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AUSTRALIAN

JANUARY 2020 $9.50 NZ $9.99 INC GST

0itis UNLOCK KEXTRA BRAINPOWER

PEOPLE’S CHOICE

ASHION MEN’SFA GOESSGREEN

2020

H HOW TO MAKEFR RIENDS

CAST YOUR VOTE NOW!

And keep them!

TAKE YOUR GLUTEUS TO THE MAXIMUS

Get your arse into gear One-o on-One with h CrossFit's Froning Rich F Ric

HIT REFRESH Your new year reboot starts now!

menshealth.com.au

Your Lunch-Hour Mood Enhancer

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CONTENTS

01.20

20 CrossFit GOAT Rich Froning isn’t ready to lie down.

While striving for yet more titles, he’s pondering the very limits of human athleticism.

COVER GUY: RICH FRONING PHOTOGRAPHED BY:

JASON LEE

RICH WEARS:

REEBOK

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE

TACTI CS

p32 Our Kind of Girl

Olympic skier Danielle Scott wants you to get your arse outside.

p78 The Art of Mateship

Starting friendships is the easy bit.

Here’s how to keep them strong.

FI TN E SS

p119 Country Strong

C & W titan Tim McGraw is in the house – and training the place down!

p124 Positive Vibes Only

Not every workout needs to sap you.

Here’s one to top up your joie de vivre.

NUT R I TI ON

p40 Let’s Talk Turkey

It’s usually bland, yeah? Not this Xmas, with these inspired tweaks.

p123 Grate Outdoors

How to turn nachos (with loads of cheese) into muscle-building fare.

MI ND

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Smoking Gun Vaping is taking off. But is this another case of where there’s smoke, there’s fire?

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p72 Control Freak!

High Stakes Fear is your No. 1 performance saboteur.

Cliff divers show you how to tame it.

Get a grip on your possessive instincts – before they take over.

p86 Lift Your Brainpower How to cast off vagueness and build an elephantine memory.

MUSCL E

p26 Total-Body Strength

One move – the Rolling Pistol – is your best shot at a radical power upgrade .

p126 Maximus Gluteus

The leading expert on building a bigger engine is here to help you.

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Men’s Fashion Goes Green A fresh hue is here to enliven your look – and put navy and grey in the shade.

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Dirty Salads – For Healthy Appetites Well, more hearty than dirty – for big, hungry men who train hard.

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E D I T O R’S L E T T E R

Men's Health Australia

@MensHealthAU

@MensHealthAU

menshealth.com.au

STRETCHING THE TRUTH I learnt a new term this month while jumping on The Game Changers bandwagon: “flexible morality”. For those living under a rock – or without access to your wife’s Netflix account – The Game Changers is a new pro-vegan documentary produced by Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Cameron and Jackie Chan. Before you turn the page in a meat-fuelled fit of annoyance, this isn’t a letter dedicated to plant-based eating. While I’m awakened, I’m still firmly on the cow juice for the time being. But this concept of “flexible morality” caught my interest. It refers to our tendency to justify our decisions and actions as ethically sound, based on our own circumstances, despite having knowledge to the contrary.

It’s something we’re all guilty of from time to time. We know the salad is the healthier option, but we’ve had a big day and so we rationalise the need for the burger with fries. We know a singleuse coffee cup is bad for the environment, but we forgot our mug and, hey, “one cup won’t hurt” on our morning commute. We download that podcast series with every intention of expanding our minds, but the lure of a Netflix binge proves too strong.

There’s nothing wrong with balance, of course. But as a reader of Men’s Health you’ve no doubt come aboard in pursuit of knowledge – knowledge that will set you off on a healthier course.

As the great Bruce Lee said: “The quest for truth is only useful if you’re prepared to action on what you find”.

As we begin a brand-new year, in which we set ourselves fresh goals and encounter unfamiliar challenges, I encourage you to heed the wisdom you’ll find in these pages. Arm yourself with the knowledge and strength you need to implement the strategies you know work for you. Make informed, healthy decisions. And dominate 2020 while applying the least amount of “flexible morality” as possible. The choice is yours.

Speaking of choice (and seamless segues), we’re excited to announce a Men’s Health first: our 2020 People’s Choice cover, coming to newsstands and digital platforms in March. We’re pitting two Centr experts, Bobby Holland Hanton and Luke Zocchi, against each other in a campaign to rival any political showdown (p. 44). I’ve gotten to know both Bobby and Luke well over the years, and there’s really no wrong choice in this case. As you’ll learn over the next two months of campaigning, there could hardly be two more deserving cover men for our March issue.

Voting is now open through menshealth.com.au, so jump online and let us know whose mug you want to see gracing the cover of MH in March.

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

CLARISSA WILSON

KATHY GLAVAS

Brand Solutions Director

Head of Health

JESSICA LAY

COURTENAY MCDERMOTT

Brand Solutions Manager

Senior Marketing Manager – Health

CALVIN SIMPSON

JOHN GUMAPAS

Brand Solutions Coordinator

Production Controller

ANDREW CAMERON

PHIL CAMERON

Executive Creative Director

Digital Imaging Specialist

ALEX DALRYMPLE

ALLAN WEBSTER

Multimedia Content Producer

Advertising Operations Manager

JEREMY SUTTON

Group Subscriptions Manager GEREURD ROBERTS Chief Executive Officer, Pacific Magazines GUY TORRE Chief Financial Officer LOUISA HATFIELD Group Content and Brand Director

NICOLE BENCE Commercial Director MARK BOORMAN Group Production Manager

RICHARD DORMENT

Scott Henderson menshealth@pacificmags.com.au m

The King and I: Hen nderson, right, wit th Froning (and MH snapper Jason Lee).

Editor in Chief, Men’s Health US SIMON HORNE

KIM ST. CLAIR BODDEN

SVP/Editorial & Brand Director CHLOE O’BRIEN

SVP/Managing Director Asia Pacific & Russia

Deputy Brands Director

RICHARD BEAN

Executive Director, Content Services

Director of International Licensing and Business Development

SHELLEY MEEKS

Pacific Magazines, Media City, 8 Central Avenue, Eveleigh, NSW 2015 Phone: (02) 9394 2000 Fax: (02) 9394 2319 Subscription enquiries: 1300 668 118

Men’s Health is excited to be an official Australian Olympic Team Partner. We look forward to supporting our Olympians and Paralympians on the road to Tokyo.

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Printing Bluestar Web, 83 Derby Street, Silverwater NSW 2128. Distribution Gordon & Gotch.

Published 12 times a year. Registered business name Pacific Magazines Pty Ltd, (ABN) 16 097 410 896. All rights reserved. Title and trademark Men’s Health © Hearst Magazines International.

No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission. Men’s Health is a registered trademark and the unauthorised use of this trademark is strictly prohibited.

ASK MH

THE BIG QUESTION

Even when it’s not injured, my lower back hurts. Is this something I just have to live with?

There are few things we just have to live with, DC – and chronic lower-back pain isn’t one of them.

If you’re a tallish guy who’s been sporty all your life while simultaneously holding down a desk job, some grating in your lumbar spine is almost inevitable. But a new meta-analysis by Deakin University’s Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition has confirmed the value of being proactive when it comes to keeping back pain under control.

The world-first study found that active treatments, including Pilates, stabilisation moves and weight training, were the most effective forms of exercise for managing mild-to-moderate back pain with a non-specific cause. “In contrast, the least likely treatments to be effective included hands-off treatments, such as only educating people about chronic pain or doing psychological interventions alone,” says lead researcher Associate Professor Daniel Belavy. Likewise, as comforting as they may feel, sessions of massage or acupuncture were found to be of limited efficacy.

“There’s a common misconception that if someone is in pain, they should be resting, but our research shows that when the pain has been there for a long time, exercise is an important part of treatment,” Belavy said. Our advice: Google spine guru Stuart McGill’s “Big Three” exercises for back pain and start the program tonight.

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DC

GET TO WORK ON CONSTRUCTING A STRONG CORE AND PUT BACK PAIN ON NOTICE.

ANCIENT SOLUTION TO A MODERN PROBLEM Q My girlfriend’s bugging me to go to a climate-change protest. How can I tell her I couldn’t be arsed?

A The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

–Plato; b. circa 428BC

TEXT A PT I’m tired of the same old weights moves. Can you suggest a change-up?

Sure. But this move isn’t newfangled.

It was a staple of the golden era of bodybuilding that’s fallen out of favour. It’s called the straight-arm dumbbell pullover.

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

I’m not proud to admit it but I’ve cheated on previous girlfriends. My new girlfriend just confessed she never has. What’s my play?

Is it okay to lie?

-Steve Lizza Tricky. I reckon if she hasn’t asked you directly, then you don’t have to volunteer the info, because you haven’t cheated on her. But if she does ask you, you’ve just got to grow a pair and be honest.

Harriet Agreed. Lies always catch up with you and could really damage the trust in your relationship later on.

Lucy If it were me and my BF had cheated on a girl in the past, I

wouldn’t want to know straight up. I reckon it would make me super-paranoid – even if he’s never done anything wrong in our relationship.

Harriet But would you rather know than find out later and feel like it had been kept a secret, and then his excuse is, “Well, you never asked”?

Lucy I don’t expect him to come home and casually drop it into the convo, but if the topic comes up around cheating, I guess I’d expect him to tell me. You just gotta trust that he learned from past mistakes.

Lizza Relationships are all about trust, right? If you don’t have that, you have fuck-all. So, if you tell

your girlfriend about your past, and as a couple, you aren’t able to get beyond that, I reckon she might not fully trust you, anyway.

Lucy Totally. Where do you guys stand on the whole “once-acheater-always-a-cheater” thing?

Lizza I think if you’ve cheated once, doesn’t mean you’ll cheat with future partners. I also think too that as you get older, you realise what a rarity it is to find someone you do life well with, so you’re less likely to jeopardise it.

Lucy I do think that if a person has gotten away with cheating once, there’s a strong likelihood they’ll do it again. BUT . . . that’s not to say a person can’t change, especially for the right person.

Fire off your query to facebook.com/MensHealthAU

Oh yeah, I think I’ve seen it in Arnold’s encyclopedia. Maybe it disappeared for a reason?

Well, no good one. It’s a great upper-body exercise that hits your chest, triceps, lats and abs like no other. I see the difference in clients’ physiques when they add 3-4 sets of straight-arm pullovers to their routine.

LUCY

HARRIET

LIZZA

OK. Any performance tips?

Control the weight on the way down, really feeling the stretch in your lats at the bottom. Go for relatively high reps: 15-20.

I’ll give it a crack.

You won’t regret it. And you’re right to mention Arnie by the way – he swore by it.

Ben Williams PT, pymble@northshoregym.com.au

January 2020

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SWIPE LEFT ON YOUR CRAVINGS Late-night Candy Crush binges are fuelling your real-world sugar habit. Switch off weight gain

HIT SNOOZE ON YOUR SWEET TOOTH

Keep the lid on your sugar habit with our pick and mix of simple tips DON’T SUGARCOAT THE HARM OF SCREEN LIGHT.

WORDS: MILLIE WEST; PHOTOGRAPHY: JOBE LAWRENSON; *ABC SCIENCE WEEK SMARTPHONE SURVEY

THREE SQUARE IT’S NO SECRET that we’re all slaves to our screens, but some of us might want to keep under the covers just how far it goes. In Australia, as many as 70 per cent of adults take their smartphones to bed with them* and many continue to check it through the night. But this isn’t yet another story warning of blue light’s ability to sabotage sleep. Rather, it’s about how your late-night habits, whether scrolling, streaming or sliding into DMs, could be to blame for your slowly expanding waistline.

According to a rodent study conducted by the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior, exposure to blue light is directly linked to sugar cravings and, as a result, your inability to keep your hands off the fridge door. The researchers found that male rats that were shown blue light at night experienced cravings for sweet foods the following day. Worse still, they displayed a reduction in glucose tolerance caused by spikes in blood sugar – a warning sign of pre-diabetes.

And your phone-related lack of sleep isn’t helping, either. Sleep deprivation has been proven to increase the production of ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger, while reducing your levels of satiety hormone leptin. That means you’ll find it harder to feel full, no matter how many Krispy Kremes you shovel down.

Banishing screens from the bedroom – or, at least, limiting your nocturnal blue-light exposure with an app such as F.lux or Twilight – is the simplest solution. Trust us, that “U up?� text can wait until the morning.

Eating regular meals that have a good macro split between protein, quality carbs and healthy fats will help to maintain satiety and prevent your blood-sugar levels from plummeting.

SNACK RIGHT

The magnesium in nuts and dark chocolate improves cells’ sensitivity to insulin and maximises the amount of sugar that your body can metabolise to cut spikes and crashes.

EXTRA HELPINGS

Add spices, such as cinnamon, to your meals and snacks. Studies have shown that they could help to improve blood-sugar control. Sprinkle a spoonful on your morning oats.

GET MOVING

Combat stress with regular exercise. Not only will this reduce anxiety, it will also top up your energy levels, which is a major factor in why people seek out sugar in the ďŹ rst place.

JANUARY 2020

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CARVE OUT YOUR BEST-EVER BODY Monstrous gym schedule to tackle? Tucking into a certain orange vegetable can help you chase the pump energy. A study published in Plos One found that lab rats covered twice as many kilometres on a treadmill after being fed a combo of lutein and milk.

As well as an increase in the rats’ AMPK levels, the researchers saw heightened activity in the enzyme CPT1, which helps your mitochondria to burn fat.

If you want to take the fear out of a new gym regimen, help yourself to an extra-large slice of pumpkin pie, washing it down with full-fat milk to improve nutrient absorption. Let biology take care of the rest.

You’ll squash it.

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SEASON’S EATINGS

Update your summer shopping list with these foods to cash in on more beneďŹ ts per mouthful

PEAR

DUCK

Fights diabetes

Extra muscle

BEETROOT

TURKEY

New stamina

Better sleep

KALE

OYSTER

Bolstered immunity All-day energy

SCULPT NEW MUSCLE WITH A HEFTY HELPING OF PUMPKIN.

WORDS: LOUEE DESSENT-JACKSON; PHOTOGRAPHY: COLIN BEAGLEY

BRO SCIENCE HAS LONG ENDORSED the value of sweet potato to your fitness-and-nutrition regimen. All those vitamins and minerals in a tasty, low-GI package make it a winner on your plate.

But sweet spud isn’t the only Trumpcoloured side worthy of a place in the vegetable hall of fame. Pumpkins are rich in lutein, a carotenoid that helps to protect your eyes from the damaging components of sunlight. Less well known is its ability to stimulate muscle cells and enhance your appetite for physical activity.

Lutein boosts levels of AMPK, an enzyme that stimulates muscle cells to develop when they’re running low on

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POWER DOWN WORK STRESS It may be months before your next holiday, but just 15 minutes of meditation will press your reset button. Deep breath, now It’S A SAD REALITY of modern life that unpaid overtime regularly spills into your weekend. With work emails beamed directly to your pocket at all hours, you’ve probably developed a warped sense of “time off�. That chronic inability to chill will slowly but surely lead to burnout. Fortunately, researchers at the University of Groningen have found a solution: a way to refresh your brain and mental wellbeing, pronto. And it doesn’t involve a panic-booking session on Skyscanner.

In the study, test subjects who took part in a brief meditation session on work days reported feeling more positive and having better control of their emotions. Performing the mindfulness exercise ahead of the daily grind led to greater equanimity throughout the day. Impressively, the benefits of the 15-minute session were roughly equivalent to those of taking an afternoon off.

Gratifyingly, you don’t need to spend months wearing orange robes and

practising the correct technique to benefit. The results of this particular study held true even for beginners. Keep up your new habit for eight weeks and the implications for your work-life balance could be profound. A study in the International Journal of Stress Management found that meditation reduced anxiety and increased feelings of wellbeing in overworked health-care staff, who are among the most stressed out of all professionals. Close your eyes and go to your happy place.

GET IN THE ZONE

If meditation doesn’t appeal, try these more active alternatives

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PRACTISE YOGA

TRY LIFE DRAWING

GO DANCING

READ A NOVEL

It boosts your exibility and eases back pain, but yoga also helps your brain to disengage.

Research shows that anxiety levels drop signiďŹ cantly when drawing, banishing your office blues.

Dancing has a positive effect on your mood by allowing your body to express emotion.

Burying yourself in a good book can lower stress by 68 per cent* and boost your empathy.

MENSHEALTH.COM.AU

WORDS: LOUEE DESSENT-JACKSON; PHOTOGRAPHY: JOBE LAWRENSON; *UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX

FIND BALANCE IN YOUR DAILY GRIND WITH A 15-MINUTE MINI-BREAK.

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GIVE FAT-BURNING THE GREEN LIGHT Think you can’t teach an old veg new tricks? Fresh weight-loss discoveries have raised broccoli from tired side to modish superfood once more

USE BROCCOLI TO REIGNITE YOUR FAT-BURNING GOALS – AND OUR TWEAKS (BELOW) TO SPARK YOUR TASTEBUDS.

THE TASTEMAKERS

Partner your broccoli with these accompaniments for delicious, fat-loss combos

BRING THE HEAT

Coat orrets in oil and turmeric then roast. The active compound curcumin causes fat cells to turn brown. Fourth Military Med University in China

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effect on obesity has been scientifically proven. A study by Kanazawa Uni found the chemical uses two mechanisms for fighting flab. Firstly, it activates brown fat cells, stoking your metabolism to burn kilojoules. Secondly, and notably, it reverses the effects of high-fat food on your gut biome to reduce inflammation and halt weight gain.

Still, this is no reason to joylessly chew through piles of bland, boiled greens. Add flavour – and more benefits besides – with our simple tweaks (right).

Then bring it back to your al-desko lunches and keep torching fat long after your plate, or Tupperware, is cleared.

Mix stir-fried broccoli with crushed peanuts. Research shows that people who regularly eat peanuts are 3kg lighter than others.

University of Otago

COOL DOWN

Serve broccoli with a yoghurt dip to keep you fuller for longer. Mix low-fat yoghurt, garlic, lemon rind and mayo then season.

University of Missouri

WORDS: LOUEE DESSENT-JACKSON; ILLUSTRATION: PETER CROWTHER

ALONGSIDE PLAIN CHICKEN breasts and brown rice, broccoli stands atop the gym-goer’s nutritional podium. But despite an impressive vitamin and mineral profile, its inclusion in any post-workout menu rarely inspires enthusiasm; we eat it out of duty, invariably served in Tupperware.

However, if your appetite for the veg is waning, new Japanese research linking broccoli to a healthy spike in metabolism should revive your relish for ‘midget trees’, if not quite to Joe Wicks’ levels. Sulforaphane, a phytochemical found in broccoli sprouts, has long been touted for its anti-carcinogenic properties. But now its more tangible

DO YOUR CRUNCHES

Don’t let aches and pains interrupt your training Don’t let sore muscles, aches and pains interrupt your training schedule–Nature’s Way Magnesium has you covered.

Like Nature’s Way High Strength Magnesium 600mg that combines 4 forms of magnesium to help support muscle function, relieve mild muscle cramps and spasms and muscle stiffness when dietary intake is inadequate.

And Nature’s Way Magnesium Gel + Arnica is an easy to apply gel blended with Arnica that is traditionally used in Western herbal medicine to help relieve muscle aches and pains and mild muscle inflammation.

Nature’s Way Magnesium range can help you get back on your bike, the gym, the track or the court, sooner.

Available at leading Supermarkets & Pharmacies Always read the label. Follow the directions for use. If symptoms persist, talk to your health professional.

Vitamin and mineral supplements can only be of assistance if dietary intake is inadequate. CHC73874-0819

A+ COVER GUY

FACE OFF: FRONING STARES DOWN HIS ANGRY ALTER EGO.

WOD GOD

Arguably the greatest athlete in the history of the CrossFit Games, four-time champion Rich Froning manages to retain an air of calm at all times. It’s a quality that infuriates his competition yet endears him to his teammates and brands alike. It turns out 10 years of hoisting barbells overhead is the perfect preparation for carrying the weight of an entire sport on your shoulders

BY SCOTT HENDERSON PHOTOGRAPHY BY JASON LEE

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+ Advantage

STAY AHEAD OF THE GAME

WALKING INTO Brisbane’s notorious CrossFit Torian gym on a sweltering day, it isn’t multiple CrossFit Games champion Rich Froning who catches my attention. Well, it is and it isn’t.

My gaze is immediately drawn to a 2.5-metre high mural of Froning’s face, a striking tribute to one of the sport’s pioneers, and a suitably imposing image to confront upon entering one of this country’s foremost CrossFit boxes.

“I don’t know why they chose a shot of me looking so cross,” muses Froning, his laidback attitude jarring with the ferocious intent captured in his painted visage. There are only two murals on the wall of Torian. Froning’s and that of local CrossFit hero Tia Toomey, who’s also here today gazing up at her own painted image.

It’s not really surprising that Froning’s face adorns the wall of a gym on the other side of the globe from his native Tennessee. The sport of CrossFit wouldn’t be the cult it is today without him.

The term GOAT gets thrown around far too freely these days, and in a sport as young as CrossFit, it’s perhaps foolish to laud one athlete over all others. But given the incredible physical demands of the ‘sport of fitness’, perhaps an exception can be made. After all, it takes a man blessed with singular determination and a unique capacity for hard work to reach the dizzying heights Froning has achieved.

CrossFit has been the fastestgrowing sport in the world over the last 10 years, creating cult-like communities across the globe and superstars out of its athletes. “I was just kind of doing my job and I wanted

January 2020

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A+ COVER GUY

to compete,” Froning says casually between 100kg ‘warm up’ snatches.

That’s seriously downplaying his position as possibly the fittest all-round athlete ever to walk the earth, but perhaps no surprise – his commitment to humility is literally tattooed on his body. “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,” reads Galatians 6:14, the bible verse inscribed down his side, often hidden beneath his mountainous biceps.

As humble as he may be, though, only one other man has dominated the CrossFit competition floor to the extent Froning has: Mat Fraser. And while the Froning vs Fraser debate remains

unsettled (in 2019 Fraser equalled Froning’s record of four consecutive Games titles), no one can argue with the profile and prestige Froning brought to the sport in its formative years, even if he didn’t realise it at the time.

And it’s perhaps this ambivalence about his influence that truly defines Froning. This is a man at the top of his sport, answering questions between muscle-ups, posing for selfies with fans and keeping his Reebok bosses at bay. It’s how you imagine a champion of fitness to behave – always training.

Because for Froning, being the fittest man on Earth is more than just a career. It’s his way of life.

TEAM PLAYER: FRONING REMAINS HUMBLE DESPITE HIS ACHIEVEMENTS.

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MH: Let’s go back to the beginning.

What first drew you to CrossFit? RF: Growing up playing sports says a lot about who I am as a competitor. I’m one of 32 first cousins on my mum’s side, 25 of us are boys and the girls are just as competitive as us. And so, my whole life has just involved some type of competition. After college, I was a firefighter and I was kind of missing that competitive piece. Then I found CrossFit. Honestly, I just enjoyed working out.

My undergrad degree was in exercise science and I didn’t even know there was a competition until about a month or two into doing CrossFit. I was like, “Oh, all right, let’s see how this goes”. As they say, “The rest is history”.

MH: Why do you think CrossFit fosters a ‘cult’ community more than other sports?

RF: Well, the cool thing is I’ve been all over the world to different CrossFit gyms, spoken different languages and things like that, but it’s the same community and it attracts the same type of people. It’s a super supportive community.

And I think there’s that shared suffering. You’re doing a similar workout and you know everybody’s suffering together.

People may not be able to do the exact same movements, but they can do a similar type of workout and scale it and they just feel more connected.

Back home you could play football and go play out in the yard, but you can’t strap the pads on and see where you

line up against the professionals. With CrossFit, you can actually do a workout that we do and see where you stack up, which gives you a little bit more connection. Because you understand what we’re going through as top-ofthe-line athletes. But as top-of-theline athletes, we understand what somebody who’s just walking into the gym feels like too. It’s pretty cool.

MH: You’re vocal about your faith.

How does that play into CrossFit? RF: My faith is a huge part of who I am and why I do what I do. I feel like the talents that I’ve been given are my way to glorify God. I don’t want to say that God makes me win or anything like that. But it lets me separate my athletic profession. Because I know I’m going to be okay no matter what happens.

My faith in Christ, that’s what defines who I am, not where I finish on the podium or if I finish on the podium.

MH: There have been recent changes in the structure of the competition [controversial new competition calendars have eliminated certain events] but across your CrossFit career, what are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the sport?

RF: That’s the biggest change. When I started there were things called Sectionals. Now it’s Sanctionals, which are similar to the Sectional model except that Sectionals fed Regionals before the Open. I think the changes are good for the athletes. You have more opportunities to compete. If you qualify but you still want to go make some money, you can go to

“THAT’SONEOFCROSSFIT’S MAINTHINGS:‘HEY, GET OUT THERE AND USE YOUR FITNESS’” some of these local Sanctionals and/or have sponsors pay for you to go. It’s another way to make money and get some exposure. You know, for athletes to monetise being athletes.

I do think there needs to be some type of standardisation, not really to the workouts themselves but somebody needs to be checking on how the workouts are conducted because you’ve got to have a balanced test or it’s not fair. You can change who wins an event through the programming, especially in the teams’ category. You can gear it more towards the female with heavy stuff or light stuff. There needs to be some type of standardisation.

MH: Do you see the new structure having an impact on the events that we’re seeing in competition?

RF: I don’t think so. I think as long as Dave [Castro] is the one programming across the Games, you’ll still see a wellrounded, well-balanced test.

MH: In professional sport in 2019, there’s a huge emphasis on partnerships, especially with brands supporting athletes. And now you have gear designed specifically by athletes. How important is it for athletes to have that direct input into the gear they’re using?

RF: It’s huge. Reebok and Rogue are some of my longest sponsors and both of them have a direct impact on the CrossFit Games because we use Rogue equipment and we wear Reebok apparel and shoes.

Rogue has been a CrossFit company from day one and it’s just grown as we’ve grown. With Reebok, it’s been cool to see them actually take the input we’ve given them as athletes.

They’ll come to us with something and we’re like, “No”. And they’re like, “Oh, okay”. And then they totally redo it. If we can’t perform in it, we can’t wear it.

MH: What’s the strangest event you’ve seen at the CrossFit Games?

RF: There are many things that we’ve done where you’re like, “Wow, that was interesting”. Having played baseball, the softball toss for me [in the 2011 CrossFit Games], was fine. I was completely okay with that.

But you look at something like the handstand walk obstacle. You’ve got pegboards and some of that stuff.

Every year I feel like there’s something new that’s added. That’s a testament to the athletes in that we have to be ready for anything. You need to learn and play new sports. That’s one of CrossFit’s main things: “Hey, get out and actually use your fitness”. And I think that’s what a lot of people get too

CULT FIGURE: FRONING INSPIRES AWE AND RESPECT IN THE CROSSFIT COMMUNITY.

January 2020

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caught up in – being in the gym and not getting out and playing sports.

MH: How has your approach to fitness changed over your career?

RF: It’s definitely evolved. Because every year I think it changes just a little bit because of the different demands of the sport.

Over the years it’s been a learning experience and that’s the difference today. I feel like everybody does something similar in their training because they’ve all learned from what some of us who were there at the beginning have done. I’ve been doing it for 10 or 11 years now and I still enjoy trying to figure things out.

MH: With time pressure, what do you prioritise in your training?

RF: You try not to prioritise anything.

You try to be as well-rounded as you can. My weaknesses are usually in some of the endurance-type stuff, so that’s what I concentrate a bit more on.

I try to get in, warm up, get moving, maybe build some endurance stuff into my warm-up and then you can do a workout. Especially with three kids, that’s been the fun part.

MH: You’re notorious for your chocolate milk-based diet. Has your approach to diet changed?

RF: The last year I’ve also taken to intermittent fasting. I love it. I do the 16-8. I feel great. Blood work has been

done and come back a couple of times and I’ve done really well. It’s also worked really well for my schedule.

My big problem was I would eat in the morning, get busy throughout the day and wouldn’t eat until night.

Now, we’ll start training about 9:30, go to about 12:30-1, then again from 3:30 until about 5:30-6. I start eating at 1 and then I’ll try to eat once or twice or take a shake or two within that two-or-three-hour period between training sessions. That was the big thing. Now I feel good for that second training session where I used to just feel run down.

MH: What do you credit your CrossFit longevity to? Is it the diet?

RF: I think genetics is a huge part of it.

But also trying to take care of my body, especially the last couple of years as I’ve got a little older. And just being able to go get some body work done once a week versus waiting until things snowball so bad that I’m pushing an injury.

MH: And what kind of body work are you doing?

RF: I worked with a chiro and he does some manual therapy type stuff, some acupuncture. I’ll do some dry needling, anything allencompassing. Like I said, the big thing is doing that on a regular basis versus waiting to get hurt and then going and doing it.

RAISING THE BAR: THE CROSSFIT GAMES ARE LIKE CHRISTMAS FOR FRONING.

MH: You’re now competing in the teams’ events rather than individual.

How does that differ?

RF: It’s way more fun. Just being able to share it with other people. You know, everybody’s like, “You should come back as an individual”. I just don’t have that. I don’t want to do that anymore.

[Competing as an individual] was fun in the moment. But it’s super nerve-wracking and it got old. Being able to train with the team day in, day out and see the sacrifice they put in every day to push that much harder on the floor is amazing.

I grew up a team-sports guy. I played baseball, some football. I was always on a team, so competing as an individual was miserable for years. But I obviously enjoyed it.

MH: With all that you’ve achieved, what are your goals now?

RF: We always joke that it’s kind of like Christmas when you’re a kid where you have all this build-up, then at the end of the year Christmas happens and you’re like, “Wow, that was awesome”. But, the next day it’s like, “Aw, Christmas is another 364 days away”. And it’s just the way it is for us with the Games. As soon as the Games are over, the goal for next year is to win the CrossFit Games.

I want to keep competing as long as I’m still healthy, I’m not a burden on my team or a burden on my family and I still enjoy what I’m doing. Every year the goal is to win the CrossFit Games and that’s it.

MH: With three kids, how do you balance family life and being a professional athlete?

RF: It’s tough. There are some days where I do a really good job of it and other days I’m really bad at it. And so, I try not to get too high on myself when I think I’ve done a great job or too low on myself when I’ve done a bad job.

