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Behind the Wheel with the Man of Steel
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CONTENTS
02.20
COVER GUY: HENRY CAVILL PHOTOGRAPHED BY:
BEN WATTS CAR SUPPLIED BY:
JEEP
62 Not content with being the chubby kid who became the Man of Steel, Henry Cavill is stamping himself as an acting force.
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INSIDE THIS ISSUE
TACTI CS
p20 Stanimal Instinct
Why tennis titan Stan Wawrinka’s tattoo is a motto for every man.
p36 Our Kind Of Girl
An ex-Miss Universe Australia reveals the traits she wants in a guy.
FITNESS
p92 The Gym in 2030
Get ahead of the curve and adopt tomorrow’s fitness breakthroughs now.
p117 The Incredible Rulk
The man behind a new fitness model will have you moving like a kid again.
NUT R I TI ON
p14 Sprouting Muscle
How adding this vegetable to your plate could speed up gym gains.
p26 Think Fast
If you’re not having long spells sans food, are you missing a trick?
MI ND
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47 Of The Best Snacks For Men Our panel of experts serves up the flavourpacked answers to guilt-free grazing.
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p34 Be Mr Brightside The Angry Man Of Fitness Shaping up? The curt James Smith tells you how to sift the wisdom from the woo-woo.
Negativity has its place. But don’t let it dump you in a chronic funk.
p108 Shrinking Feeling
Why all the excuses you pull for evading therapy just don’t hold up.
MUSCLE
p126 Hollywood Ripped How this big-time producer trains like an action hero.
p129 The Perfect Squat It’s bodybuilding’s golden move – provided you do it right.
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Baller Fitness The NBA’s most committed stars spill their secrets on prepping for peak performance.
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Field Weapons It’s time you enlisted the rugged cred conferred by a military-inspired watch. February 2020
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E D I T O R’S L E T T E R
Men's Health Australia
@MensHealthAU
@MensHealthAU
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SAVE THE WORLD, SAVE YOURSELF As I write this letter, the view from Men’s Health HQ is a sickening yellow haze, a scene evocative of the Chernobyl mini-series. It’s a result of 140 fires currently ravaging bushland across the Eastern States of Australia, and by all projections will continue long after this issue hits newsstands. According to official readings, the air in Sydney this week has a PM2.5 reading of 734 micrograms (PM2.5 is the global fine particle matter measure). To put this seemingly random number in perspective, the average cigarette registers at 20 micrograms, meaning a trip outside is the equivalent of smoking 37 darts. There’s surely no remaining doubt that the environment directly affects our health. The smoke currently infiltrating the office air conditioner is a reminder of that delicate relationship. And what’s happening on the East Coast of Australia is far from an isolated extreme weather event. At time of writing, floods are ravaging the South Island of New Zealand, fires still burn through the lungs of the world, the Amazon, and it’s snowing in the Victorian Alps. The time for passive indifference is over. You don’t have to believe in climate change (although, really, in 2020?) to recognise the benefits of looking after the world. To advocate for the environment is now akin to fighting for the health (if not the survival) of the human race. So, in an issue that is fronted by our generation’s Superman, Henry Cavill, what can you do to unleash your own inner Clark Kent and save the planet, not from alien invasion but from mankind itself? For me, I turn to the super men in my sphere for inspiration, with one leading the way this month: Dylan Garft. SuperGarft is co-founder of vegan instant coffee brand Sipp, an ecofriendly business (yep, even their packaging is compostable) that supports charity WildArk in setting aside nature conservancies around the globe. Going beyond business on a recent weekend, Garft donned his own Superman cape, again combining his passion for health and the environment in an effort to salvage both. What started as a friendly challenge between us following a routine training jog – to run the marathon distance in laps around Cape Byron – quickly escalated into Garft driving the first “Byron Ultra”, what we hope will become an annual event for us all to “Run For Change”. Our run ended up covering 54km, with upwards of 2km’ elevation – and it wiped me out for the two weeks following. True to his values, Garft structured the event HEART’S ON FIRE: so we were running to raise awareness (and AGENT OF CHANGE much-needed funds) for local fire relief. It DYLAN GARFT TOILS IN was the perfect synergy of health, fitness and THE BYRON ULTRA. the environment. And while the tone of this letter may seem bleak, with stories similar to this one popping up around the nation the ultimate outlook is still hopeful. Whether leaping tall buildings à la Cavill, or operating in a more mortal capacity, you can do something towards saving the planet. With so much at stake, the onus is on all of us to find a way to give back to the world that has given us everything, including our health.
SCOTT HENDERSON Editor BEN JHOTY Deputy Editor DANIEL WILLIAMS Associate Editor DAVID ASHFORD Creative Director JASON LEE Deputy Art Director LAUREN WILLIAMSON Digital Content Manager – Health ALEX PIEROTTI Digital Content Editor HARRIET SIM Editorial Coordinator/Junior Writer TODD LIUBINSKAS Fitness Director ERIN DOCHERTY Grooming Writer
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Editor in Chief, Men’s Health US SIMON HORNE
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ASK MH
THE BIG QUESTION
Will my sweet tooth sabotage my New Year workouts? BW
Not necessarily, BW. Sugar has rightly been vilified in recent years. It is addictive, as shown by the fact that many of us can’t quite get through our 3pm cuppa without the accompanying chocolate digestive – or four. But as you commit to the “New Year, New Me” eating plan consisting of chicken, broccoli and brown rice, you’ll be pleased to know that sugary treats don’t have to be off the menu. Nor chocolatey ones. In fact, they could feed your progress. Make the swap from milk chocolate to modish cacao and you can feast on post-workout brownies that will fire up your fat-burning potential. According to an animal study published in Lipids in Health and Disease, the antioxidant flavonoids in cacao boost the synthesis of enzymes that power fat burning in your muscles, liver and brown fat cells. They also stimulate the growth of new mitochondria, which create energy and boost metabolism.
SWEET SPOT: THE ODD TREAT WON’T BLOW UP YOUR FITNESS AMBITIONS.
Similarly, if you need to sweeten up the “earthy” flavour of a plantbased protein shake, then a squeeze of honey works wonders. Not only will it help the medicine go down, but a team of American researchers found that honey’s fast carbs impact insulin, testosterone and cortisol to create the perfect environment for protein to fuel growth. Nearly half of diet adopters give up after less than a month. For long-term glory, it pays to sweeten the deal.
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ANCIENT SOLUTION TO A MODERN PROBLEM Q I’m being shifted at work into a department known for backstabbing and bastardry. Should I quit now?
A Throw me to the wolves and I will return leading the pack.
–Seneca The Younger; b. 4BC
TEXT A PT: BEAT THE RUSH Today 1.15pm
The January gym rush is a nightmare. All the treadmills are taken, and now I don’t know what to do. Help!
First, well done for making it. Second, are you after fat loss or fitness? A bit of both – but my aim for this year is to lose 5kg … Oh, and I’m fairly new to all this gym lark, so no squat racks or trap bars yet, thanks!
ASK THE GIRLS IN THE OFFICE Ask the MH girls the questions you can’t ask anyone else. They’re three women who speak their mind, so don’t expect sugar-coated answers
Q
How do I tell my partner I want us to be more sexually adventurous without making it seem like I think she’s boring in bed? – Colin Harriet I think the best time to ask your partner to try new things is in a place where they are going to feel the least vulnerable; i.e. not during sex . Lucy Where would you ask, then? It sounds a bit awkward bringing it up over dinner like, “Hey, honey do you want to try anal?” Lizza I agree. I think when you’re out somewhere over a couple of drinks is great because it’s less pressure on your partner and if they’re horrified by the idea you can always just laugh it off.
Harriet Yeah, drinks can definitely help make it feel less of an interrogation. Start by asking, “Have you ever tried this?” or “What’s something you would like to try?” Keep it light-hearted and playful. Lizza To be honest, who says she’s not the one who’s bored? Lucy For me, I think I’m more likely to say yes if we’re in bed because I’d probably feel that I could go with it more in the moment. Harriet In that case, it could be good to introduce the idea during foreplay rather than during sex. Keep it positive and say stuff that you do like, rather than what you’re not enjoying. Lucy Yeah, so maybe try and change it up, so if she always goes
down on you maybe reverse it so that she knows from that switch that something is different. Harriet What’s the best way to react if she starts getting defensive or doesn’t seem keen? Lizza If you’re just going to surprise her by wearing a gimp mask in the bedroom, when you’re usually quite vanilla, I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t keen. But is your whole relationship – not just the sex – stuck in a rut? Maybe start by reintroducing emotional intimacy into other areas of your relationship first, because if you can’t be honest about your feelings then how are you going to ask your partner to go all 50 Shades on your arse?
Gotcha. Can you get your hands on a kettlebell and a rower? And 20min? Got the kit. And just 20min? That doesn’t sound so bad…
I suggest you reserve judgment till later. Rowing’s a full-body workout that’ll peak your heart rate, and the KB lets you hit big muscles in your lower body to spike your metabolism.
PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE; JASON LEE
OK, now I’m nervous! Start by doing 5 goblet squats and 10 swings, then hop on and row for 15kcal. Repeat every 2min for the 20. The faster you finish each round, the more of the 2min you get to rest. That’s 50 squats, 100 swings, 150kcal on the ergo and plenty of fitness gains in 20min. Not to be sniffed at.
LUCY HARRIET LIZZA
Today 1.40pm
On the floor in a puddle of sweat but feeling
Andrew Tracey is a fitness coach with a passion for CrossFit
Fire off your query to facebook.com/MensHealthAU February 2020
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WASH AWAY INSOMNIA PRE-BED
SCHEDULE IN MORE SHUT-EYE
Start getting ready for bed earlier – much earlier – to prime your body for sleep
T – 15 HOURS
WORDS: LOUEE DESSENT-JACKSON; PHOTOGRAPHY: STUDIO 33; *SLEEP MEDICINE REVIEWS
Still tossing and turning at 3am? New research suggests a warm evening shower can send your sleepless nights down the drain SLEEP IS THE TRENDING area of health research, and for good reason. According to a recent survey, only one in seven Australians can manage to sleep through the night, with nearly 20 per cent waking four times or more. Aside from millions of pairs of bleary eyes, the potential consequences of this are dire. Insufficient sleep increases your risk of obesity, diabetes and even alcohol abuse. Perhaps the most eye-opening statistic, however, is that it can raise your odds of an early death by 12 per cent. Fortunately, scientists in the US have found that adding a hot shower to your bedtime routine can put you on the fast track to the Land of Nod. That it’s a comforting end to a long, challenging day is a bonus – as is the fact that your sheets won’t serve as the final resting place for the leftover grime of your rush-hour commute. In a study*, taking a warm shower 90 minutes before bed helped test subjects to nod off 50 per cent faster and increased their total sleep by 15 minutes. Hot water dilates your blood vessels, improving your skin’s ability to lose excess heat. This helps your body to reduce its core temperature, a process
Get some sun in the morning. It helps to regulate your circadian rhythm and trigger sleep hormones after dark. University of Michigan
T – 4 HOURS
At the end of the working day, write tomorrow’s to-do list. Those with a sense of purpose in their lives report better sleep. Northwestern University
T – 1 HOUR
THE SMARTEST WAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SLEEP HYGIENE.
Not too hot? Put on some woolly pyjamas. It’ll ke k ep youu in the “therm rmal com mfort zone� betteer thann cotton. You can cooun untt on sheep. University of Sydney
T – 10 MINUTES that is essential to falling asleep easily. Compound this effect with a savvy choice of shower gel: a product infused with citrus can reduce your blood pressure and sink your cortisol levels, making dropping off even easier. Consider this your clean bill of health.
Set up a diffuser on your bedside table. Lavender oil increases the quality and duration of sleep for those with anxiety. Chronobiology International
FEBRUARY 2020
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YOUR ALL-NEW MUSCLES FROM BRUSSELS Elevate this m much maligned g side dish to the main event this season and feed your six-pack LOVE THEM or loathe e them, the small but mighty sprout is an impressive e, potassium and source of fibre, folate vitamin C. More imprressively, scientists have linked eating brrassica vegetables rich in glucosinolatess – such as cabbage, cauliflowerr and Brussels sprouts – to pumped d up muscle gain. Italian researcherrs found eating these underapprecia ated vegetables can stimulate the development of stem cells in your muscles, helping them to repair and grow. Wha at that means is you can fuel extra muscle e gain this summer by pairing your chickken with more than just another handful of spinach. The chemical compound d sulforaphane in sprouts also reduc ces cell death, which is crucial to sustaining muscle mass and facilitating fast recovery after a heavy session. A tasty bit of nutritional science, we’re sure you’ll agree. And sprouts need dn’t resemble the soggy morsels that u used to contaminate your grandmother’s roasts, either. When cooking c them, simply swap the sauc cepan for the roasting tin. Not only does boiling turn them into mush, you’ll also end up pouring much of their goodness down the plughole with the e water. Coat them in a little oil and seaso on, before roasting at home until golden and crispy with a few bacon rashers. The distinctly sprouty odour you will w leave in the office kitchen is sadly unavoidable, so the least you can do is make it taste good.
’TIS THE GET CRACKING SEASONING Black pepper stimulates Update your rack to spice up your sprouts’ performanceenhancing potential 14
gastric acid secretion, helping to enhance your digestion of protein. University of Port Harcourt
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CRUSH THE GYM
BRING THE HEAT
Garlic improves blood ow to your muscles by increasing your hydrogen sulďŹ de levels. Johns Hopkins University
Sprinkle with cayenne pepper before roasting to ďŹ re up your metabolism, torch fat and reduce your odds of the u. Purdue University
WORDS: MILLIE WEST
ING YOUR HOL OLIDAYY GREENS CAN GIVEE YOUR ABS A LIFTT.
THE CAREER PATH TO LONGEVITY
A late night at the office? Don’t despair, as hard work can earn you the overtime you really want – a longer life. Consider it a bonus
MAKE 6AM WORK PAY Stay in bed while the Ensure that your efforts at work are recognised with our workday plan
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email you scheduled the night before pings into your manager’s inbox. It’s a cheat so easy that you can do it with your eyes closed.
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attention to detail and a good work ethic – lived longer than their more laidback peers, even in cases where their careers never really took off. At a time when overtime is increasingly considered a dirty word, this is an important piece of evidence to the contrary. Overwork and burnout are
undeniably damaging, but if staying late to finish a project is important to you, then don’t hold back. Work is an essential component of a happy life, and now research suggests that investing your time and energy into a field that you love will grant your life the most significant payout of all.
RESET YOUR BALANCE: MORE WORK COULD MEAN MORE LIFE.
8.45AM
10AM
12PM
4PM
6PM
Abandon the at white queue and stroll into the office early. Arriving just in time looking sweaty and exasperated creates a bad impression.
Study the agenda for your one-on-one meeting in advance and, whatever you do, leave your phone well alone. Don’t even put it on the table.
Make a point of ďŹ xing the jammed printer. Engaging in “organisational citizenship behavioursâ€? will subtly but surely get you noticed.
Share the credit for successful projects with your managers, no matter how small a part they played. They will remember to return the favour.
Politely decline the dinner invitation from your boss. Keeping a professional distance fosters mutual respect and won’t attract the ire of your colleagues.
WORDS: LOUEE DESSENT-JACKSON; PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL HEDGE; ILLUSTRATION: MODERN TOSS
BURNING THE CANDLE at both ends, working yourself to an early grave – few idioms about hard graft offer much hope for longevity. But research suggests that your perseverance could earn you the last laugh. A long-term study published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine analysed the lives of almost 700 people, categorising them based on their level of success in their careers. Its first conclusion was unsurprising: a high level of attainment (defined by job prestige, leadership roles or a respectable annual income) lowered mortality risk during the study period. After all, it makes sense that you’re likely to be healthier and happier if you can afford to treat yourself. However, the researchers found that a psychological trait also confers some protection, regardless of whether or not you’re an office hotshot: an appetite for genuine hard work. Men who were deemed conscientious – those who exhibited self-discipline, ambition,
National Gallery of Australia
13 December 2019– 13 April 2020
Book now nga.gov.au
Pablo Picasso L’Arlésienne (Lee Miller) 1937, Private international collection © Succession Picasso / Copyright Agency 2019
CLOCK UP THE SAME GAINS IN HALF THE TIME More is not always merrier. New research shows that you can fit an hour’s worth of fitness gains into a swift, 30-minute session
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QUICK-FIX FITNESS
Tired of jogging? Sub in these alternatives to make your 30 minutes of work more interesting
SPINNING
1990kJ Get on your bike. Amateur cyclists are better able to maintain stable muscle mass, cholesterol and blood pressure levels throughout middle age. Aging Cell
ROWING
TAKE YOUR FOOT OFF THE GAS THIS MONTH. TIME IS ON YOUR SIDE.
1590kJ The metabolic requirements of a HIIT rowing workout were similar to what ďŹ ghters experience during MMA training. Strength and Conditioning Journal
SKIING
1320kJ Nordic skiers in their eighties were found to have a similar cardio proďŹ le to men in their forties. A SkiErg is the next best thing. Journal of Applied Physiology
WORDS: LOUEE DESSENT-JACKSO; PHOTOGRAPHY: JOBE LAWRENSON
AS YOUR KILOJOULE INTAKE maintains its festive peak, you will doubtless be thinking there aren’t enough hours in the day to offset your mince pie predilection. If an evening Ironman is the only way to make a dent in your fitness goals, you might as well hang up your trainers until autumn, right? Not according to scientists at the University of Copenhagen. Their research suggests that, rather than a sweat-soaked slog, you’re better off limiting your cardio to bite-sized portions of 30 minutes a day. They asked a group of healthy but slightly overweight men to commit to a daily cardio workout for 11 weeks; some were asked to do half an hour and the rest trudged through 60 minutes. All of the participants lost a significant amount of body fat but, surprisingly, the longer sessions conferred almost no extra weight loss. The study, published in the journal Obesity, also measured the effects on cholesterol, maximal oxygen uptake and insulin sensitivity. Again, only a negligible advantage was gained by the group that had put in double the effort. This is because your metabolism only has a finite amount of adaptive energy to translate your pain into gains (or losses). So, after a certain point, the ratio of benefits to training time nosedives. Overdoing the intensive workouts with back-to-back HIIT classes, for example, could cause your levels of muscle-and endurance-building testosterone to plummet, too. Our New Year message? You’d do well to forgo the extra mile.
A+ TACTICS
RETURN OF VERVE: HAVING OVERCOME KNEE SURGERY, WAWRINKA IS POISED TO MAKE HISTORY.
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+ Advantage STAY AHEAD OF THE GAME
STANIMAL INSTINCT
The late-blooming Stan Wawrinka reveals what it takes to excel in your field when you’re trading blows with a triumvirate of all-time greats
BY DANIEL WILLIAMS PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIKA BOUDOT
YOU MAY DISLIKE TATTOOS. You may think them ill-advised. You may think them unsightly. More than that: a stain on the body as temple. But could you make an exception, if not for yourself then for a fellow traveller? How about for Stan Wawrinka, whose career as a professional tennis player has coincided with those of the three best players (statistically, at least) who’ve ever lived? If a down-in-the-mouth Wawrinka had come across a message that could lift his spirits, anytime, at a glance, would you understand his choosing to ink that message onto the underside of his left forearm? And would it boost your understanding if the quote – lifted from a story by Samuel Beckett – encapsulated one of the finest philosophies any man could live by? Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. “I can’t remember how I first saw it,” says Wawrinka, who’s speaking to Men’s Health while on a spell in his
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homeland of Switzerland, spending time with his nine-year-old daughter, Alexia, while recharging on the eve of another year on the circuit. “When you’re a tennis player, even when you’re in the top 5 or top 15, you keep losing during the year. And when we are young, I think, losing means negative. And I don’t really agree with that.” Wawrinka has grasped an essential truth. Tennis, like life, delivers nonstop miniature defeats. Even on the way to a triumph there are kicks in the guts, pokes in the eye, blows to the ego. You won that war but not every battle. You did this well and you fluffed that. You performed well but behaved poorly. You performed terribly and behaved worse. Tennis has honed Wawrinka’s ability to go again, and again, after falling on his face. To find the nobility in failure. To understand that the point of all this is not the winning or the losing but the striving. “You need to learn from when you lose,” he says. “You need to try again. You need to practise and keep trying to improve. In life, for me, it is the same. You need to accept what is happening.”
COURTING HISTORY What’s happening for Wawrinka is this: he’s starting his 18th year as a pro with a monumental achievement in reach. Yes, the Australian Open is the next grand-slam tourney on the calendar, beginning Jan. 20. And, of course, doing well there matters to Wawrinka, a champion in Melbourne in 2014. The city’s searing summer heat rarely bothers him, he says, and he’s always excited at the start of a new year. And yet . . . for fans of Stan, Wimbledon in June looms as the more tantalising
“YOU NEED TO LEARN FROM WHEN YOU LOSE. YOU NEED TO TRY AGAIN”
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occasion because it is the only one of the four major titles that he hasn’t won. Membership of a highly exclusive club is there for the taking: only eight men have won all four. Talk about making the most of your opportunities. In an era dominated by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic (55 major titles between them since 2002), power baseliner Wawrinka has managed to snatch three, his breakthrough win in Melbourne in his late twenties a forerunner to success at the French Open (2015) and US Open (2016). So, he needs just a Wimbledon to complete a coveted career grand slam. If he can pull it off, it’ll feel like a daylight heist. Only tennis aficionados
DOUBLE ACT: FOR WAWRINKA, THE GREAT FEDERER HAS BEEN BOTH FRIEND AND NEMESIS.
weeks on crutches. He did the slow rebuilding of his atrophied shank and shattered confidence until he’d hauled his game and his world ranking (16 at time of writing) back into the top tier. “My first grand-slam win was at 29 years old,” he says, “so it came quite late in my career. I’ve always been the one who wanted to improve, always wanted to practise. And I give this example to any player: you need to keep pushing yourself to be the best player you can be, because you never know which age it will be.”
SWISS PRECISION
(and now you) will have seen it coming. Suddenly, Stan will be the Man, the toast of the tennis world. He’ll be 35 by then and quaffing the bubbly of Piper-Heidsieck, the champagne house that recently anointed him its global ambassador. Just a Wimbledon. That’s almost a joke because there is nothing “just” about it. Not least for Wawrinka, for whom the slick and slippery grass courts of the All England Club are a test of mind and body. “By far,” he says, “it is the most difficult surface for me.” Is Wimbledon on his mind? “Honestly, it’s not the way that I think,” he says. “And I never . . . I’ve already achieved way more than I expected.” While he knows what a Wimbledon
victory would mean, “I’m not focusing on that. I’m not telling myself, ‘Okay, it would be amazing to win Wimbledon’. To me, I know how to win a grand slam and I also know how difficult it is.” Nurse your niggles. Hit a thousand balls. Hit a thousand more. Harden your frame. Strengthen your mind. Before Wawrinka got the best tattoo in the game, compatriot Federer gave him the best nickname: Stanimal. A thickchested, amply-gluted 81kg, the man is strong. He can be a brute. He keeps coming at you. A knee injury requiring surgery in 2017 halted the most profitable run of his career and could easily have spelt ‘game over’ given his age and the movement demands of today’s game. Wawrinka spent eight
You rarely glimpse it on court but in conversation there’s a warmth to Wawrinka. He uses your name, exudes goodwill. A previously scheduled interview was aborted because he needed to take his daughter to hospital. “She’s fine, thank you,” he says. “Sorry about that.” This Stanimal comes from good stock. His German-born father, Wolfram, is a farmer and social worker; his Swiss mother, Isabella, has devoted much of her life to helping the disabled and forlorn. They sent their Stanislas to the Rudolf Steiner school in Crissier, where the goal is to nurture the whole child and not just the intellect. He was eight when he first picked up a racquet. There were courts five minutes from home and he and his brother, Jonathan, hit weekly. By 11, Stan was playing every other day. Before he had the best tattoo and best nickname, Wawrinka had the best backhand – the most sublime, anyway, a classical one-hander, all balletic lines and kinetic efficiency. As a junior he hit the backhand with two hands on the racquet but it wasn’t much of a stroke. It was his coach at the time who urged him to try it with one. “It was really tough but he said it was more natural for me and in the long term it would be better,” Wawrinka recalls. You ask him when he first sensed he possessed a talent that could carry him far. “I never start to think like that,” he says. “For me, it was always about my passion for the sport, enjoying practising, enjoying playing, trying to find solutions to win matches or to be better. I never had the experience of telling myself, ‘Ah, you are good!’ It’s always been more about what you do to get there [the top], rather than wanting to be there.” At points in the last five years Wawrinka would have been a worthy No. 1. He’s been as high as No. 3. When
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A+ TACTICS
“WAWRINKA HAS A HAPPY KNACK: HE IS DEADLY IN FINALS . . . 11 ON THE TROT” he redlines his game he can beat anyone, the Big Three included. It’s just that Federer, Nadal and Djokovic are more consistent in the execution of their distinct and prodigious gifts. Wawrinka offers this precis of the peculiar challenge of encountering each: FEDERER: “It’s the vision and the talent. He can do everything. Picks the right moment when to go and when not to go. He has a different vision of how to play.” NADAL: “Rafa is the ultimate fighter. It is tough because he always puts so much intensity in, so much spin. He makes you work for every single point and you know that, if you don’t play the right ball, he’s going to finish it off.” DJOKOVIC: “His game is so clean. He’s for sure the wall. He’s staying close to the [base] line. He’s reading. If you don’t push him back enough he will take control.”
STANIMAL KINGDOM In no small way Federer has cast his shadow over everyone in the game. But as a fellow Swiss at the sharp end of the rankings, Wawrinka might have felt it more keenly than most. But, again, the Wawrinka way is to mine every circumstance for positives. “When I got going he was already No. 1,” says Wawrinka. “And I took advantage of that for sure.” Took advantage? Federer was there with tips, guidance, encouragement. In time, a friendship formed between two men from roughly the same neck of the woods following the same surreal path to fulfilment. When they won gold as a doubles pairing at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 their embrace said everything about how close they’d become.
