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Kicking!

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“We have to reach as high as we can.

Because it may be more important than just a movie.”

Vin Diesel photographed by Olav Stubberud exclusively for Men’s Health. Styling by Paris Libby. Photo assistance

by Josue Ponce. Location: the Dominican Republic.

ON THE COVER: Shirt by Maison Margiela. THIS PAGE: Shirt by John Varvatos.

F E A T U R E S

Olav Stubberud

—VIN DIESEL, P. 62

62 VIN DIESEL, SO FAR For 20 years, he’s played Dominic Toretto in one of the highestgrossing movie franchises of all time. Along the way, he’s produced Hollywood blockbusters, kept fit, and learned the power of tough love with the Rock. BY RYAN D’AGOSTINO

70 GOLD-MEDAL SECRETS OF THE OLYMPIANS Learn shot-putter strength, swimmer stamina, and so much more from 20 athletes competing for the biggest honor in sports.

80 THE DEATH-DEFYING, LIFE-CHANGING POWER OF RESILIENCE A retired U. S. Army sergeant, a fraternity pledge, and a climbing guide all have one thing in common: They survived the impossible.

Now they’re sharing the skills they gained and proving resilience is more than just a word.

88 THE TOXICSUPPLEMENT HUNTER Inside the mission of a doctor turned investigator taking on

sketchy pill and powder manufacturers one false claim at a time. BY STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

94 “I WENT DOWN, AND I CAME BACK UP IN A REARRANGED KIND OF WAY” It’s been more than three decades since Bloodsport launched JeanClaude Van Damme into action stardom. After coping with substance abuse, the ’90s icon wants to prove he’s still kicking high. BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS MEN’S HEALTH

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CONTENTS

SHELL OUT A delicious seafood feast for gains upon gains. (See page 38.)

LIFE 33 Nine adrenalinefueled guy trips to help you reboot and escape the indoors.

38 30/10: Grilled lobster—protein-packed and infinitely tastier than chicken breast.

40 Deodorant or antiperspirant? Natural or aluminum based?

Protect your pits from sweat and odor with this decoder.

43 There’s only one right way to make the perfect margarita.

44 These sustainable clothes help the planet—and you’ll look good doing it.

48 Check yourself: The subtle art of just-looking flirtation.

50 Cool Dad:

Fatherhood author Matt Logelin says no two kids are the same, and that’s actually kind of great.

MIND 53 Crush negativity

with coffee (!) and more smart ways to build mental fortitude.

BODY

9 Your plans for escape, the greatest basketball movie in history, and way more stuff you’re excited about this month.

13 Break your gym rut

and torch fat with the wild, acrobatic sport of freerunning.

16 This six-move,

35-minute bodyweight workout packs on muscle all over.

18 6 A.M.: Rapper and

F9 star Ludacris shares his fast and furious garage workout.

20 Yeeeeeoooooowww!

Inside the decades-long quest to fend off muscle

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MEN’S HEALTH

cramps—and what you can do now to prevent your next one.

56 Your pet might be your mental-health hero, says Gregory Scott Brown, M.D. 57 Song Exploder host

24 How a dermatologist

Hrishikesh Hirway finds peace of mind in a galaxy far, far away.

26 Should you take a pre-workout supplement?

58 The massive,

28 Millions of Americans

+

solves maskne and other skin woes.

are still experiencing the effects of Covid-19 after they’ve recovered.

Here’s what to look out for.

mood-altering power of small talk.

100 Metrogrades: America’s Greenest Cities

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHELSEA KYLE

Food styling: Jamie Kimm/CXA. Prop styling: Nicole Louie.

MH WORLD

Personnel Question:

Which Olympic Games event are you most excited about?

TEAM

MEET THE Richard Dorment

Jack Essig

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Table tennis, because it gives me an eye EDITORIAL Ben Court, Mike Darling Executive Editors workout.

Jamie Prokell Creative Director

SVP/PUBLISHING DIRECTOR

Chris Peel Executive Director, Hearst Men’s Group

ADVERTISING SALES NEW YORK (212) 649-2000 Ebenezer Samuel Fitness Director Caryn Kesler Executive Director, Luxury Goods Ben Paynter Features Editor John Wattiker Executive Director, Fashion & Retail Nojan Aminosharei Entertainment Director Doug Zimmerman Senior Grooming Director Jordyn Taylor, Spencer Dukoff Kim Buonassisi Advertising Sales Director Deputy Editors Kyle Taylor East Coast Automotive Sales Director Marty Munson Health Director John Cipolla Integrated Account Director Paul Kita, Josh Ocampo Senior Editors Brad Gettelfinger Sales Manager, Hearst Direct Media Brett Williams Fitness Editor CHICAGO (312) 964-4900 Evan Romano Associate Editor Autumn Jenks, Justin Harris Midwest Sales Directors Joshua St. Clair, Milan Polk Editorial Assistants LOS ANGELES (310) 664-2801 Patti Lange Western Ad Director ART Anne Rethmeyer Group Sales Director, Auto I’m not Liz Chan Deputy Art Director usually a big Eric Rosati Designer SAN FRANCISCO (510) 508-9252 Jason Speakman Associate Digital Visual Editor sports guy, but I’ll Andrew Kramer Kramer Media Matthew Montesano Digital Imaging Specialist be watching for DETROIT (248) 614-6120 the first-ever Sam Shanahan Detroit Automotive Director HEARST VISUAL GROUP DALLAS (972) 533-8665 skateboarding Alix Campbell Chief Visual Content Director Patty Rudolph PR 4.0 Media Sally Berman Visual Director events.

Justin O’Neill Contributing Visual Director Samantha Irwin General Manager, Hearst Men’s Group Scott M. Lacey Deputy Visual Director Karen Ferber Business Manager Amy Wong Senior Visual Editor Paul Baumeister Research Director Giancarlos Kunhardt Visual Assistant Alison Papalia Executive Director, Consumer Marketing Chris Hertwig Production Manager FASHION Aurelia Duke Finance Director Ted Stafford Fashion Director Everette Hampton Executive Assistant Adam Mansuroglu Senior Style & Gear Editor Toni Starrs, Yvonne Villareal, Samantha Wolf, Olivia Zurawin COPY Sales Assistants Janna Ojeda Assistant Managing Editor John Kenney Managing Copy Editor PUBLIC RELATIONS Alisa Cohen Barney Senior Copy Editor Nathan Christopher Executive Director, Public Relations Connor Sears, David Fairhurst Anouska Best Public Relations Coordinator The decathlon, Assistant Copy Editors

for sure. The winner MARKETING SERVICES is acclaimed best Cameron Connors Executive Director, Head of Brand Strategy and Marketing all-around athlete Stephanie Block Integrated Marketing Director in the world.

Jaclyn D’Andrea Marketing Coordinator CONTRIBUTING EDITORS That’s some high Alison Brown Special Events Director Milo F. Bryant, Michael Easter, stakes.

Jana Nesbitt Gale Executive Creative Director Philip Ellis, Garrett Munce, Zachary Zane RESEARCH Jennifer Messimer Research Chief Nick Pachelli Assistant Research Editor

Michael B. Sarpy Art Director OTHER CONTRIBUTORS Lou Dilorenzo Contributing Art Director VIDEO Dorenna Newton Executive Producer Tony Xie, Elyssa Aquino Video Producers Ericka Paparella Associate Producer HEARST MEN’S FASHION GROUP Nick Sullivan Fashion Director Alfonso Fernández Navas Market Editor Rashad Minnick Fashion Associate

CIRCULATION Rick Day VP, Strategy and Business Management PUBLISHED BY HEARST Steven R. Swartz President & Chief Executive Officer William R. Hearst III Chairman I’m excited Frank A. Bennack, Jr. Executive Vice Chairman to see the best Mark E. Aldam Chief Operating Officer

floor routine in gymnastics!

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MEN’S HEALTH

A DV I S O RY PA N E L We know a lot about health and fitness, but we don’t know as much as the doctors, scientists, and trainers who keep us honest and up-to-date.

BRAIN HEALTH: P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D.

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

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

4x100m relay! The raw speed, fluid teamwork, and national pride give me goose bumps!

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

Fencing.

I was a foil and saber fencer in EXERCISE SCIENCE: college, and to see Martin Gibala, Ph.D. Mark Peterson, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.*D athletes at such Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D., C.S.C.S. high ability is fantastic.

GASTROENTEROLOGY: Felice Schnoll-Sussman, M.D.

ENDOCRINOLOGY:

Sandeep Dhindsa, M.D.

INTEGRATIVE HEALTH: Brenda Powell, M.D.

INTERNAL MEDICINE: Keith Roach, M.D.

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

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

3 on 3!

My 3 versus your 3, on the SEX & RELATIONSHIPS: Debby Herbenick, Ph.D., M.P.H. world stage?!

I’m in!

Shamyra Howard, L.C.S.W. Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D.

PAIN MEDICINE:

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

SLEEP MEDICINE: W. Christopher Winter, M.D.

SPORTS MEDICINE: U. S. A. women’s Michael Fredericson, M.D. basketball. I don’t Dan Giordano, D.P.T., C.S.C.S. think the players Bill Hartman, P.T. get enough credit TRAINING: during the regular Lee Boyce, C.P.T. season.

Mike Boyle, M.Ed., A.T.C. Ben Bruno, C.F.S.C. Alwyn Cosgrove, C.S.C.S.*D David Jack Mubarak Malik David Otey, C.S.C.S. Don Saladino, NASM UROLOGY: Elizabeth Kavaler, M.D. Larry Lipshultz, M.D.

WEIGHT MANAGEMENT: Men’s Health carries the latest health, fitness, and nutrition reporting to provide you with useful information about your health. But every body is different; individual diagnoses and treatments can come only from a health-care practitioner. Printed in USA.

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

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

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WORLD

BEHIND THE SCENES WITH THE EXPERTS, ADVISORS, AND READERS WHO BRING

LET’S TAKE THIS

E D I S T U O TRAVEL IS ESCAPE— from the indoors or the ping of your in-box—and on page 33, we found nine destinations to help you get away.

So we asked you:

Somewhere with a beach, hopefully. @edward.baidoo

Hong Kong.

I’ve wanted to go there for nearly 30 years now. @bennie.woodell

Where in the world are you planning to escape to next?

The Kennedy Space Center.

I am such a science nerd. @wendy.y.lawrence

The gym! @vegetarier .pfleger.paolo

I think I’ll blindly pick a spot on a map. @danhdz75

I’m going to Disneyland!

Lake Tahoe, if I still remember how to drive more than 20 minutes at a time. @bob.hunnicutt1

Andre L Perry

@theninja909

MEN’S HEALTH

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WORLD

EDITOR’S LETTER

Highlights from the Men’s Health channel on YouTube.

ASK MEN’S HEALTH

Q. Can

grilling meats really cause cancer?

—LEWIS, SEATTLE, WA

A.

Q+A WITH THE E.I.C.

“Thoughts on YOUTUBE fitness?” 4 —@cgtn4

FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK, @cgtn4. As I’m

lying down to write this note (oh, like you don’t?), Men’s Health’s YouTube channel has just reached one million subscribers—that’s a lot!—and I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the hows and whys of it all. So: thoughts, in no particular order . . .

1

It’s hard to talk about YouTube as one monolithic thing, because YouTube is

basically just a microcosm of the Internet (and, I guess, the world)—there’s amazing stuff and awful stuff, smart people and not-so-smart people, and the beauty and the burden of the platform is that bums like you and me get to figure out what’s what.

2

There is so much fitness on YouTube—tens of thousands of channels

with millions of hours of video that range from the most vanilla basics to the most insanely stupid moves. Upside: lots of great exercises to search out and work into your sets! Downside: everything else.

3

There’s not a huge emphasis on credibility. Unlike Google, YouTube doesn’t

account for a creator’s expertise, authority, or trustworthiness factors (known ’round these parts as “E-A-T”) when it’s ranking or recommending videos or channels for you. (In contrast, Google, which is owned by the same parent company as YouTube, is all about that E-A-T, which is why you’re more likely to see highly credible sources come up on the first page of search results.) Instead, YouTube algorithms rely primarily on which videos it “thinks” you might like. When it finds a topic that fits into your larger viewing habits, it will recommend that content, even if the person has zero business teaching anyone how to do anything.

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MEN’S HEALTH

There’s not a ton of transparency about what’s an #ad. According to the

Federal Trade Commission, content creators on social media are obligated to disclose any financial relationship with the subjects they’re covering, so users can assess the material’s trustworthiness. Which would be great, if most creators actually did it. One 2018 study from Princeton University researchers found that only a small percentage of YouTube videos included the necessary disclosure of a financial relationship. Does this mean that your favorite vlogger is being paid by the maker of the supplement they’re plugging? Maybe. Maybe not.

But the answer is worth knowing.

5

Do your homework and trust your BS detector. Does the YouTuber have certifi-

cations or a strong background in fitness? Is the comments section a positive, thoughtful place or is it filled with complaints? Certified trainers like Jeff Cavaliere, C.S.C.S., and Jeremy Ethier, NASM, are a few of the ones we like here at Men’s Health. Even noncertified figures like Eddie Hall and Jon Call (aka Jujimufu) have a ton of good advice. And then there’s us: The Men’s Health channel is home to experts like Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S.; Brett Williams, NASM; and other trainers who have the certifications and/ or smarts to make sure you can train safely. We always disclose if there’s an advertising or sponsorship angle to one of our videos. As a 33-yearold brand that wants to be around for another 33 years, we care a lot about our long-term credibility. We’re not going to risk all that for the sake of a few clicks, and we hope you’ll become one of the million-plus viewers who’ve joined the team.

Richard Dorment, Editor-in-Chief

Yes and no!

Throwing meat on the grill does produce chemicals (HCAs and PAHs) that may increase your risk for cancer—but the increase appears to be small.

The hotter and/or longer you grill meat, the more likely these chemicals are to develop, so limit well-done steaks.

Using a low-sugar marinade (such as vinegar, yogurt, lemon or lime juice, or dark beer) with herbs and spices (such as rosemary, onion powder,

+ Have a question for Rich?

Tweet us at @MensHealthMag with the hashtag #AskMHRich and ask away.

WORLD

GOALS

MVP

CALEB CAMACHO STATS

E OF THTH N MO

AGE: 31 LOCATION:

Los Angeles, CA OCCUPATION:

Manager at a socialmedia start-up

Courtesy subject (Camacho). Alamy (OG Space Jam, White Men Can’t Jump, Love & Basketball, Air Bud). Warner Bros. Entertainment (James).

FROM THE ENLIGHTENING TO THE AWESOME, HERE ARE THE STANDOUT SHOUT-OUTS FROM OUR FEEDS THIS MONTH.

channel. Everyone does rides together and encourages each other.

ON INSTAGRAM, actor Glenn Howerton congratulated his It’s Always Sunny costar Rob McElhenney on his May Men’s Health cover—sort of.

THE ONE FOOD I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IS . . .

Unreal Deli meat. After Covid-19-related complications, I decided to go vegan.

It’s made with chickpeas, tomatoes, and beets, not one of those texturized soy proteins.

@glennhowerton: I don’t know. I see a little paunch there. Happy birthday, old man.

McElhenney even spoofed his own cover and questioned if we’d picked the best shot with this throwback. @jamieprokell (MH creative director): Hmmm.

Was not aware that one was an option?

Looking good.

Men’s Health MVP members have access to the best health and fitness articles out there. Each month, we survey our MVPs and choose one whose story catches our eye. Sign up at join.menshealth.com and you could see yourself here one day.

MY FITNESS GOALS I got Covid-19 in August 2020 and was one of the unlucky ones to become a long hauler. I was in bed for a month and unable to work out for five months. I lost

about 25 pounds.

My goal is just to feel like myself again.

He’s not waking up at 2:30 A.M. for a sixhour gym session.

WHY SHAZAM IS MY FITNESS HERO

I STAY MOTIVATED BY . . .

Zachary Levi is ripped, but not Mark Wahlberg ripped.

Talking to colleagues. We have a Peloton Slack

MY PUMP-UP JAM IS . . .

“I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany gets me going. That or anything by Justin Bieber or Carly Rae Jepsen.

WHAT MAKES ME FEEL STRONG IS . . .

Getting to the end.

T H E M E N ’ S H E A LT H T W I T T E R P O L L

W HICH B ASK E T B A LL Based on 1,968 responses to @MensHealthMag.

28.2%

11%

4.1%

THE OG S PAC E JA M

LOVE & BAS KETBA LL

AIR BUD

MEN’S HEALTH

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PICTURE YOURSELF at the top of a staircase with steel railings. Next to it is a five-inch-wide, seven-foot-high wall. How would you get down? If you’re like most people, you might stroll down the stairs. But if you’re Gabriel Nunez (above), the 37-year-old CEO of the Tempest Freerunning Academy in Chatsworth, California, all you see is possibility.

You might sprint and jump into the wall, plant your feet, and then leap and flip off it, landing on the stairs below. Or you might grab the lip of the wall, lower yourself halfway, push your feet off, and flip onto the ground. Then maybe you’d hop up to the railing, run down it, and side-flip to the landing at the bottom. “Usually you start by climbing onto something,” says Nunez.

“Then once that’s easy, you figure out how

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JON JOHNSON

MEN’S HEALTH

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Corbin Reinhardt (le and Sydney Olson

ft),

Tempest CEO Gabriel

Nunez

ning. (Parkour, while still popular you might do it in a more creative IG and studios in California and Texas. The with movement zealots, suffered way. . . . Freerunning is an exploration.”

Chatsworth studio is freerunning’s de facto from taking itself too seriously and This is how you see any space with hub, with trampolines to boost your jumps, was famously parodied on The Office walls, ledges, and railings (or any space boxes to vault over, steel bars to balance on,

by Michael Scott.) Nunez, who was in outdoors) when you get into freerunning, and foam bricks for soft landings. Plenty of college at the time, was intrigued by the daredevil sport/art/way of life that’s stuntmen call Tempest home, but the gym how freerunning took the best of parkgrowing in popularity—and can help also hosts classes in which average Joes fly our and fused it with imaginative, purenergize your summer workouts. through (or learn to fly through) obstacles. poseful movement. Both freerunners At the heart of freerunning is a simple You can learn the basics at home, though, and parkour athletes do similar tricks, concept: constant movement. Your goal is and mastering just a few can jack up your but parkour athletes work through to be playful and creative, swiftly making heart rate in minutes. You’ll build uppercourses quickly. Freerunners aim to your way through a series of obstacles. body strength and challenge balance and dazzle with acrobatics. If Parkour! is Freerunning skills are the backbone of agility, two characteristics rarely trained in for Michael Scott, freerunning is for many Hollywood stunts, powering highthe gym. The experience may alter the way Marvel. “It was athleticism at its finflying action-star chase scenes—involving you approach fitness. “Athletics can make est,” Nunez says. “But it was creative, everyone from James Bond and Jason us change, grow, and evolve,” says Nunez. and there was no boundary to it.”

Bourne to Captain America and Black Pan“There are no rules to this.” Start with Four years later, in 2007, Red ther. Some of those stunt guys practice and these fundamentals from Tempest’s best.

Bull created Art of Motion, a yearly sharpen their skills at Tempest. freerunning competition that places Freerunning is an offshoot of parkour, competitors on a set course and asks which many believe was conceived in the them to zip through it, then judges early 1900s by French military officers as a them on the difficulty and creativity new method of navigating obstacle courses.

Stand up and walk around. Now realize of their route. Four years after that, But parkour focuses on “usefulness,” pushthis: Your eyes never have to look at your ing you to find efficient ways to move. In 2003, Nunez founded Tempest, a trainfeet. You trust that your legs know what ing ground, competition site, and a British documentary called Jump London to do when you hit the pavement, even if classroom all in one. The sport—and tracked three parkour athletes traversing you trip, so you look ahead at the obstacles Tempest—have gained traction ever London landmarks. None of them chased you’re approaching. This, says Nunez, is since, fueled in part by Instagram, an efficient movement; instead, they exuded one key to excelling at freerunning. ideal platform for acrobatic, “no way style, surprising viewers with their acroIt’s much easier to maintain that you can do that!” moves. Tempest now confidence when walking, since one foot batics and leading French parkour athlete has more than 193,000 followers on Guillaume Pelletier to coin the term freerunis always on the ground. In freerunning,

THINK AHEAD IN MIDAIR

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MEN’S HEALTH

alterations to make their moves his own. “Sometimes in my sleep, I’ll think of something,” he says. On his IG feed, you’ll see him perform flips and vaults off skateboards, on roller skates, and, for no particular reason, in a full dinosaur suit.

Borrow Reinhardt’s approach with one of his favorite drills, the box jump. Find a 6-inchhigh box or platform, bend your knees, and leap (yes, leap) onto it, landing with your knees bent and your weight on the balls of your feet.

Do 5 reps, take a 60-second breather, then return to the box. Leap the same way, but this time, rotate your body to the right in midair and land only on your left foot. Do 5 reps, then repeat on the other side. Over time, introduce your own variations. You’ll hone athleticism and balance and improve your footwork for playground basketball and backyard tag.

EMBRACE FALLING Whether you’re on the basketball court, playing with the kids, or midway through your first freerun after reading this story, there’s always a chance you’ll take a tumble. Learn to fall correctly and it will hurt Cyndi Turbo. “Freerunning lets me work less or not at all. through fear and learn new moves in the Hunter Payton Mendoza, 16, knows this. same way—without being so regimented.” At five-foot-six, he’s so powerful he can Absent these limits, Olson can comleap onto a 65-inch-high box. But seven bine her favorite gymnastics-style flips years ago, that’s not what he needed to forge explosive leg strength, test your do for a flashback scene in the 2016 film obliques, and build shoulder stability, too. and handsprings with simpler leaps, rolls, and tucks. One such simple move Who’s Driving Doug. The director asked First, step up to an item no higher than is the backward roll, which builds spinal him to ride a runaway wheelchair down hip height, place your right hand on it, mobility and core strength—and will have a steep hill. Hunter agreed—if he wasn’t and then place your left leg on it, bendyou feeling like a kid, too. belted into the seat. Good thing, too: On ing your knee slightly. Move your right Start by sitting on the ground, knees the first try, the chair flipped. Hunter foot through the gap between your right tucked to your chest, arms bent, hands leaped out. “If I’d let them belt me in, my hand and left leg, then step over the item. near the top of your head. Roll straight face would have been crushed,” he says.

Aim to do 3 sets of 5 reps per side. As time onto your back. Once your upper back and Hunter didn’t mind falling, because progresses, you’ll be able to run up to the head are on the ground, press your palms he’d mastered the safety roll at just obstacle and jump toward it, then place into it, tuck your chin, and roll over the seven years old. The safety roll is a key your hand and step through. back of your head. Get your feet beneath freerunning skill you can use to avoid you and land in the bottom of a squat. Do injury, no matter if you’re leaping 3 sets of 5 to 10 per day. from a park bench or a moving car. The move helps break your fall, cushioning Yes, you can do a vault, and you can jump on the impact on joints and bones alike. a box. But freerunning involves more than Advanced freerunners also use it to a single stunt. The pulse of freerunning change directions and cover territory is “flow,” the ability to connect trick after Standard gym theory says progress means in a dynamic way. trick without hesitation. When you do, say, adding weight to a bar or reps to a set. But To do it, stand, then step forward a vault over a wall, land, roll, stand, run, and there are other ways to measure it, says side-flip into a cartwheel—that’s flow.

Corbin Reinhardt, who performed stunts in 3 to 4 feet with your right foot. Reach your right arm under your torso and Perhaps more than any other active the movie Moxie. “When you go to the gym, toward your left foot, following your competitive freerunner, 2019 Red Bull Art your progression in skill level is gonna be hand with your gaze. Then lunge of Motion women’s champ Sydney Olson, your PR,” says Reinhardt, who is 24. “Here, deeply on your right leg and place the 28, personifies flow. Olson, who served as the there’s no PR, you know. It’s just learning back of your right shoulder on the stunt double for actress Brec Bassinger in the some new movement every day.” ground. Roll over your right shoulder; second season of the CW’s Stargirl, started This doesn’t mean flips one day and leaps her career in gymnastics, which also chaloff buildings the next. To Reinhardt, progres- you’ll finish in a left-foot-forward half-kneeling stance. Do 3 or 4 sets lenges you to chain movements, but wanted sion is about variation and creativity. For of 5 reps. Start slow and progress to a sport with more freedom. “Gymnastics is inspiration, he watches fellow freerunners being able to do it at sprint speed. very strict,” says Olson, whose nickname is on Instagram, then tries small, surprising

GET ON A ROLL!

PROGRESS IN NEW WAYS

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BODY

GET MOVING!

THE WILD

SUMMER WORKOUT Sure, standing in one place and doing exercises builds muscle. But if you crawl, lunge, jump, and actually move—which you’ll do in this six-exercise, animal-inspired workout—you’ll build total-body power, have fun outdoors, fry extra calories, and break out of a gym rut. BY MILO F. BRYANT, C.S.C.S. Do this workout as on to the next move. Do 3 rounds of the circuit. Enjoy the sweat.

1

WARMUP

WORLD’S GREATEST STRETCH (a) (a)

(b)

(b)

Start in pushup position, hands directly below shoulders. Shift your right leg to just outside your right hand and tighten your left glute. Pause. Reach your right hand toward the sky, following it with your gaze (a). Return your right hand to the floor, straighten your right leg, and rock backward, stretching your hamstrings (b). Return to the start. That’s 1 rep. Alternate reps between sides for 60 seconds, then rest 30 seconds. Do 3 sets. shorts by onder armoor; shoes by nike.

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(a)

2

(b)

SQUAT TO BROAD JUMP Start standing, feet about shoulder-width apart. Push your butt back and bend your knees, lowering your torso until your thighs are parallel to the floor (a). Stand. Now push your butt back and bend your knees, throw your hands backward, and explosively jump forward (b). That’s 1 rep; repeat until time is up to build leg strength and elevate your heart rate.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATHRYN WIRSING

T H I S M O N T H ’S T R A I N E R : M I L O F. B R YA N T, C . S . C . S . , is a California-based trainer who specializes in performance and speed training and founded Coalition for Launching Active Youth (CLAY), a program designed to help children get in shape.

PICTURED HERE: BEN FEIDEN, C . F. S . C . , is an ACE-certified

personal trainer at Reload Health and Performance in Manhattan.

3

each side.

4

MIXED-STYLE SKATER LUNGE Start standing, feet shoulder-width apart, knees bent. Lift your left leg off the floor and leap to the left, landing on your left leg only.

Quickly leap back to the right, then leap again to the left. After this third leap, hold for 4 counts. Repeat this pattern (3 explosive skaters followed by a hold), building glute strength and balance.