I get to spend a lot more time with my kids than most 9 to 5 parents. If they can, and they want to, I’ll take my kids wherever I’m going. Luckily, at our

“AS SOON AS THE GAMES ARE OVER, THE GOAL FOR NEXT YEAR IS TO WIN THE CROSSFIT GAMES” 24

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EYES ON THE PRIZE: FRONING SAYS CROSSFITTERS WILL CONTINUE TO PUSH THE LIMITS.

your job. Because they’re the reason I get to do what I do and make a living from it. So, you want to give back in those situations.

As long as it’s not in the middle of a workout, I’m good. I always joke, “One day, nobody’s going to want a picture with me so I might as well take a couple while they do”.

MH: People are getting stronger and fitter. Where do you think the limit of human performance is?

RF: Good question. I’m sure there’s obviously a top level, it happens in most sports. Especially with CrossFit, it’s like, what is that? What is that balance? You’re obviously going to see people get super strong, but are they going to be able to run? Or people might get super-fast, but their strength numbers may come down. I’m not really sure. I think we’ll continue to see people moving forward. When somebody does something else, there’s a new bar to reach and that motivates people.

house where the barn [aka Froning’s home gym] is 150 yards [137m] from the house, the kids can go back and forth. They love playing on the rings and swinging on the barbell or on the bar. And it’s just cool to see the things they pick up on. It gives you a little bit of new motivation because I’ve never once told them, “Hey, let’s go do a workout”. But now, they want to work out and they want to be a part of it.

We’ll be doing handstand push-ups and I’ll look over and my son is trying to kick up and he can’t. I mean, he’s 2. And just seeing him swing on the rings. My oldest has a barbell and she’ll just start doing a workout. It’s cool to see the things you impact and you’re not even trying to, you know? I’m just doing my job. But they don’t see it as that. They

RAPID FIRE Favourite movement?

Snatch or muscle-up Least favourite movement?

Running. 100 per cent Cheat meal?

Apple pie Top workout song?

I like worship music, so anything by Kristian Stanfill.

What do you do on your rest day?

I don’t really have one. I feel better when I move every day. Even if it’s just a swim or a bike.

see it as a little bit of motivation, so it’s very eye-opening and it’s kind of scary, too. You think, those are things I’ve not told them. What stupid things do I do that they pick up on? It’s awesome, but it’s a tough job, too.

MH: Do you feel that same pressure to set a good example beyond your own family – in the wider CrossFit community?

RF: In the beginning I never really thought about it. Now, as I’m getting older, you reflect a little bit more. You start to think, “All right, what kind of impact am I having?”

When I come to events and there’s pictures and people want to do all that stuff, you try to take as much time as you can without it affecting you doing

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A+ MUSCLE

STAND TALL S

TAKE AIM AT EVERY MUSCLE GROUP W WITH THE T A HIGHROLLING PISTOL, YOUR BEST SHOT AT CALIBRE POWER UPGRADE. PREPARE TO FIRE THE ERA OF MIRROR muscles has passed. With the emphasis on functional fitness never more acute, now is the time to train for strength, not just size.

Think of it as laying strong foundations for future gains.

But before you set your sights on a double-bodyweight back squat, allow us to suggest a move that doesn’t require queuing for a free rack and is a lot gentler on your joints: the weighted rolling pistol.

“Along with the full-body flexion, it’s a very advanced single-leg squat variation,” says PT Andy Vincent. The full-body flexion means you’re using every muscle to stand up. Plus, by working on one leg, you engage all the smaller stabiliser muscles, as well as the large ones in your legs.

You have to go slow, too. Vincent warns against blasting through reps.

Instead, focus on a full range of motion n an and time u tensio on. Wor W rk up to t three th e sets t of six reps on eac each s to o kickk d le let the start your progress and good times roll.

BALANCING ACT Hold your arms in front of you as your we eight transfers to your foot.

Ensure the load stays evenly disstributed from your heel to your toe, and the centre of your knee stays in line witth the middle of your foot.

F your parting For sshot, drive through h the floor to bring yo our body up and stand. A As you reach the top,, squeeze your glutes to finish the move w with your hips.

Now, slo owly sit back into the e squat and roll down under control.

Reload, and go again.

WHAT YOU’LL GAIN

CRUNCH H TIME Take a deep p breath, then work your core. With yo our aight, arms held out stra perform a rapid crunch, rolling your shoulder blades and mid-back off ep that the floor fast. Kee foot up.

SQ UAT SUPREMACY

H A RD -CO RE ABS

WI DE RA N GE OF MOT IO N

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WORDS: MICHAEL JENNINGS; PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILIP HAYNES

START HERE

GET SET Lying on your back with one leg o the floor, position off t heel of your other the leg close to your g glutes and keep it flat on the ground.

H Hold a weight plate b behind your head f counterbalance for ce..

A+ RELATIONSHIPS

BATTLEFIELD: HOME FRONT MY WIFE AND I NEVER ARGUED ABOUT CHORES. THEN WE HAD A KID. THE PROBLEMS PILED UP, AND SO WE FOLLOWED A PLAN FOR FAIRNESS SET FORTH IN THE NEW BOOK FAIR PLAY. AFTER A MONTH OF MADNESS, HERE’S WHAT WE LEARNED

BY PAUL KITA

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IT’S 7:15 on a Tuesday night and I’m neatly folding my wife’s underwear. This is not something I usually do. This is not something I usually want to do. But right now, in the name of domestic serenity, and quite possibly for the sake of our family, I am gingerly doubling over each pair of panties and tucking them into her top drawer. My wife is putting our toddler to bed and I’m thinking to myself, Well, this is weird.

This all started when my wife

called me out on my parenting abilities during a family vacation.

She recounted how, at a brewery earlier in the day, I had watched as our son picked up two mason jars filled with crayons and began banging them together.

“You just kind of stood there.

Like you weren’t worried he might shatter them and hurt himself,” Meghan said.

I admitted to her that I hadn’t thought that might happen. It was like previous times, when I’d let our son get dangerously close to

an exposed wall outlet or lamp cord and my wife had to jump in to rescue him. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d been relying on Meghan to do more than her fair share of mental labour – those household tasks that demand vast stores of cognitive energy – on my behalf.

“If this isn’t something we can fix, I’m not sure I’ll ever want to have another kid,” she said.

If my own wife couldn’t trust me with our child, then perhaps I had to become better

“You could fool yourself into thinking that, well, men spend more time at work, so we’ve earned our time off”

at undertaking those mentally demanding jobs – like watching our son closely so that he doesn’t accidentally shock himself.

The prospect of another kid wasn’t the only thing at risk.

Women who felt that they bore the majority of the mental labour inherent in running a household were also likelier to feel empty, less satisfied with life and less emotionally and physically intimate with their partners, Oklahoma State University and Arizona State University

researchers found this year.

On top of all this mental labour, women are doing the majority of the housework, despite the fact that more of them have jobs. In 1965, women spent on average 42 hours a week on housework and childcare and nine hours on paid work. In 2016, they spent 32 hours a week on those domestic duties and almost tripled their paid work hours.

Men today, by comparison, spend 43 hours a week on paid work and only 18 on housework and childcare.

You could fool yourself into thinking that, well, men spend more time at work, so we’ve earned our time off. Except that most breadwinning mothers report that they handle all (not some) of the family’s responsibilities, according to a 2017 survey by the childcare company Bright Horizons. While men might be doing slightly more housework than they were in the 1960s, we’re not doing nearly enough – and it’s slowly breaking our partners.

And something happens when men become fathers. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that in heterosexual marriages in which the couple reported sharing the domestic workload pre-child, the man went on to decrease his housework contributions by as much as five hours a week after the child was born. The wife picked up his slack, and all that slack amounted to 2.6 extra weeks of work for her over the course of a year. One explanation: babies upend the dynamic that couples have and,

as parents, they default to the domestic roles they grew up with.

So, for instance, if your dad didn’t do the laundry in your house growing up, you’ll likely follow suit.

Which brings me back to folding my wife’s underwear.

A week earlier, Meghan and I had agreed to follow the rules of a new book, Fair Play: A GameChanging Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). The Fair Play system was devised by Eve Rodsky, an organisational specialist with mediation experience. She argues that in order for women to avoid being the “She-Fault” parent, they must create equity in household chores, or else risk frustration, resentment and divorce.

She also argues that to achieve this equity, they must participate in the Fair Play “game”, which centres on a deck of 100 cards. Thirty of these cards deal with what you’d expect – doing dishes, taking out the garbage, handling the mail. There are 54 other cards devoted to chores that occur less frequently (thank-you notes, health insurance, lawn and plants). The remaining 16 cards are divided into 10 wild cards (moving, new job, death in the family) and six happinesscentric cards (adult friendships, self-care). The goal is not to carry an equal number of cards but to feel like the responsibilities each person holds are fair and reasonable.

“Is this a ruse to get me

to do more cooking?” Meghan asked when we sat at our kitchen table for our first summit. Going into it, I felt like I may have had the higher ground: I do all of the cooking for our family, and the yard work, and most of the nasty cleaning, dishes, grocery shopping and holiday-related stuff. Because I work from home, my daily breaks involve household chores – and a good number of them. Although I calmly reassured Meghan that, no, this project wasn’t intended to unload my responsibilities onto her, I was hoping that maybe it would.

But as we divvied up which responsibilities we would each handle for the week ahead, I noticed that while Meghan and I held roughly the same number of cards, the type of cards differed.

I held the majority of the cards that required physical labour.

Meghan held the majority of the cards that required mental labour – cards like “calendar keeper”, “money manager” and “medical and healthy living (kids).”

Wanting to retain my perceived footing on higher ground, I asked Meghan for the “local packing and unpacking” card, which entailed stocking the nappy bag for outings around town. It seemed like an easy one.

My father did more around the house than I think most dads did, but I can guarantee you he never held the “local packing and unpacking” card. My mum did that, and we always had what we needed. This is what my wife did, too. Until it was my turn.

During the opening weeks of

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A+ RELATIONSHIPS

“She wasn’t just asking me to watch our son when we were out in public. She was asking me to handle the mental responsibility of making sure he was safe”

Fair Play, we were invited to a family friend’s pool. I packed the sunscreen, my son’s swim nappy, a few pool toys, his water cup and . . . what else, what else? – I thought that was good. Two blocks from home, I realised I’d forgotten his pool float. I turned the car around to pick it up; I delivered him to the pool, where he had a ton of fun; and afterwards I suggested we all go out for dinner. Then I realised I hadn’t packed him a change of clothes.

How, I wondered, could I have failed so poorly at something so simple? I began to understand: mentally mapping out exactly what a super-needy kid will require for four hours is daunting. In fact, it’s emotionally exhausting to prepare for all the scenarios, including the worst ones, and especially if it’s a habit you’ve never seen practised or practised yourself.

Meghan and I returned home that night to find I wasn’t the only one struggling with our new division of labour. A squadron of flies had stormed our kitchen, likely bursting forth from the fetidness of the rubbish bin.

Meghan held the “trash” card.

“Maybe they’re coming from outside?” she pondered.

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Over the next month, Meghan and I discussed our domestic life ad nauseam. For as convoluted and overwhelming as the Fair Play system is, it does force you to have difficult conversations.

About what it means to truly execute a task. About what your agreed-upon minimum standard of care is. About competency and consistency and, all along in the background, the by-product of those two things: trust.

Trust is earned, and it is earned in a “trust spiral”, a phrase coined by Sibout G. Nooteboom, a publicadministration researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Positive trust spirals grow from a repeated sequence: establishing a common goal, having enthusiasm, navigating tensions to reach the goal, and reward.

Negative trust spirals feed off the opposite.

“Helping” in the form of nagging or swooping in to finish the job does not feed trust, Rodsky says. In fact, the Fair Play system discourages helping. If one does the laundry, one does all of the laundry. This includes deciding when to do laundry, doing the laundry, folding the laundry, and putting away the laundry.

“When you hold a card, you

own it. You conceive, plan and execute. And your partner isn’t allowed to give feedback in the moment. That’s saved for weekly meetings,” Rodsky says. And while she describes her plan as “hardcore change from how things are done currently”, she argues that anyone who has ever had a job understands what it means to take on a task and complete it. “Every business works on a direct-responsibility model. Why shouldn’t the household?”

Before Fair Play, I was routinely miffed at my wife for not taking out the rubbish as much as I did, without ever giving her full responsibility to do so. My wife was routinely miffed at me for not watching our son as closely as she would have, without ever entrusting me to carry out the full responsibility of what that means.

I kept coming back to that holiday fight my wife and I had – to the mason jars and what they represented to her. She wasn’t just asking me to watch our son when we were out in public. She was asking me to handle the mental responsibility of making sure he was safe, so that she could be comfortable.

At our week-three summit, knowing that we’d be attending a birthday party for our friends’ two-year-old son that weekend,

I took the “watching” card and actually brought it with me to the party. Carrying around Fair Play cards isn’t required, but I deemed it necessary for the task at hand. I traded “watching” with Meghan exactly once, when I needed to eat, but otherwise hovered over my son as he splashed at a water table, pushed a toy lawnmower, shovelled a god-awful amount of fruit into his mouth, and meowed at cats. Two hours in, I was spent.

After the party, Meghan told me: “You’re more competent than I give you credit for.” I took it as a compliment.

During our last summit, I asked Meghan if she was ready to burn our cards in a ceremonial bonfire.

After our usual griping about the madness of the system, we decided instead to reduce our load to just a few key cards that served as trouble spots for us – “packing and unpacking”, “weekend meals” and “watching” included.

We were starting to build something and we weren’t quite sure that our work was finished.

But we agreed that we didn’t want to run our home like a business, because, well, home is a respite from business. Though Meghan did say, “Maybe we’ll bring the full deck of cards back if we have a second kid”.

I had always followed the advice of my hero, Tom Waits, when it came to marriage. When reporters have asked him the secret of his long marriage to Kathleen Brennan, he’s replied, in reference to doing dishes: “She washes, I’ll dry”. I had always assumed that meant splitting the work 50/50, but now I understand that true synergy in a relationship comes from each partner holding an equitable – not equal – share of physical and mental chores. No woman should carry the mental weight of childcare. No man should bear the load of labour tasks.

And vice versa. My wife actually did start cooking more so that I could devote more mental energy holding on to that damn “packing and unpacking” card. I wash and I dry so she can keep the calendar.

We take turns watching. And I do the laundry. I’m even starting to enjoy folding her underwear.

A+ MH GIRL

AIR APPARENT: SCOTT TRADED THE MAT FOR THE MOUNTAINS.

DANIELLE SCOTT Aerial skier Danielle Scott reveals how the path to a dream can take many routes

BY BEN JHOTY

Growing up on Sydney’s northern beaches Danielle Scott always thought of herself as a summer sports girl. To this day she loves to hit the ocean for a surf or just muck around on her skateboard. This despite being a silver and bronze medallist in the FIS Freestyle World Ski Championships, dual Olympian and twice finishing second in the World Cup. “I think I’ll always be a summer girl at heart,” says the easygoing 29-year-old. “If I have a choice to go to the snow or the beach, I’d definitely be choosing the beach.” In fact, Scott’s first love was gymnastics, which she began at the age of three and ‘retired’ from at 13 before getting into aerial skiing. Her eclectic athletic background is a testament to the importance of passion, perseverance and purpose. As she tells MH, you’ve got to “pursue what you love and if you don’t love it, then find what that is”.

INSTAGRAM @DANIELLESCOTTSKI

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CHANGING LANES Scott began gymnastics at her local YMCA and was in an elite school program by five, training 25 hours a week. At seven she was offered a scholarship at the AIS, the youngest athlete ever to receive such an offer.

She stayed in Sydney for educational reasons but by the time she hit her teens it had become clear her Olympic dream wasn’t going to work out.

“Australia’s gymnastics program isn’t as strong as a lot of other countries’ and without that pool of girls to work with, my career fell apart,” she says.

But her ambition to represent Australia remained undimmed and it wasn’t long before she was invited to try aerial skiing, despite never having skied before, by five-time winter Olympian Jacqui Cooper. Initially, Scott admits, she felt like a fish out of water. “I remember my coach helping me put the skis on and then I was just standing there thinking, ‘Wow, these things are slippery, how on earth am I going to do this?’”

MIX IT UP Training for aerials means devoting serious time to your glutes, back and core. “That’s the powerhouse that can control us in the air and absorb the forces on landing,” Scott says. Think squats, deadlifts and hanging leg raises. Having changed sports Scott has a unique appreciation for cross training. “I love to take my mind off skiing and jumping on the water ramp to go mountain biking, get my skateboard out or go for a surf trip in between camps,” Scott says.

“Just changing up the variety of muscle memory is really valuable.”

FALL AND RISE Scott was looking forward to a big season on this year’s World Cup tour when she suffered an unlucky fall on a training site in Switzerland, resulting in a torn ACL. “I was literally just getting back up to the top of the jump site to begin training that day when I fell,” she recalls. “I knew straight away.” She returned home to undergo surgery and is currently throwing herself into rehab with hopes of returning to the

World Cup next year, before targeting the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

The key to staying positive, she says, is to have a good support crew and stay busy. “I’m not one to ask for help, but it’s definitely nice just to know that those people are there when you’ve got to ice your leg 10 times a day,” she laughs. A marketer’s dream, Scott has partnerships with likes of Under Armour, GoPro, Tradie Underwear and Nissan that will keep her busy as she plots her comeback. “I love to work with my sponsors, just getting content or being active in the outdoors.

Anything apart from skiing.”

HER KIND OF GUY A girl like Scott needs someone who can keep up with her. If you’re the type of bloke who shuns outdoor activity, you’re going to have a hard time sustaining her interest. “Because I spend a lot of time in the outdoors, I hope he would want to as well,” she says. Fair enough. She also gives time-wasters short shrift, preferring someone “who’s not afraid to fall in love and invest their time in a relationship”.

She’s been seeing her boyfriend, a carpenter she’s known since she was a teenager, for two years. “It’s pretty funny. I’ve known him since high school and here we are.”

HUNGER GAMES As an athlete whose job involves flying through the air, Scott needs to eat to fuel her training while staying in aerodynamic shape. She prioritises fresh, raw vegetables and fruit along with plenty of protein. “We push our bodies to the extreme, which makes recovery so important,” she says. “We also need enough carbohydrate to have the energy to get back-to-back sessions in.” She eats more or less the same outside of training blocks, just in smaller quantities. “You just watch the quantities because excess weight doesn’t help us when we’re in the air.”

At the same time, she likes her splurges heavy. “A laksa or a curry is a good cheat meal,” she says. “It’s quite heavy with all the coconut cream, but it’s so delicious.”

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A+ MH DAD

Fatherhood at 1:10AM

In the early, mind-bending hours of parenting a son that he, at one time, wasn’t sure he wanted, novelist Tim O’Brien turned to a simple song

BY TIM O’BRIEN // ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN INZANA

My son, Timmy, is just over two months old – nine weeks to be exact – and he won’t stop crying. He seems to hate his brand-new world and all things in it, including his cot and his rattle and his mother and me. Colic, say the doctors, but the kid hates eating and he hates not eating. He hates sleeping and he hates not sleeping. He hates being held and he hates not being held. He hates light and he hates dark.

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He hates hot and he hates cold and he hates all temperatures in between. He is full of fury. I have fathered Jack the Ripper. At the moment, in these early-morning hours of August 28, 2003, I’m taking a break while my wife, Meredith, sits in the laundry room with our howling little hater. A pediatrician suggested placing him in a basket atop the clothes dryer. The machine’s warmth and its humming motor have worked their magic, to be sure, but only on my exhausted wife, whom I last saw in a state of semiconsciousness.

Meredith and I are firsttimers at the whole baby thing, a pair of rookies, and we are

not only incompetent but we’re getting scared. I’m scared, in fact, at this very instant. In a few minutes I’ll be shutting down my computer and returning to duty, except I have no clue as to what my duty actually is. Right now it’s 1:10am, and Timmy has been crying since . . . well, since he was born. Nothing stops him – not for long. We’ll pick him up and snuggle him and walk him around the house, and for a short while he may (or may not) settle down. But then he tightens up, fidgets, squirms and eventually convulses in a deep, full-body shudder, as if electricity has just sizzled through his bones.

And then his face goes wrinkly with hatred and he lets out a Frankenstein screech that wakes up the nomads in Libya. We’re afraid the police will come. We’re afraid neighbours will nail bomb threats to our door. We’re afraid, quite literally, that our little boy hates being alive.

Our nerves are shot. We’re exhausted. We have no family nearby, no wise and experienced relatives, no one to spell us for even a few hours. Worse yet, the pediatricians and their nurses seem fed up with our panicky phone calls. Over and over, they use the word colic, or the word fussy, as if we’re too dumb to remember that these are the words they’ve been uttering for weeks.

ROSEMARY’S BABY? We blame ourselves, of course.

This morning, I’ve been sitting here at my desk, listening to the baby-din, wanting to cry, and only a few minutes ago I found myself suddenly horrified by the thought that my own hot temper and occasional rages may have been transmitted to my infant son. More horrifying yet, I worry that during Timmy’s womb time he somehow absorbed the knowledge that for years prior to his conception I hadn’t wanted children. Did his biology know that Meredith and I had nearly broken up over that issue during our courtship days? Did the cytosine in Timmy’s DNA, or the proteins of his brain stem, somehow program resentment and disgust and outright fury in a kind of organic reaction to

his father’s wicked selfishness?

Meredith and I feel responsible. More than responsible. We feel guilt. We are older than most greenhorn parents, and although neither of us says so, we’re both chewing on the possibility that our crusty, over-the-hill chromosomes combined to produce Timmy’s wretchedness. (Would Jack the Ripper have been Jack the Ripper if his parents had not crossed genetic paths?) On her part, more practically, Meredith worries aloud that her type 1 diabetes may have infected her breast milk, or may have poisoned Timmy’s pancreas, or may have otherwise caused our son all this unrelieved unhappiness. Also, because she’s a type 1 diabetic, Meredith underwent induced labour. “Maybe Timmy needed more time inside,” she speculated yesterday. “Being forced to wake up – wouldn’t that upset anyone?”

(I call this her prematureejaculation theory.)

Last night, during my 2am baby duty, I hit on what appears to be a miracle. An imperfect miracle, a miracle in need of finetuning, but a gift from the gods all the same. It is the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”. Sing it in the dark, sing it in a rocking chair, sing it long enough – maybe 45 minutes, maybe an hour – and Timmy stops crying. He sleeps. He sleeps without hatred on his face. When I mentioned my discovery to Meredith this morning, she looked at me sceptically. “So you put him in the cot?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I tried, but he – ” “He woke up crying, right?”

“Right, and that’s where the fine-tuning comes in.”

“Lots of luck,” said Meredith.

I nodded. She was right. Song or no song, his hatred for the cot was a problem. Moreover, there was an issue with the song itself.

“It’ll drive me crazy,” I admitted.

“Last night it almost did. It’s short – only four lines – and it’s a goddamned round. Try singing ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily’ for a whole hour.”

She shrugged.

It’s taken a few days, but I’ve made progress. Partly deletion, partly rewriting. Among other

things, I’ve tightened up the title.

I now call the song “Row, Row”.

I’ve deleted the merrily stuff. I’ve deleted the boat and the rowing.

I’ve deleted the stream. In fact, I’ve deleted almost everything but the melody, and as Timmy and I sit in the dark, rocking in our rocking chair, father and son, I invent filthy lyrics to keep myself sane. True, I adore that final line, “Life is but a dream”, but it had to go. You don’t sing about a pair of horny pigeons and end with “life is but a dream”. It does not fit. Not with pigeons. Tonight, I’ll branch out. Buggering mice, maybe.

Although I haven’t written much since Timmy was born, I now sit in the dark and produce some of my best work in years.

No pressures to publish. So far no bad reviews. I’ve finally found my subject.

Bleep, bleep, bleep like mice, Gently up the bleep, Verily, verily, verily, verily, Firmly bleep the bleep.

As I mentioned earlier, Meredith and I had come within a whisker of calling it quits over our deadlock on the children question. She very much wanted kids. I very much did not. And so it happened that on a late night several years ago we exchanged heated words on the subject, each of us digging in, and eventually Meredith announced, wearily but bluntly, that there was no future for us. I was hurt by this. I asked her to leave, which she did, and for a couple of weeks we saw nothing of each other.

Now, singing “Row, Row” in the dark, I recall only bits and pieces from that period of silence and separation. I was appalled that Meredith could love something that did not exist, in fact the idea of something that did not exist, more than she loved me.

It seemed cold-blooded. It seemed heartlessly reproductive.

In the end we met for drinks on neutral ground, in a bar, and for several hours we learned a great deal about each other, not only emotional things but also the contents of our personal histories, the biographical facts that had brought us to this bar and to this impasse.

Meredith talked about her mother dying. She talked about

“I AM GOING MAD. BUT TIMMY DOESN’T NOTICE. FOR A FEW MINUTES, HE SLEEPS” her father, a good man but sometimes a distant man, a man who too often seemed absent from her life. She talked about her sisters, one of whom had been institutionalised for decades with severe schizophrenia, the other of whom had twice attempted suicide (and would later succeed).

She talked about the dream she’d been cultivating since she was a little girl, the dream of a happy, normal family life.

“Maybe it’s a fantasy,” she said, “but don’t I get to hope for something?”

On my part, I opened up about pretty similar things.

An alcoholic father. A father who often scared me and who sometimes didn’t seem to like me much. I talked about the tensions in our house, the late-night shouting matches between my mum and dad, the cruel words, the brittle silences that followed for weeks afterwards. I also expressed, as best I could, my suspicion that I’d make a far less than ideal father.

Meredith and I managed to work it out. In that bar, and in the weeks afterwards, the realisation began to stir in me that I, too, yearned for a happy, normal family life, even if I remained terrified of failing. There were no promises, exactly. But there was a prospect. Three years went by, and Meredith and I got married, and our son was conceived, and now I sit here in the dark, rocking my precious, life-hating Timmy to sleep, singing an unprintable new edition of “Row, Row”.

SONG SUNG BLUE The miracle hasn’t panned out.

In some ways things seem more hopeless than ever. Although “Row, Row” will eventually put Timmy to sleep, he continues to wake up screaming after a half hour or so, often after only a few minutes. The crying has become infectious. Meredith is crying – a

lot. I’ve cried. All three of us are ragged with fatigue. Not only am I exhausted beyond exhaustion, but I’ve also exhausted all possible combinations of dirty rhymes.

I’ve turned to politics: Bush – tush. Rice – advice. Rumsfeld – beheld. Cheney – rainy.

First names, I’ve discovered, are much easier. I have fun with George and Don. I have a shitload of fun with Dick. Condoleezza has proven difficult, but like my poetically minded friends, I have no scruples about cheating with near rhymes.

My masterpiece is a version of “Row, Row” that I sang to Timmy just last night, a version in which every word but one must be redacted. It goes like this: Bleep, bleep, bleep Dick’s bleep, Bleepily bleep bleep bleep, Bleepily, bleepily, bleepily, bleepily, Bleep Dick’s bleeping bleep.

I am going mad, of course, but Timmy doesn’t notice. For a few blessed minutes, he sleeps. And perhaps one day, if he survives his life-is-but-a-nightmare infancy, he will thank his father for this solid foundation in modern dirtymouthed political discourse.

Two-and-a-half weeks pass.

Things have changed but not for the better. Timmy has lost a little bodyweight. He blinks away tears as he eats; he chews more than he sucks; he vomits; he hisses at us; he hisses and he shrieks both at once.

Meredith, I’m almost certain, lies awake wondering if our beloved baby boy has inherited the afflictions of her two disturbed sisters. The hissing and the shrieking reproduce the bedlam of a psychiatric ward interstate in which her older sister has resided since Meredith was in Year 10. Inevitably, given what we know of genetics, the blaming has revved up a notch.

The guilt has thickened. I worry not just about Timmy but equally

January 2020 35

A+ MH DAD

“I ‘D BEEN AFRAID MY SON WOULD DIE. I’M STILL AFRAID. I WILL ALWAYS BE AFRAID” so about Meredith. I don’t think she can handle much more.

Though I try not to let on, I’m also concerned about the limits of my own tolerance. As I sing “Row, Row” in the dark, my thoughts seem to rattle around without content, or without objective and realistic content. I fantasise sometimes. I pretend none of this is happening. I pretend I’m teaching history to my son as I sing about John Wilkes Booth going merrily down the stream.

This morning I found Meredith sitting outside Timmy’s bedroom. She was trembling with . . . I don’t know what. She was trembling with all that has been and all that still is. I had seen her weep before, but never like this.

Behind the closed bedroom door, Timmy was shrieking.

I didn’t decide anything; I just did it – loaded all three of us into the car and drove to an emergency room. Seven hours later we departed with

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three prescriptions: Xanax for Meredith, Xanax for me, and a drug called Prilosec for Timmy.

Our son was found to be suffering from acid-reflux disease. His case was severe. We were informed that acid reflux can be difficult to diagnose, especially among infants, who are unable to articulate where things hurt or how things hurt or why things hurt or even that things hurt.

They can cry. They can shriek and hiss.

RELEASE FROM HELL We learned today, along with a great deal else, that insomnia is a common symptom of acid reflux; we learned that the condition is caused by a relaxation of the lower esophageal sphincter, which in turn permits stomach acids to drain into the esophagus; we learned that those acids can produce intense pain, especially in the sensitive tissues of a baby; we learned that the word colic (sometimes called infantile colic)

is descriptive of a set of symptoms (frequency of crying, duration of crying) but is not a diagnosis of organic cause; we learned that we were not to blame; we learned that Timmy hated only the terrible pain, not the world.

Now it’s 11:17 pm and the house is bizarrely silent. The Prilosec did its magic – not instantly, but very nearly so. The Xanax also worked. Meredith has been sleeping since late afternoon. I’m feeling extremely fine. Until two hours ago I had been sitting in the dark with Timmy, even though he no longer needs me. He, too, is feeling fine.

He sleeps peacefully.

In a few minutes I’ll get some sleep myself, but for now, as I scribble down these few words, I’m content to sit here listening to the all-is-well hum of our baby monitor, its soothing electric buzz coming from some unpopulated and distant galaxy. I’m riding the jet stream of Xanax, true, but I’m also feeling a kind of nostalgia,

the sort of backward-looking, tongue-probing surprise one feels after an aching tooth has been pulled. I don’t miss all the horror, of course. But I do miss surviving the horror. I miss holding Timmy in the dark. I miss “Row, Row”—enough to feel acutely what is missing.

This sensation, whatever it is, reminds me a bit of what I’d once experienced in Vietnam after a firefight ended, when something that was so excruciatingly present became so shockingly absent.

I’d been afraid my son would die. I’m still afraid. I will always be afraid.

