock star known for energetic – and shirtless – performances. Indeed, when Reynolds, 31, walks into Gold’s Gym in Glendale, California, for his MH photo shoot, the first thing someone asks him is whether he wants his shirt on or off. “Off,” he fires back (with unusual vigour for a celebrity). “This has been my healthiest year yet,” he says. “It’s also been my hardest year.” But it’s been a long journey. His transformation began slowly, as he first sought to learn as much as he could about his diseases. He addressed his depression first. The Las Vegas native has been open about how growing up Mormon forced him to conceal his most basic impulses, everything from his sexuality to his creativity. Reynolds spent two years on a Mormon mission, was kicked out of Brigham Young University for having sex with his girlfriend, and had to write songs in metaphor to hide things from his parents. “The reason I started writing in the first place was for refuge,” he explains.

“THIS HAS BEEN MY HEALTHIEST YEAR YET. AND MY HARDEST”

Who are you, really?

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THE THUNDER-AND-LIGHTNING FINISHER Dan Reynolds’ trainer, Brad Feinberg (@bradfeinberg88), recommends this total-body burner as a finisher or as a short workout (as long as you do 3-5 rounds) Choose weights that are heavy enough that fatigue sets in after around 1 minute but not so heavy that you compromise form. Do each move for 60 seconds. Rest 3 minutes and repeat up to 5 times. KETTLEBELL (OR DUMBBELL) SWING

DUMBBELL OVERHEAD PRESS

DUMBBELL GOBLET SQUAT

Hike the kettlebell and swing to chest height. Do single-arm swings on rounds 2 and 3 if you get bored easily.

Start with the dumbbells at shoulder height. Press straight up.

Aim to get your thighs just below parallel to the ground and push up rapidly.

DUMBBELL ALTERNATE RENEGADE ROW

PLANK JACKS

Do a push-up with your hands on dumbbells. Raise one dumbbell, then the other.

If it’s too difficult, switch to a standard plank. Doing multiple rounds, alternate star planks.

PHOTOGRAPHY: STEVEN LIPPMAN

Reynolds found a therapist who, he says, helped him realise that the root of his depression was the fact that he’d spent much of his life living for others – for the Mormon church and anyone else who had an opinion. He had lost sight of his own needs. “That’s when everything changed for me,” he says. “I decided with every decision I made from that point on I would ask myself, ‘Is this my truth?’” It had almost a domino effect. He started reexamining everything. In April 2018, he announced that he would be divorcing his wife of seven years, with whom he has three daughters. Another thing he learned along the way was that he wanted to beat back both his physical and mental ailments without the help of drugs. “Pain medication ruins your vocal cords, and immunosuppressants made me get sinus infections all the time,” he says. “I really had no other option than to completely clean up my diet and exercise every day.” In early 2017, Reynolds met trainer Brad Feinberg, a guy who he said looked like a Viking and a badarse. Using Feinberg’s program, Reynolds eventually reached an intense level, working out for one-to-three hours seven days a week. Workouts during the tour usually included squats, deadlifts and lunges, as well as Turkish get-ups and jump variations. But

HEALTH

PRIORITISE YOUR HEALTH

KEEPING DOWN WITH

What we can learn from ROB KARDASHIAN’S public struggle to reach a healthy weight BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS

Feinberg says Reynolds also wanted to look like a superhero, which meant high-volume upper-body drills, kettlebell swings, pull-ups, and curls. Plus, every workout had 20 minutes of cardio. Recovery was just as important, adds Feinberg. “Touring is extremely stressful – the performances, the emotional stress – so we also emphasised deep breathing and mobility.” Touring plays a huge role, too, in dictating Reynolds’s diet, which basically requires constant eating. Couple the training with epic two-hour live shows and Reynolds sometimes needs to down 20,000 kilojoules a day just to maintain his weight. His body fat hovers around 6 per cent. His meal plan: oatmeal, berries, bananas, salads, sweet potatoes, brown rice, chicken, lamb and lots of olive oil.

Keep It Real It took Reynolds more than a year to go from skinny-fat to shredded. When I point out that six-pack abs and Thor-like biceps seem like overkill for battling AS, he says, “It’s a statement. It embraces the spirit of rock ’n’ roll. I grew up loving Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, Freddie [Mercury] – showmen.” When I press him to clarify whether he is completely sober – whether paparazzi might ever catch him drinking – his answer is refreshing. “Oh, it could happen,” he says with a smirk. “They might even catch me doing worse than that. I believe in living in the moment.” Reynolds says he owes his newfound calm to being more honest with himself, and that’s evident in the songs on the band’s new album, Origins. “I’ve resolved a lot of these issues in my life,” he says. “This has been the first time in 10 years that I can say I have no depression. Sadness? Hell, yeah – it’s included some of the saddest times in my life. But no depression. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.”

CREATED TO CAPITALISE on a leaked sex tape of a C-lister best known for her preposterous glutes, the 11-year-old E! series Keeping Up with the Kardashians has always been a show about bodies. But in recent years, the hard physical effort required to stay perpetually camera-ready has become more central to the show. Someone is always sculpting a “Revenge Body” or shedding baby weight, and for every exposition-heavy conversation that takes place over a meal, there’s a punishing workout session that doubles as a chance for a sisterly heart-to-heart. And then there’s Rob Kardashian, 31, whose relationship with his body has pushed him into one of the strangest spaces in American pop culture. No matter how you felt about Kim, Kourtney and Khloé as they ascended from pseudocelebrity to actual fame, you at least had to admire their hustle. Rob doesn’t even meet that baseline of respectability. In the beginning, he was the Kardashian who lacked basic Kardashian skills – he was bad at pretending that his fake job (the hosiery company Arthur George) was actually difficult, and he was bad at breaking up in public. The other Kardashians tended to rise like toned, confident phoenixes from the ashes of their doomed relationships; Rob lashed out at his ex Rita Ora (without naming her specifically) by posting accusations of infidelity online,

and last year he leaked revenge porn of his daughter’s mother, Blac Chyna. But beginning in 2013, Rob’s struggle to keep his weight down became a long-running and sometimes humiliating Keeping Up story arc. We witnessed him hiding candy wrappers and bingeing on takeout. When the family travelled to Florence in 2014 for Kim’s wedding to Kanye West, Rob became ashamed of his weight after feeling uncomfortable in his threads and skipped the ceremony. We watched Rob – who was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at the end of 2015 – try to change his diet and exercise more, and we saw him fall off those wagons, distance himself from his family and grow depressed. It all came to a head on 2016’s Rob & Chyna. Rob, who weighed in at 119 kilos in the first episode, clearly wanted to be anywhere but in front of a camera. There are Leonard Cohen albums less depressing than Rob & Chyna. It lasted one season and ended with Rob relating his myriad issues to a mental-health professional, who responded, “That sounds like a mess”. Rob and Chyna have since split up, and after that, Rob went into hiding. He’s all but dropped out of Keeping Up and exists in its narrative as a cautionary tale. The social-media accounts Rob once used to publicise his drama appear carefully managed these days. By Kardashian standards, he’s practically gone black-ops.

Reportedly, Rob turned to food for comfort, and his weight passed 136 kilograms. Lately, though, something strange has happened. He’s reportedly taken huge steps to improve his health both physically and mentally, dropping 15-20kg. He has a daughter he needs to be there for – and he’s recalibrated his priorities around diet and exercise. Rob’s mother, Kris Jenner, has hinted we may see more of Rob on Keeping Up’s 16th season. All this sounds positive, except the last part. Because the show focuses on the perspectives of Kim, Khloé, Kourtney and momager Kris, Rob’s weight problem has mostly been presented as a heartbreak for his mother to endure or a problem for his sisters to solve. And because family and work are so hopelessly intertwined in the Kardashiverse, Rob’s choice to distance himself from the family business – because he didn’t want to be fat on camera, which is totally understandable – is a professional decision with personal consequences. What no one ever talks about is the possibility that leaving the show is the healthiest thing Rob could possibly do. Whether you’re lifting logs alone on a mountaintop or hashtagging every #LegDay on Instagram, everyone’s fitness and mental-health journeys are ultimately personal. In order to see himself clearly, Rob Kardashian had to disappear. April 2019

CLEAN UP YOUR ACT

A spirited embrace of the party lifestyle threatened to bring down the ARIA Award-winning CONRAD SEWELL. Sensing danger, he swapped all-night benders for early-morning workouts BY DANIEL WILLIAMS

PHOTOGRAPHY: JASON LEE

SEWELLSURVIVOR

HEALTH

AT THE TIME it seemed like the apogee of Conrad Sewell’s burgeoning career. The Brisbane-raised singer-songwriter stood centre-stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden, a headline act at the 2015 Jingle Ball mega-concert. He belted out “Firestone” and “Start Again”, two of the hits that had shot him to stardom. Was he joyful? In complete command of his talent? Well . . . not exactly. In hindsight, he did well not to keel over mid-act. Leading up to the show, Sewell had been on a drinking spree. As his team battled to clear his head in time to perform, Sewell’s response was to demand more alcohol. “I got through that show. I killed that show,” says Sewell, who on this warm, windy lunchtime is kicking back on a shaded bench adjacent to an outdoor gym in Sydney’s Alexandria. “Somehow, [feeling wasted] didn’t affect my performances. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before it would.” The Garden wasn’t an aberration. Having settled in LA, Sewell was a mid-20s not-soinnocent abroad; a pedigreed artist who, for reasons he still struggles to grasp, seemed hellbent on sabotaging his emergence as Australia’s next pop phenomenon. Perhaps the touring (with Ed Sheeran), the dollars and attention came too fast, he muses. Perhaps the pressure he felt to produce his first album was too intense. He has, he says, addictive tendencies. “I started drinking a lot and partying a lot.” Cocaine was in the mix, while his health and relationships were in freefall. “I almost hit rock bottom.”