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They’re also different styles of men. The cover provided by Federer’s GOAT-sized aura is a blessing of sorts for Wawrinka, who is as shy and private as Federer is gregarious. As a Top 10 player Wawrinka has been through a divorce and more recently a relationship imbroglio needlessly inflamed by a puerile contribution from Nick Kyrgios. At such times Wawrinka would have been glad to be only the second most-celebrated racquetwielder from Switzerland. Which brings us back to Wimbledon and Wawrinka’s quest for the full-house of majors, since who better than Federer, an eight-time champion there, to advise Wawrinka on how to win the world’s most famous tournament? Except that Federer will almost certainly be playing there himself – possibly for the last time – and craves a ninth title for the road. So never mind advice. What about Federer’s example of skipping the claycourt swing in 2017 so he could focus on Wimbledon, which he duly won without dropping a set? Would Wawrinka consider trying the same approach? “Absolutely no chance,” he says. “And I will tell you why.” He explains how he’s a confidence player. How everything good in his game flows from confidence, and how there’s only one way he can build that confidence and that is by winning. So, to skip the big tournaments on clay – his favourite surface – would make no sense. Much better to play lots on clay, even if he runs himself ragged, and then show up at Wimbledon brimming with confidence. That will be the strategy, for better or worse. And if he can win six matches to reach the final, look out. Because Wawrinka has a happy
knack: he is deadly in finals. Before that bout of knee surgery flattened him in 2017 he’d won 11 on the trot. He is also 3 and 0 in grand-slam finals in which his opponent is the world No. 1. The only conclusion to draw from those numbers is that Wawrinka is one of those athletes who’s able to perform at the outer limits of his talent when the stakes are highest. “I think, you know, when I get deep into a tournament, I always have the confidence,” he says. “I feel like I’m playing well. It is my chance to play my best tennis.”
STANIMAL LIBERATION At the end of last year there were hints – only hints, nothing more, nothing that hasn’t been misinterpreted many times before – that the next generation of male tennis players might at last be ready to surge and push the Big Three off its perch. Needless to say, none of Federer (38), Nadal (33) and least of all Djokovic (32) is ready to go quietly. You can ascribe that same attitude to Wawrinka. “I would say it’s possible that I could play my best tennis sometime from now,” he says. That doesn’t mean, he clarifies, that he expects to go on some crazy winning streak, starting in Melbourne. “But I do believe that this year I will have some chances to win some titles and, hopefully, I will. Whether it’s going to be a big one or smaller ones, I don’t know. But I believe, yes, I still have some good tennis in me.” Regardless of trophies, Wawrinka will revel in the process of trying to find his best game. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Tryagain.Fail again.Fail better. Withthis asyour maxim, how can you ever lose? Piper-Heidsieck is the official champagne of the Australian Open
BACK FROM THE BRINK: AFTER SURGERY, “I HAD A LOT OF DOUBT. THAT’S WHY I’M SUPER-HAPPY TO BE PLAYING WELL.”
THE
LIFE OF S TA N
1985: BORN IN LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND 1993: STARTS PLAYING WEEKLY TENNIS 2000: AGED 15, QUITS SCHOOL TO FOCUS ON HIS GAME 2002: TURNS PRO AT 17 2003: WINS THE JUNIOR FRENCH OPEN 2008: TEAMS WITH FEDERER TO WIN OLYMPIC GOLD IN THE DOUBLES 2009: MARRIES ILHAM VUILLOUD, A SWISS TV PRESENTER AND FORMER MODEL. THEY DIVORCE IN 2015 2014 WINS FIRST MAJOR TITLE, BEATING NADAL (AT HIS 13TH ATTEMPT) IN THE FINAL. HITS CAREER-HIGH RANKING OF NO. 3. GETS HIS FAMOUS TATTOO 2015 WINS THE FRENCH OPEN, BEATING DJOKOVIC IN THE FINAL 2016 WINS THE US OPEN, AGAIN BEATING DJOKOVIC, TO CLOSE IN ON A CAREER SLAM 2017: UNDERGOES KNEE SURGERY POSTWIMBLEDON; SITS OUT THE REST OF THE YEAR 2019: BEGINS TO REGAIN PRE-SURGERY FORM; RETURNS TO THE TOP 20
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A+ NUTRITION
THINK FAST THE HOTTEST THING TO EAT FOR A NEW KIND OF ENERGY AND A BETTER BODY IS . . . NOTHING. SHOULD YOU JOIN THE CULT OF FASTING? BY MICHAEL EASTER
It was this past autumn, and Jack Dorsey, the tech entrepreneur who cofounded Twitter and Square, was on biohacker Ben Greenfield’s podcast to divulge the newest tool that helped him work the long, demanding, intensely focused hours required to run not one but two billion-dollar companies. “Fasting has been a new dimension,” he said. “For the past two years, I have only had dinner. The other thing I’ve been playing with recently is...I’ll go from Friday till Sunday. I won’t have dinner on Friday. I won’t have dinner or any meal on Saturday. And the first time I’ll eat will be Sunday evening.”
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Dorsey is another high-profile face in a swelling movement of selfproclaimed “top performing” men for whom when to eat is now just as important as what to eat. A-Rod, Jimmy Kimmel, Hugh Jackman and Chris Hemsworth have all fasted. Not to mention average guys – fasting books are ticking up the sales ranks of Amazon and WeFast, an online network of people who connect over their lack of meals, has around 20,000 members. Going anywhere from 12 to 72-plus hours without a single kilojoule, these guys believe, is the ideal diet strategy for the demands of the modern world. It allows humans to get more
“FASTING HAS BEEN A NEW DIMENSION. IT’S LIKE TIME SLOWS DOWN” - JACK DORSEY
shit done in less time (“It’s like time slows down,” Dorsey said of his first long fast) while also helping them live longer or cut weight. For some it’s a lifestyle – short fasts every day – whereas others tackle longer fasts weekly, monthly or annually to capture some magic or to “reset” after a bout of unhealthy eating or drinking. But not everyone agrees that there’s any magic to be had. Not everyone even agrees on what fasting is. “Intermittent fasting” or “timerestricted eating” means eating all of
your daily kilojoules within a specified window. What that window should be, however, is up for grabs. Responses to Dorsey’s fasting regimen came fast and hard, with people accusing him of both promoting and suffering from disordered eating, and of peddling pseudoscientific nonsense. Except he and other fasters aren’t onto anything new. They’re just more guys in a long line of people who have used time away from food to enter a new level of religious experience, biological revision and physical
metamorphosis, says Stanford researcher Adrienne Bitar, author of Diet and the Disease of Civilization. Abstinence is having a moment across the culture and lifestyle board – you probably know someone doing a fast in an effort to earn their way to something that’s missing. Like control. Detoxification, whatever that means. Self-improvement. A new way to be righteous. Or proof that they’re stronger than a sufferfest. The Internet spoons out plenty of reported benefits of food fasts. But beyond participating in a social trend, are people really getting anything out of it besides hunger pangs? We looked into what fasting could do for you.
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A+ NUTRITION
THE CLAIM MORE FOCUS
The Facts: Fasting adopters say that going without food allows them to do more work – and do it better – than they’ve ever been capable of, and it’s not just because they spend less time dealing with meals. It may have something to do with adrenaline, sleep or both. You’ve fully metabolised your last meal after 10-16 hours, depending on how much you ate. That’s when your body transitions from “fed” to “fasted”, releasing a symphony of hormones including testosterone, cortisol and a host of lesser-
known biochemicals that signal your body to mobilise and burn energy stores, says biochemist Trevor Kashey, founder of Trevor Kashey Nutrition. “Your body generates energy by burning fat, while arousing it with adrenaline, which increases your alertness and focus.” Other research shows that people who stop eating a few hours before bed sleep better, says Satchin Panda, author of The Circadian Code. That could lead you to be more focused the next day.
THE CLAIM LESS DISEASE
The Facts: From Hippocrates in 400 BC to American doctors in the 1800s, medical minds have theorised that fasting could cure diseases like cancer. These guys may have been too bullish, but some science suggests that fasting could have an effect on chronic disease. It may reduce inflammation and improve blood-sugar and lipid levels. And studies from the University of Wisconsin and the National Institute on Aging found that kilojoule restriction – a form of fasting, since there are long hours
THE CLAIM LESS FAT
The Facts: Wars are raging over which fasting diet is “best”, but the research community does agree on one thing: if you burn more kilojoules than you eat, you will lose weight. Because the average person in Australia eats three meals a day, plus snacks, nixing some of these can cut kilojoules and result in weight loss. “It’s another way to set parameters around eating,” says nutritionist Chris Mohr. Let’s say you used to have a beer or ice cream before bed. If you stop eating after 8pm, that s a big chunk of calories automatically 8pm “that’s
between feedings – reduced heart disease and diabetes in monkeys. Restricted eating also lowered cancer rates in the monkeys, possibly by leveraging an evolutionary mechanism that cleans your body, Panda says. When your body flips into fasted mode, it doesn’t burn its finest tissues for energy. “We get rid of a lot of dead and damaged cells,” he adds. Is fasting better for your health than a normal, balanced diet? Probably not. “Fasting doesn’t make you healthy so much as overeating can make you unhealthy,” says Kashey.
removed from your diet.” You just have to make sure you don’t overindulge in your eating window. A recent study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that fasting diets and plans that had you simply eat fewer kilojoules led to equal weight loss. Since there’s no magic food-timing formula yet, you can choose a plan according to lifestyle and personality. Or if you’re not convinced, you can always eat normally. Just keep it healthy. healthy
“SOME SCIENCE SUGGESTS THAT S FASTING COULD HAVE AN EFFECT ON CHRONIC DISEASE”
al
om.au
Make This Fast Redditors, wellness gurus and more than one tech boss have turned the very simple idea of going without food into a complicated, even mystical lifestyle, all swearing by a different number of food-free hours. If you’re fastingcurious, here’s how you’d tackle the three most popular approaches
Your situation:
Your situation:
Your situation:
OKAY, I’LL FAST, BUT I’M NOT SKIPPING FAMILY DINNER.
I’M INTERESTED, BUT IS THERE A FAST THAT LETS ME EAT?
NO FOOD? NBD.
Your Fast
12-16 HOURS
Difficulty
NOVICE
You’ve surely slept in and missed breakfast – and survived, right? Do that again, except on purpose. Aim for 12-16 hours without coffee or food. Short, daily fasts are practical. And if you eat only a 3300-kilojoule lunch and a 5000-kilojoule dinner, you can still go to bed feeling full. Suffering? Push breakfast later by 15 minutes each day for a week until it’s within a couple of hours of lunch. Then drop it completely. Justin Theroux
Who’s done it: Terry Hugh Crews Jackman
Your Fast
TWODAYS ON,FIVEOFF
Difficulty
INTERMEDIATE
For two days a week, you satisfy just 25 per cent of your usual caloric needs. The other five, you eat normally. It’s considered IF (also called 5:2), since you can’t graze all day if you’re eating only 2000 or 2500 kilojoules. It’s popular with the weight-loss crowd thanks to the best-selling book The Fast Diet, and research has found it effective, as long as you don’t go crazy with food on your regular eating days.
Your Fast
J. Lo
EXPERT
Yeah, you’ll be hungry, but the hunger builds and subsides. Long fasts like these may even reduce your appetite during normal eating hours through a cascade that happens when appetite hormones decrease, research suggests. Aim to end a long fast in the morning so you won’t be tempted to overeat with a massive dinner. Ease yourself into a light breakfast, then have your normal lunch and dinner.
Who’s done it: Jimmy Kimmel
Difficulty
36-72+ HOURS OFF
Who’s done it:
Benedict Cumberbatch
Jack Dorsey
Gandhi
Tim Ferriss
Other Trendy Fasts Food isn’t the only thing you can forgo.
ALCOHOL FAST
PORNFAST
SEXFAST
SOCIAL-MEDIA FAST
Even for those who drink moderately, a “dry January” can help reboot your life. In a study done at the University of Sussex, dry-January participants said they had better sleep, increased energy and even weight loss.
Colloquially called “no-nut November”– yeah, we know – it’s 30 days without porn and masturbation. Internet health guru Tim Ferriss claims that time off getting off helped him concentrate and accomplish more.
Terry Crews and Rebecca King-Crews are famous practitioners of this three-month mutual abstinence, which the couple say helped them reconnect (and assisted Crews in kicking his porn addiction, too).
The Happiness Research Institute found that people who stayed off Facebook for a week had higher life satisfaction and better concentration than those who continued their Facebook habits. – Joshua St. Clair
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A+ SEX
ANTI CLIMAX: WILLING HER TO THE SEXUAL FINISH LINE CAN TAKE THE HEAT OUT OF A RED-HOT ENCOUNTER.
HOW TO CLOSE THE PLEASURE GAP
So your partner had an orgasm. But did she actually enjoy having sex? BY MARK HAY
ARE YOU CLOSE? Are you there? Christine was hooking up with a guy from the club who was determined not to come unless she did – so determined, in fact, that he repeatedly asked how close she was to orgasm. For Christine, who often has trouble getting off with new partners, the sex wasn’t anywhere close to enjoyable. It was stressful. “It was like he’d watched a whole series of pornos and
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compiled a list of positions,” she recalls. “He kept asking me, ‘How much do you like this? Tell me exactly how much!’ I was like, ‘What do you want me to say, 8.34 out of 10?’ ” As he tracked Christine’s progress – or lack thereof – he called for five-minute breaks in the action, lest he climax before fulfilling his duty. The man was on a mission. And it didn’t matter that Christine was miserable.
It’s easy to see why some men approach sex this way, says sex educator Lawrence A. Siegel. “It’s what we teach men to do: be goal oriented, conquest focused. Everything has to have a clear, winning goal.” Research suggests that men can feel less masculine when their female partner doesn’t orgasm; when they think about failing to get a woman off, they feel embarrassed, distraught or
inadequate. And to be clear, guys should care about their partner’s orgasm, not just their own. By now, you’ve probably heard about the orgasm gap, the undeniable reality that women get off far less frequently than men during heterosexual encounters, possibly because the men they’re with – be they hookups or husbands – aren’t listening to their needs. But men sometimes take that mandate and warp it into terrible sex like Christine and Club Guy’s, insisting that the woman has to come – and often come first – even if that might not be practical or desirable for her. This creates what researchers call an “orgasm imperative”, a belief that any sex that doesn’t end in climax for both parties has been a complete failure. Nothing sucks the fun and
“NOTHING SUCKS THE FUN OUT OF SEX LIKE A GUY ANGLING FOR A GOLD MEDAL IN THE ORGASM OLYMPICS” passion out of sex like a guy who’s angling for a gold medal in the Orgasm Olympics. Women say it puts undue pressure on them to get off, which can make it harder not just to get there but to enjoy sex at all. Sex therapist Renée Burwell says that both
partners end up in “a cycle of shame and anxiety that decreases connection and enjoyment of sexual experiences”. So let’s throw out the orgasm checklist and think about closing the pleasure gap instead. “Removing the goal of orgasm
can reduce pressure and return – or introduce – the fun of being sexual,” says sex educator Lisa B. Schwartz. The less pressure a woman’s under, the more she can actually enjoy the experience. Ironically, letting go of the orgasm imperative might even make female orgasms more likely. First step: stop with all the asking. Mid-coitus is not the time to inquire about her orgasm, anymore than the health of her nanna. Instead, have that talk before you get busy, says sex therapist Vanessa Marin. Let her know you’re game to do whatever makes her feel good – as long as it’s within your own comfort zone – and that you’d like to get her off but are totally fine to stop what you’re doing if she says she’s had enough. Then, during sex, you can focus on enjoying the experience. Elisabeth Lloyd, a leading scholar on the biology of the female orgasm and a pioneer in the concept of the orgasm gap, says you can still check in with each other, but with noninsistent questions like, “What feels good or would feel good to you right now?”, rather than, “How close to coming are you?” The two of you can also make bucket lists of things you’d like to try in bed. It can be as simple
as spending a certain amount of time on massage, gentle touch, or deep kissing, says Lloyd. That way, you can concentrate on exploring that new activity together instead of fixating on orgasm, which takes pressure off both of you. If you’re still having trouble prioritising pleasure over climax, there’s always Siegel’s idea: don’t come at all. “Go on an orgasm ban, so that everything you’re doing with and for and to each other is for the sole purpose of experiencing pleasure,” he says. There’s no set rule for how long your ban should last – try it for a few days, or a few weeks. “Sometimes we just have to create a new picture of what we are expecting until the behaviour sets in,” Siegel says. A temporary ban on the big O might sound scary and even a little bizarre, but there’s a lot more to sex than 10-20 seconds of orgasm. Many women find intense – even complete – pleasure in the intimacy, passion and playfulness of a sex session. Focusing on the orgasm alone is like “eating an ice cream sundae and focusing on the cherry”, Burwell says. “The cherry is great. But the greater experience exists in the ice cream.”
Pleasure Boosters Some new items for your sexual tool-kit
RUB IT IN
Grab the oil and give her a massage. It’s a great way to explore the erotic potential of often-neglected parts of the body. Tracey Cox Supersex Massage Oil ($19.95; lovehoney.com.au)
EV UP THE FU
A bullet vibrator works not only on the clitoris but also as a new form of stimulation for any erogenous zone you can think of, male or female. Desire Luxury Rechargeable Bullet Vibrator ($79.95; lovehoney.com.au)
ROLL THE DICE
Sex dice will randomly tell you what to do to your partner – and where. They can feel corny, but they’ll help diversify your repertoire and avoid hammering straight toward the big O. Sexy Six Foreplay Dice Game ($19.95; lovehoney.com.au)
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A+ MUSCLE
TAKE YOUR FOOT OFF THE PEDAL AND INVE EST IN STRENGTH AND STABILITY ILITY WITH IT THE LOW LO -IM IMPACT ACT LUNGE TO OVERHEAD PRESS PRESS. IT’LL PRIM P E YOU TO HIT THE GROUND RUNNING IN 2020
WHAT YOU’LL GA IN
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S H O U LD E R STA B I LI TY
P RIM E D SIX-PAACK
PEACHY GLUTES
INJ U RY PROTECCTIO N
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BAND AID Secure a resistance band to a rack at waist height and hold it in both hands. To get into your starting position, step to the side, removing any slack from the band.
2
STEP TO IT
Push your arms out straight in front of you and feel the band twist your torso. Engage your core to ensure you remain facing forward. Now, lunge away from the rack with one foot.
ALL IN THE HIPS Firmly plant your outside foot, with your toes facing forward. Drop your hip to the side and sink until your glutes are in line with your knee, engaging your quads.
BRACE YOURSELF Keep your ribcage down and core tight as you raise both arms above your head – you’ll feel the resistance kick in. Reverse the movement for one rep.
WORDS: MICHAEL JENNINGS; PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILIP HAYNES
AS 2020 kicks off, you can look back with pride at all the burpees and deadlifts you sweated and swore through in 2019. Frankly, you’ve earned a rest. And while you rightly change gears into party mode, it makes sense to shift your focus in the gym, too. “Using the festive season to concentrate on movement quality in the gym is a smart move,” says elite PT Luke Worthington. “It’s hard to fit quality recovery time into a packed social calendar. That makes it difficult to build more muscle, or target fat loss.” So, reach for a band and head make the lunge to overh press a new staple movee. Perform three sets of 8-10 reps on each side at the end uts of low-intensity workou to strengthen your glutees, hamstrings and quads while This challenging your core. T lateral movement will also a strengthen your thighs in their most lengtheneed position – where injuriees are most likely to occur when you head back to HIIT class c come February.
A+ MIND
Becoming Mr. Brightside Our minds are programmed to focus on the negative. But you don’t have to surrender to the barrage of bad sh*t in your life
BY JOSHUA ST. CLAIR // ILLUSTRATION BY NEIL WEBB
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HUMANS ARE HARDWIRED for negativity. We dwell on the bad. We assume the worst. We’re way more likely to remember that one time our boss told us we were sloppy than the 10 times she told us we were great. And as much as we try to look on the bright side of half-empty (-full!) glasses, we’re just not built that way. The human brain developed millennia ago, when danger roamed the savanna, ready to ambush and kill us at any moment, and that led to what Roy Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University, has dubbed the “negativity bias” that still governs how we think. The only trouble is that for all the times it might keep us alive, negativity bias also has a way of causing us a ton of unnecessary stress. “The negativity bias gives us a warped view of the
world,” says John Tierney, who worked with Baumeister to coauthor the upcoming book The Power of Bad. We focus only on what’s going wrong (in the present) and assume that it will keep going wrong (in the future). We despair, lose hope and conclude that things won’t change. As if that weren’t already bad enough, Twitter, Instagram and other feeds hit us with crisis after crisis. But there’s some hope: through their research, Baumeister and Tierney have found real solutions that can help us fight our instincts and keep us out of a daily emotional funnel cloud.
THE POWER OFTHE RULE OF FOUR 1 UNLEASH
Five to one. That’s the famous Gottman Ratio, a predictive formula showing that couples tend to stay together when they have five times as many
“FOR EVERY NEGATIVE COMMENT, MAKE FOUR POSITIVEONES” positive experiences as negative ones. Baumeister thinks of it as a positivity ratio, and when it comes to your kids, your spouse, your underlings and bosses, he recommends aiming for a more attainable ratio of about four to one. For every negative comment you feel compelled to make, make four positive ones. Baumeister even believes that this four-to-one ratio applies to other aspects of your life. For instance, if you’re having sex with your partner four times for every one argument (sex because of arguments probably doesn’t count), then your relationship is likely positive.
2 REMEMBER THE HONEYMOON
Nostalgia used to be a dirty word. People prone to indulging in nostalgia were thought to be depressed or living in the past, says Tierney. But recent research has shown something else entirely. Far from keeping you down, nostalgia – yearning for past positive events or relationships – can actually pick you up. In one study, people who were prompted to think of an experience that made them “long for the past” before work reported feeling more motivated and therefore worked harder than those who were asked to think of an ordinary life event. Another study even showed that people experiencing nostalgia judged a room to be warmer than those remembering an everyday event. Your move: spend a moment before your workday begins to relive a special memory. Then extend the good vibes by writing down four keywords that best describe or recapture that memory.
3 PLAY THE (GLAD) GAME
You may not like tooting your own horn, but a proven way to combat negativity is to heighten positive experiences, and highlighting the positives gives them extra power. “When something good happens, sharing that good news with people you care about makes it more important, gives it a bigger impact and helps you develop a bond with the person you’re sharing with,” explains Tierney. Pay attention to and celebrate other people’s victories, too. If they share good news
with you, really hear it. A “That’s great!”/“Amazing!”/“Tell me about it!” ratchets up positivity. Even better if you put down your phone for the story and your response. On the flip side, you can also draw strength from negative experiences. Baumeister points to Shelley Taylor’s research on breastcancer patients. “The surprising thing was that most of them ended up talking about it as a positive experience,” he says. They saw it as an opportunity to make positive changes: to appreciate life, to focus on the present, to manage stress. One way to reframe is to think about what you can learn from a negative experience, not how it holds you back.
4
CHECK YOURSELF
“Why do you think you’re a good [intimate] partner?” That’s what Baumeister asks in his senior psych class at FSU. Many of his students list what they do well, saying that maybe being a good listener or a good sexual partner gives them an edge. It’s good to be good. “But what makes more impact,” says Baumeister, “is not doing the bad things.” Because bad always outweighs good, what you do is less important than what you don’t do. Sometimes that means holding your tongue, he adds, and putting a lid on the judging or curtness for what are minor infractions.
5 FOCUS ON THE PRESENT
For the majority of us, our greatest negativity is behind us – in our tendency to dwell on past mistakes and regrets, according to Baumeister’s current research. The future also carries negativity: stress about outcomes and potential failures. The present, however, is something of a golden mean, a place away from all that. “The mindfulness people are right,” Baumeister says. “Keep your attention focused on the here and now.” Catch yourself regretting the past? Bring yourself back to now. Worrying about tomorrow/next month/dinner tonight? Bring yourself back to now. If that’s too hard, just write down one thing you’re grateful for every day. That pushes away the negative and lets the positive flow in.
WHEN BAD IS GOOD
Employ these strategies from social psychologist Roy Baumeister and journalist John Tierney to use the negative to your advantage
D O N ’ T R E LY O N T H E C A R R OT
Rewarding your children for good grades (by giving them money) is less powerful than punishing them for bad (grounding them). Things are a little different in the workplace: motivating employees with both punishments and rewards has been shown to increase productivity.
ST R I V E TO FA I L
“It’s the mistakes you make – that’s where you learn and improve,” says Tierney. For instance, one study showed that students who attempted and failed a first round of maths problems later outperformed their peers who had been immediately taught the correct strategy.
PAY AT T E N T I O N TO T H E O N E - STA R S
If you’re a business owner, Baumeister suggests being attentive to negative feedback. That’s because negativity can hurt a business more than positivity can help. Going above and beyond for customers is not nearly as effective as focusing on how to minimise and fix their unhappiness.
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A+ MH GIRL
TEGAN MARTIN The former Miss Universe Australia and reality TV star credits sport for putting a little steel in her stilettos
BY BEN JHOTY
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For a girl who would grow up to become a Miss Universe Australia winner, Tegan Martin’s upbringing wasn’t all dress-ups and tea parties. “A lot of people probably think I’ve always been a girly girl, but I was actually a good mix between being girly and a tomboy and I played a lot of sports,” says the 27-year-old from Newcastle. She played representative netball, along with basketball and credits sport for developing the competitive instincts that have helped her succeed in life. “I think that’s where I got my tenacity, strength and determination from,” she says. “I think you can really carry that competitive edge into anything you do.” Sport also fostered boldness. As she tells MH, “I’ll give anything a crack”.
POWER OF THE UNIVERSE Martin began doing odd-jobs in a hair salon at 13 before undertaking an apprenticeship in hairdressing at 15. After dabbling in modelling she decided to enter her first Miss Universe Australia competition in 2011 at the age of 18, finishing second. “That was a huge shock,” she says. Having largely winged it, Martin returned to the competition with a more calculated strategy in 2013, again finishing second. Disappointed to miss out on the crown a second time, she resolved to give it one more shot in 2014. “I had these last-minute thoughts where I was like, ‘You know what? I have to do this for myself’.” This time, though, she wasn’t obsessing over the result. “I wanted to enjoy every moment and, of course, once you let go of holding onto something so tight, that’s when it falls into place.” SICK AND TIRED The pressures of performing, presenting and competing in Miss Universe sapped Martin’s energy. She visited various doctors, had tests done and was even prescribed antidepressants before eventually being diagnosed with glandular fever, which later developed into chronic fatigue syndrome. The diagnosis came as a relief. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s not all in my head’,” she recalls. In order to manage the condition Martin has had to drop the high-intensity circuit classes that had previously been her go-to workouts. “When I was training for Miss Universe, I was doing F45 and really high-intensity stuff twice a day trying to get my perfect Miss Universe stage body,” she says. Now she exercises according to how she feels, with walks, Pilates and the occasional jog. EMPTY YOUR BUCKET To manage her energy levels Martin also has to make sure she’s mentally refreshed. “I was approaching everything from a physical standpoint, but I didn’t realise that true healing
would only kick in once I started looking at my emotions and my mental state.” Martin uses a bucket metaphor to describe how stress from work or relationship problems can accumulate. “Eventually, if your bucket overflows that’s when you get to the point of being sick,” she says. Daily meditation, she adds, helps keep negative thought patterns in check. “I learnt how to do it by sitting near the ocean and being in tune with the sounds around me.” Her method for defusing incoming stress grenades? “Each time you have a thought like, ‘Oh, I forgot to do this’ or, ‘I need to do that’, the sentence that works for me is, ‘I’ll deal with you later’. I just keep saying that until I silence my mind.” HER KIND OF GUY If you want to woo a woman like Martin, best drop the po-faced, cool-guy act. “I’m a very humorous person and I find life boring if I’m not laughing,” she says. At the same time, you still need to be nimble of mind and ready to chew the philosophical fat. “He needs to be emotionally intelligent because I need to have those deep chats as well,” she says. Honesty and positivity are also key traits – and you need to be as committed to your health and fitness as she is. “If your partner doesn’t want to eat healthy or train, it’s hard to have much in common because it’s such a big part of my life.”
