65ydt f

STRALIA

Right This Way… P22

LUG HERE

MENSHE ALT H.COM.AU Strength Report

A SMARTER WAY TO CHASE THE PUMP P120

Survival Instinct

WIN AT LIFE WITH JONATHAN LAPAGLIA P16

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More Abs, Plz

Dedicated to Dads

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SHANE AND JACKSON WARNE ON FITNESS, FAMILY AND FAME

MASTER YOUR...

Mind Muscles Mood

IN 18 EASY STEPS J u e 2 0 20

CO NTE NTS 0 9/ 21

62 THE WARNE LEGACY In an MH exclusive, cricketing icon Shane Warne reflects on his remarkable career, his passion for health, fitness and looking his best, and perhaps his greatest achievement: a loving relationship with son Jackson.

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COVER GUYS:

SHANE WARNE & JACKSON WARNE PHOTOGRAPHED BY:

JAMES GEER

INSIDE THIS ISSUE TACT I CS

p16 Survival Instinct Survivor host Jonathan LaPaglia’s battle-hardened success strategies.

p37 Nothing Ventured Why doing sweet FA could help you bounce back from burnout.

129

Feet Up For Extra Gains More than just a show-stopper, the handstand push-up delivers upper body strength and power. Find out how to see the world upside down.

108 Exercise vs Diet

Are abs made in the kitchen? Can you out-train a bad diet? Or munch away a foul mood? See how the science stacks up to determine the most potent weapon in your health and fitness arsenal.

MUS CL E

p84 7 Minutes to Stronger Microdose body blasts you can do anywhere to get ripped quick.

p120 Chase The Pump Combine old school moves with modern science to stack on size.

FATHERHOOD

p42 A Tale of Two Kiddos Your kids are individuals, so nurture them with nuance and understanding.

p72 Fit Dad Cool Dad The Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno, and son, Lou Jr, on building strong bonds.

HE ALT H

p11 Whip Up Heart Health Why a new cold brew coffee could give your ticker the buzz it needs.

p44 Pro Penis Tips A urologist’s guide to building and maintaining a bulletproof package.

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When life gets tough your diet is often one of the first things to suffer. But seeking solace in food can be a recipe for disaster. These nutrient-rich power meals will help you build resilience and swallow stress.

The ‘Muscles from Brussels’ has had a hell of a career, facing off against all manner of foes, while demonstrating an unusual level of self-awareness.

But his biggest battle has always been with himself.

Pressure Cooking

Jean-Claude Van Damme

F I TN E S S

p22 Build Ant-Man Abs Master the dead bug crunch to forge a core that won’t buckle under pressure.

p117 Reece Lightning Wallabies utility Reece Hodge on why pain is often the catalyst for gains.

SEPTEMBER 2021

5

EDITOR’S LETTER

menshealth.com.au

Men's Health Australia

@MensHealthAU

@MensHealthAU

AUSTRALIAN

DAD ISSUE What makes a modern-day hero? If you’re hooked on a certain film genre, you might say superhuman strength, virtuousness and a commitment to defend and protect the good people of your land. Perhaps even a gritty origin story. And spandex.

But what about in the real world?

Like almost every former schoolkid, I remember Not all heroes wear capes: being assigned my first major writing task. I was MH editor Scott Henderson, aged about 10 years old, and it was sometime between two, with his dad, Harry. earning my pen licence and learning the game of bullrush. The theme: who is your hero and why?

My answer back then came as easily as it does now: my dad. The previous weekend had been spent at the beach, where I found myself caught in a rip that was dragging me out into the Tasman. With the ocean floor invisible and the outlook, from my angle, grim, I panicked, causing me to ingest salt water in great gulps. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I felt an arm wrap around me from behind, simultaneously hoisting me skyward and pulling me towards the sand.

My rescuer was none other than my father.

It was an act that now, more than 20 years later, I’m sure he doesn’t even recall. Such is the way with heroes: what seem to them like simple and instinctive acts of necessity are, to their recipients, feats of extraordinary courage and capability. That moment not only provided me with a hero (and a subject for my writing assignment), but also inspired me to become a lifesaver for more than 15 years at the very beach where I was rescued. And although I’m not yet the hero I see in my father, maybe that spell in the tower provides a poetic setting for my own origin story, should there ever be a clamour for its telling.

As I’ve grown, so too has the breadth of Papa Hendo’s influence. As our relationship has evolved from father and son to great mates, he’s been a pillar of inspiration and font of wisdom when it comes to family, relationships, health, finances and sport. In the eyes of all of his kids, he’s our family’s eternal optimist.

He’s also our biggest fan, our champion and, in every sense of the word, our hero.

There’s a reason why father figures play such formative roles in our lives and become our biggest inspiration. Biological or assigned, they provide a blueprint for manhood. Whether we choose to follow that blueprint or try to draw up a new one of our own is up to us. Either way, that blueprint is their legacy, a playbook passed to the next generation of men – for better or worse.

Because, heroes or not, fathers are also flawed. They’re human and make mistakes. Many father-son relationships have complications. In some cases, those complications provide us with some of our most profound moments of learning and growth. The role of a father is not fixed. But while it changes according to circumstances, its importance never dims. Fathers are the great driving force behind the next generation. And great power begets great responsibility.

In our inaugural ‘Dedicated to Dads’ issue, we pay tribute to father figures everywhere, while reflecting on the qualities of fathers passed, including a recent paternal passing within our own MH family. And as we’ve been reminded during the creation of this issue, you don’t need to have children of your own to approach life in a fatherly manner. We implore you to share and impart your hard-won wisdom to a generation beyond your own, with the aim of building a better future for us all. Pretty darn heroic.

SCOTT HENDERSON

Editor BEN JHOTY

Deputy Editor DANIEL WILLIAMS

Associate Editor JASON LEE

Creative Director CHRISTOPHER RILEY

Contributing Editor NIKOLINA SKORIC

Digital Editor JESSICA CAMPBELL

Digital Content Writer HANNAH CHAPMAN

Contributing Designer

IAN BROOKS

Chief Executive Officer LLOYD O’HARTE

Executive Director LEE MCLACHLAN

Creative Services JULIE HUGHES

Subscription Manager subscribe@paragonmedia.com.au NATALIE WARD

National Brand Manager RACHEL SULLIVAN

National Partnerships & Integration Manager JORDAN LOZINA

Partnerships & Integration Manager CHRIS MATTHEWS

Partnerships & Integration Manager JULIA PASCALE

Content Activations Coordinator

DEBI CHIRICHELLA

President, Hearst Magazines INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS

Australia, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, UK, US

KIM ST. CLAIR BODDEN

SVP/Editorial & Brand Director CHLOE O’BRIEN

Deputy Brands Director

PARAGON DCN PTY LTD

Scott Henderson

ABN 73 627 186 350. PO Box 81, St Leonards, NSW 1590 14/174 Willoughby Road, Crows Nest NSW 2062 Ph (02) 9439 1955, paragonmedia.com.au

scott@menshealth.com.au

Men’s Health acknowledges the Cammeraygal people, Traditional Custodians of the land on which this publication is produced, and pay our respects to their Elders past and present. We extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

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Published and Distributed by Paragon DCN Pty Ltd by Permission of Hearst Magazines, Inc., New York, New York, United States of America. Printed and retail distribution by Ovato Limited. Published 12 times a year. All rights reserved. Title and trademark Men’s Health © Hearst Magazines International. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission. Men’s Health is a registered trademark and the unauthorised use of this trademark is strictly prohibited. issn 13293079. © 2021 Paragon DCN.

BOSS.COM

HUGO BOSS AUSTRALIA PHONE +61 3 9474 6310

ASK MH THE BIG QUESTION

Cancer rates in men are rising. What can I do to stop it all ending in tears? - RG The recent rise from one in three people being diagnosed with cancer to one in two seems ominous – but the shift has a benign cause.

Doctors are simply eradicating other causes of premature death. “With fewer polio and tuberculosis deaths, elderly people are far more likely to die from cancer – the over-60s account for more than three-quarters of patients,” explains Sarah Lewis, an epidemiologist at the University of Bristol. “Overall survival rates have actually doubled in the past 40 years.”

But while deaths are in relative remission, cancer is far from cured. In Australia, 76,000 men are diagnosed each year, with prostate, skin, bowel and lung cancers (in that order) the most common. The most terrifying stats show how many lives could be saved by making simple, non-invasive lifestyle tweaks.

Take bowel cancer. Eating half an onion per day could peel away your chances by 79 per cent. The vegetable has proven carcinogen-killing properties, while its high-fibre content

trims the time that harmful chemicals sit in your gut. Each 10g dose reduces your risk by a tenth, according to the BMJ. When it comes to lung cancer, there’s no clouding the obvious: stubbing out smoking blows away your risk by four-fifths. Swap your fag break for a quick stroll and you’ll slash your odds even further. “Walking and light exercise boost your immune system, affecting your insulin sensitivity, antioxidant defences and hormone levels,” says Lewis. “All are vital factors in warding off cancer.”

If you top 30 minutes of activity per day, you could step down your prostate cancer risk by half, a study in the Cancer Research Journal reports. Just make sure that the greengrocer is on your route: a weekly helping of mushrooms contains enough of the antioxidants L-ergothioneine and glutathione to reduce your risk by 17 per cent. Take these simple steps and save crying for episodes of This Is Us.

WORDS: THOMAS LING; PHOTOGRAPHY: MAX OPPENHEIM

Simple changes to your lifestyle can slice away your odds of cancer.

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ANCIENT SOLUTION TO A MODERN PROBLEM Q How am I going to upgrade my digs in this crazy property market?

A If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires. – Epicurus; b. 341 BC

TEXT A RUNNING COACH ‘I don’t want to overshare, but I’m chafing post-run. Soothe me, please!’

Friday 5:30pm There’s no chance I can focus on a PB. It’s all pain, no gain!

I hear you. Take a shower! Keep it lukewarm to soothe your skin and pat yourself dry – rubbing will cause more pain. Then stick some Sudocrem on your sore bits.

The pain is gone! But I NEVER want that again. Any tips?

Your running outfit is probably too loose, causing friction. Try tight and breathable.

Seamless materials cost more, but are worth it.

More moisturiser, too?

Body Glide balm is best. Apply it to areas at risk beforehand and bring it with you in case you need a top-up. If your nipples are still suffering, it’s time to go Kim K …

Post a pic of them online?

Tape them up! Kinesiology tape is ideal.

You can also use it on your heel and toes, if they’re rubbing. Stick to cream only for your groin.

Saturday 12:30pm Smashed it! New PB! And no more sore nips.

Answers by Matt Buck, Coach of runningadventures.uk

ASK THE GIRLS IN THE OFFICE Ask the MH girls the questions you can’t ask anyone else. They’re three women who speak their mind, so don’t expect sugar-coated answers

I really like this girl at work.

But is it worth trying to navigate the minefield of an office relationship? – AC Lizza: Yes! My parents met at work, and they’ve been married for 40-plus years.

Nikolina: I know a few couples who have met at work. I don’t think it’s a reason you shouldn’t get to know someone.

Maybe not so much in the office, though – maybe lunch breaks.

Lizza: It’s easy to see how colleagues can form an attraction. You spend so much time together.

Nikolina: Yep. And you’re in the same field, so you’re more likely to have a similar outlook and similar interests compared to a banker and a social worker.

Lizza: And you also get to see them when they’re under stress – you see how they deal with that.

You get to see the whole range of their personality, so it’s a good gauge of whether you’ll be all right outside of work.

Becky: Exactly. You see the highs. You see the lows. You see each other in every state. That’s why friendships, strong friendships, are formed at work, because you’re going through this shared experience. So, I can imagine relationships would be the same. But my question for AC is: does she like you? What’s happening here? Is it just you liking her, or is there a connection you’re wary of

exploring? First know that.

Nikolina: Also, if it kicks off, do it on the DL. Don’t make it obvious to your colleagues because if it doesn’t work out, it’ll just be awkward for everyone.

Lizza: And because you don’t want the extra pressure of your colleagues watching your every move and talking about you guys.

Nikolina: Because you share a workplace, you do want to be reasonably confident that the relationship is going to last, for a while at least.

Becky: Years ago, I actually went out with a colleague, and then when we broke up, I quit the next week. I was like, “I never want to see you again”.

Nikolina: What if you hadn’t quit? What would it have been like?

Becky: Well, it ended on bad terms. So, it would have been uncomfortable for everyone involved.

Because I was young.

I wouldn’t have been able to . . .

Nikolina: Get your work done?

Becky: Just be civil to him! I mean, every situation is going to be different, and I guess maturity comes into play.

So, it’s not a case of never, but take it real slow.

BECKY

LIZZA

NIKOL INA

SEPTEMBER 2021

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THE

09 21

YOUR MONTHLY DOWNLOAD OF THE LATEST LIFE ENHANCING RESEARCH

WHIP UP NEW HEART HEALTH

WORDS: LOUEE DESSENTJACKSON; PHOTOGRAPHY: @HUMMINGBIRDHIGH

Bulletproofs and flat whites may no longer be hot on Insta, but adopting the latest coffee craze could give your longevity a buzz VIRAL FOOD and drink trends usually turn out to be high in flavour and fat and low in pretty much everything else.

The cronut and duffin (a doughnut muffin) may do plenty for your Instagram kudos, but they’ll do nothing for your health. The iced dalgona coffee, however, is both an artfully whipped brew designed to court double taps and, according to new research into the benefits of coffee, a delicious ally in reducing your risk of disease.

Previous studies have linked coffee with a raft of health benefits, including sharper memory, improved liver function and protection against dementia. But, so far, no one has identified precisely how those benefits are conferred. Recently, a team of Dutch scientists focused their research on epigenetic changes – that is, environmental influences on DNA – to ascertain if coffee was able to mitigate our risks of disease by altering “gene expression”. In other words, they wanted to know if coffee hits the off switch in genes associated with certain diseases and disorders.

Their review of 15 studies concluded that compounds in coffee do lead to beneficial modifications, through a process called “DNA methylation”. Specifically, they noticed key epigenetic markers associated with a decreased risk of heart disease, man’s biggest killer. So, if you want to drink to your long-tern health, then give this trend the beans.

Give your genes a pick-me-up to brew extra longevity.

TRENDS ON TRIAL Which viral food’s health claims measure up?

GOOD

UBEICECREAM The yam that this is made from is high in nutrients like vitamin C, potassium and heart-healthy antioxidants.

BAD

HA BEER lth-boo probiotics used to make alcoholic kombucha are either killed or removed before they’re packaged.

GOOD

CHOCOLATE It won’t get you high, but cannabidiol – cannabis plant extract – has been touted for its potential to alleviate pain and anxiety.

BAD

MEAT-FREE BURGER While a beef patty has about 4.2g of saturated fat, a Beyond burger has 6g and an Impossible burger contains 8g.

SEPTEMBER 2021

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THE FEED

09 2 1 CORE PRINCIPLES To achieve stability in both your posture and your mental health, take charge of your midsection with Worthington’s foundational moves A

MUSCLE OUT YOUR ANXIETY

IF YOU WANT to crush your stress levels and build a cobblestone core, sit up and take note.

No, not like that. In fact, that’s part of the problem, says elite movement coach Luke Worthington. Adopting “correct posture” usually means pulling your shoulders back and pushing your chest out, creating an arch in your lower back. But this position – in which the ribcage and pelvis are pulled in opposite directions – is bad for both body and mind.

“It decreases breathing efficiency, reducing air flow to the bottom part of your lungs, where the majority of blood vessels are situated,” says Worthington. This doesn’t just reduce your training capacity. Extending the spine by arching your lower back also stimulates the sympathetic ganglion, the part of your neurological system responsible for the “fight or flight” response. The combination of restricted breathing and heightened stress creates a damaging cycle that can result in anxiety and fatigue.

The fix is to shift the focus of your workouts to your core. Strength at your centre will draw your ribcage downward, stacking it on top of the pelvis. Here, with a neutral spine, you’ll be set up to breathe deeply into the diaphragm, sparing your nerves of everyday stressors and pumping up your workouts, too. And the side benefit of a six-pack? That’s a welcome bonus.

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Lie flat on your back with your arms held above you.

Bring your legs up, so your knees are bent at 90° (A).

Slowly lower your right arm and left leg, exhaling, keeping your back pushed into the ground (B). Switch sides and repeat.

Want to get your head straight? Put your back into it.

A

2/ SHORT SIDE PLANK

B

Lie on your side with your knees bent at 90°. Rise up on one elbow (A) and lift your hips, supporting your weight on your elbow and knee. Create a straight line between your head, torso, hips and thighs, when viewed from above or in front (B). Hold still.

A B

3/ LEG WHIP

Lie down with your knees bent. Lift your hips, then your right leg (A). Using your core and glutes to keep stable, lower your right leg, stopping any rotation in your torso (B).

Use the muscles on the inside of your right thigh to pull the leg back to the start.

WORDS: LOUEE DESSENTJACKSON

Building a strong core will do more than earn you abs. Follow our advice and it’ll correct your posture and bolster your defences against stress

B

1/ DEAD BUG

THE FEED

09 2 1

GRASP THE NETTLE

Your garden-variety stingers are an unsung superfood that can spike your weight-loss potential, and they’re ripe for the picking. Here’s how to handle them with care THE STINGING NETTLE was the scourge of everyone’s childhood adventures, but the bad boy of garden weeds has long been misunderstood. This nutrient-rich mainstay of the Australian bush has been linked to reductions in blood pressure and inflammation, higher testosterone and, in a recent study, even fat loss.

Researchers at the University of Maryland found that mice fed on a high-fat diet for 12 weeks gained less weight if they consumed nettle extract, too. Nettles activate a hormone in cells known as FIAF (fastinginduced adipocyte factor, in case you were wondering), which not only accelerates the conversion of fats into energy, but seems to protect your vital organs from

SEASON’S EATINGS s p you harvest new health benefits

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OYSTER MUSHROOMS

DAMSONS

HAZELNUTS

Stir-fried caps will lower cholesterol.

Use these in jams to aid digestion.

Crush and sprinkle on ice cream for a hit of protein.

DANDE The coffee alternative full of antioxidants.

MUSSELELSS Steamed, these give your brain function a boost.

WORDS: LOUEE DESSENTJACKSON; PHOTOGRAPHY: ROWAN FEE RAPHY: DAN MATTHEWS

Weed out excess weight in the kitchen.

absorbing too many fatty acids. The amount of nettles you’d need to consume to see these beneficial effects equates to around 100g per day in humans – which, conveniently, is about as much as you’d use in a bowl of nettle soup.

To prepare the soup, gather some nettles growing in a spot away from the road or other polluted areas.

Put on some gloves and a long-sleeved top and collect 400g of the leaves (about as many as you can fit in a supermarket salad bag). Wash them before adding them to your soup stock, boiling away the plant’s stinging hairs. The leaves will wilt just like spinach (they taste similar, too). Alternatively, you can put the plant through a juicer and add an antioxidant-packed shot to your morning smoothie. Either way, you’ll move the needle on your weight-loss progress.

LAST MAN STANDING: LAPAGLIA HAS BEEN THE STRONG AND SYMPATHETIC CONSTANT OF A TV PHENOM.

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ADVANTAGE STAY AHEAD OF THE GAME

SURVIVAL INSTINCT Survivor has often been referred to as the ultimate metaphor for life, an unfiltered contest of strength and stamina versus congeniality and cunning. With six seasons at the helm of the Australian incarnation, JONATHAN LAPAGLIA knows a thing or two about the strategies and ‘gameplay’ that will set you up for success, regardless of your habitat

BY SCOT T HENDERSON PHOTOGR APHY BY NIGEL WRIGHT

SEPTEMBER 2021

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ONE OF REALITY TV’S most compelling franchises, Survivor has achieved enduring popularity, no doubt due to the parallels between island life and, well, reality. It’s a game played out in the elements, and yet the contestants’ challenges, conversations and alliances could just as easily occur among colleagues in a CBD boardroom.

You could argue Survivor’s format trumps even Big Brother’s as a social experiment – survival, after all, is the most basic human instinct. But what makes a survivor?

Through an incredible 40 US seasons, the format has seen contestants divided into teams to battle it out for the title of ‘Sole Survivor’ in an effort to answer this very question. Often grouped according to socioeconomic status, age and even, controversially, by race, the contestants’ trials and tribulations provide an extraordinary insight into the nature of community, human interaction and the hardwired drive for supremacy.

The imminent sixth season of the rebooted Australian series will again adopt a theme, pitting ‘brawn’ against ‘brain’. It’s perhaps one of the more relatable contests for young Australian men as they weigh up traditional male stereotypes and fresher, more nuanced conceptions of masculinity.

Interestingly, returning host Jonathan LaPaglia seems to think that perhaps neither brains nor brawn alone do a survivor make.

Rather, LaPaglia believes the key to modern-day survival lies in remaining socially adept.

“You’re trying to navigate your way through this social world,” 18

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reflects LaPaglia from the set of the latest season, in the harsh Queensland outback. “You have to be socially aware and make sure you don’t tread on people’s toes to work your way up.”

In the Survivor universe, LaPaglia would feature very near the top, rivalled only by US host Jeff Probst and the exotic locales. Both hosts command as much admiration as the best players themselves. If a season of Survivor is indeed life in miniature, then LaPaglia, given his half-decade at the helm, must have some first-hand knowledge of the attributes common to winners.

LaPaglia is somewhat the hybrid Survivor contestant: a former career as an emergency doctor ticks the brains box, while our photoshoot provides clear evidence of his formidable brawn. Yet as anyone who has had the good fortune to meet him will attest, it’s the self-identified ‘social’ game that Lapaglia has truly mastered. His colleagues continually sing his praises, former contestants gush, and further removed, fans can’t get enough of him onscreen.

In person, he’s humble, amicable and vulnerable, showing equal empathy for all contestants on the show. (Conversely, Probst is notorious for playing favourites.) It’s no surprise LaPaglia has risen to the top without stepping on any of those toes he’s acutely aware of.

Perhaps Lapaglia has picked up a tip or two on how to play the game of life from watching contestants battle it out in the elements.

But that seems unlikely, because the guy exudes authenticity: he’s not a game player, but rather the real deal.

Then again, that’s exactly what a master of the game would have you believe …

TACT I C S

SPEND ANY TIME WITH LAPAGLIA AND IT’S OBVIOUS: HE HAS BRAINS AND BRAWN.

MH Survivor’s a little bit different this

year, back with a Brains vs Brawn theme, and filming in the outback. How has that changed the game?

JL The location has had a real impact on the game, more than I anticipated, actually.

I mean, the conditions are so different from tropical Fiji. Fiji is hot, but I think it’s a little more difficult to be surviving here. It’s really tough out here. It’s harsh. Obviously the temperature is way hotter here than in Fiji.

It’s a different kind of heat. It’s an intense, searing heat that just cooks your brain. I mean, I’m out there for an hour and I’m a blubbering mess. I can’t even speak after about an hour in that heat.

That has been particularly difficult for the contestants. They’re exposed to that 24/7.

And then at night time sometimes, because it’s desert, it’s the complete opposite. It becomes freezing cold. So they’re really dealing with the extremes.

The other thing is there’s not much for them to forage. There’s no real way for them to survive off the land. In Fiji, there’d be coconuts, bananas, papaya. There’s none of that here. So that’s an issue. In Fiji, fish were plentiful. Here, not so much. I think they’re getting some yabbies and stuff like that in creeks, but it’s been a big difference.

And then, of course, you’ve got the wildlife. There’s a plethora of deadly snakes and spiders that could kill you at every turn.

So I think it’s been really tough for the contestants. Certainly tough for us from a production point of view, operating under these conditions. And for that, I think it’s added a whole new level for the game.

MH With the new concept Brains vs

Brawn, what constitutes ‘brains’?

JL We have some people that academically are well-accomplished. We have doctors, we have a researcher, we

have various other academics. But then with that, we have a politician. It’s not just book smart. There’s also street-smart people mixed in with that as well. It’s kind of a cross-section.

MH And ‘brawn’?

JL It’s the same thing. Some of them

are personal trainers. We have a couple of bodybuilders. We have a pro surfer.

We have a correctional officer. So it encompasses not just physical strength, but also mental strength.

But having said that, like every season, when we introduce a theme, it’s really just a jumping-off point to tell a story, to start a narrative. And the truth is that there’s crossover even between the tribes. It’s kind of an artificial separation because there are people on the Brains who have physical strength and there are people on the Brawn who have the brains to navigate the game.

So the truth is you need both of those to make it in this game. I think that’s what you really start to see – that both tribes have elements of the other. In actual fact, that’s not the complete story, because we’re still missing one crucial element and that is the social game. In many ways, I think the social game is probably the most important part of Survivor. Even though they’re doing well, even though they’re really living up to their namesake in tribes, you really start to see that social game come out. Because it has to. You can’t progress in this game without it.

MH A previous theme was Champions

vs Contenders. When contestants were put in those boxes and given those labels, those qualities seem to amplify.

Have you found that happening again with these tribes?

JL Yeah, look, you’re right, and they run

with them. But like I said, if you really look closely, they have both aspects. The characteristics really cross over between the two. We’re coming close to the end of the game and they’re still talking that, “We want a Brawn to win or we want a Brain to win”.

I think it’s hilarious, because I don’t see the difference between them anymore.

MH Entering your sixth season as host, what are the biggest lessons you’ve learned from watching the game play out firsthand?

JL I think if you look at Survivor superficially, it’s all about muscle. But there’s a lot more to it. It’s a very strategic game. But what we’ve had more over the six years is the social game, which is much more subtle. The premise of the game is that you need to vote people out, put them on the jury in such a way that they’ll vote for you in the end. I think that requires a very special social touch. So I guess that’s the biggest lesson for me: that it’s the social game that’s the most important.

MH It’s clear that your own rig is in unbelievable shape. How do you typically train outside of filming?

JL I’ve been training a long time, I guess, probably since I was like 16. I started when I was a goalkeeper in soccer and when I got to the age of 16, I had to move up a division, and I ended up being smaller than everyone else. All the guys seemed to be a lot bigger at the time. So I started training more and it kind of started from there. I’ve just been consistent ever since.

I’m kind of old school. It’s alternating weights one day with running the next. And a rest day every, like, five or six days. But that’s it. I’ve tried some yoga when I can get myself motivated, but otherwise it’s just old school weights and running.

SEPTEMBER 2021

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“I END UP A BASKET CASE AT THE END OF IT. THAT’S WHY I GO SEE MUM”

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TACT I C S

ROAD TO RIPPED: WEIGHTS AND RUNNING ARE HOW LAPAGLIA STAYS IN SHAPE.

MH And how does that change when you’re on set in the outback?

JL Well, it’s the temperature that makes it difficult to run and also the schedule is so brutal.

It’s just hard to find the time. But I still try and squeeze in whatever I can. Where I’m staying, there’s a small gym with some weights.

MH Is your diet pretty clean, generally, no matter where you are?