It occurs to me that one day, when he’s in his last year of university, I’ll have to let him take his chances out in the killer world. At that point, I’ll probably allow him to apply for a driver’s license and (if he’s very careful) use the family car to go out on his first dangerous date, though I’ll be singing “Row, Row” in the backseat.

Ronald McDonald House.

Where family life carries on.

Two brothers, 145 nights at Ronald McDonald House.

Scout and London have a lot in common.

The brothers love the outdoors, playing with cars, trucks, their pets (a dog and two guinea pigs) but the truth is, they’re pretty happy doing almost anything as long as they’re doing it together.

They have something else in common, too.

Help family life carry on.

Donate today at rmhc.org.au

They were both born with cleft lips and palates and Pierre Robin syndrome. They’ve also spent much of the first part of their lives in hospitals. But with the help of Ronald McDonald House, they’ve been able to have their parents and each other nearby.

You can help family life carry on for Scout and London and the other 10,000 families with seriously ill children who rely on Ronald McDonald House each year.

Australia

A+ TACTICS

HARDEST TACKLE West Coast Eagles superstar Nic Naitanui has had to deal with being different his whole life.

Here he reveals how he came to realise that was something to celebrate

BY BEN JHOTY

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The schoolyard can be a tough place for anyone who’s a little different. Imagine then, what it was like for a tall, skinny Fijian kid growing up in Perth in the mid-nineties. With his rangy body, black skin and wild locks, the young Nic Naitanui could scarcely have been more distinct from his classmates. A tough place? Hell is another way to describe it.

The thing about being different, of course, is that it makes you a target. A uniquely vulnerable one at that. Because for those that don’t fit in, it’s

never just the insults and abuse that have the capacity to cause harm. For the victim, names become arrows, jokes land like jabs, even a mere look is freighted with the power to wound.

“It’s a feeling more than anything,” says Naitanui of the effect barbs from schoolyard bullies had on him. “It’s a feeling inside you of worry or hurt.

Someone doesn’t even have to say anything. It can just be a look that makes you feel a certain way because you’re different.”

It didn’t help that Naitanui was shy. Sometimes he wore the

“IT’S A FEELING INSIDE YOU OF WORRY OR HURT ”

insults, pretended they didn’t bother him. “You don’t want to complain or whinge and you’re worried that if you do, you’ll stand out even more,” says the Eagles ruckman, who’s just released a children’s book called Little Nic’s Big Day that celebrates cultural diversity. Other times, he took his anger out with his fists. “It’s tough to say but sometimes that’s just your natural reaction,” he says quietly. “It gets to the point where you feel like that’s the only way to deal with it. You look back and you almost wish there was a way you could have stopped it

before it got to that point.”

The one thing Naitanui had going for him was that he was good at sport. Over time his prowess on the football field won him the respect and admiration of his peers. “I found acceptance through playing footy,” he says. “It was probably a bit of a saviour for me. It was my way of integrating and being accepted, not just in the schoolyard but the local community as well.”

But acceptance from others was only half the battle. So long shamed for who he was, Naitainui’s real goal was one

many young men find even more elusive: self-acceptance. That meant embracing his uniqueness and taking pride in his cultural identity. He remembers latching onto the phrase ‘dare to be different’. “It just helped me realise that it’s okay to be unique and be different and to celebrate that,” he says.

These days Naitanui is easily one of the most popular athletes in WA but that hasn’t saved him from racist abuse, particularly on social media. He estimates he cops racist, vitriolic attacks from online trolls around every two weeks. “The over-the-fence stuff or abuse from other players on the field is pretty rare,” he says. “Social media is the big one because it’s given these people a voice they didn’t have before.” Dealing with online trolls presents a dilemma, he adds. Do you call them out, in the process amplifying their voice?

Or ignore them? “At times I will call it out but there are times I don’t,” he says. “Sometimes it’s more powerful not to respond.

You don’t want to give them an extra platform. I don’t really like showcasing it too much.”

Nevertheless, he has leapt to the defence of others, calling out a troll who posted a racist slur directed at his teammate Liam Ryan. “It’s tough for young guys like that so you just want to let them know that you’ve got their back,” he says.

While direct abuse is easy to recognise and highlight, casual racism is more widespread and often equally pernicious, Naitanui adds. “We stamp down on any casual kind of stuff at the club because that can be just as hurtful,” he says. “Some might not find it offensive, but others do so I’ve become a

lot more confident in myself in confronting that. If it was someone really close to me, I would be the first to tell them. It might break a few friendships but so be it.”

The Eagles star has drawn inspiration from Indigenous players like Nicky Winmar, Michael Long and, of course, Adam Goodes, who’ve shown the courage to speak out against racist abuse. “Those guys are prominent examples of how you can make an impact and influence people through your actions,” he says.

“It was sad to see what happened to Adam in the latter part of his career. I think that’s been a big eye-opener for the community.”

The treatment of Goodes shows how much work there is still to do and Naitanui is all too aware of the challenges involved in trying to shift ingrained attitudes, particularly among older generations. “You try your hardest, but you know when someone’s been doing something a certain way for 70-80 years it’s hard to break that down,” he says. Which is why he believes educating and informing kids is the most effective way to promote tolerance and understanding going forward. “I think it’s important for people like myself to try and influence and teach younger generations to help them become individuals that are accepting of people’s differences.”

In doing so, he hopes the schoolyard, footy field and maybe even social media feeds, become more welcoming, inclusive places.

Little Nic’sBig Day (Allen & Unwin) is on sale now

January 2020 39

A+ NUTRITION

Turkey, Except Actually Delicious Admit it: turkey usually sucks. But don’t blame the bird. By roasting it whole at Xmas, you dry out the white meat before the dark meat cooks. If you use a technique called spatchcocking, the meat will roast evenly. Enjoy all the tasty protein along with these two fibre-packed sides

BY PAUL KITA // PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHELSEA KYLE

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30G

10G E

THE FIBRE

White or dark – doesn’t make a big difference. Some 115 grams of roasted white meat, with the delicious skin, have 840 kilojoules, 33 grams of protein, six grams of fat and no carbs, if you’re counting macros (and if you’re counting macros on Christmas Day, maybe don’t?). The same amount of dark meat has 975 kilojoules, 31 grams of protein, 11 grams of fat and no carbs. So they’re similar in their nutrition. That means you should eat whichever you like better.

$ BU Y I T As a general rule, estimate about 700 grams per person, to account for the meat-to-bone ratio and allow for ample leftovers. So, for example, a 5.5-kg bird will serve eight people. Buy organic so you know the turkey wasn’t raised on feed or water containing antibiotics.

Maybe it’s more expensive, but your guests are worth it, right?

P P

COOK I T

These sides fill you up and taste amazing

Spatchcocked Lemon Rosemary Turkey

A simple dry brine helps the meat stay juicy and the skin crisp.

All you have to do is wait, roast and eat

W H AT Y O U ’ L L N E E D 1

( 5 . 5 KG ) T U R K E Y, N E C K A N D G I B L E TS R E M OV E D , PAT T E D D RY, S PATC H C O C K E D ( S E E B E LOW ) 2 ½ T B S P KO S H E R S A LT L E AV E S F R O M 2 S P R I G S R O S E M A RY, CHOPPED, P LU S 2 W H O L E S P R I G S 2 L E M O N S , Z E ST E D A N D THEN SLICED OLIVE OIL, FOR BRUSHING

• In a bowl, mix the salt, chopped rosemary and lemon zest. Put the turkey, skin side down, on a large high-walled baking sheet with a roasting rack. Rub the mix on the skin and meat. Chill overnight, or up to 24 hours.

• Remove the turkey from the fridge about an hour before cooking. Preheat your oven to 200°C. Brush the turkey with the oil and season well with pepper. Remove the roasting rack and line the sheet with lemon slices and rosemary sprigs.

Return the rack and bird to the sheet. Roast until a meat thermometer registers 75°C in the thickest parts of both breasts and both legs, about 75 minutes, turning the sheet every 30 minutes.

• Wearing oven mitts, carefully remove the turkey and let it rest at least 15 minutes before carving and serving. Feeds 8, plus leftovers

Toss 8 cups of cubed squash on a baking sheet with 1 Tbsp olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast at 200°C until tender, 20 minutes. Add ¾ cup chopped walnuts and roast till aromatic, 6-8 minutes. Transfer to a bowl, cool and mix in ½ cup pomegranate seeds and the leaves from 2 fresh thyme sprigs. Feeds 4 Per serving: 1220 kilojoules, 6g protein, 28g carbs (9g fibre), 18g fat

Nutrition per serving: 2370 kilojoules, 84g protein, 1g carbs (0g fibre), 24g fat

Spatchcocking the turkey helps it lie flat so it’ll cook more evenly.

You just r of stron

n

In a large pan over medium heat, add 1 Tbsp olive oil, 50 grams diced prosciutto, and ½ kg Brussels sprouts, finely shredded. Saute till tender yet slightly charred, about 8 minutes. Mix in a bowl with ½ cup shelled, unsalted pistachios.

Season with salt and pepper. Feeds 2 Per serving: 1640 kilojoules, 22g protein, 30g carbs (12g fibre), 24g fat

January 2020

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A+ MIND

07/ LITTLE BOOSTS

21

WAYS TO GO FROM LISTLESS TO LIMITLESS Plug into our exhaustive list of research to short-circuit tiredness and jump-start your body and mind. What 3pm slump?

01/ MORNING GLORY

Roll over and start the day with a smile.

Sex stimulates brain function and burns away fatigue.

02/ RED-HANDED But put a limit on those solo missions.

Over-masturbation sinks levels of energyboosting testosterone.

03/ BRIGHT START Avoid blue light at night, but scrolling the news on your phone in the morning fires up your brain.

04/ GREEN ENERGY

Include spirulina in your supp stack. Taken regularly, it can make you physically and mentally sharper.

05/ PEDAL TO THE METAL

A lack of iron limits oxygen delivery to your body, so take a pill and stay pumped.

06/ BY A NOSE

Avoid the big brekkie and start off small.

Lighter, more frequent meals keep your blood sugar levels stable.

08/ CARB UP

11/ POWER DOWN Working from home?

A sneaky 20-minute lunch-break nap will boost energy and enhance cognition.

16/ WATER WORKS

Drinking 2.5L of water a day has been shown to decrease signs of sleepiness and fatigue.

12/ SHOT IN THE ARM

17/ MESSY DESK…

Think twice before cutting out pasta, as low-carb diets sap brain energy, reducing your attention span.

Sink a coffee before you nap: the same study found it boosts post-kip alertness

… messy mind. Getting distracted by clutter exhausts mental reserves. Marie Kondo your workspace.

09/ TUNE IN

13/ CHEW AWAY

See off coffee breath with chewing gum to freshen up your mind, too: the mint can help your attention span.

18/ BREAK IT UP

14/ BUILD FOCUS

19/ CLOCK OUT

But you can help your concentration levels by listening to Mozart, so set the office radio to ABC Classic.

10/ RUDE AWAKENING

Don’t stifle that yawn.

Oxygen acts as a pick-me-up by helping cognitive function and brain activity.

Stretching for 10 seconds every 20 minutes is all it takes to stop fatigue setting in at your desk.

Work smarter, not harder. Worn-out, unhappy workers are 22 per cent less productive than happy ones.

If you’re anti-espresso, the lower caffeine and calming L-theanine of builder’s tea will give you a gentler boost.

15

20/ NET GAINS

Outside the office, make time for a hobby. Fun at five-a-side can invigorate your body and mind: #LifeGoals.

BED TO BARBELL

Lift your energy in the gym: just an hour of exercise a week can cut signs of fatigue by 65 per cent in six weeks.

21/ AND FINALLY…

Don’t be afraid to hit snooze after a bad night’s sleep. Just one lie-in can get your brain firing again.

Add an allergy med to your pill pack.

Inflamed sinuses can sabotage sleep to sap tomorrow’s energy.

WORDS: MATT EVANS | PHOTOGRAPHY: JOBE LAWRENSON

AMP UP YOUR ENERGY SUPPLY WITH A WEIGHTS SESSION.

January 2020 43

A+ COVER GUY

S ’ E L P O E P CHOICE

2020

Though the eyes of the world have begun turning towards the US and the long build-up to the Nov. 3 election, the real battle isn’t Trump vs Biden/Harris/Warren. A rougher, higher-stakes contest is brewing here on home turf, in a rivalry borne out of Chris Hemsworth’s fitness app, Centr PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES GEER

SINCE THE LAUNCH of Hemworth’s Centr app nearly a year ago, and the reveal of ‘Fat Thor’ earlier in 2019, new heroes and potential Men’s Health cover men have emerged, with two leading the charge: Luke Zocchi and Bobby Holland Hanton. Both fiercely competitive and equally worthy of a cover, the team at MH couldn’t split the two, so we’re leaving the choice in your hands in our very first People’s Choice Cover.

Coming out swinging for the Aussies is chef, Sipp Instant founder, personal trainer to Chris Hemsworth and lovable larrikin Luke Zocchi.

Boasting over 250k followers on the ’Gram and counting Hemsworth as his closest mate, Zocchi is a crowdpleaser sure to win more than a few votes with his fun-loving nature.

LUKE ZOCCHI @zocobodypro

Age 35 Height 170cm Weight 71kg Occupation Personal Trainer Skill Legend in the kitchen Trademark Quirky Insta cooking videos Training Style 20-minute cardio and boxing workouts.

LUKE 44

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VS

BOBBY HOLLAND HANTON @bobbydazzler84

Age: 36 Height: 190cm Weight: 85kg (92kg in ‘Thor mode’) Occupation: Stuntman Skill: Death-defying stunts Trademark: His Zoolanderesque pout Training Style: HIIT sessions and circuits, “and then I’ll isolate a lot of arms because they are always on show in the Thor costume”.

In the corner of the Brits, standing at a lofty 190cm, is stuntman to Hemsworth, Daniel Craig and Henry Cavill, Bobby Holland Hanton. Rippling with functional muscle, the former gymnast is the go-to stunt expert for Hollywood action blockbusters.

Returning from back surgery in early 2019, Holland Hanton is a hero for the underdogs. And if anyone loves a comeback story, it’s the team here at MH. Both Zocchi and Holland Hanton are featured experts on the Centr fitness app, inspiring hundreds of thousands around the world to get active. Both are truly worthy candidates for the March 2020 cover.

The choice is in your hands, with voting live at menshealth.com.au until January 16, 2020. Stay tuned to MH socials for campaign messages from Luke and Bobby, and cast your vote at any time to nominate who you want to be your March 2020 Men’s Health cover man. Remember, every vote counts. May the better man win.

V TE NOW! MENSHEALTH. COM .AU

BOBBY January 2020 45

A+ MH GARAGE

RIDE AND PREJUDICE

Haunted by a past experience in an SUV, MH writer Alex Dalrymple had largely written off the category. Then he drove the Audi Q3 through the Byron Bay hinterland

SEA CHANGE: THE NEW Q3 IS EQUIPPED TO TAKE ON ALL TYPES OF TERRAIN.

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LOOK, I’M GOING TO LEVEL WITH YOU. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of SUVs. I’m still mentally scarred by a torrid experience many years ago in a wobbly 1980s Suzuki Vitara. The vehicle lurched all over the road and had brakes that locked up with the slightest touch.

But today I’m in Byron Bay to test-drive the new Audi Q3 compact SUV and the location alone might be enough to put my prejudices aside. Byron would have to rank as one of the best places in the world to test drive a new car. Rough, winding roads criss-cross the town’s lush hinterland, taking in a range of challenging terrain and jawdropping scenery.

It’s hard to think of a car more primed to become a favourite of families, young couples and retirees than the Q3. Audi call it a triple-threat and that’s not hyperbole – it’s an SUV with something for just about everyone. It’s bigger and sits lower to the ground than the car it replaces and has been completely redesigned inside and out.

Having spent the night at the amazing Elements of Byron, I join a five-strong Q3 convoy out of town the next morning. The route has been pre-programmed into our vehicles’ Audi Connect Plus system, with five stops on the way. First, we head northwest towards Mullumbimby, then out towards Mount Burrell, down to

Nimbin and back to Byron. Along the way we encounter rainforest, open pasture and a tiny bit of freeway, the twisting route giving us ample opportunity to test out the car’s impressive roadholding dynamics.

Confronting a sharp bend with a steep incline to follow, I find myself whacking the back of the steering wheel searching for paddle gear shifters that aren’t there – a disappointing omission in an otherwise impressive interior. But performance-wise it doesn’t matter. The 1.4-litre engine screams to attention as we swing around the bend and up the hill with minimal fuss. As the route unfolds, I do find the six-speed S-tronic gearbox can

occasionally struggle to find the appropriate gear. But the overall handling is far more car-like than SUV. It’s certainly no ’80s Vitara.

The quality of the tarmac on the roads around Byron varies greatly. Loads of bumps, potholes and loose gravel give the Q3’s suspension a thorough working over. The 18-inch wheels on the base model handle these a little more smoothly than their better looking 19-inch siblings.

Inside is where the Q3’s biggest changes have occurred.

The car’s interior controls are almost all digitised across twin 10-inch screens dedicated to the infotainment and gauge cluster.

The car is also the latest recipient

of the aforementioned Audi Connect Plus system, which provides up-to-the-minute traffic information, can tell you where to get the cheapest petrol and even give you a heads-up on nearby carparks with available spots. Plus, the mapping information also appears on the dash (or Virtual Cockpit, as Audi calls it) right in front of the driver, with a highly customisable digital display helping to keep your eyes on the road. Android Auto and Apple Carplay are also available – in fact Carplay can be used wirelessly – and there’s a wireless charging pad in the middle of the dash. Leather seats are standard, providing firm,

comfortable support and two rear-seat passengers have plenty of room – three is possible, but would be a little too cosy on a long trip. The rear cargo area is an impressive 525 litres and you can triple that with the rear seats down – perfect for a family holiday, shopping trip or even moving small furniture.

Cruising back to the finish line for lunch after our 165km lap of the hinterland, I have to admit I’m well on the way to overcoming my SUV aversion.

And with the Q3 Sportback model featuring a more powerful 2.0 litre engine due in mid-2020, my conversion could well be complete.

“I’M WELL ON THE WAY TO OVERCOMING MY SUV AVERSION” January 2020

47

BRUSH UP ON YOUR GROOMING

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

beautycrew.com.au Bea u tyc re w

@B e au tyc rew

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* BE A U T Y crew is A us tra l ia’s numb er o ne d ed i cate d o nl i n e b e au t y d e st i n ati o n, as r ate d b y Niels en wit hin t he ap pa rel a n d b ea uty c a teg ory. Sourc e: Niel sen Mark et I ntel l i g en c e (D o me s ti c ), Av e r ag e Dai l y Un i q ue Brows er s , as a t 18 /5 /2 01 7.

AUSTRALIAN

YOUR PASSPORT TO WELLNESS

T

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FA R N O RT H Q U E E NSL A N D

PAIN FOREST

WANT TO TEST YOUR PHYSICAL AND MENTAL LIMITS IN LUSH TROPICAL SCENERY? RED BULL DEFIANCE IS THE RACE FOR YOU

BY SCOTT HENDERSON

AND SO THE PLANNING of your annual boys’ trip begins. Your leave application has been approved 10 weeks in advance (by both your better half and your boss) and you’ve assembled a small but mighty crew to head off on a longweekend adventure. Deserted beaches?

Check. Tropical jungle? Check.

Whitewater rafting? Sure, why not? Now add 150km of running, mountain biking and rafting over two days, racing against the fittest units in Australia. Still keen?

Welcome to the Men’s Health-iest getaway imaginable: RedBull Defiance.

Will you return relaxed? Far from it. Will you be better for the experience?

Without a doubt.

January 2020 49

FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND

In today’s largely sedentary workplaces, vacations and fitness go together like avocado and toast. And while there’s been an undeniable rise in yoga-themed, resort-based wellness escapes, sometimes you want to go bigger and harder. Just like your smashed avo’.

Thankfully there are a few events on the fitness calendar that can scratch your adventure itch as hard as they’ll lacerate any unprotected skin. They’re the destination races that provide that double-win: an escape from the ordinary and an immense physical challenge.

Our own quest for adventure led us north, to the upper reaches of Queensland, to tackle the pinnacle of adventure races, Red Bull Defiance. Already recognised as a benchmark of athletic endeavour and masochistic pain in New Zealand, this was the first time the event had been held on Aussie shores. As much as the tropical setting of Mission Beach and the Cassowary Coast might invite visions of a relaxing beachside retreat, our poolside chilling would be confined to post-race recovery, much needed after 10km of rafting,

45km of running, 75km of mountain biking and 20km of paddling.

Such an undertaking requires a solid team to laugh, commiserate and, let’s face it, share the suffering with. Fortunately ours couldn’t have been better constructed. Personal trainer Jaden Garft and Sipp Instant co-founder Dylan Garft are the sibling duo that will set the pace for us out on the course. My race partner is Ben Gordon – drummer for heavy metal band Parkway Drive, who was able to both motivate and calm the rest of the quartet. A yoga-loving, vegan metal-head, Gordon brings the best of each of his distinct worlds to a weekend away with the lads.

As a side note, Gordon had the good fortune to be roped into this trip with only three weeks notice. Short enough to not fully comprehend the intensity that lies ahead of him, but just enough for some last-minute training. Not that he needs it. It turns out that drumming in one of the world’s biggest metal bands provides the aerobic conditioning to tackle a race that is as relentless as, well, a pounding thrash anthem.

FROM LEFT: A COMPETITOR RAPPELS OFF A BRIDGE; MH FITNESS TSAR TODD LIUBINSKAS AND TEAMMATE TRENT KNOX KAYAK THROUGH THE OCEAN.

DAY 1: HEAVEN AND HELL The first day of Defiance provides a classic case of “Instagram vs Reality”. Where a snap on an Insta feed might see us waking before sunrise to head for a scenic raft-cruise through the tranquil Queensland rainforest, in ‘reality’, a 4am bus-ride is the start of a day that will see us take in over 80km of hard-core racing. Hey, you’ve got to earn those likes.

It’s 5am when we arrive in the depths of the rainforest to be kitted out with a life vest and paddle before being assigned to our rafts. And, with a swift push off the river bank, Red Bull Defiance begins.

In this initial phase of the race, we’re largely in the hands of our

WHITE ON: COMPETITORS BATTLE RAPIDS AND ROCKS IN THE RACE’S EARLY STAGES. 50

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rafting guide as we cruise through dense foliage, over rapids and rebound off the occasional boulder. More fun than challenging, it perhaps sets a false tone. For a second I feel like we’re on a regular holiday. It’s not long before those foolish thoughts are dismissed.

With the novelty component of the race out of the way, it’s time for our training to kick in . . . and the commencement of a chafe that will endure for weeks to come. A 21km trail run with your teammate up front is the perfect way to test what you’re both made of and highlights the areas of your character that need adjustment.

It’s as close to a therapy session as you’re likely to find, without having to fork out $250 to sit on a couch. This part of the world is home to some incredible rainforest and unique wildlife. But if you happen to chance upon a Cassowary, pick up your pace, no matter how much your body is hurting.

With the shelter of a canopy of ferns, the course is cool, the vivid scenery distracting you from the uphill trot. It’s a place you’re unlikely ever to experience again, unless you compete in Defiance a second time, something I naively contemplate at this stage of the race.

The bike leg soon brings us back to Earth, though. Thoughts of “surely everyone else walked this part” and “did we take a wrong turn?” dominate the 55km ride through the rainforest.

Battling against steep, rocky terrain I begin to wonder whether

D E P A R T U R E S 01 20 “Beers are substituted for a night on magnesium supps”

I’d be able to handle this leg of the course better if I’d actually logged some serious time in the saddle in my race prep. The answer is yes – mountain-bike racing does in fact require mountain-bike training.

On the plus side, I’ve done my share of adventure races and never before have I been able to stop mid-race and fill up my drink bottle with pure filtered spring water in the middle of the bush. Were I less competitive (read: scared of slowing the team down), I’d probably be tempted to have a quick dip.

As we roll back to our beachside bungalows at Mission Beach, the usual boys’ trip beers are substituted for a night on magnesium supps. Some aspects of a traditional lads’ trip that do ring true? We eat. Carbs upon carbs at the Castaway Resort, where we compare the days’ stories of triumph and torture in an effort to repel thoughts of what is to come tomorrow.

DAY 2: WATER TORTURE The second day of our ‘getaway’ starts with a 20km mountain-bike ride along the coastline and much like many of the competitors’ energy levels, the terrain is a lot flatter than the day before. After yesterday’s slog uphill, today’s ride is more of a sprint. An 8pm bedtime the night before sees us wide-eyed and over-eager, hurtling through coastal rainforest in an effort to separate ourselves from the pack.

Our reverie is short-lived, though, for next up is my own personal hell, the kayak leg. Try as he might, even Ben, my personal Buddha, can’t keep my spirits up as we find ourselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, paddling 16km towards an elusive Dunk Island. The repetitive paddling and unchanging scenery play the kind of mind games you imagine would plague a lonely soul in the middle of a desert. Are we even moving forward? Is this how I will spend the rest of my life? Would being taken by a croc be as bad as this?

If you’ve ever seen that famous scene where Bambi slides around the ice finding his legs, then you can perfectly imagine us trying to haul our kayaks ashore after 2.5 hours at sea. It’s unfortunate, as the next leg of the race involves a trail-run around Dunk Island. The trail takes in both unspoiled ocean vistas and an eerie abandoned resort, the aftermath of devastating hurricane activity in the area.

It’s the perfect setting for a horror movie, and a timely reminder that when you compete in an adventure race you truly are at the mercy of Mother Nature.

The ascent of the mountain on Dunk Island leads to a panoramic view of the adjacent reef and archipelago. Reaching the peak without a phone or camera, in the company of only my mates, provides one of the biggest lessons of the entire experience, something I’ll take with me on future trips: you don’t need to live your life through a lens. I’ll remember that view, the feeling and that moment shared with Ben, Dylan and Jaden in greater clarity than any photo that would inevitably have gotten buried in the depths of my iPhone storage. There’s a certain satisfaction in not feeling compelled to share every aspect of our getaway, and in that brief moment time stands still.

Unfortunately we can’t linger too long. We have to paddle back

to mainland Queensland to finish this beast and enjoy the spoils of celebratory drinks.

Once back on the sand, our running training once again kicks in as we shuffle the final 7km along the soft sand of Mission Beach. The expanse of fine, white sand is impressive in its own right but to negotiate it by foot and round out 150km of adventuring ensures you truly appreciate its enormity.

GAIN AND SUFFERING Unusually, only in crossing the finish line do I really question why it was that we chose to spend our annual leave this way. Sure, as Men’s Health men we love a goal and are driven to push our bodies through training and competing.

But in our downtime why were we not content to get on the piss and hit the bars of one of our Aussie capitals? The answer comes down to connection – and disconnection.

An event like Defiance requires disconnecting yourself from the distractions of your 9-5 lifestyle. Emails evaporate in your conscious mind when you’re shuffling past bush possums in the middle of a jungle or worrying about the snake watching you from a nearby branch. And that’s the exact connection the race does foster, bringing you closer to nature, your mates and your own thoughts. Exhausted, you emerge from the jungle enriched.

FROM LEFT: KETTLEBELL SWIM; SMILING THROUGH PAIN; HENDERSON COOLS OFF; IN THE HOT SEAT.

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FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND

FROM LEFT: RACERS HOIST THEIR RAFT THROUGH THE JUNGLE; EMERGING FROM MISSION BEACH; BRIGE CONQUERED; FUN ON THE OPEN WATER.

DEFY THE ODDS ELITE ADVENTURE RACER AND WINNER OF DEFIANCE 2019, COURTNEY ATKINSON, SHARES HIS TIPS TO HELP GET YOU THROUGH A TREACHEROUS TRIP

“All in all, you’re looking at about 12.5 hours of work over two days of racing for the winning teams, with the possibility of being out there on the course for around 20 hours over the weekend. That’s a lot to train for, but with a bit of work even the most inexperienced athletes can be up to meet the endurance challenge.”

ENDURANCE “With such a massive endurance focus, any pure aerobic exercise is beneficial. Aim to complete three days of endurance training specific to each of the three main adventure-racing sports: 52

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running, cycling and paddling.

In the city, where you don’t always have access to equipment, running is going to provide the biggest bang for your buck.

It’s all about consistency. Try one longer or faster day followed by a day of recovery, easy jogging, cross training or complete rest.

At the speeds you’ll be travelling in an adventure race, long days out hiking in the mountains can be a great way to build muscular endurance and specific strength, as well as prepare your body and mind to be on your legs for a whole day. ”

TECHNIQUE “The reason we love adventure racing is that there is more to it than just putting your head down and your body through the ringer.

The nature of the course means you’ll likely need some new skills as well. These include: agility,

uphill running on rainforest trails, the basics of abseiling, handling a mountain bike on rocky trails and paddling through choppy waters.

The best way to train for technique is to get out there and be specific on the same terrain you’ll face on race day. If that’s not an option you can use obstacles in the urban environment to challenge your running agility. For climbing, head to your local climbing gym and ask to be shown the basics of harness and abseiling, plus get a bouldering session in to work your upper body while you’re there. Try paddling on windy days and letting the direction of the chop hit the side of the boat to help you feel comfortable balancing with your hips in a kayak.”

RECOVERY Training long and hard is only half of the adventure sports equation. The real benefits come from allowing your body to absorb the rigorous workload and come back stronger. This is why in your programming I would advise following a long day on your legs with a recovery day or upper-body workout.

It sounds obvious but make refuelling and sleep priorities.

Too many people overlook these fundamentals. Yes, there are a lot of one per centers out there you could do, but when you add up the hours of training, along with work and family commmitments, food and sleep have the most evidence and are easily the best use of your recovery time.”

D E P A R T U R E S 01 20

“There’s more to adventure racing than putting your body through the ringer” NUTRITION “When it comes to refuelling there’s a big difference between exercise nutrition and everyday nutrition. During big weeks of endurance training, my goal is to make sure I get enough kilojoules in to recover properly.

My golden rule is everything in moderation. If you look in my fridge, it’s filled with the colours of the rainbow. No fad diets or strict kilojoule counting here, just

healthy, whole foods every day.

It’s a bit different though when it comes to hard training and racing. Ensuring that I consume the right fuel, at the right time means better quality training sessions and better performances on race day. We’re talking carbs and fluids here. And when it comes to the really long days, a combination of whole foods, gels, Red Bull, confectionary and water help me achieve my needs.”

