VIN

DIESEL
SECRETS OF

Gold-Medal
The Fast &
Furious Icon on
Muscle
+ SCULPT A
Staying SWIMMER’S “V”
Power +BUILD A
SPRINTER’S QUADS
Paul + 24 MORE TIPS
Walker
Strength THE
After 50
CRUSH
CRAMPS
Eight Ways
to Stop
Sweating
+ Smell
Better
8 TRUE
STORIES OF
SURVIVING
(ALMOST)
ANYTHING JEAN-
CLAUDE
VAN
DAMME
Is Alive
—and
Kicking!
 THE
EXCEPTIONAL
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Drink responsibly. Corona Premier® Beer. Imported by Crown Imports, Chicago, IL. Per 12 fl. oz.
serving average analysis: Calories 90, Carbs 2.6 grams, Protein 0.7 grams, Fat 0.0 grams.
 “We have to
reach as high
as we can.
Because it
may be more
important than
just a movie.”
—VIN DIESEL, P. 62
62 VIN DIESEL, SO FAR
F E A T U R E S
For 20 years, he’s played Dominic
Toretto in one of the highest-
grossing movie franchises of all
time. Along the way, he’s produced
Hollywood blockbusters, kept fit,
and learned the power of tough love
with the Rock. BY RYAN D’AGOSTINO
70 GOLD-MEDAL SECRETS
OF THE OLYMPIANS
Learn shot-putter strength,
Olav Stubberud
swimmer stamina, and so much
more from 20 athletes competing
for the biggest honor in sports.
80 THE DEATH-DEFYING,
LIFE-CHANGING POWER
OF RESILIENCE
A retired U. S. Army sergeant, a
fraternity pledge, and a climbing
guide all have one thing in common:
They survived the impossible.
Now they’re sharing the skills they
gained and proving resilience is
more than just a word.
88 THE TOXIC-
SUPPLEMENT HUNTER
Inside the mission of a doctor
turned investigator taking on
Vin Diesel photographed by
Olav Stubberud exclusively
for Men’s Health. Styling by
Paris Libby. Photo assistance
by Josue Ponce. Location:
the Dominican Republic.
ON THE COVER: Shirt by
Maison Margiela. THIS PAGE:
Shirt by John Varvatos.
sketchy pill and powder
manufacturers one false claim at
a time. BY STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
94 “I WENT DOWN, AND
I CAME BACK UP IN A RE-
ARRANGED KIND OF WAY”
It’s been more than three decades
since Bloodsport launched Jean-
Claude Van Damme into action
stardom. After coping with
substance abuse, the ’90s icon
wants to prove he’s still kicking
high. BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 3
 CONTENTS

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

LIFE
33 Nine adrenaline-
fueled guy trips to help
you reboot and escape
the indoors.
38 30/10: Grilled
lobster—protein-packed
and infinitely tastier
than chicken breast.
40 Deodorant or
antiperspirant? Natural
or aluminum based?
Protect your pits from
sweat and odor with
this decoder.
43 There’s only one
right way to make the
perfect margarita.
44 These sustainable
clothes help the
planet—and you’ll look
good doing it.
48 Check yourself: The
subtle art of just-looking
flirtation.
50 Cool Dad:
Fatherhood author Matt
Logelin says no two kids
are the same, and that’s
actually kind of great.

MH WORLD
9 Your plans for
escape, the greatest
basketball movie in
history, and way more
stuff you’re excited
MIND
53 Crush negativity
with coffee (!) and more
smart ways to build
mental fortitude.
56 Your pet might be
BODY your mental-health
13 Break your gym rut cramps—and what hero, says Gregory Scott
and torch fat with the you can do now to pre- Brown, M.D.
wild, acrobatic sport of vent your next one. 57 Song Exploder host
freerunning. Hrishikesh Hirway finds
24 How a dermatologist
Food styling: Jamie Kimm/CXA. Prop styling: Nicole Louie.

16 This six-move, solves maskne and peace of mind in a

about this month. galaxy far, far away.
35-minute bodyweight other skin woes.
workout packs on 58 The massive,
muscle all over. 26 Should you
take a pre-workout mood-altering power
18 6 A.M.: Rapper and supplement? of small talk.
F9 star Ludacris shares
his fast and furious 28 Millions of Americans +
garage workout. are still experiencing 100 Metrogrades:
the effects of Covid-19 America’s
20 Yeeeeeoooooowww! after they’ve recovered. Greenest Cities
Inside the decades-long Here’s what to look
quest to fend off muscle out for.