JL Yes. I’m not crazy about my diet. I eat what I want. I just make sure it’s relatively balanced in terms of carbohydrates, proteins and fat. I used to be a doctor, so I have a science background, so I have a rough idea what the body needs, but I’m not maniacal about it. I still eat sweets and stuff like that. I’m not counting calories. I’m not weighing stuff. I’m not doing any of that stuff. I guess it’s kind of intuitive, you know?

I really don’t do any special diet or any of that water loading and loading up with sodium and then stripping away the water and all that sort of stuff. That just seems like a lot of hard work. It’s hard enough training.

This is the first time I’ve had a kitchen in six seasons of Survivor. I’m actually enjoying that because I can prepare my own meals.

Normally I have to rely on catering and stuff like that. It becomes tricky and a bit unhealthy. So I’m enjoying the fact that I have my own kitchen.

MH Will you return to LA after Survivor?

JL Honestly, I’m going to go back. My mother

lives in Brisbane. I’m going to go visit her for four or five days. I have a couple of days to do stuff for the show. Then I’m going to head back to LA, because it’s where my family is. And honestly, I think I’m just going to fall over for a month. I’m so exhausted from the shoot. It’s been real tough for the contestants. It’s been tough for us, too. So I’m going to fall over for a couple of months and try and recover and then go from there.

MH You’re under a lot of pressure – time pressure and performance pressure. Do you have any go-to strategies or ways to manage your mental health?

JL I don’t. I wish I did. I wish I was better with stuff. I wish I was better at meditating and stuff like that. But honestly, I know some people, when I tell them [about the stress I’m under], it’s like, “Really?”

But I’m working nonstop, from the minute I get up in the morning to the minute I go to bed at night. I’m in front of the camera, or if I’m not, I’m preparing to get in front of the camera and all the material. I don’t even feel like I have time to take care of my mental health. It feels like it’s a sprint – a three-month sprint until the end. Then I end up being a basket case at the end of it. That’s why I go and see Mum. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of time just to ruminate. It’s just coming at me so fast that you’ve got to sink or swim. You’ve just got to get on with it. It’s not until it’s all said and done that it starts to hit you. Like, “Whoa!” I feel like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck.

Australian Survivor: Brains vs Brawn, Sunday-Tuesday at 7:30pm on 10 SEPTEMBER 2021

21

MUS C LE

THE

EXERCISE YOU’RE NOT DOING

GRO Good for your back and even better for your six-pack, the DEAD BUG CRUNCH delivers an injury-free burn to your midsection. Get down to it

1

Lie on the fl raise your arm your legs up your yo ur k ne nees es tow owaa Point your kne the ceiling, w calves paral ground. Keep y pointing

2

ARMS DEAL RPHOSE YOUR ABS th this thorax-busting e dead bug crunch is an core exercise that requires oordination and plenty of ays Chris Jillard, a PT at Stren St rength gth. a pretty of your core strength, th he exercise e is best used in lower-in inten tensit ten tensit sityy workouts,” he adds. “It’ It’s t’s mostt effect eff ective ive wh hen com comple pleted ted un under der control and d not for speed.”

Focus on o mastering the original dead bug technique before you attempt a higher h number of reps, and likewi lik ewise se be efore ef ore ad addin ding g the the cru crunch nch element. “P Practise by doing fewer reps, startin ng off by moving just your legs, then just your arms – and finally try to move your arms and one leg at the same time,” ime,” says Jillard.

He suggests adding the move to your warm-up, to allow you to focus on the technique while feeling fresh.

“In time, you could insert it in between exercises,” he says. “It would work well in a workout of eight deadlifts, six dead bug crunches and a 30-second elbow plank. Rest for 60 seconds and repeat 2-3 times.” So, slow slo w itit down down an and d make make lilike ke a bug bug.

Extend one leg leg, with your lower back pinned to the floor. Keeping both of your arms straight, lower them towards the floor over your head. (In a regular dead bug, you’d lower them one at a time.)

3

THE CRUNCH Ensuring that your lower back is still pinned to the floor, bring your ar ms up arms up to the the starting sta tart rtin ingg position and crunch up, bringing your shoulders towards your hips.

4

BACK TO THE FLOOR Lower your upper back to thhe floor andd return the extended leg back to the starting position.

That’s one rep. Repeat usin us ingg th thee ot othe herr le legg fo forr the next rep.

CORE STRENGTH

22

MEN’S HE ALT H

ROCKHARD ABS

PAINFREE BACK

PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILIP HAYNES

What You’ll Gain

ADV A DDV ERTO V E RRTTRI O RI RAL I AL A LF EFATU E A TRE URE

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M I ND

CLUBHOUSE HAS EVERYTHING! I joined the buzzy new app hoping to bare my soul. Instead, I learned to keep my guard up BY

JASON ROGERS

ILLUSTRATION BY RYAN

OLBRYSH

A DISEMBODIED MALE VOICE crackled over my iPhone speaker as I nervously awaited my turn to share. “Before we go to Jason . . . there’s something like 48 people in this room,” the man said. “I’m just curious: out of all the people in the audience, how many of you have not heard of, or have not tried, semen retention?”

The speaker, Solay Rad, didn’t mean room in a literal sense. The financial advisor was moderating a conversation on Clubhouse, the popular voice-only social-media platform you’ve probably heard about, thanks to high-profile users like Elon Musk, Drake and Oprah. If not, think of the app as a fusion of Reddit, TED Talks and LinkedIn.

SEPTEMBER 2021

25

You can navigate through a feed of live conversations – your “hallway” and “rooms”, in Clubhouse-speak – and pop in and out of the ones that pique your interest (semen retention, for one). Whenever they want, a moderator can move you from the audience to join the other speakers “onstage”.

When I started using Clubhouse at the beginning of the year, I was excited to see rooms with names like Men’s Group and Men’s Mental Health: Inspiring Stories, where mods were inviting men to get vulnerable and share their feelings – or so it seemed at first glance.

I was a prime candidate. In my teens and 20s, a personal battle with sexual performance anxiety made it difficult for me to be emotionally available to others. Working with a psychologist helped me overcome the performance anxiety, and learning to be open about uncomfortable feelings helped me overall. I’ve attended plenty of men’s discussion groups, where guys sit in a circle and talk feelings. Sounds corny, but they’ve made me feel less alone, and I hoped these Clubhouse rooms might mimic that cathartic experience of getting stuff off my chest.

Clubhouse’s founders, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, seem to have a similar vision. “The intonation, inflection and emotion conveyed through voice allow you to pick up on nuance and form uniquely human connections with others,” they wrote on the company blog last July.

(Clubhouse’s press team didn’t respond to my request to interview the founders.) I wanted in. The anxiety and loneliness brought on by the pandemic had left me especially eager to form those “uniquely human connections” with like-minded guys.

Which is how I stumbled into the What Is Semen Retention?

26

MEN’S HE ALTH

“CLUBHOUSE IS SMACK IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS GOLD-RUSH PHASE, WITH USERS FLOODING THE PLATFORM BY THE MILLIONS AND INFLUENCERS POUNCING ON THE OPPORTUNITY WITH VARYING DEGREES OF TACT”

room, a conversation about the supposed physical (and spiritual!) benefits of denying yourself ejaculation. “We’ll go to Jason next,” Rad said. “Jason, what’s on your mind? Please share.” I unmuted and explained how I’d tried the practice during my bedroom struggles but ultimately abandoned it.

“Some of us who’ve tried semen retention, we’re like war-level propaganda about it,” Rad answered with an air of practiced warmth. “But I do want to create balance in this room, so really grateful for Jason being up here.” Was he, though? Unlike some of the earlier participants, I was swiftly removed from the stage. It was like the music had started playing during my Oscar acceptance speech. Had I done something wrong?

Rad is the founder of Men’s Tribe, the semen-retention room’s overarching masculinityfocused “club” – basically the Clubhouse equivalent of a

Facebook Group. “We have a following of men who have been to our other rooms, and they get the energy,” he told me after the session. “We might call on them first so that it sets the tone for the type of sharing and the level of vulnerability that is expected.”

Initially, I concluded that my semen-retention story hadn’t been deep enough. But after talking more with Rad, I learned that, in addition to running a wealth-management business, he has a coaching business that offers master classes on topics like wealth creation, sexual mastery and – hold up – semen retention as part of a dopamine detox class. He also teaches “high-conscious sales”, a practice he described as the ability to “sell from a space of connection . . . instead of trying to manipulate and close”.

I wanted to take him at his word when he said he doesn’t use Men’s Tribe to seek out clients, but I couldn’t ignore a nagging feeling that it might not

be the case. As to potentially soliciting clients through Clubhouse in the future?

“Maybe,” he said. “I guess so.”

I told myself I’d had a one-off weird experience, and I kept exploring. In a room called Truth Tellers, a dozen men shared their experiences with impostor syndrome. I spent a half hour listening to their pass-the-mic style of conversation and eventually shared my own story. The men onstage toggled their mute buttons, causing the microphone icons on their profile photos to flash – the Clubhouse version of applause.

Later, a college student came onstage with a party-hat icon, meaning he was new to the platform. He asked how to deal with impostor syndrome amid the pressure of the Ivy League.

A handful of men, including me, offered heartfelt advice. I was optimistic about the integrity of the experience.

“I don’t even think about [making money off

MI ND

Clubhouse],” Truth Tellers founder Shawn Nason later told me. “What I think about is, can we reach the men we need to reach? And I believe if we do that, a monetisation piece might come out, or it might not.” A day after our follow-up conversation, I received an invite from a Truth Tellers community moderator to Nason’s virtual book tour.

I had a similar experience in the Men’s Mental Health: Inspiring Stories room. To get the conversation started, the leader, Adam Hindley, shared that he’d struggled with body dysmorphia. Other men shared difficult moments: issues with drinking, thoughts of suicide.

But again, there was a catch: Hindley and two colleagues run a physical- and mental-health performance coaching business in the UK, where they charge £747 (more than $1300) for a six-week program.

Toward the end of the talk, Hindley offered his numberone tip to improve mental health: “Having a coach. Even the best coaches have coaches.” It felt like an over-rehearsed play.

When I later spoke to Hindley, I shared my concern that Clubhouse’s “safe spaces” might actually be “sales spaces”. He seemed earnest in his intention to help men “turn their mess into a positive message”, but he also admitted that Clubhouse is, in effect, “the top of the [sales] funnel.

That’s where the majority of people come in to find out about our Facebook Group and our trainings”.

Mariah Wellman, a Ph.D. candidate studying social media and its influencers at the University of Utah, says the behaviour I encountered in the masculinity-themed groups and elsewhere on Clubhouse was indeed influencer marketing. “The old business model was, ‘I create this thing, then I go figure out who it’s for,

and I market to them,’ ” Wellman says. “Now it’s, ‘I am a human. I’m going to make human connections to all these other people, and then eventually I’m going to make a product and, because these people like me as a human, they’re going to buy it’. ” After visiting more than a dozen similar rooms, I wandered ambivalently into one called Men’s Group, where I noticed that the lead moderator, Kapil Gupta, was a self-described “Master Coach” specialising in “transformation”.

Here we go again, I thought,

bracing myself for discomfort.

Gupta welcomed 10 new audience members to join him onstage. “If you haven’t been part of Men’s Group before, it’s nothing to be scared of,” he announced. “It’s quite a vulnerable but fun experience.”

I listened as he and his co-moderator laid out the protocol for the room by demonstrating how the other men should share. “There’s a weird sadness in my system,” Gupta said as he described how disconnected he’d felt that past week. The way he slowly unspooled his emotions

6 WAYS THE INTERNET

CAN ACTUALLY HELP YOU BE A BETTER HUMAN

IF YOU WA N T TO...

C RO W D S OURC E A DV ICE G ATHER SOME C OUR AGE

C A LM THE CH ATT ER IN YOUR MIND OPEN UP A LI TT LE

EXORCISE YOUR DEMONS UNLOCK THE MEA NING OF IT A

TRY...

Reddit’s “A m I the Asshole?” subreddit Brené Brow n’s TED Talk “T he Power of Vulnerability” The Headspace meditation app The ManKind Projec t’s Virtual Men’s Group Talkspace online ther

LL

Cour sera’s free philosophy cour ses

apy

seemed to help other men do the same.

As Gupta wrapped up the session, I was shocked to realise that the discomfort I’d expected never set in. It had been the closest thing I’d experienced to a real-life men’s group on Clubhouse. Had I found the pure human connection I’d been looking for, or was Gupta just that good a soft salesman?

The answer turned out to be both. Gupta told me he avoids soliciting clients from Men’s Group, but he doesn’t have an issue with the practice overall – only with when it’s done in an underhanded way.

“People who are tuned in definitely feel it,” he said. That had been the key difference between Gupta’s group and the rooms I’d visited before: how the experience felt. Gupta was raw and honest in a way I hadn’t encountered on Clubhouse; he conveyed his value as a coach simply by being himself. If that’s great marketing, more power to him.

The problem is, how many guys not on a Men’s Health assignment would persevere through all the slippery sales agendas to finally find a safe space like this? Clubhouse is smack in the middle of its gold-rush phase, with users flooding the platform by the millions and influencers pouncing on the opportunity with varying degrees of tact.

In the end, I might have found a few “uniquely human connections” in Clubhouse’s men’s groups, but the overall experience left me feeling the opposite of how I do during IRL discussions: disheartened and on edge rather than energised and free. Men’s discussion groups only work when everyone lets down their walls. It’s hard to do that in the digital Wild West, where your senses are on constant high alert for danger in the form of an influencer’s stealthy pitch.

SEPTEMBER 2021

27

THE HEALTH SNOB’S GUIDE TO

FRESH PASTA The Italian staple might put the fear of God into the low-carb crew but, with the right sauce, pasta can be your optimal fuel for quick-fire gains

1

B ACK T O B A SIC S

Good Italian food is all about keeping things minimal – that’s why cream in a carbonara is as divisive as pineapple slices on pizza. To make your own pasta, you need only three simple, healthy ingredients: finely-milled “00” flour, free-range eggs and high-quality olive oil. We enlisted Jay Patel, founder of London Italian eatery Legare (legarelondon.com), to deliver a crash course in lip-smacking nourishment.

A Pappardelle When you’re working with a broad, flat sheet of pasta dough (see method, right), it makes sense that the easiest pasta to make is the broad, flat pappardelle. All you need to do is roll up your pasta sheet and cut it into 2.5cm-thick strips.

B Tagliolini This is essentially spaghetti but easier to make. Most pasta machines come with a tagliolini attachment, allowing you to feed your dough through the cutter for a square-edged alternative to your standard Bolognese accompaniment.

C Tagliatelle One of the most popular pastas, tagliatelle was allegedly invented in the 15th century to emulate Lucrezia Borgia’s golden hair. But don’t let that unappetising image put you off.

To make yours, use the same method as pappardelle but cut thinner strips – about 1cm.

D

Orecchiette To turn your pasta into these morsels, follow the steps until you have a smooth dough, then cut it into chunks. Push these down using a table knife until the edges curl over the knife, then invert from the other side with your thumb to give them an ear-like shape.

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MEN’S HE ALTH

2

K E E P O N R O L L ING

Your most important investment when it comes to high-quality, healthy pasta will be in the right flour. Italian “00” flour is finer than all-purpose varieties, resulting in a silkier, chewier mouthful and, crucially, less gluten. Chefs swear

by Caputo (basile.com.au).

Pour 200g of 00 flour into a stoneware dough dish. Then, in another bowl, whisk 1.5 teaspoons of antioxidant-rich extra virgin olive oil and two eggs. Go for eggs with intensely coloured yolks – these tend to be higher in omega-3s. Make a well in the flour, pour in the egg mix, then use a fork to combine it all from the inside out. When it’s too firm for the fork, mix and knead with your hands for 10-15 minutes (add water if necessary), until you have a smooth dough. Wrap in cling wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour. Cut in half and flatten with a rolling pin.

Patel recommends a Marcato Atlas 150 (victoriasbasement.com.au), the gold standard of pasta machines, to roll this into 2mm-thick sheets and shape according to your preference.

NU TR I T I ON

3 SH A P E UP Pasta shapes are best matched to their sauces. Thick, meaty sauces are better when coating pastas with a flat surface – such as pappardelle – while thinner pastas suit lighter, oilier sauces.

Here, Patel shares four pasta recipes to match the shapes you’ve learned to make. And if you want an authentically Italian taste, don’t forget to salt the pasta water and – for a deliciously viscous sauce – keep some close by.

PASTA LA VISTA Sub in these alternatives if you’re on a low-carb diet

B

A

Omega g Bomb Anchovy y and Garlic Tagliolini

Metabolism-Firing g Sausage Pappardelle

Serves two INGREDIENTS • Tagliolini, 240g • Anchovy fillets (preferably Ortiz), 6 • Olive oil, 2tbsp • Garlic, 2 cloves • Chilli flakes, pinch • Parsley, large handful • Butter, a knob

Serves two INGREDIENTS • Pappardelle, 240g • Olive oil, 1tbsp • A yellow onion • Italian sausages, 3 • Garlic, a clove • Rosemary, a sprig • Chilli flakes, a pinch • Bay leaves, 2 • Tomatoes, a tin • Butter, a knob • Parmesan, to taste

METHOD In a large pan, cook the omega-3-rich anchovy fillets in the olive oil until they melt. Add the minced garlic and gently cook through, then add the chilli flakes and fry for a minute. In a separate pan, boil tagliolini in salted water for two minutes, then add to the anchovy, chilli and garlic mixture. Add a splash of pasta water and the chopped parsley, tossing the pasta to emulsify the sauce. Add butter and serve.

METHOD Heat the oil in a pan and fry the onions until light brown. Add the sausages, minced garlic, rosemary, metabolism-spiking chilli flakes and bay leaves. When the sausages are cooked, break up into pea-sized pieces with a spoon. Add the tomatoes and simmer for half an hour.

Boil the pasta in salted water for two minutes, then mix with the sauce.

Add butter and Parmesan and stir.

Plate up and top with more Parmesan.

Eggplant

WORDS: BOBBY PALMER; PHOTOGRAPHY: MICHAEL HEDGE

Eggplant has fewer kilojoules than an energising bowl of spaghetti, and contains vitamin C and potassium.

Butternut Squash This is rich in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants – and is also linked to several markers of improved digestive health.

Seaweed Ultra low in kJs, kelp noodles are a source of vitamins such as B12 and even vitamin K. Serve with oily fish for extra omega-3.

C

D

Muscle Food Tagliatelle Alla Carbonara

Doctor’s Orders Prosciutto Orecchiette

INGREDIENTS Serves two • Tagliatelle, 240g • Egg yolks, 3 • Parmesan, 75g, grated • Pancetta, guanciale or thick-cut bacon, 75g-100g, lardons • Black pepper, lots (we suggest 20 turns of the mill)

INGREDIENTS Serves two • Orecchiette, 240g • Butter, a knob • Prosciutto di Parma, 75-90g, thinly sliced and roughly torn • Cherry tomatoes, 220g • Wild rocket, a large handful • Parmesan, to taste

METHOD “A proper carbonara has no cream,” says Patel. Instead, combine the yolks and Parmesan in a bowl and set aside.

Crisp the lardons in a large, dry pan.

Add black pepper. Cook the pasta in salted boiling water for two minutes, then add to the lardon pan. Remove the lardon pan from the heat and pour in the Parmesan/egg mixture, stirring to avoid curdling. Add some pasta water if it’s too thick, then serve.

METHOD In a large pan over a medium heat, melt the butter until frothy, ensuring it doesn’t burn.

Add the prosciutto and cook until crispy.

Add immunity-boosting cherry tomatoes, season, then add rocket and toss so the heat wilts it. Boil the pasta for two minutes.

Remove and add to the mix. Toss and serve with a sprinkle of Parmesan. “This is also great served as a room-temperature pasta salad,” says Patel.

SEPTEMBER 2021

29

HE ALTH

3

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN

S CR E E N BUR N

…I DOOMSCROLL?

LEARN TO LOG OFF BEFORE BAD NEWS OVERWHELMS YOU.

Knowledge is power, but overloading your brain with bad news can leave you despairing. Close your tabs, log out of Twitter and build positivity IRL

BAD

1

2

P LUGGE D IN

“The tendency to endlessly scroll through bad news story after bad news story has been turbocharged over the past 12 months,” warns Tanya Goodin, an expert in digital detox.

“Doomscrolling” is a habit that is specific to your smartphone.

Unlike your TV, the hi-tech device in your pocket is always there, offering you constant access to a depressing echo chamber of negativity. It’s like having the DailyMailOnline comments section on an intravenous drip.

2

AC CE N T UAT E T HE NEGATI V E

“Your brain has a tendency to zoom in on the bad stuff,” explains Goodin.

“The algorithms that control newsfeeds take this into account and ramp it up.”

Reading worrying news triggers your fight-or-flight response.

But your brain also hates to leave things unfinished. So, without resolution, you experience the Zeigarnik effect – anxiety about incomplete tasks. It’s a perfect storm.

30

MEN’S HE ALTH

4

T IP T HE S C A L E S

4

3

OFF

5

“Any form of scrolling that increases your anxiety is harmful,” says Goodin. “If you notice that your mood is deteriorating, you need to log off and do something completely different.” Easily said, but don’t we need social media to stay aware of what’s going on in the world? “Cutting yourself off isn’t good for your mental wellbeing, any more than over-consuming the news is,” says Goodin. “The key, as ever, is balance.”

5

CL E A N BR E A KS

Remember when the news was on TV at 6pm and 10pm, and that was it? Goodin recommends that you live by a similar schedule to stay informed without risking over-exposure. “Breaks from bad news are essential,” she says.

“Train yourself to dip in, simply to update yourself, and then log off.” Goodin also suggests that you seek out and engage with positive news stories to reprogram your personal algorithm. Remember, it’s not all bad.

WORDS: TOM WARD I ILLUSTRATION: PETER GRUNDY

1

GOOD

This detrimental effect is associated with digital media in particular. According to research conducted in the early days of the pandemic, the consumption of stressful content online was linked to increased levels of depression, negative feelings, anxiety and stress. The same study found that this wasn’t the case with newspapers or, happily, magazines.

“Badminton brought the skills I had from tennis and added tactics, agility and fast pace”

GRONYA SOMERVILLE She is one of Australia’s finest in the Olympic sport of badminton. Reaching the summit has involved seizing an unlikely opportunity and training diligently to overcome limitations that might have discouraged a lesser woman

BY DANIEL

32

WILLIAMS

MEN’S HE ALTH

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ARNAUD

DOMANGE

W O M EN

I N

SP O RT

SOMERVILLE HAS TASTED SUCCESS BECAUSE SHE’S PAID HER DUES IN SWEAT.

BEFORE WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED the turning point of her young life, Gronya Somerville had played badminton once or twice at primary school using volleyball nets.

Then, one day when she was 12, her PE teacher handed her a flyer inviting girls to attend a “fitness day” on which they could try out for the privilege of being put on a path that might lead to their representing Australia in badminton at the Olympics.

“So, I went along and did the fitness test and played the competitive games, and at the end of the day we had a hit with some of the national players,” Somerville recalls.

“There was a guy there hitting all these trick shots, and I fell in love with the sport.”

Fourteen years later, Melbourne’s Somerville, the daughter of a British mother and a Chinese father, is preparing for the Tokyo Games, where she’ll compete in the women’s and mixed doubles events.

Competition for medals will be fierce in a sport historically dominated by China and featuring emerging powerhouses Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Denmark. But a super-fit and determined Somerville – an eight-time Oceania women’s doubles champion – is primed, in concert with her partners, to produce the outstanding performances of her life.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GRONYA SOMERVILLE PHOTOGRAPHY: INSTAGRAM @GRONYASOMERVILLE

Men’s Health: So, before you discovered

badminton, you’d played a fair bit of tennis?

Gronya Somerville: Yep, as well as circus gymnastics and Little Athletics. Tennis I was pretty good at, and the coaches wanted me to take it more seriously, but I just never had a passion for it. Badminton, though, was like a perfect crossover: it brought in the skills I had from tennis and added all the tactics, decision-making, agility and fast pace that kept me engaged.

MH Tokyo will be a test of your mental strength. What are your keys for producing your best under pressure?

GS My women’s doubles partner [Setyana Mapasa] and I are still working on that as a pair. In doubles, there’s that added dynamic of trying to be on the same page. We’re working with a sports psychologist, and I think, with us, it’s getting us to the right level of arousal, making sure we’re pumped up to a certain point before we step on court, because we can be a bit slow starting. If we’re in a good space as a pair and communicating well and supporting each other, usually we can play some of our best badminton. But once that falls apart, it’s really hard for us to get it back.

MH People can watch you train at

gronyasomerville.com – and having tuned in myself, it’s clear you don’t muck around when it comes to building serious lowerbody power.

GS That’s really been a long journey for me because when I started out I was very pigeon-toed – weak glutes, weak quads and a lot of knee and ankle injuries. For me, strength training has really changed my physiology. My feet aren’t as pigeon-toed and everything is just a lot biomechanically better. It’s just come from a lot of glutestrengthening over the years – a lot of crab walks, as well as squatting with heavy weights. That said, I’m never trying to make huge gains in the gym. My sessions are all about trying to keep me on the court longer by avoiding injury and building up my body to take the competitive load.

MH The word is you follow a vegetarian or vegan diet. What have been the effects on your performance of going meat-free?

GS That started about five years ago from having a vegan friend, who was in Switzerland at the time. I visited her for a weekend when I was competing in Europe

and asked her a lot about her diet. Over time, I’ve adopted it myself more seriously. I’m not strictly vegan, but I eat predominantly vegan.

Physiologically, I haven’t really noticed any difference whatsoever. The change didn’t make me feel any better or any worse. It didn’t seem to affect me in any way.

MH Why stick with it, then?

GS Because it’s more ethically and

environmentally [sound], and I feel like I make overall better food choices by keeping it in mind. A vegie burger rather than a meat burger . . . the additives within the vegie burger are healthier. Small things like that.

MH What’s it like being an elite competitor

in a sport that gets so little attention?

GS It’s a little frustrating. We see the kind of respect and admiration that badminton gets in Asia especially, and it would be nice for Australians to experience it the way we do.

It’s just not traditional for kids here to start playing badminton – which I understand. But it would be awesome to get more of them involved and have more people see the game played at a high level and to appreciate the speed and athleticism involved.

MH What are the qualities you most value

in a partner? A life partner, that is, not a doubles partner.

GS I’ve been 10 years in a relationship with [New Zealand badminton player Maika Phillips], a lot of that done long-distance before he moved to Melbourne in 2019. For me, the main thing is honesty. If you’re not honest, you can’t build a relationship.

Respect. Loyalty is a huge one. And then I guess the humour and keeping each other happy, and just really wanting the best for each other.

MH Do you have a life philosophy?

GS Fulfill your potential, in whatever that

might be.

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MI N D

usic is a proven performance enhancer, but should you cue u z or Motörhead? MH zart H tunes into the latest science to find d

BEATS

CHILL

VS

e h he l leased.