INSTAGRAM @TEGAN.MARTIN
BATTLE HARDENED Martin has had two spins on the reality TV carousel, first on The Celebrity Apprentice and more recently on I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! “I learned that if you take it day by day, hour by hour, it’s the easiest way to get through anything,” she says. The hardship and isolation she experienced in the jungle, together with the glare of the spotlight, helped forge resilience. “It was the most challenging five weeks of my life, but it taught me that I can truly do anything I put my mind to.”
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A+ COVER GUY
PEOPLE’S CHOICE
2020
With your verdict on March’s cover guy getting closer, we figured these workouts from the two Centr trainers might clarify your pick. After all, a man is what he does, right?
AFTER A MONTH on the campaign trail, Centr experts Luke Zocchi and Bobby Holland Hanton have entered the home straight in the race for our March 2020 cover. While home-grown Zocchi has flexed his culinary skills in the kitchen, Hemsworth look-a-like Holland Hanton has proved a formidable force in the wit department. While only one man can prevail in this battle, both are superb physical specimens, worthy of a place on both Team Hemsworth and the next cover of Australia’s favourite men’s mag. This month, the gents go head to head in the gym, revealing the signature workouts that got them fighting fit for quite possibly the biggest battle of their professional lives. Thanos who?
LUKE’S PUNCHY LITTLE ARM CIRCUIT Complete the below movements without a break. That’s 1 set. Aim for 4 sets with only 30 seconds between sets
Biceps Curl (6 reps each arm) Hold one dumbbell at 90˚ – palm up – with your left hand, while your right arm completes the lower half of a curl. Repeat in reverse. That’s one rep.
Hammer Curl (6 reps each arm) Hold a dumbbell at 90˚ – palm turned inwards – with your left hand, while your right arm completes the lower half of a hammer curl. Repeat in reverse. That’s one rep.
Zottman Curl (6 reps each arm) Complete a biceps curl with both arms moving together. On the eccentric phase of the curl (that’s the downward movement), turn the palms so they’re facing the floor . . . and hold on tight.
Overhead Triceps Extension (6 reps) Hold the head of a heavy dumbbell and raise it overhead. Slowly lower the dumbbell behind your head, before raising it back up. That’s one rep.
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Triceps Push-up (6 reps) Place your hands on a bench in an elevated push-up position, with your legs fully extended. Lower your body by bending at the elbows, bringing your head down toward the bench. Contract your triceps and raise back up to a plank. That’s one rep.
Chest Press (6 reps) Raise two dumbells above the midline of your chest, pressing the heads of the dumbbell together. Lower the dumbbells toward your chest, never letting them disconnect, whilst keeping your elbows tucked into your sides. Raise back up. That’s one rep.
LUKE
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BOBBY’S FULL-BODY DESTROYER WORKOUT Same deal: move from exercise to exercise without a break. That’s 1 set. Aim for 4 sets, taking a 30-60-second breather between each
Jumping Switch Lunge (10 reps per leg) Start in a lunge position, left leg forward. Spring into the air with enough height to land with your right leg forward. Move continuously through your reps.
Crunch (10 reps) Lie on the floor, face up, with your knees at 45˚ and feet firmly planted. Bring your lower ribs towards your hips, raising your shoulder blades off the floor. Maintain control even when lowering.
Triceps Push-Up (10 reps) Assume a standard push-up position, except with your hands much closer together, thumbs touching. Lower your chest slowly to the floor. Now, squeezing your triceps, push back up to the starting position.
Alternating Biceps Curl (10 reps) Grasp a dumbbell in each hand at waist level, palms in. Elbow locked, curl the weight in your right hand to your shoulder, turning your palm upward on the way up. Repeat and alternate.
Knee-Raised Crunch (10 reps)
Bodyweight Squat (10 reps) Assume an athletic stance, feet at hip width, hands clasped in front of your chin. Sink into a squat by pushing back your butt, keeping your upper body as upright as you can. Drive back up.
Lie on the floor, face up, with your knees at 90˚and feet up in the air. Bring your lower ribs towards your hips, raising your shoulder blades off the floor. Maintain control even when lowering, squeezing your abs.
Chin-Up (10 Reps) Toughest for last. Grasp a bar with an underhand grip and haul yourself up until your chin clears the bar. Lower slowly and repeat. Resist any superfluous movement.
V TE NOW! MENSHEALTH. COM
BOBBY
.AU
February 2020 39
A+ RELATIONSHIPS
BOYS WILL BE BOYS: AND AT WORK, WOMEN MIGHT PREFER TO ENDURE IT THAN BE EXCLUDED.
WHO GETS TO GO FOR DRINKS?
If you’re hanging with work pals, you’re networking. And as our keen-eyed writer has learned, that usually comes at the expense of those (read: women) who aren’t invited BY LAUREN LARSON // ILLUSTRATION BY MITCHELL MACNAUGHTON
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I RECENTLY READ Lord of the Flies for the first time. In case you, like me, went to a studentfearing school that did not assign it, Lord of the Flies is about a group of boys left alone on an island after their plane crashes. One by one, the boys succumb to their primal instincts – a “boys will be boys” worst-case scenario. At one point, Simon, the only morally steadfast boy on the island, contemplates a severed pig head on a stake. He realises that he alone stands in the way of the inherent evil consuming them, and he stumbles back to the group to warn them about their own vicious natures. They murder him with their bare hands. I’ve been Simon, kind of. Late at night one spring, I accidentally infiltrated a boys’ night. I was sitting around with a group of coworker friends, drinking beers and doing shots in one of their living rooms. I was the only woman there, but not in a “one of the boys” way. I have never in my life been one of the boys. I like spending time with men one-on-one, or even two-on-one (hold the threesome jokes), but when I’m alone in a group of men, I always feel self-conscious. I find myself either flirting with or mothering the group. I know that my presence causes some tectonic shift in the dynamic and that everyone is less comfortable because I’m there. I know that because whenever my friend brings her barnacle boyfriend to dinner, we have less fun. Back to that late night: I usually leave early when I’m hanging out with a group of guys – especially work guys – but on this particular occasion I stuck around. I stuck around long enough that the night became a boys’ night. A pizza came and went. One of my coworkers told a story about walking in on another hooking up with a bridesmaid after a recent wedding. “He was just pump-pump-pumping away,” he said, laughing as he burned the image of my colleague’s pumping tushy into my brain forever. It wasn’t full-on “locker-room talk” but it wasn’t conferenceroom talk, either. Some of the guys there were probably
“OVER AND OVER, I’VE BEEN AFFECTED BY DECISIONS MADE BY A BUNCH OF DUDES JUST HANGING OUT ” uncomfortable, and I was extra uncomfortable. I forced a laugh and stared into the depths of my beer. But I would have felt a lot more uncomfortable if I hadn’t been invited. I should clarify that I don’t mind being excluded from nonwork-related man time. A man I used to date goes on annual dudes-only camping trips with his friends. Whenever he brought up the trip, I would mention that I love camping (“but no pressure!”) and he would gently deflect (“we should definitely go camping sometime!”). Finally he explained that he and his friends spend most of the trip buck naked. I imagined myself staring agape at his friend Karl’s hairy back, like Simon facing the flynibbled sow head. I did not press the issue further.
MEN AT WORK But anytime business is on the table, I want to be involved. That’s especially true of the workplace. With the arrival of start-up culture, boundaries have relaxed a bit: work friends can also be friend friends, and there’s an expectation that you can and will hang. Being a “team player” used to mean that you participated in meetings. Now it means going to lunch and grabbing beers. That imperative creates a lot of opportunities for casual, freewheeling off-site brainstorming sessions, but it also creates a lot of opportunities for exclusion. Every time my male coworkers hung out without me, I whined, cold-shouldered and said, “I’m fine”. When I’d try to explain why I was upset, I sounded like the group’s clingy girlfriend. I understood they craved woman-free time the way I craved a man-free yoga class, but I didn’t want to be invited for the sake of being invited.
Over and over, throughout my career, I’ve been affected by decisions that were made when a bunch of dudes were “just hanging out”. In between the stories about walking in on each other p–ugh–pumping at a wedding, advice is given, ideas are shared and professional connections are built. For a woman, the politics of out-ofoffice hangs with male coworkers are different. I work in an industry in which professional bonds are forged over beers, but I’ve never once gotten drinks alone with a male superior. Granted, I’ve had plenty of lovely lunches with male bosses, but it’s not the same. When my male coworkers described the things they talked about with our bosses over drinks, they didn’t mean to be hurtful. But they didn’t understand how uncomfortable I would have felt proposing drinks to older men, and how rarely those invitations came my way. I tried to explain this to a friend. We were discussing a particularly exclusive – reactionary might be closer to the mark – golf club that requires “gentlemen’s golf attire” and continues to deny membership to women. A privatemembership club is allowed to restrict membership based on gender as long as the club isn’t open to the public, and Butler is invitation only. My friend suggested that by my logic, there wouldn’t be anything uncouth about the golf club banning women if male members pledged not to discuss business there. The problem is that “doing business” very rarely includes actually talking about business. “Networking” is 5 per cent impressing someone with your professional qualifications and 95 per cent hanging out, convincing people you’re not a sociopath. Even when the men at Butler
aren’t doing deals and mergers on the course’s shapely knolls, they’re doing business. My friend called me a hypocrite: I’ve attended a lot of women-only networking events (“Women in Media”; “Women Who Want to Be in Media”; “Women Who Aren’t Sure Whether They Want to Be in Media or Just Raise Alpacas”). And in spite of frequently railing against men-only spaces and institutions, I’d recently joined a coworking space that, in its genesis, was explicitly women-only. The bathrooms were pink and well stocked with beauty products, it wasn’t too cold, everyone dressed cute, the bookshelves were organised by colour – wholly impractical when you’re looking for a specific title. It was the cheapest coworking space that made sense, and it was pretty.
WELCOME TO MY WORLD But beyond that: in January, the space began letting in men. None has joined as a member – whenever a woman brings a male guest through, a hundred heads pop up from their computers – but men are allowed. If a man wants to come share light bites and white wine with me, nobody will tell him he can’t. None of us is as comfortable when a man is there, but we respect his right to be there. That’s all I want from manonly spaces. I don’t want to be there all the time, listening to them talk about dude stuff (pumping, hairy backs, etc.). But if an important conversation is going to happen on a golf course or over drinks – even if it’s just two seconds of important stuff nestled within five hours of watching the game – I want to be invited. Lord of the Flies wouldn’t have gone down the way it did if a girl had been there.
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A+ MH GARAGE
THE PLACE TO BE : THE VENUE HAS CHUTZPAH TO BURN.
PLUCKY PERFORMER Hyundai’s new Venue comes out swinging and lands a punch
BY ANDREW CHESTERTON
IT MUST take huge levels of corporate cockiness to openly advertise a new car as “the place to be”. A little like giving yourself a nickname (shout-out to all the “Big Dogs” out there), accolades do tend to lose a little steam when they’re self-delivered. Which is why all this “place to be” schtick is the kind of maverick marketing move usually only deployed by exotic Italian car makers like Ferrari or Lamborghini, both already so brimming with confidence in their vehicles they can charge $400k for a new car, and then ask, and with a straight face no less, “Would Sir like floor mats with that? That’ll be another $2000”. But Hyundai is no such company. Humble replaces
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hubris here. Remember, this is the same brand that gave an entire generation of P-platers their first taste of motoring freedom with the Excel, which not only debuted the now ubiquitous sales tag “drive away, no more to pay”, but was also – if you took a few steps back and squinted just a little bit – a lot like an actual car, only cheaper. In the years since, Hyundai has built its now rock-solid reputation on dependable, accessible vehicles, but you’d find more chutzpah in a head of lettuce. And yet here we are with the new Venue; an SUV that, according to the brand, is so named because it’s “the place to be”. It makes sense, then, to start this review while standing
outside the Venue, rather than from behind the wheel, to see if it manages to live up to that hype. And with exactly one engine to choose from – a naturally aspirated 1.6-litre petrol unit good for 90kW and 151Nm – this is no Ferrari. For once, the driving can wait. So, let’s start with the obvious. That high-riders now arrive in all shapes and sizes should be obvious (don’t believe me? Take a walk up and down your street this evening), but Hyundai’s newest offering perhaps stretches the SUV tag more than most. For one, it’s tiny. At just over 4m in length, it’s only a minuscule 20mm longer than the bite-sized Mazda2 (and given it’s strictly front-wheel drive, it’s
every bit as off-road ready), but Hyundai has somehow disguised its diminutive dimensions behind a wide, strong-looking grille, gently puffed wheel arches and a set of standard roof rails. The result is a vaguely rugged-looking SUV that somehow manages to look substantially bigger than it actually is. It feels bigger inside, too. Front-seat riders can travel with none of that awkward shoulder and knee rubbing common in tiny cars and there’s even enough room in the back seats for two adults to travel in something approaching comfort (although squeezing a third full-size person in the middle would truly be a cruel and unusual punishment). You can have the Venue
“YOU’LL FIND YOURSELF GRINNING ON A TWISTING ROAD”
in three guises, with pricing that stretches from $19,990 to $25,490. And in true Hyundai form, you get plenty of bang for those bucks. Even the cheapest cars get a 20cm touchscreen that’s Apple CarPlay and Android Auto equipped – so you can access your phone’s key features without risking a monster fine. But spend a little more and you’ll unlock a genuinely premiumfeeling vehicle, complete with big 17-inch (43cm) alloy wheels, leather-look seats and a very decent six-speaker stereo. One thing you can’t change, though, is the power, with just the one engine offered right across the Venue range; a simple 1.6-litre, four-cylinder unit that’s designed for frugality over fun. Still, keep the Venue where
it’s really supposed to be driven, namely the city CBD and its surrounding suburbs and you won’t notice the lack of grunt. The little Hyundai will happily climb to the legal limit with very little fuss and while you won’t be winning any Fast and Furious traffic-light sprints, you also won’t feel like you’re being anaesthetised every time you bury your right foot. The engine is smooth and unobtrusive in the city and the six-speed automatic shuffles through its gears easily, too. Oh, and there is a manual gearbox available, but nobody is going to buy one, so it’s largely a moot point. More good stuff? It’s seriously quiet in the cabin and that big centre screen is not only super easy to operate, but
the ability to use your Apple or Android operating system means proper navigation (as well as podcasts, Spotify, etc) is always at your disposal. It must be said, though, that the warm and fuzzy feeling does begin to dissipate once you leave the confines of the city. The Venue is not swimming in extra power and so acceleration to 110km/h (and not a kilometre more, officer) not only takes the same amount of time it does to boil an egg, but also injects plenty of harsh gruffness into the cabin. Like living under the flight path, you’ll get used to it. But if you pay close attention you’ll notice you start speaking louder when you see a steep hill or an overtaking opportunity appears. The ride is seriously
sublime, though, even over the sudden rough spots that plague Australia’s road network, and the steering and handling set-up is so surprisingly engaging that you’ll find yourself grinning on a twisting road and desperately longing for more grunt from that engine. With small SUVs still selling like high-riding hot cakes, there’s no doubt the Venue will do big things for Hyundai. It looks good, drives well in town, and has enough on-board tech to keep you amused on longer drives. So, is it really the place to be? Well, that’s up to you. But we can happily report that the Venue does arrive with floor mats included in its commendably sharp price. And that’s exactly our kind of chutzpah.
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AUSTRALIAN
YOUR PASSPORT TO WELLNESS
T 02 20
V E N: HIP S TER HE A O Y T, U’LL DAY OR NIGH ORE D NE V E R GE T B . IN PORTL A ND
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PORTLA ND
Run, Forest, Run The birthplace of Nike, Portland is the unofficial home of running culture. But there’s plenty more to discover in the US hipster capital, including an amazing food and drink scene, breathtaking natural beauty and possibly even a creature that leaves rather large – say, size-44 – footprints BY COURTENAY McDERMOTT
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PORTLAND, OREGON
THE PIANIST’S HANDS are dancing up and down the keys, the guitarist is aggressively strumming chords to match and the crowd are singing along like they’ve known each other for years. While you could be forgiven for thinking I’m at the type of local bar where ‘everybody knows your name’, this is, in fact, the scene on a Sunday afternoon at Portland International Airport. From the moment you land in Portland, the hipster capital of the US, if not the world, you’re treated like a local. Everyone is welcom-
ing, friendly and looks like they’ve just stepped off a Man Of The Woods-inspired shoot – even the arrivals lounge feels like you’ve stepped into a forest cabin and should be wearing plaid. Portland is situated on the Willamette River, which gives local runners some amazing bridge-to-bridge tracks to explore and explains one of the city’s nicknames – ‘Bridge City’. That and the fact I’m in the HQ of Nike, it seems only fitting that I lace up my runners and take a tour of the city on foot. I set off through a large
food-truck heavy neighbourhood on SW 3rd Avenue that features everything from mac n’ cheese to vegan bowls to burritos the size of your head, plus locally-made beer and spirits. The city is big on food and drinks, but more surprising perhaps is that all these suppliers work to support each other under the motto ‘better together’. Among them is Westward Whiskey, a locally-produced drop making a name for itself, not only in Portland but on Australian shores. Potential posterboys for the minimalist movement, the
“Even the arrivals lounge feels like you’ve stepped into a forest cabin and should be wearing plaid”
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company believe less is more, an ethos that guides the production of their whiskey. Less processing allows for stronger flavours. My tastebuds are definitely on board. With food now well and truly on the brain, I head to the Portland Farmers’ Market at the local university where some of the best suppliers set up shop, offering produce like apples, chillies, honey and some powerful bulletproof coffee. One local chef takes to the stage to host a free cooking demo using roasted jalapenos, before supplying the crowd with hot bite-sized snacks, as a handful of buskers plays funky tunes in the background. With a full belly and a caffeinated brain, my next stop is the Portland Japanese Gardens, which boasts some of the most peaceful and serene landscapes in the city. In a concrete, graffiti-covered jungle it’s immensely calming to be able to walk the orderly paths, admire the pagodas and practise some meditation, only 10 minutes from the CBD.
D E P A R T U R E S 02 20
The Nines Hotel 525 SW Morrison Street, Located in the historic Meier & Frank building in the heart of the city’s downtown precinct, think luxury digs with eclectic artwork. thenines.com
STAY
ON BIGFOOT’S TRAIL Stepping outside the city to explore greater Oregon, I jump on a bike-and-hike tour around the Columbia River Gorge. My goal is to see if I can spot a renowned Oregon local, the great man-mountain himself: Bigfoot. Oregon has more sightings of Bigfoot than anywhere in America and the locals love it so much they host an annual Bigfoot festival each August. Whizzing down winding roads, I take in some stunning vistas while keeping an eye out for the big guy. My ride finishes at the spectacular Multnomah Falls, where you can see why the locals are such outdoorsy people. Stunning in both scale and beauty, this tranquil natural wonderland is an amazing showcase of the rockfaces that surround the city. All that riding builds up a thirst . . . for whiskey, of course. Westward Whiskey organises for a group of us to explore its distillery and learn about the process of making the liquid nectar. Not a regular drinker of the good stuff, I’m surprised by
how quickly I learn to appreciate the process and enjoy their amazing drinks, including my new favourite: the ‘Westward Old Fashioned’ (see box for recipe). Next, we head east for a long lunch at Skamania Lodge, a luxurious retreat lying between soaring mountains, right in the heart of the Columbia River Gorge. In front of an open fireplace some of the local breweries educate us on the area’s prodigious craft beer scene. It’s a great overview of all the region’s amazing food, wine, beer and whiskey and as we methodically eat and drink our way through it all, I can only conclude that in terms of food and beverages, this little corner of America is punching way above its weight. As the clock runs out on my time in Oregon, I grow desperate for a Bigfoot sighting. Alas, the closest I get to the elusive creature is a pine-scented car freshener. For now, though, it’s back to the airport for some live music with the locals.
FROM LEFT: BIKE TRAILS ABOUND BOTH IN THE CITY AND ITS SURROUNDS; RAMEN TO THE RESCUE AT AFURI JAPANESE; BARRELS OF WHISKEY AT WESTWARDS’ DISTILLERY; LOCALS ARE PROUD OF THEIR CITY’S ECCENTRICITIES.
Skamania Lodge A glorious setting in the heart of the Columbia River Gorge, open fires, stellar views and a range of accommodation ranging from treehouses to log cabins make this a great base for Bigfoot stalking. skamania.com Hey Love Exotic plants and local art set the scene for fresh, bold and brightly-coloured dishes, not to mention a killer cocktail list. heylovepdx.com
EAT
Westward Old Fashion • 60ml Westward American single malt • 7ml Rich Simple syrup • 3 dashes angostura bitters • Orange twist • Cherry to garnish westwardwhiskey.com
FROM LEFT: DOWNTOWN STREET ART; ENJOYING LUNCH AT SKAMANIA LODGE; BOUNTIFUL LOCAL PRODUCE; ONE OF THE CITY’S MANY BEARDED BARISTAS.
Afuri Japanese Hearty bowls of Ramen are a great tonic after sipping whisky and craft beer all day. afuri.com Cup and Bar Quintessentially hip cafe that combines small-batch coffee and handmade chocolates. Win win. cupandbar.com
DRINK
Powell’s City of Books The largest used and new bookstore in the world. With over one million books you should find something for the flight home. powells.com
SHOP
There’s no better way to see the Columbia River Gorge (and possibly Bigfoot) than on a bike. aroundportlandtours.com
EXPLORE
In town, Nike offer bikes for hire. February 2020
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LONG SHORTS ARE ON THEIR LAST LEGS THIS SUMMER, WITH MICRO GLUTE SKIMMERS SHOWCASED ON THE MOST INFLUENTIAL RUNWAYS FROM LONDON TO MILAN. COOL IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE AND A DETERRENT TO SKIPPING LEG DAY, THEY SIGNAL THAT IT’S TIME TO GO SHORT OR GO HOME STYLING BY ERIC DOWN PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICK GUEST
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February 2020 49
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February 2020
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February 2020
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CLEAN SLATE
Here’s the skincare routine that’ll get you out the door fast – but still looking fresh BY ERIN DOCHERTY
Mornings are hard enough. Which is why a simple skincare routine is essential. If you’re a bit of a minimalist on the grooming front and just want to know what’s mandatory for keeping your skin looking healthy and blemish-free, then we’re going to lay it out for you. Things needn’t be complicated. Focus on the basics and stock your sink ledge with the following must-haves. They’ll add less than a few minutes to your routine and could mean the difference between someone saying, “Wow, you look great!” as opposed to, “Man, you look like shit”.
1
CLEANSE
First up, wash your dial. This removes dirt, grime and excess oils that are chilling on top of your skin and inside your pores (read: blackheads and breakouts). Splash your face with warm water and use a circular motion to work the cleanser into your face. “Once it’s applied, wash it off with water and repeat,” says Sydney skin therapist Dr Guilia D’Anna. Follow this double-cleanse by drying your face with a clean towel. “This process should be completed morning and night,” she adds. Before we go any further, let’s be clear: hand soap does not qualify as a cleanser. So, put that bad boy down. Instead of a soap that inflames and irritates your skin, D’Anna recommends cleansers that contain AHAs (alpha hydroxy acids). “These help to loosen dead skin cells from the top layers of skin, allowing them n to break free. This reveals softer skin that is more radiant,” she says. Try: Medik8 Pore Cleanse Gel Intense, $48
2
SCRUB
For a deeper clean, exfoliate your skin. This will buff away dead skin cells that can lead to clogged pores and breakouts. It’ll also give you a brighter complexion while minimising the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. Do this twice a week max – because dead skin cells don’t pile up that fast and you don’t want to end up irritating your skin. Try: Nivea Protect and Care Exfoliating Face Scrub, $12
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GROOMING
3
TREAT
37%
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If you don’t want to look like Iggy Pop by the time you’re 35, use an anti-ageing serum. A serum penetrates deep into the skin and is packed with nutrients, vitamins, antioxidants and more, depending on the concoction you go for. According to D’Anna, there’s one particular type every guy should use: a vitamin B serum. “Vitamin B is also called niacinamide in skin circles, and it’s a powerhouse ingredient, especially since our skin cannot make vitamin B for itself,” she explains. Vitamin B helps prevent and treat pigmentation by slowing down the transfer of melanin to the skin’s surface. It also works to improve the skin’s barrier function to maintain hydration. “It’s really the perfect serum for those guys seeking improved skin condition in terms pigmentation, dullness, fine lines and enlarged pores,” D’Anna says. Try: Alpha-H Vitamin B Serum, $70
4
MOISTURISE
Yes, moisturising is essential. Not only will a decent moisturiser make your skin smooth and soft, it’ll also create a barrier to shield your skin from toxins – like bushfire smoke. So, yeah, it’s pretty darn important. “In a nutshell, moisturisers contain emollients that smooth roughened skin and also seal in hydration, and substances that attract water into the top layers of the skin to reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles,” explains D’Anna. “Without a moisturiser you are relying on the skin’s ability to produce enough oil to coat the skin and do this work for us.” The main problem with that approach is that our environment and daily habits can often overwhelm the skin, so that the oil glands simply cannot catch up. “This leads to skin dryness and dehydration. Visibly, this means red, irritated skin prone to breakouts and other blemishes.” See? We told you this was important. Try: Hunter Lab Daily Face Fuel, $54
Bonus points if you use a daily moisturiser that includes SPF-30, because this’ll shield you from harmful UV rays, preventing premature ageing of the skin. Our advice? Be that guy.
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Q
I’m a huge sneaker head – well over 150 pairs. I’m also a 47-year-old professional. Have I outgrown them? Or is there a way to wear my beloved shoes and still look my age? - RC A. Outgrown them? Absolutely not. If you’re passionate about your collection and want to show it off, you are allowed to, no matter how old you are. The trick to not looking as if you’re desperately trying to dress like you’re still 20 is to let the Jordans or Yeezys do most of the talking. Keep the rest of your look subdued, like this guy – think neutral colours, dark jeans and minimal patterns that will let your soles shine. Air Jordan 1 Retro High Rookie of the Year sneakers ($235) by Nike; jordan.com. Cashmere sweater ($130) by Uniqlo; uniqlo.com/au. Cotton oxford shirt ($85) by Abercrombie & Fitch; abercrombie.com. Cotton stretch 502 jeans ($120) by Levi’s; levi.com.au. Twill backpack ($730) by Korchmar for Allen Edmonds; allenedmonds.com. Steel Black Bay 58 watch ($4570) by Tudor; tudorwatch.com.