First, Look Within The realisation he needed professional care dawned gradually. At last, he turned to a Californian therapist, who helped him get clean before focusing on his mind, encouraging Sewell to think about the man he is, to understand his proclivities and motivations, to reflect on his adolescence. “Growing up, I wanted to be a fucking rock star, and I just drank a lot from an early age,” he says. “From 15, I was going out and getting drunk. And if you do that for long enough, with one of the most addictive substances in the world, you’re going to become a fucking alcoholic. It’s just science.” In LA, biology collided with circumstance to create the perfect storm. He was suddenly part of a scene: beguiling, but also shallow and destructive. “People would visit me and I’d feel like I had to take them out, show them a good time and get drunk with them,” he says. “I was the party guy.” Sewell recognised it wasn’t only his mind that needed attention. With his body creeping more towards Meat Loaf than JT, he set about

“MY AIM IS TO BE IN THE BEST SHAPE OF MY LIFE BEFORE I GO ON TOUR”

getting fit. He would also clean up his diet. “I just knew I had to start taking care of myself,” he says. “Otherwise I was going to lose it all.” Never mind strolls to the shops. “I’m an all-or-nothing person,” Sewell says. “I went from three-day benders to two workouts a day and eating as clean as I possibly could.” Sewell’s preference is to work out first thing. In LA, his trainer, Bret Lusis of Show Up Fitness, favours military-style workouts. On trips home, Sewell links with Rafael David, who guides him through heavy-lifting sessions. If time’s short, they’ll target Sewell’s whole body with squats and deadlifts. If several sessions can be squeezed into the week then the singer will hit separate muscle groups on different days. “I also make sure I get out and move every single day, whether that be a circuit class or a long walk. But you don’t get results unless you lift, I feel.” Simplicity reigns in his kitchen. Breakfast is eggs and spinach; lunch: fish and salad; dinner: chicken and vegetables. He’s barely budging from that menu as he sheds the last remnants of some extra weight he stacked on during an extended Christmas cheat. The clean living is reaping professional dividends. Sewell’s first album – LIFE – is a wrap. After its release on May 17, he’ll tour

Australia in May-June – a two-week, sevenconcert sweep of the country that will test his stamina as much as his vocal cords. “My aim is to be in the best shape of my life before I go on tour,” he says. “I mean, I’m already fit. I can go for a five-kay run and do that easily.” But he’s chasing a body that screams stellar conditioning rather than merely whispering it. He wants a body-fat reading of sub-10 per cent – and the six-pack that goes with it. LIFE is a peek into how low he got. There had been a girlfriend who saw the best in him during a period when he couldn’t. “Eventually that belief in me faded and that broke my heart, and broke me, and that’s what a lot of the stuff in the album is about.” It’s a catharsis? “Definitely, man. It’s taken me my whole life to write this album. Thirty years old and it’s my debut album! Which sounds insane because I got signed at 17. Imagine writing the most real stories you can and singing the absolute shit out of them. That’s what I’ve done.” He makes no claim to a squeaky-clean life. He hasn’t sworn off the booze, he says; he’s simply drinking a lot less and picking his times. Music comes first now. And new habits are a shield from relapse. “I’m a work in progress. But I feel like everybody is.” April 2019 99

STAY THE COURSE

LOWE-CARB LIFER

It might seem like ROB LOWE represents the anti-transformation. But his consistent look is due to an evolution in his diet and exercise plans

WHEN ROB LOWE looks in the mirror, he expects to find the same person looking back at him every day: a lean, toned, fresh-faced man in peak physical condition – himself at 28, the age when he had already gotten sober and married Sheryl Berkoff. “I feel exactly like that guy,” Lowe says. “And I see him.” It’s not that Lowe, 54, is oblivious to the passage of time – he’s just made himself impervious to it. “I’m fitter than I’ve ever been. More experienced. Smarter,” says the actor, who landed his first major TV role in 1979 and whose breakthrough came in the 1983 film The Outsiders. “I’m not looking at a 20-yearold kid in a cape as my due north,” he adds. “I’m looking at a guy like Springsteen.”

Lowe’s High Bar Lowe’s man in the mirror is familiar to anyone who’s watched him. As his Parks and Recreation alter ego, Chris Traeger, would 100

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say, he looks li-trilly unchanged. Consider the meme “Incredible timelapse gif showing Rob Lowe ageing [sic] over the last 30 years”, which is, in fact, a recent still image of him – psych. “I treat it as a compliment,” Lowe says, but he chafes at any suggestion that making time stand still is a passive endeavour. Lowe’s status as a real-life Dorian Gray is based on a rigorous exercise regimen, a dedication to a low-carb diet (last year he became a spokesman for Atkins, the eating plan that emphasises protein and healthy fats), and a love of outdoor sports. It doesn’t hurt that he is, by both professional and personal inclination, invested in self-care. (He launched Profile, a skin-care line including an under-eye serum, moisturiser, sunscreen and shaving gel in 2015.) Or that he’s open about his desire to look good. “Men deny having vanity – that’s the greatest vanity,” Lowe says. “Not me. I’m vain as fuck.”

Lowe remembers getting his first real taste of working out as a teenager while filming The Outsiders: he joined costars Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise, who would drive 45 minutes to the one health club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with Nautilus machines. “They were animals about it,” he recalls. “I was just kind of doing it because they were doing it.” His fascination with fitness took hold a few years later while he prepared to play a hungry hockey prospect in Youngblood. The role required him to bulk up, Lowe recalls: “It was the first time I ever had a trainer and did proper weight work.” He also skated and practised hockey, leaning over the boards to vomit. “It was brutal,” he says. After reaching idol status, he went through a speed-freak phase, when he trained with the UCLA track team. As his penchant for partying grew, Lowe, one of the ’80s Brat Pack, would use fitness to plaster over his

PHOTOGRAPHY: STEVEN LIPPMAN

BY ALEX BHATTACHARJI

HEALTH

NO WRINKLES IN TIME

Four decades of Rob Lowe

1979

1987

1999

2018

alcohol abuse, working out like a demon to reassure himself he didn’t have a problem. In his mind, no matter what wild stuff he did, if he could still run a 60-second 400 metres, he was fine. Inevitably, he could – and he still can today.

Stop The Clock At 26, in 1990, Lowe managed to get sober, and exercise played a new role in his life. “It became an outlet for all of the tension, stresses, compulsivity,” he says. “I funneled the addiction, frankly, into that.” Today, after 28 years of sobriety, Lowe’s devotion to fitness qualifies as a dependency in its own right. A typical day starts with a 45-minute Peloton bike ride or a run. He follows that with traditional lifting and circuit training. He prefers to exercise alone: “I don’t want to have the smoothie stand. I don’t want to look at beautiful women when I work out.”

“IN HIS LIGHTER MOMENTS, LOWE ADMITS HE’S BEEN SCARED SKINNY, DRIVEN BY FEAR OF A DAD BOD”

For a long time, Lowe felt this routine meant he could eat whatever he wanted. As he approached 40, that started to change. He was aware of Robert Atkins, “from the beginning,” he says. He became a convert to the high-protein, low-carb plan. He scoffs at the thought that it’s a license to eat two massive burgers without buns, because as he practises it, Atkins is a program built to maintain, not yo-yo. He’s also experimenting with intermittent fasting, and often skips breakfast. His typical menu on no-breakfast days: Greek yoghurt, berries and nuts for a snack at 11:30am; chopped-chicken salad for lunch; and steak and vegetables for dinner. When we meet, he has just come from a fitting for his new show, Wild Bill. Normally a nerve-racking affair, it was no problem for Lowe, who has had the same measurements for 20 years. In his lighter moments, Lowe admits he’s

been scared skinny, driven by fear of a dad bod. Yet thanks to fatherhood, he’s found his way of combating it: surfing. Although Lowe grew up in Malibu, he only took up the sport at age 40 after his sons, Matthew and John Owen, did. “They got me into that, and I’ve gotten them back into the gym,” he says. Surfing has offered Lowe proof that the immutable man is changing. “I had the best surf day of my life three days ago,” he says, describing his last session at a Santa Barbara break. “Set waves. Double overhead. Not a drop of wind. Pumping. Guys were getting barrelled.” He pauses to ponder the sport’s particular appeal to him as someone in recovery and obsessed with continuity. “You’re always chasing a high that you’re probably not going to ever repeat,” he says. “Conditions change, so no waves ever just stay the same. Nothing can ever stay the same. Nothing.” April 2019 101

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The

Hidden Masses STEROID CULTURE IS EXPANDING, NO LONGER CONFINED TO A SUBGROUP OF STRONGMEN AND BODYBUILDERS. TODAY’S USERS AREN’T JUST CHASING AESTHETICS. THEY’RE SEARCHING FOR YOUTH, VITALITY AND THAT MOST NEBULOUS OF ATTRIBUTES: MASCULINITY. BUT TO WHAT END? AND AT WHAT RISK? MEET THE NEW FACE OF THE GLOBAL STEROID EPIDEMIC By

Alex Moshakis

Photography By

Philip Haynes

April 2019 103

before he heaved an almighty load, he would summon a rough growl from his stomach, shocking his body into the production of adrenaline. Other men knew when he’d arrived at the gym. They could hear him roar. Wilson was 36. He was not a professional bodybuilder, but an academic with a couple of science degrees. Most days, his office was a lab. And yet his training had become relentless. Almost every night, as soon as his young son had gone to bed, he would head to the local weights room, lift hard and chat game with other big men. Often, he felt he could go all night. Lifting. Talking. Lifting. Talking. “I’d stay until they kicked me out,” he told me. “Then I’d go back the next night.” Wilson and I first met at a bar not far from where he lives. (His name has been changed at his request.) Instantly, he struck me as a contradiction. At 178cm, he isn’t especially tall, though he looks big. His shoulders are broad, his chest resembles a whisky cask and, in

many ways, he is large enough to make me feel like a small boy. And yet at times he spoke so softly I found him difficult to understand; when we first introduced ourselves, his right hand was trembling. Wilson explained that he hadn’t always been so big. A few years ago, he’d had trouble lifting anything close to his 212kg record. He’d trained for years, but his power had plateaued and he’d become frustrated. At the gym, he and others would discuss technique and nutrition. But they’d also chat about steroids. Men would reveal the compounds they were using, regularly slipping into a quasimedical language that, to outsiders, was hard to understand. When they mixed compounds, a process called “stacking”, they shared their experiences, taking questions from others. How did it feel? What side effects did you suffer? What would you do differently? Wilson was proud of the fact that he was privy to these conversations. “It wasn’t easy to become absorbed in this culture,” he told me. “You really had to earn respect. If you waited your turn, let the big guys go first, knew your position in the pecking order, you’d get your place.”