A perforr

by A i

FAST FORWARD Rapid beats can boost performance by up to 15 per cent, helping you train at a higher intensity with lower perceived exertion.

Need a lift between warm-up and WOD? According to Sheffield Hallam University, music paced between 125-135bpm made people feel more driven during rest.

125-135

HIIT PLAY?

SLOW IT DOWN ...But medium-tempo tracks can have the same workout-enhancing impact, while even slow music is better than none.

RECOVERY

Brunel University found that more sedate tunes can help you bounce back quicker. Half an hour of listening to slow, wordless music can dial down your cortisol levels.

BPM

20-30 MIN

BEAT MATCH

EDM

(128 bpm)

If you find it hard to get started, stick to a rapid BPM. In one study, almost a third of people said that beats were a powerful motivator to get a workout under way.

A Canadian study found that you can enhance your HIIT workouts through the process of “entrainment”, in which your brain syncs your body with fast music.

R&B

Drum’n’Bass

Reggae

(60-80 bpm)

(174 bpm)

MIND GAMES

30%

10 MIN GET IN SYNC

(60-90 bpm)

Listening to Mozart for 10 minutes can give you a short-term brain boost, improving your reasoning and spatial awareness. Perfect for complicated drills.

Soothing music can be used as part of a “dissociative strategy”: during exercises such as long runs, it works to take your mind off fatigue and discomfort.

THE MH VERDICT: IT’S A DRAW! Ultimately, it comes down to your training needs. Faster beats are associated with hard work, while slower tunes aid rest and recovery. But research suggests that nothing is more effective than music to which you feel an emotional connection – so we’ll leave your playlist up to you.

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Hip Hop

(85-115 bpm)

WORDS: KIERAN ALGER; ILLUSTRATION: SCRATCHINPOST.CO.UK

Techno

(120-125 bpm)

TACT I C S

The science-backed, therapist-approved case for doing way less and ending up better than ever BY

PAUL KIX

ILLUSTRATION BY

IT BEGINS AT 4am on a Saturday, a throbbing and unceasing pain behind my left temple. I try to go back to sleep but can’t – the second missed clue – and around 6am I face another day of weekend work.

It’s the autumn of 2020 and I’m at risk of losing my job at ESPN. Two decades of outworking others – by writing books and hosting a podcast, among other pursuits – and of taking pride in friends saying, “How do you do it all?” has convinced me I must do even more now. I should find solace in all the skills I’ve developed to support my wife, Sonya, our three kids and my mother-in-law, who moved in when she retired.

But I don’t.

By midday, I can’t focus and have to lie down. Soon I’m hyperventilating as searing pain spreads to my stomach and then to my fingers and toes, suddenly inflamed and too sensitive to touch anything. At the ER,

THERE IS STUDIO

Sonya speaks for me while I undergo a CAT scan that thankfully rules out a brain aneurysm.

The bad news, the neurologist says, is that he’s seeing more guys like me, for whom the pandemic accentuates stress that goes ignored until their anxiety levels rise so high that they double over.

Seventy-seven percent of us say we’re way more stressed now, according to a Cleveland Clinic survey.

Fifty-nine percent say COVID isolation has done more damage to our mental health than the 2008 economic crisis. Yet 66 percent of us live out the old-line mores of masculinity and rarely discuss the pain and the impact the pandemic has had on our mental health.

“And so you end up here,” the neurologist says. His advice? Don’t come back.

The stress I’m feeling! I decide I have to do something about it.

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LESSON 1

LESSON 2

IDE N T IF Y W HE N NO T T O HUS T L E

T RUS T T HE P OW E R OF IDL E NE S S

I have to do nothing. That’s what I settle on with my therapist: incorporate idleness into my day. “Rest will relax you,” he says. Then a few weeks later, I get a call from my boss with an executive from HR on the line and they lay me off. Now the crisis is real. I can feel the anxiety and fear of looming destitution pushing me towards more crazed productivity, fuelled by the urge – primal and real – to provide. My therapist recommends I start with a walk.

It’s not the prescribed nothing — I still scoff at nothing — but the walk that will separate me from the everything on my laptop. I keep it short, staying on the shaded street of my quiet suburb, listening to a biography of Douglas MacArthur because, c’mon, I’m not not going to be productive. But I do in fact feel calmer yet energised when I get back, which makes me curious. Can doing nothing be a productivity hack?

It turns out Thomas Edison and his employees would spend hours doing nothing but pondering. It led to some of the team’s greatest insights. Bill Gates has long taken what he calls a think week, during which he goes alone to a remote area to simply read and think. That inspired many Microsoft wins. These days, Stefan Sagmeister takes a whole year off once every seven years. It’s made his New York–based design firm one of the most sought-after in the world because, as he says in a TED Talk, each “sabbatical” provides unrivalled insight and enthusiasm for future projects.

Staying true to form, Sagmeister turned down my request to speak with him by saying, “During this unusual time, I try to minimise my scheduled time in front of screens and on the phone”.

I take my cues from these entrepreneurs and literally schedule idleness using the calendar I’ve crowded with projects. Some days it’s the half-hour walk my therapist recommends – a pair of Ecco ST.1 Lite Men’s Sneakers, $149, au.ecco.com – are perfect for this. Other days it’s a block of daydreaming when I journal about projects I might one day pursue. Sometimes it’s acting as my nine-year-old twin boys’ PE coach while they learn remotely. As it does for everyone else, the downtime produces real results for me. During one daydream session, I get the idea to start a paid online community to help creative types learn from one another in ways they can’t from social media.

A small business is born.

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In my emerging downtime, I read books like Andrew Smart’s Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing, which articulates a theory for why unplugging is so important. When regions of the brain “do nothing,” Smart tells me, they’re actually “organising themselves for later use.”

This neural recuperation has a name, the resting-state network (RSN), and also a function: to foster creativity. That’s according to the neurologist who laid the groundwork for the study of the RSN: Dr Marcus Raichle of Washington University School of Medicine.

Colleagues thought Raichle was crazy in the early 2000s for hooking people up to MRIs and observing what happened brainwise when the subjects did nothing physically.

“They’d just lie there,” Raichle says. But he found “there is ongoing activity in your brain, all the time”, which suggests neural rest is never rest. “Problems are getting solved,” he says, even without us knowing it.

Whether it’s Isaac Newton under the apple tree or me on a walk, Raichle argues we are often at our creative best when we’re most relaxed. That’s true for me. I’m happier, thinking more clearly because of my scheduled downtime. Though I have more work than ever, I’m less stressed. I realise I’ve been working the wrong way for 20 years. I need not wrestle and pin and rule the hours of each day. I can move with them, enjoy them for what they are. I find snatches of time for still more downtime.

TACT I C S

“It’s led me to realise that idleness is not laziness“ LESSON 3

DO L E S S T O F E E L MOR E At a certain point in early 2021, it feels off to say I’m using rest as a guide to optimised productivity. I’m beyond life hacks. I’m developing a worldview now, with idleness — that long-ago-prescribed nothing — as its core tenet.

As artist and author Jenny Odell says in her recent book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, “such ‘nothings’ cannot be tolerated [by modern society] because they cannot be used or appropriated and provide no deliverables”. Odell connects the less-is-more ideology to ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who established a garden and a school of thought on the premise that the good life comes from studying everyday life closely.

One day, I call up Tom Hodgkinson just before he leaves the office early so that he can properly observe his vibrant city on the bike ride home to his flat. Hodgkinson runs The Idler, which is a mindset as much as it is a magazine published in London: his team hosts events and even a full-blown academy to teach the art of simple pleasures, what some see as indolence but is in fact heightened intelligence.

“People feel – men feel – that they must act responsibly, meaning that they have to slave away at the office to provide for their families. But then they get to be 50 and their wives hate them and their kids are grown and don’t know them,” Hodgkinson says. “That is irresponsible to me.”

We talk about the Harvard Grant Study, a longitudinal project that tracked World War II–era Harvard students from the time they were sophomores to the day they died. The chief finding, across decades and strata of careers? Happiness is a by-product of the relationships you keep, with your friends but even more so with your family.

“Happiness is love. Full stop,” one of the chief researchers on the Harvard Grant Study wrote.

“Exactly,” Hodgkinson says.

LESSON 4

N O T HING + N O T HING = E V E RY T HING I decide to put down my work to teach my daughter to roller-skate. I attempt to keep up with my twins as they play Just Dance 2021 on the Nintendo Switch. My walks get longer and I leave my phone behind. I watch the rising sun limn the tree line. I distinguish birdsong.

Back home, I answer fewer emails and begin to pray, something I haven’t done since childhood. It is both an act of faith and a communion with stillness.

I haven’t had a headache in weeks, but my hope is that we can all be, as Hodgkinson puts it, “evolved and superior people”. We still have time, even as the world reopens, to remember where that world of busyness will lead us.

“Look where it led you,” Hodgkinson says.

“Exactly,” I say.

It’s led me, ultimately, to realise that idleness is not laziness. I’m still doing a lot. But the nothings that I schedule every day edit, and streamline, all the somethings I pursue.

The nothings focus me not just on my work but also, as Epicurus would have had it, on the granular life outside it: the multitone silence of dawn as I stand in my kitchen in the moment before I brew coffee; the high-pitched shrieks of laughter at night when my kids and I play games together.

Lately, every noon hour, I’ve been walking the trail that leads to a river that runs behind my house. One day I meet a photographer who points to a swan and tells me it is seldom seen in our part of Connecticut. That’s why she’s brought her camera: to capture that which seems prosaic, discardable, nothing, but to the trained eye is actually beautiful and even transcendent.

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THE POWER 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

BY JOE KEOHANE

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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 grocerystore owner or a friend of a friend are actually really good for you.

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

SOURCE: JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR AUGMENTATIVE AND ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION

SUPER SMALL TALK: “CAPE DRYCLEANING COSTS A BOMB, DOESN’T IT?”

MI N D

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The pe rcentag e of adul t speec h that is classifi ed as sma l l ta l k

3

1

PRY YOUR EYES AWAY 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.

2

ACTUALLY LISTEN

Why it works: Listening attentively “is one of the most socially attractive behaviours you can engage in,” says Harry Weger, 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 behaviour 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, kicking the chat back to the speaker.

ASK SOMETHING 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 cafe.

4

MOVE ON TO “BIGGER TALK”

Why it works: 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 upcoming cricket season or knock-’emdead exam results – or your newfound appreciation for manhole covers.

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FATH E RH OOD

“It wasn’t until Berd came along that I learned what a non-boring baby was“

A TALE OF TWO KIDDOS Children are like snowflakes, each special in their own innocent way . . . and that eternal truth makes parenting unexpectedly fun BY

MATT LOGELIN

ILLUSTRATION BY

LIAM EISENBERG

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 5am 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 and should mellow out.

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 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 42

MEN’S HE ALTH

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 nappy 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 travelled with me through India and Nepal as I wrote a book. She joined me on countless trips to music stores to pick up records and pose for photos. She laughed while I tossed pumpkins off a nearby bridge into the 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 10 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 non-boring 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 nappy changes, she rolled around like an alligator wrestling its prey. After a particularly long day with Berd, a babysitter 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 a 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.

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HE ALTH

A UROLOGIST’S GUIDE TO A

HEALTHY PENIS Chances are you’ve been criticised for acting as if everything is all about your penis. But it pretty much is: so many of your daily practices and behaviours, from your workouts to your sleep, affect this key body part. Here’s what urologist Dr JAMIN BRAHMBHATT does to keep his working for him GE T YOUR B L O O D F L OW IN G I work out three times a week, either running or lifting. Exercise helps keep your blood vessels flexible and healthy. That’s especially important in the penis, which has some of the smallest vessels in the body. If they can’t deliver blood, you can’t get an erection. And if this is the case, get your heart checked. Guys who develop ED – even in their 40s – have a good chance of seeing other heart-disease symptoms within the next two or three years.

DON ’T FE A R A S T R AT EGIC CU T I was circumcised as an adult.

Chronic dry skin meant cracking in the foreskin, and it became a problem to be hygienic no matter what kinds of creams and lotions I tried. Now I just wash with water (no harsh soaps), and I don’t use a moisturiser. Not everyone needs a circumcision, and not everyone needs a moisturiser. But don’t be afraid to take advantage of them if you think they’ll help you stay comfortable.

CHECK YOUR S T R E A M Urination is a vital function of your penis, and I discovered I had a kidney stone recently when I saw that my urine was red. Other signals your urine stream gives you: straining, pushing, dribbling and feeling like you can’t empty can indicate an infection, scarring from an STD or prostate issues. Get these signals checked out.

GI V E T HINGS A R E S T I try to get enough sleep, because it allows the body the time it needs to rebalance. Chronic sleep loss can cause testosterone to drop, which suppresses your desire and ability to have an erection. Sleep loss is also linked to body fat. Extra fat converts testosterone to estrogen more quickly, so it’s tougher to maintain healthy T. – As told to Lynya Floyd

“If the vessels in your penis can’t deliver blood, you can’t get an erection“

I don’t have a need or desire to watch porn, but urologists are concerned about how it can leave many men thinking their penis size and stamina are inadequate. Some will then spend a lot trying to change that. I remind them that the average erect penis is five inches and that healthy penises capable of great sex come in all sizes.

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LEVI BROWN. PROP STYLING: MIAKO KATOH

DIS T INGUISH B E T W E E N FAC T A N D FA N TA S Y

ALERT

AUSTRALIA

N

ASK

GROW, TRANSFORM & REINVENT YOURSELF

with lessons from the

Ask Men’s Health Podcast IN THIS BRAND NEW PODCAST, THE MEN’S HEALTH TEAM CHATS TO

INDUSTRY EXPERTS AND EXTRAORDINARY THOUGHT LEADERS ABOUT THE ISSUES THAT MATTER MOST TO MEN. FROM FITNESS AND NUTRITION TO MENTAL HEALTH, WE LEAVE NO QUESTION UNANSWERED.

Download Ask MH on your favourite streaming app or visit menshealth.com.au

BLACK MIRROR Eating disorders increasingly affect men, too. As writer WILL COOK experienced first-hand, once your thoughts around food and exercise begin to warp, you’re in danger of losing sight of who you are “DO YOU REALLY need another ice-cream today?” “Surely you haven’t exercised enough for a bowl that big?” “Fuck, you’re looking fatter than yesterday”.

It’s a rite of passage to live in a subpar share house with frustrating housemates. You know, the type who leave dishes to pile up or pinch your last drop of milk. In my case, my flatmate teased me every time I sat down for dinner, opened the fridge door or looked at myself in the mirror. It was cruel and unrelenting. I wish I could have moved out. The problem was my tormentor was one I could never escape: myself.

At 17 I had left my bubble of family support in Adelaide and moved to the big smoke. I came to Sydney to embrace a lifestyle I’d fantasised about during years of devotion to TV soaps.

To start with, my new life was amazing. I moved into a residential college with almost 200 other young people. My Instagram grid revealed an aesthetic tease of new friends, late-night partying and decent uni grades. Family, friends and employers would marvel at how I could pack three jobs, never-ending coffee dates, bender after bender and exercise into each week. I was committed to doing it all.

But while I focused on everything going on in my life, my conscious mind began to lose the ability to distinguish between rational and irrational thoughts. Hidden beneath the veneer of my Instagram filter was a desperate pursuit of perfectionism that slowly, but surely, manifested as an eating disorder.

RIT UA L OF SE L F A BUSE At some point, my body and my mind became separate entities. Although I was physically fit, I had an intense fear of gaining weight. I spent hours each day looking at myself in the mirror, picking and pulling at what I perceived was a flabby muffin-top.

To lose weight, I committed to pounding the pavement around Sydney’s coastline. I would walk morning, noon and night. My new regimen was complemented by what I pretended was an ethical decision to go vegetarian. Restricting my diet gave me the excuse I needed to skip more and more meals.

My days became endless voids of disconnected numbness. I would sit in uni tutorials with my mind caught in a loop of rumination, sifting through a stocktake of what

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I’d eaten that day. Zombie-like, I was incapable of feeling anything other than a cruel concoction of self-pity and hunger.

Every time I went to the fridge or tried to prepare my meals for the week, that voice in my head would tag along. It would belittle me until I admitted defeat, conceding that it was easier to starve my body to appease my mind’s demands.

In an irony that would have been delicious if it weren’t so cruel, after wrapping up my studies, I landed a coveted job as a food writer.

I began secretly purging to ensure I could eat out without expanding my waistline. My physical body was losing the battle to twisted thought processes.

I have a reputation among friends for being the life of the party. Yet as my anxiety heightened, my enthusiasm for socialising was replaced by a commitment to nullifying my inner pain with the help of alcohol. I no longer cared about seeing my friends. Instead, the sound of a cork popping was a contractual agreement to commit to blackout-level inebriation.

S TAGE A N IN T E RV E N T ION For about six months I carried on with a gulp in my throat, an empty pit in my stomach and legs that ached from kilometre upon kilometre walked. Meanwhile, I kept distracting myself with a devotion to constant action.

It was around my 21st birthday when I lost the ability to sleep. I decided to consult Dr. Google. Was it anaemia? Diabetes? I was even willing to admit to being stressed. I booked an appointment with a real GP. With the timebomb entering a critical phase of its countdown, she told me my heart rate was almost low enough to have me hospitalised. I had anorexia. While stereotypes paint men as eating-disorder anomalies, we actually account for 37 per cent of sufferers, according to The Butterfly Foundation.

My GP and I devised a mental-health care plan that would involve seeing a psychologist along with sessions with a dietitian who specialised in treating eating disorders.

Within weeks, I’d assembled the medical A-team, set myself up with a new diet, was monitoring my exercise and had found a way to balance it all with work. But I was unwilling to engage with the cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) the psychologist was

BODY IMAGE CAN GET TWISTED IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER.

M A N

TO

M AN

recommending. Instead, I focused on the visible side of my anorexia and committed myself to putting on weight.

Outwardly, I appeared to be getting better, but six months down the track, things took a turn. I found myself caught up in a toxic work-place culture that catapulted my anxiety to new levels. I slipped back into my old survival habits. After a week of sleepless nights, I locked eyes with myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyelids were droopy, my arms whittled to the bone, my chest a hollow cavity. My body was calling for me to stop.

TACK L E W H AT ’S E AT ING YOU

“While stereotypes paint men as eating-disorder anomalies, we account for 37 per cent of sufferers”

That day I quit my job. Perfect Will wasn’t so perfect anymore. For years I’d let the expectations of others guide me along a tightrope that demanded perfection in everything I did: job, study, body, diet. I’d become bound to a life that wasn’t mine.

I was afraid to break the shackles for fear of displeasing others. Perfectionism had become my prison.

Right before the arrival of a certain virus, I spent three months travelling. A real eat, pray, love experience. I actively nourished my body and restored my weight. It wasn’t easy but with professional support I did it.

I gave myself the time to dive into the CBT strategies my psychologist had been recommending. I realised that recovery can be a slower burn than you anticipate. My psychologist encouraged me to question my intrusive thoughts and reframe the body comparisons I was fed by social media’s human-less algorithm.

By reframing how I spoke to myself, I slowly learnt that I wasn’t that voice in my head.

My psychologist pointed me towards mindfulness and yoga as a way to still my racing mind. Alongside continued sessions with the psychologist, the mat became my therapy. For the first time I found myself craving movement, rather than using it as a tool to punish my body. Nearly two years later, I’ve completed 250 hours of yoga-teacher training.

My life today is so very far from what I had envisioned at 17. In fact, it’s a glorious mess.

There are resounding peaks and then there are what a wise friend calls “splat days”. On those days where everything seems overwhelming, I step off the accelerator of life and focus on doing things that nurture my body and mind.

At the ripe old age of 23 I’m at a place where I can comfortably share my story. Better still, I’m in a constant state of gratitude about my body.

Dealing with the discomfort and dissatisfaction of distorted body image isn’t an overnight fix. As I’ve learned, you must surrender to treatment, abandon the quest for perfection and give yourself the time and space to heal.

Struggling with an eating disorder?

Contact The Butterfly Foundation: butterfly.org.au

SEPTEMBER 2021

47

UTILITY PLAYER Isuzu takes utes to D-MAX with a vehicle that’s as tech-smart as it is tough BY

JAMES JENNINGS

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of Australia’s invention of the ute, which went on to become a pick-up truck and take over the world. The first ute was made by Ford, after they got a letter from an unnamed farmer’s wife in 1932 asking for “a vehicle to go to church in on a Sunday and which can carry our pigs to market on Mondays”.

While the tale is possibly apocryphal, it would perhaps be the only case, ever, of a random rural resident inventing a whole new type of vehicle. Even if it isn’t true, one thing is: utes have been largely agricultural ever since.

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Barnaby Joyce – utes spent decades pointedly ignoring mod-cons.

Carmakers argued that tradies didn’t want stuff like aircon or touchscreens, just hard plastic interiors. Until, finally, they relented.

And the Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger, having shot out of the blocks, were never to be headed.

Until now. Because if you’re looking at one of those and not also considering Isuzu’s D-MAX, you’re missing a trick.

Even one iteration ago, the big-selling D-MAX wore its bucolic lack of sophistication as shamelessly as Barnaby. But now, out of left field, the thirdgeneration model arrives as a

properly tough, stylish, technologically festooned contender for Ute of the Year.

It’s still a ute, bouncing about with typical rear leaf-spring suspension that tends to shunt and shuffle a bit over potholes or speed bumps. Only the short-lived and ultimately doomed MercedesBenz X-Class has offered multi-link suspension in a ute and look at what happened there.

All D-MAXs are diesel – Isuzu is a diesel specialist; its two-model range (along with the seven-seat Isuzu MU-X – basically a D-MAX with rear seats instead of a tray) is oil-burning only. But that specialisation – with one engine across the range – has produced

unmatched reliability. The D-MAX’s 3.5-tonne tow rating is facilitated by a 140kW/450Nm engine that delivers its power via a choice of six-speed manual or six-speed automatic gearbox, and both are good.

It has a nifty dial that allows you to switch between 2WD and 4WD-high range, on the run, in under a second.

The main game here, though, is the interior tech. It doesn’t have full digital instrumentation – instead, there’s a little rectangular screen between the dials – but that screen is useful, offering helpful information as straightforward as a digital speedo and as clever as the current speed limits for the street

M H

GA R AGE

UTE BEAUT: NOT ONLY EASY ON THE EYE, THE D-MAX IS EQUIPPED TO GET DOWN AND DIRTY.

you’re on (it reads the road signs).

The central screen offers

wireless Apple CarPlay connectivity and is fast, bright and high-res.

The safety systems, however, are next level.

They include everything from advanced cruise control to rear-traffic alert (it tells you if someone’s approaching from the side when you’re reversing out of a driveway), to clever functions like automatically dipping your high beams when another car is coming.

It took a long time for utes to be granted access to the sort of tech that other vehicles took for granted. Now ‘near car level’ functionality is offered almost

across the spectrum. With HiLux and Ranger ahead of the sales pack, the D-MAX’s arrival at the parents’ table is a refreshing challenge to the Ford vs Toyota status quo.

And its pricing is pretty tempting, too, with the D-Max SX single-cab 4x2 manual starting at just $29,990 drive-away. That’s a lot of ute for the money (although you can spend right up to $60K on some variants, if you prefer your pizzas with the lot).

It might not spend a lot of weekdays hauling porkers to the stockyards – or many of its Sundays in the church carpark. But the D-MAX definitely brings home the bacon. Hallelujah to that.

“Out of left field, the third generation model arrives as a stylish contender for Ute of the Year”

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Watching your friends get married is easy. Ensuring you nail the dress code while not outshining the groom is where things can get a little tricky. With the help of The Bachelor Australia’s JIMMY NICHOLSON, we showcase what to wear for different weddings, helping you to stand out for all the right reasons PHOTOGR PHOT GR APHY A Y BY B LIAM

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CHA H NDLE DLER ST YYLING NG BY B DALE E Mcc KIE GROO GROOMING MING BY KRIS R T YAN LOW

When the theme gives the freedom to interpret as you please, keeping things chic with a suit and turtleneck is a winning combination, while the bold colourway ensures you won’t clash with the groom.

Suit ($1349), by Hugo Boss; turtleneck ($39.90) by Uniqlo; bracelet ($229) by Thomas Sabo; and boots ($595) by RM Williams.

Black tie Opposite: Jacket ($3100), and pants ($500), both by Belancē; shirt ($149), pocket square ($19.95) and cufflinks ($79.95) all by MJ Bale; bow tie ($149) by Calibre; shoes ($1295) by Christian Louboutin; rings ($329) and ($199) both by Thomas Sabo; bracelets ($8230) and ($7830), by Fred.

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Because how often do you get the chance to rock some suspenders?

Exactly. It’s the simplicity here that makes the difference, and after several hours on the dance floor, you’ll be grateful for the comfy boots.

Shirt ($420) and pants ($480), both by Ian Nessick; suspenders ($149.99)

by MJ Bale; boots ($595) by RM Williams; ring ($269), bracelet ($269) and watch ($499), all by Thomas Sabo.

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An elegant suit alongside a plain black T is a pairing that never goes out of style.

Adding some jewellery to the mix allows you to show some personality while staying true to the theme.

Suit jacket (POA) and pocket square ($29) both by Farage; T-shirt ($23.95)

by Zara; necklace ($269) by Dear Letterman.

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Hitting the ranch means channeling your inner cowboy. Boots and vintage belt are mandatory, as is the thumb in pocket pose.

Blazer ($449), pants ($139) and boots ($595), all by RM Williams; shirt ($159) by Ralph Lauren; belt ($88) by Route 66; ring ($269) by Thomas Sabo.

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STY L E

We hate to break it to you but coastal weddings are not an excuse to whip out the shorts and thongs. Instead, think about a relaxed suit in a soft colour on top of an open collar shirt.

This way, you’ll stay cool – in more ways than one.

Jacket ($599), shirt ($169) and pants ($189), all by Ralph Lauren; pocket square, ($19.95) by MJ Bale; sunglasses ($1410) by Fred; bracelet ($229), watch ($549) and ring ($269), all by Thomas Sabo.

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More Room To Groom Lockdown has changed the way we live, grooming habits included. But as vaccines roll out and we venture back into the world, many of us are in dire need of a tidy-up.

Fortunately, the latest trends don’t require a 180, just a few maintenance tricks to hit the sweet spot between modern marvel and isolated caveman WHEN WE’RE FINALLY let out of the house (fully masked, no doubt), there’s some good news in personal grooming, fellas: “The shabby-looking iso-beard is here to stay,” says hair educator and former men’s hairdresser of the year Jules Tognini.

New research from grooming brand Bulldog Skincare reveals many guys are intending to go rogue when it comes to hair and grooming, with almost half (42 per cent) planning to experiment with a new look before spring hits.

The same research also shone a light on the motives behind this burgeoning need to experiment – and no, one of them is no longer “iso-boredom”.