5 BACK WIDOW Lie on your back, abs tight, heels near your butt. Place your upper arms on the floor at a 45 degree angle to your torso and point your forearms upward. Squeeze your shoulder blades and drive your elbows into the floor hard, tightening your back muscles; this will lift your torso a few inches off the floor. Hold for 3 seconds, then lower. That’s 1 rep; repeat for 40 seconds. You’ll build mid-back strength and strengthen your core more than you think.

(a)

(b)

6 SPIDERMAN-CRAWL PUSHUP Start in pushup position (a). Raise your right leg, drive your right knee toward your right elbow, then shift your left arm a few inches forward. Tighten your shoulder blades and bend at the shoulders and elbows, lowering into a pushup (b). Press up.

Repeat on the other side. That’s 1 rep. Repeat this pattern, building chest and triceps strength while also alleviating hip tightness.

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C 6 A.M. WITH...

LUDACRIS Yes, actor-rapper Chris Bridges likes the good life— but six days a week, he pushes his body to the limit in fast and furious sweat sessions. BY BRETT WILLIAMS, NASM 18

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CHRIS BRIDGES IS still doing pushups. A few minutes ago, he was doing classic reps, and then he was gritting out T pushups: pressing upward, then shifting into a side plank. Now he’s doing one more variation, a snake pushup, meant to stretch his spine as it builds his chest and triceps.

Sweat forms a sheen on Bridges’s forehead, but the man you know better as rapper-actor Ludacris doesn’t stop.

“No matter how many pushups I do,” he says, “even when I don’t want to do them anymore, that’s like the only exercise I don’t mind doing.” His voice rises to the frenetic, staccato 11 you remember from bangers like “Rollout (My Business)” and “Southern Hospitality.” “Until I cannot.

Fucking. Do. Them. Anymore.”

On this morning in Atlanta, Bridges will spend two hours in his garage gym pushing himself to that place on everything from bodyweight moves to bench presses to isometric holds. And yes, it crushes his muscles, but the way Bridges, 43, sees it, by pushing himself six days a week, he earns the right to enjoy life, even if that wrecks his physique just a bit. “My goal isn’t to look like the most ripped, biggest guy in the gym,” he says.

“I just want to be functionally right in between the man that works out hard, but that motherfucker drinks beer and whiskey on the weekends.”

So he sets aside all distractions, trudges out to his personal muscle palace, and attacks challenges from trainer George Bamfo Jr. When Bridges isn’t filming movies like F9—the ninth entry in the Fast & Furious franchise, which is out now and costars the guy on our cover— he spends most of his workday juggling and evaluating music and upcoming film and TV projects. Right now, all his devices are back in his kitchen. He’s focused. “If I get a text or email or phone call,” he says, “it just fucks up the consistency [of the workout].”

Bridges knows that consistency is key, because he spent the start of his career without it. He rose as a rapper in the early 2000s, buoyed by a string of hit singles, then appeared as mechanic Tej Parker in the second Fast & Furious installment, in 2003. But as his star grew brighter, traveling and touring destroyed any

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW HETHERINGTON

FAST & SERIOUS! Get an epic, equipment-free chest pump by taking on Bridges’s favorite all-pushups triset. Do 3 sets of 10 reps for each move, resting 30 seconds between each set.

PUSHUP

T PUSHUPS

INCHWORM PUSHUP

Start with classic reps, focusing on keeping your abs and glutes tight.

Shift into a side plank and reach for the ceiling after each pushup rep.

Start standing, then walk your hands into pushup position.

BETWEEN SETS FAVORITE EXERCISE?

Ludacris trains his abs daily, doing exercises like ring L-sits (bottom right) and decline bench med-ball tosses (top right). Twice a week, he’ll do incline bench presses (above) to blast his chest.

semblance of discipline. “One day, I happened to look down, and there was a gut just looking back at me,” he says. “I was like, ‘There’s no way; where did that come from? I have to get rid of this.’ ” He started doing one-hour sweat sessions a few days a week. Then in 2019, while prepping for F9, he met Bamfo, who instituted his current grind. “On day five or six, before you get that rest day,” he says of training with Bamfo, “that’s when it’s hell.”

Bridges relishes all of it. His eyes narrow as he grabs a pair of gymnastics rings hanging overhead and hoists his 175-pound body upward.

Tightening his core, he lifts his legs in a straight line, a devastating gymnastics skill called an L-sit. “We never worked on this stuff,” says Bamfo. “As he’s gotten stronger, he was able to do this.”

Bridges shows off that strength throughout this workout, following those L-sits with decline situps and bench presses. He finishes the session with ten

“Anything chest. Dips and bench press—you always want to get that indentation, whatever you can do to mold your fucking pecs.”

MOST HATED EXERCISE? “Squats. . . . Fuck the legs, but you have to do them.”

WHAT DO YOU LISTEN TO WHEN YOU TRAIN? “Diplo’s Revolution on SiriusXM satellite radio. I love that shit.”

GO-TO CHEAT MEAL? rounds of 30-second treadmill sprints, resting just 30 seconds between each.

When it’s all over, he’s drenched in sweat—and ready for a few six-packwrecking ice-cold beers. “I’m more of a four-pack kind of guy,” he says. “Save the other two packs for Friday and Saturday nights.”

“Chicken parmigiana with noodles and garlic bread.”

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PEAK PERFORMANCE

ESCAPE

MUSCLE CRAMP

HELL

Scientists have rival theories as to what causes those exerciseinduced aaaaaarrrrggggghhs—and that’s leading to a range of new cramp-busting elixirs. Should you drink up? BY JACQUELINE DETWILER-GEORGE IT’S AN ATHLETE’S WORST MOMENT:

A hammy seizes like an old engine down the homestretch to Olympic glory or in the middle of your rec hoops game.

Suddenly, instead of chasing gold or bragging rights, you’re crumpled on the ground praying for deliverance. And it’s not uncommon: Research reveals exercise-associated muscle cramps affect up to 70 percent of endurance runners and cyclists. Who hasn’t experienced a cramp at some point while exercising hard?

You’d think science would have discovered a cure. After all, researchers have been studying cramps in industrial laborers ever since the early 1900s.

In 1932, researchers from Harvard’s “fatigue laboratory” traveled to the construction site of the Hoover Dam to take samples from workers who developed cramps in the heat. They noticed that cramp sufferers had lower

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE VOORHES

concentrations of salt in the blood and little to no salt in the urine. The scientists concluded, reasonably, that cramps were related to the loss of water and salt via sweat.

This idea, that cramps are caused by dehydration and an imbalance in electrolytes, persisted. Athletes were encouraged to down sports drinks, salt tablets, and/or bananas (a source of the electrolyte potassium) to relieve or prevent cramps. Trainers also began giving cramping athletes pickle juice—a brine of salt, vinegar, and water. It worked so quickly that scientists found it biologically confusing. “In our 2010 study, we had this weird phenomenon where cramps seemed go away faster when you drink pickle juice,” says Kevin C. Miller, Ph.D., ATC, a cramp researcher at Central Michigan University, “but there’s no change to the major electrolytes or blood.”

In 1997, a South African exercise researcher had put forth a theory about muscle cramps that explained the pickle-juice phenomenon: Two categories of neuroreceptors act as a kind of teeter-totter for your muscles—and they can get out of whack when you exercise too hard. “One side tells your nervous system, Relax, chill out. The other side, Hey, get excited,” Miller says. “When you become fatigued, there’s an imbalance in that teeter-totter towards the excitatory side.”

Miller now thought that something in the pickle juice—vinegar, maybe?—was initiating a neural reflex in the mouth that zipped down the spinal cord and calmed the overexcited teeter-totter. But people who had dedicated their careers to studying dehydration didn’t switch over easily.

It’s difficult to model muscle cramping in a lab, and people questioned the method Miller used, which involved shocking the big toe until it cramped.

That’s not comparable to the cramps that occur after an athlete runs or cycles for hours, says exercise researcher Michael Bergeron, Ph.D. “For you to tell me that there’s no sodium issue because your blood sodium is normal tells me you have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says.

Nothing lights up academics like a pissing contest over a new theory. Experts quibbled over official sports-organization opinions, sent negative reviews

Model: Joshua Moore/Naturally Fit

BODY

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Brief Summary of information about RYBELSUS® (semaglutide) tablets

Rx Only This information is not comprehensive.

• Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist • Visit www.novo-pi.com/rybelsus.pdf to obtain the FDA-approved product labeling • Call 1-833-GLP-PILL Read this Medication Guide before you start using RYBELSUS® and each time you get a refill. There may be new information. This information does not take the place of talking to your healthcare provider about your medical condition or your treatment.

What is the most important information I should know about RYBELSUS®?

RYBELSUS® may cause serious side effects, including: • Possible thyroid tumors, including cancer. Tell your healthcare provider if you get a lump or swelling in your neck, hoarseness, trouble swallowing, or shortness of breath. These may be symptoms of thyroid cancer. In studies with rodents, RYBELSUS® and medicines that work like RYBELSUS® caused thyroid tumors, including thyroid cancer. It is not known if RYBELSUS® will cause thyroid tumors or a type of thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) in people.

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What is RYBELSUS®?

RYBELSUS® is a prescription medicine used along with diet and exercise to improve blood sugar (glucose) in adults with type 2 diabetes.

• RYBELSUS® is not recommended as the first choice of medicine for treating diabetes.

• It is not known if RYBELSUS® can be used in people who have had pancreatitis.

• RYBELSUS® is not for use in patients with type 1 diabetes.

It is not known if RYBELSUS® is safe and effective for use in children under 18 years of age.

Do not use RYBELSUS® if: • you or any of your family have ever had a type of thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) or if you have an endocrine system condition called Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia syndrome type 2 (MEN 2).

• you have had a serious allergic reaction to semaglutide or any of the ingredients in RYBELSUS®. Symptoms of a serious allergic reaction include: swelling of your face, lips, tongue or throat problems breathing or swallowing severe rash or itching fainting or feeling dizzy very rapid heartbeat Before using RYBELSUS®, tell your healthcare provider if you have any other medical conditions, including if you: • have or have had problems with your pancreas or kidneys.

• have a history of vision problems related to your diabetes.

• are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if RYBELSUS® will harm your unborn baby. You should stop using RYBELSUS® 2 months before you plan to become pregnant. Talk to your healthcare provider about the best way to control your blood sugar if you plan to become pregnant or while you are pregnant.

• are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. Breastfeeding is not recommended during treatment with RYBELSUS®.

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RYBELSUS® may affect the way some medicines work and some medicines may affect the way RYBELSUS® works.

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How should I take RYBELSUS®?

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RYBELSUS® may cause serious side effects, including: • See “What is the most important information I should know about RYBELSUS®?”

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• serious allergic reactions. Stop using RYBELSUS® and get medical help right away, if you have any symptoms of a serious allergic reaction including: swelling of your face, lips, tongue or throat problems breathing or swallowing severe rash or itching fainting or feeling dizzy very rapid heartbeat The most common side effects of RYBELSUS® may include nausea, stomach (abdominal) pain, diarrhea, decreased appetite, vomiting and constipation.

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Talk to your healthcare provider about any side effect that bothers you or does not go away. These are not all the possible side effects of RYBELSUS®.

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Revised: 04/2021

Manufactured by: Novo Nordisk A/S, DK-2880 Bagsvaerd, Denmark RYBELSUS® is a registered trademark of Novo Nordisk A/S. © 2021 Novo Nordisk US21RYB00189 5/2021

PE A K PERFORM A NCE

of each other’s talks, and took potshots at each other in journals. On one side, you had people who believed Miller: It was a haywire neural process. Think of them as the neurological camp. On the other side, the dehydration camp, who felt that eliminating electrolyte imbalances from the cramp equation was a mistake. Further muddying the controversy was that a substantial portion of sports-nutrition research is funded by electrolyte-hydration brands. No one knew whom to believe.

Getty Images (Fields)

MARKETING TO THE RESCUE! IN 2016, the makers of a product called HotShot launched a 1.7–ounce beverage that tastes like getting punched in the face by a pack of Big Red gum. It’s only the latest in a long line of over-the-counter cramp remedies, including CrampX, Sportlegs, and various formulations of pickle juice. But HotShot inspired a scathing editorial in an academic journal and ignited the cramp blogosphere.

HotShot’s inventors were a pair of nerve and muscle scientists—Rod MacKinnon, M.D., who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2003, and Bruce Bean, Ph.D., a Harvard professor of neurobiology. The two scientists had been kayaking together for years, and after a fateful trip off Cape Cod when they both fell victim to forearm cramps, they came upon the neurological-function theory and Miller’s take on pickle juice and applied their own research to them.

Both Bean and Dr. MacKinnon are experts on ion channels, the chemical pores that make nerves and muscles work. They thought that if pickle juice was causing a calming reflex in the mouth and digestive system, it might act through a set of pores called TRP channels. Activating these would cause neural interference to run down the spinal cord to stop cramping in, say, your calf.

In their own kitchens, Bean and Dr. MacKinnon experimented with ingredients that would target TRP receptors—including extracts from ginger, cinnamon, and capsaicin (from hot peppers). They tested the resulting formulation on themselves and their families and then performed case studies using exper-

ANTI-CRAMP TACTICS Whether you’re hoping to race in Tokyo, like BMX king Connor Fields (above), who uses HotShot, or going for a PB, use these tips to avoid cramps.

DRINK

One problem with evaluating cramp busters is that many contain more than one active ingredient. These three ingredients have research linking them to cramp-busting potential: sugar, vinegar, and capsaicin (which gives chile peppers their heat).

JOURNAL

Keep a record of when cramps happen, then create a list of suspects, including heat and humidity, exercise type and intensity, liquid and food intake, mental state, and sleep hygiene, says cramp researcher Kevin C. Miller, Ph.D. STRETCH

Sleeping well, exercising regularly, and avoiding extreme temperatures and stress all help prevent cramps. But if you get one, the science is unequivocal: “The fastest, safest way to relieve a cramp is to stretch it until it goes away,” says Miller.

BODY

thew Wohl, HotShot’s current CEO. (Dr. Westphal and Dr. MacKinnon have left the company.) “We’ve done our own clinical studies proving efficacy, and [there was also] work that was done by Penn State, which was independent of us. . . . We are firmly in the neurological camp.”

FINDING SMART SOLUTIONS CORRINE MALCOLM, an ultrarunner

with a degree in environmental physiology, says the dispute around HotShot represents a pervasive problem with sports supplements. She and some former colleagues at Simon Fraser University coined the term bioplausible to explain how ideas that “might work” get quickly promoted to “do work.”

In the case of HotShot, the theory was solid, but scientists on both sides of the debate worried about the distance between the claims and the data. While HotShot was raving about being “scientifically proven,” the studies the company used to market its product showed that cramps were reduced in strength and duration, says Miller. “Everybody still cramped. If HotShot works, shouldn’t nobody cramp? I mean, it’s silly.”

Strangely enough, scientists on opposing sides of the cramp debate have been coming together, just not toward a miracle cure.

Many researchers now recognize that multiple factors can cause cramping, including over- or undertraining, sleep quality, nutrition or fluid imbalances, hot or cold weather, and even limited range of motion.

Bergeron (dehydration camp) says cramps generally fall into different categories, each with different causes and prevention. Miller (neurological camp) likes to think of it as a threshold. “Your recipe for cramping might be very different than my recipe,” he says. “Maybe I cramp when I don’t get a good night’s sleep or I don’t eat enough carbs. And I pushed myself a little bit harder. If I get all three of those things happening to me, I get a cramp. If I get two out of those three things, I don’t cramp.”

HotShot is an official supplier of the USA Cycling team, and they now hope Olympic riders will use it before an event to prevent cramps and mentally pump themselves up. If that reduces prerace anxiety, it might even help prevent

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FRONT LINE

T H E E X P E R T : COREY L. HARTMAN, M.D.,

is an MH advisor and the founder of Skin Wellness Dermatology in Birmingham.

HELP YOUR SKIN

SHIELD ITSELF

WANDER THROUGH the aisles of Walgreens or CVS, with the walls of moisturizers, serums, scrubs, soaps, exfoliators, and more, and you would probably conclude that it’s super, super complicated to keep your skin healthy and looking good. However, it’s really about only two things, says 46-year-old dermatologist

Since I’m Black, the melanin in my skin gives me a certain amount of SPF. But the SPF that’s effective against skin cancer—which people with any skin color can get—is higher than what I naturally have. So I wear sunscreen every day. I use an emulsion (ISDIN Eryfotona Actinica Ultralight Emulsion) that doesn’t leave a chalky film even though it contains zinc oxide.

COREY L. HARTMAN, M.D.: Keep your routine simple and always use products with scientifically proven ingredients. Here’s how he takes his own advice.

SWIPE THIS

TAKE A SHOT I started doing Botox around age 30 and now do it every four months on my upper face. Among the many benefits: It stops wrinkles from becoming etched in, it helps with collagen production, and it just makes me look less mean and more approachable. I don’t have to convince my male patients to get Botox anymore, probably in part because I’m so open about using it.

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A SKIN DOCTOR’S GUIDE TO

HEALTHY SKIN USE A MASK TO BATTLE ACNE The masks we use at my office have to be N95’s or a similar grade. We clean them, but it doesn’t take out all the oil that can clog pores, so I was having bigtime maskne. I started using a clay mask (SkinCeuticals Clarifying Clay Masque) a few times a week when it got really bad, and that keeps my face clear.

Any patient of color and anybody over 40 is going to start to see pigment changes, like sunspots or dark spots from acne. That bothers people more than wrinkles do. I use Cyspera, a new pigment corrector that doesn’t require spot treatment; you just swipe it all over.

You have to leave it on an unwashed face for 15 minutes. I put it on when I leave the gym, and when I get home, it’s ready to be showered off.

KEEP THE BEARD, LOSE THE PROBLEMS I have a history of razor bumps that I’ve gotten under control with laser hair removal. It was life changing. Like a lot of people’s, the majority of my issues were on my neck.

Neck hair is not necessary for a full-beard look—my patients are often surprised to hear that—so I just got rid of it. I don’t get razor bumps anymore, and the hyperpigmentation and red bumps, with their potential to scar, got better as well. —AS TOLD TO GARRETT MUNCE

Studio Firma/Stocksy

BEFORE BED I apply a product with retinol at night—no skin-care ingredient has more science behind it. It’s an exfoliant, so you don’t get acne or dull skin, and it stimulates collagen, which helps keep fine lines and wrinkles away. I wash my face with an exfoliating cleanser (SkinCeuticals LHA Cleanser Gel), then use prescription retinol (Arazlo) and a hydrating cream (Senté Dermal Repair Cream) to help the retinol penetrate and reduce irritation.

CHANGE YOUR SPOTS

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BODY

SUPPLEMENT CHECK

PRE-WORKOUT BOOSTERS:

ESSENTIAL OR

COMPLETE BULL? This broad category of popular pills and powders advertises that they’ll AMP UP YOUR GAINS. Here’s what calm, collected experts say. BY VANESSA ETIENNE

THE CLAIM: “Pre-workout” supplements are a class of premixed herbal and chemical ingredient blends designed to spike your energy, enhance your alertness, reduce your fatigue, and boost blood flow to your muscles. They’ll help you work out longer and harder, with better results.

TEXT A DIETITIAN!

SHOULD YOU TAKE THEM? With caution. Experts suggest starting with a lower dose than the one on the label. Nancy Clark, R.D., a Boston-based sportsnutrition counselor, advises buying a brand with third-party certification

by NSF International for quality assurance. (We like X2 Performance Pre + Intra Workout.) Or just consume real food: A banana, oatmeal, a granola bar, or a latte are all good pre-workout fuel.

WHAT’S BOGUS: There’s not much science to the more esoteric ingredients in some of these supplements, such as Panax ginseng and deer-antler velvet. Worse yet, in a 2019 study, scientists assessed 100 pre-workout products and found that the amounts of nearly half of the ingredients were not disclosed on the label. And certain herbal extracts mix poorly with meds or other supplements, says Moon.

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MEN’S HEALTH

WHAT’S ALSO BOGUS: Some pre-workouts advertise that they contain creatine yet don’t have enough of the compound to matter, Moon says. Science has shown that taking creatine can, in fact, help you increase your strength and power, but you need to take about five grams a day for two to four weeks for the nutrient to build up in your muscles. Many of the pre-workout products you’ll find on the market have only three grams of creatine per serving.

Does caffeine actually dehydrate you?

caffeine from or then definitely not—they hydrate you.

What about those caffeine chews some runners take during a 12+ mile run?

The safe amount is less than 400 mg a day, and while excess caffeine has been shown to inhibit the absorption of calcium, a key electrolyte, in performance, I would hold off on making caffeine the villain.

Sun Lee

WHAT’S ACTUALLY TRUE: They can fire you up. Pre-workout supplements often contain caffeine, taurine, and B vitamins, all of which may help you feel motivated. That doesn’t mean it’s crash-proof energy, but the chemical compounds in a pre-workout may offer enough oomph to help you push through your session, says exercise-science researcher Jordan Moon, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.*D, a professor at Concordia University.

We hit up Dezi Abeyta, R.D.N., a Men’s Health advisor and author of The Lose Your Gut Guide from Men’s Health.

PLANT PROTEIN NUT Pro Football Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez

PLANT PROTEIN NUT W

BODY

H E A LT H Y A G A I N

WHEN COVID

NEVER GOES AWAY Millions of people who had recovered from Covid-19 started having surprising issues—brain fog, headaches, crushing fatigue—that wouldn’t go away. New clinics are springing up to offer hope and solutions.

BY ALICE OGLETHORPE 28

JULY • AUGUST 2021

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MEN’S HEALTH

and his colleagues created to help people recover from severe Covid—weren’t who he’d anticipated. Alongside those who had been hospitalized with Covid, which was the population he and his colleagues had expected to care for, about a quarter of the patients were people who had never been hospitalized for the disease. They’d had “mild” acute Covid—a fever, a cough that they’d recovered from quickly. But months after thinking they’d beaten the illness, they didn’t feel like themselves— heart palpitations, brain fog, an inability to exercise even close to how they used to.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Monica Lypson, M.D., was seeing the same thing at a post-Covid clinic she’d cofounded at George Washington University, in D. C. “The predominant patients who show up to our clinic are people in the prime of their lives; they might have been marathoners or people who did CrossFit four times a week and now can barely walk around the block,” she says. “We thought most people would be post-hospitalization, but many of our patients never even saw their physician as part of their care.”

To handle the caseload, dozens of postCovid clinics have popped up at major hospitals and universities. Doctors are scrambling to help the estimated 5 to 10 percent of people—that’s between 1.5 and 3 million Americans—who’ve recovered from the defining symptoms of Covid (you know them by now: cough, fever, fatigue) and currently suffer from Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC).

Commonly referred to as “long Covid,” PASC is characterized by an assortment of lingering issues. “Even though these symptoms alone aren’t life-threatening, they feel like a major change to the people experiencing them,” says Monnie Wasse, M.D., director of the post-Covid clinic at Rush University Medical Center. Especially because so many of those dealing with long Covid are young and previously felt healthy. “It feels like a slow roll into a chronic illness,” she says, and as a result, anxiety is often spiraling around it.

“People who were otherwise well are now ILLUSTRATION BY ISRAEL VARGAS

wondering how long they’re going to have these symptoms,” Dr. Wasse adds. “This can lead to a feeling of hopelessness.”

THE SEARCH FOR THE CAUSE DOCTORS ARE AT THE place with

PASC now that they were with Covid itself about a year ago: While there are so many unknowns, some promising theories have emerged. Some experts think that the spike in inflammation that occurred when the immune system fought off Covid ended up causing a lot of collateral damage. It’s possible that the regulation of the autonomic nervous system got knocked off-kilter, so the fight-or-flight signal goes on and off when it shouldn’t, changing heart rate and breathing for seemingly no reason. Or the virus itself could have triggered the start of an autoimmune disease similar to lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. Until a theory has scientific evidence supporting it—something that hasn’t happened yet—the focus at these clinics has turned to relieving symptoms.

They’re not prescribing, say, an anti-inflammatory diet, since it’s not clear yet that inflammation is the cause.

Some experts have questioned how many of these symptoms are from Covid and how many might just be from pandemic life. Clinic founders suggest this symptom-based approach is useful either way, and that the multidisciplinary clinics are a crucial step in helping people feel some relief.

Because this is such a new disease, your primary-care physician—if you have one—might not know the right questions to ask or even what to look for.

“This is a disease that didn’t exist 18 months ago, so there’s no specialty that’s a perfect fit for addressing all the issues someone is facing,” says Dr. Block.

Not only will you save time and energy meeting with multiple specialists at a single clinic—a cardiologist for your racing heart, a psychologist for your anxiety, an Alzheimer’s specialist to help with memory issues, a pulmonologist for your difficulty catching your breath during exercise—they all talk to one another and share insights to improve your care and our understanding of the disease.

“We meet so many people who had trouble being evaluated and had what they’re experiencing dismissed,” says Dr. Block. “That doesn’t help their symptoms or their emotional well-being.” Many of these clinics are in major cities, but they often offer telehealth, so you can get treated by them even if you live far away.

A DOSE OF HOPE WHILE THERE ISN’T a standard

approach to caring for PASC yet, clinics tend to run in a similar way. Doctors first perform a series of tests such as stress tests for your heart (maybe your racing pulse is due to an existing heart issue, not your battle with Covid) and a CT scan for your lungs to rule out other diseases. If nothing comes back to explain what’s going on, current treatments are used to help with the symptoms. Think antianxiety medication or talk therapy for your mental health, an antidepressant that could help with some of the brain fog, compression tights to make sure blood is flowing well, and rehab sessions to help build exercise tolerance.

Integrative-medicine specialists might also recommend therapies involving diet, supplements, and sleep. “It’s a combination of art and science in terms of trying to find the right approach,” says Dr. Wasse.

The National Institutes of Health is so committed to finding an approach that in early 2021 it announced $1.15 billion in research funding to determine causes, prevention, and treatments for PASC. Vaccines might turn out to be part of the solution—anecdotal evidence suggests that some people feel better after receiving the Covid vaccine, although science has yet to pin down why.

Clinic founders echo one another in expressing hope. “To my knowledge, in medical history we have never developed, passed clinical trials, produced, and administered a vaccine within a year, but we made it happen,” says Soo Yeon Kim, M.D., a cofounder of the Johns Hopkins Post-Acute Covid-19 Team. “Under normal circumstances, figuring out why there are long-haulers and how to treat them would take a few years, but with over a billion dollars going into research, we are expecting to have results much sooner.”

WHAT POST-COVID SYMPTOMS REALLY FEEL LIKE These common PASC symptoms suggest a post-Covid clinic could be for you.

HEART PALPITATIONS/ DIZZINESS You feel fine sitting, but as soon as you stand, your heart starts racing as if you’d just sprinted around the block, and you feel a little woozy. When you sit down again, those symptoms go away.

INABILITY TO HANDLE EXERCISE More than just wishing your workout was over after the first five minutes, you have to stop what you’re doing so you can catch your breath—and you weren’t even working that hard.