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Later, he added, “It became part of my identity, that I was a member of this group.” Before long, Wilson decided to use steroids, too. A friend supplied him with testosterone enanthate, an anabolic used in hormone therapy, and he sourced needles from a clinic two towns away, where no one would recognise him. When his stock dried up, he found a pharmacy in Serbia, from which steroids could be bought online. Soon, he began to experiment with other compounds, gently increasing doses to overcome his body’s acclimatisation. To counter the effects of severe joint pain, he began using small doses of nandrolone decanoate, known as “deca”, which is sometimes prescribed for osteoporosis. Within weeks, Wilson’s muscles ballooned. In the bar, he showed me a couple of pictures on his phone. He was standing in the sallow light of his kitchen. His head was shaved, and it was difficult to pinpoint where his back muscles ended and his neck muscles began. Wilson began to lift heavier weights. He felt stronger, more motivated. In the mornings, he was filled with a store of energy that lasted all day. Later, he noticed a great upsurge in confidence – not just at the gym, but at work, too. Problems were easier to solve. “I became much clearer in my thoughts,” he said. Steroid cycles typically last 10 weeks. To prevent “shutdown”, in which the body stops producing testosterone naturally, users must undergo a process of post-cycle therapy (PCT), intended to regulate the body’s organic processes. But PCT is hard, and those who come off cycles complain of lethargy, teariness, low sex drive and deep and dark depression. “You feel like a small man,” one user told me. Another user commented that during PCT, “You just want to be held.” When we discussed the man’s loss of libido, he said, “Three women could be bouncing naked on a trampoline in front of you, and all you’d want is a cup of tea.” Wilson had heard similar stories and found the idea of coming off steroids troubling. So he didn’t. “That first cycle lasted four years,” he said. It led to a kind of physical destruction: “Because your strength and muscularity increase so rapidly, your tendons and joints can’t keep up.” His body was unable to support the muscle he’d constructed; his knees

HEALTH

DRIVING FORCES In one study*, users rated their reasons for taking drugs such as steroids. While body image came ﬁrst, motivations were varied

BODY IMAGE ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE SEX DRIVE YOUTHFULNESS OTHER (PAIN RELIEF, MOOD, ENERGY)

*AVERAGE SCORE WHERE 10 = EXTREMELY IMPORTANT; IMAGE AND PERFORMANCE ENHANCING DRUGS 2016 NATIONAL SURVEY

STEROIDS, FOR SOME, ADMINISTER A RUSH OF RENEWED LIFE.

became frail, and his right shoulder was damaged. During a visit to his GP, an even more urgent message rang out. “My doctor said, ‘If you keep going the way you are, you won’t live to see your son grow up. You’re going to have a heart attack.’” Wilson had been made aware of the risks prior to beginning his cycle. I asked him if he’d worried about them while he was using. “I’d occasionally give them a fleeting thought,” he said. “But I was probably arrogant enough to think I could mitigate the effects.” Later, he hinted at a greater understanding of the depth of his experience. “Some men go to the pub and never come out,” he told me. “I went to the gym.”

What Makes a Man? A couple of decades ago, steroids were almost uniquely tied to the world of competitive weightlifting. To the uninitiated, users were big, brash and quick to rage. It didn’t matter if you were a devoted father or perennial

do-gooder. The social tarnish was inescapable. You juiced. But big men are no longer the drugs’ only consumers. A recent UNSW report found steroids were the most commonly injected drug in Australia for the past six years. Most users avoid interaction with health professionals, even when their bodies begin to fail. Researchers hoping to identify real user figures quickly run into a tricky problem: how do you reach people who don’t want to be found? Most users are people considered by society to be relatively ordinary. Use is rife among men from all walks of life: lawyers, bankers, policemen, students and, in at least one reported case, a cleric. Steroids have breached boardrooms and snuck into churches, gatecrashed courtrooms and invaded classrooms. Public health specialist Dr Frank Atherton describes steroid use as “an escalating problem” and, like other medical experts I spoke to, he considers the upsurge to be rooted in aesthetics. But, in many ways, the motivations run deeper. An older user might care less about the way testosterone helps him fill out a T-shirt than he does about how it replenishes his energy levels. When the joints of a middle-aged man begin to ache

and his gut expands, he might turn to synthetic testosterone to counteract his body’s naturally depleting levels: not to look great in the mirror, but to experience the sensation of feeling young again. Young men, as parents will attest, are more complicated. “If you look at general theories, they’ll tell you it’s to do with Snapchat, Instagram – the social media experience,” says Tony Knox, a sports science researcher at the University of Birmingham. “These kids want to be able to show off. But I think it goes much further than that… A lot of these young men are deeply insecure. They don’t know their way in life.” Knox has spent the best part of a decade researching steroid use and its harms. He talks to users – men he recruits from gyms – weekly, gaining their trust, thanks in part to the way he looks: big up top, like someone who trains. “There are so many different variations of gender now that these kids don’t know where to place themselves,” he said. “So, they situate themselves in something that is ridiculously masculine. When I was a kid” – Knox is now in his forties – “there was no ambiguity. You didn’t have to look a certain way. You just walked into a masculine role and you did it. But it’s not easy for kids these days. It’s much more difficult for them to define themselves as men. Using steroids is one of the ways that some of them do it.” April 2019 105

The following day, Knox took me to a gym from which he regularly recruits. It sprawled across two floors of what was once an office building, and huge paintings of the gym’s most muscular members lined the walls. Much of the space was given over to free weights and resistance machines. A small area featured treadmills. It remained mostly empty. Knox introduced me to a friend of his, a personal trainer who had used steroids on and off for more than a decade. I asked him to explain the experience to me. “You feel stronger,” he said. “You feel as though you can hold your head up higher. You want to have sex a lot more. Then you come off and it’s like…” He hesitated. “You feel like less of a man.”

Fighting Nature Men have wanted to feel more like men for thousands of years. In ancient Greece, Olympic athletes ate sheep’s testicles before competitions, ingesting secondary testosterone. It was a time when strength really mattered. Many ancient Olympic games were brutal and not every competitor left the arena alive. The first batch of synthetic testosterone was created in 1935, and the experiment was considered a scientific breakthrough. Soon, athletes were being injected with the hormone – first in the Soviet Union, later in America. A kind of athletic arms race developed between the two nations, one that became emblematic of their political tensions. Who could run faster, lift heavier, throw further? By the time performance enhancement was banned in professional sports, in the 1970s, steroids had already entered the mainstream consciousness. Amateur athletes began to source testosterone – then it hit the gyms. And that’s where we are now. Cameron Jeffrey runs a steroid clinic. In his forties with a colossal physique, he’s spent a decade working with steroid users – most recently devoting himself to his own project, a drop-in clinic not far from where he grew up. (He asked that I change his name so as not to betray the trust of those he advises.) Jeffrey told me that he runs the clinic informally – by which he meant he considers it part medical centre, part social club. Users swing by for 106

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ity t n e d i y “M d. e r u t rac had f rol t n o c d l u All I co was my body”

guidance and stick around to drink coffee and chat. Many ask Jeffrey to supervise or administer their injections, which he performs in a sterilised, windowless room at the rear of the building. I was told to expect a carousel of users: “They’ll be in and out all day.” When I arrived, Jeffrey and a couple of men in their twenties were sitting at a counter, laughing loudly. Before long, Jeffrey and one of the men excused themselves into the back, where Jeffrey prepared 500mg of testosterone. When it was over, the young man promptly left, and Jeffrey walked into the communal area to meet me. “The big kid,” Jeffrey said. “He was asking for more. More, more, more. And I had to tell him no. There’s no point. It’s useless. His body can only take so much.” He continued: “They think it means more gains, but they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what the impact could be.”

Ageless Bodies When I spoke to Atherton, he told me that one of his most important jobs was to disseminate information. “People need to go into these things with their eyes wide open,” he said. I’d heard stories of strokes, heart attacks and infertility. Atherton continued, “I believe that a properly informed person who knows about the risks would probably choose to improve their body image through hard

UNNATURAL CYCLES There’s more to steroids than rapidly swelling muscles, explains Professor Julien Baker from the University of the West of Scotland. This is what goes down when you dose up

Once in the bloodstream, testosterone is carried to muscle cells, interacting with the DNA to increase the cells’ ability to grow.

Once the user ﬁnishes a cycle, he may struggle to produce natural testosterone, leading to muscle loss and lethargy. The cycle restarts.