NEW YEAR, NO RULES!
The Style Lightning Round YOU ASKED, WE ANSWERED. THE FIXES TO YOUR BIGGEST FASHION CONUNDRUMS OF 2020
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A. The tough answer: pay a visit to your tailor. He can take in the waist if your shirt fits in the arms and shoulders. The better answer: find brands that make options cut for broader guys, like Hugo Boss’ “sharp fit” shirt. It shows off your work at the gym when you have to be at actual work. Cotton shirt ($180), wool tie ($215) and wool trousers (part of suit, $1165) by Boss; hugoboss.com. Canfield Chrono watch ($1320) by Shinola; shinola.com.
STYLING: TED STAFFORD; GROOMING: ELLEN GUHIN/SEE MANAGEMENT; TAILORING: MORGAN FOOTE/ALTERED; LOCATION: PEERSPACE.COM; KEVIN SWEENEY/STUDIO D (BACKPACK, JACKET, WATCHES), PROP STYLING: CLAIRE TEDALDI/HALLEY RESOURCES
Q
I’maworked-out,broadshouldered guy. If I buy a dress shirt that fits my arms, it’s always blousy around the waist. What do I do? - KT
STYLE
Q
Q
This year, I’m ditching my briefcase, since it’s falling apart. Should I just get a replacement? – SC A. We’d suggest going instead for a smart leather backpack. The way we move through the world now requires durability and mobility a briefcase can’t offer. Featuring a secure tech sleeve for a 30cm laptop and multifunction pockets to hold a phone, notebooks and water bottle, this pack looks as good on the street as it does in the office.
What else is there besides a blazer that can keep me warm if I run out for a coffee? – ZH A. A thin wool blazer isn’t going to do much for you, warmth-wise, in the winter months. And if you find yourself in a casual office, it can even look out of place. Which is why a neutral, minimalist fleece works best: it’s dressy in a best-dressed-at-a-start-up kind of way and still functions as a warm layer for coffee runs. Retro pile fleece ($249.95) by Fair Trade Patagonia; patagonia.com.au. Plaid shirt ($100) by Banana Republic; bananarepublic.com. Heritage Series watch ($1240) by Movado; movado.com.
Pacer backpack in sport blue ($725) by Coach; coachaustralia.com
Q Q
My New Year’s resolution is to start wearing a watch. What’s a good starting point
Are there ideal pants for travelling? I want to be comfortable on the plane and still look good when I land. – TR
A. Ah, the elusive dignity-maintaining travel pants. Instead of wearing trackpants or scrunching into jeans, opt for pants with stretch and a flexible waist made for travelling with ease, like this pair from comfort king Mack Weldon. Radius trousers ($145) by Mack Weldon; mackweldon.com. Herringbone blazer ($436) by Banana Republic; bananarepublic.com. Cotton shirt ($430) by Eleventy; eleventy.it. Socks ($32) by Kane 11; kane11.com. Leather-and-wool slip-ons ($248) by Greats; greats.com. Watch by Rolex; rolex.com. Wheeled carry-on ($360) by Away; awaytravel.com. Leather luggage tag ($110) by Shinola; shinola.com.
– CW
A. If you’re not a regular watch wearer, you want to be sure you’re actually going to wear the thing before you put down big money for an expensive one. So grab a timepiece at an entry-level price. You’ll earn style points with a metal bracelet and bold face, and you’ll get used to regular wear without having to take out a second mortgage.
From left: Guide watch ($399) by Boss; davidjones.com . Promaster Nighthawk watch ($625) by Citizen Watch; citizenwatches.com. au. Infinite watch ($349) by Calvin Klein; myer.com.au. February 2020
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WA T C H E S
FIELD WEAPONS Attention! Salute the rugged appeal of a military-issue wristwatch
AT THE END of World War II, the British Ministry of Defence decided members of the Allied forces needed custom-built watches. In the heat of battle, soldiers required a timepiece that was accurate and reliable, so their watches had to be waterproof and shockproof. The MOD also requested stainless-steel cases, black dials plus luminous hands and hour markers. Twelve watch brands – including Omega, Longines, IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre – accepted this military assignment, manufacturing some 145,000 watches for the troops. Those brands subsequently became hailed as “the Dirty Dozen” and a set of their 12 original watches now represents the watch collector’s holy grail (there are fewer than 20 sets in the world). Today, y, the style y DNA of most militaryinspired watches can sstill be traced to those WWII watches. The defining characteristics: hard-knock durability y and easy legibility. The art of war may bee different in 2020, but a watch that’ll perform in the line of fire will always pa ass muster.
Ball Engineer 2 Magneto S $5150 Boasting shock resistance to 5000 Gs and a patented magnetic-protection system, this watch is seriously tough.
Tudor Black Bay BO1 $4970 Based on a 1960s prototype code-named “Commando” this was developed for the US Navy as a tactical diver’s watch.
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PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILIP LE MASURIER
Mido Multifort Escape Horween Special Edition $1525 Within the steel case lurks an automatic movement offering 80 hours of power reserve.
Seiko Prospex Automatic $699 Lost behind enemy lines? Not with this robust compass watch on your wrist. It’s functional yet stylish, with a vintage edge.
Citizen Promaster Altichron $950 This is an ideal climbing partner. As well as a compass, the Altimeter measures up to 10,000 metres above sea level.
Longines Heritage Military $2900 It looks like a vintage piece, but it’s actually inspired by an early 1940s pilot’s watch. Rugged but refined.
Victorinox Inox Professional Diver $1450 The titanium case is water-resistant to 200m while the camo dial and strap made from parachute cord adds extra military cred.
February 2020 59
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COVER GUY
Y BY BR IA N RA FT ER
PH OTOG RA PH Y BY
BE N W AT TS
r armour he at le r fo pe ca an rm pe Su s hi s ap The actor sw in the Netflix epic The Witcher, in a role he won by beating out 207 other guys. It’s not the first – or probably the last – time the self-described “chubby kid” has crushed the odds February 2020 63
F
It’s also one of the most castigated superhero blockbusters of all time – a film to be debated on Reddit forums and convention floors for years, or at least until the next Batman/ Superman team-up. When Cavill looks up and notices the troubled big-screen rivals standing near each other, he pauses, a muted smile flickering across his face. “Oh, well,” he declares wryly before moving on down the aisle. It’s an early-autumn afternoon, and the 36-year-old Cavill has dropped by House of Secrets to pick up some reading material for the flight home to London. It’s his first visit to the beloved store, which might be the most Superman-centric location in the entire Los Angeles area. The offices of DC Comics are a quick drive from here, as are the headquarters of Warner Bros., the studio responsible for Cavill’s Krypton triptych: Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman, and Justice League (2017). This is the last place you’d expect to find him milling about, only because it’s almost too obvious a hideaway. But here he is, cruising the store in a black V-neck shirt and light-blue jeans, his Kansas City Chiefs cap pulled down low. The getup is a valiant stab at anonymity, but it fails immediately. “Henry carries himself with a lovely sense of authority and confidence,” notes Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, the producer of his new Netflix fantasy series, The Witcher. “He doesn’t blend in very easily.” Indeed, once the half dozen or so customers get a look at the guy with the bumper-plate pecs and three-mile-wide shoulders – and the equally towering, semi-incognito bodyguard trailing him – a few start staring at one another with furrow-browed 64
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disbelief: wait, is that dude . . . Superman? As the 188cm, roughly 90kg Cavill wanders around, he points out some of his favourite Superman storylines – Savage Dawn, H’el on Earth – and gushes over the work of novelist Aaron Dembski-Bowden. (“It’s not high sci-fi,” he enthuses, “but it’s deep sci-fi.”) I steer him toward writer Alan Moore’s brain-pulping early-’80s run on Swamp Thing. It’s a psychotropic tale of existential mutation that would likely make for a nervy bit of in-flight reading. But it seems like a good fit for an actor who’s undergone his own on- and offscreen metamorphosis over the past several years. When the British-born Cavill began his career in the early ’00s, he was slotted in supporting roles, often as naïf, lovestruck young men. But ever since he signed on to play Superman – a part that required him to bulk up and become an IRL version of the world’s strongest do-gooder – Cavill has steadily transformed himself into the kind of leading man the major studios now crave: a pure franchise player, one whose dimple-chinned dashingness and carefully engineered physique can be plugged into all manner of big-brand properties. Other superstars of his generation, like three of the four guys named Chris, tend to balance out their mega movies with smaller, less CGI-intensive efforts. Cavill, though, is unabashedly dedicated to the sorts of films that necessitate huge budgets, months of physical training and mammoth Comic-Con rollouts. He was a double-crossing dandy in 2015’s late-night cable classic The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and a triple-crossing baddie
in last year’s giddily ridiculous Mission: Impossible – Fallout. This month, he plays the long-haired, evil-eyed medieval outcast warrior Geralt on The Witcher, based on the best-selling book series. “I like that realm,” he says of both The Witcher and the larger fantasy-and-fandom culture it represents. “These characters matter a lot to people, and they matter a lot to me.” As Cavill browses the aisles, some of the clientele sorta-discreetly close in on him. (Joe, his imposing but not unpleasant security guy, keeps an eye on the onlookers while rifling through comics.) The actor preempts any awkwardness by turning around, shaking hands, and chatting everyone up before they can tap him on the shoulder. One customer imitates Cavill’s
STYLING: TED STAFFORD. SET DESIGN: ABRAHAM LATHAM/ART DEPT. HAIR: JACQUELINE RATHORE USING DAVINES. MAKEUP: AILBHE LEMASS. PRODUCTION: CRAWFORD & CO.
all the Men of Steel on display at House of Secrets – a comic-book store in Burbank with red-and-blue renditions of Superman dotting the ceiling, the walls and even the floor – none is as striking, or as symbolically fraught, as the one staring down at Henry Cavill. The actor is standing under a glowering, arms-folded miniature sculpture of Supes on a bookshelf, right next to a similarly intimidating bust of Batman. The two crime fighters battled it out in 2016’s aggressively hyped Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, one of three films for which Cavill donned Superman’s cape. It grossed $873 million worldwide and is the biggest box-office hit of Cavill’s career.
COVER GUY
fierce “fist cocking” motion from Fallout; another bonds with him over Alien, a film that spooked Cavill when he was a way-tooyoung kid living on the English Channel island of Jersey. (“Dude,” the actor says, “walking up to bed that night? I swear there were those things on the ceiling.”) Yet while Cavill tours the floor, he sounds apologetic for not being more caught up on the comic-book realm. “I’ve been quite disconnected from all of this for quite a while,” he says. “I’m very behind.” It’s been nearly a decade since he was hired for Superman duty and almost two years since he last played the character, in the troubled Justice League. That film required extensive reshoots in which Cavill’s Fallout moustache had to be removed via digital effects; his
“The cape is in the closet. It’s upper lip looked as if it had been stuffed with wet cotton balls. Although the resulting film was seen as a slight improvement over Batman v Superman, it was considered a financial underachiever, despite making more than half a billion dollars worldwide. A planned sequel was quietly euthanised. Oh, well. There have been numerous reports – some from rumour-ravaged fan sites, but others from credible industry publications – that Cavill’s time as Superman is finished.
still mine”
You can sense the question forming in customers’ heads as they watch him ring up his purchases and exit House of Secrets: Wait, is that dude . . . STILL Superman? Cavill’s stayed silent about such gossip for a long time, to his occasional frustration. He fought for years, facing down countless rejections and close calls, to land a part as cosmically iconic as Superman. It’s a role, and a character, he guards fiercely – and insists he hasn’t let go. “The cape is in the closet,” Cavill says. “It’s still mine.” February 2020 65
US
A FEW HOURS earlier, Cavill’s daily workout was interrupted by a cameo from Tupac Shakur. The actor was in a private gym in L A, where he’s been spending a few days for business. Over the past two decades, Cavill has grown accustomed to exercising in whichever city he happens to land in. Maybe London. Or Budapest. Or Abu Dhabi. They’ve all served as home somewhat recently, though he notes that he doesn’t really live anywhere: “I’ve been a bit of a nomad for 19 years,” he says. On this particular morning, Cavill was sweating it out when Tupac Shakur’s 1998 hit “Changes” came on. (You know the tune, the one in which Tupac’s raging, mournful lyrics about social injustice are paired with a surprisingly banging Bruce Hornsby sample.) He hadn’t heard the song in years, and as he listened to it, Cavill – a guy who’s regularly unmoored – was briefly frozen in his past. He flashed on an image from his days as an English boarding-school student in the late ’90s, sitting in a dorm with a trio of friends as the song played. “It was the craziest sense memory,” Cavill says. “I was like, ‘Whoa’. I had my whole life ahead of me as a kid back then. I believed in myself. But I was terrified nothing was going to happen.” We’ve now grabbed a window-side booth 66
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at a restaurant across the street from the comic shop, where Cavill is having a midday iced coffee. In conversation, he is thoughtful but rarely wanders beyond his self-set parameters: he doesn’t discuss his love life in any way, and even a seemingly innocuous query – like asking if he has a favourite among the countless memes his Superman mustache inspired – finds him demurring. Yet as he describes this flashback to his old dorm, he smiles – which is unexpected, given how deeply unhappy he says he was during those years. Cavill had wanted to leave home ever since he was a kid on Jersey, a British territory known for its stunning beaches. He can appreciate the island now. But back then, it felt way too small. “I was desperate to get away,” Cavill says. His parents, who worked in finance, sent him and his four brothers off to get a private education, nearly causing the family to go broke. In his teens, though, Cavill’s big concerns were slightly more myopic: somehow he had become one of the most unpopular kids. He’d do things he considered chivalrous – like admonish his classmates for flicking up a girl’s skirt – and find himself branded a “lemon”. (The nickname, he explains, means
“a boy who tries too hard with the chicks”.) And he was picked on for his weight, earning another taunt: “Fat Cavill”. “I was a chubby kid,” he says. “I could’ve very well gone down the route of just accepting my lot in life and being like, ‘I guess I’m not going to do anything’. ” Cavill eventually slimmed down, thanks in part to playing sports like rugby. But it wasn’t until he began acting in school stage productions that he felt more comfortable in front of others. “It actually helped me survive,” he says. “Even the kids who were nasty to me at times and took pleasure in squashing me – when I finished a play, they’d say, ‘Wow, you’re really good’. And I was like, ‘Okay, this is where I draw my strength from’. ” Such an origin story, of course, is just the sort of outcast-overcomes-the-odds mythos that superstar actors sometimes inflate (or even create) to seem more relatably mortal. But in Cavill’s case, the alienation he experienced as a teen – the way people made him feel overweight and undervalued – helps explain the roles he’d seek out: the imperfect heroes who must push themselves to physical and emotional extremes just to be understood by others.
COVER GUY
“I was a chubby kid. I could ’ve gone down the route of just acceptin g my lot in life” WAS NEAR THE END of Cavill’s boarding-school years that he landed his first movie role, as a wide-eyed 19th-century teen in 2002’s adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. Director Kevin Reynolds, who’d worked on such blockbusters as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, auditioned “a crop of tadpoles”, he says, before settling on Cavill, who was just 17. Cavill also ended up in a relationship with a woman he met through one of his on-set colleagues. “I really hadn’t dated much at that point,” he says. “I had my first love on that movie.” Cavill appears in only a few moments of Monte Cristo, but the job earned him an agent and convinced his parents he should pursue acting full-time. Reynolds, who’d helped shape Kevin Costner’s career, was another early believer. “Even back then,” the director says, “I felt like Henry had the moxie and the ability to become a star.” The rest of the industry wasn’t so sure. Over the next several years, he found himself “living on sofas, and by the good grace of girlfriends and friends”. Cavill auditioned regularly – and sometimes terribly. For 2003’s The Lion in Winter, he read with Patrick Stewart and walked out flustered. “I was so shit,” he says. But at least he went back and tried a second time – a
move that earned kudos from Stewart. “It’s terrifying going into auditions,” Cavill says. “You put your hand into a dark hole and just hope that something comes out. It’s not like being fast or strong or being good at football. Sometimes the acting is just bad.” His most infamous tryout took place in the mid-’00s, when he was up for a role that seemed well suited to his black-tie-ready handsomeness and deep-voiced dryness: James Bond. To screen-test, he had to walk out of a bathroom wrapped in a towel and reenact a scene from one of the Sean Connery-era films. “I probably could have prepared better,” Cavill says. “I remember the director, Martin Campbell, saying, ‘Looking a little chubby there, Henry’. I didn’t know how to train or diet. And I’m glad Martin said something, because I respond well to truth. It helps me get better.” Cavill recalls being the 002 choice for 007, losing out to Daniel Craig. It was the beginning of a long run that positioned him as runner-up: he missed out on lead roles in Tristan + Isolde, Twilight and an early Superman film that was never realised. “I wasn’t ecstatic about not getting these things,” Cavill says, “but I was so used to disappointment from the acting business,
and also from boarding school. ‘No, you’re not good enough’ – that wasn’t anything new to me.” He did procure a four-season run on the Showtime historical drama The Tudors and later a role in the madcap swords-andslaughter fantasy film Immortals. That 2011 hit, which featured Cavill as a virtuous Greek action figure, would reach number one in the US, make a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide and expose him to filmgoers – in every way possible. “It was my first experience working on a movie and having my shirt off for most of the damn time,” he says. He was put on a strict six-month diet and underwent extensive martial-arts training to help him slim down. “It’s very emotionally taxing,” he says. “When you add the lack of food and the pressure on top of that, it’s tough.” When Immortals was released, Cavill was already halfway through filming Man of Steel, making him the third actor and the first Brit to depict the hero onscreen. Man of Steel required more working out than Cavill had ever endured, with entire filming schedules coordinated around his shirtless scenes. He’s always felt like a custodian of the heroes he’s portrayed, whether it’s an February 2020
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BUILD
SUPERHERO
ARMS The secret to Henry Cavill’s jacked Witcher physique is a trio of moves that builds powerful shoulders, biceps and forearms (critical for hoisting Geralt’s sword, by the way). Pack these Cavill favourites into your workout for a serious arm ump
ISO-HOLD BICEPS CURL Curl 2 dumbbells; hold the up position. Squeeze your right biceps as you lower the left dumbbell, then curl it up. Repeat on the other side. That’s 1 re ; do 3 sets of 10-12.
DUAL CABLE REVERSE-GRIP KICKBACK Stand facing a cable machine and grab the 2 handles. Hinge forward at the waist until your torso is parallel to the floor – this is the start. Straighten your arms, flexing and squeezing your triceps; return to the start. That’s 1 rep; do 4 sets of 10, resting just 45 seconds between sets. 68
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ILLUSTRATIONS: PETE SUCHESKI
THREE-WAY SHOULDER RAISE Stand holding light dumbbells at your sides. Raise them out to your sides, then lower. Raise them out to your sides at 45 degree angles, then lower. Raise them out in front of you, then lower. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 5.
COVER GUY
“I know what it feels like to go from out of shape to in shape” Page 64: Sweatshirt by Todd Snyder + Champion; jeans by 7 for All Mankind; watch by Timex. p66-67: T-shirt by Armani Exchange; pants by Tommy Hilfiger; watch by Omega; socks by American Trench. p68-69: Thermal shirt by Banana Republic; jeans by 7 for All Mankind; boots by Joseph Abboud for Allen Edmonds. This page: T-shirt by Armani Exchange.
Athenian warrior, a Kryptonian orphan, or a monster-slaying Witcher. That’s why he subjects himself to such torturous training. “I’m representing important characters here,” he says. “I don’t want to be a dumpy Geralt or a fat Superman.” Cavill swears by high-intensity intervals and bodybuilding exercises. “I know what it feels like to go from out of shape to in shape,” he says, “and [afterward] I’ll look at myself like, ‘Man, well done’. It’s not like I’m a golden god – I’m just proud of what I achieved. And then you can take your clothes off in front of your significant other, and they’re like, ‘Goddamn, you look great!’ Like, ‘Yes! I’m making other people happy’. ” Yet some have suffered for Cavill’s intense love of the gym. “I wouldn’t say we ‘worked out’ so much as I acted as Henry’s trainer,” jokes costar Ben Affleck of their time on Batman v Superman. “I really had to help him increase muscle mass – before my coaching, he looked like Gumby.” He adds, “In all honesty, we did work out together. And I hated it.”
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AN ALIEN do-gooder stranded on Earth, Superman was obviously going to be a bit aloof, and there were times in Man of Steel when it was apparent that Cavill’s charms were being buried underneath all of the brooding. It wasn’t until the big-screen remake of the TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that viewers got an idea of the actor’s innate playfulness. Cavill played a swanning, conning American agent named Napoleon Solo. And although it wasn’t a hit, it marked a crucial moment in his career. As Solo, he was droll, at ease and effortlessly sexy. Watching U.N.C.L.E., says director Christopher McQuarrie, led him to cast the actor as the evil-genius villain of Mission: Impossible – Fallout. “Something in Henry’s comic timing told me he had talents that weren’t being exploited,” says McQuarrie. “I found he had a charming sense of humour – at which point I knew he could be a villain. The best villains enjoy their work.” Cavill’s U.N.C.L.E. performance also made an impression on Schmidt Hissrich, The Witcher’s producer. She first talked to him about playing Geralt before the series even had a script. In the ensuing months, she met with 207 other actors about the role.
“But all the time I was writing, I kept hearing Henry’s voice in my head,” she says. “In the books, Geralt is fearsome, but he also has this amazing dry wit. We needed someone to play both ends of the spectrum, someone who could see all the trauma of the world he’s in but could also step back and roll his eyes once in a while.” The Witcher combines the sneaky charisma Cavill displayed in U.N.C.L.E. and Fallout with the sinew and strength he built up for his superhero roles. After working on Fallout, Cavill was keen to do his own stunts on The Witcher, including rigorously choreographed sword fights. But he was most excited, he says, about the chance to understand Geralt’s place in the world. “It’s funny how much he’s actually like us,” he says. “Geralt has that thing of trying so damn hard and being misconstrued or not appreciated – of people having a negative opinion of you, despite you actually trying to do the right thing.” Which brings to mind Cavill’s lengthy stretch as Superman – the three movies that made him an international star while also leaving a large segment of fans unsatisfied. He’s cautious when discussing the films themselves, so consider these assessments the height of his candour: Man of Steel? “A great starting point. If I were to go back, I don’t think I’d change anything.” Batman v Superman? “Very much a Batman movie. And I think that realm of darkness is great for a Batman movie.” Justice League? “It didn’t work.” Cavill almost reprised his Superman role for a blip-sized cameo in this year’s Shazam! but says he couldn’t do it because of his Fallout schedule. That absence – coupled with the fact that The Witcher could wind up as a Game of Thrones-like epic that eats up a huge chunk of his calendar – furthered the speculation that his time in the cape was finished. “I’m not just going to sit quietly in the dark as all this stuff is going on,” Cavill says of the rumours. “I’ve not given up the role. There’s a lot I have to give for Superman yet. A lot of storytelling to do. A lot of real, true depths to the honesty of the character I want to get into. I want to reflect the comic books. That’s important to me. There’s a lot of justice to be done for Superman. The status is: you’ll see.” February 2020 69
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OLIVES Bland foods encourage overindulgence. Olives, on the other hand, punch above their weight in the flavour-intensity stakes, plus they’re full of good fats and Vitamin E. NB: a dry martini will erase said benefits.
FROZEN MANGO This is one of Sullivan’s snack hacks for anyone with a sweet tooth. While mango is high in sugar, the small chunks make it easier to control portions. “Three or four pieces are usually good to kick the sugar craving and if you leave it to sit for a couple of minutes you get a gelato-like texture when you eat it.”
BEST SNA NUTRITIONAL KEY FOR FOODS Good for:
YOUR EXPERTS:
SIMONE AUSTIN is the dietitian for Hawthorn football club, President of Sports Dietitians Australia and the author of Eat Like An Athlete.
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JAMES NEWBURY is widely regarded as Australia’s fittest man. He finished 5th in this year’s CrossFit Games and trains up to 12 times a week.
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LUKE HINES is a nutrition coach, personal trainer and author of nine cookbooks including Smart Carbs, Eat More Vegan and Clean Living Made Easy.
JORDAN SULLIVAN is The Fight Dietitian, masterminding the nutritional plans of some of the world’s top UFC athletes, including Israel Adesanya.
PETE EVANS is a TV chef, presenter and founder of thepaleoway.com. His books include Easy Keto and Healthy Every Day.
Weight loss
Muscle
Satiety
Sweet tooth
Pre-gym
Recovery
Desk drawer
Vegan
NUTRITION
WALNUTS
COTTAGE CHEESE
Want to avoid overeating? A study published in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism reveals that walnuts contain an appetite-suppressing ingredient to help fill you up for longer. Squirrel away in your desk drawer to head off hunger pangs.
Turns out you can polish a curd - cottage cheese is the nutritional proof. Not only is it low-carb, but one cup contains more protein than two eggs. Don’t find it very appealing? “Eat with a little sweet chilli sauce and cut-up veggies for dipping,” says Austin.
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ou hit the gym at 5.30am then eat a sashimi salad (“hold the mayo”) for lunch. Marvelling at your self-discipline, you’re feeling pretty good – like some sort of biodynamic hybrid of Gwyneth Paltrow and The Rock. That’s until the hunger pangs strike at 3pm. With nothing to nibble in your desk drawer, you find yourself standing at the office vending-machine, where you grab a bag of Cheezels and a Twix . . . This is a familiar scenario. Bad snacks have derailed men’s good intentions since the dawn of time (or at least since the invention of the KitKat). But you don’t have to starve between meals or joylessly subsist on raw kale. You just need to graze a little smarter. Use these guilt-free options from the experts to stop your snack attacks from sabotaging your health and fitness goals.
POPCORN Salute the kernel! Popcorn contains 15 times the disease-fighting polyphenols of whole-grain tortilla chips, according to a US study. It won’t bust your gut either: one cup contains just 230kJ. Eat on a La-Z-Boy re ecliner in front of a lame superhero flick to replicate the modern cinema experience.
OYSTERS
POMEGRANATE Stacked with polyphenols, pomegranate can reduce your risk of most cancers. Indeed, a UCLA study found that pomegranate juice slows the growth of prostate cancer cells by a factor of six. Unfortunately, they’re fiddly little buggers to eat. But brands like PomLife are now delivering the fruit in a ready-to-eat form.
Forget dubious claims about their libido-boosting powers. The oyster’s real selling point is that it can spike your testosterone, protect against prostate cancer and deliver a pick-me-up blast of zinc to keep your immune system humming. Shuck it and see.
DARK CHOCOLATE + NUT BUTTER A UK study s found flavonols in cacao help reduce oxygen expenditure during g exercise. Subjects who replac ced one snack with 40g of dark choc a day for 14 days increased stamina by 6 per cent. Add a dash of nut bu utter for some healthy fats. February 2020
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SARDINES These guys pack health benefits into their rectangular tins like, well, you know. They’re high in protein, omega-3s and calcium, while low in potentially toxic mercury. Need another reason? Sardines in olive oil is the power food for ultra-marathon legend Dean Karnazes, who calls them, “My breakfast go-to for sustained all-day energy”.