Or maybe you push yourself and finish your workout, but then you feel drained for days afterward.

BRAIN FOG You start to write an email and just can’t focus on what you’re typing, or you’re constantly walking into rooms and then wondering what you were going to do there. While many people have experienced this in the pandemic even without having had Covid, those with PASC often have this in addition to other symptoms.

HEADACHES You never used to get them and now suffer through painful, throbbing episodes daily.

ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION When you want to have sex, your penis doesn’t want to get or maintain an erection—and it’s not a one-time event.

ANXIETY, DEPRESSION, AND OTHER MOOD DISORDERS Instead of looking forward to things, you dread them or feel like your emotions are dulled. You also might be sleeping worse, which doesn’t help.

MEN’S HEALTH

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INSTANT DOWNLOAD!

Build Big Muscle. No Gym Required.

Learn More at MensHealth.com/Dumbbells

CHANGE FOR THE BETTER

HIT THE ROAD! By plane! By train! By good ol’ automobile! Who cares where as long as it’s not home, right? These NINE UNSUNG GUY TRIPS will satisfy your sense of adventure and keep you safe in the kinda/sorta post-Covid world. BY IMANI BASHIR

TELLURIDE, COLORADO The adventure: Conquer the Via Ferrata You know the town for its skiing and film festival, but the hiking trails. You’ll find dozens of them, covering more than 60 miles in total, close to town. The must-do is the Via Ferrata, aka the Iron Path, a twomile trek that includes (but is not limited to) carved steps, rope ladders, suspension bridges, and caves, with a peak summit of 500 vertical feet. On dangerous sections, you can clip your harness onto a steel cable so you’re protected if you fall.

Drive this: A Kia Telluride.

The name tracks. But you can fit eight people in the SUV. Those are minivan numbers—and this beast drives like anything but a minivan.

Stay here: A 500-foot summit not enough?

Book a night at the Peaks Resort & Spa, with access to an indoor/outdoor lap pool, three tennis courts, and two pickleball courts to keep you moving.

MEN’S HEALTH

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LIFE

HIT THE ROAD

FOR THE CAMPER:

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA The adventure: Paddleboard the Three Rivers Aka the Broad, Congaree, and Saluda rivers. They’re all accessible through the band of national parkland that rests within a half hour of downtown. Warm up with the Broad River Blueway, which is wide and slow.

Then it’s up to you what’s next. The Saluda offers quiet, tree-lined waters; the Congaree flows through downtown Columbia, so you may hit (water) traffic.

Drive this: Sleek enough for city streets but tough enough for off-roading, Subaru’s Outback Wilderness will carry you and your gear to any stand-up-paddleboard put-in spot. Its X-Mode function sets up the chassis and drivetrain for optimal traction in everything from dirt to deep snow.

Stay here: Pitch a tent next to the scenic Lake Russell

FOR THE MARATHONER:

at one of Calhoun Falls State Park’s campsites. If roughing it isn’t your thing, rent a two-bedroom cabin (with air-conditioning!) at Santee State Park, which overlooks Lake Marion, the largest lake in the state.

SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA The adventure: Trail-run (or hike) the Ninja Loop Start at the Golden Gate Bridge parking lot, warm up on the slow-descent Coastal Trailhead, climb the Miwok Trail, coast down the Tennessee Valley Trail, power past the horse stables, and move on to Marincello, where you’ll grind upward until you reach views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Refuel from the ten-miler at Copita with tacos al pastor.

Drive this: The Ford Mustang Mach-E EV is an all-electric SUV with a 230-mile range, which means you can book a hotel in San Francisco or San Jose and still be within range.

Stay here: After hitting the trails, recover with an in-room deep-tissue massage at the Inn Above Tide, which has waterfront views of Angel Island. If you’re looking for a different kind of recovery, head a half hour north to Sonoma wine country.

C O V I D T R AV E L PROTOCOLS! Check the hours and accessibility of your destination, which may be affected by changing safety guidelines.

Read the CDC’s website for up-to-date info on traveling to different states or regions, vaccinated or unvaccinated.

Contact your airline for testing requirements if you’re traveling by plane.

Wear a mask in public.

Do we have to explain?

34

Getty Images (paragliders, paddleboarder, runners, surfers, diver). Luanne Horting/ Tandem BASE (BASE jumper). Michael Turek/Gallery Stock (fish). Courtesy slovenia .info (kayakers). Courtesy brands (cars).

!

FOR THE ADRENALINE JUNKIE:

LA GRANDE, OREGON The adventure: Paraglide through the clouds Cycle along a section of the 134-mile Grande Tour Scenic Bikeway, which runs through La Grande, and take in views of the nearby Wallowa and Blue mountains.

When you’re done, Oregon Paramotor offers eight-day paramotor courses (think paragliding but with an engine) to explore the east-Oregon skies.

Drive this: No lie, the Bronco Sport has a GOAT mode. That’s “goes over any terrain,” a claim backed by its standard 4x4 system and optional lifted suspension. Its roof rack lugs up to 150 pounds, too.

If you’re vaccinated and the CDC okays it, head to these three life-changing cities while everyone else goes to Tahiti.

Stay here: Grab a suite at the Landing Hotel for easy access to the entire valley, or stay farther away at the pet-friendly Barking Mad Farm Bed & Breakfast, where pigs, goats, and chickens roam the land. Just two miles away is the Terminal Gravity Brewing Company, famous for its IPA.

FOR THE ANGLER:

WANCHESE, NORTH CAROLINA

OUAKAM, SENEGAL

The adventure: Fish the deep sea On the southern end of Roanoke Island sits this fishing village undiscovered by most tourists. Grab a six-pack, charter a boat at the Wanchese Marina, and go battle feisty (and delicious) Spanish mackerel and acrobatic mahi-mahi (also delicious). Bonus: All that reeling counts as a forearm workout.

The small Dakar suburb is known for its swells and seafood. Surfers from across the globe flock here for the year-round waves.

Drive this: The Ram 1500 with eTorque Hybrid technology averages 26 miles per gallon, and the quad cab is roomy enough to stash tackle boxes, hard coolers, and camping gear if you’re overnighting it.

Stay here: Each beachfront, four-bedroom cottage at Nags Head’s Haven on the Banks has its own hot tub and gas grill to cook up your catch of the day. Afterward, head to the beach, start a fire, and take in the views of the area.

KOROSKA, SLOVENIA Beneath Mount Peca, you’ll find three miles of winding bike trails in the tunnels of an abandoned mine. Descend even farther and you’ll see a kayaker’s playground: an underground lake with crystal-clear water and few tourists in sight.

FOR THE TRULY WILD:

TWIN FALLS, IDAHO The adventure: BASE jump (no, honestly) First off, you’ll have an experienced jumper with you.

Tandem BASE provides the equipment and instruction to leap from the 486-foot-tall Perrine Bridge.

You’ll work up the intestinal fortitude to sign a waiver and then plummet toward—and eventually rest easy in—Snake River Canyon.

Drive this: The all-wheel-drive, 158horsepower, sporty-as-all-get-out VW Taos is your go-to dependable vehicle when you’re about to head out and do something wild.

Stay here: After a nine-minute drive from the Snake River Canyon trail, you’ll feel like you’re at home at the Fillmore Inn . . . because it’s literally in someone’s home. The tiny bed-and-breakfast lies at the heart of Twin Falls, just a few minutes’ walk from Koto Brewing Co. and its more than 20 beers on tap.

AIN SOKHNA, EGYPT A one-and-a-half-hour drive from Cairo, the coastal city of Ain Sokhna has several scuba-diving reefs, a kitesurfing center, and pristine beaches to take in the blue waters of the Gulf of Suez.

MEN’S HEALTH

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LIFE

30/10

LOBSTER . . .

ON THE GRILL! If you really want to celebrate summer, there’s no better feast than lobster tail cooked over an open flame.

The high-protein, muscle-building meal needs little else, save for a gut-filling, fiberrich side or two.

BY ROBERT IRVINE AND PAUL KITA

THE EXPERTS: ROBERT IRVINE is the longtime host of

Restaurant: Impossible and Dinner: Impossible.

PA U L K I TA is the food and nutrition editor of Men’s Health.

THE FIBER

10g

Choose either of these sides to reach the 10-gram fiber threshold you need to stay full until your next 30/10 meal.

THE PROTEIN

30g

Is lobster slightly pricier than chicken breast? Yes, but it tastes infinitely more awesome than chicken breast. One eight-ounce lobster tail contains 25 grams of protein.

B U Y I T Check the package or ask the person behind the fish counter for the ocean of origin: You want cold-water North American lobster. The farther north you go (Maine, Nova Scotia), the richer and meatier the lobster.

Lobster tail tends to be a bit more expensive than whole live lobster, but that’s because it’s already grill-and-go.

Grilled Lobster with Charred Onions W H AT YO U ’ L L N E E D 1 TBSP SMOKED PAPRIKA 1 TSP GARLIC POWDER 1 TSP DRIED OREGANO 1 TSP GROUND CUMIN 1 TSP SUGAR DASH GROUND CAYENNE 4 LOBSTER TAILS (8 TO 10 OZ EACH), THAWED 4 BAMBOO SKEWERS (8 INCHES LONG), SOAKED IN WATER ¼ CUP GRAPE-SEED OIL 1 LARGE VIDALIA ONION, PEELED AND SLICED INTO ½-INCH SLICES JUICE FROM 1 LIME Per serving: 353 calories, 35g protein, 8g carbs (1g fiber), 19g fat

Food styling: Jamie Kimm/Creative Exchange Agency. Prop styling: Nicole Louie.

30g 10g

HOW TO MAKE IT

Sriracha-Buttermilk Dressing

1. Preheat your grill to medium. In a small bowl, mix the smoked paprika, garlic powder, oregano, cumin, 1 tsp kosher salt, sugar, and cayenne. Set aside.

2. Using a chef’s knife, cut about halfway through the center of each lobster tail lengthwise. Insert a soaked bamboo skewer lengthwise through the middle of the lobster meat.

(This will prevent it from curling on the grill.)

3. Brush the lobster and onions with the grapeseed oil and season with the reserved spice mixture. Place the lobster on the grill, meat side down, and add the onions next to it. Grill everything until slightly charred, 5 to 6 minutes. Flip it all; continue to grill the onions until tender, about 2 more minutes, and the lobster until just cooked through, about 5 more minutes.

4. In a small bowl, add the onions and lime juice, then season to taste with salt. Serve the onions with the lobster. Feeds 4

Preheat your grill to high. In a medium bowl, whisk ½ cup buttermilk, 1½ Tbsp grape-seed oil, 1 Tbsp Sriracha, ½ Tbsp lemon juice, and ½ tsp rice vinegar. Season to taste. Cook 1 cup quinoa, toss it with 2 Tbsp dressing, and allow it to cool. In a separate bowl, toss 2 medium broccoli crowns (cut into large pieces and grilled) with 1 small shallot (thinly sliced), 1 Tbsp capers (chopped), and the remaining dressing. In a serving bowl, add the quinoa and then the broccoli mixture, top everything with 2 Tbsp shredded aged cheddar, and serve. Feeds 4 Nutrition per serving: 324 calories, 15g protein, 48g carbs (9g fiber), 10g fat

WHY 30/10?

30/10 brings you healthy, filling meals with 30 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber. For an entire month’s worth of recipes, head to MensHealth.com/30-10.

Arugula Salad

D O YO U E V E N C O O K B O O K , B R O ?

Summer’s tomatoes are almost here, so arm yourself with Mariana Velásquez’s new book, Colombiana (out now). Her gazpacho tosses in papaya, which boosts the natural sweetness of the cold soup; cranks the heat with ground achiote pepper; and is topped with charred leeks and Thai basil.

Experiment with any (or all) of those add-ins and you’ll plow through your garden bounty in no time.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHELSEA KYLE

In a small bowl, combine 1 Tbsp white-wine vinegar, 1 small shallot (minced), and 1 tsp honey. Whisk in 3 Tbsp grape-seed oil and set aside.

In a large serving bowl, add 8 cups baby arugula, 3 slices cooked bacon (crumbled into bite-sized pieces), 2 avocados (cubed), and 6 peaches (grilled and quartered). Pour on the vinegar dressing and top with 1 Tbsp Gorgonzola crumbles. Feeds 4 Nutrition per serving: 358 calories, 8g protein, 34g carbs (9g fiber), 24g fat MEN’S HEALTH

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LIFE

GROOMING

, S S E L T A E W S

!

R E T T E B L SMEL

For products with a simple task—make your armpits smell better—DEODORANTS and ANTIPERSPIRANTS can be so complicated. Cut through the label lingo with this decoder and find the right stuff for you. BY GARRETT MUNCE

Sooo...

Do you want to reduce how much you sweat?

Antiperspirant it is! Do you tend to sweat through shirts quickly?

NO

YES

Do you have to apply the product more than once a day?

YES, PLEASE. I’m sweating just thinking about sweating.

So you want a deodorant.

All natural, or just the regular pharmacy kind?

NOT REALLY. It’s more about the smell.

How concerned are you about plastic waste?

VERY

MEH

ALL NATURAL

Do you have sensitive skin?

Do you prefer solid or creamy sticks?

SOLID

NO Old Spice Swagger Refillable Antiperspirant ($10.50). The fresh lime-and-cedarwood scent you like.

Pop a plastic-free refill into the reusable case and you’ll help the planet.

Degree Victory Antiperspirant Deodorant Spray ($6.70). There’s no definitive data that proves that aluminum-based antiperspirants are bad for you, says New York– based dermatologist Joshua Zeichner, M.D. This vanilla-scented antiperspirant/deodorant blocks sweat for up to 72 hours.

Carpe Antiperspirant Underarm Lotion ($20). Antiperspirants block sweat, whereas deodorants just cover up odors.

If you’re a heavy sweater, lean on this eucalyptus-scented antiperspirant to stop sweat in its tracks.

40

CREAMY

JULY • AUGUST 2021

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MEN’S HEALTH

YES Gillette Invisible Solid Antiperspirant & Deodorant ($5.50). With an herb-and-lavender scent, this gentle formula will keep you smelling fresh all day long.

Schmidt’s Hemp Seed Oil & Sage Natural Deodorant ($11).

Odor-neutralizing baking soda is common in natural deodorants. But for some people, it can cause redness or even burn, says Dr. Zeichner.

This contains magnesium to neutralize odors without causing irritation and leaves your pits smelling like vetiver grass.

NO

Art of Sport Victory Cool Eucalyptus Deodorant ($8). Those yellow stains on your T-shirts are caused by aluminum reacting to your sweat, says Dr. Zeichner. The arrowroot powder in this aluminum-free stick helps soak up excess sweat, with an added eucalyptus scent.

Native Cucumber & Mint Deodorant ($12). When you switch from aluminum-based products, expect a short purging period, says Dr. Zeichner. That’s just your body clearing out aluminum. (It’ll only feel like you’re sweating more.) This minty deodorant contains natural moisturizers like shea butter to keep your underarms smooth.

Dove Men+Care Eucalyptus + Birch 0% Aluminum Deodorant Stick ($6). This woody-smelling deodorant fights yellow stains, odor, and skin irritation with one application.

Courtesy brands (products)

YES

THE REGULAR PHARMACY KIND

Reshape Your Life Bluetooth Indoor Training Bike with MyCloudFitness App

S H O P T H E F U L L C O L L E C T I O N AT M E N S H E A LT H . C O M / W H M H F I T N E S S

Get All Out Arms, the new program from Men’s Health Fitness Director Eb Samuel, plus 100s of other programs on the All Out Studio app.

We Have the Secret to Big Arms MensHealth.com/AllOutApp

Brought to you by the editors of

m

p

LIFE

T H E E X P E R T : V I A N N E Y R O D R I G U E Z is a coauthor of Latin Twist: Traditional and

Modern Cocktails and the host of Tex-Mex Queen on YouTube’s Identity Network.

T H E R E’S ON LY ON E R IGH T WAY T O...

MAKE A

MARGARITA

Food styling: Jamie Kimm/Creative Exchange Agency. Prop styling: Nicole Louie. Steve Sanford (illustrations).

HOLY SH!T COCKTAIL TRICK!

2

GO TOP-SHELF You want a bright, crisp tequila blanco that’s 100 percent agave— not cut with corn syrup or sugar. Try Siembra Valles, which has an earthy flavor, or Astral, which is a little more floral but works really well with lime juice. And for your triple sec, opt for Cointreau, which hits all the right orange notes.

SALT THE GLASS Salt intensifies the flavors of the other ingredients.

Plus, it’s delicious in and of itself. Take a margarita glass, run a lime wedge around the rim, then dip the rim into a plate with about 2 tablespoons of flaky kosher salt and spread the salt evenly. Coconut, hibiscus, and lavender salts all work wonders.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHELSEA KYLE

DITCH THE PITCHER Batchmade margaritas sit out and gradually lose their freshness. Good thing the best margaritas are so easy to make: Grab your shaker, fill it with ice, and add 1½ ounces tequila blanco and 1 ounce Cointreau. (A jigger has these measurements on each side, or you can do 2 tablespoons per ounce.) Add ½ ounce fresh lime juice.

MEN’S HEALTH

REALLY SHAKE THE THING Bartenders go to town because thorough shaking not only chills the drink but also combines the ingredients so the booze doesn’t sit at the bottom of the glass.

Shake the cocktail until the outside of the container is frosty, at least 20 seconds. The rest is simple: Strain into a glass.

—AS TOLD TO LESLEY TÉLLEZ |

JULY • AUGUST 2021

43

LIFE

STYLE

Outer Banks star Chase Stokes wearing shorts by Katin, made from polyester sourced from recycled plastic bottles. Good for the oceans (and for diving into pools).

Swim trunks ($62) by Katin.

SPLASH INTO

R E M SUM

Millions of tons of plas tic end up in our oceans, riv ers, and lakes each ye But a new breed of cl othes made from this ar. to change all that. Thes discarded waste want s e sustainable summer staples look and feel good when it’s 100 degree s out—and help keep our water clean, too.

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MEN’S HEALTH

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC RAY DAVIDSON

FAST

eing a trainer, bodybuilder, and nutrition expert means that companies frequently send me their products and ask for my stamp of approval. Most of the time I dive into research, test the product out, and send the company honest feedback. Sometimes, however, I refuse to give the product a try, because frankly, the ingredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d rather drink diesel fuel than torture my body with a chemical concoction.

Like my father always said, “What you put inside your body always shows up on the outside.”

One protein shake that I received, that will remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying ingredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful artificial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic dyes, preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind of proteins that keep you fat no matter how hard you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing for your muscles.

Disappointed after reviewing this “new” shake, I hit the gym and bumped into my favorite bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50, has the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So are his clients.

While I firmly believe that the gym is a no-talk focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein shake are you recommending to your clients these days?”

Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Protein shakes are old news and loaded with junk. I don’t recommend protein shakes, I tell my clients to drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake because it’s

B

the only all natural meal replacement that works and has a taste so good that it’s addicting.”

Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decided to investigate this superfood shake called INVIGOR8.

Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators are actual scientists and personal trainers who set out to create a complete meal replacement shake chocked full of superfoods that—get this— actually accelerate how quickly and easily you lose belly fat and builds even more lean, calorie burning muscle.

We all know that the more muscle you build, the more calories you burn. The more fat you melt away the more definition you get in your arms, pecs and abs.

The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined to make the first complete, natural, non-GMO superfood shake that helps you lose fat and build lean muscle. The result is a shake that contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a superior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey found in most shakes, metabolism boosting raw coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to promote a healthy immune system, Omega 3, 6, 9-rich chia and flaxseeds, superfood greens like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorella, and clinically tested cognitive enhancers for improved mood and brain function. The company even went a step further by including a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity in optimal digestive health, and digestive enzymes so your body absorbs the high-caliber

nutrition you get from INVIGOR8.

While there are over 2000 testimonials on Amazon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more energy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really impressed me was how many customers raved about the taste. So I had to give it a try.

When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike most meal replacement shakes it smelled like whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so good.

Still INVIGOR8 had to pass the most important test, the taste test.

And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good.

I could see what Zee meant when he said his clients found the taste addicting.

I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years to achieve total definition.

Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say, shaving that last abdominal fat from my midsection wasn’t just easy. It was delicious.

Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can honestly say that the results I’ve experienced from INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing.

A company spokesperson confirmed an exclusive offer for Men’s Health readers: if you order INVIGOR8 this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “MEN10” at checkout. If you’re in a rush to burn fat, restore lean muscle and boost your stamina and energy you can order INVIGOR8 today at www.drinkInvigor8.com or by calling 1-800-958-3392.

LIFE

STYLE

3 WAYS TO

THE SALVAGED SWEATER It can take 2,700 liters of water to make a single cotton tee.

You can save all the water that goes into producing a new cotton hoodie by wearing this one by Toad&Co, made from recycled cotton scraps and postconsumer plastic. It’s built with breathability in mind and has two side pockets for all our gadgets. And if the hoodie suffers wear and tear, the brand will replace it . . . for free.

Hoodie ($100) by Toad&Co; shorts ($68) by Vuori; sandals ($30) by Reef.

THE SUSTAINABLE SHORTS Think of joggers as performance-built sweatpants. They have all the comfort of sweats with the added benefit of stretch for running (or pre-pool pushups). Even better, this pair of jogger shorts (made with recycled polyester) by American Eagle houses a drawstring waistband, bonded tape pockets, and innovative moisture-wicking tech to draw sweat and salt water away from your body.

Ralph Lauren gave its iconic polo the ultimate upgrade. Made entirely from plastic, the Earth Polo ($98.50) uses a waterless dyeing process that helps the planet, resulting in a shirt that looks good even without a Zoom filter.

call for a breathable shoe you can wear from the office to the bar.

This one by Rothy’s ($175) fits the bill, with an upper made from recycled plastic and an ankle collar stuffed with cushy yarn.

AE Active 24/7 shorts ($40) by American Eagle; sneakers ($110) by Timberland.

or pound the pavement in these water-repellent cotton shorts by Fair Harbor ($68), made from 11 upcycled plastic bottles. Or you could just chill by the pool. Everyone needs a little downtime.

Styling: Cassie Anderson. Styling assistants: Hannah Yohannes and Claire Zimmerman. Grooming: Christine Nelli/the Wall Group. Prop styling: Cate Geiger. Production: Suzette Kealan/Crawford & Co.

GO GREEN

BREAKING THE BANKS

THE ECO-FRIENDLY HENLEY A Henley hits that sweet spot between a tee and a polo. It’s comfortable and flattering on every body type (including those who maybe gained the quarantine 15). This version by United by Blue is made from sustainable fabrics like organic cotton. Pair it with these recycled-polyester board shorts by Vuori, which were engineered with antiodor tech and stretch for hitting the surf or just the road ahead.

EcoKnit Henley ($48) by United by Blue; shorts ($68) by Vuori; sandals

by Rainbow Sandals, Stokes’s own; Electrical Ninja surfboard ($725) and Classic surfboard ($1,200)

by Earth Tech Surf.

WHEN CHASE STOKES, 28, flew out to Charleston, South Carolina, for an audition, he packed just two pairs of shorts, underwear, and three T-shirts.

Having faced career rejection before, he assumed he wouldn’t stay long. “My bank account had just overdrafted and I couldn’t even afford an Uber from the airport,” Stokes says. “I had to ask someone in production to spot me some cash.”

Fortunately, this audition turned out to be for a part on Netflix’s murder mystery Outer Banks, a cultural phenomenon among the Gen Z crowd.

And he snagged the lead role of John B only 20 minutes after his audition. “I never went back to L. A. after that, and all I had were the clothes I’d brought. I couldn’t even buy anything until I got my first paycheck.”

Growing up in both Orlando and Atlanta, Stokes played ice hockey and surfed. Much like his character, he says, he was the troublemaking class clown in high school. “We’d use a friend’s fake ID to buy beer or sneak into hotel hot tubs. At the time, I was going through my stepdad and mom’s divorce as the oldest of four, so I was angry and frustrated.” Also like his character, Stokes’s day-to-day uniform is all about basics that keep up with his athletic lifestyle: a buttondown, some Levi’s 501’s, and a pair of “beat-up” Converse. “John B’s style is a lot like mine, except his could probably use a good wash and dry.”

To prep for the (usually shirtless) role, Stokes spent hours in the gym, most days focusing on cardio. His goal wasn’t to bulk up to Marvel-like superhuman standards to play John B. “He’s just a kid, and his day job is cleaning a yacht,” he says. “It’s manual labor. I didn’t want to give unrealistic expectations to young kids.”

With season 2 of Outer Banks out on Netflix on July 30, Stokes says the greatest perk of newfound fame is connecting with his fans—both famous and not. “Snoop Dogg’s manager told me he watches the show,” he says. “I was like, all right, when am I going to snap back into reality?”

—JOSH OCAMPO MEN’S HEALTH

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WHO DO YOU LOOKING AT?

THINK YOU’RE

Summer is here! We’re (mostly) vaccinated!

That means a return to checking people out!

Just don’t kill the vibe. BY SABLE YONG 48

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IF BASEBALL is considered America’s pastime, then checking people out is humanity’s.

Our eyes are naturally drawn to things we like looking at: namely, attractive people.

It’s safe to assume there will be a surplus of visual stimulation when we all venture out of our quarantine caves. There’s nothing wrong with taking it all in, but there’s a graceful, and perhaps even flattering, way to do it.

Trust me, it can get weird to be on the receiving end of a stranger’s lingering stare. I’m just trying to go about my day, and suddenly I’m wondering if I should be scanning for exits or potential witnesses. I’ve crossed

LIFE

The Sliding Scale

you’re putting down. That’s your cue to snap out of it and move on.

Even if you’re not looking to take things further, you can still be guilty of an unsubtle checkout. Just because you’re married or otherwise off the market doesn’t mean you automatically stop noticing other people. (It helps to be in a relationship with someone who acknowledges this, too.) Sometimes you simply encounter someone so hot, their hotness acts like a supermagnet for all the eyeballs in the vicinity. If you’re one of those cool, cheeky couples who are very open and vocal with each other about whom you find attractive, congratulations, I am very happy for you! Still, don’t stand there leering, because I don’t want to feel like I’m the target of a unicorn hunt. Not saying you’re necessarily looking for a third, but depending on the situation, it could read that way.

These tips are also key in that virtual space known as online. You can stalk someone’s Instagram feed all you want without interacting with it—I mean, that’s the point of social media, right?

We’re all curious to know what people are up to. And sometimes they’re up to some obvious thirst-trapping. (See Channing Tatum’s naked selfie for reference.) If you want to put yourself on someone’s radar, liking their Instagram post is a generally inoffensive way to do that. But commenting on the post with a heart or flame emoji? You are now approaching iffy territory. A midnight double-tap binge through someone’s entire Instagram grid? You are officially doing way too much! This will never not come off as a cartoon eye-springing awooga wolf call.