4 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH PHOTOGRAPH BY CHELSEA KYLE

 Personnel Question:
Which Olympic Games event
TEAM are you most excited about?
MEET THE
Richard Dorment Jack Essig MEN’S HEALTH
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Table tennis,
SVP/PUBLISHING DIRECTOR A DV I S O RY
Jamie Prokell Creative Director because it
gives me an eye
Chris Peel Executive Director, Hearst Men’s Group
PA N E L
EDITORIAL ADVERTISING SALES
Ben Court, Mike Darling Executive Editors workout. NEW YORK (212) 649-2000
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Jordyn Taylor, Spencer Dukoff Kim Buonassisi Advertising Sales Director
Deputy Editors Kyle Taylor East Coast Automotive Sales Director scientists, and trainers who
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Brett Williams Fitness Editor CHICAGO (312) 964-4900 BRAIN HEALTH:
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Matthew Montesano Digital Imaging Specialist be watching for DETROIT (248) 614-6120 Brian Capell, M.D., Ph.D.
HEARST VISUAL GROUP the first-ever Sam Shanahan Detroit Automotive Director Corey L. Hartman, M.D.
Alix Campbell Chief Visual Content Director skateboarding DALLAS (972) 533-8665 Adnan Nasir, M.D., Ph.D.
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Samantha Irwin General Manager, Hearst Men’s Group
Scott M. Lacey Deputy Visual Director Italo M. Brown, M.D., M.P.H.
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Paul Baumeister Research Director
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FASHION Chris Hertwig Production Manager Sandeep Dhindsa, M.D. I was a foil and
Ted Stafford Fashion Director Aurelia Duke Finance Director
EXERCISE SCIENCE: saber fencer in
Adam Mansuroglu Senior Style & Gear Editor Everette Hampton Executive Assistant
Toni Starrs, Yvonne Villareal, Martin Gibala, Ph.D. college, and to see
COPY Samantha Wolf, Olivia Zurawin Mark Peterson, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.*D athletes at such
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John Kenney Managing Copy Editor fantastic.
PUBLIC RELATIONS GASTROENTEROLOGY:
Alisa Cohen Barney Senior Copy Editor
Nathan Christopher Executive Director, Public Relations Felice Schnoll-Sussman, M.D.
Connor Sears, David Fairhurst
Assistant Copy Editors The decathlon, Anouska Best Public Relations Coordinator INTEGRATIVE HEALTH:
for sure. The winner MARKETING SERVICES
Brenda Powell, M.D.
RESEARCH
Jennifer Messimer Research Chief
is acclaimed best Cameron Connors Executive Director, INTERNAL MEDICINE:
Nick Pachelli Assistant Research Editor all-around athlete Head of Brand Strategy and Marketing Keith Roach, M.D.
in the world. Stephanie Block Integrated Marketing Director
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Jaclyn D’Andrea Marketing Coordinator MENTAL HEALTH:
That’s some high Gregory Scott Brown, M.D.
Milo F. Bryant, Michael Easter, Alison Brown Special Events Director
Philip Ellis, Garrett Munce, Zachary Zane
stakes. Jana Nesbitt Gale Executive Creative Director Thomas Joiner, Ph.D.
Michael B. Sarpy Art Director Avi Klein, L.C.S.W.
OTHER CONTRIBUTORS Drew Ramsey, M.D.
Lou Dilorenzo Contributing Art Director CIRCULATION
Rick Day VP, Strategy and Business Management
NUTRITION:
VIDEO Dezi Abeyta, R.D.N.
Dorenna Newton Executive Producer PUBLISHED BY HEARST Chris Mohr, Ph.D., R.D.
Tony Xie, Elyssa Aquino Video Producers Steven R. Swartz President & Chief Executive Officer Brian St. Pierre, R.D., C.S.C.S.
Ericka Paparella Associate Producer William R. Hearst III Chairman PAIN MEDICINE: 3 on 3!  
I’m excited
Frank A. Bennack, Jr. Executive Vice Chairman Paul Christo, M.D., M.B.A. My 3 versus
HEARST MEN’S FASHION GROUP to see the best Mark E. Aldam Chief Operating Officer your 3, on the
Nick Sullivan Fashion Director floor routine in SEX & RELATIONSHIPS:
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Rashad Minnick Fashion Associate Debi Chirichella President, Shamyra Howard, L.C.S.W. I’m in!
Hearst Magazines Group, and Treasurer Justin Lehmiller, Ph.D.
MEN’S HEALTH INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS Kate Lewis Chief Content Officer
Australia, China, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Kristen M. O’Hara Chief Business Officer SLEEP MEDICINE:
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Middle East, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Gilbert C. Maurer, Mark F. Miller Publishing Consultants SPORTS MEDICINE:
Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, UK Simon Horne SVP, General Manager & U. S. A. women’s
Michael Fredericson, M.D.
Managing Director, Asia & Russia basketball. I don’t
Dan Giordano, D.P.T., C.S.C.S.
Kim St. Clair Bodden SVP/Editorial & Brand Director think the players
Bill Hartman, P.T.
Chloe O’Brien Deputy Brands Director get enough credit
Shelley Meeks Executive Director, Content Services TRAINING:
Lee Boyce, C.P.T. during the regular
Mike Boyle, M.Ed., A.T.C. season.
Ben Bruno, C.F.S.C.
Alwyn Cosgrove, C.S.C.S.*D
HOW TO REACH US: Customer Service: To change your address, pay a bill, renew your subscription, and more, go David Jack
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6 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

