Yujjhh by Soyaleman

OFFLINE AND OFF-ROAD IS THE BEST WAY TO GO.

GO EXPLORE

“I’ve been brokebroke, dude.... Don’t forget where you came from.” —CHRIS PRATT, P. 66

FEATURES

Chris Pratt photographed exclusively for Men’s Health by Peggy Sirota. Styling by Annie Psaltiras/the Wall Group. Grooming by Bridget Brager/the Wall Group. Prop styling by Francisco Vargas. Production by Crawford & Co. On the cover: Tank by Todd Snyder; sweatpants by Mr P. This page: Shirt and pants, available at Moth Food Vintage; tank by Abercrombie & Fitch; slides by APL; necklace by David Yurman.

66 THE PEOPLE’S CHRIS

Internet trolls have long aided a public (mis)perception of Chris Pratt. With three major new projects—Jurassic World: Dominion, The Terminal List, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3—as well as a growing family, the Parks and Rec alum wants to change the narrative. BY MICKEY RAPKIN

PHOTOGRAPH BY PEGGY SIROTA

74 EXTREMELY HOT AND INCREDIBLY SWEATY

Working out in the summer has always been risky, but with each year bringing new record-breaking temperatures, things are getting dangerous. Here’s how to stay safe even when it’s scorching out.

82 THE DUDE SURVIVES

Last year, cancer and Covid brought Hollywood icon Jeff Bridges to “death’s door.” Doctors wanted him to fight. Instead, he decided to surrender. That’s when it got interesting. BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS

90 THE FIT MAN’S GUIDE TO THE NEW FAST FOOD

Greasy chain restaurants are now catering to a different crowd of healthy eaters. But which menu items actually earn their nutritious labels? BY CASSIE SHORTSLEEVE

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

CONTENTS

BONUS:

2022 MEN’S HEALTH FITNESS AWARDS

Featuring the best sweattested tech, clothing, shoes, and equipment. p. 58

LIFE

PLUS: THE RISE

33 A new class of rough-riding, toughas-all-heck e-trucks is here to turbocharge your life.

OF BLACK-OWNED FITNESS-GEAR BRANDS

And the visionaries leading the way. p. 62

36 Cook the perfect

protein (we’re talking salmon!) without drying it out.

38 There’s only one right way to mix a Bloody Mary. 41 Andrew Koji, star

of Bullet Train, test-kicks a new breed of summer activewear.

44 Erase and prevent your #bacne just in time for beach season. 46 Live music is back!

And it might just improve your mental health.

48 Cool Dad: Why

Adam Pally doesn’t miss all the meals/movies/ shows he’s skipped since having kids.

MIND 51 These mental-fitness

skills helped former NFL safety Myron Rolle, M.D., become a surgeon.

54 Ketamine is now

15 Knee-pain guru Ben

without burning, and what you thought of David Duchovny’s oat-milk obsession.

Patrick thinks you’ve been squatting wrong your whole life. Is he onto something?

18 Build a summer

body fast with these nine moves. No equipment needed.

20 6 A.M.: How Allbirds co-CEO Tim Brown boosts stamina (and business goals) on his daily run.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

22 Increase mobility and prevent back pain with the Bear x Gorilla Flow.

24 Transfor-Nation!: One man brought his blood pressure down and his energy way up. Here’s how. 26 Why you may be

suddenly allergic to all your favorite foods— and what to do about it.

30 Are mushrooms

56 Gain more focus and energy by doing less. 57 Black Male Mental

Health founder Dawan Alford explains why he checks his email only three times a day.

96 Six Pack: Aaron Judge shares his essential gear.

really the magic supplement for your immunity? PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDRE RUCKER

Prop styling: Kelsi Windmiller

BODY

a viable treatment for depression. But not all doctors are on board for the trip.

You don’t need a big budget to make big changes at home. A cuddly nightlight could be all it takes to help them feel safe and sound so they can get a good night’s sleep—and you can too. Explore the IKEA Marketplace and EJTDPWFS BMM UIF B PSEBCMF IPNF FTTFOUJBMT and décor designed for a better everyday life. IKEA-USA.com/Marketplace

Sometimes it’s the little things UIBU NBLF UIF CJHHFTU EJ FSFODF

Personnel Question:

How do you take your summer workouts?

TEAM

MEET THE

Nancy Berger

Richard Dorment

SVP, GROUP PUBLISHING DIRECTOR

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

“I’ll plan 40-minute walks Jamie Prokell Creative Director to tasty and fun Caryn Prime Executive Managing Editor destinations EDITORIAL around my Ben Court, Mike Darling Executive Editors neighborhood.”

Jack Essig SVP, Publishing Director Kathy Riess Group Executive Financial Director Leslie Picard VP, Sales Kristina McMahon VP, Marketing Marnie Braverman, Marianne Civiletto Group Marketing Directors

Ebenezer Samuel Fitness Director Ben Paynter Features Editor INTEGRATED ADVERTISING SALES Nojan Aminosharei Entertainment Director Andrea Foster, Hazel Jane Lyons, Julia Whalen, Paul Kita, Jordyn Taylor Deputy Editors Doug Zimmerman Executive Directors, East Coast Marty Munson Health Director Jee Ahn, Margot Becker Giblin Keith Nelson Jr. Senior Editor Executive Directors, West Coast “Good Sean Abrams Senior Editor, Growth & Engagement Monique deBoer, Nicole Shuldiner weather means Brett Williams Fitness Editor Sales Directors, East Coast super-long runs, Evan Romano Culture Editor Hope Agase, Nikki Giovannoni usually with Joshua St. Clair Assistant Editor Sales Directors, Midwest a tequila-based Milan Polk Editorial Assistant Alexis Herder Sales Manager reward.” Dawn Franco Direct Response Manager ART Andrew Kramer Kramer Media, Pacific Northwest Michael McCormick Contributing Art Director Erin McDonnell McDonnell Media, Southeast Travel Chloe Krammel Digital Designer Patty Rudolph PR 4.0 Media, Southwest Jason Speakman Associate Digital Visual Editor Aliyah Wilson Executive Assistant to SVP Matthew Montesano Digital Imaging Specialist Paulina Carrillo, Paulette Markarian, “I moved the Angela Martinez, Emily Stevens Sales Assistants HEARST VISUAL GROUP Karen Ferber Business Manager gym outside. Alix Campbell Chief Visual Content Director Emma Chapman Research Manager I bought a squat Sally Berman Visual Director Chris Hertwig Production Manager rack and other James Morris Contributing Visual Director gear, and I work Scott M. Lacey, Dangi McCoy INTEGRATED MARKETING out in my Deputy Visual Directors Stephanie Block, Christina Cordero, Ariel Kaye, Giancarlos Kunhardt Visual Production Coordinator yard.” Melissa Macaleer Executive Marketing Directors Bonnie Blue Marketing Director FASHION & COMMERCE Alesandra Ajlouni Associate Marketing Director Ted Stafford Fashion Director Kelly Roma Marketing Director, Special Projects Christian Gollayan Senior Style & Commerce Editor Rhyan Kelly Associate Marketing Director Dale Arden Chong Gear & Commerce Editor Stephanie Rubino Senior Marketing Manager John Thompson Commerce Editor Caroline Hall Associate Marketing Manager Grace McLoughlin Manager, Special Events COPY Lulu Zeitouneh Creative Director Janna Ojeda Assistant Managing Editor “I like to Paula Prado Senior Art Director John Kenney Managing Copy Editor bring my barre Flannery Wilson Sales & Marketing Coordinator Alisa Cohen Barney Senior Copy Editor workouts outside Connor Sears, David Fairhurst PUBLIC RELATIONS with a mat, weights, Assistant Copy Editors Jaime Marsanico Senior Director, Public Relations RESEARCH Jennifer Messimer Research Chief Judy DeYoung Assistant Research Editor

and my front-porch banister doubling as the ballet barre!”

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Milo F. Bryant, Michael Easter, Philip Ellis, Garrett Munce, Zachary Zane VIDEO Dorenna Newton Executive Producer Tony Xie, Elyssa Aquino Senior Creative Producers Kyle Orozovich Senior Video Editor Janie Booth, Carly Bivona Associate Producers HEARST MEN’S FASHION GROUP Nick Sullivan Fashion Director Alfonso Fernández Navas Market Editor Rashad Minnick Fashion Associate

CIRCULATION Rick Day VP, Strategy and Business Development

PUBLISHED BY HEARST Steven R. Swartz President & Chief Executive Officer William R. Hearst III Chairman Frank A. Bennack, Jr. Executive Vice Chairman “I bought Mark E. Aldam Chief Operating Officer

dog harnesses and leashes for running, so my corgis and I can get a great cardio workout.”

“I love ADMINISTRATION doing yoga in Caryn Kanare Editorial Business Coordinator Mariah Schlossman Editorial Business Assistant the park. It’s

HEARST MAGAZINES, INC. Debi Chirichella President Kate Lewis Chief Content Officer Regina Buckley Chief Financial & Strategy Officer & Treasurer Brian Madden Senior Vice President, Consumer Revenue & Development Catherine A. Bostron Secretary Gilbert C. Maurer, Mark F. Miller Publishing Consultants

HEARST MAGAZINES INTERNATIONAL Jonathan Wright President a nice break Kim St. Clair Bodden SVP/Editorial & Brand Director from the hot Chloe O’Brien Deputy Brands Director studio.” Shelley Meeks Executive Director, Content Services

MEN’S HEALTH INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS Australia, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, United Kingdom, United States

HOW TO REACH US: Customer Service: To change your address, pay a bill, renew your subscription, and more, go online to menshealth.com/service, email mhlcustserv@cdsfulfillment.com, or write Men’s Health Customer Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-1500. Editorial offices: 300 W. 57th Street, New York, NY 10019. Feedback: mhletters@hearst.com. Licensing & Reprints: Contact Wyndell Hamilton, Wright’s Media, hearst@wrightsmedia .com. Absolute satisfaction guaranteed. Scent-free subscription available on request. From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such mailings by postal mail, please send your current mailing label or exact copy to: Men’s Health, Mail Preference Center, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-0128.

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

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

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

MEN’S HEALTH

A DV I S O RY PA N E L

We know a lot about health and fitness, but we don’t know as much as the doctors, scientists, and trainers who keep us honest and up-to-date. BRAIN HEALTH

P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D.

CARDIOLOGY

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

DERMATOLOGY

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

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

ENDOCRINOLOGY

Sandeep Dhindsa, M.D.

EXERCISE SCIENCE

Martin Gibala, Ph.D. Mark Peterson, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.*D Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.

GASTROENTEROLOGY

Felice Schnoll-Sussman, M.D.

INTEGRATIVE HEALTH Brenda Powell, M.D.

INTERNAL MEDICINE Keith Roach, M.D.

MENTAL HEALTH

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

NUTRITION

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

PAIN MEDICINE

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

SEX & RELATIONSHIPS

Debby Herbenick, Ph.D., M.P.H. Shamyra Howard, L.C.S.W. Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D.

SLEEP MEDICINE

W. Christopher Winter, M.D.

SPORTS MEDICINE

Michael Fredericson, M.D. Dan Giordano, D.P.T., C.S.C.S. Bill Hartman, P.T.

TRAINING

Lee Boyce, C.P.T. Mike Boyle, M.Ed., A.T.C. Ben Bruno, C.F.S.C. Alwyn Cosgrove, C.S.C.S.*D David Jack DeVentri Jordan Mubarak Malik David Otey, C.S.C.S. Don Saladino, NASM

UROLOGY

Elizabeth Kavaler, M.D. Larry Lipshultz, M.D.

WEIGHT MANAGEMENT

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

St. Ann Restaurant, The Harwood District

W here el s e c a n you d i s c over aut hent ic , c hef-d r i ven c u i s i ne i n a re st au r a nt t h at ’s a l s o a s a mu r a i a r t mu s eu m, fol lowe d b y c oc k t a i l s i n one of t he most v ibr a nt a nd i nc lu s i ve L GBT Q+ enter t a i n ment d i st r ic t s i n t he c ou nt r y ? W h ate ver you r a l l i s, we welc ome you to f i nd it i n Da l l a s. To plan your trip, go to VisitDallas.com

OF THE

King prawns wrapped in bacon on a skewer!! Pieter Van Dijk

Mushrooms Giannis Kosti

It’s peak BBQ season: WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE UNDERRATED FOOD TO GRILL? Corn @Palacio Ypmenger

Chargrilled oysters! @momslisa

Catfish

@FStormBB

MH STAFF TIP Char romaine for the best Caesar salad you haven’t had . . . yet.

Pineapple! Slice it up and throw it on the fire. Use it to complement chicken or pork. It’s so easy! Travis Rathbone

@Mountyfan

Halloumi! Matthew Haas MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

WORLD

EDITOR’S LETTER

ASK AN EXPERT

“ What are the

best ways not to

SWEAT?

”

—@josehernandezmorfin

YOU COULD STAY INSIDE, I guess, and

park it next to whatever AC and/or fan situation keeps things frosty for you. You could also avoid spicy foods and strenuous activities, clothed or unclothed, and if you play your cards right, you might just have the least sweaty—and least fun—summer in the history of humanity. I don’t think that’s really what you’re asking, though—sweating, after all, is usually awesome. It’s how you know your body’s awake. It’s how you know you’ve worked hard and pushed your limits and earned whatever rest-day recovery or cheat-day indulgence your body’s been craving. It is also, of course, the most natural thing in the world, your body’s built-in system of temperature regulation, which is why I’d think twice before messing with any of the industrial-grade antiperspirants or quick-fix injections that promise to help you stop sweating altogether. 10

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

Q. Is there

any way to tan without damaging my skin?

Yes. Sunscreen. Tanning acts as a kind of natural sunscreen, with your skin cells producing pigment to protect your underlying tissues from the sun’s harmful UV rays. Even if your skin is darker or you tan easily, you should still use sunscreen. (Don’t worry, sunscreen shouldn’t prevent you from tanning; it just protects your skin.) The 2022 MH Grooming Award winner for sunscreen is Sun Bum Mineral SPF 50 Roll On lotion. The worst way to tan is with a tanning bed. (Fifteen minutes in one equals four hours under the sun.) The safest way to tan is with a tanning spray or lotion. These are recommended for people who aren’t able to tan—or can’t without burning. Even with an artificial tan, though, you still need sunscreen. No one gets a pass from sunscreen.

— ADNAN NASIR, M.D., PH.D. ,

MH DERMATOLOGY ADVISOR

Have a question for Rich? Tweet us at @MensHealthMag with the hashtag #AskMHRich and ask away. Allie Holloway

ASK THE E.I.C.

You’re an active guy who needs to cool the eff down—you’re supposed to sweat! However—and this is what I think you’re getting at—there are times and places where sweat and sweating are not awesome. On your way to or from work, at parties or restaurants, under interrogation by local authorities: You’re going to want to keep dry. Start with a gentle antiperspirant like Dove Men+Care Ultimate Smooth Glide (a recent MH Grooming Award winner) and sprinkle some baby powder in assorted nooks and crannies. Then take a cue from our story “Escape the Heat” (page 41) and throw on some lightweight clothes that keep cool air circulating around your skin while your body heat seeps out. But what if it gets brutally hot—the kind of hot that more and more of us are learning to live with as our weather gets weirder and weirder? Then you’ll have to take some additional measures, especially when you’re exercising outdoors. In “Extremely Hot and Incredibly Sweaty” (page 74), our team of experts examines the latest science around how people can work out safely during what used to be considered a heat wave but is now just another summer weekend. From tips on how to reset your internal thermostat to DIY hacks like cold towels and ice vests, there is plenty you can do to manage (if not beat) the heat. And manage you must: There are already more than 67,000 emergency-room visits due to heat exposure every year, and unless we get smarter about how we train and compete, that number is only going to climb. Think of this feature as your first step toward protecting your body so you can sweat—or in your case, Jose, not sweat—as much as you want in the future.

WORLD

GOALS

MVP

MEMBER

THE

TRUTH IS OAT THERE

OF THE

MONTH

MY FITNESS/ NUTRITION GOALS THIS YEAR Lowering my body-fat percentage and replacing processed foods with natural foods.

David Duchovny is 61 and in even better shape now than in his days investigating aliens on The X-Files. The proof: his “Gym & Fridge” video on the MH YouTube channel, in which he showcases holistic-wellness routines and blasts through a workout. You want to believe, as your comments reveal:

MY DREAM WORKOUT PARTNER

PAUL VRANESH STATS

Steve McQueen, because his no-nonsense daily workout regimen mixed practical weightlifting and movement-based aerobics.

AGE: 38 LOCATION:

Jacksonville, FL

MY ROLE MODEL RIGHT NOW

OCCUPATION:

Lighting engineer

My mother. She’s currently battling her second bout of cancer at the age of 70 and refuses to give up.

WHAT MAKES ME FEEL STRONG

MEN’S HEALTH MVP members have access to

Courtesy subject (Vranesh). Everett Collection (The Wire). Getty Images (Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Alamy (Boardwalk Empire).

mlt how many cartons of oatly does one really need??????

Pop-esum disappointed we didn’t see him in those infamous red speedos!

some of the best health, fitness, and entertainment coverage on the entire Internet. Each month, we survey our MVPs and choose one whose story catches our eye. Sign up at join.menshealth.com and you could see yourself here one day.

Watching my parents battle cancer at the same time. They fight side by side, with love, grace, faith, and courage.

THE MEN’S HEALTH TWITTER POLL

THE GAME OF THRONES UNIVERSE RETURNS IN AUGUST WITH HOUSE OF THE DRAGON. WHAT’S ANOTHER TV DRAMA THAT DESERVES A PREQUEL? Based on 473 responses to @MensHealthMag.

LOST

BOARDWALK

BUFFY

david verdugo Chill dude and actually has decent punching form on the bag.

rolita12 20 yrs later and I still have the biggest crush on this man!

De De Dude is 61 and doing pullups

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

THE NEW 2022

GRAND CHEROKEE

MADE FOR THE EDGES OF THE EARTH.

M A D E F O R W H AT Y O U ’ R E M A D E O F.

J E E P. C O M

LESS SUGAR NEVER TASTED SO GOOD

20 CALORIES

5G OF SUGAR

SCAN IT. TRY IT.

VITALITY STARTS HERE

WELCOME TO

KNEE HAB

BEN PATRICK, better known as Knees Over Toes Guy, has a controversial plan to help you beat chronic knee pain—and transform your athleticism in the process. BY THE EDITORS OF MH

BAD KNEES. The words conjure

images of popping joints, morning runs turning into jogs and walks, and pizza-box-height vertical leaps. You probably know a few people who have bad knees—an estimated 65 million Americans fight chronic knee pain every year. You might even have a pair of less than stellar knees yourself.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL SCOTT SLOSAR

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

MOVES YOU KNEED

Ben Patrick, 30, knows bad knees well. Patrick is Knees Over Toes Guy, a social-media sensation/knee-rehab guru whose training methods promise to end knee pain and juice athletic ability. Patrick himself suffered from bad knees, and he says he still remembers being called the “old man” of his high school hoops team, back when he had knees so bad he could barely jump two feet high. You’d never know that from checking his Instagram (@kneesovertoesguy) now, though. His 1.4 million followers watch him drag sleds, train with elite CrossFitters and weightlifters, and throw down dunks. Patrick’s secret: He regularly pushes his knee’s range of motion to its max, bending the joint so deeply that hamstring touches calf, his knee extending so far in front of him that it goes beyond the tips of his toes (hence his “knees over toes” handle). The way he sees it, every foundational athletic movement (running, jumping, lunging, squatting) requires you to move knees over toes. Watch your knees as you descend a flight of stairs and you’ll notice that Patrick is right. But if it’s so natural, what makes his advice so special? Well, his advice runs counter to what doctors and trainers have long recommended: When you lower into the bottom of a squat or lunge, you should never let your knees pass beyond the tips of your toes. The reasoning for this conventional wisdom is relatively simple. Imagine a straight line shooting up from your toes; keeping your knees behind this line helps them stay safe by never stressing the joint. In limiting your knee’s range of motion, you build strength without ever running the risk of aggravating it. Patrick disagrees. “The knee that can go farthest and strongest is the most protected,” he says, quoting the late Charles Poliquin, a legendary strength coach. “The moment I read that, I knew it was true because of everything I’d been through.” So he encourages his clients and online subscribers to do exercises that actively drive knees in front of toes, like extreme split squats, Poliquin stepups, and reverse sled pulls. 16

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

These four exercises from Patrick are worth mastering to build leg strength and athleticism. Start with the first move and gradually work to learn the others over the course of your training.

REVERSE SLED PULL

WHY: Each step back forces you onto the balls of your feet, before you straighten your knee and drive into your heel. “With each step backward,” says Patrick, “you are loading the knee for greater strength.” But the sled provides gentle resistance, since it’s delivering only horizontal force. DO IT: Load a sled. Wrap a harness around your waist. Walk backward. Take 20 to 30 steps per leg; do 2 or 3 sets. You can do this daily as part of your warmup.

The social-media explosion around Patrick has refocused the fitness conversation onto the knee joint itself—and exercises that help stabilize it. But Patrick has no formal training in medicine or physical therapy, and qualified experts don’t fully embrace his theories. You can learn plenty from his approach—but not every move will erase your knee pain.

THE RISKS TRADITIONAL METHODS of knee

strengthening start with the joint above your knee, the hip. Many experts value knees-over-toes movement but only if

you have hip and glute control. Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D., C.S.C.S., a Men’s Health advisor and renowned muscle researcher, says he’s “not aware of any evidence showing that intentionally forcing the knees to go over the toes during squatting and other lower-body exercise improves joint health.” And Dan Giordano, P.T., D.P.T., C.S.C.S., the chief medical officer of Bespoke Treatments and a fellow MH advisor, can’t rationalize pushing a painful knee to its limits to kick-start healing. “Medically speaking,” he says, “you should offload the joint and transfer

Location: Paradiso CrossFit Venice

BODY

2 3

TIBIA RAISE

WHY: The tibialis, a muscle

that starts under the knee and runs to the bottom of your foot, is a key decelerator of your foot—but it rarely sees direct weight-room work. “A stronger tibialis means less stress on the knees and more protection for your shins and ankles,” says Patrick. DO IT: Stand with your butt against a wall. Without bending your knees, lift your toes. The farther your feet are from the wall, the harder it gets. Do 3 sets of 20 reps; you can do this move daily.