After several centuries of society positioning a woman’s appearance as her primary value, we are lucky enough to live in an era when women are rediscovering and reinventing femininity on their own terms. I’m assuming you don’t want to blow it by making it about you, or for you. Conduct yourself like a gent and you might just find someone making eyes at you from across the bar (hooray, vaccines!) this summer.

Sexy Selfie Positions

THE SNEAK PEEK: Tug up the hem of your shirt—or tug down the hem of your pants.

THE BOA CONSTRICTOR: Get naked—but use your arms and/or legs to cover up your private bits.

MOUNTAIN VIEW: Lie flat on your stomach and lift your butt. Shift the camera slightly to the side so your booty is visible behind your head.

SUPERMAN: Plant your hands on your hips and show off . . . everything.

WHOA, NELLY

the street to walk on the other side when a dude’s eyes were glued to my body as he came toward me; I’ve also switched train cars or seats at the bar when I realized someone was indiscriminately gawping at me. But stepping into a room and having someone look me in the face, smile, and say hello? This is fine and friendly!

I know there are a lot of mixed messages when it comes to how (or even if) men should check people out. Many women will tell you they’re generally aware that they’re being looked at all the time: on the street, on social media, pretty much anywhere their image exists—and it can get exhausting. Yet lots have internalized this stuff themselves, hence the inner conflict of feeling uncomfortable when strangers ogle them while also appreciating external validation about how nice they look—in the proper context, of course. It’s one thing to walk into a bar or club and turn heads. It’s much weirder and grosser to walk into a conference room and experience that same reaction.

All of this is happening in the age of “WAP” and other women’s sexualempowerment anthems, which means you’ve probably noticed that women are feelin’ themselves more. They’re reclaiming their bodies as their own to flaunt as they please. The key is being supportive of that without assuming that any show of skin or hint of promiscuity is an invitation to voice your explicit approval. If you want to demonstrate your support, a friendly hello—the same kind of nonsexual greeting you’d give to your local barista or postal worker—is totally sufficient. Don’t make it about them being hot is what I mean.

It’s no one’s business whom you choose to throw your lustful gaze at. However, making it someone else’s business—i.e., forcing them to react to your very obvious ogling—is when things can veer into creep territory. Whether the object of your lustful gaze wishes to be perceived or not, they probably already realize you’re checking them out, and if they want to take things further, they’ll let you know. If someone doesn’t reciprocate your eye contact or smile, they’re likely not picking up what

TEASING

@salmanqasemi (peach). Shutterstock (eyes). Chris Danger (illustrations).

S A B L E Y O N G is a New York City–based relationships and beauty writer. She cohosts a podcast called Smell Ya Later about all things scent-related.

And always (always) crop out your face before sharing any nudes. For security’s sake.

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LIFE

T H I S M O N T H ’S C O O L D A D : M AT T L O G E L I N wrote the memoir Fatherhood, the basis for the new movie of the same name starring Kevin Hart and available now on Netflix.

COOL DAD

A TALE OF

TWO KIDDOS Children are like snowflakes, each special in their own beautiful way . . . and this cold, hard truth makes parenting unexpectedly fun. BY MATT LOGELIN THERE’S THIS annoying thing pediatricians do when you try to pin them down on a real answer to a burning question.

You’ll say, “Well, why does my toddler insist on waking me up at 5:00 a.m. to poop?” and the doc will shrug their shoulders in an almost pitiable way and utter, “Every kid is different.” I used to find this phrase the parenting equivalent of “It is what it is,” a sort of nonanswer that seems to imply I was overreacting.

But then I had two kids.

Maddy, my 13-year-old daughter, is the kind of kid who loves reading and playing chess and reading about playing chess. I 50

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also have a two-year-old daughter. Berd is the kind of kid who loves to tear pages out of books and throw chess pieces across the room. I doubt that she’ll ever willingly read a book about playing chess. She may never willingly read any book. These character traits, it seems, are set at birth.

Maddy was a boring baby. I was told countless times by countless people that the universe gave me the kind of baby I needed most. My wife died of a pulmonary embolism one day after Madeline was born, and if I was going to survive my new reality, I was going to need a boring baby.

Boring babies sleep through the night.

Boring babies lie still for diaper changes.

Boring babies give you time to cry in the shower. Boring babies don’t throw their food all over the floor while you feed them. Boring babies actually allow you to feed them. Boring babies are easy babies who, at least in my n=1 experiment, turn into easygoing children.

Maddy traveled with me through India and Nepal as I wrote a book. She joined me on countless trips to Amoeba Music to pick up records and pose for photos in its graffiti-covered elevator. She laughed while I tossed pumpkins off the bridge into the L. A. River below (separate story).

Now that she’s older, I’ve learned that she was just too nice to try to stop me.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t know Maddy was a boring baby and an easy kid.

I had no point of reference. She was the only child I had.

I remarried ten years after my first wife died, and not long after, Berd was born. It wasn’t until she came along that I truly learned what a nonboring baby was.

Berd wasn’t just not boring; she was wild.

I guess I assumed that she would be of the same disposition as Maddy, and I was absolutely positive that things would be easier, especially because I wouldn’t be parenting alone this time. Heh. Early on, Berd refused to take a bottle (rendering me basically useless as a parent). During diaper changes, she rolled around like an alligator wrestling its prey. After a particularly long day with Berd, a babysitter once said to me, “She cannot be tamed.”

And while Maddy is a cautious, thoughtful teen, Berd is now wilder than ever. She flies through the tube slide at the park without hesitation. She jumps off the back side of the couch with no expectation that anyone will be there to catch her—even though her cautious older sister is often there, ready to save her.

I understand now what those pediatricians mean. It doesn’t matter if you’re a girl dad or a boy dad or the dad of a gender-nonspecific kid—being a dad of any child is never what you expect even if you already have one child. This is frustrating only if you choose not to accept it.

And here’s the twist: This actually makes parenting fun. My third daughter is due to arrive on October 2. I don’t know what to expect, but I know for a fact she’s going to be different.

ILLUSTRATION BY LIAM EISENBERG

© 2021 Kraft Foods

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WHERE STRENGTH MATTERS MOST

10

M

D L I U B O WAYS T

S S E N H G U O T L A T EN

UP” N A M “ TO requires awareness, D L O T G being “tough.” It strategies to level N I E B T U es doesn’t require expert-approved O H T I W ... challeng mind. Use these fe’s true B Y JO g li wn O R T IN G Navigatin d knowing your o W IT H A DDIT ION A L R E P n D, finesse, a game. B Y T OM WA R it r up your g

. C L A IR SHUA ST

1

Jobe Lawrenson

CAN YOU GET PHYSICALLY STRONGER WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR MENTAL COMFORT ZONE?

“The body can only adapt if it faces something new, and new challenges won’t always be comfortable,” says MH fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. So basically, no. Your mind will adapt to the discomfort, too, and you’ll boost both your mental and physical strength. The secret: Start small. “Every week, add one to whatever goal you’re chasing,” says Samuel, “whether that means doing one more pushup rep every set, adding one more minute to your morning run, or holding a plank for one more second.”

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MIND

MENTAL STRENGTH

2 WHAT WENT WRONG? Start thinking like Michael Jordan.

3

CAN I LET GO OF NEGATIVITY WITHOUT WRITING A DAMN GRATITUDE LIST?

Yes, by doing something for someone else. “An active approach to purging jealousy and negativity is to practice acts of kindness,” says psychiatrist Tracey Marks, M.D., of Marks Psychiatry in Georgia. Start by giving compliments and positive feedback to others. If you’re feeling especially generous, pay it forward at a coffee shop or drive-through.

There’s some evidence that acts of generosity are linked to activity in brain regions responsible for happiness. Still, if giving makes you frustrated (like, what about my needs?), try gratitude without the list, Dr. Marks says. Just spend a moment every morning thinking about what you’re grateful for.

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4

MY WORKLOAD IS RIDICULOUS. HOW DO I AVOID BURNOUT WITHOUT DROPPING DOWN THE OFFICE PECKING ORDER?

Learning to deploy the word no comes naturally to some of us but slowly to others. Many people don’t use it because they fear that they’ll lose opportunities or be seen as unwilling by employers or clients. In reality, the opposite can be true. “My experience has been that when I say no, my value increases,” says Elizabeth Day, creator of the How to Fail podcast and author of Failosophy. “When you respect yourself, others respect you more, too.” At any rate, “I can’t handle any other project” is an easier conversation to have than “I can’t handle this job anymore.”

5

I’M A HOPELESS PROCRASTINATOR. HOW DO I WORK UP MORE GET-UP-AND-GO? Let go of the concept of creative inspira-

tion or having to be “in the zone” to do what needs to be done. There will never be a right time to get the work done, and if you’re waiting for the mood to strike,

you’ll be waiting a long while. James Clear, author of the best seller Atomic Habits, advocates committing to a schedule rather than to a deadline. If life gets in the way of what you need to do, cut down the size of the task—spend ten minutes on it instead of the 30 you’d intended—but always stick to the schedule. Just don’t give yourself the option to skip it.

6 I’M STRUGGLING WITH THE LOSS OF A LOVED ONE, BUT I NEED TO BE STRONG FOR MY FAMILY. WHAT CAN I DO? Being “strong” doesn’t mean holding back emotions and tears. “The way to show strength is not to be afraid to reveal your hurt,” says Dr. Marks. “When everyone is hurting, the people who depend on you will look to you as a model for how to handle themselves.” If you’re holding everything back, you may be telegraphing that grief is shameful. To be strong, show how you feel.

Piotr Gregorczyk (sneakers). Studio 33 (remaining).

He’s considered himself a failure: By his count, he’s missed more than 9,000 shots. “Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the gamewinning shot and missed,” he’s said.

“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.” How did he move on?

He moved forward. “Making a mistake is just a source of feedback informing you that you are off course,” says Lisa Stephen, Ph.D., a career, personal, and sports performance coach and the owner of Ignite Peak Performance in Vermont. “Use that data to focus on what to do next. Then forget the mistake. You can visualize yourself flushing it down the toilet or releasing it in a balloon. The point is to leave the mistake behind and build on what you’ve learned. You cannot perform at your best by focusing on your worst.”

7 READING THE NEWS OFTEN UPSETS AND ANGERS ME. HOW DO I RESET? That’s understandable; the news causes stress because of the sense of hopelessness and feelings of injustice it can evoke. To process difficult news, try creating boundaries around how you’re getting it and find people to have meaningful conversations about it with, recommends psychiatrist and MH mental-health advisor Gregory Scott Brown, M.D. Since distressing news can put your natural fight-or-flight response into overdrive, do something to cool it off, like meditation or at least watching an enjoyable non-news, nondramatic show.

Another solution: Trade passive news consumption for active discussion. Taking the Black Lives Matter movement as an example, Eugene Ellis, the founder and director of the Black, African, and Asian Therapy Network, points to the mental-health benefits of talking with others.

This can also help you know what actions to take. “It’s an antidote to the feelings of powerlessness that many of us experience. When you start to engage, you discover that below the hopelessness is connection. And when you find connection, it’s easier to know what to do.”

8

I’M DOING AN ULTRAMARATHON. IS IT TRUE IT’S MIND OVER MUSCLE?

“Ultras are probably 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical,” says Michael Wardian, a professional endurance runner who’s one of only three people to complete the Leadville 100-mile/Pikes Peak marathon combo. To get through an ultra or any endurance feat, “you need to have a big why.

Not just running for social media but for your kids or to prove something to yourself,” he says. Also helpful: Rely on “chunking”—setting small goals like reaching the next mailbox or aid station. You don’t always have to be running to build your mental strength. “Get used to doing stuff that makes you uncomfortable,” he says. Set your alarm for 4:00 A.M.—or just do the dang dishes.

9 ANOTHER WAY? “Yoga is an excellent way to de-stress,

and it’s good for the person who can’t sit long enough to meditate,” says Dr. Marks. It also brings you stressreduction benefits from two directions: As with meditation, you focus on breathing, which can help relax the body. “And by stretching tight muscles, you relieve tension,” she explains. You don’t have to be flexible to do yoga, and these days there are tons of virtual options for practicing it. Two of our favorites are Alo Moves and Apple Fitness+. Both offer a wide range of classes, from hour-long stress busters to ten-minute yoga snacks.

(A side note: Meditation really is worth persevering with, so keep at it. Try an app like Calm, Headspace, or Ten Percent Happier to make it less boring.)

10

WHAT SHOULD I SAY TO SOMEONE WHO TELLS ME TO “MAN UP”?

“Here, read this article.”

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MIND

T H E E X P E R T : G R E G O R Y S C O T T B R O W N , M . D . , is a psychiatrist, a Men’s Health advisor, and the founder and director of the Center for Green Psychiatry in Austin.

MAN’S BEST

THERAPIST There’s plenty of science about what pets can do for your well-being. And then there’s what you— and I—didn’t expect. BY GREGORY SCOTT BROWN, M.D.

LAST FALL,

like seemingly every other person you know, I adopted a pandemic pet—Kai, a rambunctious ten-month-old Lab-golden mix. After a year of watching cats’ tails meandering by patients’ screens or hearing puppies barking in the background, I realized I wanted a pet, too. Perhaps I needed one.

Any mental-health professional will tell you that part of our job involves appreciating the therapeutic benefit of pets. In fact, I’m asked to write letters all the time to authorize emotional-support animals for patients who have been diagnosed with illnesses

such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Having a pet can reduce stress and help you feel a sense of connectedness. Part of what’s happening likely involves the bonding hormone oxytocin, which is associated with intimacy. When you pet your dog, for example, the levels of oxytocin released in your brain rise, stress hormones like cortisol tend to fall, and there can also be a noticeable decrease in blood pressure—all of which may contribute to an improved sense of well-being. In addition to these mental benefits, pet ownership is generally linked to better overall health, including lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

Although I was aware of the science, I really just wanted a dog to run with me and play an occasional game of fetch. I’d had pets before. My parents took me to adopt my first dog when I was nine. So as an only child, I still had playful company around, even if it meant throwing a Frisbee to a bug-eyed Chihuahua, hoping she would bring it back. I was aiming for a sportier breed this time around. I found myself thinking, Having a pet would be fun.

To be completely honest, the first few weeks didn’t feel therapeutic at all. While I was trying to teach Kai how to sit, she was more interested in chewing up my wife’s shoes or peeing underneath my desk.

I soon realized that I still had a thing or two to learn about having a pet—and about what she’d do for me. Friends in the mental-health field have said the same.

We’ve seen that there’s what science tells us pet ownership does, and there are the subtle ways pets make us better:

They Plug You In I NOTIC E D THAT training Kai by using

hand gestures, giving out treats, and raising my eyebrows to get her to bark actually improved my nonverbal communication and active listening not just with her but also with my very human patients. When I adopted Kai, I was told she’d likely been through some trauma in her early life. She was naturally timid, so when she darted away from me, I knew that running after her was a bad idea. The only way to get her to come back was to pay attention to her and to actively listen to what she was trying to communicate. When I’d kneel and motion for her, she’d settle down and walk back to me. It reminded me that plugging in to subtle nonverbal cues from patients gets us further: A head nod may tell me PHOTOGRAPH BY THE VOORHES

when to dive deeper; a long pause before answering a question suggests I might want to avoid that topic.

They Provide Structure IT’S A GIVEN that caring for another be-

ing—a pet or a kid—requires some structure in your life. But I was impressed by how much Kai put me back into a good rhythm. Now, instead of hitting snooze or scrolling through Instagram, I awaken to the Kai alarm every day at 7:30. If I don’t, I know I’ll be scrubbing the floor. And, of course, I have a running buddy who always wants me to run.

MOST DAYS, the 42-year-old host of the Song Exploder podcast and its two-volume, eight-episode Netflix adaptation spends his time breaking down the complex arrangements of popular songs. But when the pandemic hit, Hrishikesh Hirway found peace of mind . . . in a galaxy far, far away. Here’s how he forges Jedi-like mental strength. BY JOSH OCAMPO

They Put the News in Its Place

8:30 A.M.

1:15 P.M.

6:45 P.M.

BREAK A SWEAT

WALK IT OFF

BINGE-WATCH

Hirway begins each day with a highintensity workout.

Heart disease and diabetes run in his family, so he’s conscious of his health. During quarantine, he would boot up his laptop and join a group fitness class via Zoom. “I have a really serious sweet tooth, so at some level, I’m working out just so I can keep eating,” he says. “But every year, I have this abstract goal: That year will be the year I’m in the best shape of my life.”

Hirway occasionally works 14-hour days out of his Los Angeles garage and makeshift podcast studio to produce two Song Exploder episodes a month. That kind of hustle requires consistent breaks. Hirway finds solace in his backyard, where he does a few laps every hour. “Sometimes I’m zeroed in on a little section of audio or part of a song. I end up feeling like my brain is being wrung out like a sponge. When I walk outside, it lets my brain return back to its normal size.”

After hours of splicing and mixing audio, Hirway decompresses with a deep dive into the Star Wars universe.

He recently binged all seven seasons of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and four seasons of Star Wars Rebels.

“You can spend so much more time with those characters and in those worlds,” he says. The one genre he can’t stomach: true crime. “I find the news hard enough.”

A N AU S TI N - B A S E D psychotherapist I

know, Dixon Parnell, says his two cats don’t care much about his work or the news. Neither does Kai; when she’s ready to play, she starts barking regardless of what’s on my to-do list. Although being interrupted isn’t always convenient, a playful three-minute ball-throwing challenge gets me away from the computer and allows me to return refreshed and better focused. Pets are on a totally different rhythm, and it’s one of wanting scratches, treats, playtime, and new places to sleep.

Dixon tells me that seeing his cat be all about what’s really important—sleep, nutrition, exercise—keeps him from being thrown off-balance by things like work stress or a toxic news cycle.

Jason Raish (Hirway).

They Help You Slow Down K AI IS A great companion, but for some

11:00 A.M.

people, caring for an animal fosters an even deeper connection. For psychiatrist and fellow MH advisor Drew Ramsey, M.D., the time he invests in grooming his horse, Cinco, “helps me settle down and check in,” he says. That’s especially important with an animal that’s more powerful than you by a factor of at least 20, he adds. There’s no fighting his power or staying on if the horse decides he’s done with you. You need to be able to read each other.

After almost a year of looking after— and being looked after by—Kai, I’m finally able to take her for those runs I always imagined, and when I throw a tennis ball, she’ll bring it back (at least most of the time). I’m not going to say pets are better therapists than we are for complicated issues, but don’t overlook all that they can do for you.

Recording multiple podcasts and filming a Netflix series means organization is everything. Hirway has a simple hack for maintaining order: a spreadsheet. It’s a combination checklist, calculator, and chart that helps him keep track of his day.

“I really believe in the power of a spreadsheet, because it’s the hub of almost everything I’m working on,” he says. “We did all of our wedding planning through a Google spreadsheet.”

SPREAD OUT

3:30 P.M. PHONE IT IN Hirway’s an extrovert.

After all, he spends his day interviewing musicians of the Dua Lipa and Lin-Manuel Miranda sort. Once the pandemic struck, he realized how important those social connections were to his mental health.

Hirway sees a therapist and calls friends on the phone. “Some people aren’t phone people. But it’s helped keep me in check and feel connected.”

MEN’S HEALTH

8:30 P.M. MEAL-PLAN During lockdown, Hirway developed a love of cooking. He even created a podcast with chef Samin Nosrat, Home Cooking, dedicated to solving listeners’ dilemmas in the kitchen. He says it allowed him to stay present and learn to cook everything better, from squash to sardines. “So many people were feeling helpless. [The podcast] was something to occupy my time and help me feel like I’m engaging in the moment in a positive, constructive way.” |

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MIND

T H E E X P E R T : J O E K E O H A N E is the author of The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World, out July 13.

SOCIAL CUES

THE MASSIVE POWERS OF

SMALL TALK Idle chitchat confers serious health benefits, and it’s something most of us have been missing for the past year. Here’s how the author of a new book, The Power of Strangers, advises you to rebuild your social muscles after months of isolation.

WE SPENT WAAAAY TOO MUCH TIME cooped up inside with our families, with our partners, or by ourselves for the past year and a half. While that meant a total loss of solitude for some of us—and an abundance of it for others— quarantine also meant the disappearance of something we didn’t know we needed: random, chance encounters with other people. And science has shown that those fleeting conversations with the grocery-store clerk or a friend of a friend are actually really good for you.

For one, such exchanges can improve your mood, says Juliana Schroeder, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In one study, researchers found 58

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that individuals who habitually made small talk felt “a greater sense of belonging” and less lonely overall. “Talking to people, even those on the periphery of our social network, exposes us to new information and broadens our perspective,” says psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, Ph.D., one coauthor of that study. Social connections can even help maintain your immune system and increase your life span.

If pandemic life taught us anything, it’s that people need one another. So push past those fears, embrace the unknown, and get to know your fellow man again.

Here’s your four-step plan.

Eskay Lim/EyeEm/Getty Images

BY JOE KEOHANE

CBD FOR YOUR PAIN

ife really does fly by. Before I knew it, my 40s had arrived, and with them came some new gifts from dear ol’ Mother Nature—frequent knee pain, stress, low energy and sleeplessness. Now, I’m a realist about these things, I knew I wasn’t going to be young and resilient forever. But still, with “middle-age” nearly on my doorstep, I couldn’t help but feel a little disheartened. That is until I found my own secret weapon. Another gift from Mother Nature.

It began a few months back when I was complaining about my aches and pains to my marathon-running buddy, Ben, who is my same age. He casually mentioned how he uses CBD oil to help with his joint pain. He said that CBD has given him more focus and clarity throughout the day and that his lingering muscle and joint discomfort no longer bothered him. He even felt comfortable signing up for back-to-back marathons two weekends in a row this year.

That made even this self-proclaimed skeptic take notice.

But I still had some concerns. According to one study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 70% of CBD products didn’t contain the amount of CBD stated on their labels. And, as a consumer, that’s terrifying!

If I was going to do this, I needed to trust the source through and through. My two-fold research process naturally led me to Zebra CBD. First, I did a quick online poll—and by that, I mean I posed the CBD question on my Facebook page. Call me old fashioned but I wanted to know if there were people whom I trusted (more than anonymous testimonials) who’ve had success using CBD besides my buddy. That is how I

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found out that Zebra CBD has a label accuracy guarantee which assures customers like me what is stated on the label is in the product.

Secondly, I wanted cold hard facts. Diving deep into the world of CBD research and clinical studies, I came across Emily Gray M.D., a physician at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) Medical School who is researching the effects of CBD. Dr. Gray wrote “early results with CBD have been promising and we have a lot of research underway now. I’ve had several patients using CBD with good success. It’s important that you know your source of CBD and how to use it properly. Zebra CBD produces topquality products with easy to use instructions.”

After hearing it from the doctor’s mouth, I returned to my online poll and was amazed by the number of close friends and family who were already on the CBD train. Apparently, I was the only one without a clue! And funny enough, a couple of friends who commented were using the same brand as my buddy—Zebra CBD. There was no consensus as to why they were using CBD, but the top reasons given were for muscle & joint discomfort, mood support, sleep support, stress and headaches, as well as supporting overall health & wellness.

Eventually, even the most skeptical of the bunch can be won over. With a trusted CBD source in mind, I decided to try it.

When I viewed Zebra CBD’s selection online, I was impressed by its array of products, including CBD oils called tinctures, topicals, chewable tablets, mints and gummies. After reading on their website that all their products are made with organically-grown hemp, I ordered... and it

arrived within 2 days!

The first product I tried was the rub. Now this stuff was strong. Immediately after rubbing it on my knee, the soothing effects kicked in. It had that familiar menthol cooling effect, which I personally find very relieving. And the best part is, after two weeks of using it, my knee pain no longer affected my daily mobility.

The Zebra Mint Oil, on the other hand, had a different but equally positive effect on my body.

To take it, the instructions suggest holding the oil in your mouth for about 30 seconds. This was simple enough, and the mint taste was, well, minty. After about 15 minutes, a sense of calm came over my body. It's hard to describe exactly; it's definitely not a "high" feeling. It's more like an overall sense of relaxation—a chill factor.

Needless to say, I’ve really enjoyed the oil.

While it hasn’t been a catch-all fix to every one of my health issues, it has eased the level and frequency of my aches. And it sure doesn’t seem like a coincidence how much calmer and more focused I am.

All-in-all, CBD is one of those things that you have to try for yourself. Although I was skeptical at first, I can say that I’m now a Zebra CBD fan and that I highly recommend their products. My 40s are looking up!

Also, I managed to speak with a company spokesperson willing to provide an exclusive offer to Men’s Health readers. If you order this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “Health10” at checkout. Plus, the company offers a 100% No-Hassle, MoneyBack Guarantee. You can try it yourself and order Zebra CBD at ZebraCBD.com.

MIND STEP

SOCIAL CUES

PRY YOUR EYES AWAY

1 FROM YOUR PHONE

WHY IT WORKS: Awareness of your surroundings enhances the opportunity for social bonding. (Sociologists call this “triangulation.”) It indicates you’re in a place with other people, you’re experiencing something together, and you can talk about it. The topic—the weather, a street performer—doesn’t really matter as long as it’s shared. Note: This is nearly impossible to do if you’re staring at a screen.

HOW TO DO IT: Comment on how what’s happening makes you feel.

Say you’re in a crowd that’s watching a mime (random, yes, but follow along for purposes of illustration). You could say, “I’ve always been a little afraid of mimes.” The remark doesn’t demand a response, yet it invites one—if somebody else feels obliged to weigh in.

STEP

ACTUALLY

2 LISTEN

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WHY IT WORKS: Listening attentively “is one of the most socially attractive behaviors you can engage in,” says Harry Weger, Ph.D., a communications professor at the University of Central Florida who studies listening. Research has found that people consider good listeners to be friendlier as well as more trustworthy, understanding, and socially appealing. Plus, the behavior encourages deeper, continued small talk.

HOW TO DO IT: When someone says something, paraphrase it back to them, Weger says. For instance, if a colleague mentions how he almost fell into a manhole the other day, respond with something like “Wow, if you’d fallen into that manhole, you could’ve broken your leg!” This forces you to listen but also shows you’re listening.

And notice that last clause: You’re keeping up the conversation by adding to the scenario. This simple detail

33 ©2021 Mars or Affiliates.

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kicks the chat back to the speaker.

Poor listeners leave people hanging.

STEP

ASK SOMETHING

3 YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHY IT WORKS: You’ll only stay engaged in the conversation if it’s interesting. Smart questions prevent small-talk drag. And you can only talk about the weather for so long. . . .

HOW TO DO IT: Start off questions with what, where, how, or why.

They’re unanswerable with a yes or no—total small-talk killers—and they “give [people] an opportunity to reveal more about their own personal feelings,” says Weger. One example: If you’re talking to a barista, ask, “What would you order here?” If they respond with “Honestly, I’m not a fan of the coffee we serve,” you’ve opened up a new line of discussion and found a new reason to visit a better coffee shop.