BONE BROTH The health hype around this purported souper-food may be extreme, but there’s good reason to lock in the stock. Low in kilojoules, bone broth is high in protein to make it a smart weight-loss option. Dodgy tummy? Broth’s gelatin and lack of fibre also make it easy to digest.
AVOCADO
HOMEMADE EGG CUPS TRAIL MIX “Store-bought trail mixes are fine, but I prefer getting my fighters to make their own,” says Sullivan. His advice: simply mix a selection of almonds, cashews, walnuts, pistachios and cacao nibs. “That way you’re not getting stuck with all those dried sultanas. Let’s face it: no one likes them.”
“These are super easy, high protein snacks that are a great substitute to the mid-afternoon Snickers,” Sullivan says. To make: • Preheat oven to 185°C. • Grab a muffin tray and spray some extra virgin olive oil. • In a bowl mix together 6-8 eggs with a dash of baking soda and dash of wholemeal flour. • Pour into trays, and then add some onion, chives and ham. • Fill muffin cups 3/4 full and bake for 20-25 minutes until centres are set and no longer runny.
HOMEMADE ENERGY BALL They’re ultra convenient and, better still, even taste a bit like cake. But store-bought energy balls also tend to come laden with sugar. Try Sullivan’s recipe for a more bespoke pick-me-up where you know exactly what you’re getting.
SOURDOUGH BREAD Refreshingly, Newberry isn’t a member of the “bread is evil” brigade. In particular, he’s a fan of sourdough for its lengthy fermentation process that packs in lots of healthy bacteria. “It makes it easier for the digestive system to break it down,” he explains. Good reason to enjoy a slice of the action.
For the base combine: 40g dates 1 scoop of quality protein powder 1 tsp of maple syrup 3 tbsp of smooth peanut butter 30g dark chocolate. For the coating mix up: 2 tbsp of coconut flour 2 tbsp of cacao 2 tsp of coffee beans (optional) 1 sprinkle of salt
SAUSAGES Processed meat’s links to cancer may have you fearing the Wurst. But you can still enjoy the humble banger. For a healthier snag, grill to avoid charring, opt for a red-meat alternative (i.e. chicken) and aim for a meat percentage over 90 per cent. Cook up a dozen and devour cold over the week.
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The go-to symbol of millennial excess is, in fact, a nutrient-dense superfood. Bursting with folate, magnesium, iron and zinc, avocado is also loaded with monounsaturated fatty acid, the good fat swimming with health benefits. Well worth sacrificing your dreams of home ownership for.
THE UPGRADE AVOCADO MOUSSE “I eat avocado mousse every day post-workout,” says Newbury. “Sometimes I eat it twice a day.” The reason? It’s a recovery elixir that’ll let you mainline protein, carbs, good fats and a shed-load of antioxidants and trace minerals to revive your battered body after a heavy session. James Newbury’s Recipe 1 avocado 2 bananas 2 pinches Himalayan sea salt 1 teaspoon raw cacao 1 scoop protein powder 2 teaspoons maple syrup 250mls of water Small handful (each) of blueberries, raspberries, goji berries Throw in a blender.
NUTRITION
GREEK YOGHURT PROTEIN PUDDING Greek yoghurt is royalty in the snack world, boasting 23g of muscle-building protein per cup. But if you’ve got a sweet-tooth, try the Fight Dietician’s pudding. “Add one scoop of chocolate protein powder to the yoghurt, stir and leave in the freezer for ten minutes,” Sullivan suggests. “The texture is like a dessert and the blueberries add the sweetness that a lot of us crave at night.”
SMOKED SALMON Processed meat might not be too healthy, but smoked salmon is chockfull of omega-3 fatty acids linked to lowering your risk of heart and Alzheimer’s disease. One caveat: because salmon is cured by adding brine, it’s high in sodium, so keep an eye on your overall salt consumption to avoid over-seasoning yourself.
PORK BELLY TERRINE Harness the health perks of offal, without wretching. “It’s basically a fancy meat-loaf,” says Evans.
ROASTED SEAWEED SNACKS Jamie Oliver attributed a 12kg drop in weight primarily to eating more seaweed. But this underwater marvel is also full of nutrients, boosts your immunity, while it’s glutamate content will improve your brain function too. All good reasons to urgently seek kelp.
COLLAGEN PROTEIN SHAKE WITH MAPLE SYRUP This is Newbury’s weapon of choice in the shake department. Collagen protein (try Amazonia RawFIT Collagen Build, $42.99, amazonia. com) is full of amino acids, arginine and glutamine to repair muscles and reduce joint pain. Newbury mixes his with water and maple syrup to get quality carbs that convert into sugars to help him recharge. “I’m constantly trying to replenish my glycogen stores,” he says. “The darker the maple, the more antioxidant rich it is.”
RECIPE SERVES 8 2 tbsp coconut oil, plus extra for greasing 1 onion, finely chopped 1 tsp chopped rosemary 1 tsp chopped thyme 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped 100ml white wine 400g boned pork belly, rind removed, cut into 5 mm cubes 140g pork back fat, cut into 5mm cubes 220g chicken livers, cut into mm cubes 500g pork mince 3 tbsp chopped curly parsley 1 tbsp sea salt 2 tsp black pepper 2 egg yolks Heat oil in a frying pan over medium–low heat. Add the onion and sauté for 10 minutes.Add the rosemary, thyme, garlic and white wine, bring to the boil and cook until the liquid has reduced to 2 tbsp. Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Place the pork belly in a large bowl, add the pork back fat, chicken livers, pork mince, cooled onion mixture, parsley, salt and
pepper and mix well. Cover and place in the fridge for 1 hour. Preheat the oven to 140°C. Grease a 20cm x 10cm loaf tin and line with baking paper, allowing enough overhang on the long sides to enclose the top of the terrine. Remove pork belly mixture from the fridge, add the egg yolks and mix well. Pack the mixture firmly into the prepared tin. Fold the overhanging paper over the terrine to cover. Wrap the whole terrine tightly with a double layer of foil and place in a large baking dish. Pour in enough boiling water to reach halfway up the sides of the tin. Bake for 2 hours until a thermometer inserted in the centre of the terrine reaches 72°C. Remove terrine from baking dish and, still in foil, cool to room temperature. Transfer to fride to set overnight. Cut into 1cm slices, scatter with thyme sprigs and sprinkle with salt and pepper to serve.
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EDAMAME Call it “the pistachio effect”: food that demands labour-intensive prep will discourage mindless overindulgence. That’s certainly true for edamame, where you’re required to pop each soybean out of its pod. The pay-off? A nourishing mix of protein, fibre, folate and omega-3
SAFCOL TUNA POUCHES HAMBURGER PATTIES “Is there anything better than biting into a juicy flavoursome burger patty?” asks Evans. Not in a scenario minus Scarlett Johanssen. Trouble is, most burger-van patties also hide a range of unidentified evils (bone, cartilage, connective tissue and worse). Evans’ recipe allows you to control every ingredient so you can enjoy them without a guilty shudder. RECIPE Serves 4 2 tbsp coconut oil 600g beef mince 1 onion, finely diced 3 garlic cloves, crushed 1 egg 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce ¼ tsp chilli flakes 2 tbsp chopped parsley 1 tsp dried oregano 1 tsp each sea salt and black pepper
eight patties. Heat a hotplate to medium–hot or frying pan over medium–high heat. Grease with the coconut oil. Add the patties in batches and cook for 3 minutes. Turn patties and cook the other side for 2–3 minutes until cooked through.Place patties on a platter and serve.
Place all patty ingredients in a large bowl and mix well. Shape into
GRAPEFRUIT Trying to get lean? Consider becoming a sour puss. A US study of 85 obese people found that simply eating half a grapefruit 20 minutes before a meal resulted in a decrease in kilojoule intake and a decline in body weight over a 12-week period. Researchers speculate the fruit’s acidity slows your digestion to keep you full longer. Drinking grapefruit juice had the same effect.
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It’s now easier than ever to buy line-caught, environmentally friendly fish. “These little rip-open pouches in olive oil are easy to travel with and can be eaten straight out of the sachet for a high-protein, healthy snack anytime, anywhere,” Hines says.
VEG + HUMMUS
SUPER-POWERED PADDLE POPS Training hard? A US study found that supplementing with branch chain amino acids will reduce your DOMS following heavy exercise. Newbury’s preferred method of intake? To replace the electrolytes you’ve sweated out, mix your BCAA powder with coconut water then pour into paddle-pop moulds. “On a hot day, I love sucking one of these between sessions,” Newbury says.
Bite-sized vegetables – think cherry tomatoes, baby cucumbers, pickled onions or baby beets – are a no-fuss way to push your five-a-day into double figures. Become even more self-righteous by eating with a smear of hummus. Research from Louisiana State University found that people who snack on hummus have a 53 per cent lesser chance of being obese.
A CAN OF SOUP Souping is the new juicing. A study published in Obesity Research found you’ll lose 50 per cent more fat by opting for soup over an energy-dense snack (we’re looking at you, Krispy Kreme doughnut). “Choose one that’s got vegetables but also legumes or a bit of meat so that you’ve got a bit of protein to fill you up,” Austin suggests.
NUTRITION
RICE CAKES + PEANUT BUTTER Sure, Elvis didn’t look great after all those PB and banana sangers. But peanut butter is a good source of healthy fats and protein. Mayver’s Protein Peanut Butter boasts 32 per cent protein in every serve. Before a workout, Sullivan gets his fighters to chow down on rice cakes smeared with Mayvers and honey for an energy-boosting carb hit. “For bigger sessions I’ll get them to add a banana.”
COCONUT YOGHURT + RASPBERRIES + COCONUT FLAKES
FROZEN GRAPES Sour grapes? Nope. Grapes are lip-smackingly sweet. Simply wash and chuck in the freezer for a super-refreshing summer snack that can offset sugar cravings fast.
Coconut intake limited to the occasional Bounty bar? You need to think again. “Smash some raspberries in a bowl, dollop with natural coconut yoghurt and sprinkle with toasted coconut flakes,” suggests Hines. “Suddenly you’ll have one incredible snack.”
CHICKEN-LIVER PATE
CORN ON THE COB Forget the propaganda of carrots as an eyesight food. Corn is the real McCoy – it’s loaded with lutein that can help slow macular degeneration. Toss in your microwave for a minute-and-a-half then add a little black pepper or chilli flakes, Austin suggests. Just don’t forget your toothpicks for afterwards.
BANANA / STRAWBERRY / ALMOND MILK SMOOTHIE Guzzle a combo of banana, strawberries and unsweetened almond milk with some ice to bounce back from a workout, recommends Sullivan. “If we are fuelling up for a workout or have just finished one, I get my fighters to add one cup of rolled oats and a scoop of high-quality protein powder.”
Liver is known as nature’s multivitamin because it’s so rich in vitamins and minerals. If offal isn’t a lip-smacking prospect, pate offers it a more appealing form. That’s particularly true after the Italian Society of Diabetology discovered that Vitamin B7 stops the build-up of arterial plaque. The best source: chicken liver.
HARD-BOILED EGGS Eggs are cracking value – a big’un contains up to 7g of protein – so boil up a batch at the beginning of the week. For a fool-proof peeling method, chill your egg before cooking, then attack from the larger end where the air pocket is located. Shell be right, mate.
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ROAST CHICKEN LEGS Sure, chicken breasts usually snaffle the healthy food plaudits. But don’t forget its swarthier cousin. The extra fat in brown chicken meat raises your levels of cholecystokinin, a hormone that makes you feel full longer. Roast up a batch and embrace the darkside.
BIRCHER MUESLI
ALMONDS + RASPBERRIES “If you fail to have a snack to hand then you’ll look for the best available option. Usually that’ll be sub-par,” Newbury says. “That’s why I always try to carry a punnet of raspberries and a bag of almonds in my kit bag. I know a handful of those will give me quality fats, a little bit of protein and some good antioxidants.”
GRAB AND GO TUNA PATTIES “Tuna is a great source of healthy fats and protein,” says Sullivan. “And if you can find a source that is sustainably sourced (Safcol, John West, and the Aldi home brand are good for this) then even better.” Combine 300g of tuna 200g of baked and mashed sweet potato 2 brown onions, Juice of half a lemon ½ cup of mayonnaise (low fat if watching calories) Black pepper Mix together, form into patties then fry
BEEF JERKY Say hello to a filling protein fix that you can eat on the go. But all beef jerky is not the same. Look for brands with low-sugar content and no artificial nasties. The best-case? A jerky made from grass-fed, organic beef, that you can munch safe in the knowledge that you’re not chewing mystery road-kill.
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Swap your sugar-coated flakes for nutritional grains. Carman’s muesli is based on slow-digesting oats so it’s low GI while the addition of yoghurt or milk will add protein to keep you fuller for longer.
NUTRITION
SALTY AND SPICY MACADAMIAS Bored of bog-standard nuts? Try Luke Hines’ easy upgrade. Combine raw macadamias, sea salt and chilli flakes in a bowl, then toss well to coat. “Macadamias are the hero nut in my eyes due to their healthy omega 3 to 6 ratio,” says Hines. “They keep you feeling fuller for longer.”
CHEESE S LICES
CHOC-DIPPED BANANAS “Learning how to make your own healthy dark chocolate is a game-changer,” says Hines of his three-ingredient version. Simply mix equal parts raw cacao butter to raw cacao powder, then adjust with your sweetener of choice to taste. Melt down in a saucepan and mix together. At this stage, you can transfer the chocolate to a tray in the freezer to set. Alternatively, dip a banana in the mixture for a frozen chocolate snack.
A slice of ch candidate eddar could be an unlikely for weigh t-loss. In of 40 over a UK stud we y decreased ight men, kilojoul e intake b y 9 p e r c cheese fo r a snack. ent after they had S lic for the co nvenienc es aren’t just good e ; they also easier to t rack how make it much you ’re eating .
SUSHI ROLLS There’s good reason to get a raw deal. A salmon sushi roll will hand you a grab-and-go protein boost complete with memory-boosting omega-3, while the rice delivers carbs for pre-gym energy. Not a fish fan? Go for cooked chicken.
BEFORE YOU SPEAK COFFEE Newflash: lattes, cappuccinos and flat whites are milk drinks. Guzzle a few each day and the calories can start to mount up. That’s why Sullivan describes Before You Speak instant coffee as his “not-so-little secret”. It’s not just the caffeine that’ll pep you up. Turmeric and bioperine will help with inflammation while the MCT oil boosts your brain energy. Enjoy with a dash of almond milk
LAST-NIGHTS DINNER Pre-packaged convenience food is rarely the healthiest option. “Don’t underestimate last night’s dinner as a wonderful snack,” says Luke Hines. “Simply leave some leftovers or make double so you’ve got a ready-to-go snack the next day.”
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FITNESS
James Smith is ripping up the clean-living rulebook, exposing what he sees as the claptrap that is holding you back from your best life. MH sat down with the no-nonsense PT for a colourful tutorial on a BSfree approach to shaping up BY DANIEL WILLIAMS PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL LINNET February 2020
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ulfilling the brief of his Men’s Health photo shoot requires James Smith to bite into a number of nutritional bad guys – white bread, milk chocolate, ice cream. It would be enough to send many fitness professionals into meltdown, but Smith doesn’t seem bothered. In fact, he gives the impression of savouring every mouthful. It’s a peek into how the 30-year-old online PT, who these days splits his time between Sydney and his birthplace of London, has kicked clear of the pack. Smith wouldn’t even call these foods bad guys. “In every happy marriage you need a break from your partner,” he says. “And you need to do the same with your diet.” Smith is thriving on the digital fringes of an industry he routinely disparages. His straight-talking approach to fitness and nutrition has resonated with hundreds of thousands of gym-goers, reflected in his burgeoning social-media following (440,000 on Instagram) and the success of his onlinetraining enterprise, jamessmithacademy.com (7200 subscribers). His first book – Not A Diet Book: Lose Fat, Gain Confidence, Transform Your Life – hits the shelves on January 20. The secret to his success, Smith reckons, is his dissimilarity to most PTs. He isn’t obsessed with being ripped. Nor does he have a vested interest in any particular diet or system of training. What he does have is an antennae for bullshit – as well as a blunt, often coarse, style of calling it out. You can check him out online to get the flavour. With Men’s Health, however, tape rolling, he is on his best behaviour. Smith was a well-padded kid who piled on more weight after starting an office job post-school. Sure, he’d been scoffing peanutbutter-and-Nutella sandwiches between meals because he was bored, but what did that have to do with his expanding girth? Then, in his early 20s, he began getting his head around the basics of weight management. And as he did, “I got pissed off,” he says. “I developed a chip on my shoulder over how this had been kept from me for so long.” He hadn’t known what a kilojoule was, let alone a kilojoule deficit. “Why wasn’t I taught these things at school? Why wasn’t I taught them when I first joined a gym? Why had I been taking fat-strippers and doing Insanity workouts?” Today, his persona has a touch of the saviour; his message, the word. Let me tell you what I’ve learned after years of being misled, he tells the troubled. Let me help you avoid the charlatans who dishonour the industry. You mightn’t be enamoured with Smith’s style. But we’re pretty sure you’ll give him this much: the guy talks a whole lot of sense. 80
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FITNESS
MH: Boiled down, what makes you different from other PTs? JS: I think I’m more of a normal person who’s gone through the same struggles as the consumer. I can see that a large majority of PTs are born narcissists – self-obsessed and insecure people. Which sounds like I’m attacking them. But I’m not. It’s fine for people to be that way. But they think that having honed their own self-practices, that qualifies them to help people who are nothing like them. Taking someone from good shape to great shape isn’t the same as helping someone to change the direction of their life. It’s a real shame that when you need someone who’s knowledgeable, experienced and empathetic, you find someone instead who looks good with their top off. MH: You think most PTs assume the typical guy is as preoccupied with his body as they are with theirs? JS: I’d say we have two extremes at the moment. We have the people who constantly feel the pressure to be dieting, and we have the people who are anti-diet and trying to liberate everyone else from dieting altogether. And I’m saying, “Whoa, can’t we have a middle ground, where there’s a diet before you go on holiday? A diet when you come back?” I also think there are times when we shouldn’t even be thinking about monitoring our food, like Christmas. I don’t think gaining weight is a problem. I think not knowing how to lose it afterwards is.
MH: Is the anger you show in your videos real or a device for grabbing attention? JS: It’s a little bit of both. Social media, to me, is just a platform to talk to people in a very crowded room. If you wanted to talk to a girl at a bar and she’s with her friends, you wouldn’t create a long conversation. You’d go up, you’d be to the point with a call to action, and then you’d leave. And that’s how I portray myself on social media. The important thing is capturing people. I need to do that, even if I come across as crass, rude, sarcastic or facetious, or else someone with the next miracle fat-loss plan will capture them instead. Then, after a while, I can show them more of a genuine side. MH: Would it be fair to say you dislike your own industry on the grounds it bombards people with a lot of spin and blather? JS: Absolutely. Unfortunately, being in good shape doesn’t pay very well. Just waking up and being in spectacular shape will not pay your bills. It will get you likes on Instagram. It will get you engagement. It could even get you on the front cover of a magazine, but even then you’re not going to take home much money. PT salaries aren’t that high. So, we have fitness people needing to make money, and I find that the next logical step for them is not, “Hey guys, eat less, move more” – that’s not really going to get a lot of clients onboard. So, they spin. Use this supplement stack! Use this February 2020
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MY WICKED WAYS: CONTROL TOTAL KILOJOULES AND THERE’S A PLACE FOR ALL YOUR FAVOURITE GRUB, SAYS SMITH.
endorsement code! Use this special fat-loss guide that I’ve created! They become charlatans because they have no other avenues to go down. I look around the industry and every single diet that’s ever worked for fat loss works because of a calorie deficit. But that phrase doesn’t sell. What does sell is, fasting protocol! Keto protocol! Fat-burning HIIT workout! These things are dressed up as the next magical solution, rebranded and resold. I look out at the industry and I can see exactly what’s going on. So, although it’s my industry, I don’t take pride in being a part of it because it doesn’t serve people very well. MH: Are you anti-supplements? JS: I’m anti some of the messaging around supplementation. I was at a fitness expo in the UK and while I was speaking about the unnecessary supplements that are out there, one of the stores turned up their music to drown me out. Supplements, on the whole, are a great way for someone to supplement their income. That said, a supplement like whey protein, I think, should be classified as a superfood. If someone’s recovering in hospital, they should be having three protein shakes a day, but everyone goes in and gives them grapes. They don’t need grapes. They need protein during the biggest bout of recovery of their lives. MH: And pre-workouts? JS: My concern with these is that a lot of people are masking 82
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fatigue. We are allowed to be tired. We are allowed to be rundown. We are allowed to be in a state where we don’t want to go to the gym. That’s everyone’s prerogative. Ask yourself, how much do I want to train out of 10? If it’s below a five, ask yourself why. Is it sleep? Is it nutrition? Is it overtraining? Whatever it is, address that. Don’t mask it by taking a pre-workout. MH: It would be interesting to hear your take on a couple of dietary trends. Veganism? JS: I’m a fan of veganism, just not of the misinformation that goes with it. Fantastic cause. But some advocates are spreading false propaganda. Health is too much of a subjective topic to say: “Eradicate meat and you will be healthier”. I like to imagine health as a table with many legs, each leg representing something
– sleep, stress, relationships, nutrition, training. When you’re talking about whether or not to eat animal products, you’re talking about a small component of one of those legs. MH: Intermittent fasting? JS: For those people who adapt to intermittent fasting, they will lose fat. It will create a calorie deficit for them. When they get hungry outside of their eating window, they think of their belief system and they push through. But this is just one of many ways to create a deficit. Advocates talk about fasting triggering autophagy [the eradication of damaged or redundant cells], but autophagy can also occur just from creating and implementing a deficit. And a lot of the other benefits come from fat loss rather than the extended fast per se.
MH: You’ve had a shot at Men’s Health, too, quite recently. Where have we gone wrong? JS: It wasn’t so much Men’s Health. It was to do with one of your columnists – fitness columnists in general, really. When you’re given the limelight in a well-known magazine, you have the opportunity to be your very finest charlatan for profitable gain. And I feel a lot of people, when they’re given this limelight, they use it to be remembered, to stop someone on that page. It’ll be, “Do 200 crunches every night and you’re going to get abs!” And the reader might think, “What’s this guy’s name?” “Let’s follow him on Insta!” “Let’s subscribe to his YouTube channel!” A lot of these columnists may not be doing as well as they want, so often they don’t let the truth get in the way of a good article.
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training because I know it will benefit my bone-and-muscle health and help prevent me from getting injured in my sport, jujitsu. How I look with my top off has never been less important to me. And I am yet to come across a woman who’s judged me for how I look with my top off. And if I did come across one who did, who said, “You’re not in good enough shape”, then I wouldn’t want to be with that woman. Men massively misunderstand what women value and find attractive. Confidence, chivalry, aspiration: all are more important.
MH: What does being ‘fit’ mean to you? JS: First of all, there’s the psychological element – self-esteem and confidence are a big part of it. If we make fitness purely about how we look, we get into a very toxic place. We’re setting physical standards, and as a result there’s this huge component of inadequacy going on now with the male physique. What are we striving for? Should it be a six-pack? Probably not. Because the majority of men have normal jobs and normal lives, and they can’t afford to aspire to look like the guys who make it on to the cover of magazines. Physically, we should be active. You have a certain obligation to your body, but not in terms of aesthetics. Everyone should be weight-training to offset any degeneration that occurs in bone-and-muscle health as we age. We have an
MH: And yet of the thousands of men who follow you, many will be motivated by aesthetics. JS: I think – and I hope this is the way it works – that I’m helping them get to where I am now, rather than where I was five years ago. Because this version of me is a lot happier. From the outside looking in, you might ask, “How does this guy stay in reasonably good shape? He drinks every other weekend. He calls a pizza a pizza”. Well, it’s just a bit of balance. It’s just a bit of frontal-lobe work. It’s not an obsesobligation to our older selves to sive internal conversation, start doing that now. because when I was obsessing, even though I looked a little bit MH: You suggest not focusing on better than I do now, I wasn’t as aesthetics, but you’re sitting happy. And, ultimately, we want there with conspicuous biceps, all roads to lead to happiness. defined quads . . . JS: So, I used to be the very person MH: Taken to its endpoint, I take the piss out of now. I was a bodybuilding isn’t even a bodybuilder. I was trying to fit in healthy pursuit as far as you’re within the fitness world. I was concerned? weight-training, starving myself, JS: If you think about any sport, taking loads of supplements and when you get towards game day feeling hugely inadequate and you want to be in peak condition unhappy about the way I looked. I to perform at your best. Physique dabbled with things that were bad competitions are the only sport for my health, like stimulants. I’ve where you’re at your worst on lived the life of the fitness guy who game day. I’ve got friends who went too far and never got any say they can’t get an erection a happier. So, I’d say that this [my month out from their comp. body as it looks today] is an aftermath of the life I used to live. MH: Based on your videos it seems you’re not a fan of MH: Muscles are no longer running as a means of getting something you covet? fit. Why’s that? JS: No. I only do occasional weight JS: Have you ever noticed how
some people make good swimmers and others don’t? People who don’t, they stop swimming. Unfortunately, we don’t have this same mindset with running. Everyone seems to think they should be a runner. I’ve seen too many guys who’ve burnt themselves out through just running. We see the plodders out there, people who are going slower than the walkers but telling themselves, “I have to keep going”. I want to say to people, running isn’t essential. If you love it, that’s great. But if you don’t, there are other things you can do. How about a one-hour walk? It’s not going to tire you out as much and I can recommend some podcasts to listen to while you’re at it. MH: Something else that fires you up is any pursuit of thinness for its own sake. What’s the problem with making that your goal rather than, say, speed or strength? JS: Whatever you do in life, the process is more important than the outcome. Fall in love with the process of always trying to be better than where you are right now. Where I see fitness targets – a triathlon time, a deadlift mark – I see a healthy relationship between the person and his objectives. Where you’re striving to lift that extra amount of weight, I feel the physique will come as a by-product of your training. However, when you focus on your body, you can start to see some more unhealthy traits and habits come into play. Right now, I’ll step onto the beach and no one will think, “Wow, this guy just did a shoot with Men’s Health”. But that’s fine. I’m working towards performing in my sport. I eat well. I have a social life. Every tier of what makes me happy in my life is being fed. To my mind, the fitness industry is actually a portal to an unhappy life. Less food. Fewer beers. There is a happier life out there for you. But you have to make sure you’re on the right track. February 2020 83
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Stronger, g , Higher!