HEELS-ELEVATED GOBLET SQUAT

WHY: If you struggle to flex your ankles, you likely can’t drive your knees over your toes during standard squats. But by elevating your heels, you erase that limitation and can squat low. “You build strength with a full range of motion,” Patrick says. DO IT: Stand with your heels on weight plates, a weight at your chest. Bend at the knees and hips, lowering your torso as low as you can. Pause, then stand. Do 3 sets of 15.

mechanical stress to the hip to allow the knee to start healing itself.” Translation: At some point, yes, you can drive knees over toes, but if you’re recovering from a knee injury, strengthen your glutes first.

THE REWARDS IF YOU’VE ALREADY built that glute strength, Patrick’s exercises can help you take your knee strength to the next level and bulletproof the joint, too. “He’s done a great job bringing significant parts of training to the forefront,” says Brian Harrington, C.S.C.S., who works with

high school and college hoops athletes. That starts with his singular focus on knee flexing. His extreme split squats, for example, ready your knees to handle the awkward positions you might land in during games of pickup basketball or even tag with your kids. His exercises also serve to cushion your knees against impact. That’s the beauty of the tibia raise. You’ve done calf raises before, but the tibia raise, which Patrick has helped popularize, strengthens the front of your lower legs, which work to decelerate your body on every stride and jump—and protect those knees.

REVERSE NORDIC CURL

WHY: This isn’t a regular part

of your training, but it is a solid test of your knee’s range of motion. Do it once a month. DO IT: Sit on your shins, abs and glutes tight, knees wide. Maintain a straight line from shoulders through knees as you lower backward. Stop lowering if you feel any pain in your knees, pause, then return to the start. Do just a few reps (2 to 4 is plenty), and focus on lowering slowly.

Another Patrick favorite is the reverse sled pull, which gently works your quads every time you straighten your legs and pull the sled back, building muscle to help stabilize your knee. All these moves subtly enhance your athleticism, too, letting you build the same spring and stability that Patrick showcases regularly on Instagram. Your key: Don’t start with moves like Patrick’s extreme split squat. Ease into knees-overtoes training with the four moves above. (And keep strengthening those glutes!) MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

BODY

NO GEAR, NO PROBLEM!

THE 9-MOVE

TOTAL-BODY BLASTER Head outdoors for a go-anywhere, no-equipment workout that helps you build strength and torch calories—while having plenty of fun, too. BY DEVENTRI JORDAN

Do this workout 3 or

WORKOUT

WARMUP

SKATER LUNGE

WALKING LUNGE TO SPRINT Do 5 walking lunges per leg. On each, take a large step forward, then bend at the knees and hips to lower your torso until your thigh is parallel to the ground. Turn and sprint back to your starting position.

Start standing on your right leg, knee bent slightly. Swing your left foot behind your right leg, then leap to the left. Land on your left leg, left knee bent, then repeat the process to leap back to the right. That’s 1 rep; do 5, blasting your glutes and inner thigh muscles and building the athleticism to move quickly from side to side. After each set, immediately do 5 twofooted lateral jumps, leaping from left to right and then back. Rest 60 seconds. Do 3 sets.

(a) (b)

REVERSE WALKING LUNGE TO SPRINT Do 5 reverse walking lunges per leg. On each, take a step backward, then bend at the knees and hips to lower your torso until your thigh is parallel to the ground. Sprint back to your starting position. 18

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

HOLD TO EXPLOSIVE PUSHUP 2 SUPERMAN Lie on your belly, arms and legs outstretched. Lift your arms off the ground. Squeeze your glutes, lifting your straight legs an inch from the ground (a). Hold, then place your hands in pushup position. Push up explosively, driving your hands off the ground (b). Land and lower into your next rep. Do reps for 30 seconds, then rest 30 seconds. Do 3 sets. PHOTOGRAPHS BY T YLER JOE

F E A T U R E D T R A I N E R : D E V E N T R I J O R D A N is a founder of the GameFace Training program at Life Time and has worked with professional athletes, including NFL QBs Cam Newton and Teddy Bridgewater. He specializes in workouts that build athleticism.

P I C T U R E D H E R E : D A N E F I S C H E R is a New York City–based fitness trainer and fashion model.

WITH ALTERNATING T ROTATION 3 PUSHUP Do a pushup, lowering your chest to within an inch of the ground (a). Press back up. Lift your right hand from the ground and reach it toward the sky, rotating your chest to the right as you do this (b). Return to pushup position and repeat on the other side. That’s 1 rep; do reps for 30 seconds. Rest 30 seconds. Do 3 sets.

(a)

CORE CIRCUIT

DIRECTIONS: Do these exercises as a circuit. Do not rest between exercises. Rest 30 seconds between each round. Do 3 rounds.

(b)

CRUNCH 4b SUITCASE Lie on your back, arms extended, lower back pressed into the ground, legs an inch above the ground. This is the start. Pull your knees to your chest, squeezing your abs as you do. Return to the start. That’s 1 rep; do 10.

WINDSHIELD WIPER

Lie on your back. Lift your legs straight up. This is the start. Keeping your shoulder blades glued to the ground, slowly rotate your straight legs to the right until your right leg touches the ground. Return to the start; repeat on the other side. That’s 1 rep; do 10.

Start in a right-side plank, left elbow on the ground, abs and glutes tight. Raise your right hand toward the sky. Raise your right leg as high as possible. Hold for 30 seconds. That’s 1 rep. Do 1 rep on each side. TANK AND SHORTS BY TEN THOUSAND; SHOES AND SOCKS BY NIKE. MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

BODY

FA ST A ND CURIOUS

6 A.M. WITH...

THE ECO-SNEAKER

KING

As co-head of Allbirds, a billion-dollar shoe company, TIM BROWN has learned to relax his workouts—but he still knows how to go hard, too.

BY BEN COURT

THE CHILLED AIR off San Fran-

cisco Bay. The screech of seagulls. The jostling of waves under the Golden Gate Bridge. The crunch of dirt underfoot. When Tim Brown runs, he leaves his phone behind and focuses on nature and his breathing. His favorite run is a five-miler along San Francisco’s waterfront from Crissy Field to Hopper’s Hands, a sign at the base of the bridge that he high-fives. Then he loops back. “Exercise, for me, is time alone, and it’s a way to reset mentally,” says Brown, 41, the co-CEO and cofounder of Allbirds. “I disconnect from technology and I take in the beautiful views and let my thoughts go. The Hopper’s Hands run is as good as it gets.” The idea of Allbirds wasn’t conceived during one specific run, but he says that regular exercise sessions helped him create—and now sustain—the company. “It’s difficult to take an idea from 20

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

nothing to something, and often you get stuck or feel overwhelmed. Going for a run is a way to problem-solve and often sparks me to attack challenges afresh.” Brown’s relationship with exercise hasn’t always been so cerebral. The New Zealand native played professional soccer for eight years; in 2010, he competed in the World Cup with the New Zealand national team. “As a professional, you’re pushing yourself hard every day and measuring everything,” he says. “Now I’m more flexible. But I learned that we have a tendency to overestimate what we can get done, or get good at, in the short term and underestimate the long run. I believe deeply in the compounding impact of gradually getting a little bit better—in work, life, and fitness.” These days, the father of two kids under five typically trains every other day for an intense 30 to 45 minutes. “My target is

every other day, but two consecutive days off or on is fine, and it’s not something I obsess about,” he says. In any given week, Brown normally does two outdoor runs plus a gym session or two, and he’ll also mix in a yoga class or bike ride. Whatever exercise he does, he tends to chase it with a series of core moves. Brown may not train with the maniacal fervor he had in his soccer days, but he does still set benchmarks for himself. One is running six miles in under 40 minutes; it’s an intense test of speed and stamina, requiring a six-minute, 40-second pace per mile. “I’m competing with no one other than myself, and it never fails to give me a sense of where my fitness is compared with my peak,” he says. “I also get a sense of achievement from pushing myself. Usually I’m falling short, and it will be a nudge to be more consistent and eat a little better or rest a bit more.” PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAKE STANGEL

BETWEEN INTERVALS Brown is wearing Allbirds’ new technical runner, the Tree Flyer, and its Natural Run shorts and T-shirt, both made with eucalyptus-tree fiber and merino wool. allbirds.com

“After warming up, do 5 three-minute intervals at the fastest pace you can maintain. Rest 1 minute between intervals. It’s only a 19-minute session, but you’ll be wiped out.”

CORNER-OFFICE

CORE SESSION

GO-TO RECOVERY FOOD?

BROWN HAS A STANDARD SERIES OF MOVES TO STRENGTHEN HIS LOWER BACK AND ABS. DO THEM AS A 3-ROUND CIRCUIT. DO EACH MOVE FOR 1 MINUTE. REPEAT 2 TIMES.

“Bananas. Easy to grab and go.”

MOTIVATIONAL MANTRA?

1. RIGHT SIDE PLANK Squeeze your core and glutes.

2. LUNGE WITH A T-TWIST Extend your arms and twist your torso every rep. Swap sides after 30 seconds.

3. PUSHUP Aim for 15 to 20 reps. 4. HIP-BRIDGE MARCH Lie on your back, feet near your butt. Lift your hips. Raise and lower each leg.

5. STANDING SPLIT Stand on 1 leg. Raise the other leg behind you as you fold forward and extend both arms. Hold for 10 seconds per side.

6. LEFT SIDE PLANK Squeeze your core and glutes.

Although he says his running time is his personal time, he does of course check out what other runners are wearing. “Every single time I see someone, I always look at the shoes—it’s part of the job,” he says. Brown and Joey Zwillinger, an engineer and renewables expert, cofounded Allbirds in 2016 with a simple premise:

Running shoes were too flashy and too plasticky. They thought they could do better by using natural materials like merino wool, eucalyptus fiber, and midsole foams made out of beans. The company’s minimalist and sustainable sneakers caught on as part of the office-casual uniform of the Silicon Valley set and other climatechange-aware consumers. Allbirds now makes trail and running shoes—complete with their carbon footprint noted on the sole—as well as workout wear. “Sometimes when you hear that a product is sustainable, the assumption is that it’s less good,” says Brown. “Our belief is that natural materials, in the context of exercise and performance, create better experiences. That’s our journey, to engineer products out of natural materials that create better experiences.” Exercising every other day is helping him get there.

“Sometimes when you’re going out the door, you’re not quite sure you want to do it because it’s cold or you’re a little tired. But then there’s that feeling on the other side of it, having done it.”

FANTASY TRAINING PARTNER? “Roy Keane, the fiery Irishman who became Manchester United’s midfield general. I’ve always admired his competitiveness.”

FITNESS GOALS WHEN YOU’RE 100? “Being alive would be a good start! Doing some exercise every other day and maintaining that drumbeat would make me very, very happy.”

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

BODY

#TRYTHISMOVE

THE

BEAR X GORILLA

FLOW

ES, STRONG, powerful back

and core muscles can help protect your shoulders and your spine. But if you truly want to prevent back pain and injury, you also need all that beef to be mobile. “Your torso is always changing positions, twisting and turning and shifting,” says MH fitness ROW, ROW, ROW!

“And you need to train your back and ab muscles to be ready for all that movement.”

Drive your left hand into

but after you’ve done a row rep on

your spine to be ready for anything, and it rockets up your heart rate. Growls and grunts optional. —BRETT WILLIAMS, NASM

WHO’S THIS GUY? CLIFF RODGERS is an NASM-certified trainer based in New York City and a member of the Men’s Health Strength in Diversity Initiative, which helps trainers from marginalized communities jump-start their careers with education, mentorship, and visibility. Rodgers was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2017 and has since committed himself to educating clients about proper diet and exercise. Follow him on Instagram at @youcantbediabetic.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

DOUBLE UP

Squeeze your shoulder blades and row both bells toward your rib cage. Return the bells to the floor. Jump back to a bear plank and begin another rep. Do reps for 40 seconds, then rest 40 seconds. Do 3 or 4 sets. TANK BY LULULEMON; SHORTS BY GYMSHARK; SHOES BY NIKE.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PHILIP FRIEDMAN

Delivering for E-Commerce

Delivering more e-commerce packages to homes across the country than anyone else.* And we do it 6, and often 7 days** a week, so your customers will keep coming back for more.

Get started at usps.com/everywhere *Based on parcels shipped by businesses to consumer residential addresses for the FY 2020. **Speciﬁc markets, restrictions apply.

BODY

TR ANSFOR-NATION!

HOW THIS GUY TOOK DOWN HIS

BLOOD PRESSURE

AND HAD FUN DOING IT BY AMY MARTURANA WINDERL

LAST YEAR, Dallas-based musician TOLU ADESINA

found himself feeling tired and unproductive. His doctor saw that his blood pressure was high—130/90 mmHg. If it stayed there or climbed, he’d damage his heart and other organs. Adesina, now 40, made a few simple changes that brought his energy back and pushed down his BP to a healthy 120/80. Here’s how he did it.

BEFRIEND THE SPICE RACK SWEAT THE FUN STUFF

I used to eat out a lot,” Adesina says. That meant hardly any vegetables and tons of salt. (Restaurant meals are loaded with it.) In many people, all that sodium and too little potassium can push up blood pressure. So he started cooking. He looked to the flavors of his homeland, Nigeria, for inspiration, then added a twist. “In a dish that would normally have [white] rice, I’d use brown or cauliflower rice,” Adesina says. Instead of salt, “I use a lot of indigenous seasoning, like curry powder, nutmeg, and cloves. These little changes make it feel like I’m eating my traditional foods.”

ADESINA HADN’T EVER done

much cardio, but once his doctor told him that it would make a big difference in his BP, he turned to running—and made it about music. “I plug in the earbuds and zone out to the music bliss,” he says. Physical activity helps your heart pump blood around with less effort, which decreases the force on your arteries, allowing blood pressure to drop. Adesina also had high blood sugar, which the cardio helped control. He now runs 45 to 60 minutes a day and adds strength training on weekends.

HEALTHY BLOOD PRESSURE ,

BY THE NUMBERS

47 24

PERCENTAGE OF AMERICAN ADULTS W H O H A V E HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

2.2

NUMBER OF EXCESS POUNDS LOST T H A T COULD LOWER BP ABOUT 1 MMHG.

FIND MORE SOUL “I ALWAYS CREATED and listened

to music, but I’d never used it as a tool to relieve stress and decompress until recently,” Adesina says. Now he plays soul or lo-fi music for a couple hours after a long day. He’s onto something: An analysis of studies on music and blood pressure suggests that tunes may help bring down your BP. Two reasons: Music can slow your breathing and blunt the activity in the part of your nervous system that keys you up.

90 to 150

MINUTES OF WEEKLY EXERCISE THAT HELP KEEP BP HEALTHY. “ULTIMATELY, THE MORE, THE BETTER,” SAYS D. EDMUND ANSTEY, M.D., A CARDIOLOGIST AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IRVING MEDICAL CENTER.

1 in 4

NUMBER OF AMERICANS WITH HYPERTENSION WHO HAVE THEIR BP UNDER CONTROL.

Courtesy Tolu Adesina

“I’M YOUNG and not married, and

YOU DIDN’T TAKE YOUR TRAINING WHEELS OFF TO GET BEAT BY THE HEAT.

The heat can make for a tough ride. Pedialyte has

3X THE ELECTROLYTES AND 1/4 OF THE SUGAR* vs. the leading sports drink, so you can stay hydrated. *Pedialyte Sport has 1380 mg sodium and no more than 14g sugar per liter; leading sports drink has ~460 mg sodium and ~58 g sugar per liter. © 2022 Abbott. All rights reserved. May 2022 LITHO IN USA.

BODY

FOOD DRAMA

WHICH OF THESE FOODS

MIGHT SUDDENLY KILL YOU? Adult-onset food allergies are on the rise and can make your life miserable—or worse. Here’s what’s happening behind the scenes and how to deal with it. BY MATT JANCER

MARTY SPARGO was in his early 20s when a marshmallow almost killed him. He was on break from college with his friends, and they’d ducked away to the beach for a bonfire with roasted jumbo marshmallows. A few minutes after he gobbled one down, Spargo began to feel funny. “My chest started getting heavy, and my heart was pounding so hard, and 26

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

my vision was starting to distort,” he says. Panic set in among the group as Spargo grew dizzier and dizzier and seemed on the verge of losing consciousness. His friends frantically called the hospital, carried him to the car, and rushed him to the emergency room. Spargo’s diagnosis: He had a previously undiagnosed and possibly late-developing allergy to gelatin,

which marshmallows are loaded with. Although childhood food allergies get all the attention, adult-onset food allergies have become a thing, too. A recent report in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice suggests there are more adults in the U. S. with a food allergy than children. While many adult allergies are continuations from childPHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDRE RUCKER

HOW TO TELL IF YOU HAVE A

THE USUAL

(ADULT-ONSET FOOD ALLERGY)

FOOD ALLERGY

SUSPECTS SUSPECTS

SPECIFICALLY

KNOW THE SIGNS

FINNED FISH

Any fish with fins, including anchovies, catfish, cod, salmon, and tuna.

PEANUTS

Peanuts, peanut butter, peanutbutter cups. But because peanuts are actually legumes, having a peanut allergy doesn’t mean you’re allergic to tree nuts.

SHELLFISH

Can range from crustaceans (shrimp, crab, lobster) to mollusks (clams, mussels, oysters, scallops, octopus, squid).

Talk to an allergist if you have an itchy or tingly mouth; hives and itching; swelling in your lips, face, tongue, or throat; wheezing, nasal congestion, or trouble breathing; abdominal pain, diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting; or dizziness or fainting. Call 911 if your airways feel constricted, your pulse is rapid, you’re dizzy or light-headed, or you feel you’ll lose consciousness.

SESAME

Sesame in all its forms, from seeds you can see to sesame oil, paste, and flour.

Prop styling: Kelsi Windmiller

TREE NUTS

hood, nearly half of the adults in this report said theirs started in adulthood. And it’s only getting worse: Almost every allergy expert agrees that there’s been a rise in the number of people in the U. S. reporting food allergies, says Scott Sicherer, M.D., one of that paper’s authors. It’s not clear why foods you used to eat cause trouble for you now, and researchers also don’t yet know why more and more adults are affected by food allergies. “A combination of factors is likely to be responsible. It’s not just genetics. It’s not just the environment. It’s not just the food we eat,” says Bruce Roberts, Ph.D., research strategy and innovation officer at Food Allergy Research & Education. What they do know is that food allergies happen when your body misidentifies

Almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, hazelnuts, pecans, pistachios, walnuts.

a protein in a food or group of foods as a threat and responds by pumping out antibodies that trigger symptoms ranging from mild mouth and throat itching to severe ones that send you into anaphylactic shock, during which your blood pressure drops and your airways constrict. Reactions typically occur within a few seconds to a few minutes, says Pamela Guerrerio, M.D., chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Laboratory of Allergic Diseases. After that, the allergic response happens every time the person is exposed to the allergen, she says. These kinds of allergies can be annoying, deadly, or anything in between. Here’s what to look out for and how to manage all of it.

RULE OU T A N INTOLERANCE An intolerance isn’t actually an allergy; it’s a digestive-system issue. So you might have gas, cramps, nausea, heartburn, diarrhea, or abdominal pain, but you won’t have breathing issues. Lactose and gluten are classic causes of intolerance. Talk to a doctor or dietitian about these symptoms.

GET THE RIGHT TEST Food-allergy test kits look for allergy-stoking antibodies in your blood. The problem: You can have antibodies but not allergies. So the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology advises against using these as screening tests. Instead, see an allergist who can figure out the problem with a few test options.

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

BODY

FOOD DRAMA

WHY NOW?

POSSIBLE MOTIVES LARGER AMOUNTS OF ALLERGENS

Sometimes food allergies don’t show up if you have a small amount of the food. For example, you may be fine with a side of peas, but if you have pea soup or a meat substitute made with pea protein, there’s so much more protein that you may have symptoms.

MORE CONTACT WITH CERTAIN PRODUCTS

If someone has a latex allergy, they may also react to avocados, bananas, chestnuts, and kiwis, since they have similar proteins.

BACTERIA AVOIDANCE

“People who live in farming communities have fewer allergies than people in cities,” says Dr. Sicherer. For example, in recently industrialized parts of China, people started to see more allergies as lifestyles shifted to more enclosed environments and less exposure to animals, gardening, and the outdoors. Overly clean lives may reduce our ability to fend off allergies. Some researchers speculate that overuse of other bacteria killers—antibiotics—may also contribute to food allergies.

ALLERGIES: NUT ALWAYS SO OBVIOUS READ THE INGREDIENTS Allergens aren’t necessarily where you’d expect. Always check labels and verify that an allergen isn’t in what you’re ordering at a restaurant. Menu blurbs often leave out important-toyou details.

EXTRA ANTACID USE

“It turns out the acid in your stomach is really important for breaking down food proteins so that they are less recognized by the immune system,” says Dr. Guerrerio.

WIN THE ALLERGY HEAD GAME

RESEARCH PUBLISHED IN FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY LOOKED AT THE WAY PERSONALITY TRAITS AFFECTED HOW AN ADULT FOOD ALLERGY MESSED WITH QUALITY OF LIFE. THE AUTHORS HAD SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR EVERYONE.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

EXPLORE YOUR SENSITIVITY

PROTECT YOURSELF

FIND RELIEF IN SCIENCE

An oral-challenge test is a safe way to figure out how much of a food would cause a reaction and what symptoms to expect.

Despite your best efforts, a hidden allergen may come your way. If your allergies are severe, carrying an EpiPen is nonnegotiable. A generic version is available that may be cheaper.

There’s now a drug to help tame peanut allergies in kids, as well as a push to develop more drugs for allergies, including some that would treat all types of food allergies with a single compound.