TRAIN FOR PAIN

ATKINSON’S DEFIANCE REGIMEN MONDAY: Ride 60-90 mins on MTB trails Specific strength and core work in the gym TUESDAY: Run 60-75 mins with 20-40 mins of fartlek or speed play running over undulating trails Kayak 1-2 hrs – steady into the wind for 60 mins then back home with the wind WEDNESDAY: Running 60mins steady pace Specific strength and core work in the gym THURSDAY: Ride 1-1.5 hours on MTB trails (or 2-3 hrs on road) Run off the bike for 20-40 mins as a transition FRIDAY: Day off or easy swim for active recovery

SATURDAY: Run 2-3 hrs taking in challenging hills and trails – maintain steady pace Ride 40-60 mins on MTB trails, shake out legs then have some finishing fun on the trails FROM LEFT: ABSEILING SKILLS ARE PUT TO THE TEST; HENDERSON AND GORDON CROSS THE FINISH LINE; A COMPETITOR EMERGES FROM THE WATER AFTER THE KB SWIM.

SUNDAY: Kayak 1.5 - 2 hours (ideally in rough water) with 6 x 8 min efforts at or just below race pace January 2020

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Blazer $3105 Trousers $580 Belt $235 (All Cerruti 1881) Vest $65 (Hanro) Sandals $235 (Russell & Bromley) Necklace $640 (Isaia at mrporter.com) Bracelet $290 Emerald bracelet $1180 Ring $590 (all Tateossian throughout) Bag $420 (Passavant And Lee) Watch $10,315 (Hublot)

SAGE ADVICE HIGH-VIS LIMES AND FLUORO PINKS MIGHT HAVE CAPTURED THE HEADLINES AT THE SPRING/SUMMER 2019 SHOWS, BUT IT WAS THE PROFUSION OF SAGE THAT PROVED THE MOST WEARABLE HUE. THIS IS THE SEASON TO GO GREEN AND LEAVE GREY AND NAVY IN THE SHADE STYLING BY ERIC DOWN PHOTOGRAPHY BY DIEGO MERINO WORDS BY SHANE C KURUP

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STYLE

1

Lighten Up

“Sage green is a great way to bring a crisp, light feel to sporty and military-inspired pieces during summer. You can give the shade a sharp, urban quality by pairing it with black.”

– Jason Basmaijian, CCO, Cerrutti 1881

Bomber $956 (Acne Studios at Harvey Nichols) Hoodie $430 (Woolrich) T-Shirt $30 (American Apparel) Glasses $535 (Cutler and Gross)

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STYLE

2

Shade of Substance

“It’s one of those rare hues that is neither too bold nor too bland. This makes it a great option for expanding your spectrum if you’re wary of bright colours but bored of grey.”

Coat $610 (Harris Wharf London) Shirt $160 shorts $150 Rucksack $730 (All Michael Kors) Glasses $730 (Mykita) Belt $675 (Giorgio Armani) Watch $2440 (Tag Heuer)

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GROOMING: KEVIN FORD USING DERMALOGICA | PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT: MICHAEL WILLIAMS | FASHION ASSISTANT: RICCARDO CHIUDIONI | MODEL: KAMUI AT NEXT MODEL | SHOT ON LOCATION AT THE ROYAL BOTANICAL GARDENS KEW.ORG

– Creative design team, Canali

Shirt $920 (Valentino at matches fashion.com) Trousers $150 (mki miyukizoku at Harvey Nichols) Sunglasses $935 (Mykita x Damir Doma) Bag $92 (Rains) Watch $2440 (Tag Heuer)

3

Military Mix

“Sage is more versatile than you think. It’s easy to combine with other shades, but it also stands well on its own. It looks particularly strong with vintage military apparel” – Jonathan Daniel Pryce, garconjon.com January 2020

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Shirt $1275 Hat $695 Bag $2065 Belt £360 (all Giorgio Armani) Trousers $535 (Jacquemus at matches fashion.com) Watch $10,315 (Hublot)

4

Palette Booster

“Sage green is the perfect neutral shade. It lifts the palette without being too loud. If going head to toe feels like overkill, introduce it with accessories, such as a hat or bag.”

– Alina Brane, Creative Lead, Gant

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STOCKISTS: ACNE STUDIOS AT HARVEYNICHOLS.COM, AMERICANAPPAREL.COM, ARMANI.COM, CERRUTI.COM, CUTLERANDGROSS.COM, HANRO.COM.AU, HUBLOT.COM, ISAIA AT MRPORTER.COM, JACQUEMUS AT MATCHESFASHION.COM, MARNI.COM, MHL BY MARGARET HOWELL, MICHAELKORS.CO.UK, MKI MIYUKI-ZOKU AT HARVEYNICHOLS.COM, MYKITA.COM, OLIVERSPENCER.CO.UK, PASSAVANT AND LEE WMATCHESFASHION.COM, RAINS.COM, RUSSELLANDBROMLEY.CO.UK, TAGHEUER.COM, TATEOSSIAN.COM, TRICKERS.COM, VALENTINO AT MATCHESFASHION.COM, WOOLRICH.COM, WORKSHOP-STORE.COM

STYLE

5

Natural Wonder

“The colour has a soothing quality, as it brings an element of the natural world into urban life. It also pairs well with dark shades, as well as earthy hues.”

– Robert Spangle, thousandyardstyle.com

Jumper $1180 (Marni)

T-Shirt $140 (MHL by Margaret Howell)

Boiler suit $1050 (Oliver Spencer)

Boots $740 (Tricker’s)

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HOW TO TALK BARBER

Want to climb out of the chair contented? You need to work on your barber talk. Because “a little off the top” won’t cut it How many times have you left the barber shop with a haircut you hate and thought to yourself, What the hell went wrong? Was that guy an apprentice?

Did he think you’d been drafted? Did you subconsciously ask for it?

Truth is, it was probably due to poor communication. Because as much as we assume they can, barbers can’t read minds. If you don’t tell them exactly what you want, they’re probably going to go with whatever they feel most comfortable giving you. To avoid getting a cut that makes a month as a hermit seem tempting, you need to brush up on how you instruct the man with the scissors.

We asked Dan Dixon, from Mister Chop Shop in Sydney, for his best tips on what to say to your barber to get exactly the haircut you imagined.

Try describing Zac Efron’s hair.

You can’t, right? So instead of giving some insanely vague directions to your barber, bring a picture to show him what you want (this is where all those hours of scrolling on Instagram come in handy).

“The more info and direction given ensures a better result,” says Dixon.

Feel weird about pulling out a celebrity pic? You can also show a picture of a haircut you once had and really liked – and let your barber take you back to that moment.

2

KNOW YOUR HAIR TYPE

Everyone’s hair is different.

And knowing what kind of hair you have will help you understand what type of cut will work best. If you’re smuggling a whole bunch of cowlicks under your fringe, or know that your hair likes to stick out in one direction, warn your barber. They’ll be able to tell you if the cut you’re asking for is a good fit, and give you a heads-up if that Leo DiCaprio Gatsby-era number simply won’t suit your face.

3

GIVE A LITTLE BACKGROUND

If you’re not one to use multiple (or any) hairstyling products, or would

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never touch a hairdryer, let your barber know these things, because they’re pretty crucial pieces of information. If you get yourself a high-maintenance cut but aren’t willing to do all the stuff that goes with styling it, you’re just not going to look your dashing best. “A good barber wants to know what you don’t like as much as what you do,” says Dixon. “He’ll want to know what products you use, and what your styling regime, work and lifestyle are.”

4

USE THE RIGHT TERMS

It’s easy to cling to number settings on an electric clipper (“A two on the sides and a three on the top, thanks”), or technical terms you don’t really understand (“just a fade, please, mate”), but you’re not fooling anyone. If you don’t know what it means, don’t say it. “I think the biggest mistake is using incorrect terminology,” says Dixon.

“Some guys pick up words and instructions along the way and end up misdirecting a barber.” Avoid using terms like “just take a little off”, “short, but not too short” and “just a trim” – because short and long are all relative from barber to barber. Instead, try using words like “textured” versus “sharp”, as this will

make it clearer to your barber what kind of look you want.

5

FOCUS ON YOUR EARS

6

GIVE FEEDBACK

7

DON’T BE THAT GUY

Another easy way to tell your barber what kind of length and style you want is to focus on your ears.

For example, saying “a little rough over the ears” or “clean over the ears” will give your barber a good idea of how to get you there.

If you’re seeing your barber regularly, let him know what you liked and didn’t like about your last haircut, or tell him if you liked how it grew out. “To achieve a consistently great cut, your chopper will need to know if they’ve gone off track,” says Dixon. Feedback is good – just don’t wait until your barber has finished your entire cut before giving it. before you dish it out.

If you don’t want a lousy haircut, don’t be a douchebag. “Be on time, be present with your barber, give them direction and create a relationship,” advises Dixon. “Leave your phone in your pocket.

There’s nothing worse than a customer who constantly uses their phone. Your time is no more important than ours.”

WORDS BY ERIN DOCHERTY

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SHOW UP WITH A PHOTO

GROOMING

54%

The per centage of men w on the sp ho prote ot when st they rec copped k on they’ a dud ha ve ircut. Ju per cent st over 2 say noth 0 ing and barbers change , while 1 0 per ce and hop nt keep e for a b mum e t t e r result time fro n e xt m the sa me chop SOURC p er.

E: Mod ern Salo n

Media

LOCK IT IN! CLEAR AND CONCISE INSTRUCTIONS WILL YIELD A RESULT THAT’S A CUT ABOVE.

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WA T C H E S

Rolex Sea Dwelle er $21,300 Yes, it’s waterpro oof to an asstonishing 1220m, but its sheer wrist presence alsso makes it equally q y at home beneath the tailored cuff of yyour suit.

TAG Heu uer Aquaracer Autom matic $3450 With its combo of polished and brushed d surfaces, this eye-catcher b backs its good looks with water ressistance to 300m.

Omega O S Seamas $11 500 00 A variation on the wristwear of a certain James Bond, the ceramic and titanium case houses a dial etched with laser-engraved waves.

A black beauty.

Seiko Prospex $799 9 Seiko’s divers are renowned for quality and value. This o one’s nicknamed “Arnie” after cam meos on the wrist of a certain action n hero in Predator and Comman ndo.

Tudor Black Bay Bronze $5100 Time to re-enter the bronze age.

The beauty of this material is that it’ll gradually develop a well-worn patina to complement the slate grey dial.

Doxa Sub 200 Divingstar $1590 Say it loud! Bright dials may not aid visibility at depth, but as Doxa – makers of the first commercial diving watch – show, they certainly make your timepiece stand out.

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Longines Legend Diver $3725 This remix of a 1960s classic demonstrates that a diver can offer vintage good looks with its glossy black dial framed by the internal rotating bezel.

Mido Ocean Star Diver 600 $2425 For a watch to be COSC-certified COSC certified, it must stay accurate to within -4/+6 seconds a day. This Swiss-made watch ticks that box and boasts an 80-hour power reserve.

g Superocean p Breitling Automatic 46 Black Steel $6490 Sporty and bold, this piece is designed for the adventurous guy who prefers action to chatter. Swim, surf or dive without fear.

DEPTH CH A RGE

WORDS BY LUKE BENEDICTUS

When you’re heading to the beach, a diver is your ultimate summer watch THAT FABIEN COUSTEAU learnt to scuba dive on his fourth birthday is hardly surprising. The ocean is hard-wired into the DNA of the first grandson of the famed undersea adventurer, Jacques Cousteau.

Now 52, Cousteau has built a career as a deep-sea documentary filmmaker and ocean conservationist. Over the years, he’s watched diving equipment dramatically evolve. His expeditions as an aquanaut and record-breaking stint of living underwater for 31 days straight were invariably assisted by wireless dive computers and cutting-edge tech.

“But electronics have a tendency to fail at the worst possible time underwater,” Cousteau says. “For me, a dive watch is the ultimate safety mechanism. It is the backup that you can always rely upon.”

So what should you look for in a diving watch?

For starters, Cousteau reasons, you need a unidirectional bezel. This ring that encircles a dive watch’s case records the duration that you’re underwater. It turns only one way for safety reasons: if knocked, it’s designed to indicate the diver has less air or decompression time, not more.

But just as important, Cousteau insists, is legibility. “A diving watch needs an uncluttered face so you can read things whether you’re underwater in a dark cave, for example, or on deeper dives when you might be under the influence of nitrogen narcosis.”

Yet Cousteau keeps his trusty Seiko Prospex diver on his wrist even when he’s on dry land.

“It’s not so much about the act of diving,” he says. “Putting on a diving watch just transports you to the possibility of going on an adventure.”

January 2020 63

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E-cigarettes are being demonised for their link to ng disease but is the hullaballoo around vaping stopping us from addressing a far bigger killer?

BY JACK PHILLIPS

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SPINNING AN E-CIGARETTE between his fingers like a tiny cheerleader’s baton, Jamal orders another coffee because it’s apparent I’m picking up the bill. The 19-year-old student has just spent the last five minutes sipping a soy flat white while waxing lyrically about a rapper I’ve never heard of. But although I find his hackneyed use of the word “legend” grating, I have to admit he has my attention due to his ability to gush so enthusiastically while expelling plumes of blueberry-smelling smoke. “Sorry about that,” he laughs. “I have the wattage turned up on this new mod. It’s good for cloud chasing but the popcorn lung is a killer.”

That term, “popcorn lung”, might sound innocuous enough but it refers to the nickname given to bronchiolitis obliterans, a condition that affects small airways in the lungs and triggers short bursts of coughing. Jamal says he began experiencing coughing fits not long after he bought his first highpowered e-cigarette, an appendage he admits has become a common sight among his peers.

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E-cigarettes have experienced a sharp rise in popularity since first hitting the market back in 2007.

Assigned a myriad of monikers like vape, pipe and mod, they’ve spawned sub-cultures, slang terminology and drawn celebrity advocates who cast them as desirable fashion accessories.

But Jamal doesn’t care that Justin Bieber has a vape. He’s in it, he says, for the “cloud chasing” – the process of blowing large clouds of vapour to form complex shapes like rings, spheres, streams and ripples.

It’s this craze that has prompted Jamal to tinker with the settings on his e-cigarette to encourage a thicker plume of smoke. He says he’s been trying to perform a ‘French inhale’ for weeks, a trick involving blowing smoke out of your mouth while simultaneously sucking it back in through your nose. It’s impressive, trust me.

But here’s the thing. As pretty as that wispy plume might appear, the question that’s increasingly being asked is whether vaping is little more than a fancy delivery system – a smokescreen even – for a cocktail of potentially lethal chemicals that can wreak havoc on your respiratory system? After all, where there’s smoke, there’s generally fire.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS You’ve probably heard the reports on vapingrelated deaths coming out of the US in recent months. Researchers there are investigating more than 1300 cases of lung disease and respiratory failure across North America, including 33 deaths, reportedly linked to e-cigarette use. At least 20 countries to date have outlawed the sale of vaping products including Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam. The likes of Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Norway and Japan haven’t outlawed them entirely but they are restricted. The Trump White House, meanwhile, has indicated that a ban on flavoured e-cigarette products in the US is imminent.

The Australian Medical Association also has “concerns” over the marketing and advertising of e-cigarettes and has suggested the products “be subject to the same restrictions as cigarettes”. The Public Health 68

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Association of Australia has implored the government to use “precautionary principles” to reduce the chance of more people like Jamal taking up e-cigarettes as a fashion accessory or hobby.

But although the concern is widespread, it’s not uniform. There are some respected medical professionals who believe e-cigarettes are being subjected to an undue moral panic inflated by a hysterical media.

Dr Lion Shahab, an associate professor in health psychology at University College London admits that while e-cigarettes are not totally harmless, they could offer a legitimate route to improving public health.

Having spent the past 15 years studying the effects of tobacco smoking and more recently e-cigarettes, he believes the current demonising of the latter is unwarranted.

Shahab, who’s been published in over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has extensive experience in the area, told MH his research on e-cigarettes found they deliver a “60-97 per cent reduction in the level of harmful toxicants and carcinogens when compared to cigarettes”. He adds that diseases related to cigarette smoking take 20-40 years to develop and that scientists are now looking at characteristics (or biomarkers) present in both cigarettes and e-cigarettes to better predict long term effects on health.

“Cigarettes contain 600-700 constituents and over 7000 chemicals, 70 of which are carcinogenic,” says Shahab. “E-cigarettes by contrast have few; primarily nicotine, chemicals to dissolve the nicotine and flavourings. It suggests that e-cigarettes are a less harmful alternative to cigarettes.”

E-cigarette deaths should be viewed in context, Shahab adds. “Thirty or so people have died using e-cigarette products this year,” he says. “In the same time 75,000-plus have died in the US from smoking-related illnesses. We need some perspective.”

“IS VAPING A FANCY DELIVERY SYSTEM FOR A COCKTAIL OF LETHAL CHEMICALS? ”

HEALTH

TRAIL OF SMOKE It’s the purported hard and fast adoption of e-cigarettes among young people such as Jamal and his pals that has put the products in the spotlight. In September the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a stern warning letter to Juul Labs Inc., the maker of one of the most popular brands of e-cigarettes, for engaging in sketchy marketing practices targeting “students”.

The FDA took particular issue with the company’s claims that its product is less harmful than cigarettes.

The thing is, it just might be. Shahab says much of the data around vaping has been overstated. He cites figures showing regular e-cigarette users who didn’t previously smoke equate to just 0.1 per cent of vapers in the UK. “If you look at the data in the US the number is still very small, around one per cent,” he adds. “What is often reported is the number of people who have used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days. If you drill down into some of the data, 60 per cent of teens say they have used e-cigarettes for less than 10 days in their life. The measurements are incorrectly presented. The vast majority of young people using e-cigarettes were smokers.”

There are many health professionals, including Shahab, who advocate e-cigarettes as a healthier alternative to cigarettes.

Ironically tobacco-based cigarettes are still legal in all of the 20-plus countries that have now completely banned the sale of e-cigarettes, except for Bhutan, which remains the only country in the world to have outlawed tobacco. Brands are also throwing their weight behind the cessation argument.

Juul claims its mission is “to improve the lives of the world’s one billion adult smokers”.

Aspire, another manufacturer, recently described calls for strict regulation and/or a complete ban as “draconian” and proposes that the risk is “what you vape” not vaping itself. “It would be unfair to blame the entire alcohol industry for yearly onsets of methanol poisoning caused by black-market distillates,” a company spokesperson said.

Shahab concedes that black market products pose a danger but notes that the recent spate of e-cigarette lung-disease cases is a phenomenon not seen outside of

WAITING TO INHALE

18-24

MOST COMMON AGE RANGE OF E-CIGARETTE USERS

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL DRUG STRATEGY HOUSEHOLD SURVEY

149,000250,000 ESTIMATED NUMBER OF E-CIGARETTE USERS IN AUSTRALIA

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North America. “Many of the people who died were found to have contracted lung disease and to have purchased bootlegged products that contain THC cannabis oil,” he says. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly 80 per cent of patients with ‘EVALI’ (e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung illness) reported using THC e-cigarettes. These products, Shahab says, require additional oil-based chemicals in order to dissolve the THC. “If incorrect solvents are used then theoretically users could inhale these oils into their lungs, which are harmful.”

Nicotine e-liquids are not available for sale in Australia, meaning Australians have to look elsewhere to procure them. Eugene, a 29-year-old from Sydney, is one of the vast majority of e-cigarette users who were former smokers. He says he made the switch to his mango and berry flavoured e-liquid two years ago and gets around the importation restrictions by carrying it in from the UK. Jimmy, 30, from Sydney, sources his Juul pods from an under-the-counter source in the city’s eastern suburbs and says that although he isn’t “unconcerned” about the health risks, he considers it better than smoking.

Dr Rob Grenfell, Health and Biosecurity Director for the CSIRO, acknowledges the danger of bootlegged products in Australia.

“While it is illegal to sell e-liquids containing nicotine in Australia, there have been many cases where these liquids, many of which were imported from overseas, have been found to contain nicotine and other unknown and dangerous ingredients,” he says, adding that exploding devices and ingestion of e-liquids are of “serious concern”.

But Shahab believes anything is better than burning tobacco and that e-cigarettes, when regulated and controlled, will improve public health outcomes over time. “Studies show that earlier versions of e-cigarettes were found to be as effective as existing quit therapies like patches and gum,” he explains. “A study published earlier this year in the Journal of Medicine showed newer models, which are more effective at delivering nicotine, increase cessation after 12 months by 70 per cent compared to nicotine replacement therapies.” For every one per cent increase in the number of people who use

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e-cigarettes there was a 0.5 per cent increase in the number of people who stopped smoking cigarettes, he adds. “As a population trend that shows a correlation between e-cigarette use and quitting cigarettes.”

KNOW YOUR ENEMY Not everyone is buying the e-cigarettesas-cessation-aid argument. When asked if e-cigarette manufacturers are right to claim their products help people quit smoking, Simon Chapman, emeritus professor at the Sydney School of Public Health, cites a recent study from New Zealand. There, among test subjects given a mixture of aids, including e-cigarettes, almost all were still smoking six months later, he says.

“I cannot think of any prescribed drug used for any condition where the condition persisted after six months of use for 93 per cent of users, and where anything but the language of failure would be used about such an outcome,” Chapman says.

But for Aiden, a 29-year-old operations manager from Sydney, e-cigarettes did help him quit his 20-a-day, 12-year habit. He cites concerns about his health and the rising cost of tobacco as the main reason for his switch to electronic darts. He acknowledges he still worries about the effect his 500 puff-a-day habit (his e-cig has a counter) is having on his body, but it’s a risk he’s willing to take as it hasn’t obviously impacted his health, or indeed, his fitness.

“I have never felt healthier in the last two years,” he says. “Since quitting cigarettes, I have completed three marathons, countless half marathons, one half Ironman and I’m training for a full Ironman. When I smoked

cigarettes I couldn’t run 250 metres without having to stop.”

Shahab believes standardising and regulating e-cigarettes will help ensure men like Aiden have a better chance at quitting smoking. “I think the UK has got it right,” he says. “E-cigarettes are endorsed by the National Health Service as a cessation product to be used to stop smoking.

Regulation should ensure they are used and perceived as such.”

Grenfell advocates a cautious approach to reduce the dangers of e-cigarettes.

“Continued oversight, monitoring and regulation is needed to reduce the risk of serious injury from explosions and ingestion of e-cigarette fluids,” he says. But he remains more concerned by the dangers of tobacco, noting that while smoking rates have been declining since 1945, 14 per cent of adults still smoke with harmful consequences.

“Smoking-related illnesses remain a significant cause of death and disability in Australia,” he says.

Cloud-chasing Jamal is a rare example of a young man who didn’t previously smoke but now vapes. The truth is, while a growing body of research supports government concern about the risks of long-term damage to users, there is an argument that through careful regulation and use as a cessation aid, e-cigarettes are the lesser of two evils.

Shahab believes media and health bodies have a responsibility to put the spotlight back on tobacco. “It’s hard to make a product as dangerous as a cigarette,” he says. “They kill over 50 per cent of users over time. It’s a complete travesty they’re still available when something less harmful is being banned.”

QUIT THE STICKS PREPARE TO BE A QUITTER

GET SUPPORT

USE QUIT MEDICATIONS

Understanding when, where and why you vape will help you prepare for when you stop. Make plans to cope with any triggers, prepare for any withdrawal symptoms and acknowledge the stressors that may distract you from achieving your end goal.

Ask someone to be your sponsor during the early stages or surround yourself with people who are willing to support you on your journey. Lean on them for support and guidance when your will wavers.

Cessation aids can help make quitting easier and increase your chance of success. Speak to your doctor or a health professional for advice.

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Are you really a sweet and attentive partner – or something closer to an over-possessive creep? Rein in your controlling ways before, paradoxically, they send your life into mayhem

BY DANIEL WILLIAMS ILLUSTRATION BY 50s VINTAGE DAME ILLUSTRATIONROOM.COM.AU

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A JEALOUS GUY? Well, I’m better than I was. But reflecting on past conduct, shame rises like steam off a swamp. Where they involved my wife, numerous scenarios would make me anxious. Her going to parties alone.

Her being home later than she’d said she’d be. Her chatting with the buff neighbour.

Rationally, I was pretty sure none of these things meant anything. Emotionally, they put me on edge. The disconnect didn’t help: the combination of knowing I was being an idiot while still feeling threatened could transform me into a taciturn sack of negative energy for hours (sometimes days) on end.

My wife could read my mind and resented my sullenness, receiving it as an accusation, unjustified and insulting. She explained to me recently that my jealousy presented her with a choice: she could change her ways to pander to my hypervigilance, thus becoming something other than the woman she is; or she could stay true to herself, thereby risking my ire and ensuring a continuation of these spirit-crushing palls of silence.

One time, when we were able to discuss the issue calmly, I admitted to having a bit of a problem and suggested she accommodate it by, say, calling me when she’d decided to stay out later than she’d said she would. I thought that sounded reasonable; she thought it was controlling behaviour. Even today I might debate that point. What I wouldn’t question is how upset my brooding made her or how close she came to issuing an ultimatum.

In any relationship, possessiveness is corrosive. You probably don’t need telling that it’s a marker not of love but of insecurity – or something darker. If you have controlling tendencies, tackle them. Experts have a fair handle on what causes them and how to subdue them, even if they’re not always curable. The risks of doing nothing are high.

In the worst cases, outcomes can be nothing short of horrific.

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SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY Relatively speaking, my affliction was on the mild side. For an insight into men much further along the black road I speak with Jen Waite, who at the age of 25 was an actress-model supplementing her income by waitressing when a barman working in the same restaurant took a shine to her.

This guy, whom she calls “Marco” in her 2017 memoir, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing, exhibited textbook controlling tendencies in the seduction phase, according to Waite, who was too naïve to see what was happening.

Waite’s account goes like this. Marco, several years older than her, noticed this woman who’d just moved into a big city and “tractor-beamed” in on her, charming her with constant flattery and attention. Within six months they’d moved in together. After

a year they were engaged, and the wedding followed soon after.

“At the time I didn’t know what ‘love bombing’ was,” says Waite. To have a man so seemingly enraptured by her: “For a woman – I hate to stereotype – but that is really seductive.” Should she have regarded his instant ardour as a red flag? In hindsight, yes. “It’s not just disingenuous if it’s that intense so early. They’re keeping tabs in a way by staying in constant communication.

It seems sweet, innocuous – ‘How ya doin’?’

‘How are you?’ – but it can actually be a way for them to know where you are and who you’re hanging out with, and to be able to track your every step.”

Marco, in Waite’s opinion, was not merely controlling but an actual psychopath – cunning, manipulative, profoundly self-

CUS D RO VEL I SSI REHENDESTIO. EX EA DOLENT, VELES AS EOS MAGNAM

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SUSPICIOUS MINDS: DO YOU INTERPRET HER BENIGN INTERACTIONS AS ACTS OF BETRAYAL?

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centred and incapable of empathy. Just home from hospital after delivering their first and only child, Waite found an email that showed Marco was carrying on an affair and looking for an apartment for he and his mistress.

From that moment the marriage unravelled quickly. Too often, highly controlling men who suspect they’re about to be left can turn nasty. Driving that response isn’t so much any deep love for their partner – it’s not even clear these men can love. More typically, the crucial attachment is to the status afforded by the relationship. And for their fragile ego, the prospect of being dumped is a fundamental threat. In this instance, however, Waite – frazzled and suffering from post-partum anxiety – suspects Marco was tiring of her: “I wasn’t in any state to be ego-fuel anymore,” she says.

But there was one incident that, on reflection, chills her. They were in the kitchen and Waite was telling Marco she would have to move out – that she couldn’t care for a newborn while trying to process his farrago of lies. “He’d never so much as raised his voice before, but all of a sudden his eyes were black and he was screaming and coming toward me, backing me into a corner,” Waite says. At the time she didn’t believe Marco could be violent towards her. Looking back now, she’s not quite so sure.

POWER PLAYS When women are murdered, rarely is the killer a stranger to the victim. The Australian Institute of Criminology reports that between 2012-14, just three per cent (five of 184) of femicides fell into that category. The rest, ipso facto, involved a murderous acquaintance, friend, lover, relative. And were most or all of these killers also controlling types? We can say this much with certainty: the presence of extreme controlling-possessive tendencies is a risk factor for the heinous crime of murdering an intimate partner.

We know this because of the work of Jane Monckton Smith, a forensic criminologist at the University of Gloucestershire. After analysing hundreds of murders by men of women in the UK, she has identified eight steps to murder – eight stages that end in a man slaying his partner – and her findings have been published recently in the journal Violence Against Women.

What strikes you about the first four stages is that they appear, at first blush, to cover a lot of men. One – a history of stalking or abuse. (Sure, stalking sounds creepy, but does showing up at a café that is the haunt of an ex qualify as stalking?) Two – the relationship develops quickly: he’s looking for total and

“HE NEEDS TO CONTROL. AND NOT NOW AND AGAIN. ALL THE TIME, UNTIL IT’S ALMOST LIKE A JOB FOR HIM ” eternal commitment. Three – he displays controlling ways: “Who are those texts from?” “What do they say?” Four – something happens that challenges his sense of control: she threatens to leave him or he loses his job.

I ask Monckton Smith whether she believes a great many men are potential killers. Her answer: No! “For too many years I’ve heard this line that any man could be guilty of this kind of behaviour, that any man could turn into a killer,” she says. “And it’s just not true. It’s this certain type of very, very controlling man. He needs to control. And not now and again. All the time, until it’s become almost a job for him. That’s not your everyman. There are aspects to control that are in every man and every woman. But that’s not what we’re talking about.”

NATURAL BORN CHILLER? So, what are we talking about? Are control freaks insane? Are they born or made? And why do some merely sulk when they don’t get their way, while others procure a rifle?

Even the most controlling of men, psychologists say, are not, strictly speaking, mentally ill, although they may have some kind of personality disorder. Possessiveness is often traceable to childhood: something’s gone awry in the developmental phases of the mother-child union. Perhaps she didn’t hold the infant’s gaze often enough, for long enough, to forge in him a secure sense of self.

Never sure of his needs being met, a pervasive anxiety takes root.

“And he takes that insecurity into adulthood,” says Dr Yuliya Richard, a Sydneybased clinical psychologist who’s worked with scores of couples cracking under the burden of a partner’s obsession with control. “His selfesteem will be low and his anxiety high, and he will have difficulty tolerating uncertainty.”

In addition, his father, an uncle or older brother may have modelled manipulation as a means to an end.