Driving men to the clippers is the prospect of: 1. Socialising with friends (55%) 2. Spending time with family (50%) 3. Having more sex (27%) Tognini, widely known in his field as The Grooming Guy, has invariably been on point with his style predictions, and if the first half of this year is anything to go by, his forecast for spring is likely to be accurate. Here Tognini reveals the top trends in grooming and shaving for 2021, along with expert tips on how you can best achieve them at your home basin. Happy shearing, lads.

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GR O OMIN G

•T•H•E

K•I•T•

THE TAMING OF THE LOCKDOWN BEARD

“HERE’S THE GOOD NEWS: ‘THE SHABBYLOOKING IS0-BEARD IS HERE TO STAY’”

The iso-beard is here to stay – but it’s getting a makeover. Fifty-eight per cent of men say they’re planning to groom their face more and tidy up their iso-whiskers. We’re not talking designer stubble, though: there’s still a desire for the untamed look.

Beard balms and beard oils will keep your facial hair feeling fresh and looking great between trims, even if they’re months apart.

Proraso Beard Oil Wood & Spice $24.99 (prorasoaustralia.com.au) Formulated to tame, smooth and protect longer beards, this has a scent of cedar wood and Eastern spice. Rub through a damp beard from root to ends for long-lasting softness.

THE MOUSTACHE IS HAVING ITS MO-MENT As an emerging trend, the moustache is having its next 15 minutes, with one in 10 guys looking to rock a mo into summer and the new year. “My one tip here is to ensure you keep your mo in check with the right razor,” says Tognini.

“You don’t want to be caught looking like Yosemite Sam.”

Beard & Blade Moustache Essentials Kit $54 (beardandblade.com.au) Trim, tidy and style your mo with this collection. Armed with Italian-made scissors, a UK moustache wax and our very own B2 Folding Comb, you’ll have everything you need to keep your upper lip looking its best.

PUTTING YOUR BEST FACE FORWARD Skincare will be a focus over the months ahead, with one in five men planning to reboot their grooming regime and up their use of cosmetic products. “Air conditioning can lead to dry, flakey skin,” advises Tognini.

“So, as we move into summer and the AC switches on, it’s important that guys use a daily moisturiser to keep their skin in check.”

ry Useful Face er] $41 This multi-tasking moisturiser sinks in fast, is deeply hydrating and contains vitamins and antioxidants to fortify your skin. It was developed by beauty guru Zoë Foster-Blake for husband Hamish Blake. No joke.

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Time Why your kids are the ultimate excuse to buy another watch BY

WEARING A WATCH isn’t just about functionality. If you want to tell the time, after all, you can simply glance at your iPhone. This inconvenient truth doesn’t make it any easier to justify buying yourself another watch, particularly if you have a few already. No, what’s required here is some mental gymnastics to seal the deal with yourself and, in all probability, convince a sceptical partner, too. Essentially, you need to change the watch-buying narrative from costly act of self-indulgence to grand altruistic gesture. And that’s where your children come in. d Patek Philippe that artfully repositioned the wristwatch from timekeeping device to precious family heirloom. Patek continues to release advertisements in which the same scenario plays out. A photogenic small child in a tomato sauce-free, collared shirt gazes adoringly up at his square-jawed father with a watch strategically positioned somewhere in the frame. “You never actually own a Patek Philippe,” reads the tagline. “You merely look after it for the next generation.”

On one level, of course, this is a masterclass in emotional manipulation.

It’s an image of domestic bliss on an executive salary designed to sell wildly expensive consumer goods. Yet the idea of a watch becoming a family totem is also hard to resist.

Right now, I’m writing this with a wedding ring on my finger that was worn by my father. His old watch nestles in the desk drawer to my right. These

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TAG Heuer A Professiona $4350

LUKE BENEDICTUS

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Tudor Black Bay Fifty-Eight 925 $5880

Omega Seamaster Diver 300m Black Black $13,200

Longines Heritage Classic $3050

Graand Seiko SL $

cer

WATCH E S

““THESE T ARE INTIMATE POSSESSIONS OF A M MAN I NEVER TRULY GOT TO KNOW, AND THEY’RE PROBABLY TTHE HE MOST TREASURED OBJECTS OBB THAT I OWN”

ngineer al $4850

Classic ronograph Mirabaud 400

Rolex Explorer ref. 124273 $15,250

Citizen Series 8 $2599

Raymond Weil Freelancer Bronze $4795

are intim are t ate I neve e r truly and nd d th they’ y re p objecct that obj plan to pass pla a chiildrren. childr en Bu ut I aim to o do per erson son nal forr each of them Th he conce n pt of thee “bi is pop opu ular among colllecto sugg gessts, it involves sour from m the year that you u we ca an ju j mp m onto a weebsit prre-ow - ned watch hes – chrono24. com – plug in yo our b thrrough the multit u il you fin unt nd som s floats yourr horol Butt you c samee for you snappi pping up wattch for th born n recently, be ablee to go alon retaileer and buy a from their year of Ma any y moons fro suitab bly y momentous might ht choose to fi final all with th his thoughtful gifft the ha handover might g wait pop ppe ped your clogs.

A any rate, th At he factt th th h pen get to wear th hap his a watch for th t e next feew de just to imbu mbuee it wit ith th the n of paternal al con conn ne nection.

E wife that at you’r u’rre not just b watch; you’re completing a selfless act of fatherhood on behalf of your kids.

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Armed to the Teeth: Both Warnes draw confidence from looking their best.

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THE

WARNE LEGACY Fit and firing in his fifties, Shane Warne is ready to open up about his post-cricket life.

Meanwhile, his son, Jackson, still energised by his breakout appearance on SAS Australia, is right beside him, harbouring his own aspirations.

In these exclusive interviews with Men’s Health, the Warne men reveal their

secrets to staying healthy, productive and bonded eternally as father and son BY

DA NIEL WILLIA MS PHOTOGR APHY BY JA MES GEER

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Shane Warne

hen arrives for the Men’s Health photo shoot, he is polite, amicable – and businesslike. He wants to know whether it’s really going to take the time allotted. Which is quintessential Warne. Getting on with things – no fiddling about, no wasting energy on the extraneous – was always his way as the outstanding cricketer of his time. With Warne, it was, Come on, skip, toss me the ball.

And how about ramping up the aggression? Take wickets. Pursue victory. And if there’s an opportunity, I’ll gift you some theatre, too.

In his approach to things, little has changed in the 14 years since he played his final Test match. Now 51, clear-eyed, strong of body and stretched thin across a range of interests and pursuits, Warne is as purposeful as ever, too engaged with life and fatherhood to have fallen victim to the kind of existential crises that dispirit many a former athlete in the eerie quiet of retirement.

Fourteen years? Really? Fourteen years since he ripped a legbreak or clicked out a flipper in whites? Those who watched him, summer after summer, will never forget his mastery. But he’s been missing from the crease long enough for there to have emerged a new generation of cricket fans for whom the name Warne is little more than that – a name, a champion of the past, and perhaps an outspoken, coruscating voice from the commentary box.

In bringing Warne the cricketer to life, you start with the numbers. Between 1992 and 2007, he took 708 Test wickets – the second-most by any bowler in history (behind Muttiah Muralitharan) and 145 more than the next most prolific Australian (Glenn McGrath). He claimed five wickets in an innings 37 times and 10 wickets in a match 10 times. He is one of only eight players to have accomplished the 300 wickets/3000 runs double. Toss in another benchmark – 100-plus catches (in the slips, Warne had hands like buckets) and the list shrinks to just Warne and Ian Botham. In 2000, the votes of 100 cricket experts anointed Warne (alongside Bradman, Sobers, Jack Hobbs and Viv Richards) one of Wisden’s five greatest cricketers of the 20th century.

Warne likes to point out, jovially, that among that quintet, he alone has not been knighted. Maybe that will come, though some of us might prefer it if he remained simply Warnie forever.

The bowling genius from the outer Melbourne suburb of Upper Ferntree Gully retained a priceless everyman quality: he battled intermittently with his weight, loved a smoke and a drink, swore a bit, refused to treat his baggy green like the Shroud of Turin, couldn’t abide bootcamps or self-important coaches, spoke his mind, treated posties and PMs the same . . . and got into hot water now and then. Of the missteps that turned into tabloid, sexscandal fodder, Warne has always said his chief concern was that he had hurt or embarrassed his three children. Those children (to his former wife, Simone) are now adults: daughters Brooke and Summer, 24 and 20 respectively, and 22-year-old son Jackson, a sensitive, self-contained and likeable young man who has joined his father today to talk about his plans as well as the perks and challenges of navigating life in the footsteps of a legend.

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Men’s Health: Without the driver of having to be ready to bowl 25 overs in a day, what’s your approach these days to keeping fit?

Shane Warne: Sticking to a routine. Through my career, I fluctuated a little bit with my weight: it was up, it was down, I was super-fit, then not fit. And a lot of that had to do with injuries. Since I’ve retired, the health thing is both physical and mental. With the physical side of things, for probably the last 10 years or so I’ve gotten into a morning routine, whether that’s my push-ups, skipping, boxing, going for a walk or going to the gym and getting on a treadmill.

I try to do something at least a few times a week.

MH And the mental side?

SW A lot of people underestimate it. Fitness is about feeling fresh and happy. We’re all busy. There’s never enough time in the day. But I’m very structured and very disciplined. I’ve got a whiteboard and I’ve got diaries. Doing things that I enjoy helps my mental health, like playing golf a couple of days a week and walking a course for four hours. I’ve got a lot on my plate in terms of business things and being a bit of an entrepreneur, and I think the fitter you are and the happier you are, the better decisions you make.

MH How did you feel about turning 50? Was that challenging, psychologically?

SW Not at all. In a way, I think I’ve

gotten better with age. I think I understand myself so much better.

My fitness is great. The business side of things is going better than it ever has. And my children are happy. So, I’m in a really good space. You know, there’s really nothing I’m worried about.

MH In your autobiography, No Spin, you’re open about the things you do to look your best.

Is that as important to you as it ever was, and if people want to call that vanity, do you care?

SW No, I don’t care. I take pride in my appearance. I always try to dress nicely. Yes, I go to the dentist regularly and get my teeth whitened. Yes, I didn’t like going bald. Some people don’t mind it.

Some people don’t care. Some people worry about it but don’t do anything about it. I decided to do something about it because I think it makes you look older. That’s just my opinion. I’m not saying it for everyone. But I couldn’t rock a bald head like Bruce Willis. I’ve only done it once and I didn’t look very good. I looked like, I don’t know, a tennis ball. My association with Advanced Hair for the last 17 years, they’ve helped me regrow my own hair. And I take pride in my appearance, whether that be my clothes, my teeth, my hair. Now, people can take the mickey out of me. They can do whatever they like.

They can call me vain because it doesn’t worry me in the slightest.

Because in my mind it’s always been look good, feel good.

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Forward Focused: Warne is simply too busy to wallow in past glories.

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More than his wicket tally, Warne prides himself on how his kids have turned out.

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MH You’ve spoken previously about how easily your weight could swing between 80-90 kilograms. Have you settled on an ideal weight for now?

SW Yeah, I’m just trying to stay in that 85-90 range. I’m 88 now. I’m 52 this year, so I feel like I’m in pretty good nick for someone my age. And the thing is, you can’t get too lean as you get older. That’s why everyone thought for a while there that I’d had stuff done to my face. They thought I’d done all sorts of things to my face because I got too skinny. I went down to 79 kilos, which was too light, and suddenly I was drawn. So, it’s about being healthy and feeling comfortable.

Not everyone should worry about their weight – they should worry about feeling good. But, for me, mate, I look at a cheeseburger and put on three kilos, whereas I know other people can have five of them and nothing happens.

MH What’s your relationship with food these days? Has it evolved from one of indifference – and a limited menu?

SW Oh, look, when I was playing, I ate so much crap. Because, you know, you were travelling, you’d land somewhere at midnight hungry, and you’d eat. It was hard and you had to be very strict, and at certain stages through my career I didn’t worry about it. I thought, Look, I’m bowling-fit, I can bowl 40 overs no problem, and if I’ve got a few extra kilos, I’m okay with that.

But other times I wouldn’t be. I used to be all or nothing. I’d go from 92 kilos to 79 in six weeks, because I’d trained my absolute butt off, but now I’m more consistent. Look, I don’t like fancy food. I don’t like sitting in a restaurant for five hours and sampling 17 different things.

I’m very simple. People sometimes say it’s fussiness. I’m not fussy whatsoever. I like steak and chips. I like chicken and chips or chicken and salad. I like a bowl of pasta.

Occasionally I might go and have a chicken fajita or something like that.

And occasionally I’ll have a burger.

And, you know, my food, people like to take the mickey because it used to be quite fun. As players, we’d go

Lethally Blond: Warne rips a leg-break in an Ashes Test at Old Trafford in 1997.

to a Japanese restaurant, and I’d try and get a pizza delivered there. And I’d eat it out of the box. And that wasn’t being difficult – I just wanted a pizza the night before we played.

It’s evolved a little bit. I don’t eat anywhere near as much junk food because I know if I do, I’ll be heavy again. But if I’m quite strict with my diet and I combine that with my fitness routine, I’ll be fine. My size-34 jeans will fit nicely.

MH What do you miss about being a cricketer?

SW It’s very rare, but occasionally I miss not having the ball in my hand when it’s a really tight game or a wonderful finish to a Test match.

One team’s trying to bowl the other one out and I might think, Geez, I wish I had the ball in my hand. I miss the competitive side of things because I’m super-competitive. But it’s just every now and then. What I do miss is that camaraderie among the group. I was lucky enough to play with some wonderful players.

To be the best team in the world over probably 15 years and beat every team home and away was a pretty amazing achievement, so I think I miss travelling around with a group of guys who wanted to achieve something special.

MH What do you miss the least?

SW The time away from my children. When I played, you didn’t say, “I’m missing this World Cup” or “I’m missing this Test match because of the birth of my child”. It just wasn’t done. You just played and if you missed a birth, that’s just the way it was. And remember those Ashes tours back then used to be [four or five] months. You used to room with a teammate, and partners weren’t allowed on tour. I don’t miss all that – being away from my family for so long – but that’s what I did: I played cricket for Australia, and that took me away

from home. I missed Jackson’s birth. I didn’t see him for four months because we were at the 1999 World Cup. I missed the birth of my eldest daughter, Brooke, because I was playing on an Ashes tour. I went home in between Tests and saw her for one night, then flew all the way back to England.

MH Your ability to perform on the field when there was turmoil in your private life was remarkable. How did you do it?

SW Yeah, look, between making the Victorian state squad aged 18 to finishing up in the Big Bash with the Melbourne Stars at 43 . . . that was my life and I lived it in front of millions of people around the world.

The attention and the judgment were always there, and, yes, I made plenty of poor choices along the journey. But when I reflect on those, I think there weren’t all that many compared to all the good things that I did, whether it be the stuff for Australia or for charity . . . I’ve raised millions of dollars for charity. So, look, there were a few personal things . . . but you can’t say, “I don’t want to play today – I’m struggling a little”. I could always switch on and off and compartmentalise.

MH If you’d gotten the chance to be Australia’s Test captain, what do you think would have defined your leadership style?

SW I captained enough times [in

other forms of cricket] for people to see what sort of captain I was. And it’s nice when they say, “Geez, we wish you could have captained Australia [in Tests]”. If you ask players who played under me, I think they enjoyed my style, [which was] aggressive, always trying to win. I hated a draw. And I’d always back my players no matter what.

MH Outside of cricket, which sports people, past or present, do you most admire?

SW I used to love watching John McEnroe play. I think Michael Jordan set the path for every single athlete, not just in how good he was but in being a business and a brand – in his case, before there was social media. Tiger Woods. I’ve had dinner with Tiger a few times. I introduced him to my son when he was here for the Presidents Cup. The way he dominated golf for so long and then to come back to win [the 2019 US Masters] after all his injuries showed not just terrific skill but also mental toughness. So, Tiger, McEnroe, Michael Jordan – and Muhammad Ali. MH What’s keeping you busy?

SW I have a hand in so many things. My main business interest would be the SevenZeroEight Gin Collection. We’ve got a great product that won the gold medal for best gin after blind taste-testing at the 2020 SIP Awards in America. I

“I FEEL LIKE I’M IN PRETTY GOOD NICK FOR SOMEONE MY AGE” SEPTEMBER 2021

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“SEE, I THINK SUCCESSFUL MEANS BEING HAPPY” hopefully have a CBD oil [medicinal cannabis] coming out soon, pending [Therapeutic Goods Administration] approval. I’ve got my TV commentary work for Sky in the UK and Foxtel here, which I love. I was lucky enough to be with Channel 9 for 25 years and learn from Bill and Richie and Tony and Ian Chappell. I’d like to think that when people tune into the cricket, I make it more fun to listen to. I’m head coach this year of [Lord’sbased 100-ball cricket franchise] London Spirit. I’m with News Corp’s [fantasy sports competition] SuperCoach BBL, and I’m doing my Road Trips with Foxtel and McDonalds that have been awesome, telling stories, which has been quite fun in this modern world. I write some articles for [US-based website] Sporting News.

I have my own fragrance at Chemist Warehouse [SW23 by Shane Warne], which is pretty cool. We launched it last year and didn’t take one cent of profit. We donated it all to My Room Children’s Charity. And I’ve got my cricket academies [sportstaracademy.com]. I think the way coaching is done for young boys and girls, there’s a gap in the market. Because we were always taught defence – get your grip right and all that. Now it’s all changed. It’s all about bat speed, reverse sweeps and how fast you can bowl, so there’s a new way to coach. And, of course, I’m father to three children.

That’s my job. The rest is a hobby.

MH You got engaged to Simone at 23. In hindsight, is that too young to make a lifelong commitment to someone? And what advice would you give to your children about when to consider settling down?

SW Yeah, at 23 years of age, you don’t know yourself. And both of us, I think, when we look back, think, Geez, we jumped into it a bit too 68

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soon. But the great thing out of that relationship is that we both have three beautiful children. So, I would say to them, “Look, you know when you know, and there’s nothing wrong with living with someone for a while and making sure it’s 100 per cent”.

MH You mentioned a few “poor choices” along the way. Do you think they’ve had any lasting effect on your relationships with your children?

SW No, luckily, they haven’t. You know, we talk all the time. The communication is really important between my three children and me.

They’ve all got their own lives, and I’m there. My son lives with me fulltime, and when I travel, he lives with his mum. My eldest daughter [Brooke] has a boyfriend, so she goes from her mum’s house to her boyfriend’s house to my house, and my youngest daughter [Summer] mixes between her mum and me.

I’ve got a great relationship with all three, and I’m thankful for that.

MH What’s the likelihood of you ever marrying again?

SW I don’t know. I’d never say never about anything, after what I’ve experienced in my life. If it happens it happens, but I’m not looking.

MH Do you think a marriage needs to have traditional parameters to work?

SW A relationship between two people is whatever works for them.

You know, the traditions of husband and wife, kids, white-picket fence, husband goes to work, wife stays at home, they’re gone. I mean, it’s like T-Rexes: they’re gone. So, for people to judge anyone’s relationship is unfair, because if the two people in that relationship are happy, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.

MH In what ways would you say Jackson is like you?

SW Well, for the past four or five years he’s lived with me fulltime and we’ve travelled together. Once he finished school, he’d come over to England with me, he caddied for me in the New Zealand Open, we’ve made poker trips together, he’s come to Vegas, we go on road trips together. We do everything together. As well as father-son, we’re like best mates. His interests and my interests are very similar, probably because he’s lived with me for so long and he’s been around my friends. And he’s a man’s man: he likes the footy, he likes sports, he likes the cricket (he doesn’t like playing it, but he’ll watch it), he loves his AFL and he loves his poker. And he’s an exceptionally good poker player.

I love my poker, too, and, unfortunately, I have to say he’s probably a better player than me.

MH Your dad, Keith, was very strict, right?

SW Both my mum and dad were extremely strict.

MH Have you kept that going?

SW Yep, the kids say, “Dad, you’re so strict all the time!” When we have dinner, it’s phones off. We all sit there and talk. When they were growing up, I’d always pick them up from parties. When I was at home, I’d walk them to school, make their lunches, I’d go to their school things . . . I wish I could have done that every time. I loved all that stuff. It’s also important for a parent to let kids be, to let them find themselves.

You can only protect them for so long before they have to get out in the big bad world and make a few mistakes. That’s all part of growing up. I mean, if you make only great decisions and never go through anything, you won’t appreciate the good times. The tough times, which

we all go through, make you stronger. My kids are going to make some mistakes, but they know I’ll be here for them every single time.

MH What are your main hopes for Jackson?

SW For all my kids I want exactly the same thing: I just want them to find someone they’re happy with, and to be happy. I really don’t care what job they do or if they find someone they’re happy with on the couch every night. Because success . . . it’s different for everyone. See, I think successful means being happy. If you can make a few dollars along the way and stay in a nicer house if that’s important to you, great, but sometimes a tent on the beach is kind of cool, too. Some people define success as having a lot of money or owning a big house. I don’t do that. I like that. But it doesn’t define me. Being a good parent. Raising three beautiful, well-rounded people that are superpolite. I feel I’ve had a lot of success as a father. My son’s a bit more of an introvert than his sisters. He’s quieter. Calmer. They’re all very switched on. They don’t miss a trick.

MH Jackson won over a lot of viewers on SAS Australia.

SW I was so proud of him when he did that. Because we sat down and talked about it before he did it.

He’s found the gym these last five years and put on a lot of muscle, and he said he wanted to push himself. And I said, “Mate, are you sure you want to put yourself on national TV for everyone to judge you?” He said, “I’ll be the youngest person on the show, but I want to get out of my comfort zone and have a crack”. I said, “You’ve got my blessing, I’m proud of you for trying and I’ll be there every step of the way”. I was in England when he got off the show, and it was 3am when I got this phone call from him, and he’s crying. His time was up but he was so happy with what he’d achieved.

And I just wanted to give him a hug, but I couldn’t. But it was nice that he wanted to ring me as soon as he got out.

“As well as father-son, we’re like best mates,” says Shane.

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MH What attitude did you take to his playing sport?

SW Oh, look, obviously part of me would have loved him to have a proper crack at it – but I never pushed him in anything. I would always just stand under a tree and watch him play footy or lawn bowls or cricket. Part of me sort of wishes I had been a bit more, “Right, this is what you’re doing and you’re going to have a proper try at something”.

Because I think he was an extremely good AFL footballer.

I’ve always believed that children should play a lot of sports, because there’s something about team sports that helps you enjoy other people’s success and rounds you off as a person. But I look at the way he’s turned out, such a wonderful young man. And it’s never too late.

I still think he could have a crack at AFL because he was so good.

MH What misunderstandings do you think everyday people have about fame?

SW Well, when I catch up with Chris Martin, who’s one of my best friends, we do something really simple. When I go down to his place in LA, we go for a walk up the hill. He’ll go, “Right, my five first”, and he’ll say the five things that are on his mind, whether that’s a block in music writing, whether it’s his children, whatever. And then on the way down, I’ll talk about my five things. And then we sit down and talk about it all. You talk about normal things like everyone else does. The thing is about friendship – real friends never judge. I don’t judge my friends and they don’t judge me. But they know I’m always there for them, and I know they’re there for me. And even if you haven’t spoken for a year, when you do catch up it’s like you saw them yesterday. There’s no, “Oh, you didn’t call”. They’re not friends.

MH We know the type.

SW There’s one last thing I’d like to say. I’ve never pretended to be something I’m not. I’ve always been true to myself.

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SON OF A GUN Being the only son of a sporting great is hard. Or is it?

“If you want to say I’m in a shadow,” says Jackson, “the shadow is really nice.”

Men’s Health: You’ve stacked on some beef?

Jackson Warne: In Year 12, when I started giving the gym a proper go, I was around 58 kilos. I’m now sitting at just under 80. The heaviest I got was 85, which was before SAS, but I felt a bit chubby.

MH How did you gain all that extra bulk?

JW What works for me is eating as much as possible and training six days a week. Because I was really, really skinny when I started.

Now I feel comfortable in my own skin. Because I know when I was younger and looking up at people who were a bit older and bigger than me, I’d go, “Oh my God, I wish I could be like that one day”, or, “I wish I could be as strong as them or as confident as them”. And now I sort of am that person. It’s like, I’m proud of myself for it.

INSTAGRAM: @JACKSONWARNE18

MH Is your training all weights?

JW The only training I did for the first two or three years was weights.

Hardly any cardio because I quit all sports when I finished school, just because there was too much running, too much soreness and all these niggles, and I wasn’t the best for the gym. At the start of this year, I started doing 10 kilometres on the bike, three or four times a week, just so I’m not always bulking and I stay mobile and healthy.

MH Away from the gym, what do you most love doing?

JW It used to be – well, it still sort of is – Lego and hanging out with my friends. But over the last three or four months, motorbike riding has been my new favourite. I got my license in March, and now I’m obsessed with it. I love being in the gym because every time I go in there, I come out a better version of myself. With the motorbike, it’s so free, and you can’t afford to make a mistake. I like having that 100 per cent concentration while riding.

MH Have you bought a bike?

JW Yep. MH What have you got?

JW It’s a Kawasaki Ninja 400.

MH What does your dad think about your new passion?

JW Well, he actually got a bike as well, because one day I said, “I’m going to get my motorbike license”, and he was like, “Right, okay, book it for the two of us”. So, we both went and got it together. And then about a month later, I was like, “I’m going to get my bike today”, and he got one the same day.

MH Are you working now?

JW At the moment, I’m just playing poker and following the circuits around Australia. Because at the moment, poker for me is working and I’m enjoying it. But I wouldn’t say it’s my job. It’s more a hobby.

MH Did that come via your dad?

JW I think so. I started playing when I was maybe nine or 10. And because Dad and I would always be going on holidays, in hotel rooms or on planes we’d always have a deck of cards. So, long story short, I love the game. When I was about 15 or 16, I started playing with his friends and started winning, and they were all like, “Hang on, you shouldn’t be winning yet – you’re too young”.

MH Do you have an ambition?

JW Down the track, I want to have my own gym and be a personal trainer and have my own podcast.

I want my own place where people can wake up in the morning, get in their car and get to my gym, and I’ll be greeting them at the front door.

Definitely before 30 I want to make that happen.

MH What made you want to do SAS Australia?

JW The primary motivation was that I love using my body, and I love seeing how far I can push things, whether it’s getting stronger or running further or doing anything physical. So, when this opportunity came up to do a military-style TV show, I couldn’t think of a better opportunity. I thought if I can get through this course and see how far I can push my body, I’ll be so much more confident in my everyday life and I’ll have such a better appreciation for everything, and that’s exactly what happened.

MH Because of who your dad is, would you say you’ve had a complicated relationship with sport?

JW I wouldn’t say complicated . . . I think pressure is the right word.

Subconscious pressure.

Growing up, just every time I had to play cricket, I knew that all eyeballs would be on me, which is why I sort of got turned off it straight away. But in saying that, I wasn’t actually all that interested in cricket.