OPEN PEOPLE—adventure seekers—

AGREEABLE PEOPLE—the sort who

had more allergy issues. Could be they were out doing things that would expose them to more challenges, like finding safe foods. TRY: Meeting novelty needs through experiences other than food.

put others’ needs ahead of their own— tended to feel anxious or stressed about allergies in social situations that revolved around food. TRY: Finding ways to speak up to others about your food allergy.

EXTROVERTED PEOPLE—outgoing, expressive—had more concerns around the personal and social issues of living with a food allergy. TRY: Inviting people to your home for gatherings, where you can control the food.

CONSCIENTIOUS PEOPLE—responsible, organized—had problems finding a restaurant and were more likely to feel bad if issues arose. TRY: Reminding yourself that if a challenge hits, it’s often due to outside factors, not a failure of planning.

| MEN’S HEALTH

INSIDEOUT

EVENTS & PROMOTIONS

® ®

FANTASTIC BEASTS – LUNCHABLES

FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE SECRETS OF DUMBLEDORE

IT ALL

LOOK FOR IT ON DIGITAL Dumbledore entrusts Newt Scamander to lead a team of wizards, witches and one brave Muggle baker on a dangerous mission to stop Grindelwald from seizing control of the wizarding world.

SCAN TO SEE MORE

STARTS HERE start with high-performance nutrition in here.

BUILT TO BE EATEN Anything is possible when you build with Lunchables, whether it’s a rocket, horse, or even the Eiffel Tower! With Lunchables’ endless combinations and kids’ creativity, building their lunch is just the beginning. Check out the Lunchables Pinterest and Instagram for building inspiration.

Optimizes Oxygen Metabolism (VO2 Max) for Increased Stamina

30% Protein & 20% Fat to Maintain Lean Muscle

ProPlanSport.com Purina trademarks are owned by Société des Produits Nestlé S.A. Any other marks are property of their respective owners.

BODY

SUPPLEMENT CHECK

N O I S A V

OF THE

MUSHRO

OM S

If you want to enhance your immunity, the booming mushroom-supplement industry has something to sell you. Yet dietitians still aren’t so sure these pills and powders deliver. BY TAYLYN WASHINGTON-HARMON

THE

CLAIM

YOUR

Makers of mushroom supplements advertise that they can improve brainpower and mood, boost immunity, and (whoa now) fight cancer. Types like lion’s mane and reishi have antioxidants and beta-glucan, a fiber that regulates blood sugar, weight, and carcinogens.

TAKEAWAY

There’s not enough data to conclude that mushroom supplements strengthen your brain or body, says St. Pierre. Plus, supplements are pricey ($35 a bag for reishi), unlike real mushrooms, which have solid research trumpeting their benefits.

WHAT’S

TRUE

WHAT’S

“Mushrooms do contain antioxidants and beta-glucan fiber,” says Brian St. Pierre, R.D., a Men’s Health nutrition advisor. And mushroom extracts— like those derived from actual mushrooms and found in many supplements—also have these nutrients.

Some mushroom supplements contain only the mushroom root, which doesn’t include the beta-glucan-rich cap and stem. Even in supplements made from caps, companies might include merely a fraction of the dosages found to be effective in those human studies.

WHAT’S BOGUS

Most of the research on mushroom supplementation was conducted on rodents; the few human studies that exist had small sample sizes. So while there’s promise, there’s no hard data proving supplements can help improve your mood or support your immune system, says St. Pierre.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHELSEA KYLE

Food styling: Pearl Jones. Prop styling: Jojo Li.

ALSO BOGUS

These are no ordinary clouds They’re gathered by equatorial trade winds over a remote Fijian island, 1,600 miles from the nearest continent. Their rain ﬁlters through volcanic rock, gathering more than double the electrolytes* for a soft, smooth taste. What these clouds make isn’t just water. It’s FIJI Water.

FIJIWater.com *Compared to the other two top premium bottled water brands. © 2022 FIJI Water Company LLC. All Rights Reserved. FIJI, EARTH’S FINEST, EARTH’S FINEST WATER, the Trade Dress, and accompanying logos are trademarks of FIJI Water Company LLC or its affiliates. FW220331-09

By choosing paper products, you’re taking a sustainable path forward that also gives back. When you use paper products, you’re doing your part to help the planet. Because the paper, packaging and boxes you rely on every day can be recycled up to 7 times. In fact, paper is the most recycled material in the U.S., and it comes from a natural and renewable resource—trees. Choosing paper products encourages America’s private forest landowners to grow and maintain healthy forests at a rate nearly double the volume needed to make the products you rely on every day. And that’s something we can all feel good about.

CHOOSE PAPER AND PAPER PACKAGING AND BE A FORCE FOR NATURE Learn more at howlifeunfolds.com

From the Makers of Paper and Packaging

CHANGE FOR THE BETTER

THE R I S E L I A H O L F L

THE ELECTRIC TRUCK After years of Sparks and Leafs, a new class of hard-tested,

rough-riding, tough-as-all-hell e-trucks is here to turbocharge your

life—and maybe even save the planet—with sheer power. BY AARON FOLEY

ILLUSTRATION BY EDDIE GUY

WHEN AUTOMAKERS WANT to test what the public thinks of an upcoming truck model, they head to Texas. So that’s where Darren Palmer, vice president of electricvehicle programs at Ford, found himself four years ago. The handful of people in Palmer’s Dallas test group initially thought they were watching a demonstration of Ford’s F-150 Raptor, an absolute beast of a gas-powered performance truck. Palmer didn’t exactly tell them otherwise as he ran through the numbers.

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

LIFE

BUZZWORTHY

“I said, ‘I’ve got this new truck for you. It’s got 775 pounds of torque, it has 563 horsepower, it’ll pull a 10,000-pound trailer at a 25 percent grade, and it goes zero to 60 in four seconds,’ ” he says. Then he revealed that the Lightning was all electric. “It was hilarious watching [these] Texans with their faces, mouths open.” Ford’s F-150 Lightning is now available to order at just under $40,000. Ford has a planned production run of 150,000 trucks for 2023, and it isn’t alone in manufacturing electric versions of “gas-guzzlers.” There’s an all-electric Chevy Silverado on the way in 2023. There’s the Hummer EV pickup, available for preorder now for a cool $80,000. And then there’s the burly yet sleek R1T truck from Rivian, a newer American manufacturer that officially entered the market last year. Add to all these Tesla’s much publicized Cybertruck, tentatively scheduled for a 2023 release, and you have a fleet of powerful e-trucks ready to take to America’s busy superhighways and dust-strewn back roads. The timing couldn’t be any better, either. Gas prices are soaring due to global upheaval. Consumer demand for fuel-efficient vehicles is growing. (GMC recently touted that 70 percent of Hummer EV orders came from first-time EV buyers.) And in February, the Biden administration announced it would be spending nearly $5 billion over five years for a national electric-vehicle-charging network, though it did not detail charging compatibility. Even with all this momentum, Palmer says he’s still met with the same skepticism from drivers that he saw at the Dallas event four years ago. “I’m really sick of people asking, ‘Will it tow?’ ” he says. Yes, electric trucks can tow. (In a 2019 marketing splash, Ford flexed a prototype of the Lightning pulling a line of freight cars loaded with 42 F-150 trucks, equaling 1.25 million pounds.) And yes, electric trucks have all the torque, horsepower, and get-up-and-go of gas trucks— sometimes even more. “I would say the majority of the ways [electric pickups] are marketed, manufacturers are saying they can do everything a gas truck can do and still be faster than your sports car,” says Bradley Brownell, a cofounder of Autopia 2099, a car show for any vehicle powered 34

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

THE BEST ELECTRIC TRUCK FOR YOU

They’re all battery powered, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same.

BEST FOR

FIRST-TIME TRUCK OWNERS RIVIAN R1T Delays likely mean the R1T will begin arriving in 2023, but you can preorder a base model starting at $67,500. The truck is made for adventure—with a built-in flashlight, an air compressor, and a slick security system that records thieves (or bears, perhaps) trying to get their hands on the goods. Two optional packages come with a portable Bluetooth speaker.

by electrons. So when GMC ramped up its marketing for the Hummer EV, the company told the automotive press about the truck’s “WTF mode” (that’s “watts to freedom”), stating that the EV could go from zero to 60 in three seconds, nearly the same rate as a Corvette. Even Rivian, a California-based electric-vehicle manufacturer founded in 2009 with the mission of preserving the planet, boasts in its marketing for the R1T pickup that it houses an 835-horsepower engine that also pushes

from zero to 60 in three seconds. “We’re thinking about tomorrow,” says Forest Young, Rivian’s global head of brand. “All the things, I think, a truck holds up to—this idea of being tough, this idea of resilience and being able to move over obstacles in its path . . . we couple those ideas with being tenaciously responsible. It’s hopeful hedonism at its best.” Regardless of the manufacturer, there are still some reservations about electric vehicles on all sides. Drivers trained on gas engines will perpetually be con-

BEST FOR

B E ST FO R

SCHLEPPING THE KIDS

ACTIVE SINGLE GUYS

GMC HUMMER EV

T E S L A CY B E RT RU C K Okay, yes, the Cybertruck exoskeleton is nearly impenetrable, but there’s plenty of other functionality that’s actually useful. It tows more than 14,000 pounds, seats six, features lockable storage, and houses an expansive payload bay that can heft up to 3,500 pounds. Base-model costs have been quoted at $39,900, but who knows?

The $80,000 Hummer EV pickup is the only electric truck (so far) with a removable roof, which no doubt will make parents with one the envy of the morningdrop-off crowd. But the Super Cruise with driver assistance makes it an easier ride, and the 800-volt DC fast-charging feature makes pit stops super quick.

BEST FOR

MARRIED AND YARD-WORKING FO R D F-1 5 0 L I G H T N I N G

Courtesy brands

Ford’s electric F-150 boasts a Mega Power Frunk (that’s a front trunk) that can carry up to 400 pounds of additional baggage. So load up all the bags of soil, mulch, and decorative bricks—and, what the heck, maybe a new riding mower in the bed. It starts at $39,947.

cerned about the range of electric vehicles. Local governments nationwide have been slow to implement public charging stations or push substantive EV-friendly policies. And environmental analyses have shown that batteries that are used to power EVs might be more harmful to the environment in the long term than manufacturers would care to admit. But legacy automakers, like Ford, that have seen their valuations dwarfed by that of Tesla, argue that their trucks are so much more than vehicles that move

you from place to place. The Lightning can act as a backup generator for your home, it houses a massive front trunk for extra storage in place of an engine, and it can supply the electric needs of a glamping site or a tailgate party. “Our approach is that electric cars will do things gas never did,” says Palmer. “People are resistant to change, and you have to show them something to help them move into it.” You’ll notice that the ad spots for the Lightning, which, yes, feature plenty of

shots of the truck hauling stuff (a helicopter!), also show the vehicle moving through a big city at night, home to a suburban house with bikes in the garage. The indie band Battles’ song “Atlas” has replaced Bob Seger wailing “Like a Rock.” A white-collar worker wearing a button-up stands in for a cowboy in dusty jeans. And there’s a sense of evolution. It’s the kind of advertising that offers a promise: The truck has helped build America. Now can America help rebuild the truck? MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

PERFECT SALMON EVERY SINGLE TIME

Why GRILL THIS TASTY FISH and risk overcooking it when you can gently pan-sear it instead? Thirty grams of MUSCLEBUILDING PROTEIN. Ten grams of STOMACH-FILLING FIBER. One hundred grams of AWESOME.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHELSEA KYLE

THE PROTEIN

30g

Five ounces of cooked wild salmon delivers a potent 36 grams of protein— not to mention being a strong source of heart-helping omega-3 fatty acids.

THE FIBER

10g

The lentils alone will push you over the 10 grams of fiber you need to stay full. The

BU Y IT Chinook salmon (also called “king”) is higher in omega-3’s than coho, sockeye, or pink salmon. Wild salmon brings more flavor than farmed.

Perfect Seared Salmon W H AT YO U ’ L L N E E D 4 (6 OZ) SKIN-ON WILD SALMON FILLETS

1 TBSP COCONUT OIL 2 LIMES, HALVED

HOW TO MAKE IT 1. Blot the salmon fillets dry with paper towels and season both sides of each fillet with salt and pepper. 2. In a large nonstick pan over medium high, heat the coconut oil until it shimmers. Place the salmon skin side down in the pan and sear until the skin is evenly brown and crispy, about 6 minutes. Using a spatula, carefully flip the fish and sear the other side, about 1 minute.

Preheat your oven to 375°F. In a large roasting pan, toss 1 ½ lb carrots (peeled and cut on the diagonal) with 2 Tbsp coconut oil, 1 tsp sea salt, and ½ tsp ground turmeric. Roast the carrots in the oven till tender and evenly browned, about 30 minutes. Feeds 4 Nutrition per serving: 130 calories,

3. Plate the fish and squeeze half a lime over each salmon fillet. Feeds 4 Nutrition per serving: 293 calories, 36g protein, 2g carbs (0g fiber), 15g fat

Food styling: Pearl Jones. Prop styling: Jojo Li.

HOLY SH!T

KITCHEN TRICK SET

LOOSE THE

JUICE Stubborn lemons and limes are no match for the microwave. Just zap them for 15 seconds, slice, squeeze, and watch the juice inside unleash.

dium onion (thinly sliced), 4 garlic cloves (thinly sliced), 2 Tbsp fresh ginger (finely chopped), and ¾ tsp Madras curry powder. Saute till the onions soften, 4 to 5 minutes. Add 1 cup brown lentils, 1 cup tomatoes (chopped), and 5 cups chicken stock. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the lentils are tender, 20 to 25 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Feeds 4 Nutrition per serving: 225 calories, 15g protein, 26g carbs (10g fiber), 7g fat MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

LIFE

T H E E X P E R T : D AV I D W O N D R I C H is the James Beard Award–winning author of several cocktail books. He’s even studied the history of the Bloody Mary.

DRINKS

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

MAKE A BLOODY MARY Enough with the over-the-top meals in a glass. It’s about time that we all go back to basics with this classic cocktail. AS TOLD TO KURT MAITLAND

STICK WITH SIMPLE

BUT THEN UPGRADE Instead of a vegetable blend, go with 100 percent tomato juice for a balanced base. Squeeze fresh lemon juice to avoid the chemical tang of store-bought concentrates. And splurge for quality vodka if you can. (Some of our favorites, like Ketel One and Tito’s, work, but Suntory’s Haku Vodka is bright, clean, and superb.)

HOLY SH!T COCKTAIL TRICK! To decrease the time it takes to make ice cubes, use hot water. It works because of the Mpemba effect, a scientific theory proposing that hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold water, possibly because heat is released from its surface more quickly.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

MEASURE AND MIX In a cocktail shaker, shake or roll (i.e., swirl the shaker around in small circles) the following ingredients with ice: 4 oz tomato juice, 1½ oz vodka, ½ oz lemon juice, and dashes of Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco to taste. Strain everything into a highball glass over ice. (If you’re really thirsty, double this recipe and then serve in a pint glass.)

OOOOOKAY, GARNISH If you’d like a bit more burn, stir in prepared horseradish or freshly ground pepper. Maybe add a lemon wedge or an olive. Just don’t go overboard. As Dirty Harry once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Danny Kim/the Licensing Project

Hold the celery—and while you’re at it, the bacon, shrimp, and cheeseburger sliders, too. Under the ruse of “brunch,” some restaurants junk up the drink to jack up the cost. The original, post-Prohibition recipe uses just tomato juice, vodka, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco. Yes, that’s all.

CBD FOR YOUR PAIN Everyone feels the hurt as you age, but CBD can help you deal with it.

ife really does fly by. Before I knew it, my 40s had arrived, and with them came some new gifts from dear ol’ Mother Nature—frequent knee pain, stress, low energy and sleeplessness. Now, I’m a realist about these things, I knew I wasn’t going to be young and resilient forever. But still, with “middle-age” nearly on my doorstep, I couldn’t help but feel a little disheartened. That is until I found my own secret weapon. Another gift from Mother Nature. It began a few months back when I was complaining about my aches and pains to my marathon-running buddy, Ben, who is my same age. He casually mentioned how he uses CBD oil to help with his joint pain. He said that CBD has given him more focus and clarity throughout the day and that his lingering muscle and joint discomfort no longer bothered him. He even felt comfortable signing up for back-to-back marathons two weekends in a row this year. That made even this self-proclaimed skeptic take notice. But I still had some concerns. According to one study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 70% of CBD products didn’t contain the amount of CBD stated on their labels. And, as a consumer, that’s terrifying! If I was going to do this, I needed to trust the source through and through. My two-fold research process naturally led me to Zebra CBD. First, I did a quick online poll—and by that, I mean I posed the CBD question on my Face-

book page. Call me old fashioned but I wanted to know if there were people whom I trusted (more than anonymous testimonials) who’ve had success using CBD besides my buddy. That is how I found out that Zebra CBD has a label accuracy guarantee which assures customers like me what is stated on the label is in the product. Secondly, I wanted cold hard facts. Diving deep into the world of CBD research and clinical studies, I came across Emily Gray M.D., a physician at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) Medical School and medical advisor for Zebra CBD who is researching the effects of CBD. Dr. Gray wrote “early results with CBD have been promising and we have a lot of research underway now. I’ve had several patients using CBD with good success. It’s important that you know your source of CBD and how to use it properly.” After hearing it from the doctor’s mouth, I returned to my online poll and was amazed by the number of close friends and family who were already on the CBD train. Apparently, I was the only one without a clue! And funny enough, a couple of friends who commented were using the same brand as my buddy—Zebra CBD. There was no consensus as to why they were using CBD, but the top reasons given were for muscle & joint discomfort, mood support, sleep support, stress and headaches, as well as supporting overall health & wellness. Eventually, even the most skeptical of the bunch can be won over. With a trusted CBD

source in mind, I decided to try it. When I viewed Zebra CBD’s selection online, I was impressed by its array of products, including CBD oils called tinctures, topicals, chewable tablets, mints and gummies. After reading on their website that all their products are made with organically-grown hemp, I ordered... and it arrived within 2 days! The first product I tried was the rub. Now this stuff was strong. Immediately after rubbing it on my knee, the soothing effects kicked in. It had that familiar menthol cooling effect, which I personally find very relieving. And the best part is, after two weeks of using it, my knee pain no longer affected my daily mobility. The Zebra Sleep Gummies, on the other hand, had a different but equally positive effect on my body. To take it, the instructions suggest chewing thoroughly. This was simple enough, and the taste was, well, lemony. After about 15 minutes, a sense of calm came over my body. It's hard to describe exactly; it's definitely not a "high" feeling. It's more like an overall sense of relaxation—and then I was out. Needless to say, I slept great and woke up refreshed. While it hasn’t been a catch-all fix to every one of my health issues, it has eased the level and frequency of my aches. And it sure doesn’t seem like a coincidence how much calmer and more focused I am. All-in-all, CBD is one of those things that you have to try for yourself. Although I was skeptical at first, I can say that I’m now a Zebra CBD fan and that I highly recommend their products. My 40s are looking up! Also, I managed to speak with a company spokesperson willing to provide an exclusive offer to MH readers. If you order this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “MH10” at checkout. Plus, the company offers a 100% No-Hassle, Money-Back Guarantee. You can try it yourself and order Zebra CBD at ZebraCBD.com/Men or at 1-888-762-2699.

From the Editors of Men's Health

No More Excuses. Get Stronger, Smarter, Better with

PREMIUM ALL ACCESS Introducing the all-new MVP Premium membership tier from Men’s Health, designed to help readers like you dominate your fitness routine by oﬀering best-in-class workouts anytime, anywhere. Premium membership oﬀers personalized expertise to help you meet and exceed your goals. ENJOY ALL THE BENEFITS OF PRINT AND DIGITAL MEMBERSHIPS, PLUS:

Hundreds of on-demand workouts led by world-class trainers, with new fitness programs added each month

MVP Essentials Kit (value $50) with products hand-picked by our editors

Unlock Premium today for less than

A special discount oﬀ your next purchase at the Men's Health Shop

$2 /week

ESCAPE

THE

STYLE

LIFE

HEAT

Just because the sun is sizzling doesn’t mean your style has to suffer. Heat-fighting tech has gone to the next level and brought forth a whole new class of clothes redefining what it means to look cool. Andrew Koji, Bullet Train’s up-and-coming action star, proves it.

UPGRADE A CLASSIC Meet your new summertime uniform. Banana Republic’s performance pants look like chinos, but they’re water-repellent and breathable, with built-in stretch. Wear them with Goodlife’s slim, lighter-than-air Henley. This outfit looks good anywhere: the office, al fresco dates, overwater bungalows (one can dream), or wherever else summer takes you. Henley ($85) by Goodlife; Motion Tech pants ($100) by Banana Republic; Tread Lite sneakers ($120) by Florsheim; watch ($550) by Victorinox.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY T YLER JOE

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

LIFE

STYLE

PLAY SMARTER Todd Snyder’s Tipped tank is perfect for gun-show weather, thanks to its slim but not clingy fit, so you can wear it at the park or the beach. Match it with these Lands’ End shorts, which feature UPF 50 sun protection and a little stretch for swimming and running. Tank ($58) by Todd Snyder; Outrigger Stretch cargo shorts ($65) by Lands’ End; sneakers ($140) by On.

GO CAMPING Old-school camp shirts were billowy button-ups made for postretirement lounging. Fair Harbor’s Casablanca top fixes all that. Its cut is slim, like a summer dress shirt, yet lightweight for hot poolside days. Its UPF 30 fabric helps fight sunburn. Shirt ($78) by Fair Harbor; Alpha Icon chinos ($88) by Dockers; sunglasses ($163) by Ray-Ban; Captain Cook High Tech Ceramic Diver watch ($3,000) by Rado.