HEALTH

STEROIDS’ INSIDIOUS SIDE EFFECTS OFTEN GO UNDISCUSSED.

“He came in complaining of lethargy. He’d put on weight. He didn’t want to leave the house – not even to take the dog for a walk.” That was a few years ago. Jeffrey told him to get a blood test, which revealed staggeringly low levels of testosterone, even for the man’s age. He’s been coming in once every 10 days ever since. “And look at him now!” Jeffrey said. I asked him why he thought so many older men had taken to steroids. “It used to be that a man could grow old gracefully, maybe with a bit of a pot belly,” he said. “But the culture’s changing. We’re living longer. And we want to live well for longer. We’ve learned how to eat, how to train. There’s Botox. Boob jobs. Steroids are a part of that, too.” Just before I left, a tall man walked into the clinic and slumped into a chair. Jeffrey walked over and eyed him carefully. “You look bigger,” he said, “in a good way.” A broad grin slipped across the man’s face. He’d recently split up with his wife, Jeffrey told me, and he was training hard to keep his mind off it. The pair began to discuss the man’s chosen substance, and they debated the efficacy of his current dose. Jeffrey erred on the side of caution, as he tends to, and eventually he won out.

Taking Back Control 2

Testosterone may also elevate levels of mood-balancing serotonin in the brain; a shot can act like an antidepressant.

ILLUSTRATIONS: ALCONIC

Eventually, excess testosterone can start to transform into oestrogen. Breast growth and shrinking testicles are side effects.

As your muscles grow, your tendons and ligaments will struggle under the weight – they haven’t had the chance to adapt.

After a while, the ﬂood of excess hormones can place a burden on your liver and kidneys, too, raising your disease risk.

work, not chemical enhancement.” Jeffrey, too, sees his role as a kind of counsellor. As trust builds, men open up in ways they tend not to elsewhere. “It’s like a confessional,” he told me. “They can’t talk to their wives or their mates, so they come here and tell you about their lives. They spill it all.” Twenty minutes later, an older man entered the clinic, walked over to a drinks machine and quietly made himself a coffee. Jeffrey greeted him warmly and soon the pair walked to the back of the clinic. “How old do you think he was?” Jeffrey asked me, once the man had left. “60,” I said. “Higher.” “65?” “Try again.” Doubtfully, I offered, “70?” “He’s not far off 80!” Jeffrey said.

A few weeks after we had first met, I called Alec Wilson. The last man I’d seen at Jeffrey’s clinic reminded me of something Wilson had told me: that the motivation behind his steroid use was not to do with looks, or even strength, but more to do with a kind of personal agency. A few months before he began that four-year cycle, Wilson realised his marriage was breaking down, and he slipped into a depression. His mood, usually light and stable, had turned dark. On the phone, Wilson told me that his “identity had fractured. I was no longer the worker, the provider, the loving husband, the good father . . . I felt as though the only thing I still had control over was my body.” Other users spoke similarly of self-possession, of being able to affect the way they looked, felt and thought while the world around them fell entirely to pieces. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Wilson if he would use again. “I would,” he said, instantly. April 2019 107

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TACTICS

WARRIOR CODE: DICKINSON HAS BLACK BELT S IN DETERMINATION AND FORTITUDE.

SHADOWS Martial artist Andy Dickinson had never faced an opponent he couldn’t get a grip on until he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Yet somehow, by drawing on his fighting instincts and combat knowledge, he’s finding a way to keep punching BY MARK DAPIN PHOTOGRAPHY BY GILES PARK

April 2019 109

I notice when Sensei Andy Dickinson seems to become more rigid around the shoulders

but I don’t stop to wonder why. I’m half-aware when his facial expression begins to freeze up, but he’s 55 years old, and I know veteran fighters sometimes grow into that justpunched look (see Jeff Fenech, for example) so I don’t give it any real thought. Dickinson is the owner of Northstar Martial Arts, a jujitsu club at my local PCYC in Balmain, NSW. I pass him sometimes on my way to the weights room. My children trained at his club and so did I, for a while. He has always been kind to me, but I don’t know him well. So I’m surprised when he emails me to say he has Parkinson’s disease (PD) and asks for comment on a book he had written about his life. I’m also terribly sad, because PD seems such a cruel fate for a martial artist who lives by his body. We meet in Dickinson’s small windowless office, opposite the dojo where every week he threw kicks higher than his head, and boxed, trapped and grappled with younger, hungrier men. Dickinson sits with his back straight, and his right hand resting on his left to dampen the trembling in his fingers. PD is a progressive, degenerative neural condition. It shakes and stiffens, slows and stoops, interferes with balance, invites depression and renders many people disabled. It’s widely thought of as an older person’s disease. Of the 60,000 Australians with PD, only 5-10 per cent are diagnosed before the age of 50. Dickinson first noticed the symptoms in 2010, when he was 47 years old. “I was sitting in my kitchen at home,” he says, “and I felt an internal tremor, like my whole body was shaking. When I held my fingers out, I had a slight tremor in two of my fingers. It was very subtle, and I went to the doctor, he checked me over and he said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’” PD can be hard to diagnose because there are no markers for the disease. No MRI or scan can pick it up. It has to be identified through a clinical assessment, which relies on the experience of a good movement neurologist. A minor tremor is not enough to go on. Dickinson is a fifth-degree black belt in taekwondo, with additional black-belt 110

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gradings in four jujitsu systems, all of which he earned in Japan. Between 1987 and 1994, at the peak of his fighting career, he would compete every three weeks in the National Martial Arts League in Australia, while his job as a flight attendant regularly took him overseas, where he would enter karate, taekwondo and jujitsu tournaments in Asia and Europe. His five-kilometre training runs included sprints up six or seven hills or – in Asia – the staircases of soaring towers and high-rise hotels. “It would give me incredible leg power and incredible fitness,” he says. “I always loved running.” It was six years after his first tremors that Dickinson was finally told he had PD. “One of the reasons people couldn’t diagnose it was because I was exercising so much the symptoms were extremely slow,” he says. “I’d go to the neurologist once a year and have it checked: ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with you. Come back in a year.’ But I could feel that when I was washing under my arm, when I was washing my hair, my left hand wasn’t as dexterous as it should have been. And I was in peak condition during that time, still sparring regularly and teaching regularly, so it came as a real shock that the faculties I’d so relied on for so many years to keep me in the best shape of my life were sort of giving up. I understood that the body will age over time but I wasn’t prepared to have it happen as fast as it did.” Once he knew the truth, “I remember coming out of the neurologist’s with an incredible sense of relief,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than having an enemy that you don’t know anything about. You can’t train for that particular opponent. Knowing what I was up for, and up against, I could get the best possible information, the best possible neurologist, the best possible support, and I was lucky enough to be able to shape my life in a way which enabled me not to have to work full-time and meet this head on. I wasn’t upset, I wasn’t depressed, I just felt, ‘That’s great news. Now I can get on with it.’” Dickinson has devised his own program to deal with his symptoms. When he gets out of bed in the morning, he says, “Usually my hand is flapping from the lack of medication so I’ll meditate for half an hour.” Then he

performs exercises from the Chinese healing system qigong, coupled with yoga stretches and pilates moves that elongate his spine and ease some of the stiffness in his left arm. “After that, I’ll go through some martialarts forms that I’ve created myself,” he says. “The forms are totally for fast, explosive movements; that’s what Parkinson’s makes difficult. It’s the slowing down which affects you the most.” He says his routine seems to work: “I’m no worse off now than I was 12 months ago with these movements. Some of the subtle deficits have come through with the ends of my fingers – not being able to use my fingers correctly when I type and stiffness in some of the joints, but overall I’m able to do what I was doing before the diagnosis.” In an average week, he rides his bike two or three times, swims two or three times and teaches his senior black belts once or twice. “I was sparring up until the time I got my

TACTICS

“YOU WIN, LOSE OR DRAW BUT YOU FIGHT WITH A SENSE OF DETERMINATION, OF MISSION” diagnosis,” he says, “but the neurologist said it probably wasn’t a good idea. But I still do as much as possible, whether assisting boxing or non-contact sparring. The black belts I spar are very nice to me. They know what’s going on and they make me look good.” Boxing has been implicated in bringing on PD, with Muhammad Ali the best-known example of a former fighter whose Parkinson’s was linked to acute head trauma. Dickinson never competed in professional boxing or kickboxing, so he was not exposed to repeated heavy blows to the head but, he says, “Every injury that I’ve taken over the years, every time I’ve been knocked down or concussed, I feel that’s coming back. I’m not convinced it had an impact on the development of the PD, but the training was rough and it all adds up and slows you down as you get older. It comes back to make you pay the price.” Rather than blame boxing, Dickinson has embraced it. There are several non-

contact boxing programs established to help people with PD. Systems such as PD Warrior, established in Australia by two neurological physiotherapists, and Punchin’ Parko’s, assist participants to sustain their strength, balance and coordination. Dickinson structures his whole day around training. “I am a fighter,” he says, “in the true aspect of the word: I just don’t give in. Many times, I was alone in other countries, standing at the edge of the ring, looking at my opponent, who was just as keen as me to win. I was scared. I was petrified. I’d make every excuse in the world not to turn up, but I was driven to be there on the day. And there would be a sense of stillness that would come within me and the fear just dropped away. “I used to push my shoulders back, chin up and, no matter what, I’d walk in there with my head held high. You take whatever’s coming. You win, lose or draw, but you fight with a sense of determination and a sense of mission. And it’s the same with Parkinson’s. The last time I went into the neurologist before I was diagnosed, I knew he was going to find it that day. I was petrified. I knew that my life was going to change. I wanted to back out. I wanted to put it off. But sitting in his waiting room, with my thumb going a million miles an hour, a sense of calm came over me: I could do this, could face whatever the outcome was, just like I faced the outcome when I prepared for tournaments. I would put my shoulders back, hold my chin up, face my head into the breeze. That’s the way I walked into the doctor’s, with my head held high, willing to take whatever came out. And I do that daily.”