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

LET’S TAKE THIS

OUTSIDE Somewhere
TRAVEL IS ESCAPE— Hong Kong.
with a beach, I’ve wanted to go
from the indoors
or the ping of your
hopefully. there for nearly
@edward.baidoo
in-box—and on 30 years now.
@bennie.woodell
page 33, we found
nine destinations
to help you get away.
So we asked you:
Where in the world The Kennedy
are you planning Space Center.
I am such a
to escape to next? science nerd.
@wendy.y.lawrence

The gym!
@vegetarier
.pfleger.paolo

I think I’ll
blindly pick a
spot on a map.
@danhdz75 Lake Tahoe, if I still
remember how to
drive more than 20
minutes at a time.
I’m going to @bob.hunnicutt1

Disneyland!
@theninja909
Andre L Perry

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 9

 WORLD EDITOR’S LETTER

Highlights
from the
Men’s Health
ASK
channel on
YouTube.
MEN’S
HEALTH
Q. Can
grilling meats
really cause
cancer?
—LEWIS, SEATTLE, WA

Q+A WITH THE E.I.C.

A. Yes and no!
Throwing meat
“Thoughts on on the grill does
produce chemicals

YOUTUBE fitness?” 4
—@cgtn4
FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK, @cgtn4. As I’m
lying down to write this note (oh, like you don’t?),
Men’s Health’s YouTube channel has just reached
one million subscribers—that’s a lot!—and I’ve
been thinking quite a bit about the hows and whys
of it all. So: thoughts, in no particular order . . .
It’s hard to talk about YouTube as one
1 monolithic thing, because YouTube is
basically just a microcosm of the Internet (and,
I guess, the world)—there’s amazing stuff and
awful stuff, smart people and not-so-smart
people, and the beauty and the burden of the
platform is that bums like you and me get to
figure out what’s what.
There is so much fitness on You-
2 Tube—tens of thousands of channels
with millions of hours of video that range from
There’s not a ton of transparency
about what’s an #ad. According to the
Federal Trade Commission, content creators
(HCAs and PAHs)
that may increase
your risk for can-
on social media are obligated to disclose any cer—but the increase
financial relationship with the subjects they’re appears to be small.
covering, so users can assess the material’s The hotter and/or
trustworthiness. Which would be great, if longer you grill meat,
most creators actually did it. One 2018 study the more likely these
from Princeton University researchers found chemicals are
that only a small percentage of YouTube videos to develop, so limit
included the necessary disclosure of a financial
relationship. Does this mean that your favorite
well-done steaks.
Using a low-sugar
vlogger is being paid by the maker of the sup- marinade (such
plement they’re plugging? Maybe. Maybe not. as vinegar, yogurt,
But the answer is worth knowing. lemon or lime juice,
Do your homework and trust your BS or dark beer) with
5 detector. Does the YouTuber have certifi-
cations or a strong background in fitness? Is the
herbs and spices
(such as rosemary,
comments section a positive, thoughtful place
or is it filled with complaints? Certified trainers
onion powder,