TRAVEL LIGHT Cross-country summer travel calls for comfortable clothes that still look polished. Enter Buck Mason’s cotton polo, which feels broken-in like your favorite sweats, while its suede finish keeps it looking sharp. Pair it with Everlane’s moisture-wicking travel chinos to move you from the tarmac to the resort without losing a second of relaxation. Polo ($58) by Buck Mason; performance traveling chinos ($98) by Everlane; Divers Sixty-Five watch ($2,200) by Oris.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

STRETCH IT OUT A polo-and-pants combo is the ultimate summer-Friday look. Polo Ralph Lauren upgrades it with an extra-stretch, breathable fabric that feels like a second skin, so you can go straight from the office to a cookout wrinkle- and sweat-free. Polo ($95) and cargo pants ($125) by Polo Ralph Lauren; sneakers ($110) by Everlane; watch ($3,000) by Rado.

Styling: Ted Stafford. Grooming: Sandrine Van Slee for Kerastase at Art Department.

THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR

ANDREW KOJI CAN TAKE A BEATING. After all, the 34-year-old actor’s breakout character was a Bruce Lee–inspired martial artist on the show Warrior, for which he went through months of arduous training. Although Koji studied tae kwon do in his teens, this was another level of intense fight work—and it paid off. Soon after, he landed a string of steady gigs: Peaky Blinders, American Gods, the G. I. Joe prequel Snake Eyes. And then came the action-thriller movie Bullet Train (out August 5), shot at the height of the pandemic. “Normally you get to know your cast members, but we had the double masks and social distancing,” Koji says. “It was claustrophobic.” The British Japanese actor channeled his nerves into his character, Yuichi Kimura, a troubled gangster who boards the title train and collides with lethal adversaries. “I just used that anxiety for the character,” he says. “It worked because he’s a bit of a mess.” Plus, Koji had a decent scene partner to work with: Brad Pitt. “When we were going over this scene, he said, ‘We’re sculpting it and we’re sculpting it. It’s never perfect. We’re fine-tuning it and making it better,’ ” Koji says. “I really respect that. He cares so much about trying to make it as good as possible. He’s a craftsman.” Next, Koji will enter another round of martial-arts training in South Korea to prepare for Warrior’s third season. With little room for downtime, he unwinds with video games, reading, and meditation. And he sticks to comfortable clothes that he can relax in. “During my screen test with Brad, he was wearing casual sneakers and a jumpsuit thing,” Koji says. “Brad said to me, ‘Once you get to a certain age, it’s about comfort.’ That’s how I feel, but I’m already there.” —CHRISTIAN GOLLAYAN MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

LIFE

GROOMING

WATCH

YOUR BACK!

Nothing kills summer vibes like BACNE. Here’s how to treat and prevent a flare-up— plus reduce damage from old ones. BY GARRETT MUNCE

TREAT IT!

PREVENT IT!

STEP 1: Don’t pick or pop back acne. You’ll cause long-term scarring.

Body Gel Cream ($13), to help avoid overdrying your skin.

STEP 2: Using a washcloth

STEP 4: When the active

or long-handled body brush, gently clean every day with an antibacterial wash, like Hibiclens Antiseptic Skin Cleanser ($10), “to limit the amount of bacteria on the skin,” says dermatologist Dendy Engelman, M.D., and continue until the breakout subsides. Or, if your back gets real sweaty during workouts, you may need to treat bacne-causing yeast, which thrives in moist environments. In that case, use a dandruff shampoo, like Head & Shoulders Classic Clean Shampoo ($10), as a bodywash, says Dr. Engelman.

breakout is gone, exfoliate the area daily with a product containing glycolic or lactic acid, like Soft Services Smoothing Solution ($34), to help keep pores open. (Scrubs are a no-go, as they can spread bacteria and lead to dark spots.) For even more exfoliation, ask your dermatologist about a chemical peel.

STEP 3: Follow your wash

with a lightweight gel moisturizing lotion, like Neutrogena Hydro Boost 44

JULY • AUGUST 2022

STEP 5: Target

lingering zits with a benzoyl peroxide spot treatment, like La RochePosay Effaclar Duo Dual Action Acne Treatment ($31). For harderto-reach areas, try a salicylic acid acne spray, like Paula’s Choice Clear ($26).

| MEN’S HEALTH

STEP 1: Keep up your treat-

ment. Even after you’re in the clear, following the preceding steps will minimize your risk of bacne reemerging or at least reduce the frequency. Go down to every other day and then to every three days if you stay zit-free, says dermatologist Bruce Katz, M.D. STEP 2: Add a retinoid, a

vitamin A derivative that increases cell turnover and keeps pores open and clear. Apply a gel, like Differin Adapalene Gel 0.1% Acne Treatment ($22), every day

to the areas that usually break out. STEP 3: Skip workout clothes

made from synthetic fabrics, which, yes, “soak up sweat pretty well, but they’re also irritating to the skin,” says Dr. Katz. He recommends 100 percent cotton instead, which absorbs sweat but won’t anger your skin. STEP 4: Avoid foods that spike your blood sugar, like sugary postworkout drinks and dairy products, both of which, Dr. Engelman says, have been linked to acne.

TECH UPDATE

NEW WAYS TO ERASE SCARS FRACTIONAL C0 2 LASERS are the most effective for treating acne scars, even on your back, says Dr. Katz. A few sessions will smooth scar edges and stimulate collagen production. Lasers may not be recommended for darker skin tones, but a radio-frequency microneedling treatment, like Morpheus8, can fix scarring with tiny (harmless) needles. Talk to your dermatologist.

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK MATCHO

LIFE

THE

RESURRECTION OF

LIVE MUSIC IS (FINALLY) HERE

Concerts and festivals are back—and booming. Buy a ticket and you might just rediscover something you’ve been missing: humanity. BY KEITH NELSON JR.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

recorded music also sounded so flat to me during the pandemic? “We see greater brain synchrony for live music than recorded music, which is paralleled by feelings of social connection and engagement,” Grahn says. That was it. It wasn’t only connection I was missing but a shared experience. Charles Darwin once theorized that humans communicated through musical sounds before they did through speech. I didn’t just need to go to a live concert. I needed to commune. And I wasn’t alone. Look to the legions of Bad Bunny fans who, after helping the rapper become the most streamed artist on Spotify in 2020 and 2021, made his El Último Tour del Mundo 2022 the fastest-selling tour on Ticketmaster since 2018. Look to Coachella, which sold out multiday passes back in January in a matter of hours. There’s a hunger to bear witness.

So when New York joined other states in lifting vaccine and mask mandates for indoor events this spring, I made sure I found a way to get to the Tyler, the Creator show at Madison Square Garden. Minutes after Tyler’s show began, a bespectacled college kid and I went from strangers to momentary best friends, our arms draped over each other, reciting lyrics about Tyler’s threesomes with a triceratops. And as I belted out “don’t leave” from the song “Earfquake” with tens of thousands of other people I had never met, I didn’t just know live music was back; I knew I had been reborn. Find a show. Call a friend. Or don’t— because you’ll discover at least one (or maybe thousands) reconnecting just like you. KEITH NELSON JR . is a senior editor at Men’s Health.

YOUR 2022 RETURN-TO-LIVE-MUSIC BUCKET LIST THE WEEKND: AFTER HOURS TIL DAWN TOUR (July 8 to September 2) Remember those Weeknd songs you haven’t stopped singing the past two years? This tour is the first time you’ll be able to hear them live.

PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVAL

FIREFLY MUSIC FESTIVAL

(July 15 to 17) The playlist that got you through the pandemic comes to life as the Roots, Japanese Breakfast, Earl Sweatshirt, and Spiritualized join 40-plus other artists for a three-day festival in Chicago.

(September 22 to 25) In Dover, Delaware (of all places), more than 70 artists, including Green Day, My Chemical Romance, and Dua Lipa, converge for four straight days of music.

Getty Images

WHEN LIVE-MUSIC PROMOTERS

started suspending tours in March 2020 due to Covid, a part of me began to die. As the concert-less months continued, my music-loving friends turned into ghosts, sunshine on summer days reminded me of outdoor festivals of yesteryear, and listening to new music felt hollow. Then came livestreamed shows. At first, being able to catch a rare H.E.R. jam session with Chloe x Halle an hour before an equally rare Questlove DJ set was kind of awesome—and all I had to do was switch browser tabs. But after six months of streaming shows, virtual concerts faded into the endless screen-time void of Zoom work meetings and Google Hangouts. Music, once a refuge from the chaos of life, became a reminder of what I was missing: human connection. No matter how loudly I belted out sing-alongs alone in my apartment, I couldn’t recapture the feeling of doing the same with thousands of people IRL. Research bears this out. “Music has clear access to the ‘reward’ or pleasure centers of the brain. We are also very rewarded by social connection, so live music creates a double whammy of pleasurable experiences,” says Jessica Grahn, Ph.D., who heads the Music and Neuroscience Lab at Western University’s Brain and Mind Institute. This makes sense to me: Streaming shows can only ever be a virtualreality experience. But why had

LIFE

COOL DAD

T H I S M O N T H ’S C O O L D A D : A D A M PA L LY is an actor and comedian.

He’s in TruTv’s 101 Places to Party Before You Die, out July 14.

FATHERHOOD:

THE CULTURE SHOCK You cannot both be a dad and keep up with life’s more leisurely pursuits. Making peace with that is tough—but not impossible. BY ADAM PALLY

HERE’S ONE QUESTION that is particularly infuriating to a father of young children, and it goes a little something like ten-hour-long HBO investigative series here]?” The person asking the question isn’t usually trying to start something with me (at least I don’t think so) and either doesn’t have children or their kids are older and can do things by themselves (one can dream). When I hear this question, my brain goes numb and I’m seized with a combination of nostalgia and panic. Do you even understand my life right now? Are you reminding me that I was once at least somewhat tuned in? What is my favorite thing I’m watching right now? 48

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

Honestly, it’s Instagram Stories. If I do have a chance to sit down, it’s likely in a room where five iPads and a television are blasting. My phone is my only refuge. So the last thing I watched that I really loved was an alligator feeding, followed by an omelet-cooking tutorial, which set up a hack to get the kernels out of a bag of popcorn, then on to a beautiful blond playing the guitar solo from “Bohemian Rhapsody” in a string bikini, and, finally, Loki dancing on a British talk show. That’s what’s in my queue. What music have I been listening to? The other night I was lying in bed trying to watch the Knicks game, and my wife was having a freak-out that her Bluetooth headphones wouldn’t connect and her Instagram Stories (she’s a fan, too!) were

playing out loud on her phone. So I guess the song I most recently listened to was I’m begging begging begging you the small waist pretty face and big bank oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no. Have I been to any great restaurants? Most of the time I eat a salad in my car while I wait for my children to get out of school. It’s a salad to give me the illusion that eating healthy will stave off death, but it’s the same salad almost every day, and by the time I’m done throwing Parmesan crisps, tortilla chips, hard-boiled eggs, and cheese on top, the “salad” has more calories than a pizza. For dinner, it’s wine and whatever my kids want to eat, so a steady rotation of chicken nugs, mac and cheese, and Chipotle. If my wife and I get a date night out, it’s sushi, and we drink more than we eat every time and are checking in with the sitter to see how soon we can get home after the kids fall asleep, because we don’t want to put them to bed. I used to love going to the movies, seeing concerts, going out partying till late, eating at fine restaurants, wearing nice clothes. I bet I would still love it, but I don’t miss it. If you’re a dad worth his salt, you have given up even the slightest hint of being a cultured man for something more important: the well-being of other people. Having a responsibility to these little prick kids of mine has been the single greatest joy of my life. I’ve grown to realize that life is about having people to love, people to need, and people to need you. If that means I missed Tiger King for Daniel Tiger or haven’t read a book for at least three years, unless you count Lego instructions, or still haven’t seen whatever Matrix they’re on now—I’m fine with all that. And I’ll catch up on that HBO series when they start putting all their stuff on Instagram Stories.

Having a responsibility to these little prick kids of mine has been the single greatest joy of my life.” ILLUSTRATION BY AGATA NOWICKA

T H EY LOO K F ER OCIOU S, BUT INS ID E THEY’RE JUST CHICKEN RAISED WITH

NO ANTIBIOTICS Ever.

LOSE YOUR GUT Shakes are a great way to lose that extra weight

BEING A TRAINER, BODYBUILDER, and nutrition expert means that companies frequently send me their products and ask for my stamp of approval. Most of the time I dive into research, test the product out, and send the company honest feedback. Sometimes, however, I refuse to give the product a try, because frankly, the ingredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d rather drink diesel fuel than torture my body with a chemical concoction. Like my father always said, “What you put inside your body always shows up on the outside.” One protein shake that I received, that will remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying ingredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful artificial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic dyes, preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind of proteins that keep you fat no matter how hard you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing for your muscles. Disappointed after reviewing this “new” shake, I hit the gym and bumped into my favorite bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50, has the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So are his clients. While I firmly believe that the gym is a notalk focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein shake are you recommending to your clients these days?”

Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Protein shakes are old news and loaded with junk. I don’t recommend protein shakes, I tell my clients to drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake because it’s the only all natural meal replacement that works and has a taste so good that it’s addicting.” Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decided to investigate this superfood shake called INVIGOR8. Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators are actual scientists and personal trainers who set out to create a complete meal replacement shake chocked full of superfoods that—get this— actually accelerate how quickly and easily you lose belly fat and builds even more lean, calorie burning muscle. We all know that the more muscle you build, the more calories you burn. The more fat you melt away the more definition you get in your arms, pecs and abs. The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined to make the first complete, natural, non-GMO superfood shake that helps you lose fat and build lean muscle. The result is a shake that contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a superior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey found in most shakes, metabolism boosting raw coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to promote a healthy

immune system, Omega 3, 6, 9-rich chia and flaxseeds, superfood greens like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorella, and clinically tested cognitive enhancers for improved mood and brain function. The company even went a step further by including a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity in optimal digestive health, and digestive enzymes so your body absorbs the high-caliber nutrition you get from INVIGOR8. While there are over 500 testimonials on Amazon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more energy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really impressed me was how many customers raved about the taste. So I had to give it a try. When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike most meal replacement shakes it smelled like whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so good. Still INVIGOR8 had to pass the most important test, the taste test. And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good. I could see what Zee meant when he said his clients found the taste addicting. I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years to achieve total definition. Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say, shaving that last abdominal fat from my midsection wasn’t just easy. It was delicious. Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can honestly say that the results I’ve experienced from INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing. A company spokesperson confirmed an exclusive offer for Men’s Health readers: if you order INVIGOR8 this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “MEN” at checkout. If you’re in a rush to burn fat, restore lean muscle and boost your stamina and energy you can order INVIGOR8 today at Invigor8.com or by calling 1-800-958-3392.

WHERE STRENGTH MATTERS MOST

MYRON ROLLE’S

Getty Images (football). Courtesy subject (surgery).

MENTALFITNESS

PLAYBOOK

The NFL player turned neurosurgeon has spent his life fine-tuning the tactics that powered his professional transformation and help him manage stress, failure, and grief—skills the rest of us can use, too. BY TAYLYN WASHINGTON-HARMON

might seem like totally different pursuits, but Myron L. Rolle, M.D., says that doing the one prepared him to do the other. Football “has given me so much. Friends, fitness, focus, and the intangibles: communication, teamwork, structure, discipline, and overcoming adversity.”

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

MIND

PEAK PERFORMANCE

As he details in his new book, The 2% Way, Dr. Rolle was a standout safety at Florida State University, but instead of playing his senior year, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He returned a year later, was drafted in the sixth round in 2010, and played three years in the NFL until he was cut by the Pittsburgh Steelers. After that, he put his energy into studying for the MCAT, which took him to Florida State University College of Medicine and eventually to a residency at Harvard-Massachusetts General Hospital. Many of the processes and mental skills that helped him find success in football prepared him to excel in the OR. Dr. Rolle is Zooming from the sunny Bahamas, but there’s no sand between his toes. Currently a senior neurosurgery resident and the global neurosurgery fellow at Harvard-Massachusetts General Hospital, he’s spent the past nine months on a medical mission to improve care in low-resource settings. That involved performing surgeries at Princess Margaret Hospital in Nassau, as well as working on policy, training, and education and doing whatever he could to help elevate neurosurgical treatment in the Bahamas, especially for people who face systemic barriers to care. In 2010, his aunt Annie Smith, a native Bahamian, was hit by a car while walking and died from a traumatic brain injury. “My auntie did not see a neurosurgeon for seven hours,” says Dr. Rolle, 35. “No MRI, no CT scans, no diagnostic work, and she died without any medical care. That moment encouraged and motivated me to want to do something.” It’s what Dr. Rolle does: try to make a difference. He follows his philosophy of seeking small improvements in all aspects of life, including his mental fitness, and

it’s helped him with everything from dealing with hate-spewing patients and tricky surgeries to managing stress and disappointment. These are some of the key tactics that have worked for Dr. Rolle.

DR. ROLLE learned one of the most important mental skills from FSU coach Mickey Andrews (who learned it from legendary Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant). He’d shout, “ ‘Myron, 2 percent better on your backpedal, 2 percent!’ It’s about taking very small steps of improvement daily towards a bigger goal that sometimes seems overwhelming,” he says. “You break it down piece by piece and have those small victories that empower you and motivate you.” It also requires a sense of vulnerability, being able to recognize and acknowledge your own weaknesses so you can improve. Dr. Rolle applied the 2 percent way to both his physical training (whether focusing on his first step or his vertical leap) and med school (getting extra practice tying sutures and studying obscure cases). He even applies it in his personal life, recently making an effort to be more punctual and to call his parents more often, micro adjustments that help him incrementally become a better version of himself.

USE FAILURE TO PLAYING IN the NFL is an experience Dr. Rolle calls his biggest failure. “I did everything I could. It didn’t work out [as I wanted it to].

“It’s about taking small steps of improvement towards a bigger goal that seems overwhelming.” 52

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

The NFL is known for Not For Long,” he says, referring to his brief playing career. He retired from the NFL at 26. That experience recharged his desire to go to medical school, a goal he’d harbored since his older brother tossed him, at age 12, a copy of the book Gifted Hands, in which Ben Carson, M.D., describes his journey from child in inner-city Detroit to noted neurosurgeon. A deeply religious man, Dr. Rolle wonders whether having his time cut short in the NFL “was the Lord saying, ‘This is not for you right now, and I’m protecting you from hurting your hand or getting a concussion and not being able to be a neurosurgeon.’ ” He embarked on the six-year journey, all the while using the 2 percent way to find small victories that kept him on track.

HAVE A PLAN AND A BACKUP DR. ROLLE’S hands play a major

role in his work, having converted from catching interceptions to artfully making people’s brains whole again. At med school, he trained himself to be ambidextrous by using his left hand to write, suture with shoelaces, and perform other knot-tying and stitching drills surgeons do. Dr. Rolle deals with the stress of surgery by spending hours rehearsing his hand movements, visualizing the surgery the same way he prepared for a play on the field. “Because if A and B fail, based on anatomy that I wasn’t expecting, or there’s a bleed or a leak that happens that I wasn’t aware of, what are options C and D?” he asks. “I need to have other plans so that I’m not flustered and paralyzed in the moment. In the shower, I’ll close my eyes and my hands move as if I’m lifting up a part of the tissue using my right hand with a tumor forceps, imagining myself going through it over and over again. I anticipate [extra blood] the same way I anticipated a receiver running an in-route but he runs a hitch or a stop-and-go.” If you’re prepared for contingencies, it’s easier to stay calm.

PLAY HARD, WORK HARDER At Florida State University, Myron L. Rolle, M.D., excelled as a safety; he then played three years in the NFL. He’s currently the global neurosurgery fellow at Harvard-Massachusetts General Hospital. Opening page: Dr. Rolle performing a craniotomy while at a residency in Lusaka, Zambia, 2021.

RELEASE YOUR EMOTIONS

Getty Images (football). Courtesy subject (hospital).

DR. ROLLE must deal with patients

with everything from gunshot wounds to the head to cancerous lesions on the brain. Losing a patient is a reality of the job, but he refuses to be jaded and acknowledges that it hurts. “If I ever get to a point that I get so numb by situations that are poor or negative, then I should no longer be a physician,” he says. “I want to feel that pain, because it humanizes the situation and makes me go harder for the next patient and the next family. If we have this blockade about expressing our emotion, it will drive you to dysfunction. You can’t have that when your hands are responsible for lives in the operating room.” When Dr. Rolle lost his first patient, a middle-aged woman with a partially blocked carotid artery, in 2013, he cried all the way home and called his father the next day. He expected his father to tell him to toughen up, but his dad only affirmed his choice of profession, noting his sense of caring and empathy. “I don’t mind a good cry, especially in spaces where I feel comfortable and safe with my brothers, my wife, my parents, my best friends,” he says. “It’s an expression of sorrow, but it’s also an expression that I feel comfortable with you and I can share the emotions that are happening to me. Crying is part of life.”

BEING A BLACK neurosurgeon

amid a white majority brings with it unique challenges. Dr. Rolle recalls how he’s been mistaken for a food-service worker or a member of the cleaning crew, and in one instance a patient’s brother used hate language when referring to him during a preoperative consultation. After discussing it with another surgeon, Dr. Rolle decided to go ahead and perform the surgery, because he wanted to turn a negative (the trauma of a racist insult) into a positive (saving a man’s life). Plus, he was a junior resident at the time and says he needed the surgical hours.