I played a few games when I was 14, 15, and in my second or third game, I actually took a hat-trick bowling leggies. And Dad was there watching and he was, “Oh my God, he’s going to start playing cricket”, but then I played only two or three games after that. I played a lot of sports growing up. But I sort of found myself when I started going to the gym.

MH It’s a solitary pursuit, weight training. Are you happiest in your own head, in your own world?

JW Yeah, I’m at my happiest either when I’m in the gym or riding my motorbike. I’m quite content being on my own. Obviously, it’s nice hanging out with friends, but I don’t need external things to make me smile or laugh.

MH You’ve said previously that you’ve felt guilt about not following your dad into cricket.

Have you shaken that off?

JW I don’t feel it as much anymore now that I’ve spoken about it, but definitely a part of me . . . not regrets, but feels a little bit guilty that I didn’t give cricket a serious crack, because I could have been pretty good but I just wasn’t passionate about it. And as I’ve gotten older, no one is angry at me or sad about me not trying.

I can only do what I’m happy doing, and playing cricket didn’t make me happy.

MH What would you say about your dad as a dad?

JW I never know how to answer that question because I only see Dad as Dad. I can’t compare him to other parents. But growing up, I was

Jackson cops a talkingto from Ant Middleton on SAS Australia.

lucky enough to go to a great school [Brighton Grammar], with great friends in a great area. I went on a lot of nice holidays and I’ve got to meet some pretty cool people.

And I can always remember just smiling. So, I think he did a great job. And I’m proud of him.

MH You’ve said before that he’s not stuck in the past . . .

JW If you walk into our house, there’s not a room where all his trophies are or pictures of himself.

He’s focusing on now, on being present, so what’s on the walls are paintings, or photos of the family.

It’s not, “Look at this cricket ball or my baggy green”, because he knows what he did and we all know what he did. He doesn’t need materialistic stuff to make him feel better. He’s humble.

MH Your dad casts a long shadow. Have you found a way to step out from that shadow, or have you never looked at it that way?

JW I reckon while I was at school, I sort of looked at it that way. But you’ll only feel like you’re in a shadow if you choose to feel like you’re in a shadow. So, for me, all I had to do to switch that mindset was to realise that I didn’t choose who my dad was, and what he did was bloody awesome. Not many people can say that their dad did that, and it’s awesome when people come up to me and say, “Your dad is the reason why I bowl leg spin”, or, “Your dad makes me smile”. All these nice things. So, the shadow . . . if you want to say I’m in a shadow, the shadow is really nice.

The shadow is quite warm. And you can have a lot of fun in the shadow.

I’m very happy. I’m okay.

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An incredible passion for fitness runs in the Ferrigno family.

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FATHE RH OO D

FIT DAD COOL DAD This past year showed us that health, fitness and family are as important as ever. It’s something The Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno, and son, Lou Ferrigno Jr, know better than most BY

LOU SCHULER PHOTOGR APHY BY RYA N YOUNG

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OU FERRIGNO, 69, is a two-time Mr. Universe champion, a trainer and an actor (he’s the OG Hulk). His son, Lou Ferrigno Jr, 36, is also a bodybuilder, a trainer and an actor (he’s in four movies this year: Dreamcatcher, Final Frequency, Nightshade and Blackout). Here they discuss how they helped each other grow.

ON STARTING TRAINING

Lou Ferrigno: When I was young, I had the hearing issue and the speech impediment.

My father was abusive, so I was obsessed with power. I would read the Hulk comic books, the Superman comics. I fantasised about being stronger than anybody else. I just loved strength.

Lou Ferrigno Jr.: I saw a guy in a Ren & Stimpy cartoon who had these big pecs. Girls on the beach loved the pecs. So when I was 11 or 12, I said, “Dad, I want to work out. I want pecs”.

And who was I to turn to? Lou Ferrigno was my first training partner. Which is really cool.

LF When you were young, you were kind of overweight. But I never pushed you to train.

LFJ I wanted to make a change in my life.

I didn’t want to be made fun of anymore.

ON GETTING MADE FUN OF

LFJ One time, when I was about 11, our family

was at the Fashion Café in New York City. My foot was in a cast [from a PE accident at school], and I was limping. This table full of teenagers started laughing. One of them got up and was limping, making fun of me. So we get to our table and my sister says, “Dad, these boys were making fun of Louie!” And he goes [switching to his father’s voice], “Where are they?” Dad gets up and he walks over to this table of, like, seven or eight kids and a father. And he goes, “Which one of you made fun of my son?” They all freeze.

And he goes, “Don’t you ever make fun of my son again!”

LF I wasn’t really angry. I just knew I had to say something. Some of them, I’m pretty sure, peed in their pants. I’d forget how big I was. I remember walking around the street, I had to wear a 4XL T-shirt. People would get out of the way. It was like Moses coming. When I’d get upset, people would think I was becoming the Hulk. But I don’t see myself like that. When you’re that big, you don’t see yourself being that big. I see myself as a regular guy.

ON THE WAY THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH PHYSICAL FITNESS AND PARENTING EVOLVED

LF I wanted to give him my name because I felt

like he was destined for great things. I didn’t want him to go into bodybuilding, because bodybuilding is a very difficult sport. I wanted 74

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him to have a college education, because he was very smart.

LFJ There was definitely a time when I was like, “How am I going to live up to this?” He put this pressure on me, unjustly, because I didn’t choose any of this. His and my relationship wasn’t good. It took some time, and it took a lot of soul searching, but I came to see him as a teammate and a coach, rather than the opposition.

LF My wife is a former psychotherapist. I decided to go into therapy because I didn’t want to be like my father. My father never had the ability to say he was wrong, he was sorry . . . I didn’t want to be like him with my kids. That’s why I let my kids speak when they’re angry.

Sometimes I heard things I didn’t want to hear.

But I’d rather have them express.

ON LOU JR BECOMING AN ACTOR

LF Louie can do things I can’t do. He had

a different look. It all started when he saw me as the Hulk. [Lou Jr was three when his father filmed The Incredible Hulk Returns.]

LFJ That was one of my earliest memories. I thought I was just gonna see my dad. I knock on the motor home and he’s in full makeup. He looks at me, a giant green monster of a dude, and I start running down the beach, freaking out.

What I remember next is holding his hand and walking to set. He said, “Stay here”, and walked off. I looked down, and I had green paint on my hand. That’s when it all started to piece together.

LF Then I did a movie called Cage II [in 1994], and I gave Louie a small walk-on scene. He was very excited about that.

LFJ That was the moment when I knew I was going to be an actor the rest of my life. It happened in a literal instant.

ON COMPETING WITH EACH OTHER

LFJ My dad is just a big guy. Big heart, big

man, big hands, big altogether. I just didn’t match that. I just didn’t match that size in terms of bone structure, in terms of strength, in terms of anything physically. And he would remind me.

He was the Incredible Hulk, the essence of masculinity dialed up to 11. There were a couple instances when I thought if I couldn’t have that, I’d have nothing. But then there came a point [after college at USC] when I was studying the craft of acting, digging deep into what building a character is, that I realised I can do a lot of different things. So why compare when I just have to carve my own path?

LF I remember when you dieted really, really hard.

LFJ That was when I was around 19 and I did an eight-week shred. The routine was gruelling, and I was thinking about cheating, and my dad’s

like, “Hey, you can do it. You can get there”. I remember I was cleaning dishes, right before the end, and my dad starts poking me. I’m like, “What?” And he’s like, “Isn’t it amazing how the body changes?” He’d never been too excited about what I was doing. But I was peeled; four per cent body fat. He knocks on my door and he has a Polaroid camera, and he says, “Can I take some photos of you?” So I flexed.

LOU JR, ON THE PRESSURE TO PURSUE PURE STRENGTH

LFJ I did [feel pressure]. But when I started to

plateau, I was training with guys that were my size that were100, 200 pounds [45-90kg] heavier than me on the bench. I wasn’t going to lift that kind of weight. So I came to grips with the fact that I’m not as strong as my Incredible Hulk father. I don’t remember one time when he didn’t outlift me. Arms, he was quadrupling my weight.

Physically, in my life, there was always a higher power. I had to be humble because my father was bigger, stronger than anyone else. Nobody understands the sheer magnitude of his presence.

LF Louie was never into how much he could bench. I used to bench 560 [254kg]. He was always more interested in [being] athletic. You were faster than me.

ON BOTH BEING FITNESS TRAINERS

LFJ Out of college, I had to support myself

while I worked on my acting. I had a few very, very wealthy, well-known people. But it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Work ethic is built by doing things. Often a client knows they have to train, but they’re keeping a bad attitude the whole time. I’m like, “I’m here to help you. Fitness is for your health”.

LF Most of my clients listened to me because I told them, “I don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to waste my time”. They were scared of me.

One time I had a guy from the Marine Corps who said to me, “No matter how hard I train, I never get tired”. I said, “Really?” I made him do the leg press to failure. I had him do the leg extension to failure. And then squat to failure. After two sets, he went in the backyard and puked.

He came back and said, “Sorry I ever made that remark”.

LOU, ON NOT PUSHING LOU JR TOO HARD

LF It’s got to come from him. I never wanted to

force training.

LFJ I’m eternally grateful for that, because if you push your kids too hard, they’ll want to go the other way. He always let me find it for myself, and find the questions, and ask them. He was always a sounding board and a source of great knowledge for any question I had.

The Ferrignos re-create a 2003 shot from their home gym (left) almost 18 wellmuscled years later.

“IF YOU PUSH YOUR KIDS TOO HARD, THEY’LL GO THE OTHER WAY”

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NUT RI T ION

In Search of The Perfect Curry The world’s simmering love affair with curry spans centuries, yet the subcontinental staple is unjustly associated with overindulgence. Done well, it can be a fitness dish without equal, combining life-preserving spices with an array of vegetables, proteins and healthy carbs. We broke naan with the experts to learn their secrets. Here’s how to play with fire – without watching your nutrition goals burn PHOTOGR APHY BY

ROWA N FEE

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T

HE PERFECT CURRY IS, by definition, an elusive ideal. It means many things to a great many people.

To those from the Indian subcontinent, whence the curry purportedly originates, the very word denotes something quite distinct from the nosh many hanker after on a Friday night. In the UK, where chicken tikka masala has become a national dish, or here in Australia, where butter chicken reigns supreme, a curry is a symbol of indulgence and intemperance, of late nights and loosened waistbands.

Meanwhile, a moong dahl from the northern-Indian city of Lucknow, or a vegetable thoran from Kerala on the south-west coast, is a humble dish associated with sustenance and nourishment. Neither is loaded with enough chilli heat to anaesthetise a town.

But the search for perfection is not the same as the pursuit of authenticity. At least, not in Men’s Health’s book. We’re not

interested in purity so much as enjoying the best that all worlds have to offer. At their most succulent and blessedly moreish, the beef shin biryani from London’s Michelin-starred Gymkhana or the Kashmiri Naan at Sydney’s Surjit’s take some beating in the satisfaction stakes. But, tempered thoughtfully, a curry brimful of fresh spices, bright vegetables, multiple proteins, healthful fats and complex carbohydrates can be a veritable superfood bomb, served conveniently and enticingly in a sizzling karahi.

This is what we mean by perfection: something that delivers both on macro- and micronutrients, as well as a sense of cheat-day gluttony. Which is why we enlisted the help of Karam Sethi, one of the best curry chef-proprietors around today to do just that.

All you need to work out is whether you want a Jaipur IPA or a protein lassi to go with it.

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The Real CurryAtlas Each region’s approach to curry brings with it different flavours and nutritional benefits. When it comes to the subcontinent, you are where you eat

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Fittingly for a capital city, Delhi cuisine is a mishmash of influences: meat-heavy Persian kebabs; stuffed Mughlai parathas, made from flatbread, eggs, pickles and spices; plus, a burgeoning street-food scene specialising in sweet and savoury chaats. Delhi is also home to butter chicken, perhaps the closest Indian equivalent to the Brits’ beloved chicken tikka masala.

Regional Superfood: Good tandoori chicken is lean meat, marinated in low-fat buttermilk and spices, then cooked over a fierce, dry heat. There’s barely a healthier, tastier way to get your protein.

Head south-west and the menu changes with the landscape. A heavy, gravy-style dish isn’t what you want while the waves are crashing against the golden shoreline, which is why fish and rice are staples.

But Goa is one of the most diverse Indian regions, partly as a result of its time under Portuguese rule and its myriad religions. It’s also home of the original, vinegary, pork vindaloo.

Regional Superfood: Tamarind pulp is a very common souring agent in Goan cuisine. It also has excellent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, while helping to control blood sugar.

“Let me take you there,” sang Robert Plant on the classic Led Zep track “Kashmir”, and one can only assume it was on account of the lamb rogan josh dishes from the region. Meat and heat are often the order of the day in northernIndian cuisine, but Kashmir is also renowned for its dum aloo – a sweet and spicy potato curry made with tomatoes and yoghurt.

Regional Superfood: Dried Kashmiri chillies offer mild heat and a rich, vibrant, red colour to Indian dishes – as well as being packed with vitamin C, iron and magnesium, aiding metabolic health.

Further down the coast from Goa, Kerala is equally renowned for its seafood dishes, but also boasts great vegetarian ones – the broad mix owing to the large percentage of Christians and Muslims in the region. Rice is the common link, along with the liberal use of chillies, mustard seeds, curry leaves and coconut.

Regional Superfood: Coconut is king in Kerala – the name means “Land of Coconut Trees” – and is used in everything from fish curries to dry vegetable stir-fries. It’s also high in manganese, vital for bone health.

Hyderabad, in the state of Telangana, is best known in the 21st century for its role as a global tech hub. But for the purposes of this article, all you need to be concerned with is the Hyderabadi biryani, perhaps the most delicious rice dish in India. It might also be the country’s healthiest.

Regional Superfood: Indian saffron is harvested in Kashmir, but as an essential ingredient in the Hyderabadi biryani, it qualifies here. Expensive yes, but saffron helps protect cells from free radicals and has also been linked to antidepressant activity.

Delhi

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Goa

Kashmir

Kerala

Telangana

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PHOTOGRAPHY: DAN MATTHEWS, LOUISA PARRY, STUDIO 33, LUCKY IF SHARP; ILLUSTRATIONS: ANDREA MANZATI AT SYNERGY ART

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Spices of Life

They’re what gives a curry its addictive flavour, its mouth-watering kick, its alluring aroma and – let’s not forget – its nutritional firepower. Without spice, a curry would simply be a watery stew

Coriander Seeds Often paired with cumin, coriander is a common base for curry powders, lending an aromatic flavour, while acting as an emulsifier and thickener. Full of vitamin C, it has proven digestive and antiseptic properties.

New Yo Univer rk’s Sy racuse sit t ur mer y found that ic h c o m b a el p s t o related t agemuscle lo s s

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Cinnamon Bark 01/

Long before the advent of cinnamon lattes, Indians were using the spice to lend a sweet, peppery taste to savoury dishes.

It also helps reduce blood sugar and cholesterol levels when added to high-carb meals.

Cumin Seeds Bittersweet, pungent and earthy, cumin is a staple of most masala mixes. And contrary to curry’s reputation as a stomach irritant, it has been shown to help with bloating and improve the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome.

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Mustard Seeds

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Ginger Is it a herb?

Is it a spice?

The question is academic, for there’s barely a curry recipe that doesn’t begin with frying paste made from garlic and ginger. Ginger is almost medicinal, too, boosting immunity, curbing inflammation and aiding digestion.

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Fenugreek Often used to deepen tomato sauces and stews with a slight aniseed taste, fenugreek pairs well with braised vegetables such as okra and spinach.

It’s also anticarcinogenic.

One of the key spices in Indian cuisine, turmeric is used for its vibrant colour and nutritional properties. It’s antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and anti-fungal, as well as being a veritable vitamin supplement.

The piquant aroma and nutty flavour of mustard seeds are released quickly when fried.

Moreover, when these cannonballs encounter heat, they explode with nutrients such as selenium and magnesium, shown to lower high blood pressure and protect the heart.

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Some Like It Hot

Capsaicin – the compound that gives chillies heat – is burning with health benefits. Nutrition consultant Steve Grant has a few hot tips HOW “NUTRITIOUS” you can consider chillies to be depends on how much you’re willing to ingest. A chilli typically contains vitamin C, plus a pinch of vitamins A, K and B6.

However, it’s capsaicin that’s the all-star.

“It has been linked with pain relief and reduced inflammation and may help with rheumatoid arthritis,” says Grant. “Studies have shown beneficial effects on high blood pressure, stroke risk and heart disease. It might even help with certain cancers.” In fact, regular intake of chillies has been linked to a lower risk of all-cause mortality, according to research in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

As for capsaicin’s metabolism-raising effect?

It’s real, but tends to be exaggerated: a temporary 8 per cent jump in kilojoule burn is typical. “Perhaps the area that is of most interest is the impact it may have on appetite through its influence on [the satiety hormone] leptin,” says Grant. “It increases the sensation of fullness. Capsaicin has also been linked with an increase in a bacterium that helps to protect the gut microbiome from the ill effects of a high-fat diet.” Which isn’t quite a call for an extra-hot vindaloo . . . but it’ll do.

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The Coolest Kit More-advanced Indian cooking means keeping things traditional.

Our choice of utensils will serve up extra flavour at every step

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Beasts from the East You can stick with chicken if you like. There’ll always be chicken. But the robust flavours of a spicy curry lend themselves well to a more adventurous protein approach – and adventure spells nutritional benefit

BUCK THE TREND Small and stocky, with a tendency to bark, muntjacs are deer with a difference. Less gamey than roe venison but equally lean and rich in flavour, as well as higher in iron and riboflavin for muscle repair, muntjac suits the tandooris and biryanis very well.

02/

03/

Chicken is an excellent source of protein but, all too often, its breast chunks end up as dry, tasteless hunks in a sauce. Choose breasts on the bone to maintain moisture.

Or, try thighs, which offer succulence and B vitamins for your metabolism.

Many will know Jamaican curried goat; perhaps less so Indian goat curry.

Correct this. Lean, sustainable and tasting a little like lamb, only milder if using cabrito (animals less than three months old), goat is comparable to beef in protein, higher in iron and lower in cholesterol.

MURGH MOST FOWL

G.O.A.T

NUT RI T ION

Adding cu to food r r y spices im blood v proves essel f u n c t io n af ter one me just a l, r e N u t r i t p or t s io Journa n l

01/ Crush and Burn Turn your tempered spices and aromatics into a transformational curry paste.

Simply smash well with the pestle.

(Granite Pestle and Mortar, $44.95 templeandwebster.com.au)

02/ Handled Correctly Essentially a wok but with handles, the karahi is perfect for the low-to-medium cooking required for depth of flavour. The handles allow you to bring it to the table.

(Cast Iron Dish, $89 templeandwebster.com.au)

03/ In a Pinch A classic spice box will give you easy countertop access to pinches and smidges of spices aplenty.

(KitchenCraft 10-piece spice containers, $36 amazon.com.au)

04/ Temper Expectations The art of tempering – briefly roasting in oil to liberate essential oils – is the shortcut to elevating your Indian dishes.

(Shradha Trading Tadka Pan, $23 amazon.com.au)

1250 KJ

13g FAT

2g SAT FAT

13g SUGAR

04 05

The Perfect Gym Br0’s Lassi 0.5g SALT

04/

05/

We Aussies may think that we have a monopoly on the lamb chop as a key component of our meat-and-two-veg heritage. But this sweet, fatty cut (best eaten off the bone) is a Punjabi favourite, too. It’s packed with creatine, an amino acid that unlocks muscle energy.

White fish tends not to work too well in curries: its flavour is too delicate and its texture too flaky to stand up to bold aromatics and spices. What you need is either meaty or oily fish. Halibut certainly delivers on the former, while also boasting a high omega-3 profile.

LAMB OF WOD

DEEP FLAVOUR

TRADITIONALLY, the lassi is a yoghurt-based drink – the original milkshake, if you like. For a muscle-building, equally cooling alternative, nutritional guru Rob Hobson (@robhobsonnutritionist) has lowered the sugar of the OG and added protein, while flavouring it all with spices that directly benefit your body after exercise. Both turmeric and the healthy fats in the nuts help to quell inflammation in the body, while the muscle-relaxing magnesium (40 per cent of your RDI per serving) can aid muscle recovery and growth.

Place everything in a blender and blitz until smooth. Quaff.

INGREDIENTS (SERVES 1 BRO) • Cashew nuts, 30g • Water, 250ml • Whey protein isolate powder (unflavoured), 2tbsp • Ground turmeric, ½tsp • Ground cinnamon, ½tsp • Honey, 2tsp • Pinch of salt

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The Only

01/

You’ll Ever Need

(SERVES 4) • Greek yoghurt, 100g • Salt, to taste • Coconut oil, 2tbsp • Mustard seeds, 1tsp • Curry leaves, 5g • Asafoetida, ½tsp • Ginger, 1tsp, chopped • Shallots, 1tbsp, chopped

High-Protein Tempered Raita INGREDIENTS

From muscle-building mains to vitamin-packed sides, this curated menu from Karam Sethi is your st

METHOD Beat the yoghurt with a pinch of salt.

Heat the oil and sizzle the mustard seeds. Add curry leaves, asafoetida, ginger and shallot.

Sauté for 30 n add on top of the raita. Stir.

Highh flavour, llow carb

Rich in dair proteins

A natural T-level booster

02/

Power-Building Go t K INGREDIENTS (SERVES 4) • Kid shoulder mince, 160g • Ghee, 15ml • An onion, chopped • A bay leaf • Ginger, 10g, chopped • Garlic, 3 cloves, chopped • Green chilli, chopped • Turmeric powder, 1tsp • Red chilli powder, 1tsp • Salt, to taste • Tomato, chopped • Fresh methi leaves, 50 • Garam masala, 1tsp • Coriander, 20g, chopped

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METHOD Leaner than lamb, goat is rich in zinc, which helps to build testosterone as well as maintaining immune health.

Heat the ghee in a pan and add the onions and bay leaf.

Throw in ginger, garlic and green chilli, then add the mince, stirring until lightly browned. Add the spices and salt, and cook for five minutes. Stir in the tomato and reduce the heat to a simmer. Add the methi, mix in the garam masala and cook for a minute. Add coriander. Serve with paratha bread.

3/

ean Muscle ri Gassi DIENTS S 4)

hicken • Chicken (on or off 900g • Salt, te • wder, a pinch • Ginger paste, to taste • Garlic paste, o taste

R ice e a t er s from h benefit ig h m a g ne s i u m a n er d i ro says Fo o d a nd n , Nu t r i t i o S c i e nc n es

For the ggasssi ppast asste ast • Tamarind concentrate, 1tsp • Desiccated coconut, 65g • Coconut oil, 1tbsp • Red chillies, 10 dr • Black 1tsp • Coriander seed, 1½tsp • Cumin seed, 1tsp • Fenugreek seed, ½tsp • Coconut milk, 300ml And the rest • Coconut oil, 2tbsp • Finely minced garlic, 5 cloves • Large onion, chopped • Tomato, finely chopped

MEET M E THO T HOD Ru R ub the meat with salt and marinate in the spices. Now, for your paste: place the tamarind and dried coconut in a blender In a tea the remaining spices, one by one. Grind to a paste in a blender with half the coconut milk and the tamarind mix. Fry the garlic and onion in oil until brown.

Add the tomato, chicken and spice paste; cover and cook until the chicken is almost done. Add the remaining coconut milk, then simmer for 15 minutes.

NUT RI T ION

Packed with vital minerals

04/

Coastal Bhindi INGREDIENTS (SERVES 4) • Coconut oil, 2tbsp • Coriander seed, 1tsp • Fenugreek seed, 1tsp • Fennel seed, 2tsp • A dried red chilli • A green chilli, chopped • Garlic, 2 cloves, chopped • Okra, 250g, cut into roundels • Turmeric powder, 1tsp • Salt, to taste • Coriander, 1tbsp, chopped • Coconut, 20g, grated

In Search of the

METHOD Heat the oil in a pan, then add the coriander, fenugreek, fennel and red chilli. Once they start to crackle, add your green chilli and garlic, then stir until the garlic turns golden. Throw in the okra – a rich source of bone-strengthening vitamin K – and cook for five minutes. Add turmeric and salt, and stir until cooked. r ut.

Perfect Rice

by Toby Wiseman Too often, a curry is let down by soggy white mush. I benefited from being given a masterclass in perfect rice 20 years ago by a little-known master chef: Wendy Lancaster from Wimbledon (the mother of an ex). These are her crets. Keep them

Strengtheens your heart h

ep 1 Wash your basmati rice until the starch is removed and the water runs clear. Take a medium saucepan, tip in the rice, add water slowly until it’s twice the level of the rice. You don’t need a lot.

ep 2

05/

thletic performancee enhancer

Bo No INGRE (SERVE • Baby spinach, 200g • Ghee, 4tbsp • Cumin seeds, 1tsp • Dried red chillies, 2 • Garlic, 2 cloves, chopped • Ginger, 1tsp, chopped • Salt, to taste • Lemon juice, a squeeze

ce on a hob b uncovered a high heat. Boil until the water has all but disappeared but the rice is still moist. Turn the heat down, cover with a tea towel and lid and leave for 10 minutes.

06/

Cardio Lover’’s umin Pilau METHOD More than just a way to get your greens in, spinach contains phytosteroids, which have been linked to improved muscle mass and function. In a pan, heat the ghee until hot, then add the cumin seeds and red chillies until you can hear them crackling. Throw in the garlic and ginger and cook for a minute. Add the spinach, salt and lemon juice; the citrus makes spinach’s iron easier to absorb. Cover and cook for five minutes, until the spinach has wilted.

INGREDIENTS (SERVES 4-6) • Basmati rice, 250g • Ghee, 1tbsp • Cumin seeds, 2tsp • Bay leaves, 2 • Green cardamom pods, 4, crushed • Black peppercorns, 1tsp • Cloves, 4 • Cinnamon, 1-2 sticks, broken • An onion, chopped • Turmeric powder, 1tbsp • Water, 450ml

METHOD Wholegrain basmati rice ontains a useful 3g of fibre rving, along with B d manganese, gulate blood sugar. Soak it in water and set aside for 30 minutes. Heat the ghee in a pan and, once hot, add cumin, bay leaf, cardamom, black peppercorns, cloves and cinnamon, until they’re crackling. Add the onions and, when brown, the rice, turmeri and water Cover and cook for 15 minutes until all the water is absorbed.

ep 3 th i th h ith to fluff it up and serve. If it’s still al dente, add a drop more water from the kettle and replace the lid, but resist the temptation to disrupt the rice until it is cooked.

ep 4 e’s the best bit: your p ly be lacquered with r d if t k ith Fill it with cold water and leave for a few hours. Drain and your pan will be completely clean.