Waite’s experience of a Prince Charming being unmasked is a familiar plot twist wherever a controlling mind is central to the story. Everything hums along nicely, even thrillingly, until the controller hears the

woman make her first attempt at erecting a boundary: “Thank you for buying concert tickets,” she tells him, “but I’m seeing my girlfriends tonight.” If he loses his temper, some women will be strong enough to push back (“You don’t run my life!”) – and astute enough to terminate the relationship on the spot. However, a feature of the controlling type is that he screens his targets, zeroing in on the vulnerable or diffident – women whose default response to hostility is to assume it is they who must have done something wrong to warrant this discombobulating eruption from their hitherto flawless suitor.

A warning: if you’re a guy who likes referring to your “psycho ex”, know that on that basis alone experts would advise your partner to run for the hills. “It’s a massive red flag,” says Monckton Hill. Why? Because it exposes a man who can’t face up to what he is, and so projects his own twisted make-up onto someone else. And not just anyone. Someone who used to love him.

As for the controlling man who turns physically violent, for him there will be something else, something pathological, mingling with those possessive instincts. It could be an impulse-control deficiency, which allows his urges to override his judgment.

Or antisocial personality disorder, a marker of which is an inability to see events from another’s perspective.

I ask Waite whether she thinks Marco was an everyman whose character was corrupted by some unfortunate set of circumstances, or whether he was born different.

“He came across as an everyman – absolutely,” says Waite. “I mean, that’s the thing I think people still don’t understand about psychopaths or sociopaths: they can be very charming and seemingly threedimensional. They can copy empathy and regular mannerisms. They can be really fun.

But I do believe in his case it wasn’t something that developed. I think he was born that way.”

Waite says Marco confided once, jovially, that he’d been expelled from multiple high schools as a teen. The story seemed funny at the time. But Waite feels now it pointed to innate antisocial tendencies, despite Marco coming from a loving family.

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ARE YOU THE ONE BEING CONTROLLED? If you’re a control freak, get help. If you share a bed with one, get out. Here are 10 signs you’ve married a monster

1. They criticise you in public Humiliating, yes. But as a decent person you don’t return serve – which they’re counting on.

2. They deny saying things you know for a fact they said It’s gaslighting, and it wears you down.

3. You’re spending half your life apologising to them Anything to keep the peace.

4. There’s one set of rules for you, another for them And the hypocrisy drives you spare.

5. They forever play the victim When they’re anything but.

6. They have a look that chills you to your core And know when to use it to get what they want.

7. They sneer at your opinions, belittle your achievements Because their power rises in inverse proportion to your sense of worthlessness.

8. They sabotage your friendships and slag off your dearest relatives No one should challenge them as the No. 1 in your life.

9. They accuse you of making decisions without consultation When, in fact, that’s what they do – all the time.

10. Their temper is volcanic But it erupts only at home.

Elsewhere, they wear a mask of composure.

SOURCE: David McDermott, expert in mind control and psychological abuse; decisionmaking-confidence.com

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UNDER THE THUMB There is, of course, another way of looking at domestic tyranny. Of flipping it. Because it’s not always the guy who’s the control freak.

Perhaps you’re married to one?

Sam (a pseudonym) was – for 15 long years.

He ruminates on that time while we chat on a bench at dusk in a park in Sydney’s inner west. He says this was his go-to place when his wife’s vile behaviour was pushing him towards a nervous breakdown.

“Needless to say, I should never have married her,” says Sam. “I was a fool. We met at uni and there was a connection of sorts. She was smart and she was interested in me, and that kind of knocked me off balance because I’d never had much success with girls. She could turn on the charm, but I wouldn’t say she never showed her cracks. It was more that I didn’t have the self-confidence to believe that someone else better would come along.”

Life became an exercise in walking on eggshells, Sam says, of doing whatever it took to appease her and head off her trademark bursts of incandescent rage. “I don’t know where to start trying to capture her nature,” he says. “I would say her defining characteristic was a disregard for truth. She lied constantly, about everything, although there was always one goal behind it all: to make herself look good – brilliant, hardworking, tolerant, stoic, generous – while often at the same time making me feel two inches tall. Materially, she had everything you could ever want but she was never satisfied and would always play the victim.

Behind their backs she would be vicious about my friends and family. She hated me having a life outside of her reach.”

One time, Sam says, he achieved something pretty momentous professionally and his family came from far and wide to help him celebrate. But his wife couldn’t bear that, so she organised a lunch for that same day with people who meant nothing to him and insisted the two of them go to that.

“Something else she couldn’t stand was my having a mobile phone. Think about it: I could talk to anyone I liked when she wasn’t around!

So, guess what happened? I kept ‘losing’ my phone. I mean, they kept disappearing. I thought I was going fucking insane. And she actively encouraged that idea. Then one day I found about seven of my phones hidden in one of her suitcases under the house. That’s the kind of thing that went on.”

Finally, Sam mustered the courage to leave his wife. He did so believing she would do everything she could to make the divorce as painful for him as possible – and she didn’t disappoint. But that’s the thing about break-

ups that feature a control freak: when the abused partner is a woman, she may fear for her safety; when the abused partner is a man, he fears something else.

“In my research, what male victims told me is that they weren’t frightened their controlling partner would kill them; they were more frightened that they would destroy them,” says Monckton Smith. “Destroy their reputation. Destroy their work. That shows the marked difference between male and female behaviours.”

Which isn’t to say uber-controlling women never kill their partner. They do. It happens.

But in slightly more than 80 per cent of cases of intimate-partner homicide, the perpetrator is a straight male, while gay men make up a proportion of the remainder. Fact: male control freaks are the more dangerous beast.

LEARNING TO LET GO “Of course, it’s treatable – in most cases,” says Matt Garrett, a Relationships Australia (RA) couples and family therapist in the NSW Hunter region. On that premise, RA runs a program, Taking Responsibility, for men who’ve been abusive in their relationships.

It’s a group course requiring once-a-week attendance for more than four months. The work is confronting and the dropout rate is high – about 50 per cent.

Garrett’s view is that even mild possessiveness, while rife, is not healthy and shouldn’t be thought of as normal. “Because that sanctions the controlling or violent behaviour and we don’t do that,” Garrett says.

“We want to build relationships around trust and respect.”

In Taking Responsibility, men learn how to regulate their emotions via deep breathing, meditation and positive self-talk. They’re walked through a history of misogyny and evolving societal values around women, and they have their eyes opened to the devestating impact of spousal abuse on children.

“We see men come through and we see them change,” says Garrett. They bring their possessiveness under control. They keep their fists in their pockets. But there’s a caveat: within a year, old ways of thinking too often re-emerge. “Can you improve? Yes! If you’re prepared to look at your past behaviour and take responsibility for it,” says Garrett.

“Will [the controlling tendencies] ever be erased? Probably not. How can you erase aspects of your personality, particularly if they’re formative?”

Step one in dealing with control issues is for the patient to accept he has them, therapists say. Again, not all men with this predisposition will recognise it in themselves.

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“BEHIND THEIR BACKS SHE WOULD BE VICIOUS ABOUT MY FAMILY. SHE HATED ME HAVING A LIFE OUTSIDE OF HER REACH” If they’re monitoring their partner, they reason, it’s because her conduct obliges them to. Clinical psychologist Richard says she stopped treating one patient who felt justified in assaulting his wife for watching TV instead of doing his ironing. “You change if you want to change,” she says. “That’s the starting point. Some cases are beyond my capacity as a therapist.”

In fact, many cases are in that category.

There’s no cure for psychopathy, for example.

No pill nor any amount of psychoanalysis can dismantle a personality disorder, so the hope with these men is that they’re not also inclined towards violence – which most of them aren’t.

Forensic criminologist Monckton Smith has visited prisons to interview intimatepartner killers. I ask for her impressions of these men, whether they appeared to be wired entirely differently to the rest of us.

“No. Not at all,” she says. “Personalitydisordered people are going to be somewhat different in the way they respond to things, but generally speaking they have the same moral code, just different methods of justifying what they do. “[Normal people] would think nothing besides self-defence would justify murder, but they [killers] use neutralising techniques that make it okay: ‘Society tells me I’m entitled to this, so how can she take it away?’ A lot of these men commit suicide after killing their partner, which shows you how important this winning, this status is to them.”

Five years after leaving Marco, Jen Waite is doing well. She’s emerged stronger from her ordeal, she says, harbours no blanket distrust of men, is dating again (tentatively; baby steps) and working on her second book, Survival Instincts – a work of fiction this time, though featuring an ultra-possessive psychopath. Write what you know, they say.

As for Sam, two years after escaping his own domestic prison, he’s seeing someone new who hasn’t “a single controlling atom in her body”.

“The only person you want controlling your life is you,” Sam says. To which we’d add the corollary: the only life you have a right to control is your own.

RELINQUISH CONTROL: AS THE SAYING GOES, IF YOU LOVE SOMEONE, SET THEM FREE . . .

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HOW

TO M

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A handy guide to acquiring and hips s n o i t a l e r l u f eaning m g n i n i a t s u s d n a e c n a t r dis e v o , e set m i d a e over t h ing m a g ra e v o n r eve Shu Pho t

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DO I HAVE ANY REAL FRIENDS? A scientific-ish analysis of one man’s social circle By

T

Richard Dorment

HERE IS SOMETHING a little sad about a

40-year-old man spending the better part of three months trying to figure out if he has any friends. Fine: it’s really sad. But earlier this year, after my social-media feeds started filling up with posts on a crisis in men’s friendship, I looked in the mirror and asked some hard questions. Do I have any real friends? Would I be happier with more friends? And, is this what I look like now?

So I did what any rational person would do. I interviewed 12 sociologists, psychiatrists, linguists and anthropologists about what it actually means to have and be a friend today. I read hundreds of pages of studies on how guys build and maintain friendships. Then I conducted my very own survey

“Do you consider me a friend?”

about what kind of friend I am. I randomly selected about 70 people from my contact list, sent them ten multiple-choice questions and promised them total anonymity in exchange for some brutally honest feedback. I started with a simple question – “Do you considermeafriend?”–andwentdeeperfromthere.

Theresultshelpedmeunderstandnotjustthestateof my own friendships but also what people get wrong (and right) about Male Friendship™. According to my own research and the work of others, turns out that most men do have friends – we’re just used to doing friendship in our own imperfect way. And as with everything else in our lives, we could probably benefit from getting better at it. Here are a few of my highly unscientific findings.

“How good of a friend would you consider me?”

1

Median score

You kind of know and vaguely like me

OF THE 70 OR SO PEOPLE who got the survey, 41 of them took time away from being bored at work or scrolling through Instagram to answer my questions and each and every one said they considered me a friend. Which is a strong, reassuring number. But then why, on a recent Saturday night when I had an extra ticket to a boxing match, did I struggle to find someone who felt like a good enough friend to sit ringside with for an evening of BS-ing between undercard fights?

Dr Keith N. Hampton, a sociologist at Michigan State University, walked me through the social behaviours that might have put me in this position. “Men tend to have larger, more diverse overall social networks than women,” he explains. We are also more likely to focus on “bridging” (building looser, more diverse networks that are helpful for getting ahead professionally), whereas women are better at “bonding” (building closer, more intimate relationships). Maybe I’ve been building bridges my whole life, sometimes at the expense of bonding. It would explain my boxing-match conundrum.

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THAT SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT: I know and like a bunch of people, but there aren’t many I feel close to (or who, evidently, feel close to me).

Still, three close friends feels like enough – I didn’t go to the boxing match alone – and it tracks with most of the research around friendship.

“Multiple studies have obtained the same result for the mean size of discussion networks,” says Dr Matthew Brashears, associate professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina. Those “discussion networks” – which roughly translates to people you talk to on a regular basis – are about three people for women and men, which makes me wonder about all those stories in my social feed about men having no friends.

The confusion seems to date back to 2004, when the General Social Survey reported a huge increase in social isolation, particularly among men – and since social isolation is tied to higher risks of depression, dementia, cardiovascular disease and early death, people sort of freaked out. This was the

Number of people who said they feel close to me: 3

10 We’re basically Hamish and Andy

survey that birthed 15 years’ worth of think pieces about the dangers of men having no friends. The only trouble with it is that it was probably wrong.

To measure social isolation, the GSS researchers asked survey respondents to name up to five people to whom they felt close enough to have “discussed important matters” over the past six months. The study never defined “important matters” – big life events, thoughts and feelings? – and Brashears and other researchers have since uncovered that most of the people who didn’t talk to anyone about important matters simply felt they didn’t have anything important to say. In other words: men had people to talk to – they just didn’t do it.

More recently, a survey of 1254 people found similar results. Its biggest conclusion wasn’t that men and women have different numbers of friends – almost half of both sexes said they have one to four close friends (just like me!) – it was that men are more likely to say they don’t really need friends . . . but hey, thanks for asking.

TACTICS

“What’s the thing you like least about me as a friend?”

T O O U N R E L I A B L E : 5% T O O S E L F I S H : 0% T O O C L O S E D O F F : 74% W E D O N ’ T H AV E A L O T I N C O M M O N : 21% THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of people said that I “can be too closed off and emotionally distant”. Which is a fair enough knock – I typically keep things to myself.

“Men are less comfortable expressing and sharin sociologist Dr Richard Schwartz. “They have

less of a vocabulary for emotional things and their friendships tend to be based on doing things together rather than sitting face-toface and having a conversation about intimate things.” This shoulder-to-shoulder model of friendship, as it’s known, is deeply rooted in the male experience. But when we rely too heavily on those transactional relationships, we miss the benefits of having emotional connections.

“It’s not just that it feels nice to talk about stuff with friends,” says Dr Mario Luis Small, a professor of sociology at Harvard. “There’s a ton of research documenting the importance of literally just talking. In one study about women with breast cancer, people were randomly assigned to talk or not talk about the issues they were facing. And the women g their th to talk through experience lived almost twice as many

months as the women who were told not to talk about it. Among men and women battling rheumatoid arthritis, among people who suffer from asthma, you see the same results.”

But there’s a downside to too much talking, says Dr Amanda J. Rose, a professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri. If friends spend all their time analysing problems instead of having fun, they might end up depressed and anxious – a psychological condition called co-rumination. “We should be aiming for that sort of sweet spot where we can interact and enjoy close relationships without getting too weighed down by taking on other people’s problems too strongly,” Rose says.

While a lot of us could benefit from g more intimate connections, it can be building hard to call a friend an nd say you want to see them, Schwartz says. “It’s a little embarrassing to want something in that way, but we all feel better and thrive bette er when we have a couple of relationship ps in which we feel we are actually known by the other person.”

So, 41 friends, three close friends, and only a few more sentencess to fit on this page. The takeaway for me and maybe m you: spend all the time you want drin nking beer or playing basketball with your frriends, but try to talk more. Not too much. JJust a little. And if you can’t find a friend you feel comfortable with, find a therapist. Who knows? k After some time on the couch, you may be ready to open up a bit more over bee ers or basketball and forge a handful of dee eper, richer friendships.

Last time I checked, everyone could use another friend.

“Me en are less comfortable e expressing an nd sharing emo otions than wo omen are”

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WINNING AT FRIENDSHIP

Can gaming keep men connected?

By

T

Sean O’Neal

HE TRADITION STARTED,

Matthew recalls, not long after he left his university friends behind to attend law school. Once a week, the friends started meeting up virtually, first through co-op titles like Resident Evil 5 and then, as their displaced group swelled, rounds of Dungeons & Dragons.

Brian, 53, shares a similar story: after graduation, he and his friends kept in touch by playing Halo 2, meeting weekly for nearly a decade and a half. Although one friend has more or less fallen off, Brian and his mate Greg still keep the standing invite, using voice chat to fill each other in on major life events, all while protecting humankind from annihilation.

Online gaming also gave Lucas, 27, the pretext he needed to reach out to guys he’d once spent nearly every afternoon with, huddled around a Nintendo 64.

He looked up their old usernames on his PlayStation and, through games like Rocket League and Fortnite, managed to rekindle many of his old friendships.

Gaming, he says, reduced some of the inherent awkwardness of having those conversations over the phone.

For millions of men, this is now part of the lure of multiplayer video games, which

A BRIEF HISTORY OF YOUR NEXT FRIENDSHIP How long does it take to make a new friend?

Check the timeline

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around 25 per cent of all adults either played or watched in 2016 and 2017. Half of those people reported that “friendship” was one of their main reasons for playing, whether it was finding new relationships or keeping tabs on real-life friends. It’s a growing phenomenon that puts to rest the stereotype of the gamer as isolated and socially maladjusted.

“It’s how I found out [Greg] was getting married again,” Brian says. “He told me he wouldn’t be able to play for the next few weeks because he was going on his honeymoon.”

These days, Matthew, now 35, says it’s just one friend he keeps up with through gaming, but it’s more regular than before.

He estimates at least 25 per cent of those sessions are spent checking in.

“There are some friends I was very close with but don’t see very often, and when I do see them, I feel like the entire time we have to catch up on everything that’s happened in their lives,” Matthew says.

“And I don’t feel that way with him.”

Granted, these may not sound like the strongest friendships to begin with. If you can casually announce something as life-altering as your own wedding while waiting for a screen to load, are

A 2018 STUDY in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that people became “good/best” friends after 200 hours of interaction. “There are ways to help new friendships along,” says Dr Geoffrey Greif, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. “There are also red flags to look for. Your gut will tell you a lot.”

you really connecting? But this question isn’t specific to video games – it’s the defining existential crisis of our age, in which we spend more time interacting with one another’s social-media profiles than we do with the far less curated people behind them. Games are just the latest manifestation of this kind of virtual friendship.

There’s already debate around whether friendships that exist primarily online can ever feel as meaningful as those in person. Evolutionary psychologist Dr Robin Dunbar is sceptical online interactions can forge lasting bonds and believes they may even hinder the social skills needed to make connections in real life.

Others, like Dr Geoffrey Greif, author of Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships, are (slightly) more optimistic. “If somebody is lonely and they find a way of communicating with people around video games and that helps them, then that’s a good thing,” he says.

Still, Greif adds that if someone spends all of their time talking online, he’d advise them to cut it down to 90 per cent and use that remaining 10 per cent to find more face-to-face interactions.

Whatever your opinion, perhaps it stands to reason that we should adjust our attitudes about the relationships you can have within video games. When I suggest to Brian that some people might not consider his mostly online friendships “real”, he openly scoffs.

“That sounds silly,” Brian says. “People bond over all sorts of stuff. If we bonded over fishing, is that not real? All you’re doing is drowning worms and drinking.

Is that not a real friendship?” In other words, virtual friendship can be as real as you make it. And suffice it to say, it sure beats the alternative.

HOURS 1–2

HOURS 3–10

HOUR 24

THE HANDSHAKE

THE CONNECTION

THE FIRST TEXTS FOR SHITS AND GIGGLES

No matter where you meet, there’s ample room for the initial good-to-meet-you small talk. The next level will happen or it won’t, so don’t sweat it too much, says Greif.

“This stage will establish a lot: what kind of work does this guy do, do we talk the same language, do we like golf versus chess versus hitting the gym?”

Greif says.

Here, you’ll notice possible deal breakers like bigotry, misogyny and mismatched politics. What will you tolerate? Greif’s litmus test: “Do I like myself when I’m around this person?”

TACTICS

“People bond o “ over all sorts of s stuff.

If we bonded o over fishing, is that not rreal?”

+ HOURS 30–33

HOUR 48

HOUR 60

HOUR 80

HOUR 94

THE FIRST BRO DATE

THE FIRST CONFESSION

THE FIRST FAVOUR

THE FIRST DATE WITH PARTNERS

THE CROSSROADS

Women tend to thrive in face-to-face scenarios (wine and talking), while men do well in shoulder-to-shoulder situations, says Greif. Grab a beer, but watch or do something, too.

When do you reveal deep personal information? You really need to read the room, Greif says. “You may have to make the first outreach, and that carries risk.”

Where’s the favour on the pain scale? Asking a friend to help you move isn’t a character test, but posting bail kind of is.

It’s a good indicator, says Greif, but remember that you don’t have to force everyone in your life on one another. Don’t punish yourself and your mates for being multifaceted.

If you’ve made it this far, you probably have a legit friend. If it’s mutual, you’re golden. But if it’s him and not you, you may have to distance yourself.

HOUR 200 AND BEYOND

THE FUTURE Relax. You’re now free to ask your mate to do the airport pick-up.

January 2020 83

“I GOT SOBER AND FOUND A NEW KIND OF FRIENDSHIP.”

Around my dad and my drinking buddies, I learned to ignore my feelings. Then I discovered how to connect with men in a way I never could before

By Sean Hotchkiss

W

HEN I GOT SOBER IN 2017,

my new AA sponsor, a tall, goofy painter named Kip, invited me to a men’s meeting in the basement of a church. I arrived early, shook some hands and sat nervously in the circle of folding chairs.

Soon the room was filled: 25, maybe 30 men of all ages. The space boomed with their laughter. There were hairy, macho men sitting with thin, tattooed hipsters, and suited business types grabbing coffee and cookies for old men with walkers.

There was even a priest who sat in the corner. Everyone called him Father.

It took me about five minutes to realise how scared I was of all of them.

Each man in the circle had a few minutes to tell a bit of his story and my heart thumped as my turn approached. At one point, my vision went blurry. All I wanted was to think of something I could say that would impress these guys. Let them know I was okay, that I was one of them. An epic war story maybe, or a joke.

My turn came. Fifty or so eyes affixed to me.

“I’m Sean,” I said. “I’m an alcoholic.”

My throat went dry. Every good line I’d come up with disappeared. And I panicked.

When I think of being a kid, I think of riding around in the passenger seat of my dad’s old Toyota 4Runner. My dad lived to drive – 60,000–80,000km a year.

His carbon footprint rivalled those of small airlines. Even a Sunday-morning coffee-and-doughnut run became a grand adventure of loading up the dog, rolling down the windows, turning up the stereo and accelerating our way toward glory.

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was classic rock or country music to sing along to and there was proud proselytising from my father, who was alone with a captive audience (seven-year-old me) and no one to tell him he was wrong.

One thing I learned in the truck is that I was never right. Maybe I was just seeing things the wrong way. Maybe I could just be a bit more flexible.

Me about my father’s new wife: “I don’t think Barbara likes me.”

Dad: “Aw, buddy, of course she does. You just have to do exactly what she says. You know what Papa used to say: ‘You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.’ ” Me: “I’m scared about the science project. Do you really think we’ll be able to build a rocket?”

Dad: “Scared? C’mon! You’re talking to the 1965 Boy Scout science-fair champ right here.”

Eventually I stopped speaking at all, because my dad – a longtime human-resources consultant – would deftly swat away my every concern with a very particular brand of PR juju. His manipulation was so subtle it took me 30 years to realise I didn’t actually have any of my own feelings.

Instead, I learned to be a nice guy. To shut my mouth, to mask all that vinegar with honey. And it ended at the bottom of a bottle. Because when you silence your true feelings, you get overwhelmed.

You start living for others and denying yourself. And ultimately you get really, really angry. Some men indulge in their anger – they’re the guys you see bullying the barista, picking fights on Twitter – but if you’re like me, you end up turning that anger on yourself and it later becomes hopelessness. My dad wasn’t spared, either. His own depression culminated

in his suicide in 2005. I toasted his death and kept on going.

So I joined AA, raw and hurting and surrounded by men who I’d already decided had the potential to injure me. I simultaneously wanted to punch them in the face and have them pat me on the head and say, “I love you, son”. It was all pretty head-spinning. So what wound up coming out of my mouth in that first meeting was a cry for help.

“I just feel like the new kid on the playground,” I said, my eyes never leaving the tile floor.

After the group, a guy my age came up and put his arms around me.

TACTICS

“I didn’t have to be nice, and no one tried to change me.

In fact, these guys seemed to accept me exactly as I was”

“I’m no good at any of this stuff, either,” he said.

His name was Alexander, and he became one of my first sober mates, who I would learn were very different from the types of friends I’d had before. Recovery bonds you quickly with people. You cut through the garbage and get to the kinds of vulnerabilities that social-research professor Dr Brené Brown writes about – and it transforms you.

I’d always had a lot of male friends. We shared common interests, connected over sports, music or our careers. We got fucked up together after work or did

cocaine on the weekends. But the relationships never went much deeper.

To go deep, I turned to the feminine.

When I was a kid, my mum was the one who listened, so I shared my feelings with women. My 20s are a graveyard of women who started as friends, became friends with benefits and then turned into strangers when things got too intimate.

Later, I began opening up to gay men I met working in fashion. Beautiful friendships developed, but something was missing.

I had to risk real connections with other straight men.

Shortly after I joined AA, my therapist recommended Robert Bly’s seminal book Iron John, which shed some more light on my daddy issues. I learned that looking to women for the acceptance I’d sought from my dad was futile – like going to the dentist for a triple bypass.

I needed to go through the discomfort of making male friends who I felt would try to deny me my feelings, as my father had.

I took a hiatus from dating and hung out exclusively with dudes. Initially, I felt all my adolescent pangs of acceptance bristling.

Texting Ray to grab coffee or chatting up Jarrett after a meeting made me feel as vulnerable as I did when enduring any female courting process.

Over the next few months, I went to Kip’s painting studio to play guitar. I took boxing classes with Ben, hiked with Mark, geeked out on Free Solo with Bruce, and talked dharma over green tea with Danny. Slowly, I began to build intimacy with men. I didn’t have to be nice and no one tried to change me. In fact, these guys seemed to accept me exactly as I was.

Alexander and I put together a group of

sober guys who would meet to run trails in the park. The runs were hot, dusty and gratifying, but the best part was just hanging out in the parking lot afterward, shooting the shit. It reminded me of being a kid again, before booze, before puberty, before all the confusion started.

As the wound around my dad healed and I stayed sober, I started taking more risks. I enrolled in grad school and early on, I noticed a tall guy with a long face who looked familiar.

Nate had been one of my best friends 30 years ago.

We’d lost touch when my mother moved to an adjacent town, but we quickly bonded all over again. Turns out we had some things in common: addict fathers and the subsequent pain around male relationships.

He was a spiritual guy who lived in an ashram in LA and I went to visit him one day. We talked for four hours, covering the entire 30 years we’d spent apart.

To talk through my experience with someone else who grew up like me, in a tough part of town, was healing on a new level. He didn’t even have to say, “I get you”. I just saw it on his face.

Nate was a talented songwriter and he agreed to play me something he’d been working on.

He sang of men growing and evolving together – of conquering fears and being “broken wide open”.

On the trip home from the ashram that night, I cried. Like sloppy, clownfaced Michael Jordan cried when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. It was the kind of male behaviour that never would have flown in my dad’s truck. But I was driving now.

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HOW TO TRAIN YO R

O ME R Y 86

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MIND

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A “BAD” MEMORY. THERE ARE ONLY UNTRAINED ONES. SO WHAT EXACTLY TONES OUR GREY MATTER? EXPERTS HAVE A LOT TO SAY ABOUT THAT BY

GINNY GRAVES

ILLUSTR ATION BY

D

EDMON DE HARO

r Alexandra Nicole Trelle, a memory r searcher at Stanford University, is in the middle of explaining why dozens of research centres around the country are everishly trying to understand the most effective ways to prevent big memory problems. “There are huge studies in parts of Europe as well, so the scope is really . . .” she says, leaving dead air where more words hould be.

“Internat onal?” I fill in.

“It’s an international effort,” she says.

It’s a minor lapse, Trelle’s inability to come up with the word international – nothing like the time I blanked on my next-door neighbour’s name when I was introducing her to friend. But the fallibility and fragility of memory are precisely why so many incredible minds are striving to find effective ways to protect and even augment one of the brain’s most vital functions.

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MY MEMORY BOOST 10 J Q K A

There’s some seriously Black Mirror stuff in the works. Neuroscientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, for instance, recently completed the first-ever human trial of an implant that delivers electrical pulses to the brain’s memory centre – it enhanced participants’ recall by 37 per cent. A team at MIT improved memory in mice by exposing them to a combination of flashing strobe lights and a rapid clicking sound. Even more sci-fi, researchers at both MIT and the French National Centre for Scientific Research successfully inserted false memories into the brains of mice – a feat that proves the malleability of memory. And Facebook and Elon Musk are (separately) working on braincomputer interfaces that may allow our minds to one day merge with digital memory banks.

The scientific frenzy is driven in no small part by an everyday mystery that, odds are, worries you too: why do so many of us who almost certainly don’t have diagnosable memory problems forget the name of the movie we watched last week or stride purposefully into the living room, then stand there, slack-jawed, unable to remember what we came for?

My search for answers led me to the Stanford Memory Lab, where Trelle, 29, who has been studying the inner workings of memory for the past eight years, agreed to show me around. I expected to find a sterile-looking facility with dozens of beeping machines or at least a beaker or two of mysterious liquid. But the “lab” is a nondescript room with a couple of computers and a TV – a blandness that belies the significance of the research taking place there. Over the past decade, hundreds of study subjects have submitted to hours of memory testing while lying inside the high-res MRI machine tucked away in an adjacent room, allowing scientists to peer into their brains and watch what happens as they form, and then try to retrieve, memories.

“We set up the MRI to optimise our ability to measure what’s happening in the hippocampus, an area of the brain that’s critical for memory,” says Trelle, the study author. “We can actually see very distinct neural signatures when people successfully remember versus when they forget.”

The memory tests are sensitive enough to pick up subtle changes in recall – some of which are due to the gradual dulling of memory with age. Others may indicate something more serious, like the proteinbuild-up calling cards of Alzheimer’s. By watching memory lapses in action and comparing people’s performance over time, Trelle and her colleagues hope they can identify the early signs of memory decline and uncover its causes, as well as clues about how to prevent it.

It’s unsettling to imagine scientists peering at your brain as it flounders. “What causes those lapses?” I ask Trelle. “Why can’t I remember the name of the restaurant I went to last week but can still recall the look on my friend’s face a decade ago when she told me she was getting divorced?”

It’s pretty simple, she says. “When you don’t remember, it’s because you weren’t paying attention. Memory and attention are inextricably linked.” If you’re only halfheartedly attending to new information, it doesn’t get deeply encoded in your brain, so it’s more likely to blow away like loose topsoil on a windswept plain.

That’s normal, by the way. It happens to everyone, from execs who are killing it to Jeopardy! savant James Holzhauer. When it comes to memory, there’s a vast range of normal, but wherever you are on the spectrum, you can make it better. Scientists like Trelle go as far as saying, maybe a little hyperbolically, that unless there’s a real problem, there’s no such thing as a “bad” memory; there are just trained and untrained ones.

IF YOU’RE HALFHEARTEDLY ATTENDING TO NEW INFORMATION, IT’S MORE LIKELY TO BLOW AWAY LIKE LOOSE TOPSOIL 88

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A DR ALEX MULLEN, three-time winner of the World Memory Championships, a decathlon of memory skills One of the ways I try to keep my memory in shape is by memorising the order of a deck of cards each day. I wouldn’t be a true memory competitor if I didn’t!