In terms of how he focuses during an operation, Dr. Rolle says he thinks of his family. “My wife asked, ‘Myron, how do you get ready for a consult when the doctor calls you at 2:00 A.M. saying there’s someone with a brain bleed in the ER and you’re dead asleep?’ I say, Well, it’s tough. You wake up, wipe the sleep from your eyes, and shake yourself loose. At the same time, if this were my auntie or my mom or someone close to me, I’d want whoever was seeing her or him to be ready, charged up, mind acute, and ready to go. I put myself in that position quite often, and that pushes me to try to be the best I can.” MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

MIND

MOOD BENDERS

send him on a bad hallucinogenic trip. Or worse, that it wouldn’t work and he would be out of options. MacLean isn’t alone in weighing the pros and cons of ketamine. In 2019, the U. S. Food and Drug Administration approved a nasal-spray version used in conjunction with an oral antidepressant for people for whom other depression treatments had failed. But psychiatrists had already been prescribing the psychedelic, a short-acting anesthetic that induces a trancelike state, as a treatment for lingering depression. Now there’s intense interest in the idea that ketamine might be the next best thing to alleviate the country’s mental-health crisis—at a time when it’s never been harder to find counseling. And ketamine isn’t difficult to get. Field Trip, a Toronto-based company, is banking on the surging interest in the treatment so enthusiastically it’s opened eight locations in the United States since the fall of 2020. Telemedicine companies like Mindbloom, TripSitter.Clinic, and My Ketamine Home will ship you ketamine lozenges that you can take at home. All this said, some experts are calling for tighter regulation. While they generally agree that the drug itself is pretty safe, advertising and marketing may be overpromising what ketamine can actually deliver. Here’s what to know now:

KETAMINE NATION

The psychedelic treatment for depression is flourishing, but some docs want to tap the brakes. Here’s what you need to know before deciding to take a trip. BY SARAH ELIZABETH RICHARDS

returned, straining his marriage. “I felt really stuck,” says MacLean, 43. Then a military buddy told him about ketamine—the psychedelic drug that doctors have used for decades as an anesthetic and pain reliever and that has gained new popularity as a possible wonder drug for mood disorders. MacLean was initially scared it would

KETAMINE C LINIC S are apt to promise speedy relief. And for the most part that’s true: One recent Columbia University study found that suicidal patients were significantly less depressed and were less likely to hurt themselves within 24 hours of taking a single dose of ketamine. Except experts agree that the benefits can be fleeting. (People taking ketamine for depression often relapsed within three weeks, according to a small 2013 study.) That’s a major downside for anyone paying several thousand dollars for a series of treatments. “The vast majority of ketamine clinics are opening up with the business model of dosing people and sending them on their way. It’s limited in its effectiveness,” says Alan K. Davis, Ph.D., director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at Ohio State University in Columbus. For changes to stick, research shows it’s best to pair ketamine with psychotherapy.

Getty Images

THE EFFECT TENDS TO FADE

At first, the experience was comforting; he sensed he was floating in the sky and told himself, as an eightyear-old boy, “Everything is going to be okay.”

“Often people have a meaningful experience, but that doesn’t solve the underlying problem,” Davis says. “Where the rubber meets the road is what happens outside the session and how you change your life.”

YOU NEED THE RIGHT DOSE AND THE RIGHT REASONS AT MANY CLINICS, patients often don’t

receive a high enough dose for the treatment to be effective, says Steven P. Cohen, M.D., a ketamine researcher and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Other concerns have emerged about clinics making dubious claims, failing to adequately screen patients, or administering inconsistent dosages. “I know of places where you don’t have to have a diagnosis for depression or anxiety,” says Austin-based psychiatrist and MH advisor Gregory Scott Brown, M.D., who’s among a chorus of experts calling for more regulation of the ketamine industry. Even the most promising of drugs won’t work if they’re not given for a condition they can actually help treat.

IT’LL COST YOU A TREATMENT package from

Field Trip consisting of a screening, a prep session, four ketamine sessions, and three integration sessions with a therapist runs about $3,500. Clinic treatments like this are rarely covered by insurance, and if they are, there are usually hoops. For insurance to pay for the FDA-approved treatment sold under the brand name Spravato, you typically must show proof you’ve taken two other antidepressants for at least six weeks and failed to derive any benefit. So people may be tempted to get it on the street. Never a good idea, says Jedidiah Ballard, D.O., an emergencyroom physician and MH advisor in Augusta, Georgia. He’s concerned about the purity of the ketamine you could wind up with this way and what can happen if you don’t have a mental-health pro there to guide you through. Having a bad trip is another

drug is administered as an injection in the U. S.) and MacLean closed his eyes. At first, he says, the experience was comforting; he sensed he was floating in the sky and told himself, as an eight-yearold boy, “Everything is going to be okay.” Then he saw a shoe he’d found belonging to an 18-year-old woman who had been choked to death by her boyfriend in the woods in 2013. MacLean had long questioned whether he could have changed the outcome—if only he’d intervened earlier when he suspected her abusive boyfriend was in town. Yet the ketamine helped him let go of his guilt. “I realized I couldn’t be responsible for someone else’s decisions,” he says. “Ketamine gives you distance to process traumas differently and then just leave them there.” A f ter a dditiona l treatments and therapy sessions, MacLean says, his home life is now more harmonious. He WHETHER YOU GET IT FROM A CLINIC OR FROM A DOCTOR, MAKE SURE YOU CHECK ALL can let things go more easily, OF THESE BOXES FIRST, SAYS PSYCHIATRIST has started working out again, GREGORY SCOTT BROWN, M.D. and is able to live more in the moment. “I just wish I’d done Monitoring before and after treatment this sooner,” he says. If you’re receiving your ketamine through Ketamine may help mentalthe mail, you should be regularly monitored health care in a broader way, by a health-care professional who is trained too: by opening minds to psyto address your expectations for the therapy, spot signs of psychosis and addiction, chedelic drugs as legitimate help you make sense of the sessions, and therapies. Several biotech know the nuances of depression. companies are patenting other psychedelic treatments, Proper screening and Davis is studying the poCheck with a psychiatrist before trying tential of psilocybin to treat this if you have a history of schizophrenia depression with longer-term or bipolar disorder; there have been success. “Our society tends to reports of mania and worsening psychosis. Also check in if you have a heart issue focus on the harms of drugs,” or uncontrolled high blood pressure. he says. “Ketamine is starting to change the narrative about Treatment for a valid reason the positive effects.” If someone is willing to prescribe ketamine Yet with ketamine, as with for “an existential crisis” or to “help you all things concerning your relax,” go elsewhere. health, it’s on you to plan your trip the smart way. risk, says psychologist Keith Trujillo, Ph.D., who studies ketamine at California State University San Marcos. “K-land can be a positive, blissful experience. Colors look more vivid. People see or hear things differently,” he says. “They also report the ‘K-hole.’ People feel separated from themselves or think they’ve died. That can be anxiety provoking.” Last fall, MacLean, the former police officer, decided to undergo ketamine treatment. In a New Brunswick treatment-center room decorated with potted plants and thick floor cushions, he sat beside a counselor for the next hour and a half. The counselor placed a ketamine lozenge under MacLean’s tongue (the

HOW TO CHOOSE A KETAMINE PROVIDER

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

MIND

ENERGIZE

energy not only returned but remained. Rest mode isn’t something you need a UFCPI plan to execute. Sara Mednick, Ph.D., a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, says anyone can take advantage of what she calls the “downstate,” daily periods of relative calm that can improve your energy and sharpen your thinking. “Like every animal and plant, we have natural rhythms for our upstates and downstates, and tapping into these rhythms optimizes your energy so you have more when you need it,” says Mednick, author of The Power of the Downstate (out now). Here are five opportunities to shift into downstate throughout your day. DOWNSTATE NO. 1:

COFFEE O’CLOCK

ENOUGH WITH HUSTLE.

DOWNSTATE

IS THE NEW SECRET TO SUCCESS. You can have more focus, better sleep, and way more energy for just about everything. All you have to do is less.

Don’t try to overcome your post-lunch lull with another run to Dunkin’, says Mednick. Caffeine heightens stress, burns you out, and meddles with sleep. So instead, take ten minutes after lunch to run through a 2-2-2-2-2 exercise, which will help set you up for a more productive afternoon. For the first two minutes, focus on the space just outside yourself (the few inches around your body). Then, for two minutes, pay attention to your senses (smell, hearing, etc.). Next, spend two minutes on how you’re feeling (sad, mad, glad) and two more on what you’re thinking (This is silly and will never actually work ...). In the last two minutes, compare how you felt when you started with how you feel now (Oh, whoa, this kind of worked!). DOWNSTATE NO. 2:

LATE AFTERNOON

SEVEN YEARS BEFORE

Glover Teixeira earned the UFC lightheavyweight championship in 2021, he was wiped. “All I wanted to do was train more than anybody,” he says. But despite his hustle and his experience as a 35-year-old fighter, Teixeira was no longer competing at the same level as his much younger opponents. So he turned to the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas for help. After trainers there assessed everything from his workout regimen to his nutrition and 56

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

sleep, they recommended something that surprised him: He needed to train less and concentrate more on recovery. In fact, the new plan that the UFCPI sent Teixeira even told him to take an entire day off. (“I kind of felt guilty,” he says.) It took him some time to adjust, but eventually he started to access “rest mode” more often. He stayed in bed 12 hours at a time. He built a routine that was more in line with circadian rhythms. And after a while, Teixeira began winning more fights—his power, focus, and

Like you, your heart works hard all day long. Unlike you, it doesn’t get a break, which means that days of prolonged stress can be especially rough on it, says Mednick. (If you’ve ever felt lethargic at 3:30 P.M., that might be your heart saying, “It’s quitting time.”) Indulge your heart in the downstate and you might be able to stoke your energy—or at least lower your stress. Lie down and elevate your legs against a wall. (Yeah, if you’re in an office, find some privacy.) Or if that’s uncomfortable, prop up your hips with a cushion or block. Remain in this position for at least five minutes.

Stocksy

BY GINA LOVELESS

DOWNSTATE NO. 3:

AFTER WORK

“In the evening, the right kind of physical contact can help to settle our system, relax us, and help us feel secure and safe,” says Kevin Gilliland, Psy.D., a clinical psychologist. So set and enforce boundaries around distracting devices. Designate a bowl in another room for phones and stash yours there. Power down your laptop. Then move into the present with your partner and/or kids. Bring an interesting question to the dinner table. Make it a point to hold eye contact. Initiate a great big family group hug. DOWNSTATE NO. 4:

AFTER DINNER

Early-evening sunlight signals to your brain to decrease cortisol, the stress hormone, and increase melatonin, a sleep aid. Going for a 15minute walk before sunset helps to further ease you into the restorative, pre-bed downstate, says Mednick. When you’re back home, ensure you’re not taking in excess blue light, which can jolt you out of the downstate. If the idea of wearing blue-light-blocking glasses, like Mednick’s recommended Swanwick Classic Night Swannies ($79; swanwicksleep.com), sounds silly, fine. Your alternative is avoiding screens altogether. DOWNSTATE NO. 5:

Jason Raish (Alford)

BEDTIME

Sleep is your body’s most powerful downstate. Mednick recommends that you go to bed by 10:00 P.M. every night. That’s because you experience your most restorative chunk of rest during the first deep wave of sleep, she explains. The later you go to bed, the more that wave is compressed. “When you align the downstate of your autonomic nervous system with that first period of nighttime sleep, your whole restorative system resonates,” Mednick says. “You get the most recovery from the day before, and you set yourself up to be best prepared the coming morning.” The good thing is, this can be easy—as long as you’ve already followed all the downstate-enhancing tips in the steps before this one.

DAWAN ALFORD When DAWAN ALFORD wanted to create a space for Black men to talk candidly about mental health, he launched Black Male Mental Health on Instagram in 2019. It resonated: BMMH has garnered 47,000-plus followers so far. (So much for men not talking about mental health.) Here’s how the 37-year-old keeps it going and puts some chill in his day. —TAYLYN WASHINGTON-HARMON

6:30 A.M.

9:00 A.M.

Even as the sole face of his brand, Alford doesn’t live by or believe in alarm clocks. He wakes up with gratitude and a word of thanks, breathing deeply and “acknowledging that all my body is working well.”

Alford checks his email only three times a day—at 9:00 A.M., noon, and 5:00 P.M.— something he picked up from Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. “After these 30-minute email windows, don’t expect an immediate response.”

GREET THE MORNING

7:00 A.M.

TEND AND CENTER He starts his day by drinking coffee and nurturing his collection of 35-plus plants, which he sees as a metaphor for mental care. “I walk around spraying them, seeing who’s growing, speaking nicely to them, and it’s a really centering practice.”

8:30 A.M.

AROUND THE WORLD Alford does a threeset series of pushups, pullups, and triceps dips, sometimes adding a five-mile run. Living with PTSD, he says this practice prepares him for any dangerous situation. “I want to have enough strength to manage my body in ways that are most helpful.”

THRICE IS NICE

12:00 P.M.

TUNA TIME

phone—“things I can do sparingly on my device”—while helping her with homework.

5:30 P.M.

CUT THE CORD After answering his last email, he signs off for the evening. “I think that this idea of perpetual grinding has been really embedded into our culture,” he muses. “What happens when you grind something? It becomes dust.”

Alford dishes up his go-to lunch: a tuna melt with avocado, lettuce, and tomato. He’s a pescatarian, inspired by Malcolm X’s diet—minimal meat and few starches. Alford doesn’t want to repeat the health issues—including high blood pressure and diabetes—he’s seen plague others in his community.

6:30 P.M.

3:30 P.M.

Alford winds down by listening to a selection from his enviable vinyl collection, often Miles Davis or Grover Washington Jr. “I try not to fall asleep [just anywhere] around the house,” he says. “With a vinyl, you have to stop it yourself, so it’s like saying, ‘All right, goodnight.’ ”

MERGE WORK AND PLAY Alford shifts into dad mode but keeps his business going. After picking up his 11-year-old daughter from school, he engages with followers via comments, DMs, and tweets from his

MENU MIXING How do you get a peckish, picky-eating tween to eat dinner? You compile a weekly menu of known likes à la Alford, such as salmon, pasta, or a quiche with cheese. “It’s dad life,” he says with a laugh.

9:30 P.M.

VINYL CHILL

“Treadmill or elliptical?” used to be your biggest gym debate. But these days, you have waaaaay more workout options. We sweat-tested the best new products to find the true varsity list of fitness gear.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

WATER WORLD The right swim gear can push you to a new PR—and make every water workout way more comfortable.

BEST SHORTS

BEST RUNNING EARBUD

Puma x First Mile Woven Running Shorts These aren’t just comfortable; they’re also made of recycled fibers. $45; puma.com

Shokz OpenRun Pro

BEST RUNNING SHADES

Most options shut out the sounds of the outside world, which is great for music but not for general safety. Shokz delivers strong audio that also lets environmental noise through. $180; shokz.com

Best Swim Shorts

ROKA SIM PRO II Neoprene buoyancy shorts perfectly position your body for extra speed as they keep water out and maintain comfort for a broad range of body types. $135; roka.com

District Vision x New Balance Keiichi Standard They sit easily on your head and feature antifog tech that keeps your vision clear even during your hardest runs. $220; districtvision.com

Best Technique Tool

FINIS MANTA SWIM PADDLES

BEST ALL-AROUND SNEAKER

Finis’s biggest strapless paddles let you go fast while correcting your form—pushing you to extend and catch and teaching you to apply even pressure on each stroke.

$25; finisswim.com

Nike React Infinity Run Flyknit 3 A perfect balance between stability and flexibility, it’s equally powerful for sprinting ultrafast on a manual treadmill and pounding out a five-mile run. $150; nike.com

COBRA ULTRA SWIPE GOGGLES You’ve gotta see the competition to beat them, and the Swipe antifog tech in these lets you reactivate your antifog coating after extended use. $70; arenasport.com

RECOVER SMARTER Your ability to build muscle, ease soreness, and bounce back for your next workout requires effort, too.

BEST SMARTWATCH Garmin Fenix 7 Solar This ultimate outdoor watch tracks key fitness metrics, plays music, and offers spot-on GPS—all while providing up to 22 days of battery life with solar charging. From $799; garmin.com

Its shape anchors the roller in place, letting you apply pressure to tight muscles by rolling your body across its surface. From $35;

BEST TECHNICAL TRAIL RUNNER Hoka Tecton X Hoka reinforces this pair with two carbon plates that deliver both forward and lateral energy return. That means you’ll stay balanced and nimble on even the rockiest of switchbacks. $200; hoka.com

HYPERVOLT GO 2

BEST WATER BOTTLE Nathan SpeedDraw Plus The strap on this 18-ounce flask is so comfortable that you’ll barely realize you’re carrying it. Bonus: There’s room in the zippered pocket for just about everything. $37; nathansports.com

ED IT O R S FA V O R IT E’

’ ORS E D I TO R I T E FAV

“I take this 1.5-pound powerhouse everywhere because it fits easily in any backpack or duffel bag. It’s the ultimate

BEST RUNNING HAT Brooks Carbonite “The extra-breathable material keeps my head cool, and reflective tech on the brim keeps me feeling safe during night runs.” —Christian Gollayan, senior commerce editor. $35; brooksrunning.com

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

compression boot features four pressure settings and 240 minutes of battery life on one charge. It’s post-leg-day bliss. $899; therabody.com

BEST DUMBBELL INNOVATION NordicTrack iSelect Voice-Controlled Dumbbells

EDIT F A V OOR R S ’ ITE

Nordic teamed up with Amazon for these weights, which adjust from five to 50 pounds with voice command. $599; nordictrack.com

GET

BEST TRACKER Whoop 4.0 “It tracks the metrics I need— heart-rate variability, sleep—with no excess, and it’s built to take a pounding in the gym.” —Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S., fitness director. Free with subscription, $49 without; whoop.com

construction.

BEST WORKOUT SHOE Reebok Nano X2 A redesigned heel clip stands firm even during the heaviest deadlifts, and a flexible foam springs back during plyo drills. $135; reebok.com

Courtesy brands

WANT E XT R A R E C

FO R 25 M O R E P R O D U CTS, H E A D TO

MENSHEALTH.CO M FITNESSAWARDS /

BLACK-

THE RISE OF

FITNESS-GE Since the dawn of dumbbells, there’s been a stunning lack of diversity among the owners and operators of fitness-gear brands. Here’s how a new generation of entrepreneurs is changing that. BY MILO F. BRYANT, C.S.C.S.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

THE FITNESS-EQUIPMENT land-

scape has never been this expansive. Ever since the pandemic sparked an uptick in sales of home gym equipment, gear companies have been in overdrive, pumping out everything from adjustable dumbbells to connected cardio machines to fully wireless recovery boots. But amid all that innovation, something’s still missing. Scan the companies driving the next generation of workout gear and you’ll see little diversity. Most major fitness brands have overwhelmingly white ownership. While the equipment offerings have grown increasingly diverse, the faces that bring you that equipment have not.

-OWNED AR BRANDS “The disparities and inequality that exist for Black people in this country in general exist in so many ways [in the fitness industry],” says Percell Dugger, founder of Fit for Us, an agency that advocates for and empowers Black fitness professionals and underser ved communities. Dugger can name only a handful of Black gear players. “Being in business, the abilit y to grow, the scaling and marketing, it is vastly disproportionate. We don’t have the opportunities or network to attract the support needed.” There are few statistics about underrepresentation among fitness-gear makers, but here’s what we do know:

Regardless of industry, Black-owned businesses face immense challenges. According to a 2020 poll commissioned by Groupon and the National Black Chamber of Commerce, 74 percent of Black small-business owners still struggle with a lack of capital and investment resources, and 59 percent say they experienced some form of racism or bias when they started their business. Despite that, a generation of Black fitness entrepreneurs has emerged. They’ve fought hard to get ahead while learning firsthand how much the lack of representation has hurt others like them—and how it may be damaging the entire fitness-gear industry. For every

would-be gear maker who hasn’t been able to succeed or grow their company, these Black fitness-brand owners stand as role models—and proof that it’s possible to overcome oppressive odds, even if you shouldn’t have to. “They’re creating a new way of [succeeding],” says John Butler, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business who specializes in entrepreneurship. It’s a way that hinges on lived experience that allows them to see the world differently— and their products can help everyone make greater gains. Here, in their own words, is how three Black entrepreneurs forged ahead. MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

TRAIL BLAZER THE

have the same amount of money in the bank. So a bigger business loan to help me expand my company didn’t exist in my mind. There was no way I could ever get the necessary capital, so I accepted this reality. Other companies with deeper pockets and backing have copied our technology and been able to do a ton of marketing. You really can’t compete with that, but we’ve done everything right in terms of our positioning to become the official rope for the U. S. Olympic teams, which use our training techniques. We were Michelle Obama’s spokespersons for fitness with the Let’s Move campaign. We created a Preferred Course and jump rope for CrossFit, and we partnered with TRX—but now many companies have created their own branded ropes. I simply know that I cannot ever give up. My mission in life remains the same: to help the entire planet of people get fit and strong in mind and body.

As president of Buddy Lee’s Jump Rope Technology, ANTHONY “BUDDY” LEE, 64, originated the swivel-bearing tech that’s in jump ropes today.

THE

REINVENTOR

WAS BORN in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Richmond, Virginia. My dad was a Vietnam veteran, but he wasn’t the same when he came back. It was up to my mom to take care of six children. Honestly, we struggled. There were many days I went hungry, but those are good lessons because when you’re at the bottom, you grow to understand that the only way out is up. I was introduced to rope jumping by Mr. Herbert Rainey, my next-door neighbor. He was a fourth-degree black belt in karate. He was jumping rope one hot summer day and put that rope in my hand just before 5:00 P.M.; it was after 9:00 P.M. before I put it down. I took that rope with me everywhere after that day— school, basketball courts, everywhere. I incorporated it into all my wrestling training, too. I’d jump with the rope to improve my athletic conditioning and get my heart rate up, and then I’d go into a match and finish it off in one or two minutes. I wanted to make the jump rope even better, so 27 years ago my business partner and I invented the swivel-bearing jump rope that became a patented technology in 1997. We looked at the smaller ball-bearing technology they use for fishing rods and tested it on athletes, and their speed and conditioning started increasing drastically. Every good jump rope that’s out today uses some form of our swivel-bearing technology. We are the originators and the pioneers of jump-rope training and the swivel-bearing technology, but there are still issues. The only loan I qualified for was a share-pledge loan, where I had to

CHAD PRICE, 38, teamed up with two friends to start Kettlebell Kings ten years ago. Since then, the company has rethought the classic kettlebell, pioneered online kettlebell education, and built a fitness community that goes beyond its product.