THE MOVEMENT MEDICINE Exercise is a safe, free and effective treatment for managing PD, says professor Simon Lewis, director of the University of Sydney’s Parkinson’s Disease Research Clinic. It improves quality of life, and it seems to improve symptoms of PD, Lewis says, but there is no evidence that it slows progression of the disease. “The biggest physical deficit is because you lose a chemical called dopamine,” he says. “It does its main job in the subcortical regions of your brain, i.e. not the thinking part. The

things you don’t have to think about doing – like walking and talking. We concentrate on training people to engage the cortex, the thinking part of the brain, to compensate for the subcortex, which has got the impairments.” Many physical exercise programs try to make the patients think about making large movements that involve effortful thought, Lewis adds. “You normally wouldn’t think about walking but if you can walk like that all the time, the Parkinson’s will be a bit

better. The idea is to train you to automatically use a part of your brain that you wouldn’t automatically use. With activities like boxing, like yoga, like the exercise program PD Warrior, effectively that’s what happening.” Although exercise is great, it’s not a panacea and the same exercises don’t work for everyone, Lewis cautions. Slow, methodical exercises, mindful of balance, are best for many PD sufferers – and even the youngest, fittest patients still have to take their tablets, he says. April 2019

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M H D A D

HUGHES, WITH HIS DAD, DES, AND SON, RAFFERTY, CIRCA 2010.

WHAT I’VE LEARNT ABOUT FATHERHOOD My father, Des, was an intelligent, hardworking guy. He was a housepainter who ended up working at the Nestle factory for 30 years. It was the classic left-school-at-15 thing – that’s what you did back in the ’50s.

party at home. I’m not a naturally extroverted person. But dad would say to me, “You’ve always got a bed at home – remember that.” And that was actually pretty reassuring in the early days.

Dad had simple tastes. He didn’t go in for travelling much. Very happy to stay home. We lived in Warrnambool, which is three hours west of Melbourne. He thought it was paradise, and the older I get the more I probably agree with him.

I never really had a yearning to be a father. I didn’t see kids at the park and think, ‘Oh, I want one of those!’ But when my wife and I started going out, I was 31 and she was 22, and she was like, “We’d better get a move on or you’re going to be too old to be a father”. And look, as soon as my son came along, it does change your life. As I’ve said about fatherhood, you’ve finally got something you’re prepared to die for – and often you hope that day is today.

He was forever telling me, “Get out of bed, you lazy bastard!” I’m not at that point yet. With my son, it’s like, “Stay in bed, can you, for God’s sake! Why are you up at 6am?” His big thing was to work hard. He’d say, “It doesn’t just happen – you’ve got to make it happen”. That inspired a line I had about the dole: you don’t just start getting it – you have to apply for it. When I first quit university, my dad was worried I was going to be drawing money off him for the rest of his life. My idea of being a comedian confounded both my parents, who thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to spend his whole life trying to juggle on street corners with a hat!’ Because I wasn’t the life of the

The hardest part is just the fact you’ve got to be less selfish. You’re sacrificing your own pleasure for theirs basically. I’ve got a set of golf clubs that I haven’t used for . . . it’s very rare now that I’ll say, “Yep, I’m going out now to spend six hours hacking my way around the local course”. Their joy becomes your joy, and you’ve got to accept that. They’re good for material. I mean, they’re so funny and clever in their own way. I wanted to have one more. I’d say to my wife, “I think

Sydney Comedy Festival headline act Dave Hughes. Father of Rafferty, 9, Sadie, 7, and Tess, 6

one more would be really good for my act”. But that wasn’t a good enough reason, apparently. I’m often the fall guy for their comedy. My seven-year-old daughter was performing a song about my man boobs the other day. They’ve got license to be funny around me. And they make the most of that license. Screw-ups as a father? One time, I was in the backyard, on my phone, and I heard a thud behind me. My youngest daughter, who was three at the time, had fallen off the step up to the trampoline onto concrete. She had a bump on her head the size of a bloody tennis ball. I wasn’t very popular with my wife, who said if I hadn’t been glued to my phone it wouldn’t have happened, which is probably true. Another time I was at the aquarium with my son and we were engrossed in an arcade game. I looked up and my two-year-old daughter had gone. I thought, ‘Where the fuck is she?’ I started running around, and I’ll never forget the look on the cleaner’s face when I said to her, “Have you seen a baby?” She popped up about five minutes later, by which time I’d had about four heart attacks. The Sydney Comedy Festival runs from April 22 to May 19. For details and tickets, go to sydneycomedyfestival.com.au April 2019 113

Food Fight

I’m a chef. My daughter is unimpressed by my cooking. That can be hard to swallow By Tyler Kord

I CAN TAKE PRETTY much any ingredient you can throw at me and, once I pick it up off the floor because I am not great at catching things, I can make something delicious with it. I don’t need to look online to remember the ingredients for a chicken pot-pie, chicken cordon bleu, or even a chicken cordon bleu pot-pie. If you challenged me to make a 114

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soufflé, I would have to look at a recipe, but I wouldn’t necessarily follow it to the letter and it would still be a pretty excellent soufflé. I’m a good enough cook that I could put a little twist on it – like if it was a tomato soufflé, I might add a splash of elderflower syrup, which would catch you off guard but in a sweet and comfortable way that might make you say to my daughter, “Wow, Barbara, you’re so lucky to have a dad like Tyler to cook for you.” “No,” 22-month-old Barbara would say. And herein lies my challenge: to feed my child while trying not to feed my ego. Barbara is a toddler who knows how to say only one word but loves a wide range of foods, from blueberries to cheese to anything that is salty or crunchy or that I am about to put into my mouth. She especially loves when her mum gives her cooked pasta with nothing on it. What could be more delicious than dried pasta boiled in water,

M H D A D

“‘I am pulling cat hair off pasta and considering still feeding it to you!’ I shout at a toddler who thinks I’m a terrible cook” cooled to room temperature, and served with a glass of water? I’m sure that it tastes even more delicious when her father, who has spent the past 20 years of his life dedicated to the pursuit of a relatively high level of culinary understanding, stands by, observing as his daughter shoves fistfuls of plain shells into her mouth while watching Coco for the 64th time. I’m trying. I take her beloved pasta and I add cheese and milk and a bit of flaxseed meal, which thickens the sauce to a velvety consistency, turning good cheese and organic milk into fancy processed cheese, and she will take a bite, at which point I will set up FaceTime on my phone to show my wife what an incredible Chefdad I am. Barbara will take advantage of my lack of attention and dump the rest of the pasta on the floor. ‘Bon Appétit named my restaurant one of the best new restaurants in 2009, and I am pulling cat hair off pasta and considering still feeding it to you!’ I shout at a toddler who thinks I am a terrible cook but also that my exclamations are hilarious.

Award for cooking!” and I calmly told my little girl that at least I got a writing nomination and put her to bed and drank vodka while eating cheesy rice. And frankly, it’s okay. I will simply take the high road, as I do with my wife and parents, and hold on to the frustration so that years later I can throw it right back into the faces of the people I love most. Actually, I’m really looking forward to teaching my daughter how to cook. Right now, however, I must

remain patient – a truth that I’ve found links cooking and parenting well. Someday, I imagine that we’ll make a simple soup, one of the first things I learned to make, and together we’ll chop vegetables, gently sweat them in butter, add a little stock, and simmer them. I’ll let her season the soup and make sure it tastes just the way she wants it to. We’ll set the table and sit as a family, and I will try not to spit the soup all over the floor.

A SOUP FIT FOR A DAD Tyler Kord, cool dad and chef at No. 7 Sub, fixes us a hearty soup that will please even the most fussy family member

KEEP STIRRING THE BROTH Recently I cooked her some broccoli – and yes, I get that kids don’t like broccoli and it is totally my fault – but I gently caramelised it in a touch of olive oil to give it that magical toasted-broccoli flavour, then gently poached it in garlic-laced chicken stock, emulsified with more butter than my wife would be comfortable feeding to our daughter, and Barbara wouldn’t even taste it. My broccoli has been mentioned in The New York Times, and she pointed at a box of whole-grain bunny crackers because I guess she can’t read The New York Times. My friends ask if she likes broccoli because it’s kind of my thing, and they’re only kidding, but I pretend that something else has caught my attention. I cooked jasmine rice in a combination of milk and chicken stock with some tiny pieces of carrot and a little butter, and after it cooked, I stirred in a very mild shredded mozzarella. It was a bunch of stuff she likes, fortified with some protein and fibre, but in a way that even a child could love, and of course she tried to push it off the table, shouting, “You’ve never even been nominated for a James Beard

Ve p IsNotVegetarian (Not because I care about how much protein my daughter consumes but because I love vegetables cooked in chicken stock)

1. In a small stockpot, combine 450g chicken bones (these could be left over from a roasted chicken) with 1 litre of water. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce the heat to low and simmer for 1 hour. Strain the stock. If you no longer have a litre, add water until you do.