The challenge: we live in a world with more distractions than ever, where pings and chirps vie relentlessly for our attention.

(Really, when was the last time any of us fully paid attention to anything?) In fact, our cultural distractibility may be the main reason more and more of us have the disquieting sense that our memory is failing. Fortunately, researchers have begun exposing the cost of our inattentiveness – and have some ideas for keeping our brains on track.

Being “on” turns memory off Some of the best insight into what we’re up against these days is being revealed at the Stanford Memory Lab, where researchers have devoted considerable time to seeing if and how modern life – specifically, media multitasking – is messing with our memory.

“The human brain, by design, can only focus on one thing at a time,” says Dr Anthony Wagner, the Memory Lab’s director.

Think you’re a proficient multitasker?

That’s like saying you’re a good drunk driver.

Sure, it feels like you’re masterfully juggling two or more things at once. But your attention is actually flitting, like a hummingbird, from one thing to another, with predictable consequences. Wagner and his team at

MIND

SUCCESS, IN RED. MEMORY IS REALLY COMPLICATED: THIS FMRI DATA FROM THE STANFORD MEMORY LAB SHOWS THE NUMEROUS AREAS OF THE BRAIN (FROM TWO DIFFERENT ANGLES!) THAT ARE RECRUITED DURING SUCCESSFUL MEMORY RETRIEVAL.

Stanford discovered that heavy media multitaskers score lower on tests of working memory, the brain’s temporary scratch pad, where we store information about what we’re doing in the moment. And that may have long-term effects. Multitasking may also interfere with the ability to encode and retrieve long-term memories.

Checking Instagram while binge watching isn’t the only tech-related reason your conversation is increasingly peppered with phrases like “what’s his name” and “that movie with Chris Hemsworth”. Indeed, there’s a growing list of potential ways our favourite digital tools may subtly chip away at our recall.

Simply knowing that you can check Google for information you’ve just learned, for instance, makes you less likely to remember it. Typing notes instead of writing them in longhand may reduce your ability to recall the material. And reading text solely on screens, which we tend to skim more than immerse ourselves in, may undermine your capacity to remember what you read. (RMIT researchers may have a solution; they’ve developed a difficult-to-decipher typeface that demands extra concentration. Called, memorably, Sans Forgetica, it significantly bolsters recall.)

There’s even some evidence that taking pictures of your experiences blurs your memory of them. Call it the Selfie Effect.

“There’s mounting evidence that when we engage with technology while we’re trying to experience something, it short-circuits the memory-encoding process and diminishes our ability to recall the experience later,” says Dr Jason Chein, director of Temple University’s Brain Research & Imaging Center.

Load your memory right Even in our tech-tethered world, most of us have the potential to remember far more than we actually do. Ironically, this is where technology may help save us. For instance, Dr Adam Gazzaley, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and his research partners have created and published research on MediTrain, an app-based meditation program designed to improve your ability to regulate your attention and tune out distractions, just as meditation has been doing for thousands of years. Until the program is available in another year or two, regular meditation and brain-training games may help, too.

(See page 86.)

Ultimately, we need to adapt our use of technology to our brain, rather than the other way around. That means not just using tech programs to enhance our focus but making room for nondigital methods that do so as well. “You can dramatically improve your attention ten- to 15-fold,” says Dr Murali Doraiswamy, director of Duke University’s Neurocognitive Disorders Program. His research shows that although memory and attention peak in our mid-tolate 20s, we can improve, regardless of age.

“After 25 sessions of cognitive training, 40-year-olds may outperform untrained 20-year-olds – but it takes effort,” he says.

By “effort”, he means doing things like turning off your devices so you can actually listen, challenging your intellect and spending hours immersed in a single task like reading an actual book. Yes, you’ve heard that before, but experts like Doraiswamy keep repeating it, because we’re not getting the message.

Training your attention is a big piece of

COURTESY STANFORD MEMORY LAB (2)

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the remember-more equation. If you sit in a meeting without making an effort to retain what’s being said, roughly 50 per cent of what you hear will disappear in a day or two and 90 per cent will be gone within a month, warns Doraiswamy. The same goes for books, movies, conversations. Poof. To remember something, you need to remind your brain it’s important. Take notes after meetings or when you finish a book. Explain interesting things you’ve picked up during the day to others. At the very least, think through information after you hear it. By giving it as much richness and context as possible, the pieces of it are more likely to be distributed throughout your mind’s memory network – the neural equivalent of hitting your brain’s “save button”.

Deep memory encoding – cementing information into your mind so you can recall it months or years from now – works best when you relate the information to existing memories or knowledge in a meaningful way, says Trelle.

Which explains why my friend’s divorce details are still so vivid and why nearly everyone remembers what they were doing on 9/11.

So next time you meet someone you want to remember, don’t just repeat their name. Try to find a shared interest. Make a connection. By doing so, you’ll encode the name more deeply into your brain’s existing web of memories, and it will become part of your personal lexicon.

“In the memory world, we call this depth of processing, but it’s really just being curious and interested about new people or places or ideas or information,” says Trelle.

And being curious and interested does more than bolster your memory. It makes you better at life.

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MIND

THE FINE ART OF FORGETTING It was one of the worst things I had ever seen, but three months later I’d all but forgotten about it. Why?

BY BILL GIFFORD

I HAD ALMOST reached my exit when the traffic suddenly slowed. It was Remembrance Day, and I was annoyed because it meant I would probably be late to a BBQ. Then I heard the sound of skidding tyres. A motorcycle careened into view on my left, out of control. It bounced off two cars before it tipped over and slid under the bumper of a car just in front of me. I remember feeling relieved that both riders were wearing helmets and long pants

WHERE TO GET EXTRA BRAINPOWER

Caffeine

A shot of espresso Dr Doraiswamy before an important weighs in on meeting could whether today’s help you absorb most popular key facts. It’s a stimulant, which memory boosters can improve certain work or not types of memory.

MOST POWERFUL

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Intermittent fasting

Crossword puzzles

Think of this as the opposite of a food coma. Fasting may help release specific brain chemicals that protect memory networks.

These can help you concentrate and recall words – which makes you better at these puzzles, not at remembering other things.

Music making

Sleep

Jamming requires focus. Singing may be even better.

Spoken and sung words use different pathways; it’s like having back-up cell phone towers.

Your brain’s like a librarian at night, archiving the day’s “books”. Without that, Doraiswamy says, “you can’t make sense of the library the next day”.

MY MEMORY BOOST

and that it had all happened at such a slow speed. Everything was going to be okay.

Except it wasn’t. “You’re trying to kill me,” the bike’s passenger wailed, as her friend (who’d been driving it) pulled her out from under the bike.

He was moving quickly, urgently, like he knew something was wrong. She stood up and swayed as two more people appeared and steadied her, guiding her toward the side of the road. She was wearing jeans and a white top.

I got out of my car and saw that there was a white stump of bone and bloody flesh where her right hand should have been. Fuck. In the distance, we could already hear sirens.

For days afterward, whenever I closed my eyes, all I could see was this poor woman’s bloody arm. I heard her plaintive cry, again and again. And most of all, I remembered that powerless feeling, that there was nothing any of us could do to fix her. It seemed like it wouldn’t ever go away, even after I burned through two therapy sessions talking about it. “That’s textbook PTSD,” my therapist said. But then, three months later, I was trying to think of bad things I’d experienced,

and the motorcycle crash did not even come to mind. That was weird. The crash was one of the worst things that I had ever witnessed outside of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Three months later, I’d all but forgotten about it. Why? Memory is tricky and, as any prosecutor (or criminal-defence lawyer) knows, highly unreliable. It fools us, but sometimes that’s to our advantage. For example, I still mourn my late dog, whom I put down when I was 16, as a sweet old girl, when in fact she was a complete pain in the arse most of the time. Yet I have only vague, fuzzy memories of her twin brother, whom (sorry) I loved much more. The dog of my heart, he died unexpectedly and too young. It’s as if my brain is trying to protect me from that traumatic episode, the way scar tissue makes the site of a wound tougher than the surrounding skin.

“Our brains are basically forgetting machines,” says Dr Tracy Wang, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Wang recently published a study that used brain imaging and machine

learning to discover that when we want to forget an image, the best course is neither to try to ignore it nor to fixate on it; her study found that images that were “moderately activated” became most susceptible to forgetting.

And we can actually expend more brain energy trying to shake those memories than we do on memories that we wish to retain.

“Your brain has to figure out what’s important and what’s not,” she says. “If you remembered everything, you would have difficulty going through life.

But you need some memories to inform future behaviour.”

Just not all of them. Forgetting is critical. “Imagine a football game in which players have to ‘forget’ plays in order to adopt new ones,” says Wang.

“Or dancers learning new choreography need to forget outdated old choreography. In each case, forgetting must be intentional in order to overlay new information.”

Memory, in other words, is both selective and adaptive; we retain information that might help or protect us while discarding most of the rest.

In the weeks after the accident, I would replay it almost every night when I tried to sleep or

DR DANIEL AMEN, psychiatrist, brain-disorder specialist, and competitive table-tennis player My favourite activity is table tennis, the world’s best brain sport. [He has been nationally ranked, by the way.] It’s highly aerobic, sparking the growth of new neurons in the brain’s main memory centre. It also boosts blood flow to the brain and low blood flow is the number-one brain-imaging predictor that a person will develop Alzheimer’s disease.

whenever I drove on the freeway.

I came to terms with it, and that’s the key to forgetting something you don’t want to remember.

That poor woman’s life will never be the same, and I feel bad for her. But I didn’t know her, and the accident did not affect me directly. It was just a thing that I had seen, and while the image is slowly fading away in my mind, I will never forget its “adaptive” lesson: don’t ride a motorcycle on metropolitan freeways.

Sugar

Fish oil

Cocoa

CBD

Ginkgo biloba

Ginseng

Glucose is your brain’s preferred fuel, so a dose of sugar may improve your memory immediately. But it gets fed just fine with healthier fare.

Omega-3 fatty acids in fish help build grey matter and improve whitematter integrity.

Whether that helps your memory?

Not clear.

Memory improvement has been measured with 500mg of cocoa extract in recent studies; its anti-inflammatory effect may be why.

The trendy weed-derived ingredient could have calming effects, but it likely won’t help (or hurt) your memory.

This extract might help prevent dementia in older folks, but there’s no evidence that it improves a young person’s memory.

Some claim this herb can boost your memory and energy, but studies have not proved either, and it could cause health problems.

SORT OF POWERFUL LEAST POWERFUL

January 2020

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MIND

STRENGTH-TRAIN YOUR...

WHAT WAS I SAYING?

Scientists don’t fully understand yet how brain-training apps improve your focus and memory. One thing the apps can do is boost your confidence in your memory, which can enhance your mental performance in other aspects of your life, too, says brain-health expert Dr P. Murali Doraiswamy. The most popular picks:

BRAINHQ

PEAK

LUMOSITY

ELEVATE

If you love to learn about the research behind your habits, this brain-training app is for you. BrainHQ shares the science behind each of its 29 exercises. One drawback: unlike Lumosity, which gives comprehensive tutorials at the start of each game, BrainHQ sets you loose without a whole lot of direction. You might have a rough start to your first few games before you get the hang of things.

If you value healthy competition, consider Peak. The app allows you to compare your scores on more than 45 brain-training tests with those of friends and even other people in your profession. As you get better at each game, you’ll move up in status from Novice all the way to Graduate. If you get a little too competitive, Peak also offers relaxing tasks to help you stay calm and focused.

The OG of brain training serves up five daily game workouts for your mind. If that’s not enough, you can choose among the 60-plus other games, more than any of these popular apps. This combined with performance data that helps contextualise how you’re doing is what makes Lumosity shine.

Caveat: some games can seem tedious.

Marketed to execs as a way to improve communication and analytical skills, Elevate claims to have memory benefits as well. The app’s 35-plus games are designed to boost your abilities in five areas: speaking, reading, writing, listening, and math. You get to customise what you’d like to improve (e.g., focus while reading or retaining more of what you read).

BrainHQ.com; $14 per month for full access

Peak.net; $35 per year for the unlimited-game Pro version

Lumosity.com; some games are free, $15 per month for access to all games and tools

ElevateApp.com; $45 per year after a free two-week trial

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MY MEMORY BOOST

7

THIS MAY BE WHY YOUR MEMORY SUCKS

7

It might be worse than your parents’ at your age because you’re . . .

BINGE DRINKING.

Blackouts not only block your memory of that night; they can affect your mind forever. When Yale researchers scanned people’s brains, they saw that the heaviest drinkers had reduced activity in areas related to spatial working memory, the kind that helps you find a shop you’ve been to before.

SCR AMBLING ALL THE TIME . You rush from work

to pick up your kid from basketball and continue at a frenetic pace until your head hits the pillow. “If you’re always rushing and not giving anything deep, deliberate thought or making deep connections, then you don’t form good memories,” says Doraiswamy.

7

77

7

7

SKIPPING THE GYM.

Cardio workouts are helpful, but so is strength training, says Dr Steven Masley, author of The Better Brain Solution. His research on older people showed that boosting the number of push-ups they could do by at least 10 percent raised scores on cognitive-function tests by 18 per cent.

SHAAN PATEL, founder of the test-tutoring program Prep Expert, who earned a perfect score on his SATs My seventh-grade science teacher told us that if you see something seven times, you remember it. I don’t know if this research is true, but I made it the basis for my memorisation strategy in high school – I repeat to myself what I need to remember seven times – and it has worked ever since.

O TEST YOUR M E M R Y

Since how well you remember is related to how well you pay attention, take this unscientific but revealing test.

See how much you noticed about the spot illustrations we sneaked onto the past six pages. No flipping back (yet)!

2 3

A

Hummingbird

B

Elephant

C

Squirrel

D

There are grey heads in that story?

The cards in the box on page 88 form: A

Three of a kind

B

A royal flush

C

A pair

D

No winning combination

Look at the phone number in the grey head on page 89 for 30 seconds, then flip back here. The phone number is: A

643-975-8309

B

643-975-8039

C

643-935-8039

D

I outsource all my phone-number remembering to Siri.

4 5

The battery level in the grey head on page 92 is: A

Panic-inducingly low

B

Almost fully charged

How many boosters on pages 90 and 91 can really increase your memory power ?

A

Uh...none that I’m currently doing

B

One

C

Three

D

Five

ANSWERS: 1) A; 2) B; 3) B; 4) A; 5) D

1

The creature that appears in the illustration of a grey head in the lead story about how your memory works is a/an:

How did you do?

GOT ALL FIVE RIGHT?

THREE OR FEWER?

Your memory is awesome.

Pay more attention.

January 2020 93

ROCK OF AGES: WEIR’S PHYSIQUE HAS STOOD THE TEST OF TIME.

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MUSCLE

he

quietly been an icon of wellness for his e s a h R I E W B BO ntire c ar u c r s r i e h n o t t d g a i e g, playi lD u f e t a r ee G e h t d ng th founde r, f reero h O M N M w A C o C r M ks out w ou S S O R m . s d n a b t n i e r rs fe th a w ho le ge w nd sw –o fm us ic an

e ifnh od ss tw ne

ith

d

fit PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTAAN FELBER

There’s a lot going on here.

Bob Weir, 71-year-old founding member of the Grateful Dead, is running around Jiffy Lube Live amphitheatre in Bristow, Virginia, on a 35° day in June. “We’ll start off by going for a trot,” he said a few minutes ago, after stepping out of his tour bus wearing a sleeveless tee, capri-length sweats and toe running shoes. He looks like a Civil War general who’s really into CrossFit. Five minutes into this run, he’s already covered a lot of ground: how to incorporate his Apple Watch into his workouts, how the shoes changed his life, how he meditates on tour. But right now he wants to tell a little story about his ol’ pal Rolling Thunder.

“I got hit with a chop block when I was a defensive end in high school. My ankles were weak for years,” says Weir, in full canter now, starting to sweat a little. “So when I became an exercise junkie in my 20s, I used to turn my ankles a bunch. Anyway, I had a friend, a Shoshone healer. Rolling Thunder. I used to see him work on people with an owl’s wing and cedar smoke.

I said, ‘Chief, would you consider doctoring my ankles?’ He stood me up and said, ‘When you’re running, have you ever thought about looking down at where you put your feet?’ ” Here he pauses for effect.

“And I haven’t turned my ankle since.”

January 2020 95

Everything Weir talks about during this and the other conversations we’d have over the next few weeks would involve the powerful themes found in that mildly amusing vignette.

style. Twenty-second sprint, 20-second walk. It’s back, he began his trotting habit, going for easily a 45° incline – a daunting angle for anyone, a run in whatever neighbourhood his tour much less a septuagenarian. Bob stands there bus happened to be parked in: the middle of in what seems like ‘Should I actually do this?’

Detroit, beside the Great Pyramid, wherever. contemplation. Turns out he’s just waiting for And there’s always been football his Apple Watch to beep. When it does, off he – the subject that comes up most in our goes. The watch beeps again and he turns to conversations. His love of the sport began when Bob Weir may be the former rhythm walk down the hill. Then another beep and he he played linebacker in high school. From the guitarist and co–lead singer of the sprints back up. He goes up and down, up and mid-’80s until five years ago, he was on the Grateful Dead, which he founded at 16 down until he reaches the top, where he takes roster of the Tamalpais Chiefs flagyears old (16!) with Jerry Garcia in San a breather. A few seconds later, he’s gone over football team in his longtime hometown in the Francisco. He may have sung “Truckin’”, the hill and into the amphitheatre. When I Bay Area. He talks about that team with the “Playing in the Band” and “Sugar catch up, he’s heading back to his bus. “That reverence with which he talks about music. “It’s Magnolia”. He may currently be playing was the warm-up,” he says. the most complicated sport there is. You’ve got three-hour shows with his band Bob people with virtually every kind of body type Weir and Wolf Bros and packing venues who specialise in doing what that body type like Madison Square Garden alongside Over 56 years of performing, he’s never can do. All that comes together and if the team John Mayer and former Dead drummers looked anything other than fit and he’s never moves as one, it’s really pretty awesome.”

Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann in sounded anything other than amped. There’s Sort of like a band.

Dead & Company, but the essential thing no difference between his vocal commitment to “I can still throw a ball that you can hear about Bob Weir – the thing even some “Cassidy” or “Mama Tried” or “The Other One” in comin’,” he says. That ability is supported Deadheads might not fully grasp – is the late ’60s and early ’70s and the versions he sings by what he’s doing now, as bemused foodthat he thinks of himself as a jock as in 2019. He’s always brought it. Always. Maybe that’s service vendors walk by: throwing a 10kg much as a musician. Maybe more. because his togetherness, his essential responsibility, is medicine ball to a member of his staff.

Bob (“Bob’s fine. Bobby. Your what allowed Jerry to be Jerry, even as Garcia deteriorated First with two hands, then with one. choice.”) likes to say you need to do before everyone’s eyes in the years before he died in 1995.

A few minutes later, he pulls on three things to be happy. You need Bob was aware of the counterbalance, though not acutely. some knee pads and picks up the to “dedicate your life to the pursuit “I admired Jerry because he didn’t give a shit about any of TRX bands, which have been of a sense of purpose”. You need to that and I think he admired me because I did. I admired his secured to the forklift that Bob meditate, which he did on his bus ability to just say, ‘Fuck it. I’m going to suck down a couple of ordered up before our run. He does right before this interview. And you cheeseburgers and a pizza and a couple of White Russians and skaters and lunges. need to work out, which he’s doing I’m going to be fine about that’. Working out was just too much Bob walks over to the wheeled right now, although we’ve paused for a effort and too much pain.” metal cart full of workout moment while he positions himself at Bob stayed fit with what today might be called equipment that accompanies him the bottom of the vast, steep grass hill “intentional” consumption. “I’ve tried to be aware of how on every tour and grabs a 10kg mace that makes up the back of this open-air stuff affects me, what food or drugs make me burn brighter and does halos over his head to concert venue. and which ones tend to dull me, so that I can be better at loosen his shoulder and upper-back “This is not the fun part,” he says what I’m trying to do.” And he’s always worked out on tour. muscles. He orbits the mace around about the intervals he’s about to do. Tabata In the mid-’70s, after seeing a chiropractor about his his head and then moves to a kneel

THE LONG GAME: FROM LEFT: BOB WEIR ONSTAGE WITH THE GRATEFUL DEAD IN ROTTERDAM IN 1972; PLAYING BERKELEY’S GREEK THEATRE IN 1985; AND DEAD & COMPANY’S TOUR STOP IN BRISTOW, VIRGINIA, THIS PAST JUNE. 96

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MUSCLE

PLAYING WITH THE and then back up again to do the other side.

BANDS: WEIR TRAVELS Over and over. His workouts focus on WITH THE TRX rotation and mobility. A lot of shoulder SUSPENSION-BAND work. A lot of stuff that targets his TRAINING SYSTEM, WHICH posterior chain – his back and ALLOWS HIM TO DO PULL-UPS, PEC FLIES AND OTHER glutes. And a lot of twisting, which BODYWEIGHT EXERCISES. strengthens his core.

You don’t just pick up a heavy mace and start doing that. Someone has to teach you. And you have to work up to it.

He got hooked on CrossFit a few years back. “A couple of my friends and I were frequenting the San Francisco facility and managed to snake one of the instructors to train us out at my place, where I set up a little outdoor gym. I’m always on the lookout for functional stuff that’s fun to do.” One of his go-to drills is beating a huge tyre with a gada mace. “The practice goes back thousands of years. The old original martial art better I play, the more I get into the swing like that.” And more mace techniques. And was learning how to swing a big heavy thing and of things.” yoga trapeze. keep your balance and keep yourself collected. You A lot like a quarterback.

When you see Bob onstage with Dead can feel when you’re slipping from the proper form; “I might have been, come to think & Company, you’re witnessing a striver, a there’s a timelessness about it.” of it. Organisational stuff is one of my runner, a gym rat, a jock. You’re witnessing Despite his lifelong commitment to working out, strong suits, and a quarterback is an a man who was probably all over the stadium despite his Instagram account being full of exercise organisational kind of guy. Jerry was earlier and may have worked out on the videos, he says he’s never been an evangelist. He never something of an elusive yet powerful ground your blanket’s on. tried to get the other guys in the band into working out, running back. He could do it all. But I You’re witnessing a guy who, playing he says. “I never pushed it, because I don’t think it’s my was cueing the up and down because middle linebacker in 1962 at 15 years old, right. It’s a lot like pushing religion. I don’t think any Jerry was fucking busy.” ran through a hole in the line and got to the human has a right to do that.”

Bob wants to point out, though, quarterback right as he was handing off the But he’s starting to see the power of the mission that it’s not exactly him doing the ball, who felt the weight of 21 guys fall on now. “This is something guys my age can do, and quarterbacking. “When I walk onstage, top of him, who was knocked out for a few it will make an immense difference in what they I leave the building. The guy people take seconds but somehow woke up and felt the call your golden years if grace and happiness are photographs of is not there. I’ve pretty ball underneath him. goals of yours.” Other than a little arthritis, he much taken leave of the regular world. It’s “The moment comes back every now feels good these days. “I remember looking in another place entirely. Things are different and again,” Bob says. “It’s that thrill of the mirror in my 20s and thinking, Holy shit. there. I’m a combination of the characters that grace that travels up your spine whenever I’m ripped! That was probably the peak of it. come and visit us in the songs and the storyteller you’re doing things right.” You could I’m getting to a place now where I’m rivalling who brings these characters around. I’ve given up be playing football. You could be that. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got even attempting to see which song is going to sit up quarterbacking onstage. You could be going now.” and beg on a given night.” doing intervals up the arse end of an At home, he has a workout group with amphitheatre. You could be getting his old football crew. They organise their your ankles doctored by a Shoshone routine for the day on a whiteboard, like “At my age, if you let it go, it ain’t coming back” was healer. You could be doing the a set list. He says his general goal is just one of the first things Bob said to me in Virginia. “I have stepper at a hotel gym. But fitness to have “some gas left in the tank after a lot of stuff I want to get to. And I gotta fuckin’ live to do leads to magic. the show”. Although he’s not climbing it.” So if he’s gonna live – really live – he has to double That day in ’62, Bob trotted PA stacks like he used to, he’s still down on his workouts, adopt new practices, meet new off the field after the play to performing three-hour concerts of 20 people. And do this story. “One of my goals for this recover, to soak in the glory. As he or so songs. (His current catalogue is interview is to open some communication with your got to the sideline, his coach looked about 200.) outfit,” he said in his dressing room after the show. Turns at him and said, “Weir! Get the fuck It’s a physical effort. “If I want a out he wasn’t making small talk. Bob sent me a text one back out there! You’re on offence!” dynamic drop, I’m going to signal that.

Monday afternoon a few weeks after the interview, a list And that’s where he’s stayed: on I’ll just dip a shoulder. They know that of stuff he wants to try: Bob wants to get into underwater offence. He’s still playing. He never the drop is coming, but nobody knows workouts. “I saw a video clip of a guy working out came out of the game. exactly when and I never know exactly underwater; he took a kettlebell from the bottom of when until right before it happens. a squat position and powered into a backflip and Ross McCammon is the author of I find that the more that I move, the came back around to the squat. I wanna do stuff Works Well with Others.

“Dedicate your life to the pursuit of a sense of purpose”

January 2020

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HELP, I’VE GOT…

MAN B How YouTube, Reddit and a plastic surgeon in Texas are transforming the lives of untold numbers of men with breasts

BY TOM FOSTER PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRENT HUMPHREYS

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BS! WHENEVER Alan Ash would take

off his shirt in his own home, he’d first make sure the blinds were closed. If they weren’t completely shut – if even a sliver of light could creep into the house – he’d tug them down the rest of the way.

Alan, who’s 38 years old, lives in the country, about 45 minutes outside Louisville, Kentucky.

It wasn’t as if there were many neighbours around who could catch a glimpse through the windows, but Alan needed to be sure. Meanwhile, his fiancée, Rebecca, had no problem walking around the house nude.

“If someone sees me, so be it,” she’d say.

Alan went to great lengths not to be seen shirtless. He’d been in other serious relationships before he started dating Rebecca at age 31, but he never really felt comfortable with those women seeing him without his shirt, even in the most intimate moments. Rebecca was the first to see him in full, he told me.

When Alan was a schoolkid, other boys would sometimes tease him about his appearance when he took off his shirt – “but I didn’t let that go on too long,” he says. He was a big kid, 188cm, January 2020 99

97.5kg. Classmates learned not to mess with him. He also resorted to making fun of himself to neutralise any incoming jabs.

And he figured out how to hide his condition or at least fool himself into thinking he was hiding it. He wore two or three XXL shirts at a time, even at the height of summer, so they’d drape over his form like heavy curtains. He walked with his shoulders hunched forward. At restaurants, he’d always sit in the back so fewer people would walk by and possibly look at him and snicker. Alan had gynecomastia. Man boobs.

Gyno, as it is called among people who talk openly about it, is a real physiological condition – a proliferation of breast tissue, not just an awkward distribution of fat – caused by an excess of estrogen relative to testosterone.

Millions of men have gyno – at least 30 per cent of males will be affected in their lifetime – but it’s impossible to get much more specific than that, because most people who have it don’t discuss it, let alone do anything about it. For some men, gyno can be painful, making the breasts tender to the touch. For most men suffering from it, the real damage is emotional.

Alan managed to talk to a few friends about it over the years, and they always recommended chest exercises. Do more flies.

Bench more. Drop and do pushups whenever possible. He took their advice and started working out obsessively in his 20s. “But it actually made it worse,” he says now. “The boobs were more pronounced.” So he went the other way and gained weight on purpose to try to even things out in his midsection. He ballooned up to 118kg.

It was no way to live. Alan knew male breasts could be removed through surgery –his sister, who’s a nurse, had given him a brochure – but he’d seen some scary pictures online of botched results and he couldn’t afford the out-of-pocket expense anyway ($US 4000). After getting 100

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a new job as a maintenance technician at a pharmaceutical warehouse, however, he was able to save a little more money. He began doing some additional research online, and that’s when Google led him to the website of Dr Robert Caridi, a plastic surgeon in Texas who performs gynecomastia removal surgery.

The site touted Caridi’s thousands of gyno patients from all over the world. There were videos from inside the operating room, before and after photos, images of raw breast tissue just pulled from men’s chests. Alan couldn’t look away. There was a button that said FREE ONLINE CONSULTATION. Ten minutes after discovering Caridi’s Austin Gynecomastia Center, Alan had Rebecca take pictures of his chest in the bathroom. It was about 10:30 on a Sunday morning when he sent in his photos and some details.

“I have been living with this for around 27 years,” he wrote in an email that reads like a primal scream. “Only a couple of people in my entire life have ever seen me with my shirt off. I’m convinced this is the main reason for my insecurities and social anxiety, ruined relationships, jobs, etc . . . Basically controlled my life as long as I can remember . . . Just pure misery with these

breasts, and I’m sick of it.”

Thirty minutes later, Caridi got back to him. Three weeks later, Alan was in Austin for surgery and a day after that, he tells me his story. We’re in an exam room in Caridi’s office suite in the posh suburb of Westlake.

Rebecca sits across the room, smiling sweetly. As we talk, Alan stands a few feet away from me – a complete stranger – with his shirt off. His chest is bruised purple from the procedure, but where he once had a pair of C-cups, he now has typical pecs. He doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s shirtless, and he absentmindedly pats his chest during our conversation. For the first time in nearly three decades, Alan Ash feels comfortable in his own skin.

The words come like bullets.

“Look at this one. Rohan. He’s from Bangladesh. Here’s one in Sweden. Or look at this one. This guy, he says, ‘I’m going to be in Austin soon – I need you to check me out because I’m freaking out.’

He’s 71.”

It’s a little after 8am and Caridi (or Doctor C, as he’s known to patients and employees, including not one but two nurses named Lacy) is wearing scrubs

and scrolling through online consult requests that came in overnight. Email after email tells variations of Alan Ash’s story.

Humiliation. Years or decades of quiet suffering. Elaborate cover-up rituals.

Sixty years old, trim and intense, with a rapid-fire Brooklyn-tinged accent that he has never fully shed since leaving New York at age 20, Doctor C is arguably one of the world’s most in-demand gynecomastia surgeons, and one of the few doctors anywhere who’s considered a gyno expert.

He’s done nearly 3000 of these surgeries in the past couple of decades and today averages 250 to 300 per year, about 70 per cent of which, he says, are patients who travelled from other states or countries to see him. On the day I spend in his office, he does three gyno removals and sees two post-op patients he treated the day before. “Most plastic surgeons do maybe a dozen in a year,” he says. “Or less. If they do it at all.”