BUDDY LEE’S JUMP ROPE TECHNOLOGY

EHEMIAH “BUBBA” HEARD and Jay Perkins are the

two other founders at Kettlebell Kings. We met when we were 18. Bubba, who like me is Black, played football with me at Rice. Jay, who is white, lived in Austin and went to the University of Texas. After graduation, the three of us went into the corporate world, but it didn’t take long for us to realize that we were all too ambitious for that pace. The eureka moment for me was the actual results from using kettlebells to train. I saw results, but more importantly, I saw how easily the exercises translate to real-world improvements in your daily life. We started the company in 2012. To build awareness, we used free content, such as videos and weekly workouts, to gather email addresses, and we partnered with the top organizations in the kettlebell community to officially support and sponsor their events. But we had the toughest time getting funding. There were times we would go into a bank and we would ask them

KETTLEBELL KINGS to give us a road map of the numbers that we needed to hit to establish lines of credit, but no one ever offered that information. We certainly thought about sending Jay into the banks alone. That way the banks would only see a white face. Instead, we initially bootstrapped it with what we had in our savings. We didn’t get any access to capital until after our first five years in business, when we started taking some short-term smallbusiness loans. We’ve been working with pennies and reinvesting everything we can into the equipment for our growing client list every single year, year after year. We’ve actually thought about dangling Jay out there for a lot of things! We were officially a Black-owned business, but we had to consider race and its impact on our business. We have to consider how racism affects getting our supply out of China and who represents the brand to a Chinese manufacturer, for example. A better example may be how the brand helps or promotes social change. The one #BlackLivesMatter post our company posted led us to lose social-media followers. It’s sad, but it’s true.

THE

FOR MORE STORIES from emerging Black entrepreneurs, head to MensHealth.com/black-owned-gear.

ARY

VISION

normal. That is what you’d see in the history of the Black community—until now. We are finally learning our strength. I’m still astonished by what we’ve created with no blueprint. Powerhandz started with one vision and one mission in July 2014. The best ideas come from a personal need or solution. When Jason Williams revealed to Slam magazine that he used gardening gloves to improve his electrifying ballhandling, it was game over, especially once my cofounder added weight resistance to gloves to take his training drills to a more complex level. Powerhandz was self-funded in the beginning. We have received loans and a line of credit and closed a few small funding rounds. Understanding how to accomplish generational wealth and obtain funding for a new venture were foreign conversations for first-time African American entrepreneurs. Our goal was to build a dope e-commerce brand, educate people, and serve the community. However, this one product and one mission gave birth to our global mission in multiple sports. I had been in the health-care industry for 16 years prior to launching Powerhandz. I was the youngest, the only Black, and typically one of two female managers at the table. I will never forget attending a boardroom meeting as a director at the age of 25 when one of the older executives looked around the room and decided to ask me to get his coffee. Or when my VP informed me that he didn’t know how to manage women because we wear our emotions on our chest. All of these experiences prepared me and led me to this very moment in time. Today, I see a shift occurring for Black and women entrepreneurs. We have support from professional athletes like LaMelo Ball and serial entrepreneurs who are investors in our company. It’s funny—at one point I told the team, “I wonder if we should let a white male be the CEO of this company?” I wanted to let someone else be in the elite position of a company we worked so hard to create, because that’s what I felt was going to help us gain access and just scale quicker. Wow! In hindsight that discussion was heartbreaking. And I’m glad we didn’t do it.

EING A COUNTRY Florida girl from Jacksonville, be-

coming an entrepreneur was not included on my vision board. I wanted to be a nurse when I was growing up, because my neighbor was a nurse. When you’re not exposed to different careers, you don’t tap into your passion; you do what is

POWERHANDZ

DANYEL SURRENCY JONES, 46, created Powerhandz, weighted basketball gloves meant to improve your dribbling skills, in 2014. The product is now sold in more than 80 countries.

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

Photographs by Peggy Sirota

Blockbuster movie star. Beloved coworker. Stand-up dad and all-around good hang. So why is Chris Pratt the subject of so many Twitter pile-ons? He has some theories. By Mickey Rapkin

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

hris Pratt is halfway through a set of 100 pullups, his hands like two giant meat puppets gripping the bar. We’re doing the Murph CrossFit Hero WOD in a gym he’s installed in the farmhouse he’s renting outside Atlanta. He’s been living here since October while filming Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the final installment of the trilogy, which has earned more than $1.6 billion at the box office worldwide and spawned a video game, multiple action figures, and a ride at Epcot. Though the Guardians also appear in this summer’s Thor: Love & Thunder, the end of an era is decidedly here. “You want to be conscious and put a lot of effort into experiencing the moment,” Pratt offers. “Like, This is going away. I want to take it in. You can’t take it in any harder than just being present to it. So I’m being present.” Still, he finds the emotional resonance bubbling up at odd times. “The other day,” the 43-year-old says between sets, already laughing at himself, “Russell Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback”—that’s Pratt’s hometown team—“he got traded to Denver. He’s been with Seattle for about ten years. Which has been about the duration of this.” He gestures to his surroundings. “I was like, ‘Wait, hold on, what happened?’ The emotion around the last ten years sort of coming to an end . . . I was in the most embarrassing way, like, ‘My quarterback leaves, so I’m gonna cry.’ It’s hitting me in moments like that.” For Pratt—an aw-shucks Viking in Alo shorts, his massive legs threatening to split the fabric—this is a time of transition in many ways. His other billion-dollargrossing trilogy, Jurassic World, concludes this summer with the release of Jurassic World: Dominion. Pratt and his wife, Katherine Schwarzenegger, also just welcomed their second child together, Eloise. (Their daughter Lyla was born in 2020; Pratt has a son, Jack, with his first wife, Anna Faris.) The actor is by any measure phenomenally successful, responsible 68

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

for something like $10 billion in box-office receipts if you include the Avengers films he’s been in. He’s beloved by everyone he’s ever worked with, too; midway through our interview, Pratt’s phone blows up with the Parks and Recreation text chain, a full seven years after that show’s finale. Yet today—and on other days recently, it seems—he’s been struggling to understand a disconnect between his perception of himself and who he is versus the public’s perception of him and why some corners of the Internet love to troll him. “You don’t ever wanna get caught complaining or anything,” he says. “’Cause I have so many blessings. I consider everything a blessing truly in my life.” But during a recent run, he tells me, he couldn’t shake this feeling: “Why are they coming after me?”

HERE IS A meta-narrative hang-

ing over today’s conversation, and it stems from one of the dumber (yet more stubbornly persistent) Internet memes: the Worst Chris. You’ve seen this, yeah? It went viral and resurfaces periodically on Twitter, with fans debating the merits (or demerits) of the superhuman Hollywood Chrises: Pratt, Hemsworth (Thor), Evans (Captain America), and Pine (Captain Kirk). Says James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy films, “It absolutely infuriates me. Chris is unspeakably kind to people; he goes out of his way to help kids. He’s an especially loving father. And there’s a lot of stuff that people have literally just made up about him—about

his politics, about who he is, about what he believes of other people, you know?” Colin Trevorrow, who directed Pratt in two Jurassic World films, echoes the point: “I don’t know why we treat each other this way.” I have a half-baked theory that Pratt has possibly been a victim of his own success— both onscreen and in the gym. As doofus Andy Dwyer on Parks and Rec, he was one of us, memorably sitting at a restaurant presciently called Jurassic Fork, insisting on a fresh rack of ribs to devour in every take just to make his costar Nick Offerman laugh. Pratt was an everyman, a hero we could imagine shooting whiskey with. But he was also tired of losing out on bigger roles to men with, well, no rolls. He hit the gym to snag the part of a major-league first baseman in Moneyball, emerging from the weight room with steel-cut abs and arms and (for the first time in his career) options. I started to wonder if the fans who loved him as Disgusting Donald in 2011’s rom-com What’s Your Number? felt betrayed, the way some women reportedly did when Adele revealed her recent body transformation. Pratt has his own idea about the backlash. After our sweaty workout, during which Pratt (very kindly) helps me out, grabbing my legs near the end of a set so I can finish some pullups with dignity, we get into all of it pretty quickly—and at his prompting. We’re meandering through the woods around his rental home, taking the scenic route to a local sandwich shop, when an innocuous question about filming Jurassic World: Dominion overseas during a pandemic—and having to care for his then very pregnant wife via FaceTime—leads to a surprising conversation about the origins of that Internet bile and the role he believes he inadvertently played in lighting the match. A few years ago, he explains, he was asked to give a speech at the MTV Movie & TV Awards as the recipient of a Generation Award (a lifetime-achievement honor for people with a lot of life left to live), and he was instructed to say something inspiring. So, standing next to a trophy made of golden popcorn, he spoke from the heart: “God is real. God loves you. God wants the best for you.” He also said, “Don’t be a turd.” But people mostly just remember the God part. “Maybe it was hubris. For me to stand up on the stage and say the things that I said, I’m not sure I touched anybody,” he offers, and he gets why people were put off. “Religion has been oppressive as fuck for a long time,” he says as we walk over a tiny footbridge, the words spilling out in an

Styling: Annie Psaltiras/the Wall Group. Grooming: Bridget Brager/the Wall Group. Prop styling: Francisco Vargas. Production: Crawford & Co.

emotional tidal wave. “I didn’t know that I would kind of become the face of religion when really I’m not a religious person. I think there’s a distinction between being religious—adhering to the customs created by man, oftentimes appropriating the awe reserved for who I believe is a very real God—and using it to control people, to take money from people, to abuse children, to steal land, to justify hatred. Whatever it is. The evil that’s in the heart of every single man has glommed on to the back of religion and come along for the ride.” Say what you will about Pratt, but these are big ideas he’s openly wrestling with, and it’s something I can’t imagine another celebrity in his shoes saying. The situation wasn’t helped by Pratt’s alleged association with the celebrity church Hillsong, whose official policies contain what can generously be called non-LGBTQ-affirming statements. After Pratt casually talked about his faith with Stephen Colbert in 2019, the actor Elliot Page called him out. Pratt issued a statement at the time: “It has recently been suggested that I belong to a church which ‘hates a certain group of people’ and is ‘infamously anti-LGBTQ.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a man who believes that everyone is entitled to love who they want free from the judgment of their fellow man.” What he didn’t say then—and what he tells me now—is: “I never went to Hillsong. I’ve never actually been to Hillsong. I don’t know anyone from that church.” Okay. Why not say that at the time? “I’m gonna, like, throw a church under the bus?” he replies, before reconsidering. “If it’s like the Westboro Baptist Church, that’s different.” No one’s suggesting that. But he could have, ya know, read up on Hillsong. Pratt tells me he attends Zoe Church, but I’m not sure the distinction will satisfy his critics. Zoe, also popular with celebrities like Justin and Hailey Bieber, was founded by pastor Chad Veach. He executiveproduced a 2017 film that equated “sexual brokenness” with “same-sex attraction.” Pratt also mentions that he doesn’t go to Zoe exclusively. When it came time for Lyla to be baptized, he and his wife chose a norm-y Catholic church in Santa Monica where she worshipped as a kid. So yeah, Pratt’s relationship with organized religion is maybe a work in progress. It’s worth noting that his fatherin-law, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is Catholic, never took any shit for that church’s messed-up relationship with

the LGBTQ+ communit y. Religion is complicated, and I say this as a gay Jew. Does it help that the Internet’s original Bernie-loving boyfriend, Mark Ruffalo, came to Pratt’s defense in the wake of Page’s comments, calling him “as solid a man as there is”? For some, it probably does. Hulk Smash! But if this disconnect persists and Pratt is “misunderstood,” as he says, maybe there’s a simpler reason: What if the loudest voices on Twitter aren’t all that interested in what the actor and his buddies care about? Which is, in his telling of it, “the f words: faith, fishing, fighting.” And what if Twitter is infinitely more excited about retweeting photos of Chris Pine leaving an indie bookstore in short shorts and sharing Chris Evans’s thoughts on the debt limit than it is about hyping Chris Pratt’s Bible quotes? I pause here to remind Pratt that none of

Previous spread: Tank by Todd Snyder; sweatpants by Mr P.; slides by APL. This page: Shirt and pants, available at Moth Food Vintage; tank by Abercrombie & Fitch; slides by APL.

this noise has hurt his box-office prowess or his reputation in town (which is basically the same thing). I also remind him that Twitter isn’t a real place. “That’s a lesson I’ve learned,” he counters before getting at what’s really on his mind: “It’s not a lesson that my son has learned yet.” And that’s the root of this anguish. Pratt is still smarting from backlash over a recent Instagram post of his in which . . . well, I’ll let him explain. “I said something like, ‘Find someone who looks at you the way my wife looks at me.’ And then I gave her some shit in the thing and said, ‘But I love you. I’m so thankful for my wife—she gave me a beautiful, healthy daughter.’ And then a bunch of articles came out and said, ‘That’s so cringeworthy. I can’t believe Chris Pratt would thank her for a healthy daughter when his first child was born premature. That’s such

Sweatshirt by Ron Dorff; shorts by Abercrombie & Fitch.

RAPID FIRE on the radio. Pratt asked a dig at his ex-wife.’ And CHEAT MEAL? this guy to play “Valhalla I’m like, That is fucked up. “Pizza. Everything on it, Calling” but to pretend My son’s gonna read that double pepperoni, double cheese, thin crust.” it just happened to be one day. He’s nine. And on the radio. it’s etched in digital stone. MEAL YOU COOK FOR Minutes later, the dad It really fucking bothered YOUR PARTNER? sent Pratt another video. me, dude. I cried about “Two poached eggs “Jack goes, ‘Oh my gosh, it. I was like, I hate that over avocado, olive oil, everything bagel.” this is my favorite song! these blessings in my life This is my favorite song!’ are—to the people close to BIGGEST HEROES? He knew all the words,” me—a real burden.” “Navy SEAL Jared Shaw. Pratt says. “And he was so He knows he shouldn’t Men and women in proud, and it was so cool.” comment on any of this, uniform, first responders, saying with a laugh, “My people who sacrifice their life to create the publicist would be like, bubble inside which we’re ‘I’m sweating, Chris, I’m allowed to thrive.” sweating. What happened RATT DID NOT to the it’s-an-honor-justhave this k ind FAVORITE MOVIE? to-be-nominated-let’sof relationship “Stand by Me. There’s move-on fucking line with his own dad. a scene where the boy breaks down when he’s that we talked about?’ ” “I was raised by Homer talking about how his dad He acknowledges that Simpson, not Ned Flanhates him; he’s crying so this very conversation ders,” he says as we sit hard. Every time I watch we’re having right now down on a bench in the it, I watch it with Jack, and will only extend the news woods. Dan Pratt was a he’s like, ‘Dad, why are cycle even more. Though taconite miner in Minyou crying?’ I hope to God I’d argue that the humannesota before moving the you’ll never know why!” ity he’s showing here is family to Alaska, where FAVORITE EUPHEMISM what makes him such an he worked in gold mines. FOR SEX? empathetic actor. Eventually they settled in “Getting it in.” Pratt is so clearly in love Washington state. with his kids that to let any His dad could also be suggestion to the contrary “mean,” Pratt adds. “He go by is untenable. And while it’s a cliché for was from the old school. He was a boxer and an actor to talk about how much he adores a bouncer. He used to fucking kick the shit his family, the story he tells me next is so out of people.” Pratt was, well, not that. nakedly vulnerable—so far from the alpha“I am a sensitive person. My dad knew male chum you might expect and some- that when I was a youngster, and it kind thing I wish my dad had done for me—that of made him dislike me. Or not dislike me it stays with me for months. but act like he disliked me—’cause he probHe says his son is obsessed with this song ably grew up in a world where a guy like that “Valhalla Calling,” which features promi- could get eaten alive. And so he wanted to nently in an Assassin’s Creed video game. put calluses on me. Early on, I developed Jack was on a ski trip with friends when one humor as a self-defense mechanism—I of the dads texted Pratt a video of the kids in developed Andy, really. Andy on Parks the backseat singing along to some pop song and Rec was my clown that I had honed my

“I am a sensitive person,” Pratt says. “My dad knew that when I was a youngster, and it kind of made him dislike me. Or not dislike me but act like he disliked me—’cause he probably grew up in a world where a guy like that could get eaten alive.”

entire life, a guy who is affable, who’s an intelligent person playing a dumb person.” Pratt’s mother, Kathy, has always been more outwardly affectionate. When he was very young, she worked at a local supermarket, and money was tight. When Pratt was in high school, his parents lost their home and later moved the family into a trailer. He considered enlisting in the military, as so many friends did to help pay for college, but his brother didn’t think it would be a match. So he took some communitycollege classes instead and then got a job selling coupons door-to-door. These were not focused years, let’s say. Pratt moved to Maui on a whim—when a friend sent him a plane ticket—and waited tables at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. while living in a van on the beach. This, he says, is when he found religion. As the story goes, he was standing outside a grocery store with some friends one night—on their way to a party, no doubt—when a stranger approached Pratt in the parking lot, saying, “Jesus told me to talk to you.” Pratt had felt a connection with God before, but something profound shifted that night and he vowed to make a change. A few weeks later, a film director came into the restaurant and asked Prat t if he was an actor. He wasn’t even supposed to be working that day. What happened over the next decade is (almost) enough to make me believe in God. Pratt auditioned for that director’s horror-comedy short film, Cursed Part 3, and suddenly found himself in Los Angeles. He landed a series-regular role on the WB’s Everwood and then wound up on Parks and Rec, as a standout funnyman in a cast of killers. It seems ridiculous to say this now, but when James Gunn cast him as the scrappy, rakish fortune hunter Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy, it was considered a risk. Chris Pratt? That guy? But it paid off in intergalactic units. Pratt’s chillaxed vibe would perfectly ground an otherwise absurdist crew of characters that included a monosyllabic tree and a gun-toting CGI raccoon. That he married Katherine Schwarzenegger—the granddaughter of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and daughter of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger—and became part of a legitimate American political dynasty only heightened one of the crazier rags-to-TomFord stories. And in 2019, Pratt bought a $15.6 million unfinished house in the Palisades that was essentially a construction site with a view. MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

As a fellow child of the ’80s, I have to ask: What’s it like to have Arnold Schwarzenegger for a father-in-law? Has Pratt imitated Ah-nold’s voice to him, which is something you could definitely imagine the guy doing after too much whiskey? (“Oh God no,” Pratt says.) Okay, did he ask for Arnold’s permission to marry his daughter? (“Yeah.”) Tell me something I wouldn’t know about Arnold, I say. “Gift giving is absolutely one of his love languages,” Pratt replies. “The most thoughtful gifts you could imagine, like quilts with all of the baby’s pictures on it. He gave us these—I don’t know what you’d call them—like statues carved out of wood. Nativity statues. They’re from Oberammergau in [Germany].” Even if this trajectory seems like a miracle—and it does to an outsider—Pratt still won’t cite these blessings as proof of God’s existence. “Seeing David Copperfield pull a fucking trick off doesn’t mean that magic exists.” And he isn’t a saint, he seems to say, offering up a pretty great story about how he nearly quit the business, showing up at a last-minute TV audition so “stoned it was like Snoop Dogg had just shit in my mouth.”

Maybe he’s right. Because to call this career somehow preordained—a miracle—would be to diminish Pratt’s work ethic. Fans of Parks and Rec will remember a notorious riff where Andy Dwyer rattles off a list of alternate names for his band, Mouse Rat. It’s a crazy-long, seemingly stream-of-consciousness run of 30 names that includes lines like (and I’m paraphrasing) “The band has had several names over the years: Threeskin, Foreskin, Just the Tip.” The director just let the camera roll, and Pratt crushed it. But the actor later revealed he’d actually written the list far in advance. Making it seem spontaneous in the moment was the real trick. Pratt did it again in Jurassic World: Dominion, leveraging his own dumbguy image for a joke. This iteration of the dinosaur franchise finds him teaming up with Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, and the rest of Steven Spielberg’s original cast. Pratt explains that when his character, Owen Grady, meets Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant, a noted paleontologist, the former announces, “Hey, I’m a big fan! I read your book. Well, book on tape.” Says the actor of his whole dumb-guy

act, “It was absolutely a tactic to lower people’s expectations of me.” Pratt’s father never lived to see this level of success; he died in 2014 after a 20-year battle with multiple sclerosis. “And MS really just fucking kicked his ass,” Pratt says. “He decided not to take any medicine to prevent it. He was, like, incapacitated, in diapers in a wheelchair—for eight years,” often watching reruns on TV of whatever movies or shows his son had been in. What would his father have made of Guardians of the Galaxy? Pratt smiles, waits a perfect beat, then laughs. “He would’ve said something mean. To be funny. Like, ‘Yeah, good, good. That fucking raccoon can’t shoot a gun.’ ”

HIS SUMMER, PRATT is giving

the public a preview of what the next phase of his career might look like, starring on a decidedly not funny psychological thriller for Prime Video called The Terminal List. On this eight-episode series (which he also produced), he inhabits James Reece, a 40-year-old Navy SEAL whose platoon is killed in action. When Reece returns

BUILD CHRIS PRATT MUSCLE

DIRECTIONS: Start with a 1-mile run, followed by the 3 moves. See “Best Breakups” for options. Finish with another 1-mile run. Wear a 20-pound weighted vest if you dare.

BEST BREAKUPS Instead of completing all reps of every move, you can do Murph as a circuit to allow each muscle group time to recover. Try these rep schemes. Do not rest between rounds. 72

JULY • AUGUST 2022

1. Pullup

2. Pushup

3. Air Squat

Hang from a bar with an overhand grip. Pull your head to the bar, then lower. That’s 1 rep; do 100. Struggling? Do inverted rows instead.

Get in pushup position, abs and glutes tight, hands directly below shoulders. Lower your chest to the floor. Push back up. That’s 1 rep; do 200.

Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart. Push your butt back and bend at the knees, lowering your torso until your thighs are parallel to the floor. Stand. That’s 1 rep; do 300.