like Jeff Cavaliere, C.S.C.S., and Jeremy Ethier,

the most vanilla basics to the most insanely
stupid moves. Upside: lots of great exercises to
search out and work into your sets! Downside:
everything else.
There’s not a huge emphasis on cred-
3 ibility. Unlike Google, YouTube doesn’t
account for a creator’s expertise, authority,
or trustworthiness factors (known ’round
these parts as “E-A-T”) when it’s ranking or
recommending videos or channels for you. (In
contrast, Google, which is owned by the same
parent company as YouTube, is all about that
E-A-T, which is why you’re more likely to see
highly credible sources come up on the first page
of search results.) Instead, YouTube algorithms
rely primarily on which videos it “thinks” you
might like. When it finds a topic that fits into
your larger viewing habits, it will recommend
that content, even if the person has zero busi-
ness teaching anyone how to do anything.
NASM, are a few of the ones we like here at Men’s
Health. Even noncertified figures like Eddie
Hall and Jon Call (aka Jujimufu) have a ton of
good advice. And then there’s us: The Men’s
Health channel is home to experts like Ebenezer
Samuel, C.S.C.S.; Brett Williams, NASM; and
other trainers who have the certifications and/
or smarts to make sure you can train safely. We
always disclose if there’s an advertising or spon-
sorship angle to one of our videos. As a 33-year-
old brand that wants to be around for another 33 +
years, we care a lot about our long-term credibil- Have a question
ity. We’re not going to risk all that for the sake for Rich?
of a few clicks, and we hope you’ll become one of Tweet us at
@MensHealthMag
the million-plus viewers who’ve joined the team.
with the hashtag
#AskMHRich
and ask away.
Richard Dorment, Editor-in-Chief

10 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

 GOALS WORLD

MVP E
OF THTH
CALEB
CAMACHO
STATS
MO N
AGE: 31
LOCATION:
Los Angeles, CA
OCCUPATION:
Manager at a social-
media start-up
FROM THE ENLIGHTENING TO
THE AWESOME, HERE ARE channel. Everyone
does rides together
THE STANDOUT SHOUT-OUTS FROM and encourages
OUR FEEDS THIS MONTH. each other.
ON INSTAGRAM, actor Glenn
THE ONE FOOD
Howerton congratulated his It’s Always I CAN’T LIVE
Sunny costar Rob McElhenney on his WITHOUT IS . . .
Courtesy subject (Camacho). Alamy (OG Space Jam, White Men Can’t Jump, Love & Basketball, Air Bud). Warner Bros. Entertainment (James).

May Men’s Health cover—sort of. Unreal Deli meat. Af-

ter Covid-19-related
@glennhowerton: complications, I de-
I don’t know. I see a little paunch cided to go vegan.
there. Happy birthday, old man. It’s made with chick-
peas, tomatoes, and
beets, not one of
McElhenney even spoofed his own Men’s Health MVP members have access to the best health those texturized soy
cover and questioned if we’d picked the and fitness articles out there. Each month, we survey our MVPs proteins.
best shot with this throwback. and choose one whose story catches our eye. Sign up at
join.menshealth.com and you could see yourself here one day. MY PUMP-UP
JAM IS . . .
“I Think We’re Alone
@jamieprokell
MY FITNESS GOALS about 25 pounds. He’s not waking up Now” by Tiffany gets
(MH creative
I got Covid-19 in Au- My goal is just to feel at 2:30 A.M. for a six- me going. That or
director):
gust 2020 and was like myself again. hour gym session. anything by Justin
Hmmm.
one of the unlucky Bieber or Carly Rae
Was not aware
ones to become a WHY SHAZAM IS MY I STAY Jepsen.
that one was
long hauler. I was in FITNESS HERO MOTIVATED BY . . .
an option?
bed for a month and Zachary Levi is Talking to col- WHAT MAKES ME
Looking good.
unable to work out ripped, but not Mark leagues. We have FEEL STRONG IS . . .
for five months. I lost Wahlberg ripped. a Peloton Slack Getting to the end.

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

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

28.2% 11% 4.1%

THE OG LOVE & AIR
S PAC E JA M BAS KETBA LL BUD

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 11

 VITALITY STARTS HERE

S P R I N T !
JU M P !
RO L L!
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Turn an
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BY A

PICTURE YOURSELF at the top of a

staircase with steel railings. Next to it is a
five-inch-wide, seven-foot-high wall. How
would you get down? If you’re like most people,
you might stroll down the stairs. But if you’re
Gabriel Nunez (above), the 37-year-old CEO of
the Tempest Freerunning Academy in Chats-
worth, California, all you see is possibility.
You might sprint and jump into the wall,
plant your feet, and then leap and flip off
it, landing on the stairs below. Or you might
grab the lip of the wall, lower yourself
halfway, push your feet off, and flip onto
the ground. Then maybe you’d hop up to
the railing, run down it, and side-flip to the
landing at the bottom. “Usually you start
by climbing onto something,” says Nunez.
“Then once that’s easy, you figure out how