It’s not that gynecomastia surgery is all that complicated.

We’re not talking brain surgery here. It starts with liposuction, to address the gynecomastia tissue, along with the fat around the breast. Then residual

HEALTH

tissue is removed through a small incision at the bottom of the nipple and it ends with some careful sewing to ensure minimal scarring. In the most complex cases, such as when a patient is particularly large or has lost a lot of weight, the last step might also involve removing the excess skin. In these cases, Doctor C removes the chest skin and repositions the nipple. As plastic surgery goes, it’s pretty basic. Most operations are done in less than an hour.

Doctor C doesn’t pretend he’s a surgical genius – more like a sculptor who’s mastered the male form. “I think that most surgeons are adeptly qualified to do it,” he says. “But I will tell you this: there’s nothing that beats experience. You do 100, okay, you start to get the idea. Do 300, you’re really kind of figuring it out. Do 1000? Okay, now we’re talking.”

His experience with performing the actual procedure is part of what sends all those patients through his doors, for sure, but it’s not the main reason. More important, after seeing so many men like Alan, after hearing so many of their stories, Doctor C began to grasp how crushing it was to them mentally. “The more I’ve delved

into it, the more I’ve realised they all have just been jacked by this. They don’t have sex. They don’t take their kids to the pool.

It affects their relationships.

This isn’t a small bother; it’s a big deal.” And he started to realise how he could broadcast that understanding so that men would find him and know that he was the doc who got it.

Doctor C’s awakening happened about 10 years ago. His practice back then was, like that of most plastic surgeons, focused 80 or 90 per cent on women: face-lifts, breast augmentations and revisions, nose jobs. At the time, those kinds of procedures were common in pop culture.

Throughout the ’00s , a parade of reality-TV series such as Extreme Makeover helped bring cosmetic surgery out into the open, and 79 per cent of the cosmeticsurgery patients surveyed had been influenced by these shows, according to a 2007 study in the academic journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Seeing the surgeries and watching patients’ journeys made people more comfortable with the idea of going under the knife themselves.

A few Internet-savvy doctors took note, posting videos of their surgeries on YouTube. Why bother with a TV deal when they

could potentially reap the same benefits more easily online, reaching prospective customers directly and controlling their own messages and images? Some, like a South Floridian named Dr Michael Salzhauer (aka Dr. Miami), became celebrities because of their social-media videos. Doctor C, who has never been shy in front of cameras (he got married on Good Morning America in 1990), decided to try his hand at it too – with a twist.

Rather than concentrate on female boob jobs, as others were doing, he put out a gynecomastia video in 2010. “You have to understand, at the time, gynecomastia – no one even knew how to pronounce the word. It was not talked about.” The term actually dates back to the second century A.D. – it means female (gynec) breast (mastos) – and the first surgical treatments came a few hundred years later.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that liposuction entered the picture, and the procedure has become less invasive since then. A doctor in White Plains, New York, named Mordcai Blau, is considered the modern trailblazer in the field for men. But despite Blau’s decades of success, the condition was still largely under the radar. “I could see this shit was prime time for someone to blow it out,” Doctor C continues. “So we videoed one.

My wife was like, ‘No, don’t put it out, because it’s just so disgusting’. ” He did it anyway.

“And the floodgates opened.

Totally opened.”

In the years since, Doctor C has posted nearly 100 gynecomastia videos on YouTube, which have racked up millions of views. He started experimenting with Snapchat, Periscope and other forms of social media a few years ago, yet it was the online consultation form, which he

“FOR MOST MEN SUFFERING FROM IT, THE REAL DAMAGE IS EMOTIONAL”

BOOB JOB: CARIDI PREPS A PATIENT AT HIS OFFICE IN AUSTIN. HE DOCUMENTS THE SURGERY FOR MEDICAL REASONS (TO DETAIL THE PROCEDURE AND OUTCOME) AND FOR PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES. January 2020 101

added to his website in 2016, that brought in customers from all corners of the globe. They were finding him on YouTube or Reddit, but before the online consultation, prospective patients still had to clear the mental hurdle of reaching out.

A phone call or Skype session might be embarrassing. A trip to Austin for a simple exam would be expensive. Taking off their shirt would be mortifying.

But snapping a few selfies and shooting an email? It was like discovering a lifeline.

Now Doctor C says gynecomastia accounts for about 70 per cent of his practice. It’s one of the top plastic-surgery procedures for men, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Between 2013 and 2018, the number of such surgeries grew by 30 per cent – and Doctor C is the tip of the spear, or scalpel, as it were.

“Feel it, go ahead. Feel it.

Yeah, right there, go, do it.

That’s the gland. That’s it. That’s gyno. That’s the mass.” It’s a tad awkward. We’re in an exam room and Doctor C is directing me to squeeze the nipple of a patient I’ve just met: Max, a 22-year-old Texas A&M Corps of Cadets senior with sleeve tattoos and an impressively built upper body that looks pretty much ideal – except for the puffy nipples, stretched-out areolas, and small, cone-shaped breasts, as if somebody had stuffed little birthday-party hats in there. The doc then produces a marker and starts drawing circles around the breasts to define the area that he’ll reduce, all the while talking in a machine-gun rap. One of the things patients like about Doctor C is his directness, his refusal to coddle their selfconsciousness. It’s not that he ignores their sensitivity but that he acknowledges it by charging right at it – to “cut through the crap”, as he describes it. “Bam. Brooklyn. Let’s go. ‘Take your shirt off.’ Grab their boobs. They don’t have a choice. Walls come crashing down. Let’s just take 102

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LIFE-CHANGING WORK

These photographs taken before surgery and after reveal changes in the size and profile of the men’s chests PATIENT 1 DEVELOPED GYNECOMASTIA IN PUBERT Y AND LIVED WITH IT FOR MORE THAN T WO DECADES. BEFORE

AFTER

PATIENT 2 DEVELOPED GYNECOMASTIA FROM STEROID USE .

BEFORE

AFTER

care of business.”

“Open up your shoulders, Max,” he barks, pressing one hand into the young man’s back and pulling his shoulders with the other. He gives Max’s shoulders a pat and looks over at me. “He’s got good muscles. The reason I asked you to feel it, his gyno’s mostly puffy stuff.” Puffy nipples are a common, telltale sign of gyno among bodybuilders. He looks back at Max. “Did you take some kind of prohormones?”

“I took SARMs,” Max admits.

Selective androgen receptor

modulators, that is, a category of steroid alternative that has become popular among athletes in recent years; they work like anabolic steroids but target androgen receptors specifically in skeletal muscles, in theory sparing other tissues from typical steroid side effects. Max hopes to be an Army infantry officer one day and fitness is a big part of his preparation for that life, he explains.

About two years ago, in his second year at uni, he was in the best shape of his life – “88kg with

a really low body-fat percentage” –and SARMs helped him get there. That’s when he first noticed the puffy nipples and so-called “post-cycle therapy” to counteract the SARM regimen didn’t make them go away. His third year at uni, he landed in the hospital with a bad case of both mononucleosis and pneumonia.

He lost 10kg in a week and the doctors prescribed him some steroids. About four weeks after that, he had full gynecomastia.

Doctor C has heard all this before. There are three groups of people who make up the vast majority of gynecomastia cases he sees, he’d explained to me earlier in the day. First are those like Alan Ash, for whom the problem began in puberty and never went away. Many boys develop small masses behind their nipples in their teens, when a surge in hormones creates an imbalance between the levels of testosterone and estrogen. In most cases, things rebalance naturally in a matter of months, but for some men that never happens.

Second are guys who have used anabolic steroids or steroid alternatives such as prohormones and SARMs. Then there’s a third category of gyno patients: men past their mid-40s, when testosterone levels can dip and result in a hormonal imbalance.

This can cause the pecs to soften and flesh to sag, with as many as one in four men experiencing this problem as they age.

Of the patients I met in the doctor’s office, three had used performance-enhancing drugs, and three had suffered since puberty. One patient, 37-yearold David, played football at a midwestern Division II college.

He wanted to level up to a D1 school, so he started using steroids the summer after his freshman year. Boom, gyno, within weeks. He’s now married and has a three-year-old son he couldn’t wait to take to the water park this summer for the first time after having avoided all swimsuit-related activities for

HEALTH

most of his adult life. Matthew, 30, is a former patient and competitive men’s physique bodybuilder who stopped in for a visit today. He once took a 12-week round of steroids.

Boom, puffy nipples. Soft-spoken 39-year-old Jose, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has had gyno since puberty. So has 22-year-old Tawsif, a software engineer who found Doctor C on Reddit.

Not that everyone with pronounced masses in their breast area actually has gynecomastia. It’s rare but possible for men to get breast cancer, so if you develop a breast lump or thickening or notice any type of change in the skin or nipple, have it checked out.

And then there are men who accumulate fat in the chest region – there’s even a medical term for their condition, pseudogynecomastia. This fat could be targeted through exercises such as push-ups, rows and pull-ups. In theory, anyway.

“The whole concept of pseudogynecomastia should be banned,” says Doctor C. “The implication is [the breasts] will go away if you lose weight, but that doesn’t happen.”

On the surface, that might seem self-serving coming from a surgeon who has every incentive to book more surgeries.

But as an article in the peerreviewed journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings put it: “The decision to treat . . . should be based on the degree to which this condition has affected the quality of life and mental health of patients and on their desire for cosmetic correction.” In other words, if a guy has boobs and the boobs are bothering him, he should get rid of the boobs.

Back in the exam room, Doctor C leaves me alone with Max, who talks with me some more. Despite his physique and tatts, he hasn’t quite grown out of a boyish sweetness. He explains that he has some friends who use anabolic steroids and have developed gyno; they self-

medicate by trying to adjust their estrogen levels with drugs such as tamoxifen and letrozole (which reduce estrogen production or block its effects and which the FDA has not approved for the treatment of gynecomastia; illegal steroid suppliers usually sell these otherwise prescriptiononly drugs). Max “almost went down that route,” he says, but decided to do his own research first. On Internet bodybuilding forums, “people swear by [the self-administered drugs]”. But as he dug deeper, he wasn’t so sure.

“I think you’re throwing the dice there,” he says. “You can block the estrogen so much that it’ll shut off and something catastrophic can happen.” His Google searches directed him to Doctor C’s online consultation, then to the YouTube videos and finally to his office.

“I’m glad I’m here,” he says. “To get rid of it.”

At this point, one of the nurses named Lacy comes back in to cut us off. The anesthesiologist is waiting for Max. So is Doctor C’s dedicated videographer, Jonathan Holt. Like every other surgery patient here today, Max has agreed to have his procedure filmed. Maybe the footage will help some other guy with a similar story come out of the shadows. And now it’s showtime.

“You can really feel the bass in here!” Jonathan says. The Ariana Grande song “Break Up with Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored” blares through the

operating room’s speakers as the videographer enters with his shoulder-mounted camera rig, followed by Doctor C, a nurse named Sarah, the Lacys and me.

Max has already been put all the way under and his face is hidden beneath a blue sheet. After making a small incision on the outside of one side of the breast, a cut no wider than a grain of rice, Doctor C inserts a roughly 30cm-long wand into the hole and starts waving it around inside the chest, his arm twisting and jerking this way and that as if he were working a giant socket wrench. The machine makes a persistent squeaking sound as he does this, and as Doctor C probes every inch of the breast, the far end of the wand pushes up the skin from the inside, somewhat disturbingly like the extraterrestrial bursting from John Hurt’s midsection in Alien. This is the first step of liposuction, which melts the fat in the breast using ultrasound energy.

Then the doc switches to a suction tube that vacuums out the melted fat, a viscous, pinkish fluid that sputters through a transparent tube into a collection vessel. Once he’s removed the fat – and narrated every step, and paused for a conversation with the anesthesiologist about the newest Corvette model – he makes a slit just below the areola and manually begins to pull out a mass of harder tissue, the actual breast gland, with a forcefulness that’s a little violent. It’s lumpy,

pink and white, and about the size of a small crab cake. He flaps it around once it’s fully dangling out of the hole, asks me to come in close and have a look, makes way for the camera to get a good money shot and then pulls the connecting tissue taut and scissors the gland out of the body.

After about 45 minutes, the surgery is over. Two of the fleshy crab cakes sit in a small plastic tub and Doctor C says he always offers patients a chance to see these when they wake up, to stare down a vanquished demon.

“They always want to see it,” one of the Lacys says. “It’s the first question: ‘Did you get out a lot?’

They need to know it’s gone. And they’re like, ‘Show my wife, show my sister, show my mom. This was in there, and it wouldn’t just go away with weight loss’. ” Doctor C cuts in. “You can touch them,” he says to me. “Go ahead, feel it.” I slide on a sterile glove and give one of the masses a quick poke. Yep, it’s firm.

“And you see the nipples now?

Totally different.” They’re no longer puffy.

Half an hour later, having changed from scrubs into a sharp checked blazer and pink shirt, Doctor C is ready to take the team out for happy hour. But first he says a quick hello to his ex-patient Matthew, who’s been hanging out with the nurses. “Hey, Matt, you feel good?” asks Doctor C. Matthew whips off his shirt proudly. “Let me see that,” the doctor says. “Look at you, wow.

Beautiful, baby!”

“TWO OF THE FLESHY CRAB CAKES SIT IN A SMALL PLASTIC TUB AND DOCTOR C SAYS HE ALWAYS OFFERS PATIENTS A CHANCE TO SEE THESE WHEN THEY WAKE UP” January 2020 103

FORHEALTHY APPETITES For many, attempting to eat clean can mean swinging from monastic restraint to hedonism. Jump off the dietary see-saw and savour the best of both: these salads are as gluttonously satisfying as they are replete with nutritious gold. Time to turn over a new leaf

BY SCARLETT WRENCH PHOTOGRAPHY BY LOUISA PARRY FOOD STYLING BY IONA BLACKSHAW If a bleeding animal burger represents the acme of “man food”, salads tend to signify the opposite. But at Men’s Health, we’re simply not having it: the idea that your menu order is in some way indicative of your character is a tired one. And yet . . . salads do still get a bad rap. They’re side dishes, compromises, your penance for overindulgence – and likely to elicit eye-rolls from any colleague already a few 104

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mouthfuls deep into a chicken burrito with extra cheese.

We’re here to tell you that this is nonsense. With a little forethought and flair, you can throw together a summer salad that’s toothsome, filling and on-point for your macro targets, too. We asked five leading chefs for mouth-watering recipes that will change your mind about salads, each bursting with flavour and freshness. Trust us, you won’t go hungry.

NUTRITION

SPOON ON EXTRA PEAS: THEIR VITAMIN K BOOSTS FAT LOSS.

SERVES 4 .

CAJUN CAULI, EGG AND TOAST Transform your postwork plate of vegetables into a decadent meal worth savouring. This colourful feast from the team at rustic eatery Brother Marcus sorts out your five a day in one hit

A cauliflower, sliced Spanish onion, ½, sliced Cajun spice, to taste Quinoa, 250g An ear of corn Limes, 2, juice and zest Coriander, large pinch, chopped Beetroot hummus, 300g Cooked beetroots, 8 Snow peas, 200g Garden peas, 200g Free-range eggs, 4, poached Rustic sourdough, 4 slices, toasted

METHOD .

Bland ingredients make for drab salads. “We base our recipes on seasonal, local produce,” says chef Tasos Gaitanos. “It’s a natural way to add more flavour.” First, prep the cauliflower: it’s packed full of glucosinolates, which will bolster your liver’s defences after you’ve made a few too many pub-garden stop-offs. Pop it on a tray with the onion, then

sprinkle liberally with Cajun spice. Drizzle with oil and bake it at 180°C for 18 minutes.

While the cauli cooks, prep the quinoa mix. Boil your corn, char it on a hot griddle pan, then scrape off the kernels.

Cook the quinoa as per pack instructions, then combine with the corn, lime juice and coriander in a bowl.

Plate up as follows:

use the hummus as the base, then add the cauli, followed by the quinoa mix and veg. Had a stressful week? The double beetroot hit will help lower your blood pressure. Top each plate with a runny poached egg and serve with a slice of sourdough.

“Liven it up with wild garlic,” says Gaitanos.

“It complements this dish perfectly.”

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BBQ PORK BELLY WITH CRISPY TOFU Your backyard BBQ needn’t start and finish with burgers and buns. This fresh spin, from Patrick Williams at Caribbean restaurant Soul Food, offers a more nutritious take on al fresco eating

SERVES 4 .

Pork belly, 500g Smoked paprika, 2tsp Ground allspice, 2tsp A chocho, thinly sliced Avocados, 2, diced Carrots, 2, sliced Cucumber, ½, sliced Watercress, bunch Flour, 2tbsp Extra firm tofu, 300g, diced FOR THE DRESSING Dijon mustard, 1tsp Flaxseed oil, 75ml A lime, juiced

METHOD .

Bookmark this recipe for the next scorching Sunday. Pork belly may be a guilty pleasure – and rightly so – but most of its fats are of the healthier monounsaturated variety.

Plus, it’s packed with B vitamins. Slice the meat into strips and marinate the night before in half of the spices, salt and pepper. When you’re ready to cook, fire up the barbecue, ensuring you

leave a “cool zone”. Lightly brush the pork with oil, place it on the grill and close the lid. Cook for 10 minutes per side, then move to the cooler area.

Place all of the sliced fruit and veg, including the zucchini-like chocho, in a bowl with salt and pepper. “The chocho gives this dish a lovely, crispy texture,” says Williams. It’s also rich in vitamins C and K, zinc,

copper and manganese, all of which support fast fat-burning. Combine the flour with the remaining spices, coat the tofu, then drop it in a hot pan with a dash of oil until crispy.

When the pork is cool, slice it and add to the salad. Whisk the dressing ingredients together, then drizzle over everything.

Top it all off with crispy tofu for an extra punch of protein.

PORK CONTAINS OLEIC ACID, THE HEART-HEALTHY FAT FOUND IN OLIVES.

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NUTRITION

WITH A 10:1 PROTEINFAT RATIO, CRAB IS WORTH A CRACK.

SERVES 4 .

DINNERWARE PLATES HABITAT.CO.UK

CRAB SOM TAM This lean dish promises all of the sweetness and heat of your favourite Thai takeaway but with a more palatable macro balance. Tuck into this fragrant feast from Rick and Katie Toogood at seafood restaurant Prawn on the Lawn

Large carrots, 2, peeled A green papaya, peeled Garlic, 2tsp, crushed Mint leaves, small handful Coriander leaves, handful Cherry tomatoes, 8, halved and squashed Spring onions, 2, sliced A red chilli, deseeded and finely sliced Unpasteurised white crab meat, 150g Peanuts, handful, crushed FOR THE NAM JIM DRESSING: Thai fish sauce, 1tbsp A red chilli, deseeded and finely sliced Ginger, 2tsp, chopped Limes, 2, juiced

METHOD .

Crafting abs in the kitchen should be a labour of love.

“This dish has the typical balance of flavours found in Thai dishes: salty, sweet, sour, spicy – but it’s also very healthy,” says Rick Toogood.

Using a mandoline, slice the carrots and vitamin C-packed papaya into thin matchsticks.

Place in a mixing bowl, add the garlic, then whisk up the nam jim sauce and pour it over. Purists add palm sugar, but this recipe gets its natural sweetness from the seafood, further cutting

carbs. Cover with cling film and store in the fridge for at least an hour to allow the flavours to infuse.

When you’re ready to serve, remove the bowl from the fridge and add the mint, coriander, squashed tomatoes, spring onions and chilli. Mix thoroughly.

Pile it onto a serving plate and top with the crab meat, an excellent source of mood-improving riboflavin and selenium, as well as testosterone-boosting zinc.

Sprinkle the toasted peanuts on top and serve.

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LAMB’S 30G OF PROTEIN WILL PUT A SPRING IN YOUR STEP.

ROAST LAMB, POTATO AND CHERRY

After a tough session in the gym, you deserve a greater reward than a limp supermarket salad. Prep this recipe from chef Peter Gordon of fusion restaurant The Providores the night before, and break it out 108

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SERVES 4 .

Lamb rumps, 4 x 160g New potatoes, 300g A red onion, sliced Garlic, 6 cloves, sliced Oregano leaves, a large pinch Cherries, 16, halved Balsamic or red wine vinegar, 2tbsp Salad leaves, 2 handfuls

METHOD .

“This dish is great for summer, when the lambs are a little fatter,” says Gordon. The meat from grass-fed lambs, in particular, is rich in weight-controlling omega-3 fatty acids.

Heat the oven to 180°C and put a roasting dish in the middle. Sco re the lamb fat, then place the meat in a hot pan with a dash of oil, fat side down. Cook for five minutes, turning once,

to render the fat and give the meat a little colour, then roast in the oven for 13-15 minutes.

While it cooks, boil the potatoes, drain and halve. White spuds are stuffed with fast-acting carbs and rehydrating potassium, ideal after cardio. Fry the onion and garlic until caramelised, then add the potatoes, oregano and cherries to warm through. Season with salt and pepper, add a splash of the vinegar,

then take it off the heat.

Fill your Tupperware with the salad leaves, then top with the potato and cherry mix. As well as adding a welcome hit of sweetness to your dish, cherries are among the most effective foods for reducing postworkout muscle inflammation. Finally, slice the roast lamb against the grain and place it on top. It’s a lunch that’s well worth working for.

NUTRITION

SUMMER CAESAR DELUXE This twist on the classic salad will sate your cravings for salt and fat but won’t leave you lethargic. Best of all, it includes bacon – courtesy of Ben Tish, chef at the Stafford

SERVES 4 .

Baby gem lettuce, 4 heads Chicken stock, 50ml Dijon mustard, 1tsp Thick-cut streaky bacon, 8 slices Thyme leaves, 1tsp Honey, 1tbsp A slice of sourdough, torn Fresh mayonnaise, 170ml Beech-smoked anchovies, a small tin Aged Parmesan cheese, 100g

METHOD .

Greens are good for more than just bulking out your plate. Pick the outer leaves of the lettuce and wilt them in a saucepan with a dash of oil and some seasoning. Pluck them out while they’re still green and blend with the stock and mustard.

Next up, the rashers. Pop them under the grill until they start to colour, then top with the thyme

and honey. Finish for another minute or so.

“The salty bacon works wonders with the sweet honey and the fragrant thyme,” says Tish. Toss the sourdough pieces – a source of slow-burning carbs – with oil and seasoning, then bake in an oven at 180°C for 10 minutes. Blitz the mayo along with four pieces of anchovy. Fresh mayo, made with extra-virgin

olive oil and egg yolk, can be an excellent source of healthy fats, while anchovies are rich in energy-lifting niacin.

Dress the remaining baby gem leaves with the mayo. To assemble, divide the blended greens into four bowls, then top with the dressed leaves, bacon, croutons, anchovies and Parmesan shavings, for cheat-day flavour with minimal drawbacks. Best served in the garden alongside a chilled glass of . . . well, anything.

COMPOUNDS IN AGED CHEESE ARE LINKED TO HIGHER LIFE EXPECTANCY.

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TACTICS

H I G H

Throwing themselves headfirst into death-defying drops, cliff divers learn to control their fear in order to perform at their peak. Steal their secrets in order to thrive under pressure

BY LUKE BENEDICTUS PHOTOGRAPHY BY RED BULL CONTENT POOL

S T A K E S

LOOK OVER THE EDGE of the platform and it hits you in the pit of your stomach. That lurching sense of visceral dread. Giddily, you look down and down and down. Snaking far below is the river, its water a murky shade of khaki. Brown leaves float in it like specks. At point-blank range, the 27-metre drop from the bridge is a harrowing prospect.

Yet here in Spain’s Basque capital of Bilbao, daredevils in tiny swimsuits will shortly hurl themselves off this bridge into the Nervión river in the final of the Cliff Diving World Championships.

Edging off the platform, I spy Rhiannon Iffland, the reigning women’s champion for the past four years. All golden tan and blazing blonde hair, she hails from Lake Macquarie, NSW, and is gunning to complete a clean sweep of seven straight victories to clinch the title tomorrow. When I confess how confronting I found viewing the drop, she winces and nods. “Trust me, I had exactly the same feeling when I walked out there fully clothed,” she says. “It takes a lot of getting used to. Really.”

It’s not just nerves that the cliff divers have to adapt to, but the phenomenal stress this extreme sport puts on their bodies. From 27 metres, the divers accelerate off the platform at 9.8 metres per second while performing spins, twists and somersaults as they whirl through the air. They punch through January 2020

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the surface of the water at 85 kilometres per hour.

“When you enter the water at that velocity, the impact is severe,” says Eric Brooker, the Newcastle diving coach who introduced Iffland to the sport.

“It’s like hitting a bus if you don’t get it right.”

Get it wrong and things get ugly. Ask Iffland about the sort of damage a cliff diver can sustain and her breezy manner suddenly becomes evasive. “Any injury, you name it,” she shrugs, flatly refusing to get drawn on specifics.

There’s a reason she doesn’t want to get into details. Iffland is, after all, steeling herself to leap from the bridge the following day. Just as a boxer refuses to countenance defeat when entering the ring, she can’t allow doubt to cloud her focus. When you’re staring down this sort of critical danger, self-belief is vital to success.

Yet the truth is that a wrong move in this sport can prove lifethreatening. Just ask Joe Zuber.

The Brisbane native was an elite cliff diver who’s now Red Bull’s live TV commentator, as well as being a member of the FINA High Diving Technical Committee.

He’s also bloody lucky to be alive.

In 2008, he was doing an exhibition dive at a music festival in Colombia when, as he puts it matter-of-factly, he “chose the wrong dive”. After entering the water, Zuber hit the bottom, shattering his femur and breaking his ankle. Rescue helicopters refused to airlift him to hospital from the remote location, fearing they’d be shot down by the anti-aircraft guns of the local cocaine guerrillas. As a result, Zuber was forced to endure a nine-hour ride over dirt-track roads to the nearest hospital.

The delay, coupled with surgical complications, led to both heart and kidney failure. “It was a life-and-death situation,” Zuber admits. “It really was close.”

While that career-ending accident was dramatic, lesser injuries like concussions, skin lacerations and ripped tendons are not unusual. Cliff-diving is not a forgiving business. When you’re hurtling through thin air, small things become big things fast.

But that edge-of-the-seat danger, coupled with the jawdropping locations, also make cliff diving an amazing spectacle.

Certain things in life – penalty shoot-outs, high-wire walks, Russian roulette – are just

“When you enter the water at that velocity it’s like hitting a bus if you don’t get it right”

TAKE THE PLUNGE: A DIVER RACES TOWARD THE WATER AS THE CROWD LOOKS ON. 112

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inherently dramatic. Watching an elite athlete in negligible swimwear nail a quadruple somersault half-twist pike off a cliff is, it turns out, utterly compulsive viewing.

It’s therefore no surprise that the sport is becoming increasingly hot property. While Red Bull is the Cliff Diving Championships’ headline sponsor, this year the Swiss watch brand, Mido, also got involved as the sport’s “Official Performance Partner”.

“Watchmaking at Mido and this sport are based on precision and top performance,” says the brand’s president Franz Linder.

“Plus cliff diving is about the water, too – the perfect theme for our divers’ watches.”

TACTICS

LEFT: MEXICAN DIVER PAREDES IN MID-AIR AND REFLECTING ON THE PLATFORM.

One of Mido’s ambassadors is Jonathan Paredes, the Mexican diver who won the Championships in 2017. The day before the final, I spot him sitting on the edge of the bridge’s diving platform. With a baseball cap screwed backwards on his head and legs dangling above the drop, the 30-year old calmly sips a drink as he admires the view of the Guggenheim Museum, Frank Gehry’s architectural showstopper, that’s situated on the riverbank to the left.

Judging by his immunity to panic-inducing heights, Paredes clearly has serious cojones. But the diver reveals that he still endures sudden attacks of fear.

The worst moment, Paredes explains, is on the journey to the diving platform, which often involves shinning up rocky clifffaces to access it. That journey is when the mind games crank up. “There are a lot of things going on. Fear. Tension.

Pressure,” Paredes admits. “It’s not a walk in the park.”

It’s then that your voices of self-doubt begin to jabber more loudly. After all, there’s not just the physical height to consider.

Unlike when you launch off a diving board, divers can fly terrifyingly close to the cliff face and protruding rock ledges before they have to negotiate their make-or-break entries.

“You never conquer the fear,” Paredes says. “You just manage it. If you lose fear, it’s the moment to retire.”

In fact, he explains, fear is a vital accomplice in cliff diving, because it forces you to confront the magnitude of your challenge.

Backflipping off a 27m drop there is no room for complacency. Fear makes you face up to the gravity of the situation in every sense.

That’s why whenever you have to perform under pressure – whether public speaking or sitting an exam – Paredes’ number one piece of advice is to give your challenge the respect it deserves. Break down the components of what you must

do, visualise how to tackle each one. And then practise, a lot.

“Stay respectful, stay focused.

That will keep your feet on the ground and give you a bit more confidence,” Paredes says. “Then you can start to control the fear.”

But cliff diving isn’t just about bravery. To get a better idea of the sport’s physical demands you need to speak to Greg Louganis, the five-time world diving champion and quadruple Olympic gold medallist whose victory in Seoul after whacking his head on the springboard is the stuff of sporting legend.

Today, Louganis is the sports

director of the Cliff Diving World Series. He’s never tried cliff diving from the full competitive height after once attempting a dive from around halfway. “Then somebody showed me a videotape of it,” he says with a grimace. “I was like this close to the rocks.”

The big difference with Olympic diving is the sheer height. Cliff divers leap from 27m compared to a maximum of 10m in the Olympics (female cliff divers compete off a 20m platform). These physical demands mean that divers have to enter the water feet first.

“That’s because your hip sockets are much more stable than your January 2020 113

CARVE A CLIFFDIVER’S ABS Coach Eric Brooker explains how cliff divers build a core of steel

PLANK: Lie prone on elbows with a flat back. Hold this position for 60 secs and repeat 3 times.

SUPINE BRIDGE: Lie on the floor with arms straight out to the side, palms down. Place your heels on a Swiss ball, raise your hips to form a 90° angle at the knee, hold for 3 secs and repeat 10 times.

TUCK TO DIVE Assume a push-up position on a Swiss ball with your hands on the floor. Bring your knees to your chest in a tuck then push out to the starting position.

Focus on controlling the movement so your hips remain still. Repeat 5 times.

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shoulders,” Louganis explains.

“But while it’s less stress, the impact is still massive.”