CLASSIC

5 PULLUPS

10 PUSHUPS

15 SQUATS

20 ROUNDS

BITE-SIZED

1 PULLUP

2 PUSHUPS

3 SQUATS

100 ROUNDS

TOUGH GUY

10 PULLUPS

20 PUSHUPS

30 SQUATS

10 ROUNDS

| MEN’S HEALTH

Courtesy Prime Video

To play a Navy SEAL, Chris Pratt needed to be in “combat shape, ready to do everything from sprint with a heavy pack to drag a body,” says his trainer Jared Shaw, a former SEAL. That meant embracing the Murph CrossFit Hero WOD (created in memory of Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy), which Pratt did several times as part of his training.

home, he struggles to find out: Was it simply bad intel that got his men killed, or were they set up? I’d wondered whether audiences would accept Star-Lord as a possibly rogue SEAL holding a gun in a federal agent’s mouth. The Terminal List director Antoine Fuqua had no doubts. “We’ve seen guys not as physical, not as big as Chris—guys like Bruce Willis who back in the day were witty and charming, but they could also handle weapons.” He’s right. Having now seen the first three episodes, I can say Pratt delivers—on the physicality but even more impressively on the emotional front, as his onscreen wife and child are ensnared in the conspiracy. What may propel Pratt’s career even further—as a producer and an actor—is his refreshing curiosit y, Fuqua adds: “[Chris] never pretends to know something he doesn’t know. He’ll ask. He’ll go do homework and read 12 books after you have a conversation with him. Shirt by Save Khaki United; And then he’ll come back pants by Armani Exchange; telling you about it.” sneakers by Converse; tie, The Terminal List is a photographer’s own. chance for Pratt to celebrate the men and women of the armed forces, which is clearly important hamburger to go (a cheat meal since his to him, but I’m curious if the project also shirtless scenes have already been shot), appealed to him on another level. James and our conversation turns to what’s next. Reece is a decorated operative who—for He’ll voice the title character in a 2023 all his strength and smarts—cannot pro- Super Mario Bros. film. (He agrees to do tect the most important thing in his life: the voice for me if I promise not to reveal his family. Was Pratt fighting some of his it. Though I can safely say it’s not the dreaded It’s-a me, Mario.) He’s also got an own demons onscreen? He pauses, then works through what upcoming animated Garfield movie. Both I’ve suggested out loud: “It was an oppor- projects seem on-brand for Pratt. But after tunity for me to play a character who takes filming Jurassic World: Dominion overvengeance against the people who took his seas during the pandemic—a boondoggle family, because—as a man and a dad—I feel that reportedly inspired the Judd Apatow out of control around being able to protect film The Bubble—he was also pretty happy my family when it comes to the press or to work from home. “I don’t actually know what’s gonna Twitter or whatever.” He thinks on it, then adds, “I never was actually aware of that. come next,” he tells me while we wait, It’s really . . . maybe that’s—I think that insisting he doesn’t have a “ten-year plan.” Like other A-list actors who’ve might be an astute observation.” Eventually—and we’ve been out in the earned the right to choose their material, woods for a long time—we emerge and find he’s looking for great filmmakers and that local sandwich shop. Pratt orders a great stories. Getting older, becoming a

father again: “You asked whether or not I’m cognizantly, intentionally turning a page. The page is turning. Whether I want to or not. Because the franchises are over.” What he’s struggling with is what we’re all struggling with at 43. In that way, he is still very much an everyman. “I’ve been broke-broke, dude,” he says. “And I think early on in my career it was so important to me. It’s like, Don’t forget where you came from. Don’t forget who you are. And part of me is struggling with who I am maybe not being who I was.” You should be able to grow, I say. How could you not, with all that’s happened? “Exactly,” he responds. “So yeah, you should. And I have. I’m kind of coming to terms with that. What does it mean to me?” MICKEY RAPKIN is the author of Pitch Perfect and It’s Not a Bed, It’s a Time Machine. MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

DAN FORBES

HOW TO WORK SAFELY WHEN IT’S

OUT

SIZZLING, SCORCHING, AND WAAAAAY TOO TOASTY OUTSIDE

These maps from the Climate Impact Lab, a data-driven research group, show average temperatures in the summer months both today and, based on current projections, in the not-so-distant future.

Temperature

Portland

°F

100

Los Angeles

will be equally scorching and that by 2050, if recent trends in climate change continue, the estimated increase of up to 5 degrees could feel as if many American cities have moved 500 miles south. That could mean even more serious risks for anyone who prefers to exercise outdoors. Excessive heat makes people vulnerable to heatstroke, which is one reason it’s already responsible for more weather-related deaths every year than any other natural hazard (including tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods). Heat is so much trouble because it affects almost all systems in your body, says Margaret Morrissey, president of the National Heat Safety Coalition and director of occupational safety at the Korey Stringer Institute, which studies how heat attacks your body. “The hotter the environment is, the harder the body needs to work [to limit the rise in core temperature].” Fortunately, researchers are on it, seeking new ways to keep us working out, not flaming out, in the heat. The recordbreaking temperatures at the Olympic Games in Tokyo last summer offered the perfect lab for scientists, including Douglas Casa, Ph.D., CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute and a professor in the department of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut. Athletes swallowed thermometers and let themselves be rigged up with sensors so that researchers could see exactly what was going on inside. While all this tech is only available at labs for now, Casa envisions a day when whole teams use it; coaches could monitor athletes from the sidelines and make heat illness a thing of the past. “Five or ten years from now, devices like these will be game changers,” he says. Until then, there’s plenty you can do to change your own heat strategy, from cooling workout gear to science-backed and athlete-tested approaches. The advice here won’t solve the climate crisis—well, maybe the parts on pages 80 and 81 will help a little—but it will allow you to better manage the reality of training when it’s too damn hot. Tactics like these—plus the promise of a frosty Goose Island IPA at the finish—not only kept me moving through the sticky Chicago air but also propelled me to a 20-minute PR. Use them to your advantage and your metabolism will be the only thing burning when you step outside this summer. — MIKE DARLING 76

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

90 85 82 78 74 70 68 66 64 62 60

THE DANGER ZONE Before training outdoors, check the heat index, which factors in temperature and humidity. When the index is 90-plus (82 degrees F or higher and humidity 85 percent or higher), be extra cautious.

Los Angeles

NUMBER OF DAYS PER YEAR OVER 95 DEGREES TODAY/TOMORROW New York

4/30

Oregon

10/31

Illinois

12/51

TODAY

REAL HEAT,

(2020–2039)

REAL TROUBLE

New York Chicago

EVERY YEAR, there are more than 67,000 ER visits due to heat. Here are two of the most common diagnoses—and the signs you’re getting too hot.

HEAT EXHAUSTION Stop and attend to these right away; the situation could progress to heatstroke.

Denver

HEAVY SWEATING PLUS: COLD, PALE, CLAMMY SKIN FAST, WEAK PULSE MUSCLE CRAMPS, TIREDNESS, OR WEAKNESS NAUSEA OR VOMITING DIZZINESS OR HEADACHE FAINTING

Phoenix Dallas

TOMORROW

WHAT TO DO: Move to a cool

(2080–2099)

place, loosen clothes, drink cool liquids, and take a cool bath. Get immediate help if you are throwing up and/or if symptoms worsen or last longer than an hour. New York Chicago

HEATSTROKE The following symptoms are super serious; people can die or be permanently disabled if these aren’t treated quickly.

Denver

BODY TEMPERATURE OF 103 DEGREES F OR HIGHER HOT, RED, DRY, OR DAMP SKIN FAST, STRONG PULSE CONFUSION HEADACHE, DIZZINESS, OR PASSING OUT

Phoenix Dallas

WHAT TO DO: Call 911 without

delay. Get the person to a cool location and use cool cloths or a cool bath to lower their temperature. Don’t give them anything to drink. Colorado

17/54

California

40/72

Texas

74/135

Arizona

137/179

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

THE SCIENCE OF SWEAT. . .

WORK OUT WITHOUT OVERHEATING

BACK IN AUGUST 1985, Douglas Casa was young, healthy, in great shape, and racing a 10K. He ended up

in an ambulance and a coma due to severe exertional heatstroke. It’s been his goal ever since to keep others from suffering the same fate. Casa, who heads up heat research at the Korey Stringer Institute, is on the cutting edge of how athletes and outdoor workers can do what they do when it’s sweltering without ending up where he did. Use these tips to get a workout in, hit your splits, and live to tell the tale.

THERE’S A REASON 85 percent of football-related heatstroke deaths happen in the first three days of practice. The initial hot days put a ton of stress on your body as it kick-starts its internal air-conditioning system. Your body briefly increases your plasma volume to help your heart pump more blood with less effort so that you can keep sweating and working out at the same time. You also start to sweat faster, and sweat more, to keep cool. That’s how your body is supposed to cool itself. But when you don’t give yourself enough time to acclimate to extremely hot weather, it can’t adjust and you’re more susceptible to heatstroke. Help your body with this by easing into outdoor workouts. “Do some easy or medium-effort workouts outside and do the hardest ones inside,” Casa says.

HOW THE

Then, over about a week, start to introduce your higher-intensity work outdoors. To help air get to your skin so sweat evaporates and cools you, wear a lightweight, loose-fitting T-shirt made of a fabric that wicks away moisture (whether synthetic like polyester or natural like merino wool). If you don’t feel well during a workout, lower your intensity. “That’s your body’s early-warning system,” says Casa. “A lot of people try to tough it out, and that’s when you run into problems.”

CHILL OUT, THEN WORK OUT JUST AS IT TAKES LONGER for a frozen burger to cook than it does a room-temperature one, you’re able to resist heat better if you begin your workout with a lower body temperature, says Casa. If you’re doing something relatively short in duration, like running a 5K or playing a game where you

SIP. SIP. SIP. WATER IS YOUR MVP. “Your body

temperature goes up faster when you do intense exercise in the heat if you’re dehydrated,” says Casa. No scientist will guesstimate how much you should drink during a workout, because that depends on how hot it is, what workout you’re doing, how much you sweat, and more. But guidelines from the American Council on Exercise say that after a workout, you should replenish about 24 ounces of fluid for every pound of weight lost during exercise. —MARTY MUNSON

PROS HANDLE THE HEAT

MONITOR YOUR TEMPERATURE

BREATHE AND GET YOUR HEART RATE DOWN

VICTOR CAMPENAERTS,

CHRISTIAN JONES,

pro cyclist; holder of the one-hour world record

former Chicago Bears linebacker

WHEN YOU’RE GOING for the one-hour record—the

farthest you can ride in 60 minutes—“overheating is a major issue,” he says. To determine how hard to push without overheating, he uses CORE ($257; corebodytemp.com), a waterproof sensor that snaps onto a heart-rate strap or sticks on the body. In races, it helps him keep his core temp low until the moments he really needs to push the effort. 78

can rest between sets, precooling may help you perform better and stay in your groove longer. If your workout is over an hour, the impact wears off. Cooling techniques that cover a large part of the body—ice baths or exposure to cold air—are better than strategies like iced wristbands.

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

JONES GREW UP in Orlando, Florida, and knows that under-

neath the pads and the helmet, there’s a body doing its best to stay cool. As your core temp rises, so does your heart rate. He tries to prevent his body from overworking and overheating with a breath-control method he learned in Pilates: five deep, controlled breaths, inhaling for five seconds and exhaling for five. “It sounds easy, but when you’re tired, it’s hard,” he says.

Dirk Waem/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images (Campenaerts). Courtesy Jones.

RESET YOUR THERMOSTAT

ELECTROLYTES:

FRIEND OR TREND? DO YOU NEED THEM? If you sweat a lot during an intense workout that lasts longer than 60 minutes, a drink with electrolytes is probably smart, says endurance coach Kim Schwabenbauer, DHSc, R.D., C.S.S.D., founder of Fuel Your Passion.

WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK FOR? Sodium. It’s a limiting factor in performance as exercise goes on. It also helps you retain fluid, and it keeps your thirst mechanism working properly.

HOW MUCH SODIUM DO YOU NEED? You generally want a product to provide 300 to 400mg of sodium

Courtesy Woltering. Courtesy Inter Miami CF (Yedlin).

STICK TO A HYDRATION PLAN

in 13 to 27 ounces of water, says MH advisor Brian St. Pierre. We like the not-too-sweetness of UCan Hydrate (300mg sodium, $25 for a 30serving jar; ucan .co). Salty sweaters can go higher on electrolytes; LMNT packets contain 1,000mg of sodium ($20 for 12; drinklmnt.com). No idea how salty your sweat is? Patches by Gatorade can estimate your sweat rate and sodium loss ($25 for a two-pack; gatorade.com).

WHAT ABOUT OTHER ELECTROLYTES? They’re nice but not required. Potassium balances sodium and helps with muscle contraction. Magnesium and calcium are fine, but don’t obsess over amounts. —M. M.

DRINK AHEAD OF TIME

COREE WOLTERING,

DeANDRE YEDLIN,

record-holding ultrarunner

right back, Inter Miami CF soccer team

April 2015. It was already over 100 degrees on race day,” he says. Critical to making it through was adhering to a hydration plan. He sticks with what he learned that day: Every mile, his watch beeps, which cues him to drink. He slugs four to five ounces at a time, as noted by hash marks he makes on the bottles in his North Face Hydration Vest ($149; thenorthface.com).

to grant hydration breaks in the game. These happen if it’s around 90 degrees or warmer and last for three minutes. For Yedlin, prehydration is the key. That means replacing every pound of water he lost during practice the day before, stirring in DripDrop electrolytes ($19 for 16 packets; dripdrop.com). At halftime, he usually dons an ice vest and cold, wet towels. MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

TAKE ACTION

LET COOLER HEADS PREVAIL

For my birthday last year, I made my own Paris Agreement: to personally slash my carbon footprint by about 30 percent. One year later, I took stock. Far from being a buzzkill, the climate resolutions I made, below, have left me healthier, happier, and blissfully immune to high-horse hippies trying to scold me about the occasional (sublime) cheeseburger. —BRAD WIENERS

GO ON A CLOTHING DIET OF ONLY TEN NEW ITEMS Clothing makers waste tons of water and spew out 10 percent of all the heat-trapping carbon emissions on earth. Even if you donate your hand-me-downs, too many items end up in landfills. So, a clothing diet. Eleven months in, I’d added only eight items (not including socks and undies). I prize my new clothes—a pair of Allbirds, a Friends of Friends flatbrim hat—so much more.

DON’T FLY UNTIL MY NEXT BIRTHDAY The pandemic made it easier, but this will be hard to abide by for a second year. I’m not swearing off all flights, but I’m vowing to take fewer, longer trips and explore other transit first. Almost everything that’s overheating the planet is like flying, which “saves time” by allowing you to do something faster. Slowing down, even taking the long way, I’m finding, is better for nature as well as for my mental health.

EASY WAYS TO

ONE DOUBLE-DOUBLE PER MONTH Cutting meat out of your diet is an efficient way to reduce carbon emissions. But I live five minutes from an In-N-Out Burger, and my two teenage boys are growing by the foot. By taking a “cheat day” approach, I was able to slow my fast-food roll without feeling like a failure for caving once in a while. Next year, I’m stepping up to weekday vegetarian.

DUMP JUGS FOR STRIPS I bought my last jug of All detergent in June 2021; from now on, it’s sheets (or strips) of laundry detergent that dissolve in the wash and won’t fill landfills. This move saved us some cash, too, because my sons never seemed to get the concept of “concentrate” and typically used three times as much liquid soap as needed. Now they peel off one sheet. Done.

CHECK THE FRIDGE Unless they stop working, I don’t mess with major household appliances, but now I schedule maintenance. Having a technician check for, and repair, any leak from the refrigerator is an easy—and potentially massive— climate fix. A class of chemicals called hydrochlorofluorocarbons, used in most fridges and air conditioners, are thousands of times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide is.

GO ELECTRIC I found researching EVs overwhelming. First, I didn’t want to pull an e-car into the driveway only to charge it with fossilfuel-generated juice. So a big first step was a rooftop solar array. Now that that’s up, when we switch, we’ll be driving solarpowered cars. I put $1,000 down on a Ford Mustang Mach-E—the only way I could guarantee a test drive. (Any day now.) My younger boy is asking for an e-bike, so we know what his summer job is for!

GREEN UP YOUR WORKOUT

What to do

Ways to do it

Two notable events that care for the environment with low-impact activities, swag, and practices: the Green Fondo Chautauqua in Western New York and the TD Beach to Beacon 10K Road Race in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

REFILL

Plastic from those little nutrition packets builds up . . . and often ends up in our water ways. Cut down on waste with the GU Energy Flask ($10)—it holds five servings of energy gel.

M A K E YO U R NUTRITION CARBON-NEUTRAL

Sports-nutrition and protein-powder brands such as Vivo Life aim for zerowaste packaging and organic ingredients. Form, a performance-nutrition brand, uses compostable packaging and doesn’t include a plastic scoop.

PLOG WHEN YO U J O G

Originating in Sweden and gaining ground in the U. S., plogging simply involves carrying gloves and a trash bag and collecting garbage as you run. —LISA JHUNG

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

STAY COOL WITH THESE ECO - MINDED FITNES S B R ANDS

synthetic and natural in its Capilene Cool Merino shirt ($59) to keep you dry during brutal sweat sessions.

Aero-Bill ($28) has perforated panels for ventilation and is made out of 50 percent recycled materials.

Prop styling: Birte Von Kampen. Courtesy brands (products).

Climate+ 20 oz Wide Mouth ($40), keep your water chilled and are made using sus-

es natural materials. Its Trail Runner SWT ($140) is made of merino wool, eucalyptus fiber, and rubber. —L. J.

MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

JEFF BRIDGES has played RUGGED, MYSTICAL ICONS

like HIMSELF on film for decades (and decades!). He’s 72 now. Never expected TO BATTLE CANCER and THEN COVID. And yet? He abides.

BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS

JULY • AUGUST 2022

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

/ MEN’S HEALTH

BEAU GREALY

Jeff Bridges poses for Men’s Health at a studio in Santa Barbara, California. Jacket by John Varvatos; T-shirt by Buck Mason.

—it’s Jeff Bridges. Alive and well, at 72. Like, really well, from the looks of things. He’s walking around a photo studio in Santa Barbara on a hot, still Tuesday. When he walks, he leads with his rib cage, his weight in his heels, his whole posture telegraphing a wide-openness to the world. He’s been telling me where that posture comes from— it’s thanks in large part to these isometric exercises he learned from a trainer named Eric Goodman, which are designed to get the muscles in the backside of your body to work together to support you better, so that the burden of carrying your weight around the planet doesn’t fall solely on your poor, embattled joints, and which have freed Bridges from some hellacious back pain—but he’d rather show me. And that’s how he ends up standing over me, a fatherly hand on my shoulder, helping me bend, saying, “Hinge! Hinge!” as I try and mostly fail to hinge myself, and then, to demonstrate how I should be holding my body, he takes a bit of my hair and tugs it upward, not hard, just firmly, directionally. He doesn’t seem, at all, like somebody who was on the verge of death just last year. He was, though. In 2020, the Dude was diagnosed with cancer, specifically lymphoma, and just as he was pulling through that, he caught Covid, and because the chemo that had knocked the lymphoma down to size had also left Bridges severely immunocompromised, the Covid really kicked his ass, making cancer look like a cakewalk in retrospect—and because he 84

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

is Jeff Bridges, and was already a pretty spiritual guy, all of this did not engender anything you’d call a spiritual awakening. But it’s got him thinking more about things—about time, mostly, and about the specific strain of neurosis with which he’s always approached his work, and about what he wants to leave behind when it’s actually all over. “Times like those,” he says, “when you’re facing your mortality, all of your game plans come to the fore. Your philosophies, your spiritual beliefs. What’s made you you all these years gets tested and brought to the fore big-time. And that is only available in those times, I believe. But what’s fortunate is that what you learn in those times can linger, and you can apply those to the rest of your life.”

HE’S FINE NOW.

In remission. Done with everything—done with the special diet, done with the supplemental oxygen. Back at work as if nothing even happened. Busy promoting his new FX series, The Old Man, on which he’s an ex-CIA operative haunted anew by a lifetime of choices he made in the past, a role that happens to be Bridges’s first-ever series-regular TV gig in roughly 50 years of full-time acting, a chewy part on a twisty spy series that lets him play off TV legends like John Lithgow and Amy Brenneman. Bridges shot half of the first season before Covid and cancer and went back

Styling: Tracy Shapoff. Grooming: Thomas Nellen/Schneider Entertainment.