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JON JOHNSON MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 13

 ft),
Corbin Reinhardt (le
and Sydney Olson
Nunez
Tempest CEO Gabriel
you might do it in a more creative
way. . . . Freerunning is an exploration.”
This is how you see any space with
walls, ledges, and railings (or any space
outdoors) when you get into freerunning,
the daredevil sport/art/way of life that’s
growing in popularity—and can help
energize your summer workouts.
At the heart of freerunning is a simple
concept: constant movement. Your goal is
to be playful and creative, swiftly making
your way through a series of obstacles.
Freerunning skills are the backbone of
many Hollywood stunts, powering high-
flying action-star chase scenes—involving
everyone from James Bond and Jason
Bourne to Captain America and Black Pan-
ther. Some of those stunt guys practice and
sharpen their skills at Tempest.
Freerunning is an offshoot of parkour,
which many believe was conceived in the
early 1900s by French military officers as a
new method of navigating obstacle courses.
But parkour focuses on “usefulness,” push-
ing you to find efficient ways to move. In 2003, Nunez founded Tempest, a train-
a British documentary called Jump London
tracked three parkour athletes traversing
London landmarks. None of them chased
efficient movement; instead, they exuded
style, surprising viewers with their acro-
batics and leading French parkour athlete
Guillaume Pelletier to coin the term freerun-
14 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH
ning. (Parkour, while still popular
with movement zealots, suffered
from taking itself too seriously and
was famously parodied on The Office
by Michael Scott.) Nunez, who was in
college at the time, was intrigued by
how freerunning took the best of park-
our and fused it with imaginative, pur-
poseful movement. Both freerunners
and parkour athletes do similar tricks,
but parkour athletes work through
courses quickly. Freerunners aim to
dazzle with acrobatics. If Parkour! is
for Michael Scott, freerunning is for
Marvel. “It was athleticism at its fin-
est,” Nunez says. “But it was creative,
and there was no boundary to it.”
Four years later, in 2007, Red
Bull created Art of Motion, a yearly
freerunning competition that places
competitors on a set course and asks
them to zip through it, then judges
them on the difficulty and creativity
of their route. Four years after that,
ing ground, competition site, and
classroom all in one. The sport—and
Tempest—have gained traction ever
since, fueled in part by Instagram, an
ideal platform for acrobatic, “no way
you can do that!” moves. Tempest now confidence when walking, since one foot
has more than 193,000 followers on
IG and studios in California and Texas. The
Chatsworth studio is freerunning’s de facto
hub, with trampolines to boost your jumps,
boxes to vault over, steel bars to balance on,
and foam bricks for soft landings. Plenty of
stuntmen call Tempest home, but the gym
also hosts classes in which average Joes fly
through (or learn to fly through) obstacles.
You can learn the basics at home, though,
and mastering just a few can jack up your
heart rate in minutes. You’ll build upper-
body strength and challenge balance and
agility, two characteristics rarely trained in
the gym. The experience may alter the way
you approach fitness. “Athletics can make
us change, grow, and evolve,” says Nunez.
“There are no rules to this.” Start with
these fundamentals from Tempest’s best.
THINK AHEAD IN MIDAIR
Stand up and walk around. Now realize
this: Your eyes never have to look at your
feet. You trust that your legs know what
to do when you hit the pavement, even if
you trip, so you look ahead at the obstacles
you’re approaching. This, says Nunez, is
one key to excelling at freerunning.
It’s much easier to maintain that
is always on the ground. In freerunning,