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STRONGER MINUTES TO

NO TIME FOR A TRIP TO THE GYM? NO PROBLEM. EARN RESULTS WITH THESE FOUR MICRODOSE BODY BLASTS YOU CAN DO ANYTIME, ANYWHERE TO GET FITTER AND MOVE BETTER IN ONLY SEVEN MINUTES A DAY BY

DA N GIORDA NO, EBENEZER SAMUEL , JA HKEEN WA SHINGTON AND JES WOODS

PHOTOGR APHY BY

W

JEFF A LLEN

HETHER YOU call it the Quarantine 5 or the COVID 10, many of us gained a few extra kilos over the past year as our routines got turned upside down and stress levels skyrocketed along with binge drinking and Netflix marathons. For whatever reason, it just seemed harder to find the time or the motivation to exercise. We’re here to fix that, as long as you can find seven minutes. That’s all you need to battle (yes, battle) through a light-speed workout that’ll supercharge your body more than you think is possible. No, a seven-minute fitness frenzy won’t swole you up like Chris Hemsworth, but it can burn fat and build strength. “Some movement always beats no movement,” says fitness writer Ebenezer Samuel, “especially if you’re pushing your limits.”

So why seven minutes (instead of five or 10)? The key is intensity, according to research from the Human Performance Institute in Orlando. In a study published in the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal in 2013, scientists at the institute showed that a seven-minute workout protocol built around high-intensity

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circuit training (HICT) can be effective. The authors of the paper created a workout that combined total-body aerobic and resistance training in a fast-moving circuit, and their busy clients thrived, improving their strength and endurance while burning fat. And yes, you could exercise for even less time, because workouts as short as four minutes can deliver benefits. But you’d have to train impossibly hard, at an intensity even greater than 100 per cent of your VO2 max (a measure of your cardiovascular output). Meanwhile, a sevenminute session elicits a metabolic response while letting you go at a more manageable 90 per cent of your VO2 max.

These four workouts remix HICT principles with fun moves that help you hit a host of fitness goals. Two of them will blast fat and build strength, and one crushes your cardio fitness. The fourth focuses on recovery and relaxing tight muscles. “Motion is lotion,” says trainer Dan Giordano, who designed the recovery session. Every workout keeps you moving for nearly every second of your seven minutes. Do any of these once per day, or to overclock your fitness, do it twice or even three times per day.

BODYWEIGHT

BLASTER Rev your heart rate while building strength and athleticism with this session from JAHKEEN WASHINGTON (pictured here), US Men’s Health’s 2020 Top Trainer winner and the owner of JTW Fit

F IT NE S S

Shirt and shorts by Ten Thousand.

DIRECTIONS: Warm up with a 30-second plank, 10 reverse lunges and 10 jumping jacks. Then set a timer for 7 minutes.

Do 10 rounds (yes, really) of the first 4 exercises below. In the first round, do 10 reps of each movement, then do 9, and so on, until you’ve done 1 rep of each move in the final round. Have time left? Perform a hollow hold until time is up.

SQUAT

Start standing, feet shoulder-width apart, abs tight. Bend at the knees and hips, lowering until your thighs are parallel to the floor.

Stand, squeezing your glutes. That’s 1 rep.

HALF BURPEE

Start in push-up position.

Keeping your hands on the floor, jump your feet forward. Remove your hands from the floor. Reverse the moves to return to the start.

That’s 1 rep.

REVERSE FLY

Stand with your torso at a 45° angle with the floor, arms hanging naturally.

This is the start. Raise your arms until they form a T with your torso (pictured). Lower them.

That’s 1 rep.

PUSH-UP

Start in push-up position, hands slightly wider than shoulder width.

Bend at the elbows and shoulders, lowering your chest to within 2cm of the floor. Press back up. That’s 1 rep.

FINISHER

HOLLOW HOLD

Lie on your back, arms and legs outstretched, lower back pressed into the floor. Raise your shoulder blades and thighs by 2-3cm. Hold until time expires.

Check out more of Washington’s workouts in 20-Minute Metcon at watch.alloutstudio.com/20-minute-metcon.

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F IT N E SS

SINGLE-DUMBBELL

DESTRUCTION Grab a dumbbell (or kettlebell!) and never put it down in this workout from EBENEZER SAMUEL DIRECTIONS: Warm up with a 30-second plank, 10 reverse lunges and 10 jumping jacks. Then set a timer for 7 minutes. Use a medium-weight dumbbell or kettlebell.

Do the moves below as a circuit. Do not rest between sets; battle to keep moving for the entire 7 minutes. Keep score and see how many rounds you can complete.

Tank and shorts

by Rhone; sneakers by Nike.

PASS-THROUGH REVERSE LUNGE

Stand holding a weight in your right hand, core and glutes tight. Step back with your left leg, then bend at the knees and hips, lowering until your left knee is 2cm from the floor and your right knee is at a 90° angle. Pass the weight under your right thigh (pictured) to your left hand.

Press through your right heel and stand up. Repeat on the other side. That’s 1 rep; do 10.

OFFSET ROMANIAN DEADLIFT TO ROW

Hold a weight in your right hand at your hip, core and glutes tight. Keeping your hips and shoulders square to the front, push your butt back, lowering your torso as far as you can without rounding your back. Pause, then row the weight to your rib cage. Lower it. Stand and squeeze your glutes. That’s 1 rep; do 8 per side.

PLANK PULL-THROUGH TO ROW

Get in push-up position, hands directly below shoulders, core and glutes tight, feet slightly apart, a weight just outside your right hand. Keeping your abs tight, reach across and grab the weight with your left hand, pulling it beneath your left shoulder. Row it to your rib cage; hold for 1 count, then lower it. Repeat on the other side. That’s 1 rep; do 10.

SINGLE-ARM PUSH PRESS

Start standing, a weight held in your right hand at your shoulder. Bend your knees slightly, then explode upward, straightening your arm and driving the weight overhead as you do so. Lower the weight to your shoulder. That’s 1 rep; do 10 per side.

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“A 7-MINUTE SESSION ELICITS A METABOLIC RESPONSE WHLE LETTING YOU GO AT 90 PER CENT OF YOUR V02 MAX”

LIGHT-SPEED

SPRINT Running coach JES WOODS of the Brooklyn Track Club pushes you through a speed session that’ll smoke legs and lungs DIRECTIONS: Warm up with a 30-second jog, then jump into the workout. Breathe deeply during the 30-second recovery windows, and go hard when it’s time to run.

Run at a moderate pace, about 80 per cent of your max effort.

0:00–2:00 Walk or jog to recover.

2:00–2:30 2:30–4:00

Run a bit harder than you did at the start. You’re running for only 90 seconds this time.

Walk or jog to recover.

Run hard. You’re running for only 60 seconds, so go all out.

4:00–4:30 Walk or jog to recover.

4:30–5:30 5:30–6:00 6:00–6:30 6:30–7:00

Shirt, shorts and sneakers

by On.

Here’s your big finish. For 30 seconds, run as fast as you possibly can.

7 To Strong Challenge Go to www.mh7tostrongchallenge.com for seven 7-minute workouts featuring our finest trainers!

Walk or jog to recover.

Enjoy the sweat.

MAD

MOBILITY This total-body flow session from trainer DAN GIORDANO, is pure back, shoulder, and hip bliss DIRECTIONS: Work from one move to the next, resting as needed.

Take your time and take a deep breath at each stretch. Do 2 rounds.

SCORPION STRETCH

Tank and shorts by Nike; sneakers by APL.

Lie on your stomach, arms out to the side.

Lift your right foot; reach it over your left leg, aiming to touch your foot to the floor (pictured). Hold.

Return to the start. Repeat on the other side.

HIP ADDUCTOR ROCK

Sit on your shins, then shift your right foot out to the right, knee straight.

Bend at the waist and place your hands on the floor. Gently rock backward, stretching the inner thigh of your straight leg.

BOW AND ARROW

Kneel on your right knee, left foot on the floor.

Place your hands together straight out in front of you. Pull your left elbow back as far as you can, as if shooting a bow and arrow. Extend your arm. That’s 1 rep; do 8 per side.

SHOULDER WINDMILL

Kneel on your right knee, left foot on the floor. Put your left hand on the floor. Point your right arm at the ceiling, stretching your chest. Return to the start.

That’s 1 rep; do 8 per side.

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Confidence Trick: Can tweaking your face do more than mask over cracks?

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HE ALTH

Just A Little Prick In an uncertain world, a new wave of non-invasive cosmetic procedures promises to give white-collar men a

for the boardroom and – perhaps more importantly – the Zoom call. Don’t have a face that fits the corporate ideal?

You can fix that for less than the price of a bespoke suit … But should you?

BY

FINL AY RENWICK PHOTOGR APHY BY PE TER CROW THER

SEPTEMBER 2021

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A single syringe of dermal filler at Dr Wassim Taktouk’s clinic costs between $700 and $1100.

“You might need three or four for a jawline,” says Taktouk, “so it can get expensive.”

A general practitioner-turned“aesthetic expert”, Taktouk, who is 43 years old and has clear eyes and clearer pores, specialises in non-invasive cosmetic procedures – injections used to reshape facial features. He has a respectable 17,000 Instagram followers and a month-long waiting list. Taktouk can change the way you look, and he can do it without making an incision, or requiring you to take even a single day off work to recuperate.

“Everyone wants a squaredoff chin and sharp jawline,” says Taktouk during a Zoom call – that most facially exposing mode of business communication.

A hit of Botox can be injected to eradicate “male resting face” – the crease that forms in between your eyebrows as the gravity of middle age exerts its pull. “Eyes are big for us, too,” he says. “A small syringe beneath the socket can make it look like you’ve just had a really good night’s sleep.”

Male clients have started to bring in photographs of celebrity bone structures. Ryan Reynolds’s jaw is a popular choice. “As we age, there is a loss of the so-called ‘superhero’ jawline,” he says.

“I replace the lost volume in this area, alongside the chin, back to its former glory.”

Using an artist’s palette of different syringes, Taktouk offers the option of a “power profile”, in which Teoxane – a thick, hyaluronic acid filler – is injected through the skin and onto the bone of the jaw and chin, altering the shape for up to two years. A “MoT” top-up 90

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can be administered in around half an hour. Men often visit for treatment during their lunch breaks. Recently, the doctor has noticed a trend: “There are more and more professional men calling up”.

The phenomenon of men turning to cosmetic procedures is not particularly new. Once viewed as youth-chasing and feature-freezing solutions for the foreheads and lips of imageconscious women, Botox and fillers can now be found lodged beneath the skin of high-flying male lawyers, financiers and property developers.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in the past 20 years, there has been a 99 per cent leap in men receiving injectables such as anti-wrinkle formulas, like Botox, and fillers.

A 2019 report published by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) found that men now want to look “tweaked” rather than “tucked”.

These “tweaking” procedures, referred to as “masculinisation fillers”, are injectables – synthetic hyaluronic acids that mimic what our bodies naturally produce – for the jawline, chin and neck areas.

What is new is the range and convenience of the procedures available and the speed at which patients recover. Also, crucially, the rationale. In January last year, the Washington Post reported on a boom in cosmetic procedures for men who work in Silicon Valley. “Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, people didn’t worry too much about how you looked,” said one 48-year-old interviewee who was considering having cosmetic work done. “If people in the workplace know you’re older than everyone else,

it can hurt you in terms of what roles you get.”

A Robb Report article published last August under the headline “Why Men are Turning to Cosmetic Procedures for a Competitive Edge in the Boardroom” described “nips, tucks and injections” as having become “stealth weapons to deploy in a Darwinian battle for corporate survival”. An interviewee who had recently undergone a facelift and nose job explained: “I play in the hi-tech and start-up world, where older individuals will be passed over. I simply aligned my outer appearance with my inner perspective”. Now, cosmetic enhancements aren’t just about vanity. They’re about success.

THE ZOOM BOOM If a scriptwriter were to conjure up a telegenic plastic surgeon for a new prime-time drama, then he might look a bit like Dr Patrick Mallucci. He appears on my Zoom screen wearing charcoal scrubs with coiffed, salt-and pepper-hair and a handsome, chiselled face set off by a neat moustache. If he has had any work done himself, it’s hard to tell.

A world-renowned surgeon who once researched “the perfect breast” in a study compiled from the opinions of 600 women and 600 men, he is at the forefront of non-invasive treatment for men.

His “Mallucci Man” concept is a full wellness/cosmetic package, ranging in price from $2800 to $9000, that was created after he noticed a growing number of men visiting his clinic.

“There’s no doubt that looks are as important in the workplace to men as they are to women,” says Mallucci. “It’s also true

HE ALTH

Facing success: Men are enhancing job prospects with a “CEO facelift”.

COSMETIC TWEAKS: THE FIGURES

$1bn 25% 4/10 14%

Annual spend on cosmetic surgery in Australia - Cosmetic Physicians College of Australasia

The increase in dermal filler injections in Australia, according to the CPCA.

The proportion of men who report feeling unhappy with their appearance, according to a YouGov survey.

The rise in anti-wrinkle injections in Australia in 2020, according to the CPCA.

that as men start to mature, the subliminal threat from younger colleagues coming through the ranks is a driver for the senior guys to keep looking good.”

To stave off the threat of junior insubordination in the C-suite, a client visiting Mallucci might opt for a shot of Juvéderm, a hyaluronic acidbased filler that targets lines and wrinkles, restores sunken cheeks and plumps up the skin.

Or perhaps he’d prefer a hit of the slow-releasing “booster” treatment Profhilo, awarded the prize for “best injectable product in Europe”. An injectable moisturiser, it promises to improve the texture of your skin for a smoother, youngerappearing you.

Or, if the problem is a swelling waistline, then there’s the option of CoolSculpting, a non-invasive fat-reduction procedure known as cryolipolysis. It works by clamping a roll of fat between two panels that cools the targeted area to a freezing temperature; these cells break down and gradually leave the body after a few weeks. It has been performed more than seven million times worldwide. “There is no downtime, no bruising and it is often a great alternative to liposuction for those who lead busy lives, or are unable to make the gym as regularly as they would like,” Mallucci says.

Along with highlighting society’s obsession with baking, toilet paper and doom, a curious side effect of the pandemic that Mallucci has observed is how it has forced many of us to reckon, unrelentingly, with the way we look. Meetings are conducted over video calls in which we spend the duration peeking at the little window broadcasting our facial flaws, every blemish and hint of a receding hairline visible, while your colleagues’ connection drops in and out and a client’s cat climbs onto his keyboard. In our harshly lit bedrooms, kitchens and home offices, insecurities are laid bare.

It’s been such a phenomenon that SEPTEMBER 2021

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Imperfect science: human faces are unique, so results can be unpredictable.

“There is an increasing pressure for men to look masculine” BAAPS has given it a name, “the Zoom Boom”, and assigned a set of ethical guidelines.

Waves of dissatisfied people booked appointments to fix facial quibbles that had become intolerable during these hours spent gazing into a computer screen, self-examining. “People couldn’t go on holiday; they couldn’t do much, really,” says Mallucci. “So, many decided to spend that money on themselves.

To treat something.”

It’s one thing using cosmetic enhancement to hang on to the job you have, but what about putting yourself in line for a better one? In a 2008 study titled “The Face of Success: Inferences from Chief Executive Officers’ 92

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Appearance Predict Company Profits”, professors at Tufts University in Massachusetts presented 100 psychology undergraduates with the head shots of the CEOs of the 25 highest- and 25 lowest-ranking companies on the Fortune 500 list, and found a link between certain facial characteristics and expectations of leadership competence (at the time, 49 of those 50 CEOs were men).

Overwhelmingly, the leaders who scored highest in categories such as “likeability” were those who ran the most profitable companies. If you want to convince people you’re CEO material, appearances count.

There are now procedures

marketed directly to those who want a Fortune 500 face.

At the Center for Advanced Facial Plastic Surgery in Beverly Hills, Dr Babak Azizzadeh has championed the “CEO facelift”, which uses endoscopic techniques – tiny incisions behind the ears – so it leaves behind no tell-tale scarring. “When you think of a chief executive officer’s responsibilities as a communicator, decision-maker, manager and leader, you realise a CEO can be, quite literally, the face of a company,” reads the centre’s website. “Wouldn’t any potential stakeholder want that face to be an impeccable representation of the company?”

Across the country in New York, Dr Douglas Steinbrech of Manhattan Plastic Surgery for Men offers a suite of procedures he calls “Boardroom Executive”, encompassing eyelid and neck lifts, highdefinition liposculpting and jaw re-contouring. The clinic’s website lists reasons you might consider its Boardroom Executive option, which include: “You’re at the top of your game and your body should be, too”; “Your assistant says you look tired” and “You deserve it”.

The trend, says Dr Helena Lewis-Smith, a senior research fellow at the University of West England’s Centre for Appearance Research in Bristol, has reached worrying heights. “We as a society teach men that, in order to be successful, you have to be attractive,” she says. (It almost goes without saying that this is something that women have had to contend with for years.) “There is an increasing pressure for men to look masculine, to develop certain traits that we know as indicators of success. Men must be tall and have hair on their head. You never see a balding man on Love Island, do you?

“With something like fillers, it is now more affordable, and you can get it done in your lunch break,” she continues. “There definitely needs to be stronger regulation around these noninvasive procedures.”

COUNSEL OF PERFECTION For Michael, a thirtysomething company director, one of the big sells for getting a nose job (other than the fact that “from the side, my nose looked bad, really bad”) was the speed at which even this significant surgical procedure could be done. For $15,000, Michael bought a new nose courtesy of surgeon Alex Karidis; eight days after his surgery and one day after removing the bandages, Michael was back at work. It was a subtle but clear modification. “I had a board meeting that day and nobody knew,” he says. “People I have

HE ALTH

worked with for years couldn’t tell that I’d had surgery, which is how I wanted it to be. It’s changed me as a person,” he adds.

There are times when Karidis feels like a counsellor. “I have to be a bit of a psychologist,” he says with a knowing laugh.

There was the architect who brought in blueprints of what he felt would be the Platonic ideal of his nose. “These were CAD [computer-aided design] drawings! Elevations and projections. I thought, ‘God, how am I going to live up to this guy’s expectations?’ I was looking at his nose in really fine detail, and it’s hard because surgery isn’t an exact science. There’s swelling, scar tissue and movement. You have to make sure that people understand the risks. There’s a lot of baggage and, as a doctor, you have to carry some of that baggage for people.”

Operating out of a wing of the private Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth, Karidis, originally from Montreal, opened his practice in 1997 and is now one of the most highly regarded plastic surgeons in the world. He has jet-black hair and a friendly, transatlantic accent. His surgery is like a little pocket of Los Angeles, with walls painted matte black and decorated with quotes from Coco Chanel, Katharine Hepburn and Keats: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever . . . ” A very blonde woman teeters into the surgery, her face hidden behind a mask and enormous black sunglasses. She considers me for a moment before strutting past a wall emblazoned with the words: “Karidis: Enhancing Your Identity”.

“There are many recent seismic changes in surgery,” says Karidis. “The techniques have improved, the speed of recovery, and as a result people are more likely to embrace it. If you say you can go back to work in a couple of days rather than weeks, it’s more appealing for a professional man. Demographic-wise, we see absolutely all walks of life. It’s truly been democratised.”

Still, he sounds a cautionary note. “You have to balance what can be achieved, as people are constantly trying to push the boundaries. You know there are these biceps implants?

I mean, you can do that, but what I say to people is, ‘Why don’t you do it naturally? You’re a fit individual, you weren’t born with a congenital issue. Go to the gym!

Why do you want me to do it? Are you lazy?’ I can do that, but if you’re too lazy to do curls, I’ll say, ‘Stuff you, mate’.

“Men see the world opening up and think they can have and do anything, but there’s a lot more to it,” Karidis adds.

“There are nuances that you can never eradicate.”

A NEW, BETTER YOU On an unremarkable October day, I walk past Rejuv Lab and London Aesthetic Medicine. A woman cooks in a tiny kitchenette visible from the pavement. There are thin women in leather trousers, convertible Porsches and two men in blue suits and white shirts loudly discussing a divorce as they walk briskly past.

Inside number 40, I wait for Dr Riccardo Frati, specialist consultant plastic surgeon at Harley Surgery London.

The reception area is densely carpeted, with red velvet chairs, fake flowers and ornate chandeliers. I could be in a Geneva hotel, or purgatory, or a branch of Swiss assisted dying society Dignitas.

I am shown upstairs to Frati’s office, which has an enormous, vaulted ceiling and more chandeliers; the back wall is a wide window facing onto the street below. The doctor gestures towards two fat leather armchairs opposite his high, wooden desk. “Please, sit.”

With 255,000 followers on Instagram and regular daytime TV appearances, Frati is both a celebrity cosmetic surgeon and an expert in his field. He has treated Love Island contestants, actors and oligarchs. One of his specialities is vibration

y at a technique using small incisions and an ultrasound probe to eradicate fat, before the muscle tissue around the abdomen is expertly sculpted. A six-pack appears where there wasn’t one before.

“There has been a lot of demand for this from male patients,” says Frati, speaking with a methodical Italian accent, each vowel carefully enunciated.

He estimates that one in every five patients he now sees is a man. “Everything changed with Instagram,” he adds, tapping a Bic ballpoint pen between words to emphasise his point.

Illuminated by the light from the window behind his desk, he appears like a well-nourished Roman god, albeit with a Rolex and a blue Ralph Lauren Oxford shirt, the gatekeeper to one’s every outwardly facing desire.

“This wasn’t the case 10, 20 years ago. Now, it’s all about the face and the body.”

Frati lists the most popular surgeries: chin implants, eye-bag reduction, facelifts, fillers like Profhilo used as part of a cocktail of non-surgical injections, nose jobs, hydrofacials and gastric bands. He predicts a revolution in the near future, as stem cell treatments are introduced into the cosmetic arena, promising a specialised injection that causes body cells to repair themselves; truly, the elixir of youth. “This will make things dramatically different,” he says, his eyes darting around the room. “We are in the early stages of it, but I am confident that we will get there.”

Later that day, I am sent a testimonial by an anonymous patient who saw Frati this year, a 32-year-old director who opted for Vaser liposuction to shift some stubborn stomach fat. The director’s wife recommended Frati to him after she’d undergone some cosmetic work herself. “We may even be back for more!” he says.

I ask the man how it has impacted his professional and

HIGH MAINTENANCE hetic facial upkeep ng off in Australia. ng to a report on alian Aesthetic rket by Mordor “the pressure n video calls n has in demand dures ere are the average costs for facial treatments according to Choice • Fillers – $600-$800 • Botox – $6500-$12,000.

“The price for a single unit is about $9–15. To treat the forehead you’ll need roughly 10 to 20 units, costing between $90 and $300”.

Cosmetic surgery is not covered by Medicare.

Similarly, procedures solely to improve physical appearance may not be covered by insurance.

personal life. Does he feel like a better person? “I feel much more masculine and confident,” he writes back, “so I would say . . . yes.”

Sitting in his big chair, behind his big desk, tapping his little pen, Frati puts it more straightforwardly.

“Most people are professionals, and they want to look better,” he says.

“Even very successful managers or lawyers might not have confidence in their professional or social lives, so they want to regain confidence and looks.

People want to look better, they want to look fresher, and they want to look younger.

Now, they can.”

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Comfort eating needn’t mean self-sabotage if you’re searching for solace in the right places. Applying nutritional principles to ease anxiety and restore equilibrium, these hearty dishes will help you eat away stress before it does the same to you

THE INGREDIENTS

BY

SCA RLE T T WRENCH

PHOTOGR APHY BY

SUN LEE

1/ Duck legs

2/ Haricot beans

3/ Serrano chilli

4/ Wild salmon

5/ Chicken liver

6/ Potatoes

7/ Radicchio

Tryptophan, an amino acid that Hobson says “promotes relaxation”, is often associated with turkey – but kJ for kJ, wild duck is a superior source.

These mild and buttery beans are a source of magnesium, which “binds with receptors in the brain to quieten anxiety”, explains Hobson.

Chillies are a rich source of vitamin C, says ayy hel helpp ddnflflaam amm mmati mm mati ation at oon. nn.

Col CCo oold-w dswi swimm sw wiimmi m nngg mm and ndd DDH HA faats t, Hobbsonn saays ys “he “he “h hl to reg reeg eguula ullaattee yo you oour levvels ellss ooff do el doppam paam amiine ne n and an and nd se s rro rot otoniin” n”. ”.

Organ meats are an excellent source of B vitamins, says Anyia. Liver is also high in iron, which helps to combat feelings of fatigue.

Your spuds are another source of sleepsupporting magnesium, says Anyia. Its potassium also helps to lower high blood pressure.

This spicy leaf provides vitamin C and manganese, which work together to convert amino acids into calming neurotransmitters, says Anyia.

1

7 4

5 2

3 6

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MEN’S HE ALTH

NUT RI T ION

“RESILIENCE” has become something of a mantra over the past year. But while mindfulness and positive thinking have their place, there are days when you would

rather indulge in a little old-school selfcare. These plates of feel-good gluttony are for those days. We recruited two top-level nutritionists – Rob Hobson and Anne

Anyia – and partnered them with a team of leading chefs to curate a menu that’s both nourishing for the soul and beneficial for your brain’s chemical balance.

8/ Egg yolk

9/ Red wine

10/ Lamb chops

11/ Avocado

12/ Walnuts

13/ Anchovies

14/ Pork sausage

“This tops up your vitamin D, which plays a role in mood regulation,” Anyia says. Many of us fall short of this in winter and early spring.

Resveratrol, a compound found in wine, has anti-stress effects, blocking the expression of an enzyme related to mood in the brain.

“Lamb is a reliable source of B vitamins, for a healthy brain and nervous system,” says Anyia. A deficiency of B12 has been linked to depression.

“This fruit is high in vitamin B6 and magnesium, which plays a key role in the production of serotonin,” explains Hobson.

A top source of omega-3, which “helps to improve mood”, says Anyia.

These also supply manganese, which balances your blood sugar levels.

These oily fish are rich in selenium, low levels of which were linked to depressive symptoms by a study at New Zealand’s University of Otago.

As well as amino acids, pork is a source of thiamin, which converts glucose into brain fuel.

And let’s not forget that enjoyment counts for a lot, too.

11 9

13

12

10 8

14

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BITE-SIZE TIP Aim to get 30g of protein per meal.

“Your body uses amino acids to build the neurotransmitters that help you feel relaxed,” says Anyia.

1 Lamb Rack Niçoise When long days are dragging you down, this warm salad from Maison François will put the spring back in your step – MATTHEW RYLE Head chef at Maison François

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MEN’S HE ALTH

THE INGREDIENTS

THE METHOD

(SERVES 2) • NEW POTATOES, 8 • GREEN BEANS, 115G • FREE RANGE EGGS, 4 • CHERRY TOMATOES, 50G • RED ONION, FINELY SLICED • GARLIC, ½ CLOVE, GRATED • A RADICCHIO • EXTRAVIRGIN OLIVE OIL, 100ML • RED WINE VINEGAR, 3TBSP • PARSLEY, 2TBSP, CHOPPED • CHIVES, 2TBSP, SNIPPED • LAMB RACK, 4 BONES, FRENCHTRIMMED • BLACK OLIVES, 20, PITTED • BASIL LEAVES, 8, TORN • ANCHOVIES, 6

Start with the veg prep. Boil the potatoes until tender, then set them aside. Boil the green beans for five minutes, so they retain some bite, then plunge them into ice water and set those aside, too. Boil the eggs for six minutes before halving them.