STEP

MOVE ON TO

4 “BIGGER TALK” W H Y I T WO R KS : People divulge more when you open up; psychologists call this the “disclosure-reciprocity effect.” Think of it almost like raising the stakes in a poker game. The other player will call your raise . . . or up the ante. And the deeper your discussion gets, the more powerful the benefits of the small talk.

HOW TO DO IT: With honesty. If an acquaintance asks how work is going, admit, “It’s been really challenging.”

Chances are, they’ll either follow up with another question or share their own emotional experience. But you don’t have to go negative: Share your excitement about your kid’s baseball season finally starting after the pandemic or your newfound respect for manhole covers.

The percentage of adult speech that is classified as small talk.

Source: Journal of the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication

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MEN’S HEALTH

Cats gonna cat.

Keep your cat at their uncooperative best with IAMS™ tailored nutrition.

©2021 Mars or Affiliates.

Vin Die So Far The star (and creator) of this summer’s F9 is an action hero, a family man, a trailblazer, and much, much more.

By Ryan D’Agostino

sel,

Photographs by Olav Stubberud MEN’S HEALTH

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HATFIELD, NORTH OF LONDON, ENGLAND, 1997—

Tom Hanks, already the winner of two Oscars at this point in his career, is soaked.

This particular sequence includes one of the few times he’ll ever say fuck on film— fucking, to be precise. Steven Spielberg is directing the death scene of Private Caparzo, a brash soldier with a heart who just tried to save a little French girl whose house had been bombed to ruins. Spielberg has won one Oscar for directing. He’ll win his second for this film, Saving Private Ryan.

Caparzo is being played by a young actor, barely 30 years old, named Vin Diesel. He used to be Mark Sinclair, but a few years back he renamed himself Vin Diesel. For the movies. And right now Vin Diesel is lying on his back in a puddle of mud and fake blood. He’s cold. Someone has brought a few dry towels to cover him between takes, when the rain stops. He is drinking a cup of hot tea.

Spielberg has assembled a company of new kids for this ensemble—Giovanni Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Barry Pepper, Ed Burns, fresh off his breakthrough film, The Brothers McMullen. But Diesel is a new kid among new kids. Those guys had some credits already. Diesel? He made a 20-minute short film a couple of years ago, starring himself. Spielberg saw it and put the guy in his movie.

It’s a complicated sequence, Caparzo’s death. Spielberg is taking his time, building the tension. Hanks’s character, the captain, grabs the girl from Caparzo and gives her back to her family (“We’re here to follow fucking orders!”), and everyone’s shouting, and Caparzo’s pleading that they should try to help the girl when pop! He’s hit, falls forward onto a piano in the street rubble of a war-torn town, then tumbles to the muddy gravel.

In the next three minutes and 16 seconds of film, there are 40 cuts. We see the intersection from every angle. Dolly shots from the ground looking up at Caparzo’s face, blood and rain splattering the camera. Third assistant director Andrew Ward remembers the use of a snorkel system, a 64

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periscope-like tube attached to a remote camera that allows for intense, low-angle shots. We see Caparzo through a Nazi sniper’s rifle sight.

And in several shots, we look down at Caparzo from approximately the level of a second-floor window.

What happened was, when they were blocking the scene, this young kid Diesel, who had all of a short film and a single indie feature under his belt—both written by, directed by, produced by, and starring himself—said to Spielberg, “Hey, Steven, where’s your C camera?”

“What? Why?” said the man who had directed Jaws and Close Encounters and Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. and The Color Purple and fucking Schindler’s List.

“Put a C camera in that second-floor window,” Diesel says he told him.

Then, the way Diesel tells the story, Spielberg did put a C camera in the window, and the shot was so good it ended up in the movie’s trailer.

That’s the way Vin Diesel tells the story.

And he is, it should be known, a storyteller, the product of a childhood spent watching Sidney Lumet and early Scorsese in Manhattan movie houses and hanging around his stage-actor father’s theater friends. He wanted only to be in the world of movies, but no one was going to hand it to him—not a mixed-race, marble-mouthed kid with receding hair. If he was going to be a movie star—his goal was nothing less than to “change the face of Hollywood,” he would say many years later—he would have to manufacture a movie star to inhabit.

Not fake. Not phony. Truly talented. But Hollywood. A synthetic creation forged for the Tinseltown machine, with a name like the fastest car you ever saw.

D

OMINICAN REPUBLIC, MAY 20 2 1 —

“Oh God. Oh God! I shouldn’t even be saying that,” he says, cracking up. Diesel is in the D.R., living in a house he refers to as the “campus.” He’s

talking about the Spielberg anecdote.

“But it was a blessing, and I can say that because Steven was also the person who said—he’ll say to this day—‘I didn’t hire you just as an actor, Vin, I expect you to be directing. I expect you to be directing.’ ” He likes the “Caribbean breeze” that blows across the campus. In the morning, he drinks fresh-squeezed vegetable juice with a ginger shot. He hits the training gym on campus. Then he’ll go kayaking with his kids or take a bike ride. Right now he’s watching his daughter’s horseback-riding lesson.

Diesel grew up far from here, in a building called Westbeth, on the far edge of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Artists’ housing, they called it, for actors and other artists who needed an affordable place to live. “When I was a kid, I used to say, I know as sure as I’m breathing, I am gonna be a movie star,” he says.

Diesel willed himself into becoming a movie star: Dom, Private Caparzo, Riddick, Xander from xXx—he created all these characters. But his greatest invention of all is Vin Diesel, one of the biggest movie stars of all time.

He hasn’t directed again, but he did become the anchor—star and eventually a producer—of a movie franchise that may be unprecedented in its box-office take, its life span, its budgets, and the career it created for its star. The Fast & Furious movies have collectively grossed more than $6 billion, and he’s in almost every frame. This year, F9—the ninth installment, shelved for almost a year by the pandemic, due out June 25—gives us Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto once again.

“There’s a filmmaker instinct in Vin, for sure,” says Justin Lin, the director of five Fast movies. “But he never shows up and says, ‘We should shoot at this angle or that angle. . . .’ By the time we get on set, every beat has been talked through—like, thoroughly. And explored a thousand times. That’s what I love about Vin: As we’re developing, we’re always dramatur-

Styling: Paris Libby. Photo assistant: Josue Ponce. Location: the Dominican Republic.

The rain machines have been running for nearly two days straight.

this page: Tank and jeans by Polo Ralph Lauren; necklaces by Cody Sanderson. pdeceding pages: T-shirt by Thom Krom; jeans by Dolce & Gabbana; sunglasses by Dita.

gically breaking down every scene. It’s been two years of that before we even film.”

The collaboration is always in person.

Lin and Diesel not only block out fight scenes and race sequences, they’re conjuring the story—what Diesel refers to as the “mythology” of Fast & Furious. Lin visited Diesel on campus in the D.R. just a few weeks ago, the first time they’d seen each other in more than a year—since the start of the pandemic. They spent four days together, riding bikes and sitting outside by the water. In that time, Fast & Furious 10 started to take shape.

“It built the foundation for the next chapter,” Lin says.

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ONDON AND TBILISI, GEORGIA, 2019—

There’s a scene in F9 in which Dom is skittering through the streets of

London at impossible speeds behind the wheel of a Dodge Charger. He’s trying to outwit a truck carrying what must be the world’s most powerful magnet. (You’ll understand.) Anyway, there’s shooting, and Dom notices that some bystanders are in danger of getting killed by stray bullets, so he thinks fast and drifts the Charger so it can act as a shield.

The whole thing takes a few seconds.

“Emotionally, Vin and I locked that in probably four to six months before shooting,” Lin says. They knew what Dom would be feeling at that moment and how he would react to save the pedestrians.

“Every beat we film goes all the way back to when I’m talking to Vin. As he preps, he’s going through every beat with me.

A lot of times for these big stunts, we have six, eight, 14 months and hundreds of meetings with departments from all

over the world, so usually when we do them, it’s pretty accurate.”

And yet when Lin watched the driving sequence, filmed in Tbilisi by a second directing unit with stunt drivers, he knew it wasn’t quite right. “The driving was so perfect, precise, and clinical that I felt it missed Dom’s intentions and emotional moment,” Lin says. “There’s humanity behind the wheel.” He and Diesel talked with the drivers about Dom’s intentions.

They t weaked the suspension on the Charger—“to help tell the story of the moment,” as Lin puts it. They went back twice over three days to film a sequence that Lin felt captured Diesel’s performance as Dom in that moment—those nanoseconds when we see on his face what he feels he has to do.

The last step was to get Diesel actually driving in London, cut in the stunt driv-

Necklaces

by Cody Sanderson.

ing, and you’ve got yourself about four seconds of a movie.

“When people are in the middle of the process, trying to manifest something, maybe they don’t spend enough time thinking about how it will be remembered—how it will be regarded,” says Diesel. “But at the same time, you have to identify the significance of it, in order to get the most out of yourself—and the most out of the people that you’re inviting on the journey. So it’s not uncommon that I’ll give a speech on set where I’ll say, ‘We’re making this franchise for people that are no longer with us,’ which is very real, and the implications of that are very heavy. ‘But at the same time, we’re making the franchise for the people that aren’t born yet.’ When you have a unique perspective of creating a franchise that spans generations, you realize, okay, we

all have to be as brilliant as possible. We have to reach as high as we can. Because it may be more important than just a movie. More important than two hours of escapism. There may be something more at play.”

Watch Multi-Facial on YouTube. Watch Find Me Guilty (2006), directed by a legend, Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Wiz, The Verdict), in which Diesel plays a wisecracking mobster defending himself at trial. Hell, watch The Pacifier, a 2005 comedy in which a little girl asks his character if one day her boobs will be as big as his. You’ll remember, or discover, that Diesel is an actor, and a good one. “He is not Dom,” says Jordana Brewster, who plays Dom’s sister, Mia. “Dom speaks and walks in an entirely different way. Vin’s creation of Dom is genius because it’s completely different from who he is.” Diesel had certainly never raced cars. (“When you grow up in the city, you grow up on public transportation,” he says. “Now, I was a daredevil, so I actually was a good driver—which doesn’t seem to make sense, but I rode everything with wheels in the most dangerous city in the world. That started with skateboards in the street at five years old, which led to banana-seat bikes, which led ultimately to motorcycles. Nothing makes you a better driver than having to navigate New York City cabs on an XR750.”)

Diesel’s occasional on-set speeches fortify the Fast films by unifying an ever-sprawling cast of characters that Brewster refers to as the family. (“We’re often forced to give speeches, too,” Brewster says, “and my nightmare is public speaking!”) Then there are the dinners. “I think what I once thought was an accident, like, ‘Oh, we’re all just going out for dinner!’ is actually something that he puts a lot of energy into,” she says.

Before filming began on the first movie, Brewster says Diesel invited her to the famous Cuban restaurant Versailles, in Miami, to talk about their characters’ relationship as brother and sister. “I was this really green, super-nervous actress,” she says. “And I thought, Holy shit, okay!

This guy’s for real.”

One previous family member who doesn’t appear in F9 is Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, who first showed up as Luke Hobbs in Fast Five (2011). It’s a bit of a messy story, with vague tales of discord on the set and Johnson calling unnamed male costars “candy asses.” In the end, all parties chalked it up to family squabbles.

“It was a tough character to embody, the Hobbs character,” Diesel says. “My approach at the time was a lot of tough love to assist in getting that performance where it needed to be. As a producer to say, Okay, we’re going to take Dwayne Johnson, who’s associated with wrestling, and we’re going to force this cinematic world, audience members, to regard his character as someone that they don’t know—Hobbs hits you like a ton of bricks. That’s something that I’m proud of, that aesthetic. That took a lot of work. We had to get there and sometimes, at that time, I could give a lot of tough love. Not Felliniesque, but I would do anything I’d have to do in order to get performances in anything I’m producing.”

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OS ANGELES, SOMETIME AROUND 2012—

There is, of course, another member of the family who isn’t here. Paul Walker, whose character, Brian O’Conner, became like a brother to Dom Toretto, and whom in life Diesel considered kin, died in a fiery one-car crash in 2013.

Here’s a fun fact not many people know: Diesel and Walker used to play World of Warcraft. Like, a lot—at Diesel’s house, on set, wherever. That’s a PVP (player versus player) game, and they played as a team against strangers out in the world.

The workweeks were intense, and this was their secret unwinding on the weekends.

And here’s the thing, Diesel says: “No one in the world knew that they were playing Dom and Brian.”

One day, after playing, “we were in this bodega—we walked into this bodega, and people just cannot believe that Dom and Brian are walking into a bodega. We were going to some birthday party or something for someone in the cast, and the— one of the guys said, ‘Brian.’ One of the guys called him Brian. And when we left, and we were in the car, he said, ‘That’s my favorite thing. It’s my favorite thing when people call me Brian.’ And it always stuck with me. Because he was so adamant about it. To him it was a beautiful compliment. I still think about it to this day, because it just says so much, that there was so much pride in this iconic character he created.

It was his creation, his superhero, and that moment represented a simpler life, I guess. And it made me want to protect that even more, because that mountain looming that is Fast 10—that’s what we promised each other, that we would take this franchise and end it at Fast 10.”

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E W YORK , 19 9 5 —He’s sitting in a booth at the Frontier diner on 39th Street and Third Avenue shooting the last scene of his first film.

Diesel has been to L. A., tried to get an agent, tried to get acting gigs. Nothing—he kept hearing he was too Black, or not Black enough, or too Italian, or not Hispanic enough, or too Hispanic, or whatever. (Diesel’s mother is white; he doesn’t discuss the ethnicity of his biological father, whom he’s never met. His stepfather, who helped raise him, is Black.) So he’s back home, working as a bouncer again—all the guys are saying, “Hey, I thought you were gonna be a movie star?” But he’s scrounged up $3,000 and he’s going to make this movie about an actor who can’t get a part because he’s too everything and too nothing.

He’s calling it Multi-Facial. Written by him, starring him, everything by him.

In it he mostly wears a muscle shirt— even in 1995 he has the sculpted upper torso he’s known for. But he doesn’t look much like Dom Toretto. He slings a backpack over one shoulder and pretty much looks like an actor going on auditions.

About 30 blocks north of the Frontier is Hunter College, the well-regarded public school where Diesel was an English major before dropping out. In 2018 Hunter awarded him an honorary doctorate, and he spoke at commencement. He stood onstage before thousands of graduates filming him on their phones and told them about how he had set out to change the face of Hollywood.

Toward the end of his 11-minute speech, he said, “My only little, small advice is: If you don’t see it out there, create it.”

Even as he films Multi-Facial, he’s thinking about his next thing, a downtown saga he’s written called Strays, about a bunch of bros getting high and chasing women—until his character, a small-time drug dealer, meets a woman he calls “pure” and tries to clean up his life.

He finishes filming Multi-Facial. The film sits unedited while he moves on to his epic, Strays. “It sat there for a year,” he says. “I had already written Strays before I did the short film, and I wanted to quickly get to the feature, because that was where I believed any hope of success would be. And I remember my father saying, ‘What about your short film? Is it done?’ And I said, ‘Dad, I’m trying to get my feature made.

That’s just a short.’ And I’ll never forget it—he said, ‘Finish what you started.’ ” So he does. He attacks the project with voracity. To force himself to follow through, 68

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he reserves a screening bay at Anthology Film Archives on Second Avenue in exactly a month. He can’t get out of it now—he’s going to will this thing into existence.

He unseals the film and edits until his eyes hurt. He has to get it sound-mixed and color-timed, and back then you did that at DuArt, a film lab on West 55th. “I had all this pressure,” he says. “I remember they called me into DuArt to say, We want to show you the timing. They projected it against a white wall—it was 16mm, obviously. This 20-minute film. And the thing I remember after that is walking down Broadway, above the subway grates, feeling like I was ten feet off the ground. Literally ten feet off the ground. I wasn’t walking. I was floating.

I was flyyy-ing! Jumping over subway turnstiles with one leap. There was no gravity.”

And then it played at film festivals, and Steven Spielberg saw it and called him up to tell him about this character called Private Caparzo.

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OMINICAN REPUBLIC, MAY 2021—

A few years ago, Diesel took his mother to a screening of Spielberg, the HBO documentary about the director’s life. He remains so proud of Spielberg’s early encouragement. “It was not just flattering, it was so supportive,” Diesel says. “And when we saw him at the screening event, he said, ‘Vinny, Vinny! When I hired you, Vin, I hired you not only because of your acting but because I believed in what you would do as a director.’ ” So whatever happened to that Vin Diesel? The one Spielberg saw, the one with Lumet and Scorsese dreams? He hasn’t directed a film since Strays, which was then part of his DIY Hollywood strategy.

He’s 53 years old now, as powerful as any actor or producer in Hollywood. But never an attempt to make a film of his own.

What’s up with that?

He laughs, and is then serious.

“My reality is, I wake up and go, ‘I haven’t done the Hannibal trilogy,’ ” he says. He first started talking about this 18 years ago: his desire to make a trilogy about Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian general, one of the greatest wartime generals in history, the man who in 218 b.c. led a troop of elephants over the Alps to invade Italy.

“I promised myself I would try to make the Hannibal trilogy. Part of creating mythology in Riddick and creating worlds like Fast, in some bizarre way, was preparation for the ultimate task.” He’ll do it, he says.

But first, there is Fast 10. “On some level, there is that voice that says, My God, you’ve done it, you’ve created this mythology out of scratch. But the Fast finale weighs on me.

Right now Fast 10 is Everest.”

H

ATFIELD,ENGLAND,1997—The crew on Saving Private Ryan has built a wartime town in the Hatfield Aerodrome, an abandoned airfield. A British company has constructed a bridge that the men will defend for the last half hour of the film. Huge volumes of water are pumped under the bridge—a fake river.

Caparzo? He died about an hour ago, in movie time. But Diesel is here on set, and Spielberg makes an unusual gesture: He hands him a camera and asks him to film. “He threw him a bone,” says Andrew Ward, the third AD. Diesel sits, in civilian clothes, wedging his mushroom body into a dirty bunker in a movie-set town, holding a camera that Steven Spielberg gave him to help film the climax of his big movie. He’s a multicultural kid playing an Italian. Back home he’s got a production company with a single film to its credit, Strays. The name of that production company is One Race. Twenty-five years from now, audiences starved of moviegoing by an enduring global pandemic will make their way back into theaters to see a film—also produced by One Race—that might just help save the movie-theater business. It will be like no other movie before it, the ninth installment of an unlikely action franchise that forged a star of the man who forged the franchise.

Says Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, whom Diesel’s kids call Uncle Chris: “Especially starting with Fast 5, the first one where you first got to see the dynamic of all those different ethnicities together, if you look back and you see the trend of power box-office movies, they all tried to diversify and use inclusion more in their casting— because of Fast 5. I don’t think you saw it being done on a scale that huge. A precedent was set.” Indeed, it will star people of different races playing a family unlike any other in Hollywood back when Vin Diesel was too multicultural to get an agent.

In that bunker, clutching his camera, shooting footage that will never even be used, Vin Diesel is floating. He is flyyy-ing!

ryan d’agtstint is the Editorial Director, Projects at Hearst Magazines.

Tank by Polo Ralph Lauren; necklaces

by Cody Sanderson.

GOLD-MEDAL SECRETS OF TH FINALLY, it’s time for Tokyo! CELEBRATE the best of human performance with these FITNESS and MUSCLE SECRETS from America’s best.

Paralympian

Jamal Hill training in Los Angeles. Watch the Tokyo Olympics, beginning July 23, and the Tokyo Paralympics, beginning August 24, on NBC. To learn the latest, visit TeamUSA.org.

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WAVE MAKER PA R A LY M PIC S W I M M E R JAMAL HILL D OE SN’T WA ST E T I M E I N T H E P O OL OR OU T OF I T, W H E R E H E’S A I M I NG T O T E ACH M I L L IONS OF PEOPL E T O S W I M.

He might be

one of the fastest guys in the water, pulling in podium finishes for the 50- and 100-meter freestyle in the 2019 World Para Swimming World Series. But most recreational swimmers probably spend more time swimming laps than Jamal Hill does. The six-foot-four, 185-pound Hill, 26, has a typical hard-driving-athlete regimen: five training days a week, about five hours a day. But only about 40 minutes of that is actually in the pool.

The expected has never really been Hill’s gig. By the time he was ten, he’d started having shoulder problems. On Thanksgiving that year, the right side of his body went limp. Within hours, he was hospitalized, for a time able to move only his head and speak. He was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT), a progressive, inherited condition causing nerve damage. Rather than give up, Hill kept swimming, competing in high school and college.

Angling for a pro career, he began training with USC’s Trojan Elite team, pretending nothing had changed. “Not only did I not want others to know there was anything wrong with me,” he says, “I didn’t want to believe it myself.” This despite the fact that his nerve damage means “from my knees to my toes pretty much feels like I’m walking on prosthetics. I’ve never been able to do things like jump or dunk a basketball, because I don’t really have the function down there. From my elbows to my fingertips, I have about 30 percent nerve capacity there, so it just looks like I’m clumsy.”

When swim coach and mobility consultant Wilma Wong saw him swim, she didn’t see clumsy. The way he got out of the pool reminded her of how some of her clients with conditions like cerebral palsy did—and she asked him if he wanted to tell her something about his body that would help her coach him. The moment Hill acknowledged his CMT to himself—shortly after he began training with Wong in 2018—everything changed. He started working with his disease, discovering new ways to add power to make up for muscle/nerve connections that couldn’t deliver it. “For a long time, my diagnosis was a point of shame for me. I felt cursed,” he says, adding that as soon as he stopped treating his disease as a negative, “blessings and opportunities started to appear.”

Hill wants to share his success with others and has created Swim Up Hill, a foundation dedicated to teaching millions of people—especially in marginalized and underserved communities—how to be comfortable in the water in just five hours. During the pandemic, he pivoted to online training, having people use a bowl, a bench, and a bucket to get the basics and get over their fears. He also used the pandemic to keep training hard, on land and in water, to be a contender for Team USA in Tokyo. “Even with a limit, we can be limitless,” he says.

Hill’s best strategies for getting fast and strong on land and in the pool: — SWIM LESS, BUT SWIM FASTER Hill spends every pool session doing ultrashort race-pace training. For instance, 1,000 yards in 50-meter intervals. For most swimmers, that’s unfathomably low volume.

“They’re like, ‘Dude, how are you getting faster?’ ” he says. It’s all about quality: Hill swims each 50 hard, rests until his heart rate drops, then does another rep. “Repetition is the mother of mastery,” he says.

— POWER UP ON LAND In his two to two and a half hours of daily strength training, Hill trains for explosive power using resistance bands to do chest presses, deadlifts, and bent-over rows. Since a strong back is essential for swimming (and good posture is essential for good lifting, he says), “I make sure to always engage my scaps—you know, the muscles around your shoulder blades.”

— TRAIN FOR YOUR STRENGTHS Hill didn’t get faster until he worked with his CMT instead of pretending it didn’t exist. Because he can’t generate power from his legs, for instance, he found another way to get a good start off the blocks. “My torso is twisted and one arm is up; it’s cocked at my hip like the hammer of a pistol,” he says. “I pop that bad boy down, and the momentum from that arm coming down and from the rotation creates the illusion that I actually have a dive where my legs are working.”

READY, SET, G AI NS! SPIN FOR STAMINA

GRIP FOR GREATNESS

Heimana Reynolds, 22, 5'9", 155 LBS

CJ Cummings, 21, 5'7", 161 LBS

SKATEBOARDING

WEIGHTLIFTING

Skaters have a slacker image, but the fast-paced, highflying 45-second runs that Heimana Reynolds performs require serious cardio and leg stamina. That’s why the Hawaiian skater and 2019 world champion hits the Assault bike for sprint intervals. He does 5 sets of 45-second intervals, with 5 seconds of sprinting all out.

Another favorite is the dumbbell snatch with a box jump: Start by squatting in front of a 12-inch box holding a light dumbbell in one hand on the floor between your legs. Pull the dumbbell up and over your shoulder as you jump onto the box. Do 3 sets of 10 per side. Focus on speed.

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Despite his young age, C J Cummings is the United States’ best hope for Olympic weightlifting gold, in part because of his polished technique. Even though he weighs only 161, Cummings has clean-and-jerked 423 pounds. Master the clean and you can build fullbody power, too. The key: the width of your hand grip. Use a grip just slightly greater than shoulder width; most people, Cummings says, go too wide. “If you have a wide grip,” he explains, “your elbow will be down.”

That will cause the bar to slip. Aim for 3 sets of 3 to 5 reps, starting light, for muscle and strength gains.

Courtesy Ralph Lauren (Reynolds). Courtesy USA Weightlifting (Cummings). Courtesy NBC Olympics (Isles). Courtesy POBY & USA Water Polo (Hooper).

By MARTY MUNSON

STRENGTH

26 YEARS OLD

Jamal Hill

SWIMMING LOS ANGELES, CA

BUILD A BRIDGE TO SPEED

GROUND-AND-POUND YOUR ABS

Carlin Isles, 31, 5'8", 165 LBS

Johnny Hooper, 24, 6'1", 185 LBS

RUGBY

WATER POLO

Sevens rugby—with seven players instead of 15 on the field—requires speed and strength: Players sprint and tackle, handling offense and defense, for 14 minutes. One of Team USA’s fastest, strongest members is Carlin Isles. The ex–track star trains that speed with drills like the hip bridge march: Lie with your back on the floor, the backs of your feet on a 2-foot-high box. Tighten your core and glutes, lifting your butt from the floor. Lift your right leg and drive your knee toward your chest; keep your hips square. Return your leg to the start, then repeat on the other side. Do this for three 30-second sets.

To prepare for the aquatic ground-and-pound that is water polo, Johnny Hooper does a lot of cardio on land, running and cycling, as well as long sessions in the pool and gym. “Core strength is critical,” he says, “because when you’re throwing a ball, you’re not just using the front that everyone sees; a lot of it is torque from your sides and obliques.” Hooper hammers his abs daily with Russian twists and side crunches and says Michael Phelps showed him a great drill: Lie on your back holding a 45-pound plate straight up, then raise your legs and flutterkick to failure. It builds shoulder stability and core strength.

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POWER

32 YEARS OLD

Joe Kovacs

SHOT PUT BETHLEHEM, PA

STAR-PLANK FOR SPEED

LEARN TO GLIDE

Noah Lyles, 24, 5'11", 154 LBS

Nathan Adrian, 32, 6'6", 225 LBS

100-METER SPRINT

SWIMMING

The U. S. hasn’t won gold in the 100 meters since 2004.