forge explosive leg strength, test your
obliques, and build shoulder stability, too. and handsprings with simpler leaps,
First, step up to an item no higher than
hip height, place your right hand on it,
and then place your left leg on it, bend-
ing your knee slightly. Move your right
foot through the gap between your right
hand and left leg, then step over the item.
Aim to do 3 sets of 5 reps per side. As time
progresses, you’ll be able to run up to the
obstacle and jump toward it, then place
your hand and step through.
GET ON A ROLL!
Yes, you can do a vault, and you can jump on
a box. But freerunning involves more than
a single stunt. The pulse of freerunning
is “flow,” the ability to connect trick after
trick without hesitation. When you do, say,
a vault over a wall, land, roll, stand, run, and there are other ways to measure it, says
side-flip into a cartwheel—that’s flow.
Perhaps more than any other active
competitive freerunner, 2019 Red Bull Art
of Motion women’s champ Sydney Olson,
28, personifies flow. Olson, who served as the
stunt double for actress Brec Bassinger in the
second season of the CW’s Stargirl, started
her career in gymnastics, which also chal-
lenges you to chain movements, but wanted
a sport with more freedom. “Gymnastics is
very strict,” says Olson, whose nickname is
alterations to make their moves his own. “Some-
times in my sleep, I’ll think of something,” he
says. On his IG feed, you’ll see him perform flips
and vaults off skateboards, on roller skates, and,
for no particular reason, in a full dinosaur suit.
Borrow Reinhardt’s approach with one of his
favorite drills, the box jump. Find a 6-inch-
high box or platform, bend your knees, and
leap (yes, leap) onto it, landing with your knees
bent and your weight on the balls of your feet.
Do 5 reps, take a 60-second breather, then
return to the box. Leap the same way, but this
time, rotate your body to the right in midair
and land only on your left foot. Do 5 reps, then
repeat on the other side. Over time, introduce
your own variations. You’ll hone athleticism
and balance and improve your footwork for
playground basketball and backyard tag.
EMBRACE FALLING
Whether you’re on the basketball court,
playing with the kids, or midway through
your first freerun after reading this story,
there’s always a chance you’ll take a tum-
ble. Learn to fall correctly and it will hurt
Cyndi Turbo. “Freerunning lets me work less or not at all.
through fear and learn new moves in the Hunter Payton Mendoza, 16, knows this.
same way—without being so regimented.” At five-foot-six, he’s so powerful he can
Absent these limits, Olson can com- leap onto a 65-inch-high box. But seven
bine her favorite gymnastics-style flips years ago, that’s not what he needed to
do for a flashback scene in the 2016 film
rolls, and tucks. One such simple move Who’s Driving Doug. The director asked
is the backward roll, which builds spinal him to ride a runaway wheelchair down
mobility and core strength—and will have a steep hill. Hunter agreed—if he wasn’t
you feeling like a kid, too. belted into the seat. Good thing, too: On
Start by sitting on the ground, knees the first try, the chair flipped. Hunter
tucked to your chest, arms bent, hands leaped out. “If I’d let them belt me in, my
near the top of your head. Roll straight face would have been crushed,” he says.
onto your back. Once your upper back and Hunter didn’t mind falling, because
head are on the ground, press your palms he’d mastered the safety roll at just
into it, tuck your chin, and roll over the seven years old. The safety roll is a key
back of your head. Get your feet beneath freerunning skill you can use to avoid
you and land in the bottom of a squat. Do injury, no matter if you’re leaping
3 sets of 5 to 10 per day. from a park bench or a moving car. The
move helps break your fall, cushioning
the impact on joints and bones alike.
PROGRESS IN NEW WAYS Advanced freerunners also use it to
Standard gym theory says progress means change directions and cover territory
adding weight to a bar or reps to a set. But in a dynamic way.
To do it, stand, then step forward
Corbin Reinhardt, who performed stunts in 3 to 4 feet with your right foot. Reach
the movie Moxie. “When you go to the gym, your right arm under your torso and
your progression in skill level is gonna be toward your left foot, following your
your PR,” says Reinhardt, who is 24. “Here, hand with your gaze. Then lunge
there’s no PR, you know. It’s just learning deeply on your right leg and place the
some new movement every day.” back of your right shoulder on the
This doesn’t mean flips one day and leaps ground. Roll over your right shoulder;
off buildings the next. To Reinhardt, progres- you’ll finish in a left-foot-forward
sion is about variation and creativity. For half-kneeling stance. Do 3 or 4 sets
inspiration, he watches fellow freerunners of 5 reps. Start slow and progress to
on Instagram, then tries small, surprising being able to do it at sprint speed.
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 15
 BODY GET MOVING!