2. Rinse the stockpot and add 1 Tbsp unsalted butter, ½ small yellow onion peeled and chopped, 1 medium zucchini chopped, 1 medium russet potato peeled and chopped into 1cm pieces, and 1 head of broccoli chopped into 1cm pieces. (Add half a Tbsp salt here as well. Then at the end, taste and adjust as necessary. The right amount of salt is what takes this soup from pretty good vegetable soup to one of the greatest things on planet Earth that you can put into your mouth.) Over medium heat, stirring occasionally, cook the vegetables until the onion is translucent, about 10 minutes. Add the stock, increase the heat to high, bring to a boil, reduce to low and simmer until the potatoes are tender, about 10 minutes. Serves 3

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ESSENTIALS Our guide to what’s happening and what’s new

SLEEK MACHINE

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GO THE DISTANCE

FIRE UP THE BURN

Keto-Fit Fire works well with the keto diet, which helps put you into fat-burning mode. Providing high-quality coconut MCTs, carnitine, cayenne pepper and guarana, you’ll have the energy you need to help kickstart your day, stay in ketosis and maximise your performance or weight loss goals.

MEN’S HEALTH – AND MORE

Get six issues of Men’s Health for just $35.99 and save 37%. Plus, get free gifts from Peter Thomas Roth, worth $97. Don’t miss this fantastic offer. Visit subscribetoday.com.au/MH/PTR.

DON’T GET STUCK WITH A LEMON

Toyota Certified Pre-Owned Vehicles are a ride you can rely on. With an independent background check, full service history and 90-point inspection by Toyota technicians, you can feel reassured about both your Toyota Certified Pre-Owned Vehicle’s past, and its future. Visit toyota.com.au/certified.

The UA HOVR Infinite is the foundation of the UA HOVR Run footwear suite. A neutral cushion, plush balanced-trainer, the shoe was created for distance training, and to provide the runner with a consistent underfoot feel through an infinite number of miles. Available at Under Armour Brand Houses and Rebel Sport stores across Australia, or visit underarmour.com.au.

NO GYM REQUIRED

Build your best body ever and save on gym fees with the new Men’s Health bodyweight bible, No Gym Required. Featuring 25 easy-to-follow workouts and more than 150 equipment-free moves, it’s the ultimate muscle manual to keep you lean and defined all year. Available now for just $12.99. Visit the website subscribetoday.com.au/special-editions.

TRAINER

122 Take your training outdoors

127 Put a fiery twist on your morning refuel

B E C AU S E

F I T

I S

T H E

N E W

128 Build footy muscle

R I C H

HELL’S BELLS Kettlebell sport is “the original

CrossFit”, a form of training that can deliver strength, power and endurance. But to unlock the total-body benefits you have to submit to a world of pain LUKE BENEDICTUS

JASON LEE

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IN FULL SWING

Reignite your training and build a granite-hard physique by making an old-school, hard-core tool – the kettlebell – the centrepiece of your workouts

RUSSIAN CHAMP ANTON ANASENKO: “BODY SAYS, ‘ANTON, STOP!’ MIND: ‘NO, GO! YOU MUST.’”

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H E L L’ S B E L L S

The Russians are coming! And upstairs at The Richmond Gym in Melbourne, their looming arrival is making James Ross excited. Ross is a bearded trainer with the powerful build of a champion freestyle swimmer. Should he ever appear on Mastermind , you could safely bet that kettlebells would be his special subject. Frankly, the man is obsessed. How much of an authority is Ross? Well, he’s already dedicated a Masters degree to the kettlebell snatch. And he’s now happily immersed in a PhD on the kettlebell swing. Oh, and the 34-year-old is the amateur world champion, too – the calluses on his palms testifying to countless hours spent wielding the bells. The reason for Ross’s palpable excitement is that the final stage of the Kettlebell World Cup is being held at his gym. That means he’ll soon be hosting the best grouping of kettlebell athletes on the planet: the Russians. “These guys are incredible,” Ross says with awe. “They’re very elite.” Scarily tough, too. To get some idea of the crazy condition these competitors are in, Ross suggests a challenge. Pick up two 16kg kettlebells and then see how many times you can press them over your head without stopping. “These guys would probably do close to 300 reps,” he says. Ross’ evangelical zeal for kettlebells was borne out of respect for their transformative power. Growing up, he’d built up a solid background in Aussie Rules and athletics, and had started lifting weights at the age of 15. He was a seriously fit guy, in other words. Then he was introduced to kettlebell sport, which involves seeing how many reps of the snatch (one bell) or jerk (two bells) that you can do in 10 minutes. The sheer intensity of the workouts left him gasping. “You do five minutes of that and you’re just cooked”. The kettlebell, Ross discovered, was a total-body training system compressed into a single blunt instrument. “I’ve heard kettlebell training described as ‘the original CrossFit’, because you train a wide range of qualities but with fewer exercises that you gradually get mastery of,” he says. “It’s just such a time-saving approach and not that expensive, so it’s a great home gym.” It also delivers multiple

cross-training benefits. Strength, endurance, power, flexibility, speed – kettlebells can create those unicorns of the fitness world: truly well-rounded athletes. Take the kettlebell veteran who once visited Ross’ gym. “He was only 75 kilos but he dead-lifted 230kg and then ran a marathon on the same day to prove that he could.” “A Russian guy?” “No,” says Ross. “He was from Kyrgyzstan, actually. He doesn’t like the Russians much.”

Might and Power Eastern-bloc rivalries notwithstanding, Russia continues to be the dominant force in the kettlebell world and one of their most celebrated proponents is Anton Anasenko. Hailing from the frozen depths of Siberia, the former sambo wrestler has dominated the sport to become a multiple European and world champion. On the day of the World Cup, Anasenko sits outside at a nearby café, calmly sipping an espresso. With his shaven head and steely blue eyes, he looks like a henchman from a Bond film, his lean, muscular physique hinting at the coiled power within. Anasenko’s demeanour, however, is unruffled. He carries himself with that special form of selfassurance reserved for

next-level tough-guys with nothing left to prove. With an accent as thick as reinforced concrete, Anasenko explains that kettlebell training is ingrained in Russia’s history. “It’s been a system of sport in military since 1966. Very nice! Very good! Because why? Just kettlebell! Very simple tool for develop some power and endurance.” In fact, the sport’s roots go even deeper. Originally, kettlebells were agricultural weights used by Russian farmers to measure units of grain. “Each family had kettlebell in garden,” Anasenko says. “My mum used it for cook some food. She press with meat. And maybe cabbage with salt,” he shrugs. “She used it for press.” Growing up, Anasenko specialised in Sambo, the devastating hybrid of wrestling and martial arts designed by the Red Army and increasingly seen in MMA with the influx of Russian and Dagestani fighters. But when the Soviet Union disintegrated at the end of the last century (“It was broken,” says Anasenko matter-of-factly) there was a shortage of training facilities and coaches. “It was a lot of problem for us kids. We wanted to train sport. And we had no possibility because a lot of gyms closed. But we wanted to train. That’s why kettlebell,

AMPLE CHALK SECURES THE GRIP OF SWEAT-SOAKED COMPETITORS, BUT DOES NOTHING TO PROTECT THEIR HANDS FROM THE TELLTALE MARKS OF SUPREME EFFORT.

because very simple and kettlebell was in each garden, each family. And so we started to train, step by step with my guys, with my friends.” Anasenko found kettlebells a fitting replacement for the hardcore intensity of Sambo. While the disciplines may look straightforward, they make grievous demands on your stamina and strength. The kettlebell snatch, for example, activates nearly all your muscles while igniting your fast-twitch muscle fibres – the game-changers

for building size and strength. Chasing that elusive six-pack? The snatch has you covered there, too. The lopsided weight distribution of the kettlebell forces your core and stabiliser muscles to engage in order to control its angle and velocity. But these benefits have to be earned. Long-cycle kettlebell work in which moves are repeated for 10-minutes non-stop is incredibly demanding both physically and mentally. “The hardest part? The middle of the distance – maybe five and six

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RUSSIAN UPSTART CHUEV, (CENTRE) EDGES OUT CHAMPION COMPATRIOT ANASENKO (RIGHT).

“Yes, kettlebell training will chisel lean definition and build phenomenal aerobic grunt. But it goes beyond that” minutes,” Anasenko says. “Because your mind and your body have a battle. Body says: ‘Anton, stop!’ Mind: ‘No, go! You must! You must! You must!’ Like a battle, Bam, bam, bam. Every time.” That’s a world of pain, even for a veteran champion. To cope during competition, Anasenko breaks it down to minute-to-minute survival. “If you think about the whole time it can kill you,” he says.

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THE BELL TOLLS Back in the gym an hour later, things are heating up. Techno blares as participants line up to compete in groups of three. It’s game on. Competitors can tackle two disciplines – the snatch with a single kettlebell or the jerk with two. Once the clock starts, they strive to crank out as many reps as possible in 10 minutes. With the snatch, they are permitted to change arms once during the

time period. Otherwise there’s no respite. Ten minutes. Six hundred seconds. What soon becomes apparent from the pained expressions is that, when you’re trying to fight your way through a lactic-acid whirlpool, this can feel like an ocean of time. First up are the novice lifters, who use 16kg bells, then come the amateurs, who use 24kgs. When the final siren sounds, the competitors

drop to their knees, wringing with sweat and hollow-eyed with exhaustion. Then it’s the main event for the professionals in the sub-85kg weight class. In the jerk, Anasenko is taking on Sydney contender Kristian Karlsen and Russian compatriot Pavel Chuev. At just 21, Chuev is one of the sport’s rising stars and a former junior champion. Fresh-faced and muscular, he looks ominously strong. Standing side by side, the three dust their hands with talc and swap fist-bumps before the competition begins in earnest. Picking up a pair of 32kg

kettlebells, they swing them back between their legs and then launch them into the rack position at shoulder height. Here, there’s a momentary pause on the exhale. Then the bells are thrust overhead with straight arms. Then they do it again. And again … Anasenko and Chuev soon settle into their groove, banging out reps with metronomic regularity every eight seconds or so. They move almost in unison, matching each other swing for swing, their flawless techniques masking the strain as they synch the reps to their breathing. On the far

H E L L’ S B E L L S

THE 15-MINUTE KETTLEBELL BLAST Burn fat and build muscle to get lean definition, fast! This full-body circuit is a boon for all-round conditioning. The lunge thruster will smoke your shoulders, triceps, core, glutes and legs, while the high pull zeroes in on your hips, backextensors and rear delts.