Noah Lyles plans to change that, in part thanks to a simple exercise, the star plank. Lyles believes this hold that targets the glutes has helped him become even quicker. “Even if you’re born fast,” he says, “you have to develop that speed.” To do the star plank, get into side-plank position, your elbow on the floor, then raise your upper leg as high as possible, keeping it straight. “You have to force yourself to stabilize in uncomfortable positions,” he says. Stronger glutes give you more powerful hip extension and greater speed. Hold each rep for 30 seconds. Do 4 reps per side.

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After battling testicular cancer in 2018, freestyle specialist Nathan Adrian, a three-time Olympian, had to adjust his expectations. “I learned to reset my baseline and to set goals in small increments,” he says. One drill that’s been beneficial is to count strokes for 10 lengths and try to do as few as possible. “It’s not just going to be pull harder or kick harder,” he says. “A lot of times it’s going to be better connecting what you’re doing with your kick to what you’re doing with your hands and gliding. That comes from bracing your core and positioning your body to be more streamlined by looking down.”

THE

HUMAN CANNON SHO T-PU T C OL O S SUS JOE KOVACS IS ON E OF T H E ST RONGE ST A N D DA I N T I E ST M E N ON T H E U. S . OLY M PIC T E A M.

By LINDSAY BERRA

Courtesy NBC Olympics (Lyles). Courtesy Richard Phibbs/Speedo USA (Adrian). Courtesy NBC Olympics (Snyder). Courtesy World Surf League (Andino).

On his Instagram

feed, there is a picture of Joe Kovacs doing a full straddle jump into a swimming pool, touching both toes with the ease of a cheerleader. Except Kovacs is five-foot-eleven, 310 pounds, eats 12 eggs and two and a half cups of oatmeal for breakfast, and lives at the top of a sport typically known for big men with big power, not bulky ballerinas.

But Kovacs, 32, has used his focus on mobility and the idea that a 16-pound iron shot put goes a lot farther when you “whip it rather than push it” to build a collection of precious medals: gold at the 2015 and 2019 World Championships and silver at the 2016 Olympic Games and 2017 World Championships.

At that 2019 World Championships, in Doha, Qatar, Kovacs’s winning throw of 22.91 meters—just over 75 feet—was the third farthest in history and the farthest, by anyone of any nationality, in nearly three decades. “That meant so much to me,” he says. “As shot-putters, we are human cannons. The ball has to go far.” For Kovacs, the challenge has always been avoiding the dreaded foul, when the shot-putter touches or steps out of the seven-foot-wide circle during his throw. On his winning attempt, he whirled his body counterclockwise with aggression, landed on his right foot, and managed to diffuse all the energy he’d created, hopping without ever bouncing forward.

That unique control, coupled with Kovacs’s strength, makes him a shot-putting force.

During lockdown, he spent quality time at the rack in his basement, pushing insane strength numbers with his wife and coach, Ashley Kovacs, a former thrower for the University of Kentucky and the throws coach at Ohio State University, as his spotter. He squatted 800 pounds for five reps and benched 650 pounds for five reps. He spends plenty of time unwinding that bulk, too. Kovacs warms up by running until he breaks a sweat, then focuses on hip, groin, and spinal stretches before ever touching a shot put. He uses yoga and gymnastics to become more bendy. “I try to get as much length as I can, because torque and separation between the upper and lower body are the X factors in shot put,” he says. “Shot put is rotational and it requires very quick feet, and you have to be mobile to generate speed.”

During Kovacs’s training for the Tokyo Olympics, the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, native beat every personal best with every implement (shot put, discus, and hammer) and every weight in the weight room. He has no doubt he can go to Japan and return with a medal. But this time, his goal is to top his 2016 performance in Rio and finish in first place. “If the ball doesn’t go over 74 feet, you’re not getting a medal this Olympics,” he says. “But I have lots of confidence right now.”

Kovacs’s tactics to boost your strength, speed, and power: — IGNITE YOUR POSTERIOR CHAIN “Everyone overlooks their posterior chain,” Kovacs says, referring to the muscles in your lower back, glutes, hamstrings, and calves, which work together to help you lift with power. He does lots of Romanian deadlifts, squats, and kettlebell swings, as well as reverse hyperextensions. Even Supermans—when you lie on your stomach and raise your arms and legs—can do the trick. “Anytime you squeeze the lower back, you’re building posterior power,” he says.

— BEAR HUG FOR ROTATIONAL POWER You may have tried a standing Russian twist with a plate, but Kovacs’s subtle, er, twist on the move trains rotational power, prepping your body to twist and lift a case of water off to the side with ease. Grab a heavier weight—a 55-pound kettlebell, sandbag, or plate—and hug it close to your body (hence the name “breathe-out bear hug”).

Stand with your feet hip-width apart and facing forward, exhale, and rotate your trunk as far to the right as possible. Inhale, return to center, then repeat on the other side.

— FOCUS ON EFFORT, NOT NUMBERS Concentrating on max effort rather than his actual max has changed Kovacs’s mentality in the weight room. If your body is fatigued or you’re having a down day, you won’t be disappointed by lackluster rep numbers. “If you put in max effort or max speed, the numbers don’t matter,” he says. “But you have to be honest with yourself.”

TRAIN AT RACE PACE

POWER UP YOUR THRUSTERS

Bradley Snyder, 37, 5'9", 155 LBS

Kolohe Andino, 27, 5'11", 170 LBS

TRIATHLON

SURFING

“The idea for the triathlon swim is to be as fast as possible while using as little energy as possible,” says two-time Paralympian Bradley Snyder. While serving in the Navy in Afghanistan in 2010, Snyder sustained complete vision loss due to an IED blast. As part of his rehab, he started training in a pool and qualified for the Paralympic swimming team. He’s already won seven Paralympic medals in swimming.

Now he’s competing in the triathlon. The drill that has helped him most is race-paced training. For instance: Do 25 meters at your race pace, rest 6 seconds, repeat 30 times. If you ever fall off your race pace, you stop.

Surfing makes its debut at the Tokyo Olympics, and bigair master Kolohe Andino is one of Team USA’s top riders.

“Surfing is a weird sport because you spend most of your time getting in and out of waves with your arms, but then all the work is done with your legs and core on the waves,” he says. That’s why he does lots of classic single-leg strength and power drills, like single-leg Romanian deadlifts, pistol squats, and single-leg box jumps. “I’ve jumped up to 38 inches—not bad for a surfer dude,” he says. He often combines these 3 moves by doing 3 sets of 10 reps per side with a minute of rest in between.

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HIGH FLYER CRUSH THE FIRST 10 One of Benjamin’s favorite drills is the 10-meter blowout. “Just sprint as fast as you can for 10 meters,” he says. “But do it while being mechanically sound.” Keep your chest slightly forward and your core tight, and focus on aggressively driving your knees high with each stride. Do 5 sets, resting 90 seconds between each.

— LEARN TO LOVE BOUNDING To forge explosive strength, hone balance, and build the stabilizer muscles around his knees, ankles, and hips, Benjamin does bounding drills. “Start with both feet on the ground, then jump forward and then hop on one leg. Then explode off that one leg onto the other leg, then explode again off that leg and land.” You’re taking exaggerated sprint strides and forcing yourself to control each landing and takeoff on one foot.

The 3 bounds equal 1 set; do 5 sets, with 90 seconds between each.

— BREATHE EASY TO GO FASTER Yes, sprinting is intense and explosive, but if you want to get faster, you must be “in a relaxed state before you compete,” Benjamin says. That’s why he practices the 4-7-8 breathing method recommended by Andrew Weil, M.D. First he blows out all the air in his lungs, then he inhales through his nose for 4 seconds. He holds his breath for 7 seconds, then, through pursed lips, blows out that breath for 8 seconds.

SHRED YOUR ABS

FORGE TOTAL-BODY STRENGTH

Ryan Lochte, 36, 6'2", 190 LBS

Nathaniel Coleman, 24, 6'0", 165 LBS

SWIMMING

SPORT CLIMBING

Four-time Olympian Ryan Lochte says now that he’s older, he has to train smarter, because his body needs more time to recover from workouts. The pandemic—during which his weight climbed to 205 pounds, 15 above his racing weight—didn’t help. To lose weight, he ate more protein and produce. He also does daily core circuits like this: 4 rounds (30 seconds on, 10 seconds of rest) of toe touches, leg lifts, 6-inch flutter kicks, and med-ball pass crunches (in which you lie down, hold a med ball with your feet, pass it to your hands, then hold it over your head, do a crunch, and pass it back to your feet).

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Benjamin’s tips to add thickness to your quads and sprint faster: —

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You might think climbing is only about upper-body strength, but your legs are what should be driving you up the wall, says speed climber Nathaniel Coleman. That’s why he emphasizes totalbody moves that build leg strength and help his upper and lower body connect better. Two favorites: heavy deadlifts and squats. (Think 3 sets of 5 reps at 80 percent of your 5-rep max.) For active recovery between sets, Coleman does hangboard drills to strengthen his fingers. “I’ll hang for 30 seconds, just from my fingers on the smallest edges that I can, so anywhere from 15 millimeters to 8 millimeters.”

Courtesy Lochte (Lochte). Courtesy USA Climbing (Coleman). Courtesy NBC Olympics (Serio and Boudia).

When he takes

the Olympic track for the 400-meter hurdles, Rai Benjamin knows he’ll be battling through one of track and field’s most rigorous events. His trademark race warrants cardiovascular and muscular systems efficient enough to sustain a sprinter’s speed for a full lap. But it also demands phenomenal mechanics and the agility and flexibility to clear ten three-foot hurdles evenly spaced around the track while not losing velocity.

Yet during the pandemic, he had just one way to train: He could run. Benjamin, who’s the third-fastest 400-meter hurdler in history (46.98 seconds is his career best), sometimes practiced at the University of Southern California track in Los Angeles, but by May 2020, coronavirus lockdowns had blocked access there. So he changed tactics. Along with his training partners, 400-meter stud Michael Norman and women’s track veteran Kendall Ellis, he hit the pavement. “We started practicing in the streets,” says Benjamin, who turns 24 in July.

It was a reminder that you don’t need a 400-meter loop and a host of strength-training tools to build speed and athleticism. All you need to do is run. For Benjamin & Co., that involved dawn 200- and 300-meter sprints on concrete in downtown alleyways. Other days they’d run for miles on the beach, using the sand’s instability to strengthen their ankles and challenge stabilizing muscles—and getting a reminder to appreciate nature. “After you finish, you just sit on the sand and you hear the waves crashing,” Benjamin says. “You’re looking into the water, and it’s really serene, really peaceful. It kept things interesting.”

Interesting and demanding. After beach runs, Benjamin would spend an hour sprinting up a grassy hill and walking back down, perfecting his sprint form. “It was actually crazy what we were doing,” he says. “But it was fun at the same time because we were in these West L. A. neighborhoods working out. People would come out and watch us.”

To blast their quads, the crew dusted off their bikes and rode up a hill as fast as they could.

“You know that will never be something you ever do as a track-and-field runner,” Benjamin says. “But it was really fun. Every week it was something new.” And even though he jumped nary a hurdle for months, it all worked. At May’s USATF Golden Games, his first big race in more than 19 months, he clocked a 47.13, the 14th-fastest 400 hurdles in history.

Benjamin says he was a bit “sloppy” with his technique at that event and is working furiously to clean it up. Blame that on his extended time away from the hurdles—and expect a better performance in Tokyo. “I know my potential,” he says, “and I know if I run the perfect race to the best of my ability, I feel like it’s going to be insane.”

SPEED

23 YEARS OLD

Rai Benjamin

400-METER HURDLES MOUNT VERNON, NY

CATCH AND PLANK FOR POWER

PIKE FOR PERFECTION

Steve Serio, 33, 5'4", 130 LBS

David Boudia, 32, 5'9", 165 LBS

WHEELCHAIR BASKETBALL

DIVING

To crush it in wheelchair basketball, you need quick hands and upper-body power. Steve Serio, a Team USA cocaptain, was paralyzed 11 months after surgery to remove a spinal tumor. “We do lots of plank variations that combine shoulder stability with quick hand movements,” he says. For instance, do a straight-arm plank and alternate raising one hand, then the other, as fast as possible. Once you can do that for a minute, have someone throw a tennis ball to you while you’re in a plank. “You catch it with one hand, throw it back, catch it with the other hand,” he says. “It combines stability, speed, and strength.”

When you’re flipping through the air four and a half times in less than two seconds, if your core isn’t tight, you’re going to have an ugly landing, explains three-time Olympian David Boudia. “I do core six days a week; some days are heavier than others,” he says. One move he finds most beneficial is the leg raise: Hang on a bar, back flat against a wall, and keep your legs straight as you lift your toes to your head, then lower them. “We do variations—like explode up to the bar and lower slowly. Or pike up to the middle, then left, then right.” He does 3 sets of 20 reps. Start with 3 sets of 5: Raise your legs fast and lower them on a 5-count.

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AGI LITY

26 YEARS OLD

Nyjah Huston

SKATEBOARDING DAVIS, CA

CRUSH YOUR CORE

JUMP FOR STAMINA

Ryan Murphy, 26, 6'3", 200 LBS

David Brown, 28, 5'9", 165 LBS

SWIMMING

TRACK AND FIELD

Backstroke maestro Ryan Murphy does some creative core exercises to give his body the stability it needs as his arms windmill through the water. Here are two of his favorites. The hanging med-ball throw: As you hang from a bar, someone throws you a med ball, which you catch with your feet and throw back. It’s more athletic and reflexive than a standard crunch. Do 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps. The stabilityball scorpion: Get in pushup position with your feet on a stability ball.

Brace your abs and rotate one leg under your body and then back over, bending your knee at the top like a scorpion’s tail. Do 3 sets of 10 per side.

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David Brown was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease at 15 months old, resulting in glaucoma that took his sight by the age of 13. Now 28 and preparing to compete in his third Paralympics, Brown is the first blind person to run the 100 meters in under 11 seconds. He trains on the track with a guide but does other drills solo. One of his favorite workouts is “double-under death”: 30 minutes of jumping rope, using ropes of different weights. “It’s great for conditioning and speed,” he says. Start with a 1-pound rope for 10 minutes. Then alternate 2-minute reps with a 1.5pound rope and double-unders with a 2-pound rope for 5 minutes.

THE

Courtesy Murphy (Murphy). Courtesy NBC Olympics (Brown and Crabb). Courtesy Thomas Kaserer/USA National Karate-do Federation (Scott).

FLOW MASTER When competitive

street skateboarding debuts in Tokyo, the judges will score the athletes based on the difficulty of their tricks (performed within a time limit) as well as originality, speed, and height. The focus is on the tricks—aerials, slides, and grinds on and off benches, walls, slopes, handrails, and stairs. They demand agility, balance, strength, creativity, and courage—to go for and nail moves you might land successfully only one in 50 times.

It’s that courage that makes the world-champion street skateboarder Nyjah Huston, 26, so hard to beat. As OG Tony Hawk wrote in Time’s 2021 Time100 Next issue, Huston’s “confidence and consistency have made once-in-a-thousand-type tricks a reality.” What’s more, Huston has never had a coach—“and I don’t think I ever will,” he says. “Skating is not like that—it’s really up to you on how hard you want to practice and how hard you want to go.”

Huston has been going hard since kindergarten, when his dad introduced him to skating.

His father pushed him at seven years old to skate rails over concrete (to be more technical) and to stop wearing a helmet (to be so confident that falling wasn’t an option). “A lot of the time, you know you can do a move; it’s just really hard to get that first try out of the way,” Huston says. “It was a constant [mental] battle because I’d be at this big rail, like I don’t know if I’m ready to do this. I’d be rolling up to it for a half hour to an hour, like What am I going to do? Most of the time, I would end up going for it.”

Those early lessons helped Huston realize the importance of commitment. In overcoming his fears, he adopted a confident attitude toward skating new surfaces, one of the hallmarks of his style. “Power and strength are most important for my skating,” he says. “I like skating big stuff, and you need the power to get on those obstacles and take the impact coming off. You need the strength to take the hard falls.”

Huston, who is five-foot-ten and 165 pounds, started weight training in 2018 to add muscle, increase dexterity, and prevent injuries. “Even in tricks where you have to spin your body 360 onto a rail, I felt stronger being able to get my body around in that motion,” he says. “I also noticed it helped with popping the board higher.” During the pandemic, Huston practiced tricks six hours a day. He’s primed for takeoff. He wishes the Olympics had added skateboarding earlier, “but at least it’s in there now,” he says. “I’m excited. It’s gonna be sick.”

Huston’s tips for greater agility, power, and strength: — SQUAT FOR BALANCE AND STRENGTH Huston usually trains in the gym in his house in Laguna Beach. One of his favorite moves is a squat on a Bosu ball holding a 50-pound kettlebell, 5 sets of 15. “It’s good for your leg strength, ankle strength from the Bosu, and for balance,” he says.

— EMPOWER YOUR POWER Given his reliance on power, Huston has added explosive moves like box jumps to his workouts, while building his leg strength through cardio, such as sprinting 1,000 steps in Laguna Beach, riding a stationary bike, and hiking with a heavy pack. He also speed-runs down steps to improve his footwork and reaction time.

— STRETCH AND RECOVER DAILY When Huston was a boy, his father always made him stretch. “I’d be so confused, like, I’m eight, nine years old—I feel perfect,” he says. “Now I look back and I’m thankful for it because I’m like, damn, it really does make a difference.” He starts each day with a True Stretch cage session and ground stretches for 30 minutes. He also uses Hyperice’s Normatec Leg System for recovery, as well as an ice compression machine on his knees and ankles.

FUEL YOUR GLORY

LUNGE FOR ELITE STRENGTH

Trevor Crabb, 31, 6'4", 195 LBS

Tom Scott, 31, 6'0", 164 LBS

BEACH VOLLEYBALL

KARATE

Beach volleyball is brutally tiring: You’re running, jumping, and diving in the sand and sun. Each rally often lasts more than 20 seconds—and it’s 20 seconds of max physical exertion and mental focus—and you repeat that for 30 minutes to an hour. To fuel up, Hawaiianraised Trevor Crabb glugs a monster power shake for breakfast before competitions and on heavy training days. Blend almond milk, 1 banana, ½ cup of blueberries, a handful of spinach, half an avocado, a tablespoon of peanut butter, 2 raw eggs, 1 cup of orange juice, 1 scoop of protein powder, and a handful of ice. “It’s super creamy and super nutritious,” he says.

Tom Scott has claimed 15 karate national championships, but he’ll chase his first Olympic title when the sport debuts in Tokyo. He will have to land punches and kicks while avoiding or blocking incoming hits. That requires agility and strength. He develops those with exercises like the sandbag lunge with rotation: Holding a sandbag (or a dumbbell) at your hips with both hands, step back with your right leg into a reverse lunge; shift the bag outside your right hip as you do this. Power back to standing and step into a reverse lunge with your left leg, swinging the bag around to your left hip as you do. That’s 1 rep. Do 3 sets of 8.

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THE

DEATH-DEFYING, LIFE-CHANGING

POWER OF

RESILIENCE If the early pandemic fired up anything within us, it was a feeling of We just need to survive this. But then, after white-knuckling through those first few months, some of us started to change . . . for the better. Psychologists call this RESILIENCE, and one 2020 study defines the characteristic as “a protective factor.” The eight men in this collection of stories all suffered soul-crushing events—a roadside explosion, a hit-and-run, deadly avalanches. Despite how different their experiences were, the mental, physical, emotional, and even spiritual growth that came from almost dying imbued them with A NEWFOUND SENSE OF LIVING. They’re proof that resilience is real and can be developed, like a muscle, regardless of who you are.

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY LUONG

Travis Mills, photographed at his home in Rome, Maine, lost four limbs serving in the U. S. Army.

Battling for strength The Afghanistanwar veteran puts in the reps at his home gym.

In April 2012, U. S. Army staff sergeant Travis Mills survived a roadside explosion in Afghanistan but lost all four limbs. After his condition stabilized, he returned stateside to continue rehab. He knew recovery would be arduous, but then he discovered a different way to serve.

As told to Joel Crabtree

I’M FROM a very small town in Michigan. After high school, I played football at a community college, but I realized I was only there to play football. I wasn’t doing well in class. I moved back home and realized I didn’t want to be back home, either. I went to talk with a recruiting station, and within two weeks I was shipped out to basic training. I deployed to Afghanistan in 2007 with the 82nd Airborne Division. I deployed again in 2009.

When I returned home after my second deployment, my wife, Kelsey, and I bought a house, and we found out we were going to have a baby. My daughter, Chloe, was born in September 2011. I deployed for my third time to Afghanistan early the next year.

One day, about a month and a half in, I set my backpack down and unknowingly placed it on top of a bomb.

Nine doctors and seven nurses worked on me for 14 hours to keep me alive. There were two nurses who took turns pumping air in and out of my lungs. I had over 400 units of blood given to me. When I woke up in Germany, the only person in the room was my brother-in-law. “My soldiers. How are my soldiers?” I asked him. He told me they were okay. And then I said, “Am I paralyzed?” He said no. I looked at him and said, “Josh, don’t lie to me. I can’t feel my fingers and toes.” And then he said, “You’re not paralyzed. You don’t have your fingers and toes anymore.

They’re gone.” I’d lost both arms and legs.

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I went from six-foot-three, 250 pounds, to three-foot-six, 140 pounds. I had to ask people to feed me and give me water. I needed help to use the bathroom. But the worst part was mental. All you can think about is What if I would’ve stepped here instead? or What if I didn’t put my bag there? I told my wife she should leave me and take everything we had.

She didn’t. I knew I had two options. I could either sit there and pity myself or get better. Everybody around me wanted me to get better. And I knew there were ways to get better. I was at Walter Reed for 19 months. I got prosthetics. I got stronger, and I was able to start dressing myself, feeding myself—all the stuff that you take for granted. I started realizing, Hey, I can still be active. I can still do things.

And I found that I enjoyed helping people. My wife and I decided to start a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called the Travis Mills Foundation. We organized a week with families of those who were physically injured from combat service. It went so well we did it again the next year. Then we got some funds and raised enough money to buy a property for the foundation. In 2017, we opened officially, and now we host eight families per week. We’ve grown to be one of the top veterans service organizations in the nation.

My wife and I are now going on 13 years of marriage. My son, Dax, is three, and he’s a wild man. My daughter is nine. We’re just going about life like we’re supposed to. There’s a slogan I started repeating to myself while at Walter Reed, and I still live by it today: “Never give up. Never quit.”

Adam Wirth (Billimoria)

“NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER QUIT.”

THE

THE BRUSHES WITH DEATH THAT

REALIGNED ME Zahan Billimoria has spent 20 years in the Tetons as a ski and climbing guide, during which he says he’s had five near-death experiences and witnessed the passing of several of his friends. Interview by Paul Kita Q: What does it mean to survive something?

A: You relinquish life and accept death. In your mind, you say goodbye to the people you love. It’s less of a moment and more of a threshold. Surviving is seeing death as a possibility, one that might be winning over, but then fighting back. I’ve been in avalanches where I’ve accepted death, but then in that moment of having nothing left to lose, my body and mind will work together to pull off a maneuver that works. In order to survive, I have to win.

And eventually, through acceptance, you come back and you reconnect with life. I’m no longer as hungry for the most out-there experiences. My choices carry a burden for myself and other people. It doesn’t mean I don’t yearn when I see my friends doing things—there’s some friction, some longing.

But am I good with who I am? I’m so good with it. I have a wife and two children. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for sitting around and feeling sorry for myself. I don’t have time to feel bad.

Q: What is your definition of resilience?

A: It’s not a word I use. My accidents are my doing. So I choose instead to accept the mistakes I’ve made and learn from them.

I’ve held my friends in my arms as they died moments after I survived. I’m close with the widows of those friends. They are resilient.

Their circumstances aren’t something of their own doing.

Q: What have you learned about grief?

A: Grief can feel like someone is choking you—like you don’t know where you are going to get your next breath. To imagine that there will be a life that will come after that, a life where you will be happy again, feels truly impossible. It’s hard to imagine that in the life that will come after that pain, you will be happy again. Some of that weight and sadness will be there forever, and you wouldn’t want it any other way. Because that’s how you honor those that have passed and that you survived.

Q: What has loss taught you about living?

A: When you survive something, you see the other side of the curtain, you live in grief.

What it means to ascend Adventure guide Zahan Billimoria says he’s made his scars of loss and grief a part of who he is.

ABCs OF PTSD RECOVERY With post-traumatic stress disorder affecting about 8 million people a year— and still no single treatment that works for everyone— researchers have pushed to find even more therapies that may help. Here are four proven strategies.

MDMA: Methylenedioxymethamphetamine Yes, Ecstasy. Researchers are enhancing psychotherapies with controlled, monitored dosages to help people break through walls they’re hitting in therapy. A recently completed phase 3 clinical trial showed that MDMA-assisted therapy eliminated PTSD diagnoses in 67 percent of people after four and a half months of treatment.

EMDR: Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing You discuss memories of trauma while moving your eyes in certain patterns. The technique was developed in 1987, and though it’s recommended by the American Psychological Association and the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs, scientists still don’t know how it works. EMDR treatments have been shown to reduce PTSD symptoms or eliminate the diagnosis altogether.

TXT: Texting Text-messaging with a therapist could turn out to be an effective alternative to in-person therapy, but more research is needed. It’s the next step to make PTSD treatments more accessible so that there will be fewer dropouts and greater success.

FTW: Activity-based therapies Holistic practitioners and therapists alike are offering white-water rafting, surfing, fly-fishing, art therapy, and yoga to help diminish the effects of PTSD. Alone, they can’t do the whole job, but they may play a valuable role. “The goal of PTSD treatment isn’t just getting rid of symptoms. It’s about getting back to life and having a sense of well-being,” says Paula Schnurr, Ph.D., the executive director of the National Center for PTSD at the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs. —Marty Munson

THE ISOLATION THAT FORGED ME Court ruling altered juvenile-sentencing policy. Manuel writes about his experience in the new memoir My Time Will Come, from which this essay was adapted.

THE UNITED NATIONS considers solitary confinement for more than 15 days torture. It was my condition for 18 consecutive years.

Imagine that you had been sentenced to social death, life without parole, in a space nine feet by seven—the size of a freight elevator— where for 22 to 24 hours a day you are trapped; where in a deadly daily routine you sleep, wake up, shit, piss, eat—food slipped through a slot as if you were an animal; where you are denied the possibility of human contact except as physical or mental abuse; where visual and sensory stimuli—the stuff of life—are only a memory or a dream; and where who you are is defined only by your willingness or unwillingness to be disciplined and punished.

I managed to endure it and survive. Scientists have shown that solitary confinement, especially of juveniles, can damage the brain, provoking panic, anxiety, depression, loss of control, and even suicide.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” the song says.

One isolated incident Sentenced to life as an early teen, Ian Manuel sustained multiple stints in solitary confinement.

During one of my many stretches of solitary confinement for a prison infraction, I was free. I was inured to it; I had adapted to the hellishness of my environment. As Guitar says to Milkman in Song of Solomon: “[You] wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” I did.