No pro sports league is more obsessed with fitness than the NBA. Steal these mind-body peak-performance secrets from the top players, coaches and movement specialists. Starring Jimmy Butler, James Harden, LeBron James, Draymond Green . . . and more! By
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Photography By
Sophy Holland
MIAMI HEAT STAR JIMMY BUTLER SPENT THE OFF-SEASON HOOPING TWICE A DAY, LAUNCHING JUMPERS IN THE MORNING AND PLAYING PICKUP IN THE AFTERNOON. February 2020 85
“I DON’T WANT TO GO BACK TO JUST BEING OKAY. SO I CONTINUE TO WORK LIKE I HAVE NOTHING”
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GET NBA FIT
Hangwith the NBA’s Fittest Players How does Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler stay dominant? By dedicating every waking moment of every day to prepping for the game
IT’S JUST AFTER 4AM in downtown Miami and the American Airlines Arena is shrouded in quiet – no cars on Biscayne Boulevard, no boats crossing the bay out front. A black Ford Expedition rolls up and out steps Jimmy Butler, swinging a portable Bose speaker that’s rocking the twangy melodies of Florida Georgia Line. At heart, the four-time NBA All-Star is a small-town Texas boy and this beat puts him in his zone. Butler needs to be in his zone right now. He’s been in Miami barely a day, hasn’t even unpacked, but he has to get back to business. He’s striding across the carpark to a practice gym with his performance coach, James Scott. If Butler’s going to be the centrepiece of the post–Dwyane Wade Miami Heat, there’s no time for days off. Or, in this case, mornings off. This is how you achieve success in the new age of NBA fitness: you start work hours before the likes of even LeBron have rolled out of bed. A decade ago, toughness and muscle ruled basketball (remember Ben Wallace?), but today the NBA may be more obsessed with recovery, diet and the science of human performance than any other league. Butler’s 4am workout puts him at the
forefront of this revolution, kicking off an entire day devoted to complete basketball readiness. “It’s a rhythm, it’s a routine, and I don’t skip any of it,” he says. “I don’t skip any steps of the process.” Every hour is mapped out, beginning with the workout, then progressing to cryo-chamber recovery, agility training and time on the court. And when his body is resting, his mind revs up, studying game tape and honing strategic thinking via games like dominoes. Even sleep is strictly programmed. Butler targets nine hours of shut-eye, which means lights out by 7pm. He preps for that sleep three hours earlier with herbal tea, a ban on all screens, and a cold-air diffuser. “I eat when I’m supposed to eat. I sleep when I’m supposed to sleep,” says Butler. “I play dominoes when I’m supposed to do that.” Scott, who worked with the Houston Rockets, has overseen Butler’s entire fitness regimen for the past two years. He’s trained NBA players for 15 years, but he’s never seen one quite like Butler. “When I started working with Jimmy, it was the first time I’d ever trained somebody at 4am,” he says. “And he’s never late, not by one minute, no matter the time or the place.”
Butler starts his workout by shooting a 5kg medicine ball to build wrist strength, then he holds 20kg plates at his sides, drops them, and quickly catches them, challenging his grip. Then it’s on to one of his favourite drills, a game that attacks both balance and mental focus: he stands on one leg, a resistance band pulling him off-centre, as Scott throws him red balls and blue balls. He must catch the red ones with his left hand, the blue ones with his right. “I love this – anything single-leg I like,” he says. “Single-leg balance, single-leg box jumps, single-leg squats.” Bridges, planks and other ab exercises follow and then Butler hits the court. For the next hour, he launches about 1000 jump shots, perfecting a shooting stroke that’s made him one of the league’s deadliest scorers in the clutch. By the time the first rays of light hit the sky, he’s headed home for a breakfast of egg-white omelette, avocado, berries and black coffee before recovery time in ice or maybe yoga, then more drills. Then, at 3pm, he returns to the American Airlines Arena, this time to see if anyone wants to play pickup. Says Scott: “It’s another level of intensity.” February 2020
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Butler maintains this work ethic because he knows it’s his only guaranteed edge. From league MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo to Clippers twin stars Paul George and Kawhi Leonard to rookie sensation Zion Williamson, the NBA continues to get bigger and more athletic, rendering Butler, generously listed at 203cm, decidedly average. He makes his living outworking and outlasting his competition. He’s led the NBA in minutes per game, and he plays both ways, attacking on defence as much as he does on offence (where he’s topped 20 points per game in five different seasons). His lone advantage: the endurance he builds in those 4am workouts. “He’s really the most competitive guy that I’ve ever been around in my entire life,” says Scott. “And it’s not just basketball. If you’re playing charades with him, it’s the most intense game of charades you’ve ever played in your life. Uno, dominoes, you name it.” Or, as Butler himself puts it, he will “whoop your ass. That’s it. I’m tougher than you. That’s where I’ll bank it at, and being
“I’M TOUGHER THAN YOU. I BACK DOWN FROM NO ONE. I’M SCARED OF NOBODY. YOU CAN’T INTIMIDATE ME” tough is a talent. I back down from no one. I’m scared of nobody. I don’t care about the name that you have, what you’ve done. You can’t intimidate me none. And that’s what’s gotten me here”. “Here” is pretty remarkable for a late-firstround pick. (Butler was the 30th selection in the 2011 draft.) He was raised by a single mum until age 13, when, he has said, she kicked him out of their Tomball, Texas home. For several weeks, he bounced around, sleeping at friends’ houses, until a surrogate family took him in. Basketball became his release – but at every level, he drew little attention. He couldn’t get a Division I scholarship and had to start at junior college. When he arrived
GetNBAfast! like Jimmy Butler With performance coach James Scott, the Heat star has dialled back his weight training – and increased his speed and explosiveness. Up your own game with these moves
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1¼ BULGARIAN SPLIT SQUAT
ROTATIONAL PULLBACK
Stand with your right foot on a bench, left foot on the floor. Bend your left knee and sit back (your right knee will bend as you do this), lowering until your left thigh is parallel to the floor. Pulse upward a few centimetres, then lower again, then stand back up, straightening your left knee. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 8 per side.
Stand facing a cable machine loaded with a light weight and grasp its handle with both hands, feet shoulder-width apart, knees bent. Take a big step back with your right foot, then pivot your torso to the right and explosively rotate your arms. Return to the start. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 8 per side.
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at Marquette, he barely played, stuck behind eventual NBA player Wes Matthews and other future pros at guard. And he barely cracked the Chicago Bulls’ starting rotation during his first two years in the league. Then in 2014, Butler’s relentless approach began paying dividends. With Derrick Rose, then the Bulls’ star, out for the season, Butler stepped in as a starter – and led the entire NBA in minutes played per game. A season later, with Rose still hobbled, Butler led the league in minutes again, this time averaging 20 points per game. He’s been one of the NBA’s top players since then – and he’s experienced the league’s shifting approach to player health. In the 2014 season, he was one of seven players who averaged more than 37 minutes a game. Last season, only four players managed more than 36 minutes per game, and Butler played just 33.6 minutes a night. It was once a badge of honour to play heavy minutes in the 82-game regular season, but teams now limit the long-term wear and tear on stars, adhering to a concept known as “load management”. The goal is to plan training, competition and other stressors to maximise performance with a minimal risk of injury. So the league’s best players no longer slog through the full season. Last year, the Raptors sat Kawhi Leonard in 12 games, citing “load management” – which left him fresh for an NBA title run. This year, Butler knows the Heat could limit his minutes. “It’s not a hard adjustment for me,” he insists, “just because I train every single day as if I have to play 48 or more minutes every single night.” When Butler is playing, he certainly won’t be thinking of load management. He’ll just keep focusing on the motivation he’s always had: fear – of losing his position among the NBA elite, of reverting to the player who couldn’t crack the Bulls’ rotation. “I don’t want to go back to just being okay. So I continue to work like I have nothing,” he says. Butler pauses. “You have to work, because at any certain time, this shit could be taken from you. It could be gone,” he says. “And when I think about that, it scares the living hell out of me.”
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GetNBAexplosive! like LeBron James
The key to LeBron’s high-flying game: classic exercises with a little twist, says his trainer, Mike Mancias. “Some of the simplest routines that include rotation are the most beneficial for you”
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INVERTED ROW
CABLE LATERAL CHOP
ROTATIONAL LANDMINE CLEAN
Set up a barbell about 90cm off the floor in a rack. Lie on the floor beneath with your upper rib cage right below the barbell and grasp it with an overhand grip. Tighten your core and glutes, keeping your torso in a straight line. Bend at the elbows and shoulders, pulling your rib cage to the bar. Pause, then return to the start. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 8-10 reps.
Stand next to a cable column set 30cm higher than shoulder height and grasp it with both hands, left side facing the column. Spread your legs just wider than shoulder width, bend at the knees and tighten your core. Pull the cable across your body and downward, bending your knees slightly as you do. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 8-10 per side.
Set a loaded barbell in a landmine. Stand with your right side to it. Grasp its end with your left hand. Hinge forward. Explosively stand, pulling the barbell upward and transferring it from left hand to right. Rotate your torso toward the bar, pivoting at the hips, and press it upward. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 8 -10.
GetNBAflexible! like Bradley Beal Baby your body for better movement. That’s what the Washington Wizards and their star guard do, warming up toddler-style. “Baby movements are fundamental positions,” says Navin Hettiarachchi, Washington’s director of athletic performance. Kids move almost perfectly, because crawling and rolling build limber bodies. Get loose (and strong!) with these kid-friendly steps
▶ GET COMFY ON YOUR BACK Lie on your back, hands over shoulders, a light dumbbell in your right hand. Bend your knees and tighten your core, lifting your shoulder blades; hold for 3 seconds. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 8-10 per side.
▶ THEN FLIP OVER Set up on all fours. Lift your knees so your shins are parallel to the floor. With your left hand, grasp a resistance band set in front of you. Pull it toward you, keeping your core tight. Hold for 20 seconds, then repeat on the other side. Do 3 sets. February 2020 89
Get NBA Muscle! like Ja Morant The Memphis top draft pick weighed 72kg in June. He’s up to 80kg. Here’s how he’s packing it on
▶ OWN YOUR BODYWEIGHT You can build plenty of muscle with your bodyweight. Try this: get in push-up position and slowly lower your chest, taking 4 seconds to do so. Pause with your chest a centimetre from the floor for 2 seconds, then explode up. Do 3 to 5 sets of 10 reps.
▶ SHAKE IT UP Morant downs this high-kilojoule shake once a day. Try it for yourself Morant’s Mo-Muscle Shake In a blender, combine... • 1 (325ml) container strawberry protein drink • 1 scoop vanilla protein • 1 scoop greens powder • 2 cups frozen strawberries • 1 banana • 2 Tbsp coconut oil • 2 Tbsp collagen peptides • 1 Tbsp chia powder • 1 tsp acai powder ... and blend till smooth. Your macros: 57g protein, 99g carbs, 43g fat
GetNBA Respect! like Lindsey Harding Think managing the egos in your office is tough? Try getting an NBA team to listen to your ideas and buy into your vision. First-year Sacramento Kings assistant coach Lindsey Harding, who’s one of eight on-court female coaches in the league, knows a thing or two about earning respect. Her advice:
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Map it out
“I’ve always been able to calmly talk and listen. That’s a big thing, because when players have input on what they’re working on, they are more likely to listen to you and trust in you.”
“I tell people what we’re going to work on and how long we’re going to be there so they know what to expect. I start the clock so they can see the time winding down.”
Shut Up & Listen
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Clearly Define Roles
Customise Your Approach
“My coaching role model is Duke coach Gail Goestenkors. She had an open line of communication about expectations. We all knew what we were doing.”
“You can’t teach everyone the same way. Some people watch you do something and they get it. Some need you to draw it out. As a whole, the best way to teach is to do all of it.”
Get Hard(en) abs! Rockets guard James Harden’s ability to change direction makes him a fearsome scorer. His trainer, Paul Fabritz, attributes that to core strength. “Your core is everything,” says Fabritz. Build it with these moves.
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Make Friends “I can’t come in day one of meeting someone and tear them down. They’re going to say, ‘Who are you? I don’t know you’. When you develop a relationship, you feel more comfortable. Do that.”
◀ HALF-BENCH SINGLE-ARM PRESS Lie on a bench, a dumbbell in your left hand directly over your shoulder. Slide to the left until the left side of your torso, your left glute, and your spine are off the bench. Bend at the elbow and shoulder, lowering the dumbbell to your chest; press back up. That’s 1 rep; do 4 sets of 8-12 reps per side.
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GetNBAclutch! like NBA 2K20
Your favourite b-ball stars love NBA 2K20 as much as you do but for a different reason: it boosts their confidence on the court. That’s what Washington Wizards performance guru Navin Hettiarachchi believes. “It’s a lot of rehearsing and mental reps,” he says. Turns out digital reps translate to real-life in-game self-esteem, which is why Hettiarachchi actually encourages his players to video-game hoop when they’re not hooping for real. You can improve your own clutch factor by creating a doppelgänger of yourself in 2K20 – or take the tactic off the court and let it help you prep for your next big event. Rewatch your favourite movie speech (think William Wallace’s “Freedom” speech in Braveheart) and visualise yourself in that role. “Be the person you want to be,” says Hettiarachchi.
◀ DA VINCI PLANK Set up a resistance band at shoulder height and grasp it with your right hand, torso parallel to the band. Lift your left foot off the floor and extend your left arm as far away from the band as possible; work to stand as tall as possible while doing this. Hold for 30 seconds; do 3 reps per side.
Get NBA brawn! like Draymond Green
Golden State’s star forward needs muscle to grab rebounds. He explains how old-school moves help him hold his ground
▲ PULL-UP WHY: This one’s about control. “It’s easy to squirm on the way up and use your lower body to give you a boost,” says Green. “On the flip side, it’s easy to just not contract your muscles going down.” HOW: Hang from a pull-up bar with a shoulder-width grip, core tight, shoulder blades squeezed. Pull your chest to the bar, then slowly lower. That’s 1 rep; do 3 or 4 sets of 8-12.
▲ DEADLIFT WHY: The deadlift doesn’t just build jumping strength. It forces you to develop hip mobility, which Green knows he needs. “I now understand a lot of my power comes from there,” he says. HOW: Stand over a loaded barbell, feet hip-width apart. Bend at the knees, hinge forward at the hips and grasp the bar. Keeping your hips lower than your shoulders, tighten your core and stand up with the bar. That’s 1 rep; do 4 sets of 8.
▲ DEAD BUG WHY: “Everything you’re doing involves your core,” says Green. “Your explosiveness involves your core. Shooting a basketball involves your core. Everything.” HOW: Lie on your back, arms over your shoulders, knees over your hips. Keeping your lower back pressed into the floor, straighten your left leg and extend your right hand overhead. Return to the start; repeat on the other side. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 10. February 2020
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WELCOME TO THE
GYM 2030
AS WELLNESS CULTURE AND CONNECTED TECH BLEND SEAMLESSLY INTO ALL ASPECTS OF OUR LIVES, THE NATURE OF FITNESS IS CHANGING AT PACE. SO, WHAT WILL YOUR WORKOUTS LOOK LIKE IN 10 YEARS’ TIME? TO HELP YOU STAY AHEAD OF THE CURVE, WE ASKED OUR HIVE MIND OF INDUSTRY INSIDERS FOR ITS PREDICTIONS ON WHAT THE FUTURE OF TRAINING HOLDS. IT’S GYM LIFE – BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT BY JAMIE MILLAR
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHILIP HAYNES
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YOUR TRAINING WILL GO BESPOKE
FROM WORKOUT PROGRAMS POWERED BY AI TO ON-DEMAND CELEBRITY PTS, THIS IS HOW YOUR SESSIONS ARE SET TO EVOLVE THERE ARE NOW 5500 gyms in Australia – more than ever. But, with the on-the-spot march of technology providing new ways for you to exercise in the comfort of your living room, will any still exist in a decade? “It used to be that every home had a VHS and Jane Fonda’s exercise video was the top-selling tape of all time,” says Humphrey Cobbold, CEO of the franchise PureGym. “So, plus ça change…” As he points out, working out in your living room is not always comfortable, particularly with the size of new homes shrinking and the number of young adults living with their parents rising. “There’s an aspect of ‘getting away from it all’ to the gym. That will not go away.” 94
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Besides, there’s no real competition. “People who also train at home are more likely to renew their membership, since they tend to be more committed to a fitness-oriented lifestyle,” says Nerio Alessandri, founder of equipment manufacturer Technogym. He is not the only industry insider who sees the lines between gym and home blurring. “Integrated tracking apps will allow a seamless transition from your home workout to your gym,” says Luke Barnsley, master trainer at high-end gym chain Third Space. Technogym’s cloud-based MyWellness app already does as much. Big-box gyms also have a scale and spectrum of
equipment that shoebox flats simply don’t. How and what you lift won’t evolve much. If anything, how we train has regressed to an old-school approach with the rise of functional spaces. What will change is how we track our training, whether that’s accelerometers on your barbell to count reps or algorithms to modulate your progressive overload. “We’ll train smarter with the kit we already have,” says Doug Tannahill, head of strength and conditioning at elite fight club BXR. Commercial trackers that focus on cardio today will be able to gauge the quantity and quality of your reps tomorrow. “As you fatigue, the speed of your lifts declines,” says Barnsley, who believes that velocity will fast become a key metric for athletic performance and injury prevention. You’ll soon be able to log into your gym’s resistance machines, which will automatically adjust to your desired workload and preferred seat position. (Again, Technogym’s Biocircuit already does this.) “The big innovation will be in personalisation,” says Alessandri. You’ll be able to take your favourite trainer’s class any time, anywhere. “An algorithm can never replace the human factor,” he adds. Clive Ormerod, CEO of Les Mills, agrees. “Gyms won’t be built around robots, but rock star instructors,” he says. Les Mills’ classes are now taken in 20,000 gyms and countless living rooms, and Ormerod draws an analogy with how streaming songs has led to record live music attendance. Several gyms have set up talent agencies for their headliners. Accountability and motivation are two of the gym’s other killer advantages, and tech will extend trainers’ ability to keep tabs on clients beyond sporadic DMs. So we’ll be saying goodbye to skipping the home workout.
THE GAME CHANGER Artificial Intelligence
The HAL 9000 has effectively become your PT, thanks to apps such as Freeletics and Aptiv that use machine learning to tweak workouts with your feedback. But while AI won’t take the place of your trainer (instead, it’ll be a tool that PTs use), it will replicate his or her features. IBM’s Watson Cognitive Computing is used by GPs to prescribe treatments, but it also powers Under Armour’s Record system and Technogym’s forthcoming Virtual Coach, which will be able to shoot the breeze while devising workouts based on your goals. The smartest innovation will come when AI can look at your calendar and behaviour to tell you not just that you should exercise, but when and how.
KEY POINTS
Integrated apps will seamlessly monitor your progress at home and in the gym. From strength and form to power output, everything you do will be trackable. PTs will be the new rock stars – and you will want that selfie.
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RISE OF THE MACHINES: THE FUTURE OF FITNESS WILL HAVE AI ASSISTANCE.
TRY IT NOW! Adaptive resistance In this brave new functional world of throwing things around, machines can seem antiquated: more 1990 than 2020, never mind 2030. But they’re not just for oldies and newbies. “Look out for machines with adjustable resistance profiles,” says Joel Silverman, Third Space’s head of education. That means the load can be reduced during an exercise, or ratcheted up, safely. Motor-driven adaptive resistance exercise machines (arxfit.com) apply the perfect, AI-controlled amount of force in each precisely logged rep, including up to 200 per cent more on the lowering phase, when you’re stronger – something your regular old gravity-based iron can’t.
NEXT-STEP COUNTERS Eventually, wearables won’t be cumbersome accessories but under-skin sensors or reactive tattoos. Until U then, these go a few steps further than glorified pedometers.
Stay on Forrm Counted on by elite sport teams, the PUSH band attaches to your body or bar to appraise power and velocity for 400-plus exercises. We said one more good rep. (trainwithpush.com)
Find Your Limits The first real-time lactic acid test, the K’Watch tracks this KPI to ensure you’re really training at your threshold (and still properly recovering). Not a finger prick, but still painful. (pkvitality.com)
Avoid Burnout Another watershed, LVL plumbs your blood H2O level via infrared. It also sheds light on your HR, activity, sleep and how these dictate your mood. (onelvl.com) February 2020 95
EYES WIDE SHUT:IN THE FUTURE YOU’LL CHASE PBS IN REST.
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YOU’LL REST AS HARD AS YOU WORK RECOVERY WILL BECOME A CRUCIAL PART OF YOUR DAILY PROGRAM, FAR BEYOND SUPERSETS OF THE SAUNA AND STEAM ROOM
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SERIOUS TRAINING demands recuperation. “While highintensity and strength workouts remain incredibly popular, more members are incorporating recovery sessions – yoga, swimming and low-impact cardio – into their fitness plans,” says Lauren Wilson, Third Space’s marketing director. “Recovery is becoming a huge focus as we look to future-proof our bodies into our later years.”
Recovery will shift from being seen as an indulgence to a necessity, adds Matt Delaney, national manager of innovation at trendsetting transatlantic gym chain Equinox, which likes to talk about “health span” rather than “lifespan”. “Longevity will become a much bigger part of the conversation,” he says. Functional training won’t go anywhere, nor will the pursuit of old-fashioned gains, but
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BRAIN TRAINING Gym chain Third Space’s member survey suggests that motivation for going to the gym is shifting from nakedly aesthetic to holistic.
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MENTAL WELLBEING
78%
OVERALL HEALTH
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MUSCLE GAIN
KEY POINTS
Giving it everything, all of the time, will be viewed as undisciplined. Rest days will be planned according to your health markers, not taken on a whim. Nutrition will be hyper-personalised via gut tests and blood-sugar monitoring.
“natural human movement and cardiovascular activity” will come to prominence to help us maintain mobility and keep us ticking. Speaking of tickers, heart-rate variability – tiny fluctuations that indicate your system’s stress level – is currently employed to assess readiness to train, mainly by pro athletes. But it’ll tell the rest of us whether to go hard or go home – potentially as early as the front desk. BXR’s
Tannahill imagines a biometric check-in that uploads the previous 24 hours’ heart-rate data from your wearable. Even today, the exclusive Equinox E club in New York is accessed via retina scan and some more budget operators boast fingerprint entry. Soon, facial recognition will rear its head. “You come in, it reads your face and tells you, ‘Right, you need to do a decreased volume’,” says Tannahill. Then,
it’ll amend your scheduled workout accordingly. In addition to his work as a strength coach, Tannahill is an osteopath who heads up the clinic that the Centre for Human Health and Performance operates within BXR. This kind of double duty is likely to increase. “The integration between medical and lifestyle will continue to grow,” says Delaney. “In the functional medicine space, many doctors are becoming health coaches, because they realise the best way to improve outcomes is to increase their reach outside of the clinic.” On the flip side, clinics will creep into gyms: some already offer GPs as well as physios and nutritionists. Similarly, body scanners that read your BMI, metabolic age and health score are already appearing in high-end gyms. All manner of gym machines will beam your stats to assorted health-care professionals. “Connected products are already a reality,” says Technogym’s Alessandri, whose wares do just that. Delaney, based in the US with Equinox, envisions health insurance premiums being dictated by activity and sleep scores, with that information delivered to doctors or coaches, so they – or their AI equivalents – can make daily recommendations. But even if government-funded healthcare still exists, it may be forced to levy lifestyle-based costs for, say, the overweight or sedentary. After your actual training, you’ll drink a shake or eat a meal prepped to your personalised nutritional requirements. Then, after soft-tissue therapy with a Theragun (or “Thera-phaser”, perhaps), you’ll go for an infrared sauna and steam, or downregulate in one of the gym’s mindfulness rooms . “Designers and architects will seek to integrate mindfulness at every touchpoint,” says Wilson. And those spaces will be intuitive. They will modify their lighting, music or smell to match your current, or desired, mood.
TRY IT NOW! Holistic health hubs Bespoke supplements and cryotherapy will only do so much if you can’t switch off: a healthy mind is a prerequisite of a healthy body, not just a consequence. “Mindfulness will increasingly be connected to fitness,” says Delaney of Equinox. Indeed, luxe wellness hubs like The Well in Bondi offer weight training alongside classes in meditation, pilates, yoga and barre, as well as treatment services such as acupuncture, physiotherapy, psychology and naturopathy, plus a cafe dedicated to healthy refuelling.
THE GAME CHANGER DNA testing No sci-fi soothsaying would be complete without it, and genetically determining your ideal dose of carbs, training and rest sounds compelling. However, the reality is that whatever consumer DNA tests tell you, the science at present isn’t so much in its infancy as embryonic. Identifying the presence or absence of individual genes statistically associated with those traits doesn’t mean you possess those traits. But the science will inevitably evolve, with AI to crunch the data and draw reliable conclusions. Hang tight.
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WELLNESS WILL BE A WAY OF LIFE AS A DESTINATION TO SOCIALISE, “SWEATWORK” AND EVEN WORKWORK, THE GYM WILL BECOME INTEGRAL TO OUR ROUTINES BEYOND EXERCISE
AMONG THE MOST pronounced recent developments in the fitness industry has been the boom in group exercise and class-based boutiques, which offer an elevated “experience” (plus some expensive grooming products and Instagram-worthy decor) alongside your endorphin hit. PureGym’s Cobbold offers some context: “Let’s remember that group classes and boutique fitness appeal to certain demographics, especially women aged 20-30.” It’s also for people with around $40 per class to burn – and voguish studios receive outsized press coverage for their distinctly boutique share of the market. Nevertheless, gyms have been upping their class game 98
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and creating “shop-in-shop” experiences. So, with cult boutiques such as Barry’s Bootcamp setting up in Australia, will studios cannibalise gyms, or vice versa? “There will be two types of clubs,” says Technogym’s Alessandri. “Boutique studios based on a specific training experience and full-service clubs offering a variety of amenities and programs with a social component.” Group exercise will never be for everyone. But its rising popularity, whether at big boxes or small boutiques, is a strong predictor of the gym’s future as a hub of an increasingly precious commodity: human interaction. “Digital is huge, but ultimately
people crave relationships,” says Les Mills’s Ormerod. And members of “Generation Active”, as he dubs millennials and Gen Z, “prefer to sweat together, rather than drink”. BXR’s Tannahill concurs: “Other generations went down the pub, but community is such a big part of gyms now.” The gym – really, “health club” – will supersede the golf club as a place to work out, work-work and play. “Friends will be made, and business conducted,” says Kerri Sibson, a marketing director in the construction industry. Cafés and lounges for socialising and “sweatworking” are standard in many gyms, which in ahead-of-the-curve New York are verging on one-stop superstores. There, Equinox has created its first co-working space and hotel (see right). Unlike the golf club of 1990, however, the gym of 2030 will be inclusive. More and more clubs will seek to target kids and parents’ lack of physical activity, not to mention childcare costs. CrossFit gyms like Hive Active in Sydney offer classes aimed at kids from eight onwards; Les Mills’ “Born to Move” initiative promises to instil motor skills and good habits in youngsters; while My First Gym puts babies in a gymnastics environment from seven months, with classes available in Parkour, yoga, boxing, dance, martial arts and ninja warrior on offer as your child grows up.