WHAT TO DO Prepare to climb the ladder. Perform 1 rep of each exercise, then 2 reps, then 3 reps until you hit 10. Now descend the ladder doing 9 reps, 8 reps etc until you’re back to 1. Repeat for 15 minutes. Got through all the reps? Increase the ladder to 12 or add 2kg to the kettlebell. 1

ONE-ARM BACK-LUNGE THRUSTER R (LEFT)

TOP: KETTLEBELL TRAINING CAN CREATE THOSE UNICORNS OF FITNESS: COMPLETE ATHLETES. LEFT: KRISTIAN KARLSEN CELEBRATES HIS NEW AUSTRALIAN RECORD IN THE KETTLEBELL JERK .

Step back with your right leg into a lunge with the k kettlebell cocked at your left shoulder. Now, drive down hard through your left heel and punch the bell up above your head until you’ ’re standing again with your arm ended. fully exte 2

SONNY RAMIREZ/ILLUSTRATIONROOM.COM.AU

ONE-ARM HIGH PULL (LEFT)

left, Karlsen is setting an exceptional pace, too (he will go on to set a new Australian record of 61 reps). Nevertheless, the Soviet competition soon leaves him trailing in its wake. Five minutes in, Anasenko takes a sidelong glance from beneath his sopping headband to check on his main rival’s progress. Chuev’s pace is still simply relentless, while the older athlete is starting to breathe a little heavier. Gradually, with each rep, Chuev edges marginally ahead. Anasenko defiantly clings on, maintaining his rhythm, hoping to reel him in.

We’re in the mind-overmatter zone now. Each rep is an act of resistance, a bloody-minded refusal to submit to the laws of gravity and the burn of the 64g load. Yet somehow the 21-year-old continues to power on. As the siren blows, the final scoreboard reads: Chuev 86 reps, Anasenko 84 reps. It’s been an extraordinary display of guts and athleticism that may signal the changing of the guard among the kettlebell elite. But it also demonstrates the truth of what, Anasenko believes, makes this such a rewarding way to train. “It’s a very good sport for muscle,

for endurance, for ligaments and for mind,” says Anasenko, pausing briefly. “But maybe, first of all, for the mind.” Yes, kettlebell training will chisel lean definition and build phenomenal aerobic grunt. But it goes beyond that, he suggests, to forge something of greater significance: an indomitable spirit to keep on trucking when the going gets tough. “Kettlebell sport teaches you fight. We have to fight from the first day we are born. Fight today, fight tomorrow,” Anasenko says with a sad smile. “All of our life is fight. So kettlebell!”

Stand with your feet further -width than shoulderapart, grippin ng the kettlebell. Using your hips, swing the weight up to hairline height, stoppi ing ing short of lifti your arm over your head. Keep your spine straight t and ht. your core tigh 3

ONE-ARM BACK-LUNGE THRUSTER (RIGHT)

Repeat exercise one, stepping back with your left leg and holding the kettlebell in your right hand. 4

ONE-ARM HIGH PULL (RIGHT) Repeat exercise 2 with the bell in your right hand.

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FRESH AIR FITNESS

Pack on muscle and incinerate fat with these clever combos and smart interval sessions TREVOR LAGERWEY

The best thing about training for an obstacle course race? Well, life itself is an obstacle course. Your body needs to be ready for anything life throws at you. This workout from South African obstacle racer Trevor Lagerwey challenges you with classic calisthenics, sandbag work and enough cardio to send your metabolism into kilojoule-burning warp speed. That builds athleticism, strength and endurance. And perhaps best of all, it requires minimal equipment. You can do the main workout almost anywhere outdoors, from a playground to your backyard, and it will challenge nearly every muscle in your body. Follow the instructions below for each move; rest 30 seconds between sets, unless otherwise noted. Stick to that routine three times a week, but don’t stop there. For extra conditioning work, squeeze in some afterburner sessions, shown to the right of the exercises.

Use sandbags or a backpack filled with rocks. Place your bag of choice on your upper back (or on one shoulder, if it’s a smaller bag) and do 30 step-ups onto a raised platform (15 reps per leg). Raise your nonstepping knee to hip height on each rep. Do 4 total sets.

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PUSH-UP & V JUMP

Do 2 push-ups. After the second, still in push-up position, hop your legs forward so your knees almost touch your right elbow. Hop back to the push-up position, then hop your legs forward so your knees almost touch your left elbow. That’s 1 rep; do 3 x 10.

BROAD JUMP & BURPEE

Stand strong. Throw your arms backwards, hinge at your hips and leap forward. Focus on landing softly. Go straight into a burpee, then stand back up and jump straight upward. Clap your hands over your head to finish off the burpee. That’s 1 rep; do 3 x 10, with rest.

CHIN-UP & HALF-L SIT

Hang from a bar, underhand grip. Do 4 chin-ups. Lower yourself to hanging. Raise your knees until your thighs are parallel with the floor. Hold for 5 seconds. That’s 1 rep; do 4. Too easy? Hold your legs straight out in front of you during the L-Sit.

PULL-UP & BAR HANG

Hang from a bar with a wide, overhand grip. Do just 1 pull-up. Don’t immediately do another; instead, hang on the bar for 10 seconds. That’s 1 rep; aim for 3 sets of 10. And don’t be surprised if your grip fatigues near the end of each set. That’s okay.

KNEES-TO-ELBOW & HOLLOW HOLD

Assume a push-up position. Extend your right arm and lift your left leg. Touch your left knee to your right elbow. Return to the start. That’s 1 rep; do 15 per side. Now, flip onto your back and do a 45-second hollowbody hold. Rest for 15 seconds; do 3 sets.

PHOTOGRAPHY: SEAN LAURÉNZ

WEIGHTED STEP-UP

FRESH AIR FITNESS

TOE-TO-BAR & PULL-UP PAIR

Hang from a bar using an overhand grip. Bend at your waist, reach your legs upwards so your toes touch the bar; then return to the start. Do 2 pull-ups, taking about 3 seconds to lower yourself to hanging after each rep. That’s 1 rep; do 3 x 10.

SANDBAG SQUAT & BURDEN RUN

Pick up a sandbag, heavy medicine ball or backpack and place it on your upper back. Keeping your chest up, do 20 squats; then, without shifting the weighted object, immediately and explosively run 30 metres. Don’t rest; immediately begin the next set. Do 3-5 sets.

THE AFTERBURNERS To build endurance and torch a few extra kilojoules, sneak in one of these short, metabolism-spiking workouts two or three times a week

GEAR SHIFTER

THE MOUNTAIN

THE PUNISHER

Bring a stopwatch outside and find an area to run. Start the clock and run at an easy pace for 2 minutes, keeping your speed slow enough to carry on a conversation. Speed up slightly for 1 minute. Then sprint all-out for 30 seconds. Work through this pattern 3 times.

Find a hill. Start at the bottom and sprint up. Focus on driving your knees upwards with each stride, keeping your eyes only a few metres in front of you. Jog back down the hill, and repeat. Start with 3 rounds of this; aim to add 1 round whenever you do this workout.

This one builds stamina. For 10 minutes, you’ll run at a comfortable pace – with a twist. Every 25 seconds, drop to the ground and do 3-5 push-ups; maintain good form on these even as you tire. Chart how many total push-ups you complete; aim to up your tally over time.

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THE ZERP GEAR WORKOUT

THE ZERO GEAR WORKOUT Use this no-weight routine to quickly strengthen your shoulders and chest and improve your mobility

MOBILITY

STRENGTH

THE BENCHMARK

Do 2 rounds of this circuit to bulletproof your shoulders. The first move trains shoulder stabilisers; the second warms up your rotator cuffs. Rest 15 seconds after each set.

Do 3 rounds of this circuit. Focus on contracting your back muscles each rep; both moves challenge middle-back, shoulder and core muscles. Rest 15 seconds after each exercise.

Do 10 rounds of this circuit. Start with 10 reps of each move; ladder down by 1 each round (so 9 reps of each move in Round 2, and so on). Then check the scorecard below.

SEAL PUSH-UP

Stand centi r forearms flush against it, elbows bent 90°, palms facing each other. Angle your forearms out slightly; this is the starting position. Squeeze your shoulder blades and slowly slide your arms up and out without shrugging; then slide them back down. That’s 1 rep; do 15.

BENT-OVER LATERAL RAISE TO FRONT RAISE

Bend at your hips and knees so your torso is nearly parallel to the floor. Without moving your torso, take 2 seconds to raise your arms out to the sides until they’re parallel to the floor; then take 2 seconds to lower them. Use the same tempo to raise and lower your arms in front of you. That’s 1 rep; do 15.

Assume a push-up position, but with your fingers pointed outwards. Keeping your core tight and elbows tucked close to your torso, bend your arms and lower your body until your chest nearly touches the floor. Pause and push your body back up. Lock out your elbows; if you don’t, the rep doesn’t count (and you’re straining your rotator cuffs). That’s 1 rep.