I cherished my aloneness in solitary confinement. I was rarely bored. Boredom in addition to the intensity of the incarceration would have made me lose my mind, might have driven me to suicide. I spent hours on end imagining, practicing magical thinking. Suppose the ocean is a fantastical realm. Posit two aquatic animals: on the one hand, a swordfish whose large gills pull more oxygen out of water than those of most fish, allowing it to spend its entire life beneath the surface of the sea; on the other hand, a dolphin or a whale, with its diving reflex, which however long it stays submerged must periodically rise to the surface to breathe air through its blowhole because like humans it has no gills. In prison, an inmate who never emerges from fantasy and delusion may be said to have slipped into schizophrenia, having completely withdrawn from reality. An inmate who dives deep into his imagination but is compelled for his survival now and then to rise from fantasy and delusion retains a firm grip on things as they are. I have always believed that I was of the latter party.

Most of my time I spent swimming in my imagination. I had a constant vision of my mother, at the feet of God seated in His throne in heaven, imploring Him: “Please let my baby go home.” I wrote rap lyrics to express my ever-shifting feelings; read poets like Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and Eminem, imagining myself in competition with, and trying to outdo, them; longed for visitations from the nurse just so I could see a female form on the wing. I dwelled on what life would be like outside prison, what I would do once I was out. I harbored childhood fantasies of becoming a rich and famous rap star. I would give back to those I had left behind in prison.

Powerless as I was, I dreamed of wielding it. I would hire lawyers—they like money—to represent the interests of prison inmates and to abolish close management. I was drawn to fantasies that gave my imagination flight, fantasies about a final struggle between good and evil to determine the fate of the world. Since those days, a line, often quoted by one convict I knew, has stayed with me: “To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

On November 10, 2016, that night around 9:30, as I walked out of Orange County Jail in prison garb, carrying the barest possession in a bag, it had been agreed that Debbie Baigrie, the woman I had shot, would meet me at a gas station just down the street from the jail. She and I stared at each other and grinned before hugging. One of my attorneys, Ben Schaefer, was busy trying to figure out where we would eat; we were all starving. He settled on a pizza joint downtown, not realizing that it was ever so close to where I had shot Debbie a quarter century before. When I got out of the car, I grabbed Debbie and kissed her on both cheeks to acknowledge the disaster that brought us into each other’s life.

From My Time Will Come: A Memoir of Crime, Punishment, Hope, and Redemption, by Ian Manuel. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Ian Manuel.

Aundre Larrow

Ian Manuel

THE

HAZING THAT GAVE ME

A VOICE Tyler Perino narrowly survived a fraternity “game.” Now he’s fighting to prevent Greek-life rituals from claiming more victims. By Spencer Dukoff THE LAST THING Tyler Perino remembers from the night of March 16, 2019, is telling some of his fraternity brothers that he wanted to go home.

In the preceding hours, the Delta Tau Delta pledge at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, had been blindfolded, spit on, berated, beaten with a paddle, and told to drink a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice and a bottle of Crown Royal before playing a game called “Chug till You Puke.” He doesn’t remember getting dropped off at his dorm or telling his girlfriend he felt like he was going to die. She called 911, and EMTs rushed him to a hospital. When he woke up the next morning, he was told he’d had a blood-alcohol level of 0.23—nearly three times the legal limit.

“I never really expected it to happen to me,” says Perino. “I don’t think anyone expects it to happen to them until it does happen.” He recognizes that as a hazing survivor, he’s one of the lucky ones. There

3

have been at least 40 hazing-related deaths on college campuses over the past decade, with causes of death ranging from alcohol poisoning and drug overdose to head injuries and trauma from falls to drowning.

And while victims of hazing may remain silent out of shame or loyalty to their organization, Perino is publicly sharing his experience in order to help prevent future tragedies. “I have the opportunity to speak for those kids who didn’t make it,” he says.

As a result of that night, in connection with his case, eighteen of Perino’s fraternity brothers were charged with dozens of felonies and misdemeanors in Butler County. He transferred to the University of Toledo, where he’s just finished his junior year.

He has also become an active supporter of antihazing legislation. In March, he spoke before Ohio’s Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee, urging lawmakers to pass Senate Bill 126, also known as Collin’s Law. The bill is named for an Ohio University student named Collin Wiant, who died in

Ways to Help Save Others

As an ER doctor and a U. S. Air Force veteran who completed a tour of duty in Iraq, John Torres, M.D., has seen people survive unlikely situations. The senior medical correspondent for NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and the author of the new book Dr. Disaster’s Guide to Surviving Everything says there are actions you can take in challenging circumstances.

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON RAISH

PACE // “In the military, this stands for Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency,” he explains. So with your family, plan your primary way to communicate and meet, then the alternate, and go down the list from there.

“When there’s an emergency and you have a plan, it takes one thing out of the equation of things you have to think about,” he says.

2018 after collapsing on the floor of an unofficial, off-campus fraternity house. Collin’s Law would increase penalties for hazing and expand the crime’s definition in Ohio.

It would also create a new second-degree felony, aggravated hazing, which would carry up to eight years in prison.

“The more we do and the harsher punishments we make, it’s definitely going to make kids think twice before they do something like that,” Perino says. “Because they’re definitely going to think, Hey, if I haze this person, or if I make this person drink these beers, or this liquor, or if I paddle this person, is it worth me possibly going to jail?”

Surviving that night in 2019 irrevocably changed Perino’s life, but he insists there’s plenty of light that’s come from the darkness. “Before the incident, I was always kind of shy to speak up. That incident has helped me grow in a way that has helped me become someone who stands up for what is right, no matter the circumstance.”

Take a breath // When someone comes into the ER needing immediate attention, Dr. Torres says the first thing doctors do is take their own pulse. That means taking a split second to center yourself and be ready so you don’t end up in a panic.

Move // “My father had a famous saying: Hesitation kills,” says Dr. Torres. “If you’re in the middle of the road, don’t freeze. Move.”

He’s seen this in other disasters as well: Even if people go the wrong way, doing something makes you more likely to survive than doing nothing.

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SHOOTING THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

Three survivors from three separate mass killings share how they’ve changed— physically, mentally, and spiritually—since the day of the tragedy they experienced. As told to Paul Kita

ALEXANDER DWORET was in English class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when a bullet grazed the back of his head. Among the 17 killed on February 14, 2018, was his older brother, Nick.

Therapy is something that I cherish now.

Right after the shooting, I started to see a therapist and do EMDR. [See “The ABCs of PTSD Recovery” on page 83.] Three years ago, I was secluded; I stuck to myself.

I see her weekly now and I can tell her anything I want.

I have my brother’s thumbprint tattooed on my wrist with the words “brothers forever” in his handwriting. My family went to Hawaii recently and we all got matching tattoos of the Mokulua islands in honor of Nick’s dream to go there.

I take my health a lot more seriously now.

The gym helps me mentally. Pushing weight can help me push out emotions that bottle up. I’ve lost weight and gained muscle. It’s nice to see something change in my life.

I think hardship showed me that you can push through. You can learn from it and evolve. But it takes time.

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JEFF XCENTRIC has gone through 12 surgeries over the past five years to repair the damage inflicted by gunfire that struck him at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016.

I bled out on the floor for three and a half hours. If it wasn’t for blood donations, I wouldn’t be alive. That’s why I advocate now and work with OneBlood [a Floridabased donation center].

Prior to Pulse, I had zero patience. I had to be in bed for a year and be taken care of.

Through the long healing process, I was forced to learn patience.

Survivors of the Boston [Marathon] bombing came to the hospital to guide me—with my health but also with the media and what to expect next. That meant so much to me.

It’s why I reach out to survivors of tragedy.

We are all interconnected in some way.

I got an ancestry DNA test and had something like 20 different results. Life is short, but now more than ever, my goal is to travel to every country in my blood.

I’ve noticed that people who are very strong are people who have been through stuff. It takes a lot out of you to be a strong person.

JONATHAN SMITH was shot in the neck, fractured his collarbone, cracked a rib, and bruised a lung on October 1, 2017, at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas.

The bullet is still lodged in there. The doctors told me they can’t remove it without causing severe injuries or possibly death.

I’ve decided that I’m alive and removing it isn’t worth the risk, even if it causes pain.

I tried to end it all because I couldn’t deal with the pain and suffering. I’ve learned that strength can still be found in the deepest places inside a person. No matter what situation we have, we can reach out for help.

When I started softball again after a year of not playing, my teammates didn’t want me to play for a while, but softball is my getaway.

That’s where I relieve stress.

My family grew from 20 to 30 people—my relatives—to 20,000 people who were strangers to me at one point but I now recognize as my Route 91 family. Whatever the crisis might be, nothing is going to stop us from being in constant communication with one another.

Now every day feels like I’ve won the Super Bowl.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JASON RAISH

THE TOOLS THAT REPAIR ME …after the hit-and-run that nearly left me dead. By Andrew Bernstein

ROSS EDGLEY’S

4 TRUTHS ABOUT RESILIENCE When you spend 157 days at sea as the first person to swim around the coastline of mainland Great Britain, you learn a thing or two about resilience. Such as: Truth #1: “Sucking it up” won’t make you resilient.

“In fact, it’ll break you. If you have a stone in your shoe during the first mile of a marathon, bearing it doesn’t do anything for you except make you miserable. So often, when I see athletes and military recruits grimacing during training, I ask them, ‘How is this helping you?’ ”

Jude Edginton/Contour by Getty Images (Edgley). Courtesy Leah Muntges (Bernstein).

Truth #2: You can’t lie to yourself.

“As I was swimming, I knew that if I put one arm in front of the other, I would circumnavigate Britain. But in the reality of the moment, I had a jellyfish tentacle stuck to my face and hadn’t showered or slept properly in months, and I made peace with it.

Accepting the situation helps you formulate a plan. Resilience is stress strategically managed.”

Truth #3: Know how to fight—and how to dance.

“There was a study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience where cyclists who were shown pictures of people smiling had far greater resistance to fatigue than those who were shown frowning pictures. It’s like what you saw when Eliud Kipchoge broke the two-hour-marathon barrier with a slight smile on his face. Not once did he seem to grimace or fight—he was dancing the whole way.”

IF ON THE morning of July 20, 2019, you had asked me about my favorite things, I probably would have named my cat, a bike, a jacket, maybe a pair of shoes. Then, that afternoon, while finishing a ride, a driver hit me and abandoned me near death on the side of the road with collapsed lungs, internal bleeding, 30 broken bones, a concussion, and a spinal-cord injury that paralyzed my left leg and bladder. I endured ten surgeries and was hospitalized for three months.

The real work began when I got home: learning to exist with partial paralysis.

Through lots (and lots) of hard work, I’m back to riding and have been hiking around my home in Boulder, Colorado.

Now, while my cat is still number one, here are some things I love in my new life.

Photos of my glory days I decorated the wall of my home gym with photos from my racing at the Valley Preferred Cycling Center velodrome in Pennsylvania, where I competed against Olympians from around the world. Looking at those pictures while doing hamstring curls or crunches reminds me of how strong I am, the loss I live with every day, and the community that has always supported me.

TriggerPoint MB5 Massage Ball I’m in physical therapy five days a week, and while techniques like dry needling are essential to reducing chronic pain, I’m also a huge fan of this dense foam ball. I roll it under my glutes, hamstrings,

quads, back, and shoulders, allowing the pressure to release knots. Like much of my recovery, it hurts like hell but works.

Wahoo Fitness ELEMNT RIVAL As a bike racer, I’m used to having a lot of workout data. When I started to be able to walk farther than around my block, seven months after the crash, I wanted to be able to track my progress.

Fortunately, Wahoo Fitness, which I represent at my day job, was about to release the RIVAL Multisport watch, and I was able to get a sample. Having information like distance on my wrist helped me to plan and track hikes that let me safely extend my range.

Sitting Pretty, by Rebekah Taussig Taussig, who is about my age, became paraplegic as a young girl and uses a wheelchair. Her memoir gives voice, and meticulous research, to many experiences I’ve had since becoming paraplegic. She also helped me examine my own ableism—both what I had before my injury and where I can improve now.

Instagram I’d always loved it as a creative outlet, but I didn’t fully appreciate the platform’s ability to connect me with a broader community until I started sharing my recovery. I’ve met people who have survived all kinds of traumas and been able to learn from their experiences. About 296,000 Americans are living with some type of spinal-cord injury, and while all of our injuries are unique, there’s a lot we share and can teach one another.

The path forward Andrew Bernstein, a hit-and-run victim, now walks the trails around his home in Boulder, Colorado.

Truth #4: Your reasons to continue need to be bigger than your reasons to quit.

“If you love what you’re doing, and you’re doing it for the right reasons, you’ll keep going.”

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THE HUNTER gain. n a th in a p re o m e s u a c r turned o t c o d e n o ’s But there king on ta ’s o h w r to a g ti s e inv e sketchy manufacturers one fals claim at a time.

BY

STEPHANIE CLIFFORD I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY

CHARIS TSEVIS

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F

FIRST IT WAS INSOMNIA.

Pieter Cohen, M.D., all complained of sleepless nights. One woman also had headaches, chest pain, nausea, and fatigue. Another was depressed, sweating, trembling. Then a trucker showed up with yet another concern: He couldn’t figure out why he’d just tested positive for amphetamines.

It was 2006, and Dr. Cohen, working at a community health clinic in Somerville, Massachusetts, realized he had a medical mystery on his hands. Many of his patients are Brazilian immigrants, so Dr. Cohen, who speaks some Portuguese, began to ask more questions. Nothing about anyone’s diet or exercise habits seemed surprising.

But when their lab tests started coming back, he was shocked. A number of the patients had amphetamines in their system, though none said they took any. Some also showed traces of known tranquilizers, hypnotics, and antidepressants.

Eventually, staff members at the clinic suggested a possible culprit. Brazilianmade diet pills, which came in different sizes and a range of colors (brown, red, white, and green) were being sold in generic packaging around the neighborhood. Dr. Cohen asked his patients directly about the pills, and they all admitted to taking them.

“Because people were having such significant symptoms, it just gave me the sense that something powerful was in the pills that was mysterious or interesting,” he says.

He got samples from his patients and found a lab that could analyze them.

It turned out that the pills contained dangerous amounts of fenproporex, an amphetamine derivative not approved for marketing in the U. S. and linked to anxiety, abuse, and dependence. The supplement had been spiked, a practice in which manufacturers cut corners and deceive customers by including harmful or even deadly ingredients in their formulas.

Dr. Cohen figured the next step was simple: He alerted his regional FDA office, hoping to see the pills taken off the market, but then . . . nothing. No warnings were issued, no recalls enacted. After several months, the pills were still on neighborhood shelves.

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Undeterred, Dr. Cohen wrote about his findings in two medical publications—the Journal of General Internal Medicine and The American Journal on Addictions. He created warning pamphlets and shared them in the community through local churches, and he talked to local radio stations and newspapers.

Once one of the main newspapers in São Paulo picked up the story, the pills started disappearing, probably because Brazilian authorities got involved. Dr. Cohen isn’t sure exactly what happened, he says, “but the timing was a nice coincidence.”

What he never imagined was that this probe might lead him to investigate another toxic supplement, then another, until his self-appointed role of policing the unregulated world of supplements turned into an obsessive quest. He now regularly analyzes dozens of pills and powders every year, pursuing any hunch that some dangerous ingredient might be lurking beneath a toogood-to-be-true marketing claim.

Adverse events related to dietary supplements cause an estimated 23,000 emergency-room visits a year in the U. S. Over an eight-year period starting in the mid-aughts, more than 200 shady products were taken off store shelves, according to an analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine. And it’s getting worse: Harvard researchers recently found that dietary supplements that claim to build muscle, sustain energy, or help with weight loss were linked to nearly three times as many severe medical events in people 25 and under as vitamins alone.

Never mind that millions of Americans spend billions of dollars every year on supplements without a guarantee of even minimal effectiveness. “Consumers in America have the sense that the FDA is quietly behind the scenes, ensuring that these

products are safe,” Dr. Cohen says. “That’s the furthest thing from the truth.”

So he has stepped in where he sees the FDA failing, becoming a toxic-supplement hunter, bent on getting unsafe and mislabeled products off the shelves. “He’s a leader in the field,” says Patricia Deuster, Ph.D., the director of the Consortium for Health and Military Performance at the Department of Defense’s Uniformed Services University, who studies supplements and has coauthored papers with Dr. Cohen. “He can really be out there in front, criticizing” as an independent researcher not funded by a company or employed by the government, she says.

But being a solo sleuth and taking on both the multibillion-dollar supplement industry and the U. S. government is not without its risks. “I think some people were probably like, ‘Pieter’s crazy,’ ” Dr. Cohen says.

“But to me, it’s fundamental to the work; it’s an extension of caring for the patients.

Consumers are being harmed, and we need to do something about it.”

TALL, BALD, AND FIT,

old and wears beat-up sneakers with his scrubs. When talking about supplements, he becomes loud and animated, laughing incredulously about all the absurdities he’s discovered. When he’s with patients, however, he is calmer and carefully inquisitive. I visited him on a recent day during the Covid era, and he’d added an unusual piece of equipment to maximize that good bedside manner: Instead of a face mask, he sported an air-purifying respirator, basically a hood with a clear face shield, so that patients could read his lips and see his facial expressions.

Dr. Cohen grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb of Boston, the son of a lawyer and state superior-court judge (his mom) and a professor of experimental psychology (his dad). In the late ’80s, he enrolled at the University of Virginia, thinking he might become an ecologist. While studying in Brazil, he ventured into the Amazon rainforest, where he met a family that had to sell its beloved, ecologically important mahogany tree to pay for an appendectomy. Another stint in the country followed, during which he did public-health research before heading to medical school to help more underserved communities. “I had all this privilege,” he says, “and I wanted to make sure I gave back.”

Page 88: Gretchen Ertl (Dr. Cohen). This page: Courtesy CBS This Morning. Anna Rabkina (Dr. Cohen at clinic, 2). Getty Images (supplements, 4).

a part of the Harvard Medical School– affiliated community health network, Cambridge Health Alliance. His journey into the supplement world deepened after he discovered the local diet-pill problem and began working to publicize it. One day his phone rang; on the other end was a lawyer at the FDA’s enforcement office, who sounded just as frustrated as Dr. Cohen. The lawyer told him, “What you’re seeing in Somerville is what we’re seeing nationally” in terms of weight-loss supplements being spiked with drugs, Dr. Cohen says. And it wasn’t just Brazilian diet pills; it was, potentially, everything from brain boosters to protein powders to vitamins on the shelves at bodegas, nutrition stores, and drugstores.

Because many different manufacturers make these products, issuing a recall or seizing them directly from companies can feel like playing whack-a-mixture.

“A lot of people would be like, ‘That’s not my lane—let the lawyers or the publichealth experts figure that out,’ ” Dr. Cohen says. Instead, he started studying chemical structures, read about the history of the FDA, and came to recognize some serious problems in the regulatory practices for supplements, which he called out in The New England Journal of Medicine as a game of “American Roulette.”

The extremely loose rules of that game— or how supplements fit into the FDA’s regulatory framework—weren’t formally outlined until the 1990s, when, with bodybuilding and diet supplements gaining in popularity, Congress considered legislation reining in supplement makers. The industry objected with a well-financed campaign, including a TV commercial showing an armed squad seizing vitamin C from Mel Gibson, and in 1994, Congress passed an act governing supplements that even one of its architects now says is faulty.

The FDA’s definition of a supplement is any substance that contains a vitamin, mineral, amino acid, herb, or botanical

that can be used to supplement the diet.

The FDA has no power to approve most supplements before they hit the market and little recourse to stop distribution afterward. Look closely and you’ll see that nearly every product has a generic disclaimer saying that it has not been formally evaluated by the FDA. As a result, while some products contain exactly what’s listed on the label, others may manipulate their ingredients to cut costs or seem miraculously effective. The first clue that something is wrong may come only after people have gotten sick.

When the law was passed, there were about 4,000 supplements on the market.

Now there are between 50,000 and north of 80,000. Last year, the FDA issued only 49 warning letters alerting manufacturers about suspect products. Meanwhile, the global supplement market grew to $140 billion in 2020 and is expected to keep expanding fast.

liver damage, many after taking OxyElite Pro, one of the DMAA-containing weightloss and performance-enhancing supplements, the state’s department of health acted to remove the product from stores.

Dr. Cohen’s goal is to speed up that whole process, to spur either the FDA or some other governmental agency to act at the first sign of trouble, before anyone else gets hurt. To do so, he’s developed his own network of doctors, academics, and doping experts who share tips about what emerging product ingredients might be harmful, and he recruits nonprofit and academic labs willing to analyze samples. Over the past decade, this small pharma Rebel Alliance has turned up an endless array of pills, powders, and botanical products containing things like banned stimulants, alternate versions of dangerous stimulants, ingredients with adverse effects at high doses, and drugs that were unapproved in the U. S. Case in point: In 2013, a source tipped Dr. Cohen off that athletes using a popular W H E N T H E F DA workout powder called Craze were testing response has proved problematic. Con- positive for an unknown amphetamine. sider the amphetamine derivative called The previous year, the product had been DMAA, which is associated with heart named the “New Supplement of the Year” attacks, seizures, and neurological prob- by Bodybuilding.com, and it was being lems. In 2011, when two soldiers who sold in stores and through online retailers. died while exercising were found to be When Dr. Cohen bought and tested it, he taking workout supplements spiked with identified a chemical called DEPEA, which the substance, the DOD banned the sale is similar to meth. (This was not, as the of products containing this ingredient label claimed, dendrobium orchid extract.)

Craze was manufactured by a Long from its on-base stores. It also released a warning about the dangers linked to Island–based company called Driven DMA A-containing products. By April Sports, whose owner, Matt Cahill, had run other questionable supple2013, the FDA had received From left: Dr. ment companies and already 86 reports of people harmed Cohen sharing been sentenced for mail fraud by them. It issued a consumer supplement safety and shipping mislabeled drugs alert and, soon after, stopped concerns on CBS the manufacturer from dis- This Morning in April to customers. In 2004, he also developed a muscle-building tributing some of the prod- 2015; suiting up at a Covid clinic in late product that sparked customer ucts. Until then, it had only 2020; meeting reports of liver damage. sent the manufacturer warn- about the pandemic Rather than wait for the FDA ing letters. in May 2020.

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shared the story with news outlets, including The Boston Globe, CBS News, and ABC News. That same week, Craze’s manufacturer announced it had ceased production due to safety concerns, well ahead of any FDA warning being issued. The product was discontinued, creating a new kind of playbook to help Dr. Cohen protect consumers.

In recent years, he has followed up on tips that led to similar success at identifying both an amphetamine variant called BMPEA in several weight-loss supplements and an unapproved neurologic drug called picamilon in supposedly memory-boosting products. As his public-awareness crusade has grown, he’s found that more states are willing to use his information to take action ahead of the FDA and target stores directly.

After Dr. Cohen’s reports on BMPEA and picamilon were released, Oregon’s attorney general sued GNC and the Vitamin Shoppe for selling products with the ingredients, and the state of Nebraska filed a similar suit against the Vitamin Shoppe.

The Vitamin Shoppe reached an agreement with the Nebraska attorney general to no longer sell products that contain BMPEA. It settled the Oregon suit by agreeing to pay a roughly half-million-dollar fine and pulling the products with the substances that Dr. Cohen pinpointed from some store shelves. It also agreed to immediately suspend sales of anything with an FDA warning or advisory and investigate the safety of those products itself. In 2015, GNC said that it had stopped selling picamilon and BMPEA products, too, though it publicly announced that the FDA had not, at that point, raised safety concerns about those ingredients.

GNC now claims that all products it sells must meet specific standards for purity and strength.

(The company did not respond to Men’s Health’s request for more information.) A spokesperson for the Vitamin Shoppe says that vendors must assure the retailer that their products “comply with all applicable laws,” and all products are reviewed by its scientific and regulatory affairs team before being sold. Its store-brand products are also analyzed internally to make sure they meet the expected level of purity and potency.

Even Amazon, an emerging force in the retail-supplement world, says it has “proactive measures in place to prevent suspicious, non92

compliant, or prohibited products from being listed, and we continuously monitor the products sold in our stores.” Amazon requires companies to share a certificate of analysis (testing confirming the makeup of a product).

Dr. Cohen says even though some stores and chains are taking steps to ensure the safety of supplements amid serious shortcomings in the laws, smaller shops and Internet sites will continue fueling the problem. With companies now seeking more formal guidance, he’d like the FDA to issue rulings more quickly, but that hasn’t happened. Three years ago, California’s Department of Public Health noted that of about 750 supplements the FDA listed as “adulterated,” it had issued voluntary recalls for fewer than half. “They’re simply not doing their job,” he says of the agency.

The FDA has a more diplomatic stance.

“We appreciate stakeholder interaction like this for raising awareness and bringing needed attention to these matters,” a spokesperson says. “We look forward to collaborating . . . to help ensure that products marketed as dietary supplements are safe, well-manufactured, and accurately labeled while preserving the original commitment to consumer access.”

DR. COHEN HAS

its lack of effectiveness for years—but he never expected that he’d have to defend his own tactics in court. The problem started in 2014 after he read a study written by FDA scientists about supplements that pur-

ported to contain Acacia rigidula, a Texas shrub that had become popular on weightloss products’ labels.

FDA scientists tested 21 products claiming to have the Acacia ingredient and found that nine of them instead contained synthetic material that turned out to be BMPEA. However, the agency didn’t list which supplements had the dangerous ingredient. Dr. Cohen waited, figuring it would at least issue warning letters to those manufacturers. That didn’t come to pass.

One of Dr. Cohen’s biggest frustrations is that even when the FDA knows about sketchy products, it often doesn’t give consumers useful information about them.

“When the months were passing and nothing was happening, honestly, I couldn’t believe it,” he says. So Dr. Cohen ran similar research, and in 2015 he published a study finding BMPEA in several supplements for weight loss, sports, or cognitive function. He listed the names of the products and their manufacturers, as he likes to do: It makes his research replicable and gives consumers solid information on what to avoid. A trio of senators—Dick Durbin of Illinois, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Chuck Schumer of New York—became aware of the study after it was published and started making news, and they pushed the FDA to act.

This time, the agency quickly sent warning letters to five companies telling them to “immediately cease distribution.” But it wasn’t just the government that noticed the paper.

That April, one of the companies Dr. Cohen cited, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals, sued him for $50 million in compensatory damages as well as $150 million for slander and libel for publishing, then publicizing in news outlets, his findings about Hi-Tech’s supplements. The issue wasn’t whether some of its products included BMPEA; Hi-Tech admitted in the lawsuit that they did.

Rather, Hi-Tech fought his statements that BMPEA was dangerous, hadn’t been rigorously tested in humans, and wasn’t derived from the natural Acacia rigidula source.