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From CrossFit boxes to boutique bootcamps, group workouts are here to stay. We’ll bring office work to the gym – and do gym work in our office. Kid WODs will develop a life of their own as gyms become more family friendly.
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SOUL TRAIN: DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN MIND, BODY, WORK AND PLAY WILL DISAPPEAR.
GROUP DYNAMICS Social wellness is clearly in rude health, as shown by group training’s recent upward trajectory in the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual rundown of worldwide fitness trends.
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THE GAME CHANGER (Nearly) home gyms
Well-heeled wellness junkies in the US have been known to relocate to be closer to an Equinox. Now, they can truly live the company’s mantra – “It’s not fitness, it’s life” – in New York’s shiny new Hudson Yards neighbourhood, where the Equinox Hotel boasts five-star fitness facilities – a 5,600m club and a SoulCycle studio, along with minibars stocked with supplements. Closer to home, Brisbane’s Calile Hotel (pictured above) has a state-of-the-art gym where you can train solo or pre-book a session with an experienced personal trainer. Afterwards, you can wander over to KAILO, the hotel spa, to recover with an infra-red sauna.
Wellbeing obsessives may not need to move to be closer to a gym in 2030. Residential gyms are becoming more common, since they are such easy wins for developers: they fill commercial spaces with something more desirable than a convenience store and recoup costs via strata fees. Some are even open to non-residents. Melbourne’s Arthur Apartments (pictured) features a rooftop gym with a pool, spa and sauna and a view over Albert Park.
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ADVENTURE
Every year hundreds of cyclists traverse the conflict-torn borders of the Jewish holy land in a gruelling three-day, 260km mountain-bike race known as Epic Israel. MH travelled to the ancient hills of Galilee to witness a contest of biblical proportions BY TOM WARD
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GREG FUNNELL
TERMS OF ENDURANCE 01 \ RIDERS BATTLE THROUGH A BRUTAL DAWN SPRINT BESIDE THE CONFLICT-TORN RIVER JORDAN, WITH A FURTHER 95KM TO GO BEFORE THE AFTERNOON’S REST. February 2020 101
JERSEY B OYS 02 \ BELGIAN OLYMPIC RIDER SCHUERMANS PREPS FOR DAY TWO BY TORCH LIGHT. 03 \ PARTICIPANTS FROM AS FAR AFIELD AS THE US, AUSTRALIA AND AFRICA ARE INDICATIVE OF THE EVENT’S FAST-GROWING POPULARITY. 04 \ FROM L-R: JENS SCHUERMANS (BELGIAN), GUY LESHAM (ISRAELI), DIDIER BATS (BELGIAN), RAZ JACOBSON (ISRAELI), DAN CRAVEN (NAMIBIAN), ELIAD DANIEL (ISRAELI), HANS BECKING (DUTCH), EREZ FALKENSTEIN (AMERICAN) AND JIRI NOVAK (CZECH).
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when the sun crests over the dry, rocky mountains of the Bar’am National Park in Israel’s northern Galilee region. As the bleached cattle bones littering the dirt trails testify, the area is home to wolves, hyenas and wild boars. This morning, however, it is empty but for a cloud of brown dust on the horizon. As that cloud moves across the undulating terrain it appears to gather pace and volume, swelling and ballooning like a sand storm. Moments later, the first set of cyclists emerges from the soup, heads bowed and shoulders braced, their faces already streaked with sweat. Their collective posture is a profound picture of studied determination. Ten metres further along the trail, the riders hit the first of the day’s rest stops. Bananas and isotonic drinks are snatched; empty water bottles are crushed under tyres.
Some cyclists drench their faces, spilling water down their chins. And then, as the next wave streams in behind them, the first group push off once again. Twenty-three kilometres in, they still have another 75km to go, with more than 100km waiting for them tomorrow, and a further 60km the day after that. With temperatures set to soar into the mid-30s and numerous mountain- and woodland-climbs ahead, it is only a matter of time before the race becomes a torturous slog in the baking midday heat. Almost 700 cyclists – from Israel, Australia, Europe and the US – have gathered here in this far northern corner of a troubled country to compete in Epic Israel, a doubles mountain-bike race to challenge road and cross-country athletes alike. Comfortably the country’s largest sporting event, the race was founded by cyclist Gal Tsachor in honour of
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his late father, a senior commander in Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, killed in a traffic accident while cycling in 2012. Having competed numerous times in South Africa’s Cape Epic, Tsachor knew that to properly commemorate his father, he would have to bring something of equally grand proportions to his homeland. For a small country, it is unsurprising that hosting an event on this scale is also a matter of national pride. Israeli Olympic representative Shlomi Haimy – who rides in the white and blue colours of the national flag – and his German partner Martin Gluth are favourites to win. As the riders sprint across the finish line four hours later, it is indeed a dust-streaked Haimy and Gluth who take pole position. It is 10.40am and they have evaded the sun – for today at least.
Borders and Crossings At 5am on day two the first riders begin to stir. Such was the demand for accommodation at the base camp hotel that a makeshift site has been erected on the lawn, with torch-lit riders beginning the day’s preparations among the neat rows of white tents. A start time of 6.30am is necessary in order to avoid the heat. But before that there is breakfast to be eaten, last-minute bike maintenance to be performed and a quick spin to flush out yesterday’s lactic acid. The first stretch of today’s race is a long, flat trail flanked by bulrushes beside the Jordan River. As brittle pink daylight clears the rising fog at their backs, the riders thunder along in a spear-like formation. Two riders suddenly break away. They are Namibian Olympian Dan Craven, 33, and his partner Roy Goldstein, 23, from Israel. Both race for Israel’s Team Road Cycling Academy as road riders, so a treacherous three-day mountain trail is far from their natural habitat. “This is Israel’s biggest cycling event, so naturally we wanted to come and put the fox among the chickens,” explains an exhausted Craven later on. “As road riders, 104
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ROAD TO PERDI T ION 05 \ COMPETITORS BEGIN TO THE SOUNDS OF THE RED HOT CHILLI PEPPERS – AN ISRAELI FAVOURITE. 06 \ AN UNDERPASS FUNNELS RIDERS INTO A BOTTLENECK. PLANS ARE UNDERWAY TO OPEN CYCLIST ROADS, BUT UNTIL THEN THE DEATH TOLL ON ISRAELI HIGHWAYS REMAINS UNCOMMONLY HIGH. 07 \ A CYCLIST DISMOUNTS TO CARRY HIS BIKE THROUGH A SHADED STREAM. IT IS A MOMENT OF BRIEF RESPITE BEFORE A GRUELLING ZIG-ZAG ACROSS BAKING FIELDS. 08 \ MOUNTAIN BIKE TYRES ARE FILLED WITH LATEX TO WITHSTAND PUNCTURES. BUT HERE SCHUERMANS AND BATS DEAL WITH THEIR THIRD OF THE RACE.
“Conflict could start any time, but we cannot be afraid”
we’re at a huge disadvantage in the technical sections, but flat sprints are where we excel, so we decided to show the other boys what we could do.” Against the odds, they manage to finish the day in 15th place. Technically, the arena for this stage of the race is the conflict-ridden West Bank. The majority of the fighting is limited to the Jordan Valley to the south, but this far north the country is penned in by enemies on all sides. Syria lies 20km or so beyond the Golan Heights to the east, while another part of the course takes riders through the orchard town of Manara, close to the Lebanese border. It was Manara that was on the receiving end of some of the heaviest damage when Islamist militant group Hezbollah launched a campaign of rocket attacks in 2006. As the race passes by, a middle-aged matron emerges from her coffee shop to cheer riders
on. “We are not at war,” she explains, pointing across the hills. “But we are not at peace. Conflict could start at any time, but we cannot be afraid. This is our home.” While international incidents are thankfully avoided, accidents on the course remain plentiful. Navigating a cattle field, Israeli rider Yotam Novik, 28, is cut up by someone trying to overtake and consequently crashes to the ground. He waits to be collected and taken to an ambulance, lying back in the shade beneath a tree, the entire rear section of his bike sheared in half. He winces as he is loaded into the back of a truck, his bruised thigh shiny with blood. Helmet and bicycle go in the truck bed, both rendered useless. Guy Leshem, a 19-year-old Israeli amateur, has suffered a similar mishap. Forty kilometres into the second day’s ride, he attempted an overtake on a downhill section. It did not go to plan. A length of wire flew into his wheel, throwing him over the handlebars. After a dizzy few minutes he pushed on, miraculously finishing the race in fourth place, though this was followed by three hours in hospital and seven stitches. Later, at the hotel, Leshem is confident that the injury will not affect his performance on the third day. February 2020 105
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As is the obligation of every Israeli over the age of 18, he is in the middle of his two years of national military service, where he works as a gym instructor as part of a special program to develop the country’s athletes alongside his military duties. “I do think conscription teaches a lot,” he says, a grubby bandage stuck to his chin. “It reinforces discipline, but as an athlete I like to think I have a good level of discipline anyway.” After a gruelling day of injuries and 105km worth of toil, it is clear that every rider is feeling the effects as they stagger about base camp, hosing the mud from their bikes, arms and legs before a scheduled afternoon of ice baths, massages and refuelling on chicken and carbohydrates. The final stage may only be 60km, but it will take everything these battered and bruised riders can muster to complete it.
Endurance Wheels After another dawn start, the final day’s race takes the riders through a grassy meadow overlooking the Hula Valley. One comes off on a downhill section, causing the cyclists behind to momentarily bunch up as their fallen comrade picks himself up and gets back on his bike. Later, the course enters an orchard close to the Lebanon border where signs advising caution proclaim the area a militarised zone. The riders, however, have other things on their mind. One of the final stretches is a punishing kilometre-long climb through the apple trees. Although it is still early, the air shimmers on the horizon as many within the peloton dismount and push their way uphill, sucking in hot air with deep, weary gulps. By 9am it is all over and the relief on all of the riders’ faces is palpable. A Dutch competitor, Hans Becking, and his Czech partner, Jiri Novak, have taken victory,
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“Many dismount and push up the hill, sucking in the hot air” having outdone Haimy and Gluth on the last two days. With a three-and-a-half minute accumulative lead going into the final day, their tactic was to hold back and attack when they could, explains Becking. But despite this, it was far from an easy win. “Today was hard,” says an exhausted Novak. “We’re from a colder part of Europe so the heat was unbearable. We had lots of flat tyres, too, and the last hill was horrible.” But their victory has been well-earned. In addition to training five or six hours per day, they also focus on core strength training. “I do twice-weekly TRX work in the winter,” says Becking, “and because I’m not used to it I put on muscle quickly. But during the season I end up losing it all. I started this year at 73kg and now I’ve shrunk down to 69kg.” Despite getting lost on the first day, two flat tyres on the second, and a few more for good measure on the third, Belgian riders Jens Schuermans and Didier Bats secure a solid fourth place. “It was a relatively short stage today, so we rode as hard as we could,” says Schuermans, who came 18th in the 11 10
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SPIN OFF 09 \ A QUIET COW FIELD OFFERS A MOMENT OF SHADE HALFWAY THROUGH THE FINAL DAY’S RACING. 10 \ A RIDER PONDERS THE SECOND DAY’S COMPETITION WHILE ESCAPING THE MIDDAY HEAT. EACH AFTERNOON RIDERS MUST TRY TO MITIGATE THE DAMAGE ON THEIR BODIES AS BEST THEY CAN. 11\ YOTAM NOVIK IS LOADED INTO THE BACK OF A SUPPORT VEHICLE AFTER A RACE-ENDING COLLISION. SUPPORT STAFF FEED HIM BEER AND FALAFEL, BUT THE DAMAGE COULD HAVE MONTHSLONG IMPLICATIONS. 12 \ A BOTTLE OF WATER AND ANOTHER OF ISOTONIC DRINK PROVIDE OPTIMUM RACING HYDRATION BETWEEN REST STOPS.
cross-country event at the Rio Olympics. “But mountains are difficult because you have to dig deep for a very long time.” Bats shrugs. “I enjoyed the uphill,” he says, as Schuermans laughs. Today they will celebrate, but in just a few weeks’ time training for the following season begins. “Next month we will start doing three gym sessions of two-and-a-half hours every week,” says Schuermans. “We focus on core stability using unstable movements. It’s essential for creating a stable position on the bike but it requires a lot of focus because much of it is about mindmuscle coordination. It even helps you go faster downhill because if your core is strong, you’re able to look further ahead, rather than focusing on picking out your immediate route.” Inevitably, there’s also some leg work involved, but not as much as you might assume. “More than 50 per cent of your
power comes from your back and abdominals,” says Schuermans. “As a mountain biker youhave to be very diverse. You have to be technically good and very fit, so we do sprints of three to four minutes to help us perform over our threshold for extended periods.” As the high-ranking competitors reflect on their past three days and the season ahead, the amateur contingent of the race continues to cross the finishing line over the course of the next hour in varying states of repair. Many of the top 20 riders are international professionals, for whom the event is becoming an increasingly important fixture on the yearly circuit. But the Israeli Cycling Federation is nevertheless keen to encourage amateur riders to compete, and has the equivalent of $2 million at its disposal to promote Israel as the go-to holiday destination for European cyclists. While Israeli-Palestinian tensions remain heated and peace teeters on a knife-edge, it may be a good while before it realises this noble ambition. Even so, for many, it’s the very confluence of latent, simmering conflict and beautiful, holy terrain that’s at the heart of Epic Israel’s appeal. Sign up for next year at epicisrael.org.il February 2020 107
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THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH ME.
Going to counselling isn’t about something being wrong with you any more than going to the gym to work on your triceps is about something being wrong with your arms. Counselling is like seeing a trainer, says Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and the author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do. “Therapists have specialised knowledge and therefore can cut time for improvement.” Mike R, for instance, a 27-year-old who first saw a counsellor as a uni student for his crippling anxiety, says, “Therapy has made a massive difference. There’s only so much you can do by writing in a journal and talking to yourself”.
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Okay, fine. Maybe something’s kind of broken. But a shrink can’t fix me. That’s not the point. “Think of your therapist as a consultant, much like you would think about your accountant or a lawyer,” says Dr David Wexler, executive director of the Relationship Training Institute. A counsellor helps you understand and manage – not fix.
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EXCUSES FOR WHY GUYS DON’T SEE A SHRINK ... and why they’re all BS BY JOSHUA DAVID STEIN
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I can’t do it – I’m the guy who is supposed to have my shit together. Retired lieutenant colonel Dr Samantha Dutton gets it. “Many men feel they have to have it all together all the time despite how miserable they feel.” But it’s hard to do a good job when you’re miserable, so if you really need your shit together, you can’t afford not to seek help.
4 GOING TO COUNSELLING MEANS I’M WEAK. Take it from Morin – or any successful person – when she says that asking for help is a sign of strength. “There’s a difference between acting tough and being strong,” she says. “It’s easy to act tough by pretending that problems don’t exist. It takes strength to admit you might need help.”
5 THEY’RE GONNA SIT THERE AND JUDGE ME. I’M NOT PAYING FOR THAT. A counsellor is, by definition, disinterested in you. That’s not “not interested”. It’s disinterested. You are, to them, a patient, one of approximately fifteen the average counsellor sees in a week. They’re not caught up in your life. They’re professionals, so they look at you in the same matter-of-fact way your mechanic looks at your car’s transmission, not – as your partner might – with the terror and resentment of riding shotgun as you blow through a red light. They care enough to assess the damage, not enough to judge. (This is helpful to keep in mind even if you’re in counselling. One survey revealed that 93 per cent of people lie to their shrink. Among the prime motivations are shame and fear of judgment.)
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I have a spouse/partner for that. Not gonna help. See above. Also, counsellors are required by law to keep your secrets. Your spouse, not so much. February 2020 109
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I have CBD for that.
Hmm . . . both CBD and alcohol may help temporarily alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety, according to Dr Gregory Scott Brown, an integrative psychiatrist, “but neither helps address
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I WENT, BUT THE COUNSELLOR JUST SAT THERE AND DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING.
WE ASKED DR DAVID WEXLER FOR HIS THOUGHTS
Q: Why is it that you just sit there and make vaguely sympathetic noises but don’t speak? A: [Silence.] Q: No, but seriously. A: [Silence.] Q: Oh, I get it. I guess it’s because in some types of therapy, your job isn’t so much to direct me as it is to allow me to unpeel the layers of my mind. It’s as if all these words I’m saying are clearing out the tubes of my mind like an emotional bilge pump until, exhausted, we start getting down to some real issues, issues I’ve long kept hidden either because they seem so trifling – like when I was eight and fell off my bike and started crying and instead of empathising with me, my dad sarcastically said, “How many wah-wahs?” – or because they’re shameful, like the fact that I think I’m fundamentally unlovable and that if I ever let anyone know me, like really know me, with all my defences down, they’d see that. Is that it? A: [Silence.] Q: [Weeping.] A: [Hands a box of tissues.]
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the root causes, and the best chance at sustainable recovery is to get at those”. Now, of the two, the jury is still out on the long-term effects of CBD use. “There’s simply not enough evidence about CBD and
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anxiety that we, as medical professionals, can recommend it,” says Brown. “The thing we know about alcohol for sure is that someone who abuses it increases their risk for depression and suicide.”
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I don’t want to complain.
Sitting in a room to delve into your own muck seems like it just gets you covered in muck. Substitute “physical therapist” for “psychotherapist” and see if this makes sense: physical therapy can be painful, sure, but it helps you get better. Same thing with your mind. “Sometimes,” says Morin, “when you have a cut, you just get a Band-Aid and it’s okay. Sometimes it’s a deeper wound and you have to go to the doctor. And if you don’t address the problem, it’s not going to heal. So you might experience pain in the short term, but it makes life much better.”
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I don’t want to talk shit about anyone. “You don’t have to complain,” says Morin. “You don’t have to talk shit about other people.” You get to talk how you want to talk.
13 O N C E YO U START C O U N S E LLIN G, YO U ’RE N E VE R D O N E . Not all counselling has to be long-term. As few as eight weekly sessions can be effective, and for certain fears (like flying, elevators) and issues (OCD), three hours of intense therapy might be all you need.
I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO START. DOCTOR? PSYCHIATRIST? PSYCHOLOGIST?
“There’s massive confusion around what the different mental-health disciplines do,” says Dutton. In some ways, the degrees are just a bunch of letters at the end of the person’s name. What matters more is your connection with the therapist. (See No. 16.) But generally, psychologists and social workers are not medical doctors and cannot prescribe medication, although there are some exceptions. Psychiatrists, on the other hand, can and do prescribe medication
when needed. Being medical doctors, they tend to explore the link between neurochemistry and mental health – e.g., considering a thyroid problem as a cause for depression – whereas psychologists consider behavioural patterns as you work together. It’s basically the difference between hardware and software. Don’t worry too much about which type of counsellor you should try first. “We all talk to each other,” says Kate Lowe, a licensed psychotherapist. “Often I’ll refer a patient out to a psychiatrist or vice versa.”
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I don’t want to take pills. If you’re dead set against the pharmacopoeia, so be it. But if your depression or anxiety is so severe that you’re struggling to function, “medication that helps balance neurochemicals like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine can help you get out of a ditch,” says Brown. “Therapy can help you build the tools to stay out.” Often, a combination of medication (getting out of the ditch) and therapy (staying out) is the most effective.
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FINDING A COUNSELLOR IS HARD.
Difficulty finding a counsellor is one of the most common barriers to counselling. Try asking your doctor for a recommendation and set up some conversations. It’s less like finding your local pub than it is discovering your favourite cafe. In the former, proximity and an adequate selection of draught beer are really the only things that matter. The latter takes trial and error, time and a battery of pointed questions. (See “7 Questions to Ask a Potential Counsellor”.) You deserve someone with whom you can be radically honest, says psychiatrist Dr Drew Ramsey. “I always encourage people to have consultations with two or three different therapists.” Don’t worry if it’s not a good fit and you move on after the first few sessions. “We’re professionals,” says Ramsey. “We can handle it.”
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I wouldn’t even know what to say to a counsellor. Sure you would. They’re a person, just like you. And you can start with these.
18 I’M B RO KE AN D I CAN ’ T AFFO RD IT. Okay, well, a Medicare rebate is available for up to 10 sessions with a psychologist per calendar year. Private health insurance can also supplement your Medicare entitlements but, of course, that means forking out for private health cover in the first place. If much of your anxiety stems from financial stress, this can range from untenable to unbearable. Happily, since the early 2010s, telemental health or telemedicine – let’s call it therappy – has blossomed. Research has shown that telemental health services, which typically rely on a network of far-flung counsellors who respond to patients via phone,text, video and chat messaging, are an effective and less costly alternative to traditional therapy. Where to get therappy:
Talkspace This app uses a network of vetted counsellors who have at least 3000 hours of clinical experience. You send text, audio or video messages and your counsellor will usually respond within the same day. Cost: From $65 to $99 a week. Good for: Anxiety, depression, PTSD, relationship counselling, eating disorders.
7 Cups of Tea It’s a peer-to-peer network of volunteer “listeners”, trained in active listening, who are available through online chat. Licensed counsellors are also available for an additional monthly fee. Cost: Free. Good for: Those who want to connect with others with similar problems, and/or are broke.
BetterHelp The more than 5000 licensed counsellors in its system are each required to have a minimum of three years and 2000 hours of hands-on experience. BetterHelp offers live phone-chat sessions. Cost: From $40 to $70 a week. Good for: Stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, anger, sleep problems, grief and more.
Woebot What happens when cute start-up culture, AI and mental health commingle? Woebot, an AI-based chatbot created by a team of Stanford psychologists and AI experts. Cost: Free. Good for: Those who do not mind accepting life advice from a robot.
7 Questions to Ask a Potential Counsellor I’m dealing with x – what is your experience treating this type of issue? What kind of treatment or therapy do you think might benefit me most? Can you describe how that treatment works? How do you assess progress? How long do you anticipate we’ll work together? What is your availability? How much is this gonna cost me, because . . . (See No. 18.)
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They won’t. Unless you tell them. But you are under no legal obligation to inform your employer that you’re seeing a counsellor. Even if you were to tell them, you are protected from discrimination based on mental health conditions under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth).
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WHAT IF MY FRIENDS FIND OUT?
Yeah, what if your friends find out? If they’re good friends, they’ll be supportive. If they’re arseholes about it, get new friends.
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WHAT IF MY EMPLOYER FINDS OUT?
WHAT IF MY SPOUSE FINDS OUT AND THINKS IT’S ABOUT THEM?
“Most of the time, men come in because their spouse is making them do it,” says Morin. “If the spouse finds out and the men haven’t told them, what I’ve mostly seen is that they’re proud. It makes you a better husband.”
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I WANTED TO SLEEP WITH MY COUNSELLOR, IT GOT WEIRD, AND I QUIT.
Oh, hey. This is Joshua, author of this piece. Yeah, this happened with me. Think about it: you’re in a small room with someone. Your secrets are coming out like you’re in an emotional colander and still they accept you. In fact, they’re sympathetic. Of course intimacy is going to flower and it makes sense why you might misidentify it as romantic. Sometimes you have to pick someone you’re not attracted to. Sometimes you write an article for MH, then send it to your counsellor and see how it all shakes out.
COUNSELLING IS A ...
Rich-person thing. “Psychotherapy may have been developed by Sigmund Freud for wealthy white women,” says Dr Monnica T. Williams, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. The Medicare rebate makes counselling an accessible option for most people. Sure, historically, seeing a shrink has been maligned as an outlet for middle class people to talk about their ‘first-world’ problems. But the truth is, mental health issues don’t discriminate between rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight. Counselling can help everyone.
25
24 I S N ’ T IT A YO U N G PE R S O N TH I N G ?
When you consider the average person spends...
Nah. They just talk about it more. Millennials may be more likely to talk about mental illness and treatment openly than older generations, but it’s more common for those in the 50-and-older demographic to receive treatment for mental-health issues.
4 HRS 47 MINS
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every week, then 50 minutes of counselling a week doesn’t sound so daunting.
26 I went once. It didn’t take. SE E NO. 16.
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The only thing worse than going to counselling is hanging out in the waiting room. Seeing the faces of your fellow patients as they scurry to and from the office is pretty awful, especially for couples counselling. But instead of seeing the suffering of you and your fellow human beings as shameful, you might take that moment to feel comforted that not only are you not alone in needing help but you’re not alone in getting it.
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I don’t have time to go sit somewhere and talk about my problems.
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I have so many other dayto-day hassles in my life that need my immediate attention; counselling doesn’t make the cut. Maybe not right now. But as Ramsey says: “I would argue the most expensive thing is not to get treatment. A good psychotherapist will make you a more successful, grounded and wealthy individual, however you define wealth.”
MIND
F* ck it. I’ll just say it. I’M SCARED.