During a dive, the biggest danger is losing your orientation, not difficult when you’re twizzling head over heels at breakneck speed. Divers need the spatial awareness to hit the water in exactly the right position to avoid injury.

“The divers have incredible depth perception,” Louganis explains. “They can sense how far off the water they are to make whatever adjustments are necessary.”

The technical term for this knack is proprioception.

Essentially, this is an athlete’s ability to make neuromuscular connections and judge multiple angles, positions and limbs in a fraction of a second. It’s the mind-body connection you need to slam dunk a basketball, nail a cross-court volley or drill a bicycle kick into the top corner.

The late neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks called proprioception a “sixth sense” that’s equal in importance to the other five.

Suffice to say, cliff divers have honed theirs to clairvoyant levels.

They’re also serious athletes.

The male competitors are all conspicuously ripped with lean definition that highlights every muscle. Despite the visual nature of the sport, the divers’ bodies

aren’t built for aesthetics. Some of the muscle serves as body armour to offer slight protection at the moment of impact. “You need to have a lot of strength without necessarily being too bulky,” Zuber explains. “But you also need to be incredibly powerful and flexible at the same time.”

Core strength, in particular, is critical. As the divers hit the water, their lower body is slowed down by the impact while their upper body is still speeding up.

The crucial link yoking the two together is the core, which is thrown under astounding pressure. If your core is not completely tight you can easily injure your back.

“Sometimes it feels like the water really wants to pull you to pieces,” Zuber admits. “I’d say that the abdominal strength of divers is the best out of almost all the sports in the world.”

It’s showtime. On Saturday afternoon the streets of Bilbao are packed with 27,000 people hollering to see the divers do their stuff. Spectators squeeze onto the balconies of neighbouring houses or sit astride the rooftops in the sun. Above the yells of the crowd, house music blares.

This afternoon is the final of the Championships, the culmination of a roaming global series. In terms of

competition, not much is at stake. Whatever happens today, Iffland has already clinched the women’s title while in the men’s competition, Britain’s Gary Hunt – a seven-time world champion – has also prevailed once again.

But while the winners may be decided, there’s still tension in the air due to the physical stakes.

That’s particularly true in Bilbao.

Many of the competitors feel that bridges are more challenging to dive off than cliffs as the lack of a discernible shoreline denies them a visual marker to judge their entry into the water.

Up on the bridge, the nerves are palpable on the faces of the divers as they wait to be called to action. Some sit with their eyes closed, quietly murmuring to themselves.

Others rehearse truncated movements from their dives to prime theirmuscle memory into action. Below at ground level, there’s a carnival atmosphere.

But behind the scenes, the mood

ILLUSTRATION BY SONNY RAMIREZ @ ILLUSTRATIONOROOM.COM.AU

HEAD OVER HEELS: CZECH DIVER MICHAL NAVRATIL TUCKS UP.

TACTICS

is sombre and intense.

When called to the platform everything changes.

Suddenly, the divers switch into performance mode and jump onto stage with a cocksure swagger. Mido’s Paredes leaps onto the platform wearing a mask and the shirt of the local football team’s goalkeeper, whipping the spectators to fever pitch. This isn’t just theatrical bravado but a coldly logical performance tactic. Projecting confidence can translate into increased self-assurance in your brain. As Paredes explains afterwards, “I wasn’t playing around,” he says, “I was just trying to control myself.”

Then there is the sound of the bell. The DJ cuts the music and the crowd falls to a hush. Paredes crosses himself and walks to the edge of the platform. In the late

afternoon sunlight, he blows kisses to the crowd before turning to stand with his back to the ledge. Concentration is etched on his face as he stands on the tips of his toes, heels cocked above the drop. It’s an unsustainable position, but he holds it for five long seconds.

As his heart rate accelerates, Paredes’ focus narrows. What’s happening now is a strange form of escapism. He’s no longer aware of the crowd or the Guggenheim Museum shimmering to his left.

All his attention is fixed on the here and now. He bends his knees and explodes upwards, using his arms to generate the rotational speed to whip him through two and half twists into a deep pike before entering the water with barely a splash. The crowd goes bananas.

Paredes emerges from the

water with a huge smile. Partly it’s the fact that his dive will have guaranteed him a podium finish (he’ll finish second behind Hunt). Partly it’s the relief of coming through unscathed. It’s also the satisfaction of pushing yourself to the limits of what’s physically and mentally possible.

So what does it feel like to pull off a cliff dive? Zuber explains.

“It’s like the law of physics: for every reaction there’s an equal and opposite reaction.” The

build-up to the dive with its mix of performance anxiety and mortal dread is a horrific ordeal to endure. Yet come out the other side, Zuber says, and you’ll feel the corollary – a wild euphoria that few people experience. If there’s truth in the old saying “no risk, no reward”, cliff divers get the payback they deserve.

Mido is the Official Performance Partner for the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series

“The abdominal strength of divers is the best out of all the sports in the world”

LEFT: GARY HUNT HURTLES TOWARD THE WATER; TOP: COLOMBIAN MARLA PAULA QUINTERO; ABOVE: HUNT AND IFFLAND CELEBRATE THEIR VICTORIES. January 2020 115

STAY CONNECTED AND STAY ON TOP OF LIFE

ESSENTIALS

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Ask your Google Assistant about the weather, news or almost anything. Hear your personalised schedule, commute and reminders. Set timers and alarms, and control your compatible smart devices.

YOUR MONTHLY GUIDE TO WHAT’S HAPPENING AND WHAT’S NEW

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DESIGN IN MULTIMEDIA

This season, BOSS plays with the role of curator. Our curatorial eye ranges across the worlds of art and design, including art spaces and architecture, drawing on the rich resource of our own heritage and long involvement with the arts. Visit hugoboss.com

124 Let’s take this outside

B E C AU S E

126 Build power where it counts

F

T

128 The after-dark training secret

E

N E W

R I C H

COUNTRY STRONG

Music legend TIM McGRAW lost 18 kilograms, turned into a fitness badass, and became the latest celebrity to launch his own health and wellness brand.

Here’s what worked for him –and what might work for you LARA ROSENBAUM

ARTURO OLMOS

January 2020 119

NEXT-STAGE FITNESS C & W royalty Tim McGraw has become a top performer of a different kind, powering through workouts that would leave lesser men singin’ the blues

This is how the 52-year-old country- music star injects fun into a vicious 90-minute sweat session he designed himself, aiming to push his own limits. “I don’t really get tired of training,” McGraw says. “There’s such a feeling of accomplishment that comes from the feeling of being my age and still being at the top of my game.”

McGraw wants you in that position, too. That’s why he’s become one of a growing number of celebrities – like Mark Wahlberg, Tom Brady and Chris Hemsworth – leveraging global stardom to build fitness and wellness brands.

McGraw creates his own workouts and partnered with exercise chain Snap Fitness to design TRUMAV, which is filled with his favourite gear (kettlebells, battle ropes). His new book, Grit & Grace: Train the Mind, Train the Body, Own Your Life, describes his late-career fitness transformation.

HOLLYWOOD

SWOLE PATROL

Here’s what we think of the other celebs diving into fitness

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Chris Hemsworth, creator of Centr This app is powered by the trainers and wellness experts who turned Hemsworth into Thor.

MH verdict: A topdrawer superhero starter kit.

menshealth.com.au

Mark Wahlberg, investor in F45 The Aussie gym chain is going global and now has 400 gyms in the US. It’s known for testing 45-minute HIIT workouts.

MH verdict: The formula isn’t revolutionary, but it is effective, especially for desk jockeys.

Eleven years and 18 kilograms ago, he realised he’d lost control of his own fitness when he starred in Four Christmases. He’d grown up playing sports, but he was up to 97kg, and his daughter Gracie noticed, saying he looked “big on the screen”. “I got out of it for a while,” he says. “I was in the prime of my career, and I wasn’t capitalising on it.”

So he ditched alcohol, burgers and “truck-stop

Tim Tebow, part owner of D1 Training in Tampa and Savannah Focuses on improving athletic performance.

MH verdict: Great for top athletes, but average gym-goers can pass.

Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez, investors in TruFusion An ambitious boutique gym chain with HIIT, yoga, Pilates and more under one roof. Hasn’t caught fire yet.

MH verdict: Blends tough workouts and recovery – and it works!

foods” and began walking in the morning.

That became a 20-minute run, and soon he was lifting weights. And he realised it was helping his music. “I use my whole body to sing – my legs, my butt,” he says. “And having more control over those things makes my voice stronger.”

He also started taking his workouts on the road. The same equipment he got for TRUMAV is always at his

Tom Brady, cofounder of TB12 Offers a unique combo of physical therapy and functional training.

MH verdict: Expensive but effective, particularly for weekend-warrior types with performance goals.

COUNTRY STRONG

MCGRAW ADMITS THAT HE DOESN’T EXACTLY LOVE LEG TRAINING. BUT THAT DOESN’T STOP HIM FROM DOING THESE BATTLEROPE REVERSE LUNGES.

BETWEEN SETS

BREAK OF BRAWN IN A PINCH FOR A QUICK SWEAT? TRY THIS 20-MINUTE BASIC BODYWEIGHT SESSION, A MCGRAW CREATION. HE DOESN’T HAVE A NAME FOR THIS ONE, SO LET’S CALL IT “NOT A MOMENT TOO SWOON”, A PLAY ON ONE OF MCGRAW’S BIG HITS

Directions: Warm up with 3 sets of 20 jumping jacks, resting 30 seconds between sets. Do the first set slowly, picking up speed with each set. Then work through the following circuit. Do each move for 40 seconds, then rest 20 seconds. Rest 1 minute after each round. Do 5 rounds.

1

PUSH-UP Start in push-up position, hands directly below your shoulders, core tight. Bend at the elbows and shoulders, lowering until your chest is 2cm from the floor, then press back up. Too easy? After you press up, lift one hand off the floor and open into a side plank; alternate sides.

2

SQUAT Stand with feet shoulder-width apart, core tight. Bend at the knees and push your butt back while keeping your chest up; lower until your thighs are parallel to the floor.

Stand up, squeezing your glutes at the top. Too easy? Squat down until your thighs are below parallel, or shift your feet wider.

trailer. Hours before every concert, he works out with his band, often using moves he learned from a trainer he sometimes works with, Roger Yuan. “I’ve learned a lot over the last three or four years.”

McGraw takes pride in his transformation because it never had anything to do with the popularity contest that is celebrity. “Most things in this business are out of your control,” he says. “What the radio is going to play, how many records you’re going to sell. Control the things you can, and maybe that helps.”

None of this means McGraw (or any celeb, for that matter) should be your go-to source for gym wisdom. But there is plenty that this wave of Hollywood athleticism can help you do.

“Guys like Tim and Chris shouldn’t be viewed as fitness gurus,” says personal trainer Ebenezer Samuel.

“They’ve experienced success. That’s not pushing somebody else to success.

Just be inspired when you see them crush their own workouts.”

Back at TRUMAV, McGraw is crushing this workout. One moment he’s climbing up two ropes; the next he’s flipping his torso upside down on them and hoisting his legs skyward.

Then he’s flipping a tractor tyre. He doesn’t slow until he begins doing burpees and push-ups.

When he’s done, he feels energised. “This workout is my meditation,” he says. “It frees things up in your head so you can get the trash out for a little while.”

3

SIT-UP Lie on your back, feet hip-width apart, heels on the floor. Keep your chin up. Squeeze your abs and, lifting your torso from the ground, reach for the ceiling. Lower with control. Too easy? Do V-ups. Lie on your back, legs straight and arms extended. Lift your straight legs and arms, touching your hands to your toes.

Cheat meal?

“A cheeseburger is my all-time favourite. Now I try to earn it, and I’ll do a little extra work.”

Songs on your playlist?

“Usually silence, so it’s like a meditation. But I’m also kind of stuck on CNN. I’m a news junkie and usually have that on. It can be a whole other world.”

Favourite superhero?

“My wife, Faith Hill! With three daughters and my schedule and her schedule, there’s a lot going on.

She helps hold us all together. And she’s an awesome cook.”

Workout kryptonite?

“I don’t have a least favourite move, though I’d have to say leg-work isn’t my favourite. It’s mostly because I’m always trying to grow mine, and it can be hard to find the balance.”

MCGRAW KEEPS HIS WORKOUTS INTENSE BECAUSE IT MAKES CONCERTS SEEM EASY. “MAKE PRACTICE HARDER THAN THE GAME,” HE SAYS. January 2020 121

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T H E G R AT E O U T D O O R S I N TAST E

THE GRATE OUTDOORS IN TASTE For a guilt-free holiday from your usual healthy fare, these campfire nachos boast a complete nutrient profile – plus plenty of melted cheese

WORDS: PAUL KITA; PHOTOGRAPHY: CHRISTINA HOLMES

MAN For the disciplined eater, excursions into the wild aren’t easy. Will his hard work be undone by a few days off the beaten track of Tupperware lunches? Will his fellow campers bemoan his fastidiousness should he remain on the straight and narrow? Fear not.

Combine these tortilla chips’ carbs, chicken’s protein, avocado’s fats and beans’ fibre with the metabolism-firing chillies and vitamin-rich tomatoes to cover all bases with this tasty compromise. The great outdoors is no place to hold back. Go all in.

PAN



A MAN, A PAN, A PLAN NACHOS

PLAN

Serves 4 • kJs 2070 • Protein 35g • Carbs 38g • Fat 24g

• Set a grate over a lit fire (check for fire bans!). Line a large cast-iron pan with a sheet of foil. Then repeat with another sheet.

Ingredients • Tortilla chips, ½ bag • Grilled chicken, 200g • Ajarofslicedjalapenos • Black beans, ½ tin • Sweetcorn, ½ tin • Cherry tomatoes, 75g • Cheddar, 115g, grated • A lime, juiced • Sour cream, 60g • An avocado, diced • Springonions,2,sliced • Coriander, ½ bunch, chopped

• Layer the chicken, chips, chillies, beans, sweetcorn, tomatoes and cheese.

Fold the foil over to make a packet, then place the pan on the grill. Cook for 15 minutes, or until the cheese melts. Meanwhile, combine the lime juice and sour cream in a bowl.

• With oven mitts, remove the pan. Peel back the foil and top with the avocado, onions, coriander, lime and sour cream. Now, dig in – but be quick. No one likes a soggy chip, do they?

HEALTHY CHEAT: THIS HEARTY DISH WILL DO MORE THAN CHIP AWAY AT YOUR HUNGER .

January 2020 123

THE LUNCH-HOUR MOOD ENHANCER

Not every session calls for lung-bursting effort.

To give yourself a much-needed endorphin boost, step outdoors and slow everything down

2B

1B

1A

POSITIVE VIBES ONLY

In this outdoor workout, you won’t be punishing a certain muscle group or fixating on kilojoule burn. Instead, the emphasis is on raising endorphin levels to reduce stress. “Don’t rush through the reps. Go at a pace that doesn’t sacrifice your form,” says PT Faisal Abdalla.

You’ll finish the session in tune with your body and energised, not quivering on the grass.

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1|| PLANK T-ROTATION

2|| RUNNER’S LUNGE

(4 rounds of 6 reps per arm)

(4 rounds of 10 reps per leg)

To open up your tight back and shoulders, set up in a high-plank position, hands under your shoulders and legs out straight (A). Let your eyes follow your right hand as you reach out to the side and upward (B). Bring it down and return to the plank before repeating on the other arm. To make it easier, set your hands on a bench. Or to advance it, elevate your feet.

The buzz you’ll get from doing this move on the spot will be just as powerful as the “runner’s high”. With your feet hip-width apart, step your right leg back, tapping your knee to the floor and raising your right hand towards your face (A).

Drive your knee to your chest as you jump your left foot off the floor, swinging your right arm back and left arm forward (B). After 10 reps, swap sides.

WORDS: MICHAEL JENNINGS; PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILIP HAYNES; STYLING: ABENA OFEI; GROOMING: NATACHA SCHMITT

2A

THE LUNCH-HOUR MOOD ENHANCER

THE SPEC MUSCLES TARGETED

MIN RESULTS IN

2

WEEKS LEVEL

EASY 4B

3A

4A

3B

3|| PUSH-UP WALKOUT

4|| SKATER

(4 rounds of 8 reps )

(4 rounds of 10 reps per leg)

Boost your circulation and energy by activating muscles in both your lower and upper body. From a standing position (A), bend at your hips, your legs straight, placing your hands on the floor under your shoulders.

Walk them in front of you until you’re in a high plank, then drop your chest to the floor to perform a push-up (B). Walk your hands back and stand. That’s one rep.

With feet shoulder-width, jump to your right with your corresponding foot, lifting your left leg to bring it behind your right. As you do, swing your left arm forward and right arm back to land in a sprint stance on your right leg (A). Switch sides, jumping with your left foot and raising your right leg (B). After 10 reps each side, rest for 90 seconds before round two of the circuit. Move well to feel great all day.

January 2020 125

BRET CONTRERAS (RIGHT) CREATED THE HIP THRUST MACHINE – FOR ONE OF THE RARE EXERCISES THAT ISOLATE YOUR GLUTES – A DECADE AGO.

SEAT OF POWER How one trainer built a temple to a body

part that’s celebrated and underappreciated at the same time: the butt EBENEZER SAMUEL

CODY PICKENS

Behind a glass storefront on a busy San Diego street, a model does barbell hip thrusts while a Brazilian-jujitsu fighter grunts through a set of 140-kg box squats.

They’ve both come to this gym for the same reason: arse. Only it’s their own arses they’re interested in.

Welcome to the Glute Lab, a large, oneroom space packed with machines even a gym rat would find exotic. There’s a contraption with pads for your calves, hooks for weights and a belt for your waist. You buckle up, then squeeze your glutes as you open your legs. (Trust me: it’s hard.)

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There’s no blaring rock music here, and nobody’s doing curls or bench presses.

In fact, the lone bench in the building is sort of stuffed into a tiny middle section, wedged between a squat rack, where one of the assistant trainers is coaching another model (there are four in here right now) through box squats, and a Sorinex training machine that three other employees are

busy constructing. Everyone here, including me and Glute Lab founder Bret Contreras, is chasing stronger glutes.

I’ve been in the Glute Lab barely five minutes, and the godfather of booty training already has me lying with my shoulder blades in one of the hip-thrust machines that he sells on his website thehipthruster.com. My butt and feet are firmly planted on the ground, and a bar loaded

with a whopping 130 kg is sitting right over my hips.

Contreras wants me to squeeze my butt cheeks super hard, an action that should propel my hips (and that bar) upward and straighten out my torso in the process.

He’s certain I can do this, so after he rearranges my head position, I squeeze. The weight is driven up, and I do 10 reps. “See? Your glutes are

S E AT O F P OW E R

THE BRET CONTRERAS BUTT BUILDER Add

stronger than you think,” he says with a grin.

Same for everyone else in the building. The bells on the door jangle and another model in booty-hugging spandex walks in. She goes up to Contreras, who quickly gives her three exercises that she seems to know already how to do, then sets off on her workout.

Contreras, 43, has made it his life’s work to show everyone the power of their glutes, and he’s squeezed all that knowledge into his new book, The Glute Lab: The Art and Science of Strength and Physique Training. “Glute training is vital to so many things,” he says. “It’s the engine for your power.”

Contreras, a 193-cm, 113-kg slab of a human, is using that engine to power an empire. He has more than 745,000 followers on Instagram, and his BootybyBret program has more than 4500 monthly subscribers. He also sells his own line of glute-building gear, including that hip-thrust machine, a bespoke barbell that’s better for glute training since the handles are specifically designed with glute work in mind, and special buttbuilding resistance bands you loop around your knees.

It’s not merely that your glutes look good in jeans.

es to your workouts, doing them as often imes a week, to grow your glutes PULSE GOBLET SQUATS Stand with a dumbbell at your chest, heels on 5-kg plates. Squat until your thighs are parallel to the floor. This is the start. Lower until your thighs are below parallel, then press up until they’re just above parallel. (You’re doing only the bottom half of a full squat motion.)

That’s 1 rep; do 20.

BENCH HIP ABDUCTION Lie with your right side on a bench, l and hips hanging off it, legs straight.

Bend your right leg. Keeping your lef leg straight, let it drop toward the flo until you feel a stretch in your left glu .

Drive your straight leg up as high as it will go. That’s 1 rep; do 12 per side.

“They don’t just look good in jeans.

Well-developed glutes power you in the gym and in sports” Although that’s no small thing. Well-developed and functioning glutes protect you from knee, hip and lower-back injuries, and they power you in the gym and in sports. And training them is even more important if you’re sedentary or have a

desk job. Sitting all day can tighten your hip flexors and lead to weak glutes, which can inhibit your ability to achieve what’s called “hip extension”— essentially, the opening of your hip joint.

Without that, athletic heroics will be confined to your past.

Strong glutes also stabilise your pelvis, supporting your spine and alleviating back pain.

“Your glutes are like a Swiss Army knife,” says Contreras. Do the exercises above to make them stronger.

GET HIP WITH YOUR GLUTES!

Hip extension is a critical human motion that’s driven by your glutes. If you sit too much or avoid activating them on a daily basis, your body forgets how to do it. Wake up your glutes and you get better at these things:

RUNNING

JUMPING

WEIGHT TRAINING

Hip extension helps you explode off the ground when you run, lengthening your stride and pushing you a bit further with every step. “Have you ever seen a sprinter with a small butt?”

Contreras asks. “No.”

Want to jump high? Then you need to extend at the hip.

Explosive, powerful hips react with your ankles and knees to propel you upwards. They’re fuelled by a strong glute contraction.

The final motion of a squat or deadlift occurs when your pelvis shifts into a truly neutral position.

Are you having trouble doing that? Squeeze your glutes extra hard and watch what happens.

January 2020 127

MOST VALUABLE PILLOW: THE WELL-RESTED ATHLETE IS PRIMED TO PERFORM AT A LEVEL SLEEP-DEPRIVED FOES COULD BUT DREAM OF.

IS SLEEP THE ULTIMATE P.E.D.?

What sleep coaches are telling the world’s top athletes can raise your daily game, too. Listen up and turn in DAVID FERRY

Tom Brady, noted underachiever that he is, aims to be in bed by 8:30pm. LeBron James plans his life around nabbing 10 hours of shut-eye. Justin Verlander, the Cy Young–winning Houston Astros ace, clocks between 10-12 hours every night.

(And he does it sleeping next to Kate Upton.) In the past few years, the world’s premier athletes have discovered a new performance-enhancing supplement for their training regimens: sleep.

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A raft of recent and tantalising studies has suggested that simple, restorative sleep can help you think, perform and recover better. It’s compelled the world’s leading players (often prompted by their team’s sleep coaches) to reprogram their social lives and change their

priorities. It’s why pro teams’ practice facilities include nap rooms – the Red Sox turned an old utility room into one, and the Warriors’ new Chase Center includes individual sleep pods. They’re reclining chairs with caps over the top that block out noise and light, but still: sleep pods!

Sleep – not training or

I S S L E E P T H E U LT I M AT E P. E . D . ?

working for another hour – is when your body gets stronger and your mind gets sharper. You break down your muscles in training, but rest is when the fibres repair themselves and become more powerful. And all those skills and memories you acquire in a day are encoded while the lights are out. Lose sleep and your neurons start firing more slowly and working together less efficiently. Your reaction time, your speed and your focus all degrade. Even just three nights of crappy sleep has been shown to drop your bench press by 10 kilograms.

And in the long run, you’re cueing up obesity, heart disease, stroke and other health troubles. “The research that’s coming out now is unequivocal,” says W. Christopher Winter, the neurologist who first figured out – more than a decade ago – that jet lag was related to Major League Baseball

teams losing games. “People who sleep more and sleep better perform better, both in the short and the long term.”

You might not need 10 hours like an elite athlete. But you should shoot for seven to nine, and most of us aren’t even coming close.

HOW GOOD IS VITAMIN Z? Dr Cheri Mah knows better than most the dividends sleep can pay. In 2011, as a researcher at Stanford’s Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Laboratory, she published the study that catapulted the subject of sleep into clubhouses across the country. Mah required a group of players on Stanford’s men’s basketball team to snooze at least 10 hours a night. (How do you get students to sleep more?

Make them spend more time in bed – for almost everyone, more time in bed leads to more time asleep, she says.)

No one expected more sleep to be bad for the players, but the results were a shock: free-throw percentages increased by nine per cent, successful three-point field goals jumped 9.2 per cent, and injuries dropped to boot.

“They all improved,” says Mah. Related studies she conducted showed that with more sleep, college swimmers improved their times, soccer players sprinted faster and reported increased vigour, and tennis players saw their accuracy increase. Basically, both their brains and their bodies functioned better. “Then my story became: How do I apply this?”

One of the first pro teams Mah consulted for was the Golden State Warriors. That was in 2014, toward the beginning of their multi-season run as the NBA’s dominant force. She quickly helped the team optimise its travel and

practice schedules.

Cross-country flights before games and red-eyes afterwards? No way.

Mandatory practice the morning after a six-hour journey? Nope. In fact, fatigue is such a clear indicator of performance that Mah collaborated with ESPN on a schedule-alert project to predict when NBA teams would be at highest risk of losing based on travel and fatigue factors. In its second season, the tool correctly guessed sleep-based losses 78 per cent of the time. Since then, Mah says, the NBA has improved scheduling by keeping player fatigue in mind. (Consider the same with your own calendar.)

Organisational changes help only so much; athletes have to follow through on their own. And you do too.

Below, discover how to get championship sleep and level up.

9% How much free-throw percentages increased after players got 10 hours of sleep.

HOW TO SLEEP LIKE A CHAMP

1

MAKE SLEEP AS IMPORTANT AS YOUR GAME.

For those of us who aren’t paid tens of millions of dollars to perform, the idea of finding more time for sleep can be daunting.

When obligations pile up, it’s usually the first thing to go. That’s backward thinking. “If you increase your time in bed by even 15-20 minutes, you will notice a difference,” says Dr Meeta Singh, a sleep-disorder and sportsmedicine expert at the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders Center. You know how Tom Brady gets to bed by 8:30? He prioritises it.

2

CUT THE BULL.

“I always encounter this type, the Silicon Valley dude who’s killing it financially, has kids, is trying to do a triathlon,” Winter says. “He goes to bed at midnight and wakes up at 4am. He says he’s doing great and needs four hours. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Give your body a chance to operate at its full

potential by getting a complete night’s rest a few days in a row.

Then see how you perform. You might do better on nine hours, even if you’ve been telling everyone – including yourself – that you’re fine with four.

3

WORK YOUR ROOM.

During the season, athletes sleep in different hotel rooms every week. To create the perfect environment – a quiet, dark, cool room (between 15.5-19.5°C) – they might need to use pillows to keep blinds and curtains light-tight. LeBron reportedly relies on white noise (Rain on Leaves in the Calm app) to block out distractions. Use your home advantage to set up the right sleeping environment every night.

4

FOAM-ROLL BEFORE BED.

You need a bedtime routine that’s not about screens, which mess with your ability to produce the sleep hormone melatonin. Athletes (and probably

you) know it’s a good idea to foam-roll muscles anyway, so why not make it part of a dedicated 15-30 minutes of wind-down time, Mah says. Substitutes for rolling: yoga or some time reading an actual book or magazine.

5

IF TRAVEL IS SHORT, DON’T CHANGE YOUR SCHEDULE.

Athletes normally shuffle between two to four time zones, Winter says. Research suggests that the players’ performance peaks in late afternoon, so he may tell a US West Coast pitcher to stay on California time for a nighttime match-up in New York. If you’re in a different time zone for a quick meeting that falls within your regular work hours, you might not have to bother trying to adjust.

6

POWER UP WITH NAP-TIME, IF YOU CAN.

Take a nap to help reset after lunch or midafternoon to finish your workday strong. In the NBA, stars such as Kevin Durant, Paul

George, and Steph Curry all swear by the pre-game nap to keep them alert and focused.

7

MAKE CONSISTENCY IMPORTANT.

You need weeks of consistent sleep to live and play to your full potential, Mah says. That means going to bed and getting up at nearly the same time every day. Your “sleep debt” accumulates when you don’t get enough for days on end, and a night or weekend of extra sleep won’t settle your bill.

8

AND IF YOU CAN’T SLEEP TONIGHT . . .

“I tell my athletes and my patients that sleep is the most important thing in the world, but tonight’s sleep is irrelevant,” Winter says. Don’t beat yourself up if you have some rough nights or weeks. That’s normal. Stuff happens – and lying in bed is often when you think about it. What shouldn’t be normal is cheating your sleep every night and expecting victory in every game.

January 2020 129

ONE WORD ANSWER CREDIT SQUEEZE: ESCHEWING PLASTIC MONEY FOR NOTES COULD MAKE YOU A SAVVIER SPENDER.

QUESTION

What should you carry to clean up your unhealthy spending habits?

ANSWER

BACK IN 2010, Eric Cantona said: “We must go to the bank”. Was the former Manchester United captain planning a heist, or simply carrying out some life admin? No, he was calling for revolution. “Instead of going on the streets [to protest] . . . go to the bank and withdraw your money,” he urged. “If there are a lot of people withdrawing their money, the system collapses.”

Unfortunately for Cantona, long before the stock markets would crash, banks and ATMs would simply run out of notes. “The only effect it would have is to inconvenience a lot of people when they go to the cash machine,” Richard Wellings of the Institute of Economic Affairs responded. Not exactly the end of capitalism as we know it. But while King Eric may not be able to bring down the

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menshealth.com.au

system for love nor money, there is still a practical reason to head to the cash machine and pull out a wad of notes.

Carrying cold, hard cash can limit overspending and may even help you make healthier choices. According to a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, applied or less “transparent” ways of paying – from credit cards to gift cards – dull the “pain of paying”. Any purchase can stimulate the release of dopamine in your brain, triggering a feeling of reward and pleasure more often associated with recreational drugs. Watching your pile of notes physically diminish can temper the fun, but without the tangible transaction of handing over cash, spending becomes a game.

Your debit card’s anaesthetic properties

extend to the quality of your purchases, too.

Another study, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that card users splash their metaphorical cash on items more impulsively than those paying with paper and coins, leading to decisions that could set back your fitness goals. The study found that if you use cash, you’re more likely to restrict your shopping trolley to wholefoods; when paying by card, you’re more inclined to load up on ice cream, chips and chocolate.

If increasing your bank balance and trimming your waistline aren’t enough of a reason to chop up your plastic, research from the University of Texas at Austin found that cash actually carries fewer bacteria than your cards. So, even the dirtiest of cash is the cleaner option.

WORDS: JUSTIN GUTHRIE

Cash

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