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

Do this workout as

on to the next move. Do 3 rounds

of the circuit. Enjoy the sweat.
1
WARMUP

WORLD’S
GREATEST
STRETCH

(a)

(a) (b)

(b)

Start in pushup position, hands directly

below shoulders. Shift your right leg to just
outside your right hand and tighten your left
glute. Pause. Reach your right hand toward (a) (b)
the sky, following it with your gaze (a). Return
your right hand to the floor, straighten your
right leg, and rock backward, stretching your
hamstrings (b). Return to the start. That’s 2 SQUAT TO BROAD JUMP
Start standing, feet about shoulder-width apart. Push your butt back and bend your knees,
1 rep. Alternate reps between sides for 60
seconds, then rest 30 seconds. Do 3 sets. lowering your torso until your thighs are parallel to the floor (a). Stand. Now push your butt back
and bend your knees, throw your hands backward, and explosively jump forward (b). That’s 1
shorts by onder armoor; shoes by nike. rep; repeat until time is up to build leg strength and elevate your heart rate.

16 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATHRYN WIRSING

T H I S M O N T H ’S T R A I N E R : M I L O F. B R YA N T, C . S .C . S . , is a California-based trainer who PICTURED HERE: BEN FEIDEN,
specializes in performance and speed training and founded Coalition for Launching C . F. S . C . , is an ACE-certified
Active Youth (CLAY), a program designed to help children get in shape. personal trainer at Reload Health
and Performance in Manhattan.

each side.

4 MIXED-STYLE
SKATER LUNGE
Start standing, feet shoulder-width apart,
knees bent. Lift your left leg off the floor and
leap to the left, landing on your left leg only.
Quickly leap back to the right, then leap
again to the left. After this third leap, hold for
4 counts. Repeat this pattern (3 explosive
skaters followed by a hold), building glute
strength and balance. 5
BACK WIDOW
Lie on your back, abs tight, heels near your butt. Place your upper arms on the
floor at a 45 degree angle to your torso and point your forearms upward. Squeeze
your shoulder blades and drive your elbows into the floor hard, tightening your
back muscles; this will lift your torso a few inches off the floor. Hold for 3 seconds,
then lower. That’s 1 rep; repeat for 40 seconds. You’ll build mid-back strength and
strengthen your core more than you think.

(a) (b)

6
SPIDERMAN-CRAWL PUSHUP
Start in pushup position (a). Raise your right leg, drive your right knee toward your
right elbow, then shift your left arm a few inches forward. Tighten your shoulder
blades and bend at the shoulders and elbows, lowering into a pushup (b). Press up.
Repeat on the other side. That’s 1 rep. Repeat this pattern, building chest and triceps
strength while also alleviating hip tightness.

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 17

 BODY

C CHRIS BRIDGES IS still doing pushups. A

few minutes ago, he was doing classic
reps, and then he was gritting out
T pushups: pressing upward, then shift-
ing into a side plank. Now he’s doing one
more variation, a snake pushup, meant
to stretch his spine as it builds his chest
and triceps.
Sweat forms a sheen on Bridges’s
forehead, but the man you know better
as rapper-actor Ludacris doesn’t stop.
“No matter how many pushups I do,” he
says, “even when I don’t want to do them
anymore, that’s like the only exercise I
don’t mind doing.” His voice rises to the
frenetic, staccato 11 you remember from
bangers like “Rollout (My Business)” and
“Southern Hospitality.” “Until I cannot.
Fucking. Do. Them. Anymore.”
On this morning in Atlanta, Bridges
will spend two hours in his garage gym
pushing himself to that place on every-
thing from bodyweight moves to bench
presses to isometric holds. And yes, it
crushes his muscles, but the way Bridges,
43, sees it, by pushing himself six days
a week, he earns the right to enjoy life,
even if that wrecks his physique just a
bit. “My goal isn’t to look like the most
ripped, biggest guy in the gym,” he says.
“I just want to be functionally right in
between the man that works out hard,
but that motherfucker drinks beer and
whiskey on the weekends.”
So he sets aside all distractions, trudges
out to his personal muscle palace, and
attacks challenges from trainer George
Bamfo Jr. When Bridges isn’t filming
movies like F9—the ninth entry in the
Fast & Furious franchise, which is out
now and costars the guy on our cover—
he spends most of his workday juggling
and evaluating music and upcoming
film and TV projects. Right now, all his
devices are back in his kitchen. He’s
6 A.M. WITH... focused. “If I get a text or email or phone

LUDACRIS
Yes, actor-rapper Chris Bridges likes the good life—
but six days a week, he pushes his body to the limit in fast
and furious sweat sessions. BY BRETT WILLIAMS, NASM
call,” he says, “it just fucks up the consis-
tency [of the workout].”
Bridges knows that consistency is key,
because he spent the start of his career
without it. He rose as a rapper in the early
2000s, buoyed by a string of hit singles,
then appeared as mechanic Tej Parker in
the second Fast & Furious installment,
in 2003. But as his star grew brighter,
traveling and touring destroyed any

18 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW HETHERINGTON

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

PUSHUP T PUSHUPS INCHWORM PUSHUP

Start with classic Shift into a side Start standing,
reps, focusing on plank and reach then walk your
keeping your abs for the ceiling after hands into
and glutes tight. each pushup rep. pushup position.