OKAY, so I’m going to talk a little bit about myself here. I’m going to keep it brief and breezy. About two years ago, my life started falling apart at an alarming clip. I was married – spoiler alert: was – and had two young children. We all lived in a too-small apartment, and I was at a point in my career as a writer where things, I thought, should be getting easier, but they weren’t. Everyone else had a house in the suburbs and a Subaru. What was I doing wrong? I had always had a lot of turmoil with my personal relationships, but as my cohort aged and had kids of their own, I found I had fewer and fewer close friends on whom I could rely. My marriage was similarly reliably tempestuous, but recently it was tempest all day. My emotions, meanwhile, were going haywire. I struggled with intense, body-clenching rage and existential squid-ink darkness. I had lived with myself my entire life. No matter how miserable I was, that misery was me, if that makes sense. And so I didn’t seek professional help. Who would I be, I worried, if this clenched mass of mess that was me was dissolved? I was scared – scared of what therapy might reveal, scared to let go of the shore and drift into deep water, scared to have to put into words what I felt. If I hadn’t had kids, I’m reasonably certain I never would have gone to therapy at all. But in the midst of what I guess was a mental breakdown – later I learned to call it an episode of emotional dysregulation – I tried to commit suicide. It was pretty rough. My wife had our five-year-old son, Achilles, talk to me through our bedroom door. He didn’t know what was up, just that something was wrong. And because trying to explain to
a five-year-old you love that what you’re doing in the bedroom is dangling from the closet rod with a leather belt around your neck is too sad (and also hard to explain with said belt around your neck), eventually I emerged and lived. At that point, seeking help was a matter of life and death for me. Even then I dithered out of fear. But what scared me more than going to therapy was what not going would mean. The evidence that I was struggling with mental illness was incontrovertible; that it was affecting the people I love was equally incontestable. Because I have children and love my children, I knew I needed to get help, not for me so much as for them. I’m already too messed up to be happy. But my kids deserve happiness and a father who can love and be loved freely. In my bones, the thought that I’d pass on to them my unresolved issues – or, rather, the contortions that grew like calluses around those issues – was repugnant. So I ended up in therapy, talking to a nice lady named Julia. Around me, in that office suite and in adjoining buildings, there were people just like me talking to people just like her. How cliché, I thought, looking at her ready-to-pluck tissues and well-hugged crushed-velvet pillow. But week by week, it felt really good to be able to talk to someone who wasn’t furious at me for a decade of craziness, who could see me with compassion and professional compunction. Who cares if I paid her $200 an hour? After a bit, Julia suggested I might have something called borderline personality disorder (BPD), a constellation of symptoms that include suicidal ideations and attempts, uncontrollable rage, impulsive behaviour,
black-and-white thinking – all traits I had tagged as mine in the coat check of ego. That character I carried and that I called “me”; that guy who punched walls and flew into rages; that guy who tumble-dried in the cycles of shame: that guy? Not me. Not really. I found I could let that image of who I was go. The more I understood about BPD, the more I understood what triggered what and why. I’m not saying that I’m not responsible for the suffering to others I caused. I am. But I didn’t have to beat myself up as much as I had. Unfortunately, there’s no medical remedy for BPD, no “stop being a crazy dick” pill. Since much of the disorder is biochemical – basically, my mind is hardwired to think those I love the most are constantly attacking me – BPD will be my constant companion. Because it’s largely genetic, it also might be my bequeathment to my sons, too. Therapy wasn’t enough to save my marriage. Therapy can’t make me travel back in time to save my kids their fear or forward to salve their suffering. But what it did, and the reason I am still grateful for the past three years of my life, is that it allowed me to fully know myself. It’s like I hadn’t fully put my weight on this earth. I was holding part of myself apart, suspended, like a terrified marionette. Now I’m here. I’m happy in a way I couldn’t be before and sad in a way I couldn’t be before. I’m tender where I was hard, looser where I was tight. And you know what? I’m more comfortable admitting, “I’m scared”, and still going to sit on a couch to get to know myself a little better. February 2020 113
ESSENTIALS YOUR MONTHLY GUIDE TO WHAT’S HAPPENING AND WHAT’S NEW
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TRAINER
120 Train hard; train smart
B E C AU S E
126 Working out with a Hollywood heavyweight
F I T
I S
T H E
N E W
129 Squatting 101
R I C H
THE INCREDIBLE RULK
The days of pure mirror-fitness are numbered. Da Rulk, the creator of Raw Functional Training and a force behind the fitness app Centr, helps you pull off a game-changing metamorphosis SCOTT HENDERSON
DANIEL LINNET
February 2020 117
RULK DOESN’T TRAIN FOR THE MIRROR, FOR NUMBERS OR TO IMPRESS. HE TRAINS TO FEEL READY FOR ANYTHING.
FORCE OF NATURE Fitness beast Da Rulk is here to shake up your training. Please don’t make him angry
Da Rulk, aka Jason Sakoda, is a Hawaiian man mountain with an original take on fitness. And we’ll get to that. But first there’s the matter of “Da Rulk”. Origin story, please. “Rulk came from some of my Brazilian friends,” says Rulk on a recent trip to Sydney. “They used to call me “Hulk” because of my strength. But in Portuguese the ‘H’ sound is spelled with an ‘R’, so that’s why it’s Rulk.” Rulk it is. Truth be told, though, the sobriquet is a tad misleading. Because Rulk is one of the friendliest men I’ve ever met. He radiates energy – though not the kind that busts down doors and upturns cars. It’s pure feel-good: he makes every single person on set feel as though this is their moment. He’s also meticulous: all his athletic gear is perfectly folded and packed. Rulk is one of the trainers behind Centr, the health and fitness app that puts Chris Hemsworth’s team in the palm of your hand. But his day job is training some of the most hardened real-life heroes across the world: first responders. His signature is Raw Functional Training (RFT), which is less a standalone training system than an adjunct of oft-overlooked work based on primal movements. After all, there’s no machine in the gym that can mimic the act of crawling through a burning building to rescue a victim. Here’s Rulk’s story. In Rulk’s own words.
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“You need to know a little about my background. I played American football. Then I did judo for a long time. I’m a proponent of many forms of training: strength training, power training . . . they’re all great. But I was always fascinated with bodyweight training. My approach is to train not just for aesthetics. So many guys do. They figure, ‘If I look better, I feel better’. I think that’s okay. But there are days when we just don’t look the way we want to. My whole thing is: what if we trained you to be empowered? To be mentally and physically stronger. And to learn the habit of consistently doing the work. I think that if we’re mentally strong we can endure far more than if we’re just fit. So, first responders: there would be firefighters and
police officers who were extremely fit. They were jacked and they were conditioned. But they would go into a fire and they wouldn’t perform well. And no one understood why. When I was designing my curriculum for RFT, I was drawn to sequencing and movement patterns. By that I mean, how quickly can you adapt to different scenarios? How efficient and fast are you at processing information? I can tell you this: incorporating RFT into the training of our first responders has been transformative to their performance. RFT focuses on the sequence of how our bodies take in information during performance. For example, how our senses react to light, sound and temperature, and how we process that
information. This can be applied to whoever I train because, in life, we don’t just walk. We run. We jog. We crawl. We sit. The better your body adapts to all these requirements, the more efficiently you move and the less pain you experience.
MOVE LIKE A KID If you’re a firefighter, police officer or military, they don’t really want you to be huge. They want you to be strong and fit. But also able to adapt. And mentally strong. A lot of the things that you see me do – long cycle-work or crawling for five kilometres – are challenging me physically and mentally. Anyone can crawl. It’s a primary movement pattern. Babies crawl to get strong enough to sit up. But can you do it for
ILLUSTRATIONS: SONNY RAMIREZ @ ILLUSTRATIONROOM.COM.AU
THE INCREDIBLE RULK
a long time? As they say, you take the highest-level athlete and have him follow around a toddler for a day. By day’s end, the toddler’s fine and the athlete’s exhausted. I like two aspects of training this way. The physiological side, which is: let’s see what part of your body breaks down first. And, can you push yourself to finish the task? Really push because you want to challenge yourself? Because if you can, I see the crossover to real life when we’re facing stress in our relationships and work. My advice with RFT is to adopt it as either a standalone program or as an enhancement. Whatever training you’re doing now, keep doing it if you think it’s working. But to take your movement efficiency and performance to a new level, introduce RFT into your training. I think you’ll see the benefits. We focus so much on getting strong physically, but that means nothing if you’re not strong mentally. With RFT there’s a lot of progressions and regressions that you can use depending on whether you’re carrying injuries or restrictions, like muscular tightness. I think the fitness industry is in a state of flux. Guys are looking less at trying to get smashed and more at trying to make improvements that actually benefit their lives. Because most guys don’t want to be a Navy SEAL or a firefighter. They may like the fact they can train like one. But they just want to be able to play with their kids, be active with their spouse or go on a run.
WHY TRAIN? For me, it’s not a matter of how hard you train. It’s, can you train consistently? And, how well do you move? RFT removes common barriers to training. Don’t have much space? That’s okay. You could do RFT in your living room or
at the beach. Time poor? Also okay. An RFT session can take five minutes, 30 minutes or longer. Once you take out the excuses you can get more consistent with things. And we’re habitual by nature. I first met Chris when he was developing Centr. He reached out to me to see if I wanted to jump onboard, and immediately we were like brothers. Chris wants to help as many people as he can. He’s a great guy. There are some people who just want to train for aesthetics. And if that’s what you want to do, fantastic. It’s great and admirable. But I’m much more about the translation of training practices to real life. How is what you’re doing going to make you a stronger person? You’re only in the gym for a couple of hours a day, so shouldn’t those two hours benefit you mentally? A lot of guys use the gym as a form of stress relief. I get it. But what if it could also make you more resilient? That will then carry over to your everyday life. If you’re focused on overcoming obstacles and doing that every day, it’s easier to accomplish other things because it becomes your habit. I see a shift in the fitness industry. The focus used to be on lifting hard and heavy. But now it’s much more about training functionally, getting the most out of your workouts and ensuring you follow a recovery protocol to avoid injury. I think people want to be healthy, injury-free and moving towards being mentally stronger. I think that’s where the true power is: understanding and coming to grips with who you are and what you’re about. That’s the real fitness journey. Focus on the journey, not the destination. And sometimes you’ve just got to start moving on the journey to find out where you want to go.”
MOVEMENT BY DESIGN Rulk’s RFT restores your body’s freedom of movement. Do this Centr workout at least once a week as an adjunct to strength work. Do three rounds of Cluster 1, rest 2 minutes; 3 rounds of Cluster 2, rest 2 minutes; 3 rounds of Cluster 3. For each move, it’s 40sec on, 20sec rest. Take a minute’s breather between rounds
CLUSTER 1
FORWARD TO REVERSE CRAWL 75%
CLUSTER 2
CLUSTER 3
SWITCH
FORWARD TO REVERSE CRAWL 100%
Hit the deck and crawl, bear-style, bringing knee close to elbow. Feel it all over, not least in your obliques. Aim to travel the same distance in reverse.
Sink into a squat. Drive back up explosively so both feet leave the ground. While airborne, cross one leg in front of the other in preparation for a smooth landing.
Hit the deck and crawl, bear-style, bringing knee close to opposite elbow. Feel it all over, especially your obliques. Travel the same distance in reverse.
00:20 REST
00:20 REST
00:20 REST
HOSTAGE
SANDBAG PULL
SIDE CRAWL
Sink into a squat. But instead of driving back up, stay down and pulse: mini-squats where you’re moving only 5-10cm, keeping the tension in your quads throughout.
Get into a push-up position, a sandbag under your chest. Alternate dragging the bag left and right with one hand, keeping the rest of your body still and stable.
Time to think laterally. Same set-up as for the bear crawl, except now you’re channelling a crab. Scurry left, then scurry back to the starting position.
00:20 REST
00:20 REST
00:20 REST
VERTIGAL JUMP
BALLISTIC PULSE
SIT-THRU
Assume an athletic stance, a bit of give in the knees. Sink into a quarter-squat and jump, lifting your arms on the way up. Land softly, giving at the knees.
Get onto hands and feet, knees close to elbows. Spring from the feet and hands so you’re airborne. Land softly and repeat. Pilot’s license not required.
Get down on hands and feet, knees close to elbows. Lift your right arm and swing your left leg under your body, touching your hip to the floor. Reverse and flow.
00:20 REST
00:20 REST
00:20 REST
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BU FOR
Time wait ts for no man. Our two-worko out plan maximises your time e in the gym to build muscle an nd develop definition without undue u soreness. Your best t years start now ANDREW TR RACEY
PHILIP HAYNES
DAD JACKED
1B 2A
1A
SUPERSET
1||DUMBBELL DEADLIF FT (5-7 reps)
oneHarness the testostero boosting power of the ing deadlift without locki yourself into a range of ury. motion that risks inju Keep the dumbbells clo ose to your body, on the front of your thighs. Hinge dow wn with tension a flat back to create t (A). Lats engaged, stan nd upright (B). Maintain a neutral spine with you ur arms hanging straight and a tight core. Repeat.
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WORDS: ANDREW TRACEY; PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILIP HAYNES
No two bodie es begin their fifth decade in the same shape, but a few things arre certain. From around the age of 40, men start to be affecte ed by sarcopenia, the suitably miserable m term for the degenerative loss of muscle tissue. Fortunately, the best thing you can n do to fight against this inevitablle fact of life is exercise. The e more work you do now, the morre muscle you will maintain for life. This work kout, best tackled on Mondays and Fridays, is built to give you a joint-friendly joint friendly pump. Complete each move for 20 minutes, resting as necessary. Take a five-minute breather before another round of 20 minutes, working through as many sets as possible. Record your total reps for each and try to beat that score in the next workout – improve with time, basically.
BUILD A BODY FOR THE AGES
THE SPEC MUSCLES TARGETED
MIN RESULTS IN
2
WEEKS LEVEL
3B
EASY 4A
3A
4B
2B
SUPERSET
2|| PUSH-UP
3|| DUMBBELL THRUSTER
4||RESISTANCE BAND ROW
Nothing beats lifting your own bodyweight. Thanks to its lack of external resistance, the humble push-up is the original joint-friendly exercise. Start by stacking your wrists, elbows and shoulders above one another in a plank (A). Flex at the elbow and slowly lower your body until your chest touches the floor (B). Push up. Repeat the pair for 20 minutes.
This huge multi-joint movement can trigger a flood of testosterone. Begin by holding the dumbbells at shoulder height, then squat down until the crease of your hip passes your knees (A). Power back up and simultaneously press the weights into the air until your arms are locked out overhead (B). Return the dumbbells back to shoulder height and repeat.
Limit the posture-crunching load of machines and work your core by using the dynamic tension of a band. Sit with your back straight, then loop a light resistance band around your feet (A). Pull the band towards your shoulders (B). Split your hands wider to recruit extra back muscle. Finish your reps, then go again from the thrusters until your 20-minute timer sounds.
(10-15 reps)
(8-10 reps)
(5-7 reps)
February 2020 121
1B 2B
1A
2A
WALK THIS WAY
The loaded carry is the Swiss army knife of joint-friendly training. It enables you to take on tremendous loads in safe positions and forces your body to adapt without breaking it in the process. By making small, oscillating movements with these loads, you can safely stimulate your joints, tendons and ligaments. If your mirror muscles are the headline act, these are the backstage crew making it all happen. Using an AMRAP (as many rounds as possible) format, complete these four movements, taking minimal rest. Work for 20 minutes. Go for it on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a day off on Wednesday. At the very least, it’ll help you hit your daily steps.
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1||KB OVERHEAD CARRY
2||KB FRONT-RACK CARRY
Keeping your shoulders healthy is imperative for long-term strength. Clean a pair of kettlebells into the front-rack position and press them overhead until your arms are locked out (A). March for 20 metres, turn and head back (B). Try to push your arms up at all times. As soon as you’re done, drop down into the front-rack position, ready for the next carry.
Slouching at your desk? Walk this way if you’d like a proud posture. Pinching your shoulder blades back, touch your fists with the kettlebells under your chin and brace your core (A). Again, walk for 20m and head back. Ensure you take short, deliberate strides, breathing deep into your belly and keeping your back, shoulders and arms solid at all times (B).
(2 sets of 20m)
(2 sets of 20m)
BUILD A BODY FOR THE AGES
THE SPEC MUSCLES
4A
20 MIN RESULTS IN
2
WEEKS LEV VEL
3A
MED DIUM
3 3B
4B
3|| KB FARMER’S CARRY
4||ALTERNATING GORILLA ROW
Here, you’ll double down on the shoulder stability, but with an added dose of grip training. Tightly packed jam jar lids don’t stand a chance. To start, stand tall with your core braced and a pair of kettlebells at your side (A). Lean forward slightly, then get marching for 20m before turning around and heading back (B). Tired of walking? Move on.
The tiny adjustments needed to work one side of your upper body at a time while keeping a stable base make this tougher than it looks. Hinge at your hips, then row one weight to your waist, squeezing for a moment at the top (A). As you lower it, row the other side (B) and alternate. Then, get the weights back overhead for another round.
(2 sets of 20m)
(8 reps)
February 2020 123
NEW PODCAST
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CASSEROLE WITH THE PUNCHES
CASSEROLE WITH THE PUNCHES
Mixing tough training with summer partying is a stinging left hook to the guts for your immunity. Keep your guard up with this simple casserole that provides five days’ worth of defence-boosting lunches
60 MIN
1
TIMETOMAKE
2
2247
3
KILOJOULES
4
42G CARBS
5 6 7
21G PROTEIN
ADD KILOS, SUBTRACT FAT
Ingredients
8
Cherry tomatoes, 2 punnets Garlic, 4 cloves, crushed Butter beans, a can Pork sausages, 10 Balsamic vinegar Olive oil Wholegrain breadcrumbs, 150g Fresh parsley, a handful
Two easy ways to instantly adjust the nutritional payload of your week’s fuel
13G PROTEIN GOLDEN CLOVES
When it comes to fighting flu, garlic is king. “Rather than chopping, crush the cloves to make the most of their health-boosting allicin,” says nutritionist Christine Bailey.
Chuck in five pancetta slices at the start, then grate 100g of cheddar into the crumbs to add calcium and vitamin D for muscle-and-bone repair.
594 KILOJOULES Try swapping the snags for low-fat versions. When baked in tomato sauce and garlic, the texture will be just as good as regular bangers.
WORDS: DAVID MORTON; PHOTOGRAPHY: PIOTR GREGORCZYK
Method STEP 1 You’d think that cooking up enough musclebuilding medicine for a whole working week would take some prep. It doesn’t. Heat your oven to 190°C. Prep done. STEP 2 Stick the whole tomatoes, garlic, beans and sausages into a casserole dish. Add a splash of vinegar, along with a glug of olive oil. Shake it up and crack some black pepper and salt over the top before shoving it all in the oven for 30 minutes. STEP 3 Take out the stew and stir. Sprinkle the breadcrumbs, chopped parsley and a dash of oil over the top. Return to oven for 20 minutes. Split into five portions and go toe-to-toe with man flu all week
FAT STACKS
“Combining tomatoes with fat encourages lycopene absorption,” says Bailey. More of this antioxidant means less of the inflammation that makes you ill.
MEAT LOCKER
Pork, the “other white meat”, packs iron, zinc and thiamin, a potent combo to blast viruses with if they show their face around your manor. It’s a tasty way to stay off the canvas.
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THE HOLLYWOOD HEAVYWEIGHT Oscar-nominated producer Jason Blum hits the gym to charge his energy levels and clear his mind completely ANTHONY McCARRON
STEVEN COUNTS
Jason Blum knows things could get gory. He’s facing a 60-centimetre-high wooden box topped with five 10-cm-high rubber plates (110 centimetres in all, if you’re keeping track at home). The stack is nearly at Blum’s chest, but the 182.5cm producer has every intention of jumping onto it. “You might get a lot of blood,” he quips, summoning visions of busted shins, split lips and the all-around FUBAR-ness of a failed landing. “I make horror movies.”
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T H E H O L LY W O O D H E AV Y W E I G H T
Don’t wish him a Happy Death Day just yet. Blum bends his knees, leaps, then tucks his legs tight. He lands with a smile. “This,” he says, “is my specialty.” The way Blum sees it, there’s nothing better than a rush of adrenaline and fear (and sweat, too) to get him pumping out adrenaline-rush nail-biters like Paranormal Activity, The Purge, and Glass. So whenever the 50-year-old is in Manhattan, he heads to Brick New York gym, just as he’s done on this day, to fight through a CrossFit-style metabolic-conditioning workout with trainer Ian Creighton. “I tell myself that I do better work and I get more done if I give myself an hour a day to work out,” Blum says between sets of landmine shoulder presses and ab drills. “I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I’ve never not given myself an hour a day to work out, so I’m not going to find out.” There’s no reason to mess with success, and from the Purge films to Whiplash and Us and Glass, Blum has had plenty. He heads Blumhouse Productions, the Hollywood film factory that specialises in transforming micro budgets (try under $15,000 for 2007’s Paranormal Activity) into major moolah (see nearly $200 million at the global box office). He traces his discipline back to when he decided to quit smoking at age 30. He’d smoked since high school, but at a nightclub during the 1999 Hamptons Film Festival, tired of being constantly out of breath, he resolved to quit and stomped his final cigarette
BETWEEN SETS Favourite cheat food? “Ice cream. Chocolatechip mint. The last seven years, I’ve started to really like it. I like it a lot.” What gets you through a supertough workout? “I count. I’m always counting. When I do a treadmill workout, I count steps. I think it’s a way of meditating.” Workout goal? “I’d like to get my box jumps back up to 50 inches [127cm]. I injured my shoulder, but it’s better now, so I’m working on my chest, too.” Fitness role model? “The person who taught me how to exercise, Logan Hood, a Navy SEAL who took a break from the military and had a gym near the airport in LA.”
BLUM’S FULL-BODY SWEAT SESSIONS TYPICALLY INCLUDE MOVES THAT CHALLENGE HIS CORE, LIKE THE SINGLE-ARM LANDMINE PRESS (INSET) AND THE OFFSET-LOAD BARBELL ROW. butt into the ground. “I replaced it with the gym,” he says. Not that he was a box-jumping badarse right away. His first post-smoker workout was a 20-minute session on a hotel stationary bike – and it left him wrecked. But a decade later, while on the Vancouver set of the family comedy The Tooth Fairy, which he produced, he
THE BREAK OF BRAWN When Jason Blum hits the road, he can’t do his beloved box jumps, but he still makes time to train, thanks to 15-minute sweatfests like this conditioning circuit from Ian Creighton. Grab your backpack (or empty out your roller bag and use it) and rip through this in your hotel room!
1
stumbled onto a CrossFit workout with a lunchtime group and loved how the pace fired up his muscles and had him dripping in sweat. “I’m very into efficiency,” he says. Blum wanted more hardcore fitness, so he asked to work out with the film’s star, Dwayne Johnson, who trained at 3am. No luck. “I endlessly tried to get in there and work out with him, and I never
Alternating Overhead Lunge
Stand holding your luggage overhead. Step back with your left foot and lower into a lunge. Pause, then push off your right heel to return to a standing position. Repeat on the other side. That’s 1 rep; do 8.
2
pulled it off,” Blum says. “He was always super-nice about it: ‘Yeah! We’ll do it next week!’ But he never let me. His workouts are incredibly private. But whatever he’s doing is working.” Whenever Blum trains, he makes sure to push himself to his limits. On this day, he rides his bike 30 blocks through Manhattan traffic (hey, more adrenaline!) to meet
Suitcase Thruster
Stand holding your luggage at your shoulders, core tight. Bend at the knees and push your butt back, lowering your torso until your thighs are parallel to the floor. Explosively stand back up and press the luggage overhead. That’s 1 rep; do 8.
3
Creighton. (Creighton and Jeff Scarborough, Blum’s LA trainer, keep their schedules flexible when he’s in town.) Forty-five minutes later, Blum is doubled over after busting through 40-secondson, 20-seconds-off intervals on the dreaded Airdyne bike, his shirt soaked. He wouldn’t have it any other way. “I really like that my mind is totally blank,” he says.
Burpee with Suitcase Jump
Place your luggage on the floor; stand to the right. Jump over it to the left, land, then squat down and do a push-up. Return to standing as quickly as possible, then jump over the luggage to the right and repeat. That’s 1 rep; do 8.
February 2020 127
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YO U D O N ’ T K N OW S Q UAT
SQUAT LEADER: HEED THE ADVICE OF A MAN WHO’S PRACTISED PERFECT TECHNIQUE SINCE HIGH SCHOOL.
YOU DON’T KNOW SQUAT In this second instalment of our “Back To Basics” series, MH fitness director Todd Liubinskas tackles the undisputed king of bodybuilding moves. Tree-trunk quads? Coming right up DANIEL WILLIAMS
JASON LEE
A lot of guys new to the iron put off including squats in their routine. Why? Because they hurt. And they don’t directly affect how well you fill out a T-shirt. But that wasn’t a rookie error MH fitness director Todd Liubinskas fell prey to. He was all of 13 years old when he began fronting up to the squat rack. “I started squatting in high school, where I was playing a pretty decent level of basketball,” recalls Liubinskas. “Basically, I needed to be able to jump higher.” Liubinskas’ coach at the time was no fool. The training wasn’t about overloading the boy’s frame. It was about increasing his mobility to ensure he could squat with depth,
and finetuning his technique. Both these imperatives apply to you, even if it’s been a while since you suited up for your Year 10 formal. “After three years of proper training I could dunk – which was the whole idea,” says Liubinskas, who still sounds chuffed at the memory. Nowdays, the gun PT squats moderately heavy twice a week (under loads roughly 70 per cent of his bodyweight). But squats of one type or another feature in every workout he does. It’s a fundamental move, he explains. You do it every time you sit down and stand up. A sign your mobility is subpar is that getting out of a comfortable chair begins to feel like work.
Here are Liubinskas’ FIVE RULES for safe and effective squatting. 1/ Get In The Groove: Your optimum pre-squat warm-up will emphasise dynamic moves like walking lunges that prepare your lower body for intense effort. “Activation is the key,” says Liubinskas. “And you have to open up those hips.” 2/ Strike A Pose: The right stance will depend on your anatomical quirks. Some guys prefer to have their toes pointing straight; others, like Liubinskas, will angle them outward. It doesn’t really matter. It’s whatever helps you to go deeper. Also, pretend you’re standing on a sheet of paper. Your goal is to screw
your feet and rip that paper apart! 3/ Breathe Deep: “A strong inhale just before you sink down puts the body into a nice, tense state that protects it from injury,” says Liubinskas. Exhale as you rise. 4/ Listen To Your Body: There will be days when squatting heavy is a lousy idea. Your body will tell you what it’s up for. “Don’t be too proud to regress sometimes,” says Liubinskas. “Switch to a goblet squat or just bodyweight.” 5/ Grab A Mate. A spotter can tell you if you’re tilting forwards or sideways. He’s also good for an encouraging word. All on your own? “Video yourself,” says Liubinskas. “Watch your style. Critique it.”
February 2020 129
ONE WORD ANSWER
QU UESTION
Whatt will make the world a better place . . . and help yo ou earn more? m
ANSWER R
MBER in the Old Dart, when a BACK IN SEPTEM floundering Boris Johnson prorogued oup of opposition MPs made parliament, a gro e known by holding up signs their displeasure ed” and chanting, “Shame!” in reading “Silence the Commons chamber. One Labour politician hurled himself across the chair of the Speaker, John Bercow, briefly preventing him from leaving the room – a symbolic gesture re-enacting a similar action taken against the tyranny of Charles I in 1629. We live in times so desperate that desperate measures seem almost ordinary – and even elected lawmakers are forced to resort to the methods of placard-carrying protesters. Which may not, in the end, be an entirely bad thing. Protest has a long history of meaningful success, from the moral victories
130
menshealth.com.au
of the American civil rights movement to universal suffrage in Australia. And crucially, it’s a strategy that’s accessible to all. Whatever your political beliefs, activism makes a difference, not just to the world you live in but also to you as an individual. One study found that the fight for change has surprising side benefits. According to researchers at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina, activists are significantly more likely to earn higher wages than their politically uncommitted peers later in life. The paper also noted a correlation between civic involvement and lower levels of depression and “negative health behaviours”, such as drug abuse. A separate study at the University of Virginia confirmed this connection, concluding that
participation in grass-roots organising can help to “alleviate psychological distress”, particularly among those “associated with a disadvantaged social sttatus”. The feeling that you lack agency has lo ong been linked to anxiety and, in the worst cases, suicidal thoughts. Empowering yourself through direct action, then, is a perfectly logical cure. A march with Extinction Rebellion, anyone? As Martin Luther King once said, any of us can transform suffering into “a creative force”. With the world increasingly divided – over climate change, over Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers, over every aspect of how we live our lives, including how to address the spiralling male mentalhealth crisis – can you afford not to?
WORDS: YO ZUSHI; ILLUSTRATION: PETER CROWTHER
st
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