Despite the bankruptcy level of damages attached, Dr. Cohen wasn’t concerned at first. “I was naively thinking, at the time, that truthful speech is 100 percent protected in America,” he says. It wasn’t that simple: The case still had to go to trial.

THE MH GUIDE TO

The good news? Harvard defended him, covering the costs of the lawyers. The bad news was everything else. In discovery, a phase of litigation in which both sides seek evidence, Dr. Cohen had to dig through his emails to find anything related to this study and hand it over to Hi-Tech. Then he had to reread and analyze all those communications in case he was asked about them in his deposition or at trial.

It got so all-consuming that in the early mornings, before his wife and three kids were up, or over the weekends at his kids’ sports practices, just about the only thing Dr. Cohen did was recheck his own work.

“I spent every free moment I had,” he says. After a six-day trial, during which he argued that his speech was scientific opinion, protected by the First Amendment, and about a matter of public concern, the jury found in his favor.

Hi-Tech’s CEO and law yers did not respond to requests for comment, and while some of its brand names that Dr. Cohen analyzed are still available, it’s unclear whether the company has altered the supplements’ makeup. As for Dr. Cohen’s case, it was a win but one unlikely to encourage other independent investigators. “The degree of scrutiny that his work was put under is something that, honestly, I think very few academics would like to go through,” says Dan Levy, Ph.D., a professor of public policy at Harvard and a friend of Dr. Cohen’s.

For Dr. Cohen, the trial had a single upside: His work was having enough of an effect that a company tried to stop him. “I definitely didn’t want to have research that is just sitting there and never read,” he says.

“I want to have a positive impact on health.”

He went right back to his research and to calling out brand names and companies.

Getty Images (supplements, 4)

IN SPITE OF

suits, Dr. Cohen has not slowed down. He’s now published more than 50 academic papers, many skewering major manufacturers for being less than forthright, and in many cases downright fraudulent, about their products and promises. He’s made stores more accountable for what they’re carrying by giving state regulators actionable information to get ahead of problems, even if the FDA is slow to take measures.

Dr. Cohen paused these investigations when the global pandemic hit, as he put all his energy into sharing anything that might be helpful for doctors trying to diagnose and treat Covid. This past March, for the first time since the pandemic began, Dr.

S AFER SUPPLEMENT SHOPPING

Products that promise bigger muscles, increased energy, and weight loss are among the most commonly spiked.

Even if you’re just buying vitamins, here are three tips from Dr. Cohen to make sure you’re getting what should be in the bottle.

Stick to well-studied ingredients like protein, amino acids, and creatine.

When in doubt, check the USADA’s high-risk list and the DOD’s supplement-safety program.

Avoid bold claims. Go for “protein powder,” not a “muscle builder,” or “ginkgo,” not a “memory enhancer.”

Look for third-party certifications of independent testing from places like USP, ConsumerLab.com, and NSF International.

sports and weight-loss supplements with labels that listed deterenol, a stimulant that can cause sweating, nausea, and cardiac arrest, as an ingredient.

Deterenol has never been approved for humans in the U. S. In 2004, the FDA determined that it is not permitted as a dietary ingredient in supplements. That some brands advertise it explicitly or use scientific synonyms, Dr. Cohen says, is a classic example of just how openly manufacturers flout FDA rules. Four of the supplements he tested didn’t contain the prohibited substance at all, despite the claim that they did; all the others contained it or had cocktails of deterenol with other stimulants. “It’s dizzying how complicated these products are,” he says, “which is incredibly frustrating from the perspective of the FDA not doing its job.”

In the meantime, plainly hyperbolic online reviews of some of these products suggest how strong they might be. Of Chaos and Pain’s Cannibal Ferox Pre Workout, one reviewer wrote, “This stuff is just a few levels below cocaine . . . . I can smell colors.”

Of Psycho Pharma’s Edge of Insanity Pre Workout, a reviewer said, “As I like to call it, edge of a heart attack.” That’s a little different from the brand’s promise of “Exploding Muscle Pumps, Zen Energy, Razor Focus” and “Psycho Endurance”—all printed in bold lettering on the front of each jug. (Neither Chaos and Pain nor Psycho Pharma responded to requests for comment.)

another governmental authority uses his latest round of intel to take these drugs off the market. At press time, the FDA had yet to act. “We appreciate studies like this for raising awareness and bringing needed attention to these matters,” an FDA spokesperson says. “However, in general, the FDA does not comment on specific studies but evaluates them as part of the body of evidence to further our understanding about a particular issue and assist in our mission to protect public health.”

Regardless, Dr. Cohen won’t stop sounding the alarm. He understands that the FDA is weak and its mandate woefully outdated. The real culprit, then, is Congress, for failing to create new laws that solve the problem. And whenever there’s a problem with Congress, it’s actually a problem concerning us—the people who hire our representatives to make laws in our name.

So he plans to keep working, unpaid, even harder. “The better that people understand [the issues], the better the eventual law we might be able to have,” he says.

His next task: studying CBD products along with more traditional supplements.

He’s also suggested a regulatory overhaul at the FDA, both in academic publications and on calls with congressional staff and consumer advocates. Earlier this year, the FDA requested legislation requiring that all supplements for sale be registered, which would give the agency a better handle on the market and the ability to act when dangerous or illegal ingredients are introduced.

Personally, Dr. Cohen doesn’t even take a multivitamin. “My take is just: It’s best to go with exercise and healthy food, and you have to have pretty strong evidence to convince me that something is better than that,” he says. But he did make a small concession at home: When his 19-year-old son got interested in supplements and his 15-year-old son started watching TikToks on pre-workout regimens, he let one of them try protein powders. Now, though, they stick to healthy diets—not sports supplements.

He understands the pressure that comes with comparing yourself with others, and how anyone who has lost a step or wants to stay one step ahead might go searching for an edge. So Dr. Cohen continues to research and write and pitch and advocate, trying to get a single message to consumers of supplements: Buyer beware.

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Jean-Claude Van Damme at a private gym in Los Angeles in May.

Jean-Claude Van Damme, now 60, has fought every onscreen bad guy imaginable. But his biggest battle has always been against himself.

By ALEX PAPPADEMAS Photographs by Maggie Shannon

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IT’S JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME CALLING.

He asks, “How are you?” and before he can hear an answer, there’s a commotion on his end—phone-fumbling sounds; a tiny Chihuahua freaking out; Van Damme’s wife, Gladys Portugues, laughing; his own low chuckle.

“Ah la la,” sighs Van Damme, back on the line. It sounds like French for What can you do?

“I’ve got my dog next to me on the table,” he explains, “and we just got back from the Caribbean”—again the dog yaps, and Van Damme says, “Lola, stop it” in a firm, don’t-test-me tone—“and she is so jealous of my wife, it’s unbelievable.”

Lately Van Damme and Lola have also been in France, Belgium, Italy, and Monaco.

“So Mademoiselle Lola is now spoiled, because she’s been going from hotel to hotel.” He speaks to the dog one more time, his voice high and sweet—“Right, Lola?”— and then chuckles, as if delighted to know there’s a creature in the world that loves him this much. Heh heh heh heh.

There’s another explosion of tiny barks.

Van Damme laughs. “Lola. Stop it.” He tries again, more sternly. “Lola. Stop. Stop. Stop.”

Van Damme turned 60 last October. In his time on this planet, he’s been a nobody from Belgium, a global box-office sensation, a coke-torqued tabloid train wreck, and a ’90s-kitsch punchline. When he was 38, he told interviewers sincerely that he believed he’d be dead of a massive heart attack by 50—and this was after he kicked the drugs, recommitting to work and family and fitness and Gladys, who’d cared for their son and daughter, Kristopher and Bianca, during the years Van Damme spent letting his demons drive.

Van Damme and Gladys got divorced in 1992, as his wild years ramped up, but they remarried by the end of the decade, making Gladys his fifth wife as well as his third wife. If not for her? “Impossible for me to talk today,” Van Damme says. Meaning he wouldn’t be alive. His implosion was well-documented—gossip columns and leaked divorce-court depositions painted the usual picture of an uncontrollable superstar enslaved by his own appetites.

Writer-director Steven E. de Souza told The Guardian that Van Damme was “coked out of his mind” on the set of 1994’s Street Fighter, when he could be persuaded to show up.

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He’d cleaned up by 2008, when he starred in JCVD, playing himself as a faded action-movie star trapped in a hostage situation at the post office. The film is a comedy, but in its most astounding sequence, a crane lifts Van Damme out of the scene he’s in and into the rafters of the set, where he speaks directly to the camera—or possibly through it, to God—for six tearful, mostly improvised minutes, in French, about the luxury-hotel loneliness that led him to drugs, about his years of self-destruction and addiction and the guilt he still carries with him. He speaks of his former self as Van Damme, la Bête—the Beast—and seems convincingly and maybe irreparably broken as a person. “I got out of it,” he says at one point.

“But . . . it’s all there. It’s all there.”

VAN DAMME IS AN undisputed icon of action cinema, a living cautionary tale about the dangers of believing your own hype, and a symbol of cheeseball ’90s excess. Since JCVD, he’s continued walking a path of self-awareness about all of this, winking knowingly at the more swole-headed aspects of his cinematic legacy in projects like the brilliant Amazon Studios meta-comedy series JeanClaude Van Johnson—Van Damme in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind mode, playing an aging action star who’s secretly a superspy, among other fun-housemirror versions of himself—and the 2013 Volvo ad in which he does his trademark split between two moving semi trucks while Enya sings “Only Time.”

Perhaps you’ve seen GIFs of Van Damme dancing in voluminous khakis and a suspender-strapped tank top in 1989’s Kickboxer. So has Van Damme, and at jcvdshop .com you can buy a hoodie or a coffee mug

with a dancing Jean-Claude on it—and you can also see present-day Van Damme modeling some of these items, cosigning our ironic enjoyment.

Maybe you saw him dancing again last year, mixing up martial arts and early ballet training and freestyle dad-at-the-rave moves in EDM duo AaRON’s “Ultrarêve” video, directed by his daughter. Perhaps his disarmingly sage and serene social-media presence has come across your timeline— inspirational quotes on the importance of patience, accented with contextappropriate Bloodsport screenshots.

Maybe you haven’t seen all or any of the 30-plus feature films and TV-show appearances he’s made since the year 2000, but the later part of the career’s going well, too.

Van Damme’s name can still get an action movie made, so there is always a script with a title like 6 Bullets or Assassination Games or The Hard Corps or Replicant that calls for Van Damme to play a guy named something like Samson Gaul or Vincent Brazil or Philippe Sauvage or Edward Garrotte.

These days, it’s easier than ever for aging-but-still-recognizable action stars to grab top billing and a quick paycheck in exchange for a few glorified-cameo minutes of screen time in movies that can be misleadingly packaged to fool some sucker at a Redbox kiosk. But Van Damme actually shows up and stars in his movies, even if he keeps his stunt doubles slightly busier than he used to, and he brings to the work a weathered, actorly gravitas that might surprise you if you know him only as the dancing fool from Kickboxer.

That’s how he’s spent the past decade or so, performing a split bridging viral silliness and the solemnity of the action hero in winter. But his new movie—his first project for Netflix—doesn’t slot comfort-

Van Damme continues to push himself physically, in part to stay mentally healthy.

ably into either category. It’s called The Last Mercenary. He plays a former secret agent pulled back into the game, does the splits, and kicks people in the face, per tradition.

But he also struggles to connect with a longlost son, nails a few deadpan moments, and slips on a tux to pull a heist—and he does it all in French, a language he grew up speaking but has rarely acted in. There are a few meta jokes about Van Damme’s Van Damme-ness, but mostly it’s JCVD pulling off the kind of warm and goofy action comedy he’s never had the chance to try before.

This is a new zone for Van Damme, who until now has done his best work as an actor in subdued, haunted-man roles with a narrower emotional register. “He’s not like that in real life,” says The Last Mercenary director David Charhon, a longtime fan who wrote the film with Van Damme in mind. “He’s sparkling, luminous, funny.

I said, ‘It’s amazing that no one’s shown him in a movie how he is!’ ”

THE CARIBBEAN VACATION was his first real time off in years, Van Damme says.

“I bought a mini motor yacht,” he says.

“My little Lolita, my dog, and a captain and a stewardess, and you go from island to island. You anchor, you swim. Go eat some grilled fish. Come back at night.

There’s no sound. No paparazzi. No phone, because WiFi is very weak.”

They were out there three months—just the old man, his Chihuahua, and the sea.

“Every day I was having the ocean in front of me,” Van Damme says. “Which is basically everything. It’s beautiful, but it’s nothing. So you see infinity. You have time to see everything and nothing. And to think about something else. To think about: What else should I do in my life to be completed?”

When Van Damme speaks of his own death, this is how he speaks of it—calmly, as if it were an item pending on the schedule. It keeps coming up, though, almost out of nowhere. At one point, he pauses midsentence; says, “Don’t worry—it’s not Covid”; then blows his nose hard, a honk that echoes through the room. When he returns to the phone, he’s suddenly talking about a routine surgical procedure he has coming up, his anxiety about it. He worries only about not being here for his family.

“I’ve made some good money. I’ve got some properties. I want to make sure my children understand the value of everything. And then I’ve got no problem to go.

I’ve been around the world so many times.”

He has arrived at this point meditatively.

“Makes me feel good, by the way—they say most successful men are from 60 to 70,” he says. “Second position is from 70 to 80”— heh heh heh—“if I can make it, agewise.”

By “successful,” he means happy. Social science calls this the U-curve, a reference

to the way happiness tends to dip at midlife and rebound when approaching retirement age. What “retirement age” means in a Van Damme context is subjective. Sly and Arnold appear poised to work through their 70s, after all, and so does Jackie Chan. And besides, Van Damme’s been defying the odds for years.

In Belgium in the 1980s—when he was a former Mr. Belgium and the holder of a few karate-tournament titles—he opened a gym, which he named California Gym, after a place he’d never been. He ensured its success by placing “all the beautiful machinery, the chrome ones, for the ladies, in front of the window, so people saw all these beautiful women training.” He made a pile of money, put it in the bank in his father’s name so he couldn’t touch it, and moved to Los Angeles with only $3,000 in his pocket, figuring if he couldn’t make it with $3,000, he wouldn’t make it with $5,000, either.

In L. A., five years passed. Van Damme learned English, slept in his car, delivered pizzas, laid carpet, drove a limo, and racked up mostly ignominious screen credits—blink and you’ll miss him as a unitard-clad Venice Beach dancer in 1984’s Breakin’. He carried around karate magazines with his picture on the covers in case he ran into a producer who could give him a job. Of course, that’s not how it works, but it ended up working for him.

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The story is that Van Damme saw the producer Menahem Golan, a cofounder of Cannon Films, at a restaurant. He showed how high he could kick by kicking up and over Golan’s head, and that’s how Van Damme booked Bloodsport.

This is more or less true, but it leaves out the part with Van Damme calling and calling and hearing nothing back from Golan, coming close to giving up, and sitting in his apartment thinking, It’s over; I cannot do more—which is when his phone rings.

He’s summoned to Golan’s office. Golan says to his secretary, “Karen, bring me Bloodsport,” and Van Damme is handed the script that will change his life, no silver platter necessary.

In the film, based on the too-wild-tofact-check recollections of a novelist, martial artist, and self-professed ex–CIA operative named Frank Dux, Van Damme plays a soldier who goes AWOL to fight in a secret, full-contact martial-arts tournament in Hong Kong. It’s as if the script had been crafted for the express purpose Van Damme with a karate magazine from 1991, the kind he once carried to help sell his potential.

of creating the need for a Jean-Claude Van Damme type of actor.

Released in 1988, Bloodsport reportedly made $50 million on a $2 million budget, and by the early ’90s, Van Damme was a bona fide movie star—playing twin Van Dammes in Double Impact, battling Dolph Lundgren as a zombie-cyborg Vietnam vet in Universal Soldier.

He was a meaner, prettier Arnold 2.0 with a rockin’ mullet, unafraid to bare his ass onscreen (or brag about his ability to crush a walnut with his glutes). In 1991, dressed in Patrick Bateman suspenders like a cocky junk-bond trader, Van Damme sat with Arsenio Hall, who asked him to look into the camera and celebrate his newfound heat by saying, “Yo, I’m large, baby.” Grinning, Van Damme turned to the camera and said something that sounded like “Yo, I’m enlarged, baby.”

A f ter Timecop ma de more tha n $100 million in the mid-’90s, Universal offered him $12 million for three more films.

Van Damme—now enlarged, yo, at least in

his own mind—asked for $20 million. Since he had built himself up from nothing, now you could tell him nothing. So went the next few years—gluttony, ego, bad choices. A $10,000-a-week cocaine habit. A tabloidugly divorce from his fourth wife, Darcy LaPier. Reported DUIs, an attempt at rehab, an eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder, of which much of the foregoing was a symptom.

By not dying in the ’90s, he’s lived to watch the world become less interesting, a process that seems to have started for him even before all human interaction shrank to the size of a Zoom window. “I’m kind of— how do you say?—blasé, kind of bored,” Van Damme says. “Because everything now, it’s on the screen.” If this is how life’s going to be from here on out, he’s glad his work allowed him to hang out in Kazakhstan and Indonesia before everything changed. But he’s also hopeful about the future.

“Every two-thousand-something-fivehundred years, we are changing constellations,” he says. “In all the biblical books, the Koran or the Torah or the Gospel, they have the fish as a symbol. And now we are entering the constellation of Aquarius— it’s a totally different cycle of life, if you understand cosmologies. It’s very important, this coming couple of years, in terms of the human cycle.”

MAYBE IT’S EASIER to see the cyclical quality of things when you’ve cratered your career at least once and have found yourself on the upswing again, flying private to Paris to make a movie for Netflix. Call it a comeback if you like, but the truth is, Van Damme’s already had a better 21st century than any other action star of his approximate vintage.

That includes the nearly $315-milliongrossing Expendables 2, in which he squared off with Stallone for the first time as arms dealer Jean Vilain, and Kung Fu Panda 2, with his voice cameo as a crocodile who fights a peacock played by Gary Oldman. (Listen for Van Damme in next year’s Minions: The Rise of Gru; he’s the voice of Jean-Clawed, a villain with an enormous crustacean pincer for a hand.)

But it also includes some smaller, darker films, in which the cumulative spiritual consequences of a life nearly squandered seem to be written on Van Damme’s carvedstone Buster Keaton face.

The best of these films are the two deranged quasi-sequels to Universal Soldier that he made in 2009 and 2012 with Lundgren and director John Hyams. The latter, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning,

Grooming: Juanita Lyon using Dermalogica. Getty Images (1991). Alamy (1994). Everett Collection (1986).

Van Damme with his wife, Gladys, in the early ’90s.

The star anchoring Street Fighter in 1994.

JCVD in 1986’s No Retreat, No Surrender.

conscious, and the experience was a rev- good movie, click out. Because I’m a thinker. is almost certainly the only Van Damme So when I do the bicycle and the yoga and movie ever compared to the work of Werner elation. After that, he says, “I was able to Herzog, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, jump from martial arts to telling the truth, the training and the gym, I don’t think.” basically—not to act.”

And there’s the work, which has become and Gaspar Noé by The Paris Review. about conserving energy until just the In the later Universal Soldier movies, Lundgren and Van Damme have been res- THAT MONOLOGUE he delivers five years later right moment. “Every time I can sit someurrected so many times that they no longer in JCVD might be his peak as both an actor where, on the set, not just stay on my feet, remember why they’re determined to kill and a truth teller, but it also seems to come I save everything I can save,” he says. “So each other, but they keep trying anyway; a from a dark and perhaps inescapable emo- what you have to do is save the car. Don’t series that began as a comic-book treatise tional place. The movie is now 13 years old; drive that car to the market. Drive another one. Only drive this one on Sunday.” on the horrors of war becomes a grim met- Van Damme is asked what the Van Damme He owes it to Gladys to keep kicking. aphor for the bloody-knuckled monotony of of today makes of the Van Damme who “If not, I will be rotting at home,” he says. an action star’s professional life. ad-libbed that speech.

The Bouncer (2018) isn’t as conceptual— “That’s a good question,” he says. He “Not as a human, but mentally. And my it’s basically a Taken movie with a touch stops. Gathers thoughts. “I’ve passed that wife will feel so bad to see me this way. She knows I like to construct.” of The Wrestler, starring Van Damme as bump. I went down, and I came back up in a He is aware of the Bloodsport reboot, a single dad mixed up with Eurosleaze rearranged kind of way. That beast you saw counterfeiters. But it’s also quiet and did go to the garage”—he makes a vroom- long in the works. “If they don’t do it, they mournful: Van Damme moves slower, gets vroom sound—“for a big adjustment. Yes, are crazy,” he says. But his interest is elseknocked around, seems to feel every hit. it’s possible. Quote me: ‘Yes, it’s possible.’ I where. There’s a film he wants to make called Headlock, which he says will be a He’s turned into the kind of actor whose repeat, quote me: ‘It can be achieved.’ ” presence can elevate a routine script, He’s learned to keep the beast in check. martial-arts epic with whiffs of Rocky. imbuing it with emotional weight.

He’s found healthier ways to get out of his The script is by Oscar-winning Green Book cowriter Nick Vallelonga. Van Damme The way Van Damme sees it, this new head. He rides a stationary bike, tries to explains the story and its visuals in a few chapter of his acting career began in find the pace where the rhythm of the cycle impossible-to-follow sentences—some2003, with In Hell, his third and final syncs up with his heartbeat. collaboration with Hong Kong cinema “When you are at that level,” he says, thing about the color red increasing in legend Ringo Lam, who died in 2018. “you click your brain out of your body, put intensity, about his character waking from “[Lam] said you have to play a guy who is it somewhere, in the iCloud, okay? And a coma and a twist involving a second coma.

At the end, he says, “I die for love. Oh my more honest than you are in real life,” Van then you start to feel the muscle. You start God, what a movie! I know they want to Damme says. “And when he said that, I to breathe, feel the inside. You start to understood, click. The way you are sitting. feel the machina—the machine—and the [remake] Bloodsport, but they’re gonna put—sorry for the expression—tits and Legs together. Not like a movie star. Don’t beating of your heart.” put your hands around the sofa. Who the He does yoga, too, as he has for 25 years. ass and all that bullshit. It doesn’t belong fuck do you think you are? Proper. Back “It’s a big cure,” he says. “You can clean lots of to me anymore. I’m 60—I want to do straight. You have a boss. You’re an employee. carbon dioxide inside your body by breath- something beautiful.”

You are receiving a check, every month.” ing. That’s what I do. And then also go to the It was the first time Van Damme had gym, train every day. That’s the best way mlex pmppmdemms has written for GQ, ever rooted a performance in his sub- to feel good. And also watch sometimes a The New York Times, and Grantland.

MEN’S HEALTH

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JULY • AUGUST 2021

99

METROGRADES THIS MONTH GREENEST 1. Burlington, VT 2. Virginia Beach, VA

AMERICA’S

GREENEST CITIES

3. Buffalo, NY 4. Honolulu, HI 5. Greensboro, NC 6. Portland, ME 7. Boston, MA 8. Anchorage, AK 9. Madison, WI 10. Fargo, ND

N O T- S O G R E E N E ST 91. Salt Lake City, UT

WITH THE pandemic (sort of, maybe) under control, vaccinated life has left us with a sense of What planetary threats can we tackle next? The good news is that some U. S. cities already have a head start on earth-killing, buzz-killing climate change. Our researchers assessed 100 of the most populous cities for air quality, green space, LEED-certified public buildings, and chemical usage (which included toxic-release totals, drinking-water violations, number of Superfund sites, and resident proximity to the sites). These are the U. S. cities where it’s easiest to be green.

92. Wilmington, DE 93. Baton Rouge, LA 94. Anaheim, CA 95. Birmingham, AL 96. Memphis, TN 97. Louisville, KY 98. Houston, TX 99. Indianapolis, IN 100. Los Angeles, CA

1

4

7

BURLINGTON,

HONOLULU,

BOSTON,

VERMONT

HAWAII

MASSACHUSETTS

This city raked in the most top 10 scores across categories—its air clean, its buildings green, and its vast stretches of parkland pristine.

(Feel free to use that as a motto, Burlington.) The Queen City is also the first U. S. city to run entirely on renewable energy—and it’s been doing so since 2015.

The Big Pineapple had one of the highest scores for the number of LEED-certified public buildings—a whopping 534 of them. LEED buildings must meet indoor-air-quality standards. Good air may stave off respiratory allergies, fatigue, and even problems with concentration.

Boston had the highest greenspace score of all 100 cities.

Credit goes to its 930 parks. (Every resident lives within a ten-minute walk of one.) If you’re not a Bostonian, consider planting a tree: One mature tree absorbs 48 pounds of CO2 a year. The average car emits 0.78 pounds of CO2 per mile.

To see where your city ranks on our list of 100, go to MensHealth.com/greenestcities.

Men’s Health (ISSN 1054-4836) Vol. 36, No. 6 is published 10 times per year, monthly except combined issues in January/February and July/August and when future combined issues are published that count as two issues as indicated on the issue’s cover, by Hearst at 300 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019. Steven R. Swartz, President & Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Mark E. Aldam, Chief Operating Officer. Hearst Magazines, Inc.: Debi Chirichella, President, Hearst Magazines Group, and Treasurer; Kate Lewis, Chief Content Officer; Jack A. Rohan Jr., Senior Vice President, Finance; Kristen M. O’Hara, Chief Business Officer; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Copyright 2021 by Hearst Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved. Men’s Health is a registered trademark of Hearst Magazines, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and at additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address changes to Men’s Health Customer Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-1500. IN CANADA: Postage paid at Gateway, Mississauga, Ontario; Canada Post International Publication Mail (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 40012499. Postmaster (Canada): Send returns and address changes to Men’s Health magazine, P.O. Box 927, Stn Main, Markham ON L3P 9Z9 (GST# R122988611). Mailing Lists: From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such mailings by postal mail, please send your current mailing label or exact copy to: Men’s Health, Mail Preference Center, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA, 51593. You can also visit preferences.hearstmags.com to manage your preferences and opt out of receiving marketing offers by email. Customer Service: Visit service.menshealth.com or write to Men’s Health Customer Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-1500.

100 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

Getty Images

METHODOLOGY: Air quality (including unhealthy ozone days, particle pollution, greenhouse-gas emissions, and resident traffic proximity) made up 30 percent of our weighted rankings. Chemical usage (including total chemical disposal, drinking-water violations, Superfund sites per county, and resident proximity to hazardous waste) accounted for 30. Green spaces (including parks per capita, percentage of city land used for parks, and resident proximity) represented 30. The number of public LEED buildings per capita made up the final 10. Sources: County Health Rankings, EPA, the Trust for Public Land, U. S. Census Bureau, U. S. Green Building Council, city and county records.

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