90° EXTERNAL ROTATIONS

PLANK SPEED ROWS

AQUAMANS

WORDS: RAY PELECKAS; ILLUSTRATION: +ISM

135°

Hold your arms out to your sides and then bend your elbows so your hands and forearms point up (perpendicular to the floor), palms facing forwards. Keeping your upper arms parallel to the floor, slowly rotate your forearms down towards the floor as comfortably as you can. Rotate them back up. That’s 1 rep; do 15.

BENCHMARK SCORECARD

HOW QUICKLY CAN YOU CRUSH THIS CIRCUIT?

Assume a push-up position, your hands slightly beyond shoulder width and feet hip-width apart. Your body should form a straight line from ankles to head. Row one hand to your chest, keeping your hips square to the floor. Lower your hand; repeat with the other hand. That’s 1 rep; do 30, moving as quickly as possible with good form.

> 5 minutes Basic training

4-5 minutes Moving up in the ranks

Lie on your stomach, arms in front of you. Simultaneously raise your arms, legs and head off the floor. (If this hurts your back, leave your legs on the floor.) This is the starting position. Keeping your arms straight, rotate them out wide until your hands touch your hips (think snow angel). Return to the starting position. That’s 1 rep.

< 4 minutes That’s MH fit!

Post your time to social media: #MHBenchmark

April 2019 125

E W !

GET A BEACH-READY BODY IN JUST 3 WEEKS! The 21-Day Metashred is a revolutionary new online workout program that will help you incinerate fat and stack on muscle in time for summer!

metashred.com.au

SAY A D I O S TO S LOW STA RTS

MEXICAN EGG & POTATO SCRAMBLE

SAY ADIOS TO SLOW STARTS

For a tastier injection of get up-and-go, spice up your morning with a Mex-style, batch-cooked breakfast to help power you through your morning workouts

2140 KJS

25FATG 45 G CARBS 24G PROTEIN

Ingredients 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Waxy potatoes, 1kg, chopped into cubes Green capsicums, 2, chopped into cubes Red onions, 2, roughly chopped Eggs, 10 Cheddar cheese, 250g, grated Fresh tomato salsa, 5tbsp Spring onions, 5, finely sliced

Method STEP 1 Preheat your oven to 200°C and place the potatoes, capsicums and red onions on a non-stick baking tray. Season with salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil and cook for 20min. STEP 2 Set the veg to one side and whisk your eggs in a bowl. Pour the mixture into a pan and scramble on a medium heat until it’s just cooked through.

CARBS BEFORE BARBELLS

Per bowl: 200g Skin-on potatoes boost muscle glucogen and are rich in ﬁbre, helping to maintain your energy levels.

PEP YOUR SPIRITS

NOT-SO-ROTTEN

SUNNY-SIDE UP

Per bowl: 60g Green capsicum packs beta-carotene to offset the fatigue-inducing free radicals released during your workout.

Per bowl: 2 Eggs are one of few foods packing vit D, while teaming your scramble with cheddar ups your magnesium to reduce strength-draining DOMS.

WORDS: MICHAEL JENNINGS; PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL HEDGE

Per bowl: 1tbsp Tomatoes provide a potassium hit that increases your body’s electrolytes and helps prevent exhaustion.

STEP 3 Now, assemble. Divide everything into five separate bowls, then put three in the fridge and two in the freezer. When it’s time to eat, sprinkle with the cheddar cheese and spring onion and add a healthy dollop of salsa. Reheat for 2min in the microwave until piping hot.

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ON TRAINING FOR FOOTY, “YOU’VE GOT TO BUILD FROM THE GROUND UP,” SAYS MH’S LIUBINSKAS.

GET YOUR ARMOUR With the NRL about to fire up for another season,

MH fitness director Todd Liubinskas shows you how to whip your body into game-breaking shape DANIEL WILLIAMS

JASON LEE

HIS FOCUS nowadays is fitness. For its own sake. But Todd Liubinskas has rugby league in his blood. His dad, Mick, was a leading player of the roughhouse 1970s, turning out for Balmain and Western Suburbs before those great old clubs coalesced into the single entity known as Wests Tigers. His father was past his prime by the time Todd came along, but bestowed

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on his son a passion both for the game itself and the physical conditioning needed to play it. “I was doing sandhill training from the age of five,” recalls Liubinskas, who went on to play both league and rugby union at braggable levels. Now 35, he reflects wistfully on those times. “I miss the soreness,” he says. “You’d wake up and think, ‘Hell, I worked hard. I

got battered. But we won’.” These days a rippling 92kg, Liubinskas reckons he played his best rugby league at a hefty 108kg. That extra bulk was essential for absorbing the collisions, he says. “If you’re too lean you’re going to get manhandled and you won’t recover. I was training twice a day and eating a chicken a day with a lot of bread. You have to beef yourself up

because you’re basically a battering ram.” As a leading strength and conditioning coach with ties to numerous NRL players and coaches, Liubinskas knows precisely the kind of training you need to do to be ripped and ready for your own footy, whatever the level. Tackle his fit-for-footy workout – and prime yourself for your best-ever season.

GET YOUR ARMOUR

BUILD AN NRL BODY

As well as creating big muscle – especially in your lower body, where you need it most to thrive in a collision sport – this workout from Liubinskas will upgrade your engine so you’re still a lethal presence in the dying seconds of play

WHAT TO DO After a warm-up to activate your posterior chain, work through your sets of the three strength-focused exercises, resting 90 seconds between sets. Take a 10-minute breather, then do the conditioning circuit, aiming to complete as many rounds as you can in 10 minutes. SEE LIUBINSKAS’S NRL-INSPIRED WORKOUT AT MENSHEALTH.COM.AU

STRENGTH

A A

FRONT SQUAT

With a barbell racked on your anterior delts, chin up, brace your core and sink into a squat (A). Summon all your glute and quad power to drive back up (B). Do 4 sets of 10.

ROMANIAN DEADLIFT

With a bar held out front, scapula back, a slight bend in your knees, stick your butt out to initiate the lowering of the bar to mid-shins (A). Stand back up (B). Do 3 x 8 reps.

BULGARIAN SPLIT SQUAT

With a dumbbell in each place the top of hand, p your left eft foot on a bench behind you (A). Head up, perform a lunge on your right leg (B). Do 3 sets of 8 reps on each leg.

100-MIN CONDITIONING A

B B B

POWER CLEAN

Hold a barbell at waist level (A). Bend your knees and clean it to your shoulders (B). Do 8 reps.

MED-BALL SLAMS

Lift a ball from the floor (A) to full extension above your head (B). Slam it down. Do 20 reps.

ROW

Jump onto a rowing machine and row for 200 metres (A), initiating each stroke with your legs (B).

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ONE WORD ANSWER

GETTING SYRUPY AT BREAKFAST OR DINNER COULD STOP YOUR GREY MATTER FROM TURNING TO FLUFF.

ANSWER

Syrup

QUESTION

FEAR NOT – scientists aren’t advocating a daily dose of Bieber. Rather, it’s that other saccharine crowd-pleaser, maple syrup, which is getting lab researchers excited. According to new studies presented to the American Chemical Society, the sweet pancake-topper protects brain cells from damage by inhibiting the formation of harmful plaque. This supplements previous research in which scientists found 54 beneficial compounds in maple syrup, many of which have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties (including the patriotically named nutrient Quebecol). Crucially, these

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health boons were found only in products made with pure Canadian maple sap; that old bottle of Green’s hiding in the back of your pantry just won’t stack up. If starting each day with a mountain of pancakes runs counter to your six-pack goals, get your dose from a sticky barbecue glaze instead. In a pan, heat 1tbsp maple syrup with 125ml tomato sauce, 2tbsp apple cider vinegar, 1tbsp Worcestershire sauce and a pinch each of chilli powder and paprika. Brush over ribs or pork chops before throwing them on the grill. Consider limp burgers and ‘cheese’ usurped. It’s aboot time, eh?

WORDS: SCARLETT WRENCH

Which cloying Canadian export can help keep your brain sharper for longer?

Discover an island paradise and soak up the South Paciﬁc sun with these exclusive 7travel deals to Fiji. Book your next holiday now! Visit 7travel.com.au or call 1300 297 577 Sheraton Fiji Resort

Bonus 7travel Extras

The Westin Denarau Island Resort & Spa, Fiji

From $1439 per person, twin share (save 48%)

From $1439 per person, twin share (save 46%)

7 Nights in an upgraded Ocean View King Room Return economy ﬂights including checked luggage Buffet breakfast daily

• Return airport transfers with VIP Concierge • Unlimited Golf • Two bottles of water replenished daily • Bula Bus transportation between Sheraton & Westin Resort facilities and Denarau

Golf & Racquet Club • Daily activities schedule including Cultural demonstrations, aqua aerobics, volleyball and board games • FREE Wi-Fi • Kids stay, play and eat free^

Bonus 7travel Extras

• Return airport transfers with VIP Concierge • Unlimited Golf • Two bottles of water replenished daily • Bula Bus transportation between Sheraton & Westin Resort facilities and Denarau

Golf & Racquet Club • Daily activities schedule including Cultural demonstrations, aqua aerobics, volleyball and board games • FREE Wi-Fi • Kids stay, play and eat free^

Terms and conditions apply. Price is per person twin share (ex Sydney), pricing for other cities available. Valid travel periods only, subject to availability and surcharges. Surcharges apply for children’s airfares and accommodation. May change without notice. ^Up to 2 kids 12 years and under stay free sharing parents room using existing bedding and eat free when dining with a paying adult from children’s menu. Children aged 4-12 years play free at Lai Lai Kids Club located at Sheraton Fiji Resort. Book by 31 March 2019. For terms and restrictions, see www.7travel.com.au or call 1300 297 577

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