Eggs provide choline, an important micronutrient that is thought to help regulate mood and memory.

Halve the potatoes, then gently warm in a small dash of oil along with the tomatoes, onion and garlic. Finish by charring the radicchio.

To make the dressing, whisk or blend the oil, vinegar and herbs. Season and grill the lamb on a hot griddle until it reaches your desired level of doneness. Grass-fed meat is a better source of omega-3 fats. Plate up the veg with the olives, basil and anchovies, coating with the dressing. Place the lamb chops on top – now you can tear into it.

NUT RI T ION

2 Tacos Distract yourself from lunchtime “doom scrolling” and dedicate your break to throwing together these tranquillising tacos from El Pastor – MARVIN JONES Executive chef at El Pastor

THE INGREDIENTS

THE METHOD

(SERVES 3) • CHORIZO, 150G • WAXY POTATOES, 200G • CHIPOTLE IN ADOBO, 1TBSP • CORN TORTILLAS • CORIANDER, FRESH

Chorizo might not be an everyday indulgence, but it has its merits. Two-thirds of its fats are of the unsaturated variety, and it’s a good source of mood-enhancing selenium, while paprika is an antioxidant. And just as importantly, it’s delicious. Remove the skin, dice, place in a pan and fry, gently stirring with a spatula so it doesn’t stick. Cook until partially crisp, then add the potatoes. Continue until both are browned and crispy. Add the chipotle and season to taste.

Blitz the salsa ingredients until they are semi-smooth; this should take about 45 seconds. De-seed the chillies if you don’t want it to be too hot. Add salt to taste afterwards. This salsa is rich in vitamin C, which studies show tempers the body’s response to stress (such as that caused by the comments section of the last article you read).

Warm the tortillas in a pan, then serve them stuffed with the choripapa, salsa verde and a sprinkle of chopped coriander.

FOR THE SALSA VERDE • TOMATILLOS, 7, LARGE • CLOVE OF GARLIC • LIMES, 2, JUICED • WHITE ONION, ½ • SERRANO CHILLIES, 510

BITE-SIZE TIP Paprika’s not the only spice with healing powers.

“Turmeric has been linked to good brain health and feelings of calm,” says Hobson.

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N U TR I TI O N

3 Duck Cassoulet Prep this fibre- and protein-rich stew on a Sunday afternoon, courtesy of Maison François, and take a big bite out of Monday morning blues

BITE-SIZE TIP The food you eat is king, of course, but if you want a quick boost, try supplementing with 200mg of L-theanine – it’s a potent anti-anxiety aid

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MEN’S HE ALTH

THE INGREDIENTS

THE METHOD

(SERVES 4) • NAVY BEANS, 600G, DRIED • STREAKY BACON, 150G, SMOKED • SAUSAGES, 300G • CELERY STICK, CHOPPED • ONION, SMALL, CHOPPED • CARROT, LARGE, CHOPPED • GARLIC, 6 CLOVES • BOUQUET GARNI • SEA SALT, 8 PINCHES • BLACK PEPPER, 2 PINCHES • CLOVE, LIGHTLY CRUSHED • LEMON JUICE, 2TSP • CONFIT DUCK LEGS, 4 • FLATLEAF PARSLEY, A HANDFUL

Soak the beans overnight in three times their volume of water, then drain when you’re ready to cook. Cut the bacon into cubed strips and the sausages into 1cm slices. Tip the beans into a large saucepan, add the bacon and cover with cold water.

Bring to the boil and cook for 15-20 minutes, then drain.

Peel the garlic cloves but leave them whole. Heat the olive oil in a casserole dish over a low heat and sweat the celery, onion, carrot and garlic for five minutes. “Onion contains quercetin, which has been shown to help promote feelings of calmness,” says Hobson. Add the bouquet garni and cook slowly for five minutes to get some caramelisation.

Add the sausage, beans and lardons and pour in 1.2L of water. Bring to the boil, skim off the scum, then add the salt, pepper, clove and lemon juice. Transfer the casserole to the oven and cook, uncovered, for two hours, stirring every hour. The beans should end up soft and the juices should have thickened.

Remove the cassoulet from the oven. Add the duck legs and sprinkle over the chopped parsley to serve.

BITE-SIZE TIP As much as 90 per cent of your serotonin is made in your gut. So give it a helping hand: “Eat fermented foods, such as miso, tempeh and kimchi,” says Hobson.

4 & Ceviche For a quick pick-me-up, stash El Pastor’s moodenhancing ceviche in the fridge, then deploy as an instant antidote to existential angst

THE IN

THE METHOD

(SE • CHAYOTE, 40G, THINLY SLICED • OLIVE OIL, 2TBSP • CIDER VINEGAR, 2TSP • THAI CHILLI, 20G, FINELY SLICED • SALT AND PEPPER, TO TASTE • AVOCADO, 300G, DICED • RED ONION, 20G, CHOPPED • SPRING ONION, 20G • CHARRED CORN, 40G • CORIANDER, 10G • LIME, 4 WEDGES • TORTILLA CHIPS, TO SERVE

Start by slicing the chayote squash. It’s a great source of folate, another nutrient shown to support good mental health. Whisk together the oil, vinegar and about a quarter of the Thai chilli with a pinch of salt. Use this to coat the sliced chayote and leave for 10-15 minutes.

Dice the avocado into 1cm cubes. Combine in a separate bowl with the onion, corn, coriander and the rest of the chilli.

Season to taste. As well as useful B vitamins, avocado contains tyrosine, an amino acid that boosts your levels of the “reward” neurotransmitter dopamine..

To plate up, fan the chayote around a serving dish and pile the avocado mix in the centre of the plate. Finish with a drizzle of the remaining chayote marinade and serve with the lime wedges and tortilla chips. Buy them or make them yourself by frying slices of corn tortilla in half a centimetre of cooking oil.

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N U TR I TI O N

5

Roast Salmon & Red Capsicum

Red wine with fish is not heresy – in fact, with this recipe from Noble Rot, it can be a potent cocktail for better mental health – ALEX JACKSON Head chef at Noble Rot

THE INGREDIENTS

THE METHOD

((SERVES 2) • RED CAPSICUM, 4 • GARLIC, 2 CLOVES, PEELED AND THINLY SLICED LENGTHWAYS • FENNEL SEEDS, A PINCH • RED WINE, A GLASS • SALMON OR TROUT, 300G FILLET, SLICED IN HALF • CRÈME FRAÎCHE, 1TBSP • BASIL, A FEW LEAVES

Start with the capsicum. Remove the stalks and seeds and cut into 2cm-wide slices. Fry the capsicum until it starts to colour and soften.

Push the capsicum to the side of the pan and add the sliced garlic and fennel seeds. Fry gently until the garlic has softened but not coloured. Pour in the wine, stir and cover. While a bottle a night will have, shall we say, variable effects on your mental wellbeing, in moderation red wine’s polyphenols can lower your stress hormones. Cook over a low heat for half an hour, or until the capsicum softens.

Meanwhile, season the salmon or trout with salt and fry in olive oil, skin side down, for a few minutes over a medium heat. When the skin is golden brown and crisp, flip and cook until the fish is a translucent pink in the centre.

Finish the capsicum by stirring in the crème fraîche and torn basil. Crack over some pepper and serve with the fish.

BITE-SIZE TIP Something sweet to finish? “Cocoa is rich in flavonoids, which improve blood flow to the brain – helpful in stressful situations,” says Hobson.

100 MEN’S HE ALTH

BITE-SIZE TIP Pair carbs with protein to balance your energy levels.

According to Anyia, “Big highs and lows can contribute to anxiety and fatigue.”

6 Chicken Livers on Toast Weighed down by your worries?

Liver little (ahem) with the ultimate spirit-lifting comfort food from Noble Rot

THE INGREDIENTS

THE METHOD

(SERVES 2) • PORCINI MUSHROOMS, 100G • CHICKEN LIVERS, 100G, TRIMMED • UNSALTED BUTTER, 2TBSP • GARLIC, ½ CLOVE • CHICKEN STOCK, 2TBSP • BRANDY, A GLUG • PARSLEY, 1TSP, CHOPPED • WALNUTS, 4, LIGHTLY CRUSHED • TOAST, 2 THICK SLICES

Slice the mushrooms into 5mm slices. Season the chicken livers with salt. Livers and mushrooms are a good source of iron and B vitamins, both of which will boost your mental energy.

Get a pan smoking hot and add some olive oil. Sauté the chicken livers over a high heat until golden brown on the underside. Turn them over, add a knob of butter and toss in the mushrooms. Season and fry the ceps until they’re golden brown and soft. The livers, meanwhile, should be cooked pink.

Reduce the heat and add more butter with the chopped garlic.

Toss everything together, then add the chicken stock with a glug of brandy – it’ll lift your spirits, though not for strictly nutritional reasons. Bring to a boil, then simmer until reduced to a slightly thickened sauce. Add the remaining butter and shake the pan to add some gloss to the sauce. Throw over the parsley and walnuts – linked to better brain function – and serve on hot buttered toast.

SEPTEMBER 2021 101

Jean-Claude Van Damme at a private gym in Los Angeles in May.

102 MEN’S HE ALTH

TACT IC S

AND I CAME BACK UP KIND OF WAY” Jean-Claude Van Damme,

now 60, has fought every onscreen bad guy imaginable. But his biggest battle has always been against himself BY

A LE X PA PPA DEM A S M AGGIE SH A NNON

PHOTOGR APHY BY

SEPTEMBER 2021 103

TACTI C S

T’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 – phonefumbling 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’ttest-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 were 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. Writerdirector 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.

104 MEN’S HE ALTH

He’d cleaned up by 2008, when he starred in JCVD, playing himself as a faded actionmovie 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 selfdestruction 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 Jean-Claude 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 modelling some of these items, co-signing 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 context-appropriate 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 agingbut-still-recognisable 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 looking for a quick hit on a streaming platform. 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 comfortably 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 long-lost 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, 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 weak.”

Van Damme continues to push himself physically, in part to stay mentally healthy.

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

“ THAT

QUOTE ME: 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

TO TMENT. E: AT, ” couldn’t touch it, and moved to Los Angeles with only $3000 in his pocket, figuring if he couldn’t make it with $3000, he wouldn’t make it with $5000, 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.

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.

SEPTEMBER 2021 105

TACTI C S

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-to-factcheck 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 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

Van Damme with a karate magazine from 1991, the kind he once carried to help sell his potential.

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 arse 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”. After Timecop made more than $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 tabloid- ugly 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 twothousand-something-five-hundred 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 carved-stone 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, is almost certainly the only Van Damme movie ever compared to the work of Werner Herzog, David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Gaspar Noé by The Paris Review.

106 MEN’S HE ALTH

JCVD in 1986’s No Retreat, No Surrender.

Van Damme with his wife, Gladys, in the early ’90s.

The star anchoring Street Fighter in 1994.

“

YOU

YOUR BRAIN

THE INSIDE . . . AND THE In the later Universal Soldier movies, Lundgren and Van Damme have been resurrected so many times that they no longer remember why they’re determined to kill each other, but they keep trying anyway; a series that began as a comic-book treatise on the horrors of war becomes a grim metaphor for the bloody-knuckled monotony of an action star’s professional life.

The Bouncer (2018) isn’t as conceptual – it’s basically a Taken movie with a touch of The Wrestler, starring Van Damme as a single dad mixed up with Eurosleaze counterfeiters.

But it’s also quiet and mournful: Van Damme moves slower, gets knocked around, seems to feel every hit. He’s turned into the kind of actor whose presence can elevate a routine script, imbuing it with emotional weight.

The way Van Damme sees it, this new chapter of his acting career began in 2003, with In Hell, his third and final collaboration with Hong Kong cinema legend Ringo Lam, who died in 2018. “[Lam] said you have to play a guy who is more honest than you are in real life,” Van Damme says. “And when he said that, I understood, click. The way you are sitting.

Legs together. Not like a movie star. Don’t put your hands around the sofa. Who the fuck do you think you are? Proper. Back straight. You have a boss. You’re an employee. You are receiving a check, every month.”

It was the first time Van Damme had ever rooted a performance in his subconscious, and the experience was a revelation. After

that, he says, “I was able to jump from martial arts to telling the truth, basically – not to act”.

That monologue he delivers five years later in JCVD might be his peak as both an actor and a truth teller, but it also seems to come from a dark and perhaps inescapable emotional place. I ask what the Van Damme of today makes of the Van Damme who ad-libbed that speech.

“That’s a good question,” he says. He stops. Gathers thoughts. “I’ve passed that bump. I went down, and I came back up in a rearranged kind of way. That beast you saw did go to the garage” – he makes a vroomvroom sound – “for a big adjustment. Yes, it’s possible. Quote me: ‘Yes, it’s possible’. I repeat, quote me: ‘It can be achieved’. ” He’s learned to keep the beast in check.

He’s found healthier ways to get out of his head. He rides a stationary bike, tries to find the pace where the rhythm of the cycle syncs up with his heartbeat.

“When you are at that level,” he says, “you click your brain out of your body, put it somewhere, in the iCloud, okay? And then you start to feel the muscle. You start to breathe, feel the inside. You start to feel the machina – the machine – and the beating of your heart.”

He does yoga, too, as he has for 25 years.

“It’s a big cure,” he says. “You can clean lots of carbon dioxide inside your body by breathing.

And then also go to the gym, train every day. That’s the best way to feel good. And

EVEL, EEL

also watch sometimes a good movie, click out. Because I’m a thinker. So when I do the bicycle and the yoga and the training and the gym, I don’t think.”

And there’s the work, which has become about conserving energy until just the right moment. “Every time I can sit somewhere, on the set, not just stay on my feet, I save everything I can save,” he says. “So what you have to do is save the car. Don’t drive that car to the market. Drive another one. Only drive this one on Sunday.”

He owes it to Gladys to keep kicking. “If not, I will be rotting at home,” he says. “Not as a human, but mentally. And my wife will feel so bad to see me this way. She knows I like to construct.”

He is aware of the Bloodsport reboot, long in the works. “If they don’t do it, they are crazy,” he says. But his interest is elsewhere.

There’s a film he wants to make called Headlock, which he says will be a martialarts epic with whiffs of Rocky. The script is

by Oscar-winning Green Book cowriter Nick Vallelonga. Van Damme explains the story and its visuals in a few impossible-to-follow sentences – something about the colour red increasing in intensity, about his character waking from a coma and a twist involving a second coma.

At the end, he says, “I die for love. Oh my God, what a movie! I know they want to [remake] Bloodsport, but they’re gonna put – sorry for the expression – tits and ass and all that bullshit. It doesn’t belong to me anymore.

I’m 60 –I want to do something beautiful”.

SEPTEMBER 2021 107

VS

108 MEN’S HE ALT H

FI T NE SS & N UTR I T IO N

Whatever your ambitions for the rest of the year, working out and eating well will always be sound strategies. But which is more effective? Are abs really made in the kitchen?

And can you out-train a bad diet, or eat away a bad mood? Our experts weigh up their benefits in the ultimate health and fitness showdown WORDS BY

SCA RLE T T WRENCH PHOTOGR APHY BY MICH A E L HEDGE

SEPTEMBER 2021 109

F IT NE S S & N UT RI T IO N

The Goal:

1 WEIGHT LOSS

The Science:

Despite what the post-Christmas surge in gym attendance might suggest, sweating it out on the treadmill is not the most efficient way to lose your extra padding. Weight loss happens n when your body requires more gy and k d so is forced to b n your fat cells for fuel.

“There are countless ‘fat-bur out there, from keto and paleo to interm fasting, but all rely on creating a calorie deficit,” says Kyle Green, a fitness model and body transformation coach. “Aim for a deficit of between 250kcal (1050kJ) and 500kcal (2100kJ) per day and see how your body responds.” There are two simple ways to work towards a 1000-kJ deficit: first, consume less (eat two fewer biscuits); second, move more (add a 25-minute run). Of those, cutting the extra snack is generally less of a faff.

An over-reliance on exercise has its downsides, too. One study conducted by the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana found that those who trained for

an average of half an hour per day didn’t lose any more weight than those who averaged 15 minutes – the more committed exercisers subconsciously “rewarded” themselves for their hard work by eating more food.

As well as tracking your kilojoule intake, Green advises boosting your nonexercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT).

This covers any movement that isn’t part of your structured training plan, such as walking to the shops, cleaning the house, or running around after the kids and/or dog.

After all, if your YouTube dumbbell workout leaves you trembling and sofa-bound for the following 48 hours, its aggregate effects on your activity levels won’t be positive.

Where exercise does come into its own is weight maintenance. Research shows that people who form good fitness habits alongside switching up their diets are far more likely to stick to their plans. So, think less about burning fat and more about bulking up your willpower.

The Decider: DIET

69% The University of Lübeck found that men who consumed two-thirds of their day’s kilojoules in the morning burned off more than those who ate a larger dinner

2 MENTAL WELLBEING The Goal:

T e Sc Th cie

“We W do n bod bo odies ie Guy Gu uy C Intelligence in the F His point is that our mi w physiological elements of our being. The way we use and maintain our muscles, organs and digestive systems informs our emotional state.

In a study at Cardiff University, scientists asked test subjects to snack on either crisps and chocolate or fresh fruit. Within 10 days, members of the junk food group were exhibiting greater symptoms of low mood and anxiety than the fruit eaters.

“High-sugar, high-fat foods can

cause a flash of hormones in the brain’s pleasure centres, which is followed by a crash,” says Mark Perera, a senior GP at Babylon Health. Perera also points to common deficiencies that can contribute to poor mental health, such as those in vitamins B12, C, D and omega-3, which he calls “the engine oil of the brain”.

Your workouts, meanwhile, will give you both a short-term high and a long-term lift. There’s more at play than just endorphins, too. “Exercise triggers the release of numerous brain-cell mediators, including serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline, which light up the pleasure and reward centres of

the brain,” explains Perera – but this time minus the comedown. In a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, those who trained for just two-and-a-half hours each week had a 31 per cent lower risk of depression than those who didn’t. Exercise has been shown to be as effective as medication in reducing symptoms of moderate (though not always severe) depression.

For many struggling with their mental wellbeing, getting outside and moving for half an hour each day will be easier than a total dietary overhaul. So, exercise edges it here – just.

45 X5 Those who exercise for 45 minutes, three to five times per week, enjoy the biggest boosts to mental health

The Decider: EXERCISE SEPTEMBER 2021 111

3

The Goal:

MORE ENERGY The Science:

Dragging yourself around the park before work might be the last thing you want to do when you’re feeling drained, but it pays to resist the snooze button.

Exercise triggers the release of invigorating neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine and dopamine, while also boosting blood flow to the brain. In one study, 10 minutes simply walking up and down stairs proved a better booster shot than 50mg of caffeine.

Be wary of overdoing it, though. One major cause of fatigue is stress, says Wilson Pinho, a trainer and nutrition consultant based at E by Equinox gym. When prolonged, this can cause a malfunction whereby your body is constantly pumping out excess cortisol. “In this state, upping your exercise will only make your body more stressed.”

Use a smartwatch to measure your heart rate, body temperature and heart-rate variability in the morning. If your heart rate is trending up while the other two metrics are trending down, you might need to ease up on your training. In other words? An active daily routine is always beneficial, while a punishing home/gym workout schedule isn’t.

A targeted diet is a more 112 MEN’S HE ALTH

reliable energiser. For optimal mental and physical stamina, Pinho recommends a macro split of 30 per cent protein, 30 per cent fat and 40 per cent carbs. “Low-carb diets can cause a drop in energy,” he cautions. Include high-fibre foods such as wholegrains, beans, lentils and potatoes in every meal to drip-feed your body energy throughout the day. As a bonus, they’ll help you build the hormone serotonin, for easier sleep.

Next, eliminate vitalitysapping micronutrient deficiencies by ensuring that you’re getting enough magnesium (wholegrains, leafy greens), iodine (seafood, iodised salt), vitamin D (fatty fish, eggs) and B12 (red meat, shellfish), supplementing wherever you need to. Finally, if you’re also working towards weight loss, try shrinking your kilojoule deficit, so you’re eating closer to your maintenance target – because there’s little point in acquiring abs and biceps if you’re too knackered to give them a showing.

The Decider: DIET

23% The proportion of Aussies thought to have low levels of vitamin D. It supports muscle growth, fat loss and your cells’ battery packs

FI T NESS & NUT RI TIO N

The Goal:

4 LONGEVITY

The Science:

Anti-ageing therapy is big business. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have invested in research into a cure for the maladies of old age.

There’s no miracle pill (yet), but tweaking your lifestyle habits can be transformative.

When we talk about lifespan, what we’re really talking about is “healthspan”: the amount of time during which we remain fit, mobile and illness-free. Research by exercise physiologist Ulrik Wisløff suggests that a key predictor of this is your “VO2 max”, a measure of how adept your body is at using oxygen.

You can improve this by exercising close to your maximum capacity a couple of times per week, either with HIIT-style workouts, or by pushing yourself during a 5K run.

However, Professor Stephen Harridge, an expert in ageing at King’s College London, notes that there’s “no evidence that one

specific type of exercise will favour increased healthspan”. Cardio is good for your heart, of course, but he points out that muscle wastage is just as detrimental as a loss of aerobic fitness. “Plus, for many older people, strength exercise is essential so that other types of exercise are actually possible.” To hit both goals, perform fast-paced circuits that incorporate full-body moves such as deadlifts and squats. As we age, we also require more protein to stimulate muscle synthesis. Aim for 30g, three times a day.

Recently, periodic fasting has become an anti-ageing trend. “There’s evidence that it improves metabolic health,” says Harridge.

“Our bodies evolved in the context of a more intermittent feeding pattern.” But for the long term, Harridge favours a consistent intake and increased physical activity. That’s fewer meals skipped and workouts missed.

“For many older people, strength exercise is essential so that other types of exercise are possible”

The Decider: EXERCISE SEPTEMBER 2021 113

F IT N E SS & N UT RI T ION

6 The Goal:

The Science:

5 The Th e Go oal al::

The Science: There are 1.2 million Australian adults ts living with conditions related to cardiovascu ular disease. The good news is that many of the big risk factors – high blood pressure, ra aised LDL cholesterol and a waist-to-height rattio above 0.5 – are under your control.

The dietary protocols are fairly predictable: more fibre-rich whole foods, less processed meat and refined carbs. Keep in mind that diets that are high in sugar can increase the synthesis of LDL cholesterol. Sat fat’s not a lone gunman.

In terms of exercise, cardio is king. And by “cardio”, we don’t mean a narrow choice between running, jogging and plodding: pacy dumbbell circuits and bodyweight drills count, too. Try this: pick four simple moves and perform a 60-second set of each in turn, working near your max effort. Rest for three minutes, then repeat three times for four rounds. In a study of older adults, those who did this three days per week had stronger, springier, more efficient hearts. A onetwo combo keeps things ticking.

The Decider: IT’S A TIE 114 MEN’S HE ALTH

You can’t pack on muscle mass without any building blocks, which means you need to be taking in more kilojoules than you’re burning off. The trick part is to ensure that those extra kilojoules end up stored where you want them. “Your body can build up to 0.2kg of muscle per week,” says Green. “If you’re putting on weight at a faster rate than that, the chances are you’re gaining fat, too.”

His recommendation mirrors that for weight loss: between 250kcal kcal (1050kJ) and 500kcal (2100kJ) per day, but this his time in surplus. Protein (1.5-2.2g per kilo of bodyweight) will help your muscles repair and grow. Carbs will fuel your workouts, and nutritious fats will maintain healthy testosterone levels.

But even if your diet

leaves something to be desired, it’s still possible to get bigger, if not leaner. There’s even a term for this kind of supersizing: “dirty bulking”. What’s not possible is to pack on muscle mass with a half-baked gym routine.

Hypertrophy occurs when a muscle is repeatedly stressed, which means pushing yourself to your limits until those limits increase. Pinho advises aiming to perform 10 or more sets per muscle group each week. That doesn’t always mean maxing out: “Research shows that load doesn’t significantly affect hypertrophy, so long as you’re working close to the point of failure,” he says. “Keep your rep ranges between eight and 12, using weights that are at least 60 per cent of your one-rep max.”

Slow and heavy(ish) wins the race.

The Decider: EXERCISE

21-36 Men working in this total rep range can gain just as much muscle mass as those working with heavier sets

“A bout of moderateeffort exercise can help the immune system to sweep up pathogens”

7

The Goal:

IMMUNITY The Science:

Back in 2019, most people’s concept of “immunity” didn’t extend far beyond swerving the biannual office cold. Today, our impetus to avoid infection is stronger. Your immune system can be compromised by a range of factors, from age and obesity to smoking. But it can also be strengthened.

The effect of exercise on immunity is dependent on dosage. There’s a theory that intense training – for a marathon, say, or CrossFit – temporarily suppresses the immune system, leading to an “open window” of heightened

infection risk in the hours afterwards. However, recent research suggests that this only applies to pro athletes with six-hours-a-day schedules.

A University of Bath review published last year concluded that a bout of moderate-effort exercise can help the immune system to sweep up pathogens.

If your training is more professional, further studies show that increasing your intake of carbs and polyphenolrich berries and veg can help to offset any damage. On top of that, Satya Dandekar, a professor of microbiology at UC Davis in California,

recommends a Mediterranean diet rich in healthy fats, such as those found in oily fish, seeds and nuts. “The quality of your diet influences the make-up of the bacteria in your gut,” she explains, “and the gastrointestinal tract is where you harbour almost 80 per cent of your immune system.”

Eating a broad range of plant foods will boost the microbiome diversity in your gut, while prebiotic foods promote the growth of healthy bacteria. You’ll still need to mask up when you buy them, though.

The Decider: DIET SEPTEMBER 2021 115

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R I C H

REECE LIGHTNING

The Wallabies’ REECE HODGE brings world-class speed and power to wherever in the backline his team needs him. Here’s the background to the emergence of a rugby weapon

BY DANIEL PHOTOGR APHY BY

WILLIAMS BRE T T HEMMINGS

SEPTEMBER 2021 117

It’s simple: when Hodge can’t play, he makes himself stronger for when he can.

PAIN AND GAIN

One of Australian rugby’s most potent attacking forces tells you how to use injury-enforced downtime to reshape your rig

WHETHER YOU’RE A PRO athlete or a weekend warrior, few things can feel more disastrous than injury.

Does that statement need explaining? No, we didn’t think so. Sometimes, though, approached wisely, a spell on the sidelines can be turned to your advantage. It’s an idea that crystallises when you listen to Reece Hodge, the hard-running, bazookathighed Wallabies utility.