OH, WOW, MAN

and finished the rest; he’ll tell you all about it. And about what he learned from almost dying. But he’ll tell you in a circuitous, Bridgesian way, circling around a point and riffing off into abstract space, forgetting things (sometimes, he says, “I ask my mind for a word and it just flips me the finger,” which could be a symptom of post-Covid brain or just old-man brain, he’s not quite sure) and then remembering, or just rolling on to the next thought, enjoying the journey of the chat without stressing unduly over the destination. “He says this constantly,” says Brenneman, who plays a divorcée who gets more than she bargained for when she falls for Bridges’s character on The Old Man. “He’s like, ‘Don’t you think sometimes, like, the acting is just an excuse for us to hang out and talk?’ ” “He’s just happy to talk about the way the universe works for an hour,” says Old Man cocreator Jonathan E. Steinberg, “and it’s great. And it’s all coming from a place of being just fascinated by the world. It’s fun to be around somebody who’s willing to kind of just see things and note them and be willing to talk about them and not be as concerned about what we’re supposed to be doing today.” Another part of working with Jeff Bridges, his collaborators all say, is that every so often you find yourself stopping and thinking, Holy shit, it’s Jeff Bridges. His IMDb credits span seven decades. He’s played cowboys and country singers, good men and flawed men and men who want very badly to kill Iron Man. He came into the business already halfway famous, because of the name he shared with his father—Lloyd Bridges, of Sea Hunt and High Noon and later Airplane! and Seinfeld—but he also came in with whatever intangible quality separates icons from mere actors. As a younger man, he always had a rare grace, and he’s aged no less gracefully—The Old Man deepens and complicates the growly, inward-turned presence Bridges brought to recent films like Hell or High Water and Bad Times at the El Royale. If icon still feels, even after all these years, like an awkward descriptor to hang on him, it’s because he’s worn that status so casually for so long. Decades ago, legendary film critic Pauline Kael said he “may

be the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor who ever lived.” The overall Jeff Bridges-ness of Jeff Bridges, his iconicity, sneaks up on you. Sometimes, Brenneman says, when she’s in a scene with him, she can’t help thinking of Peter Weir’s Fearless, from 1993, with Bridges as a plane-crash survivor whose experience scrambles his whole psychospiritual map.

watching Bridges in King Kong and Tron a million times. He grew up to be a creator of TV shows like Jericho and Black Sails. In 2017, the producer Warren Littlefield approached Steinberg and his Black Sails partner Robert Levine with a pitch for a series based on a Thomas Perry novel about a loner retiree who’s hiding a bloody and morally murky covert-ops past. “I think, almost right away, we started talking about [doing] Unforgiven in the spy genre—the opportunity to do what that movie did for westerns in the Bourne space,” Steinberg says. “And that got really exciting.” The minute they started talking about who might play Dan Chase, the titular Old Man, Bridges’s name was first on the list, Steinberg says, “and I was skeptical that it was realistic. He’d never done TV. I was fully aware that he was a guy who could do probably literally anything he wanted to do, and I felt like we were going to be in line with 35 people trying to get his attention.” Bridges is also, famously, very hard to book, for anything. The question of whether or not to accept a particular piece of work fills him with anxiety, even when the work is tempting. It’s said that the Coen brothers had to talk him into playing He shared his diagnosis the Dude in The Big Lebowwith a Lebowski nod: New ski, a part that’s now one of shit has come to light. the pillars of his legend, and then when they wanted him for the John Wayne part in “Fearless is a huge movie in my their remake of True Grit, they had internal landscape,” Brenneman says. to talk him into that, too. He even had “That look on his face as the plane’s going to be wheedled into playing the whisdown—there’s moments that are kind of key-pickled country singer Bad Blake beyond language, in that movie, for me. in Crazy Heart, the role he went on to So I have those flashes, where that face is win an Oscar for. looking at me [in a scene], and I’m like, “All of them,” he says, a little sheep‘Oh my God—it’s that face.’ ” ish. “All of them. And this one’s no Jon Steinberg remembers being a kid different. I resisted this a lot. I had a lot on the floor of his parents’ bedroom, of good reasons not to do this.” MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

JEFF BRIDGES’S ROLES OVER THE YEARS

HEARTS OF THE WEST, ’75

THE FISHER KING, ’91

But when Bridges hesitates, it’s usually for one big reason, whether it’s Jon Steinberg or the Coens or Marvel on the other end of the line: “The basic concern of, once you engage in this, you can’t engage in that—and you don’t even know what that is yet! But you know it’s going to take you away from your family, from music, from your art—all these other things you’re going to have to focus on less, if not at all.” So he resisted The Old Man, for a while, not because he wasn’t interested—he’d read the book and liked it—but because he was interested, and he knew he’d get sucked in, which is how he works. “Once you get hooked, it’s surrender,” he says, laughing a little. “Then it’s, Take me, eat me, have your way with me.”

SOMETIMES, BRIDGES SAYS,

operating with that level of commitment can keep him from enjoying the work. He’s constantly having to remind himself of what his mom, Dorothy Bridges, used to say every time he went off to make a movie: “She would say, ‘Remember, Jeff, have fun. And don’t take it too seriously.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, fuck, I forgot. That’s right.’ ” It’s like when he played Robert Downey Jr.’s nemesis in Iron Man, 86

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

KING KONG, ’76

THE BIG LEBOWSKI, ’98

released in 2008, the film that launched a billion-dollar megafranchise, which has involved Bridges not at all, because he died at the end of the first one. Or maybe he didn’t—Bridges isn’t sure. “In the script they gave me, they open the suit and the suit’s empty,” he says, “So who knows? Maybe I’ll be—what was my name?” Obadiah Stane. “Obadiah Stane,” he says. “Maybe Obadiah Stane will come back, somehow.” Honestly, he doesn’t sound hugely invested in whether this happens or not. But he was happy with Iron Man as a finished product—“I’m biased,” he says, “because I’m in it, but that’s my favorite superhero movie”—and he dug working with director Jon Favreau. “The way he worked with the suits, the Marvel people, was amazing, because we would show up not knowing what we were going to shoot,” he says, getting a kick out of the memory. “We’d be writing it in our trailers, and then all the guys from the studio would be there tapping their foot.” But at first, he says, taking that now unthinkably loosey-goosey approach to the making of a massive tentpole superhero film was a source of huge anxiety, because in order to work, he needs to commit, and in order to commit, he needs to know what he’s committing to.

IRON MAN, ’08

Early on, he says, “I was really in a terrible state. Y’know—‘I got to know what I’m saying. What’s the script? I gotta know my lines, so I can prepare!’ And then I made this little adjustment. ‘Jeff, you’re making a $200 million student film. Relax and have some fun.’ ” That’s how it goes. Bridges resists and resists, and then when he gives in, he gives them everything. One day, Steinberg and Levine got a call that Bridges wanted to do The Old Man, and then a few months later, there he was on set, a 70-year-old man shooting a brutal close-quarters knife fight in an overturned car. He didn’t do all his own stunts, of course, but according to Steinberg, “You’d be amazed by what he did do. He did quite a bit. It was important to us that it feels honest, and a lot of that solution was Jeff doing a lot of it, fighting his way through it. He doesn’t half-ass anything, and [the knife-fight scene] is a scene where he’s got to go to a really dark place to get to an emotional moment and a scene where he’s got to roll around on the ground with a stuntman and be in a lifeor-death, knock-down-drag-out fight, and it’s all fully committed to.” They’d shot four episodes and parts of a fifth when the pandemic shut down their show along with pretty much every other show on earth.

Getty Images (King Kong, Hearts of the West). Courtesy FX Networks (The Old Man). Everett Collection (remaining).

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, ’71

TRON, ’82

THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS, ’89

TRUE GRIT, ’10

In October 2020, the week they were supposed to go back into production, Brenneman heard Bridges was out with a sore back. “And the end of that week, he’s got cancer,” she says. He announced it later that month on Twitter with a Lebowski reference: New shit has come to light. He mentioned the great doctors he’d been seeing and said his prognosis was good. But by that point, 2020 had already been one of the bleakest, meanest years in recent memory, a year of endless injustice and unthinkable loss, and the idea that it might end with the Dude dying of fuckin’ cancer seemed depressingly on-brand. It was hard not to expect the worst. “I’ll give you a little of what that trip was like,” Bridges says today. It went like this: Sometime that summer, he’s exercising, stretched out on the floor in Santa Barbara. He rolls over and feels something like a bone in his abdomen where a bone shouldn’t be. His wife tells him to go get it checked out, but it doesn’t hurt, so instead they go through with a planned vacation—three months at the Bridges family’s place in Montana. “I’m sweating at night,” Bridges remembers, “but that’s because the nights are hot. And my legs itched. Those are all symptoms of this lymphoma that I had—I didn’t realize that. But I

TEXASVILLE, ’90

TRON: LEGACY, ’10

was feeling great. Had no pain.” He gets back to California about a week before he’s supposed to be back on set as Dan Chase. Decides he’ll go to the doctor, see about whatever’s going on in his abdomen. “I get it checked out,” he says, “and they tell me that I have a nine-by-twelve-inch lymphomic mass in my stomach. Nine by twelve! A huge fucking thing. Like a baby in my stomach, man.” So they call in the specialists. They start him on chemo. The chemo does its thing. Bridges feels sick, but he feels all right. He feels as much love as a man’s ever felt, from everybody. He celebrates his 71st birthday in December 2020, him and 50 friends laughing together one Zoom call, and it’s the best birthday he’s ever had. Then it’s early 2021. Bridges goes in for another scan at the hospital in Santa Barbara and the news is good. The mass in his stomach, Bridges says, has “imploded down to this little thing the size of a marble.” He sends joyful emails to Brenneman and Steinberg, grateful to the universe. This is in January. As it happens, it’s January 6. Bridges is glued to the TV like everybody else—“I’m watching the, what do you call it, the revolution or whatever the hell. The failed revolution”—and

THE OLD MAN, ’22

then he gets a letter from the chemotreatment center, telling him he’s been exposed to Covid. And that’s when things get really scary. Chemotherapy, Bridges explains, “strips you of all your immune system. So the Covid made my cancer look like a piece of cake. The cancer never hurt. But the Covid, oh God. Because I had nothing to fight it, and that was wild. “I was on death’s door,” he says, “with the Covid. My wife would say, ‘How is he? He’s going to live, isn’t he?’ And the doctor would say, ‘We’re doing the best we can.’ It was that kind of thing. They weren’t saying, ‘No, he’s going to be okay.’ ” Maybe this is no big surprise, but Bridges took a pretty Zen approach to the possibility of his own death. He says he drew on everything he’d learned from a lifetime of spiritual practice, everything he’d learned about letting go and not knowing and simply bearing witness to a situation, which he says sometimes put him at odds with the practitioners of Western medicine who were treating his cancer. “This one doctor,” Bridges says, “would come up to me and say, ‘Jeff, you’ve got to fight, man. You’re not fighting. You gotta fight!’ And I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I’m in surrender mode. I’m practicing getting ready to die. If MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

anything, my action would be closer to dancing—I’m dancing with my death.”

BUT THE DUDE SURVIVED—beating

Covid as well as cancer. (“There’s still something in there,” he says today. “They don’t know if it’s scar tissue or whatever it is. But I’m in remission.”) He went back to finish shooting The Old Man, almost two years after completing the first four episodes—two years of seeing only masked faces, two years that seemed like a weird dream. I ask Bridges if he felt like a different person on the other side of all this, in any way he can quantify. “More the same,” he says after a second. “Deeper the same, rather than different. Deeper the same.” Long before cancer and Covid, he’d already done a fair amount of thinking, he says, about mortality, and the fact that he will not be here forever. The book he’s carrying around with him today is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by the British journalist Oliver Burkeman. Four thousand weeks, Bridges explains, “is how many weeks you got if you live to around 80. That’s not too many, you know what I mean? And my buddy, he actually did the math—you’ll live to 76 with 4,000 weeks. It’s a little less than 80.” Burkeman’s big idea, contra just about everything anybody’s ever written about time management and productivity, is that no matter how we optimize our lives, we will never have enough time to meet the demands life places on us. Bridges opens the book, adjusts his glasses, reads out loud: “‘The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.’ I love that,” he says. Burkeman suggests that “the dictatorship of the clock, the schedule, and the Google Calendar alert . . . [makes] it all but impossible to experience ‘deep time,’ that sense of timeless time, which depends on forgetting the abstract yardstick and plunging back into the vividness of reality instead.” Bridges loves that idea, too. “Clock time is relatively new,” he says. “Back in the feudal times, they didn’t have clocks, man. It was a whole different thing, time. And we’re trying to jam in 88

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

Bridges loves acting but also fractals, playing music, and all his side projects. Shirt by All Saints; jeans by John Varvatos.

as much as we can. We feel like we’re left out if we don’t do this bucket list. And we miss what’s right in front of you. We can miss the present. I say, ‘That’s not what I wanted. I want this and this and this and this.’ And you miss what you’re given. “And it’s not like I’ve figured it out,” he says. “I’m an anxious cat, man. I resist life big-time.” In this moment, I’m feeling the dictatorship of the clock myself. Bridges has to hit the road soon, and I’ve still got questions. I point out that on The Old Man, he and John Lithgow’s character—a high-ranking government official whose connection to Bridges’s Dan Chase goes way back—are both thinking about their legacies, about how they’ll be remembered once their past actions come to light. I ask Bridges if he’s been thinking more about his legacy, given the events of the past few years. “It’s so wild,” he says. “There’s this new thing—it’s not only kids, it’s just a

modern thing to aspire to, which seems so bizarre. ‘I want to be an influencer when I grow up.’ And I want to be an influencer! Why not? That’s what I want to do. Make a difference.” And then he’s off, swinging from vine to conversational vine, talking about Buckminster Fuller and the way flocks of birds and schools of fish change direction as one big group, and that’s when Bridges says to me, “You know about fractals?” I say Yeah, tentatively, and Bridges, sounding almost suspicious, says, “You’ve seen the fractals?” And I say, even more tentatively, that I’ve seen some fractals in my day, and Bridges says, “The latest kind of fractals?” And at that point I have to admit that I am not really up on the latest advances in fractals, and Bridges tells me to get out my laptop and Google “hardest fractal.” And while I’m digging the computer out of my bag, he’s explaining, “This guy Mandelbrot came

WE FEEL LIKE WE’RE LEFT OUT IF WE DON’T DO THIS BUCKET LIST. AND WE MISS WHAT’S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU . . . THE PRESENT.

up with this formula, z equals z squared plus c. And when that diagram is made in a visual sense, it’s basically a window into infinity.” I can’t connect to the studio’s WiFi, so we end up elbow to elbow, me and Bridges, watching computer-animated diagrams of fractals on the cracked screen of my iPhone—kaleidoscopic geometric patterns, evolving endlessly, as if we’re zooming deeper and deeper into a universe of microscopic particles. “See that first shape—that’s the initial shape. Some call that the fingerprint of God. Now just watch this for a second. Give it a couple of minutes before you get the whole gist of it,” Bridges is saying. “Just keep watching it. Watch what happens. You think you know where it’s going, right? Watch what your mind is doing as you watch that. What’s the conversation that you have with your mind as you watch it? Pay attention. Look at the detail. Look at the fucking detail, man.”

We’ve been looking at this for kind of a while, long enough that Bridges has forgotten why he wanted to show me the fractals in the first place. And yet it’s all connected. We have, somehow, zoomed down to the root of Bridges’s anxiety. As much as he loves acting, as much as it fires him up, he also gets fired up about fractals, and about playing music with his band, the Abiders, and about this company he’s involved with that makes guitars out of sustainable wood, and when he resists engaging in this or that new acting project, he does so “because I know it’s going to take me away from all my little side projects that I love so much. “So whatever I’m attracted to, I get”— he mimes recoiling, makes a sound like somebody’s showing him a snake. He shrugs. “Funny dynamic.” Bridges’s assistant is hovering. We have five minutes of clock time left. “Let me just say this one thing,” Bridges says to me. “You married?” I am, I say. Bridges is, too—since 1977, to Susan Geston, whom he met in Montana in 1975 while shooting the movie Rancho Deluxe. It’s a good story. Geston had been in a car accident, and on the day she met Bridges, she had two black eyes and a broken nose. A makeup artist snapped a picture of the moment they met, and ten years later he sent it to Bridges. Bridges still carries it in his wallet—a picture of a goofy young actor in a cowboy hat meeting a beautiful girl with a banged-up face. “It was love at first sight,” Bridges says now. But even that wasn’t enough. “I resisted marriage so much, man. I resisted getting married because it’s the same thing—it takes you away

from all the other things. All the other chicks, man, and all these other adventures that you don’t do. “And I resisted, I resisted. And I said, ‘If I don’t marry this lady, I’ll spend my life’—this is my fear—‘I’ll spend my whole life saying, That was the one, and I let that diamond slip through my fingers in the sand. And finally the caveat I gave myself, that allowed myself to get married, was You can always get a divorce. I said, ‘Okay.’ ” So they got married. And honeymooned in Hawaii. “So now we cut to the Seven Sacred Pools in Maui,” Bridges says, “and I’m just smelling the rotting mangoes and I’m pouting. Sue says, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ She goes, ‘Oh, let’s annul this. This is terrible.’ I said, ‘No, no, no.’ “And she put up with that pouting shit for three years and didn’t kick me to the curb, thank God. I finally got with the program and said, ‘Oh no, she’s not trapping me. I got a gift, a wonderful gift, that I was questioning and didn’t want to accept. And now we’re celebrating our 45th wedding anniversary, man. Three kids, three grandkids.” Susan Bridges got exposed to Covid when Jeff did. “We shared an ambulance to the hospital. Oh, man,” Bridges says, sounding like there was still no place he’d rather be than right there with her, that it was somehow another gift from the universe, terrible and beautiful, all at the same time. ALEX PAPPADEMAS is the host of the Big Hit Show podcast and the author of Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant. MEN’S HEALTH

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

No, it’s not just your IMAGINATION :

There are more HEALTHY-ISH FAST-FOOD OPTIONS than ever. We asked registered dietitians and crunched restaurant nutrition data for NEW MEALS that hit near

or above our GOLD STANDARD of 30 grams of muscle-building protein and 10 grams of stomach-filling fiber.

WE THEN HIT THE ROUND TO TASTE-TEST THE FINALISTS (TOUGH JOB!) AND PICK THE WINNERS .

BEST CHICKEN SALAD:

STARBUCKS CHICKEN & QUINOA PROTEIN BOWL

Most fast-food chicken salads share one ingredient: boredom. Starbucks wakes things up with quinoa, roasted corn, smoked paprika, cotija cheese, and jicama. Per bowl: 420 calories, 27g protein, 42g carbs (9g fiber), 17g fat Next time you’re making a salad, try jicama, a crispy-crunchy vegetable crouton swap.

STEAL THIS MOVE

BEST PLANT-BASED MUSCLE MEAL:

CHIPOTLE VEGETARIAN LIFESTYLE BOWL

Chipotle’s “sofritas”—a smoky-spicy, soy-protein-based blend— makes a solid base for fajita vegetables, beans, lettuce, and cheese. Per bowl: 880 calories, 29g protein, 85g carbs (22g fiber), 48g fat Batch-roast a mess of sliced peppers and onions in a 400°F oven. Add to omelets, nachos, and salads.

STEAL THIS MOVE

GOOD PICK!

THE

SUGAR-SHOCK DRINK SPECTRUM

Don’t let ingredients like oat milk and green tea fool you: Not every healthy-seeming drink on a fast-food menu is actually all that healthy. 92

JULY • AUGUST 2022

R SUGA K! C SHO

JAMBA GOTCHA MATCHA (SMALL) 5 g a d d e d s u g a r, 50 calories (0g added sugar w i t h o u t t h e a g a v e)

| MEN’S HEALTH

STARBUCKS COLD & CRAFTED (11 OZ) 1 3 g a d d e d s u g a r, 9 0 calories

PEACH PASSION FRUIT DUNKIN’ COCONUT REFRESHER (SMALL) 1 9 g a d d e d s u g a r, 120 calories

PANERA BREAD PASSION PAPAYA GREEN TEA (20 OZ) 3 1 g a d d e d s u g a r, 13 0 calories

CARIBOU COFFEE SPARKLING GREEN TEA LEMONADE (SMALL) 3 5 g a d d e d s u g a r, 140 calories

Who needs milk? Strawberries are juicy enough to thicken DIY protein shakes.

STEAL THIS MOVE

BEST SANDWICH:

SUBWAY ROAST BEEF

The chain revamped its menus last year, and this option tastes great on its new multigrain bread loaded up with vegetables. Per foot-long: 590 calories, 45g protein, 83g carbs (8g fiber), 10g fat Try building a sandwich with smashed avocado or guacamole as the condiment— way heart- healthier than blue-cheese dressing.

Food styling: Rebecca Jurkevich. Prop styling: Stephanie Yeh.

STEAL THIS MOVE

This variety has four more grams of protein and 100 percent more flavor than the egg-white offering. Order it with a multigrain bagel to tack on 15 grams of protein and eight grams of fiber. Per 2 bites: 280 calories, 17g protein, 7g carbs (0g fiber), 19g fat At home, try eggs with salsa instead of sugary ketchup.

STEAL THIS MOVE

BEST PIZZA:

DOMINO’S HAND TOSSED PACIFIC VEGGIE

Fast-food companies know what you buy, where you live, and what you like on social. And they may use that against your diet, says Jennifer L. Harris, Ph.D., a senior research advisor at UConn’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. 94

JULY • AUGUST 2022

Roasted red peppers, spinach, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, and olives—all on a garlic-seasoned crust. Add a chicken Caesar salad (yeah, Domino’s has salad!) to double your fiber. Per 2 slices of small pizza: 440 calories, 17g protein, 51g carbs (3g fiber), 17g fat

STEAL THIS MOVE

SOCIAL MANIPULATION Companies partner with celebrities to post about a fast-food menu item on social media. When your friend likes or shares that celebrity’s post, that may make you more likely to buy in, says Harris.

| MEN’S HEALTH

Saute a handful of spinach in oil and add to any pizza for an easy way to sneak in greens.

APP MINING Order-ahead features are convenient— but there’s a cost. Fast-food companies dig up your location data and then feed you coupons, almost always for unhealthy items, says Harris.

based” items. Any new menu-marketing push can get prior customers to think about the chain again—and possibly return, even if they don’t always order the healthiest option.

BEST TACO BOWL:

TACO BELL POWER MENU BOWL

You don’t need a fried shell to enjoy grilled chicken, black beans, lettuce, tomato, guac, and sour cream. That avocado ranch sauce is addictive, too. Per bowl: 450 calories, 26g protein, 42g carbs (8g fiber), 20g fat Beans are a cheap, easy way to pump up the protein of almost any meal. Keep cans on hand.

STEAL THIS MOVE

BEST OG PICK:

WENDY’S LARGE CHILI WITH A BAKED POTATO

BEST BURGER:

BURGER KING BIG KING

Okay, it’s a Big Mac

At home, double up

The bean-studded chili is hearty, and a baked potato rounds out the meal with seven more grams of both protein and fiber. Per order: 610 calories, 29g protein, 92g carbs (15g fiber), 15g fat

| JULY • AUGUST 2022

SIX

A big part of Judge’s

PACK

Whoop 4.0 During baseball season, Judge works out three times a week. He relies on this fitness tracker to meticulously log his performance in each session. “It gives me valuable insights about my body and takes the guesswork out of my training,” he says. Free with subscription, $49 without; whoop.com

Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover Sleep is critical for recovery, and this hightech mattress cover lets Judge adjust his bed to his preferred temperature so he can get a great night’s rest. “It helps me fall asleep faster,” he says. From $1,695; eightsleep.com

AARON JUDGE

With strong bass, up to 12 hours of battery life, and Bluetooth connectivity, this boom box is a must-have for Judge whenever he wants to listen to music—at the gym or on the road. $399; bumpboxx.com

JULY • AUGUST 2022

| MEN’S HEALTH

Judge likes to

O from beneath

Courtesy New York Yankees (Judge). Courtesy brands (products).

Bumpboxx Flare8 Bluetooth Boombox