Men’s Health catches up with Hodge, 26, on a recent Monday lunchtime between the first and

118 MEN’S HE ALTH

second Tests of the Wallabies’ recent home series against France. A knee injury – specifically, an MCL tear he suffered back in April playing for the Melbourne Rebels – means Hodge missed the first Test and will sit out the second one, though he hopes to play the series finale in Brisbane. “I’m pretty much good to go,” he says.

(Update: he played for 78 minutes of the Wallabies’ series-clinching win.)

Though his knee didn’t require surgery, Hodge limped about (and slept) in

a brace for five weeks.

When it finally came off, he explains, he began strengthening the atrophied muscles around the joint before “slowly progressing to running, kicking, change-of-direction stuff and, finally, at about the 10-week mark, contact”.

“I wouldn’t say depressing,” he says of the last few months.

“Frustrating, yes, in the early stages. But the attitude I try to take with any injury is that you focus on the things you can control, and that’s the rehab. I just try and do that to the best of my ability.” It’s a train of thought that carries him back in time, to his mid-teens when he first started training with weights, and then to a later period in which he grasped their transformative power.

Before long, you’re hearing the inspirational story of one man’s iron journey.

“I guess mine’s different to the guys who grew up in private schools and started lifting weights from a young age,” says Hodge, alluding to the traditional preponderance of the privately educated in rugby’s top ranks, as well as to the famously well-equipped gymnasiums of the more exclusive schools of Sydney and Brisbane. For his part, Hodge attended a selective public school on Sydney’s northern beaches.

“I was always the tall, lanky kid,” he says, “and I didn’t touch a weight until I was 16”, which was when his rugby talent saw him recruited into a national junior development

program. “Most of the private school boys had been doing weights for a few years,” recalls Hodge.

“I remember when I first started, I tried to lift the same weight on the bench press that they’d been using, and ended up getting stuck under the bar.”

It was a few years later, when Hodge was 19, that his relationship with weights took a sharp and life-changing turn. And yes, the catalyst was an injury – a shocker to an ankle that put him out of the game for a year. He wasn’t a Wallaby at the time, just a promising club player for the Manly Marlins in the Shute Shield and a fulltime uni student.

He had a mate, Dave Porecki (now a hooker for the NSW Waratahs), who

stepped up in Hodge’s hour of need. Porecki had suffered a similar ankle injury a couple of years earlier and recognised that Hodge’s best course was not to mope about at home but, rather, get under some mighty loads at the gym.

“Two or three days after my ankle surgery, Dave was picking me up from my house and taking me to the gym, racking the bench press and picking up all my weights,” recalls Hodge, the gratitude he felt at the time still evident in his voice.

The gym where this happened was J-Train Athletic Performance, a facility on the northern beaches opened by another mate of Hodge’s, James Brodie, in 2010. A strength and conditioning guru, Brodie did far more than just greet his buddy at reception. “He devised programs for me and put a lot of time into helping me get stronger and put on size,” recalls Hodge. “I was there five or six days a week, grinding away. I did compound lifts for strength, plus time-under-tension stuff to build size. This is where James’ expertise kicked in. He’d spent a lot of time in the US and his ideas were cutting-edge.

He knew how to keep the lifting exciting, which helped me keep my focus through the whole year.”

BULKING UP You ask Hodges whether he can quantify the gains he made in this period. He sure can. His weight went from 90 kilograms to 97.

He upped his bench from 120kg to 160, his deadlift from 170 to 250, and his front squat from 90 to 130.

You suggest to Hodge that because of these gains, his relationship with

the iron became something akin to a love affair. “I wouldn’t call it a love affair – I feel they’re strong words,” says Hodge. “But like anything in life where you see your hard work paying off, it fuels you to pour even more time and effort into it.”

The gains weren’t just numerical. For Hodge, the point of all this effort was that his new armour was translating into improved on-field performance: more tackle busts, harder hits in defence, and that priceless lift in confidence that comes from feeling a step closer to impregnable.

“The stronger you are in both your legs and upper body . . . you can relate that to the ability to break tackles through your power and your leg drive,” Hodge explains. “Likewise, you can relate your push press and bench press to being able to give someone a strong fend and create more space for yourself in attack.”

When he returned to rugby in 2015, Hodge was built to ask questions of defenders that they couldn’t necessarily answer. The following year, he made his Super Rugby and Test debuts, and has now racked up more than 40 appearances for the national team.

“I’m a big believer in the idea that hard work pays off eventually,” he says. “And I think if you take shortcuts in the strength and conditioning side of things, it definitely impacts your rugby. Yeah, I’m a massive believer in working as hard as possible in the gym and squeezing every drop out of your ability. I was able to use that period of injury to shift my focus towards gym work and making my strength a point of

//

I’m a believer in working as hard as possible in the gym//

difference compared to other backs running around. My love for the gym was born out of that period, and I still love getting in there whenever possible to try to add to my game.”

STAYING STRONG Hodge says his greatest fitness challenge these days, as an established Super Rugby and Test player who might lace up for as many as 30 matches per season, is to maintain his size and strength from February through November. He reckons he plays his best footy at 95-96kg and never wants to drift far from that mark.

The challenges of a long season – fatigue, injuries, staleness – can limit your ability to do as much weight training as would be optimal – but Hodge says that for a lot of players, the greatest threat to their bulk occurs in the preseason, when they’re expected to run until they drop.

Nutrition plays a crucial role in this battle, yearround. “A lot of my food intake is based around

timing – fuelling for training and then refuelling afterwards,” says Hodge. With gruelling sessions normally slated for the morning and early afternoon, Hodge has found his best plan is to go big at breakfast, snack in the afternoon post-training and then, at night, plate up a king’s meal that ticks off all his macronutrient needs.

“I live by the 80-20 rule,” he says. “A treat here and there and a night out occasionally with mates, but disciplined most of the time. Some guys get caught in the trap of being overly strict and have blowouts as a result.”

You finish by asking Hodge about the Wallabies’ ongoing quest to regain the Bledisloe Cup, held by New Zealand since 2003. Given his belief in the power of the right weights program combined with hard graft to deliver on-field results for the individual, is it possible that the Wallabies have been missing a trick in

the gym, and that the route to beating the All Blacks might involve making some judicious tweaks, sooner rather than later, in that space? Hodge, not having come down in the last shower, neatly sidesteps that query.

“Outside my pay grade,” he says, before adding the Wallabies’ S & C staff comprises top-drawer operators who “leave no stone unturned”. Yep, when it comes to muscle, Hodge’s only responsibility is himself. And with the help of a great attitude towards enforced layoffs, he’s meeting that responsibility like a man on a mission.

Hodge’s episode of ASICS Sound Mind Sound Body podcast is available now on all major podcasting platforms.

TIME TO MAKE A POWER PLAY

Hodge is the Wallabies’ go-to goalkicker for long-range shots because he can boot a Gilbert into the next postcode. Here’s how to build Hodge-like leg strength in the gym Do 3 sets of each exercise using a weight that is 80-90 per cent of your 1-rep max. Rep count: only 2-4, and make each one explosive

Back Squat

Front Squat

Hip Thruster

Deadlift

SEPTEMBER 2021 119

WORKOUT #1

RAISE YOUR POTENTIAL

2A

ry y cleverr. By y fusing g old-school dern mov vements,, our fourr function nal muscle and size fe

THERE’S BEEN A RISING TIDE in at any “authentic” training regimen should focus entirely on measurable, athletic imp d that pursuing any kind of w less noble, or even narcissistic. Some have even felt shamed into avoiding training routines that they would otherwise enjoy, fearful of being labelled an egomaniac for doing a biceps curl or k.

At MH h proponents of wellinformed strength and te what the rise of functional fitness has done for the community. But for a while there, it seemed the pendulum had swung too far. As our UK editor in chief recently put it, “Since when were we supposed to feel shame for enjoying the aesthetic by-products of our training?” There’s often little difference between chasing after performance goals and pursuing changes in

120 MEN’S HE ALTH

the mirror. m So long as you are happy, h is a deadlift PB more e meaningful than an extra a 2cm on your arms?

F Fortunately, like all tidess, this one has ebbed.

On the shoreline are men eage er to get their pump on again. Better still, we’re learn ning that being as jacke ed as Arnie e and moving like U Usain Bolt aren’t mutu ually exc e xclu lus usi u ive e ideals.

With h smart programming, you can get g swole and hit your other goals.

So, rip off your sleeves and don your shortest shorts. The following workouts combine traditional hypertrophy with modern thinking, for a pump that truly pumps up your mobility, strength and physical preparedness.

We are in the age of functional bodybuilding – and, boy, is it a good time to be alive!

1B

1A

2B

2 Goblet Split Squat

Goblet Good Morning

(5 reps per leg) A contender for the title of “king of all lifts”, the split stance variation of the squat hits your quads like nothing else. Place a foot on a box about 60cm behind you and hold a kettlebell close to your chest (A). Keep an upright torso and bend your front knee, lowering your body until your thigh is parallel to the floor (B). Stand up explosively, and perform all the reps on one leg before switching.

(10 reps) Now, let’s light up those hamstrings. Hold a kettlebell to your chest (A). With a slight bend in the knees, push your hips back and lower your chest towards the ground, pinching your shoulder blades back and maintaining a neutral spine (B). When you feel a stretch in your hamstrings, pause and return to the start.

WORDS: ANDREW TRACEY; PHOTOGRAPHY: PHILIP HAYNES

THE SMARTER WAY TO CHASE

Build your strength from the ground up with this lower-body workout, which you’ll alternate through the week with the upper-body moves on the following spread.

Work through each movement as quickly as possible while maintaining perfect form, performing the prescribed reps in circuit fashion, for eight rounds. Lower your weights if you have to.

BUILDING BLOCKS

DO YOU EVEN LIFT?

For reasons unknown, the bench press has cemented its place as the ultimate dude lift. With nothing more than a few resistance bands, add these three moves to your arsenal to assist in the bro-ly grail of a bigger bench

1/ BAND-RESISTED PUSH-UP

3B

5 sets of 15 reps, 90sec rest Stretch a resistance band across your upper back and assume a push-up positio chest to the grou before explosive against the band

3A

4B

2/STRAIGHT-AR BAND PULL-DOW

4A

3

4

Box Jump

Kettlebell Swing

(15 reps) After the slow, controlled tempo of the first two movements, you’re ready to get functional, fast and furious. Squat in front of a box (A) and explosively jump on to the top, land with soft feet (B) and stand up to full extension. Take a breath before stepping back down.

Repeat, alternating your legs on the step down.

(20 reps) Put your all into driving the kettlebell skyward for maximum gains. Holding it between your legs, hinge at your hips, swinging the weight backward (A), drive your hips forward, allowing the bell to swing to shoulder height (B). Let the momentum bring it down between your legs, hinge at the hips, then repeat.

4 sets of 10 rep 90sec rest Loop a band arou a pull-up bar and arm-distance aw Grip the band wit both hands and p it down to full str squeezing your s blades together. to the top, repeat

3/ TRICEPS PULL

4 sets of 25 rep 90sec rest Loop a band arou a pull-up bar and holding it with yo palms facing eac other and your up tight to your body Explosively pull t down and apart, your arms are str return under cont repeat. Feel the burn in your tris? Enjoy it.

SEPTEMBER 2021 121

WORKOUT #2

UPPER CUT

1B

Combine classic bodybuilding moves with a rep scheme and rest times designed to leave every single muscle fibre screaming.

This is an upper-body assault that would make even Arnie blush. Work through each movement quickly while maintaining perfect form, performing the prescribed reps of each exercise as a circuit. Do 5 brutal rounds.

3B 1A

2B

2A

3A

1

2

Wide-Grip Pull-up

Dumbbell Z-Press

(5 reps) Kick off with an old-school staple to build a barn-door back. Grasp a pull-up bar with an overhand grip just over shoulder-width apart. Lift your feet from the floor, hanging freely with straight arms (A). Pull yourself up by flexing at the elbows while pinching your shoulder blades together. When your chin passes the bar (B), pause, then lower to the starting position.

(10 reps) From the back to the front: next is a humbling movement that will blow your shoulders up. Sit flat on the floor with your legs straight and open, holding two dumbbells at your shoulders (A). Drive the dumbbells upward until your arms are locked out (B). Lower under strict control.

122 MEN’S HE ALTH

3 Standing Dumbbell Hammer Curl (15 reps) Your biceps are up next. Hold two dumbbells with your arms hanging freely at your sides (A). With minimal momentum, curl both dumbbells upward, until your thumbs are near your shoulders (B). Squeeze here for a one count and lower under control.

MASTERY MATRIX

TRAIN TO YOUR STRENGTH

THE KEY TO THIS WORKOUT IS TO GO AT YOUR OWN PACE  DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOU. USE THIS MATRIX TO IDENTIFY YOUR OPTIMAL INTENSITY LEVEL

MONK ON

1

Use a band to assist you up and back down.

Use a band to assist you on the way up only.

2

Perform hands-elevated push-ups.

Dumbbell Z-Press ( )

4B

3

e your form 20 eps).

4

Perform close-grip push-ups.

Standing h (as shown)

4A

4 Bodyweight Dip (20 reps) Finish strong with this bodyweight triceps builder that will also blast your chest. Grab two parallel bars with your palms facing inward and your arms straight (A). Slowly lower until your elbows are at right angles, ensuring they don’t flare out (B). Drive yourself back up to the top and repeat.

Perform bench feet nd ch behind you.

Widepull(as sho

Add weight using a belt, or by hanging a dumbbell between your legs.

Perform with a controlled tempo, four seconds d pause on t shoulders, t explode back

Sit on a resistance band and wrap around both dumbbells, increasing the difficulty of each rep.

Perform reps kneeling on the ground to eliminate any momentum.

Stand on a resistance band and wrap around both dumbbells, increasing the difficulty of each rep.

Bodyweight dip (as shown)

Add weight using a belt, o a dumbbell between your legs.

SEPTEMBER 2021 123

MUSCLE UP TO LOOSEN UP!

Foam rolling and stretching only kind of help.

Strength coach and biomechanics specialist Greg Roskopf has a better plan: target your muscle imbalances

BY ANDRE W

HEFFERNAN

IMAGINE WALKING along a sheet of ice, struggling to find your balance. Every muscle in your body tightens, bracing for each unknown, unstable step.

“It’s an actual neurological response,” says strength coach and biomechanics specialist Greg Roskopf.

“When the body senses instability, it tightens up as a protective mechanism.”

Understanding this mechanism and addressing underlying muscle weaknesses are key to soothing your tight, achy muscles. And this concept lies at the heart of Roskopf’s Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT for short), a training protocol that protects your joints, eases

124 MEN’S HE ALTH

muscle pain and forges strength and stability. MAT does this by identifying weak muscles and activating them with the isolation movements that are often shunned by the functional-fitness world.

In an era when every gym has 10 foam rollers and mobility is the buzzword, MAT is a throwback, shifting away from multi-joint movements to focus on one muscle at a time. Despite that, Roskopf’s decades-old template (yes, it’s been around that long) has recently drawn attention.

Peyton Manning has visited Roskopf’s clinic in Denver.

Over the past three years, Roskopf has overseen the

training for golfer Bryson DeChambeau, who has packed on 18 kilograms and racked up eight PGA Tour wins, including two this year. “MAT doesn’t reinvent training,” says personal trainer Dan Giordano, “but it’s a smart reminder that we shouldn’t overfocus on mobility.”

Yes, overfocus. Your average trainer will tell you to stretch a tight muscle or foam-roll the tightness away. To Roskopf, that solves nothing. “That’s why people stretch day after day after day and they never get any more flexible,” he says.

“Because they’re still walking on ice.”

According to Roskopf, muscle tightness is a

protective mechanism against instability and a signal that other, weaker muscles are causing that instability. Whether you’re standing up from a chair, doing a squat or balancing on ice, your muscles spend every moment of every day making thousands of microadjustments, tensing and relaxing in response to your environment. They’re also adjusting to one another. When they’re in balance, muscles on the front of your body and muscles on the back of your body essentially tug a joint into ‘neutral’ position.

Your pecs and your lats, for example, help properly position your shoulders.

“Think of a tug-of-war with

ten 100-kilogram guys on either side of the rope,” says Roskopf. That’s how muscles are supposed to work: equal strength on opposing sides of a joint.

But if your lats weaken – perhaps because you’re sitting constantly, perhaps because you’re not training them – that would allow your shoulders to shift forward, leading to imbalance. Stretching your chest wouldn’t solve weakness in your back, either, says Roskopf.

Instead, you need to activate and build strength in your rhomboid and trapezius muscles, the muscles between your spine and shoulder blades (see sidebar).

HIT THE MAT Foam rolling is an excellent way to promote blood flow to a muscle, and stretching can help you understand your muscles’ full range of motion. But neither actually solves muscle tightness the way MAT can

THE PROBLEM

THE PROBLEM

TIGHT HIPS

TIGHT HAMSTRINGS

THE SOLUTION: Lie on the floor, raise your leg as shown, and turn your thigh inward as far as you can. Hold for 6 seconds, then relax. Repeat 6 times per side.

THE SOLUTION: Strengthen your hip flexors, pulling your pelvis into neutral position below your spine, with the hip-flexor squeeze. Lie on your back, legs straight. Actively lift your left leg until you feel a stretch in your hamstring. Hold it high for 6 seconds. Lower.

That’s 1 rep; do 6 on each side.

THE PROBLEM

ILLUSTRATIONS: BEN MOUNSEYWOOD

SORE SHOULDERS

Roskopf began exploring this philosophy when he was training the Utah Jazz in 1997. He regularly treated John Stockton for tight hips, taking the future Hall of Famer through a series of stretches. Stockton always returned for more work the next day. “Wherever I saw limitations in range of motion,” says Roskopf, “I saw a muscle weakness.”

So one day, Roskopf decided to try something else. He tested Stockton for muscle weaknesses, asking him to push his legs in various directions against Roskopf’s hand. He discovered that while Stockton’s glutes were strong, his hip rotator

muscles . . . not so much.

Roskopf spent the rest of the session activating and strengthening Stockton’s hip rotator muscles, and as the season continued, Stockton gradually made fewer trips to the trainer’s room. And his flexibility improved, even without Roskopf stretching him. “When you get the muscles activated, not only do they contract to a greater range of motion, but then they have strength and integrity in that great range of motion,” he says.

It’s a combination that can help you move better and feel better, erasing plenty of little muscle aches. And it certainly beats walking on ice.

THE SOLUTION: Strengthen your mid-back muscles with prone scapular squeezes. Lie facedown on a firm surface, arms at your sides. Raise your arms and shoulders toward the ceiling, squeezing your shoulder blades together. Hold for 6 seconds. Return to the start.

That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 6.

THE PROBLEM

LOWER BACK PAIN

THE SOLUTION: Build those glutes with prone glute squeezes! Lie facedown on a firm surface and bend your left knee 90° so your heel points toward the ceiling. Tighten your abs and squeeze your left glute, lifting your leg off the floor slightly. Hold and squeeze for 6 seconds.

Lower, pause and repeat.

Repeat for 6 reps. Do 2 sets per side.

SEPTEMBER 2021 125

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THE MILE IS THE NEW MARATHON

Train for this everything-you-got sprint to get a fitness bump and bragging rights

BY MARISSA

STEPHENSON

FOR THE PAST FEW years, Ironpeople and cardiovores have tried to one-up one another with epic training efforts, competing on the number of miles they run, the number of Ironmans they do, and the number of ultra-earlymorning sessions they knock out. Yet one of the most effective ways to train – and one of the most beneficial for your physical and mental health – has always been among the shortest and the simplest: mastering the mile.

“The mile [1.6km] is an amazing blend of speed and endurance, and a good indicator of your overall cardiovascular health,” says Danny Mackey, head coach of the Brooks Beasts, an elite pro track team. “You can hammer it, and because it doesn’t take long to recover, you can run it again soon to see how much you’ve improved. You can’t say that about a marathon, where most people are just trying to finish.”

Even better, Mackey says you’ll notice yourself getting faster in three weeks. While a typical in-shape guy can run a mile in ten minutes, running one in 6:30 – under the 6:47 average time for a man in the 5th Avenue Mile, the largest one-mile race in the US — can win you bragging rights. (The fastest finishing time in that race last year was 3:52.) Here’s exactly how to get after it.

3

KEY WORKOUTS TO RUN YOUR FASTEST MILE To incinerate your current mile PB, tackle each of the following workouts from Mackey every week for eight weeks. Order doesn’t matter, as long as you’re taking a day in between workouts to give your body time to soak up your gains and recover

200-METRE REPEATS

Run 200 metres

Rest

(Repeat 10 times)

Sprints build the muscle strength and power it takes to hold speed over the entire mile, and doing them in this repeating format will help you dial in your form.

Run these repeats at a pace that’s 2-4 seconds faster than your mile pace. However long it takes you to run one, rest for three times that long before the next repeat. Important: aim to run the tenth sprint as fast as the first.

HILL ENDURANCE

TEMPO RUN

Run up a hill for 60-90 seconds Walk back down

Run 3 miles

(Repeat 8 times)

This increases your stamina and prepares you psychologically to go all out in the home-stretch.

“It will be painful in the final 400, and this gets you familiar with that feeling,” Mackey says.

A tempo run pushes you out of your comfort zone with a pace that feels just a touch faster than you’d want to be running, and this constant effort builds your endurance for race-day glory.

Find a long hill outdoors or set a treadmill to an incline. (The hill should be steep enough that running up it feels like a nine out of 10 in terms of effort.)

Start at a pace that feels like a six out of 10 in terms of effort and gradually increase to a seven. This should be about 45 seconds to 1 minute slower than your mile pace and feel consistently challenging.

SEPTEMBER 2021 127

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PUT YOUR FEET UP FOR EXTRA GAINS

STAND-UP GUYS Identify these handstand faux pas to avoid any unnecessary tumbles

A staple of both callisthenics and CrossFit, the ability to get comfortable upside-down is your entryway to a world of elite-level gym-free moves. We stack up the right way to get your hands on the ground

THE BANANA MAN Places his hands too far away from the wall before he kicks up, leaving his back bending like bamboo before his feet hit the wall, potentially compromising his shoulder joints. Usher him closer to the wall, aiming for a straight line from the wrists to the ankles.

A BALANCING ACT

The first few times you try to kick up into a simple handstand hold, it seems daunting. But every journey starts with simple steps. The following techniques and tweaks will have you bounding up those steps on your hands in no time

THE HEAD BANGER

WORDS: ANDREW TRACEY; ILLUSTRATION: HARVEY SYMONS

Drops uncontrollably at terminal velocity from the top of every rep, directly onto his head. We shouldn’t have to explain the danger of this one … Tell him to slow it down, grip the floor and keep tension throughout the rep, lightly grazing the floor before pressing back up.

1/ CLIMBING THE WALLS

2/ TAP INTO CORE STRENGTH

3/ UP AND DOWN (AND UP AGAIN)

Assume a push-up position with the soles of your feet touching a wall. Lift one leg as high as possible and press it firmly onto the wall while ‘walking’ the opposite hand backwards. Repeat on the other side, gradually bringing your hands closer to the wall, until you have reached a full handstand position. Finish by carefully reversing the movement back downward.

Nailed it? Build your shoulders further: kick up into a handstand hold, facing away from the wall. Spread your legs to aid balance. Lean your weight on one arm, lifting the other and tapping the opposite shoulder.

Place that hand back on the ground, shift your weight across and repeat with the other arm. Aim for 10-15 reps per set.

Pile weight plates, books or anything sturdy around 15cm high. Place your hands at either side and kick up into a handstand.

Bend at the elbows and slowly lower your head to the plates. Pause and press back up explosively. Once you can do 10 reps, lower the plates and retest.

Continue until you reach the ground.

Who needs a barbell, anyway?

THE LEGLESS WONDER

Shoulder the burden of your weight for a full-body overhaul.

Kicks up and ignores everything from the hips down (or up, in this case).

Handstands may be a shoulder burner, but make no mistake – they’re a full-body endeavour. Tell him to squeeze his glutes and thighs and point his toes skyward. Poise and control ensure stability, and stability means more reps.

SEPTEMBER 2021 129

I’D JUST PLAYED against West Coast in Perth for North Melbourne before we caught the red-eye home. The team got back at midnight and we went out for a couple of beers – literally two beers – and then I went home to bed. During the night, I got up to go to the toilet. But I must have stood up too fast, because when I got to the bathroom I fainted and fell backwards, hitting my head on the bathroom sink and knocking myself out. When I came around, I went back to bed and didn’t think anything more of it.

On Sunday morning, we had a recovery session at the beach. But I felt like I was drunk – it was as if I had a huge hangover. I could hardly keep up with the other guys. The boys were like, “We only had two beers last night – you can’t possibly be drunk!” Back home after the session, I had this crazy headache and started vomiting non-stop. The next day at training I still wasn’t right – I could hardly open my eyes and my head was spinning. So the doctor suggested I go to hospital. I drove to Epworth Hospital in Richmond, but I was so out of it that I literally parked in the middle of the road and thought I was in the car park.

Scans revealed that I had severe bleeding in the brain.

After more tests, this neurosurgeon said to me, “We think you’ll make a full recovery, but we don’t know if you’ll ever play footy again”. I was devastated. I was like, Shit! At 23, I might lose everything. It

was really hard, particularly because I felt like I’d only just got there. I didn’t get drafted at 18 like most kids do. I had to spend two years in the VFL before getting rookie-listed. I came in the long way and only played my first season in 2006, so this news was demoralising.

But it also made me realise how deeply I loved footy. I knew from that moment forward that if I ever got another opportunity to play, I’d never take it for granted and would give it everything I had.

The next month or so were terrifying. I had to go and see a specialist to help me cope with my compromised motor skills and memory loss. Being confronted by my inability to solve simple equations and answer basic questions made me nervous. I just had this complete mind fog. Slowly, things began to improve.

Eventually I was allowed to resume training and, in the end, got back for the end of the season.

Do I think that head injury made me a better player? Well, my next two years at North Melbourne were definitely the most successful I had there.

And that probably stemmed from that mindset I had after the injury. At the end of 2009 I went across to Hawthorn, where we became probably the most successful team of my era, playing in four grand finals and winning in ’13, ’14 and ’15.

After that head injury I just went full bore and, ultimately, maybe that was the formula for me to play my best football.

Because I certainly grew to another level with my career at Hawthorn and I was always known for being the barometer at training and someone who could always be depended on to give 100 per cent. One of my coaches even said to me, “Mate, you’re training too hard.

You’re going cut your career short”. But that was just the mindset I had. It took that bang on the brain to really push me to a whole new level.

NAME: JOSH GIBSON FEAT: A potentially career-ending head injury gives a gifted footballer renewed motivation in his AFL career

130 MEN’S HE ALTH

“I KNEW FROM THAT MOMENT I’D NEVER AGAIN TAKE FOOTY FOR GRANTED”

PAUL ROVERE / GETTY IMAGES

DATE: June 3, 2007, 3:04am