BETWEEN
SETS
Ludacris trains his abs daily, doing
FAVORITE
exercises like ring L-sits (bottom right)
EXERCISE?
and decline bench med-ball tosses (top “Anything chest. Dips
right). Twice a week, he’ll do incline and bench press—you
bench presses (above) to blast his chest. always want to get that
indentation, whatever
you can do to mold
semblance of discipline. “One day,
your fucking pecs.”
I happened to look down, and there
was a gut just looking back at me,”
he says. “I was like, ‘There’s no way;
MOST HATED
EXERCISE?
where did that come from? I have to
“Squats. . . . Fuck the
get rid of this.’ ”
legs, but you have
He started doing one-hour sweat
to do them.”
sessions a few days a week. Then in
2019, while prepping for F9, he met
WHAT DO YOU
Bamfo, who instituted his current LISTEN TO WHEN
grind. “On day five or six, before you YOU TRAIN?
get that rest day,” he says of training “Diplo’s Revolution
with Bamfo, “that’s when it’s hell.” on SiriusXM satellite
Bridges relishes all of it. His eyes radio. I love that shit.”
narrow as he grabs a pair of gym-
nastics rings hanging overhead and GO-TO
hoists his 175-pound body upward. CHEAT MEAL?
Tightening his core, he lifts his legs “Chicken parmigiana
in a straight line, a devastating gym- rounds of 30-second treadmill sprints, with noodles
nastics skill called an L-sit. “We never resting just 30 seconds between each. and garlic bread.”
worked on this stuff,” says Bamfo. “As he’s When it’s all over, he’s drenched in
gotten stronger, he was able to do this.” sweat—and ready for a few six-pack-
Bridges shows off that strength wrecking ice-cold beers. “I’m more of
throughout this workout, following those a four-pack kind of guy,” he says. “Save
L-sits with decline situps and bench the other two packs for Friday and
presses. He finishes the session with ten Saturday nights.”

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 19

 BODY PEAK PERFORMANCE
ESCAPE
MUSCLE
CRAMP
HELL
Scientists have rival theories as
to what causes those exercise-
induced aaaaaarrrrggggghhs—and
that’s leading to a range of new
cramp-busting elixirs. Should you
drink up? BY JACQUELINE DETWILER-GEORGE
IT’S AN ATHLETE’S WORST MOMENT:
A hammy seizes like an old engine down
the homestretch to Olympic glory or in
the middle of your rec hoops game.
Suddenly, instead of chasing gold
or bragging rights, you’re
crumpled on the
ground praying for
deliverance. And it’s
not uncommon: Research
reveals exercise-associated
muscle cramps affect up to 70 percent of
endurance runners and cyclists. Who
hasn’t experienced a cramp at some point
while exercising hard?
You’d think science would have
discovered a cure. After all, researchers
have been studying cramps in industri-
al laborers ever since the early 1900s.
In 1932, researchers from Harvard’s
“fatigue laboratory” traveled to the con-
struction site of the Hoover Dam to take
samples from workers who developed
cramps in the heat. They noticed
that cramp sufferers had lower
20 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE VOORHES
concentrations of salt in the blood and little to
no salt in the urine. The scientists concluded,
reasonably, that cramps were related to the
loss of water and salt via sweat.
This idea, that cramps are caused
by dehydration and an imbalance in
electrolytes, persisted. Athletes were
encouraged to down sports drinks, salt
tablets, and/or bananas (a source of the
electrolyte potassium) to relieve or pre-
vent cramps. Trainers also began giving
cramping athletes pickle juice—a brine
of salt, vinegar, and water. It worked so
quickly that scientists found it biolog-
ically confusing. “In our 2010 study,
we had this weird phenomenon where
cramps seemed go away faster when you
drink pickle juice,” says Kevin C. Miller,
Ph.D., ATC, a cramp researcher at Cen-
tral Michigan University, “but there’s no
change to the major electrolytes or blood.”
In 1997, a South African exercise
researcher had put forth a theory about
muscle cramps that explained the
pickle-juice phenomenon: Two
categories of neuroreceptors
act as a kind of teeter-totter for
your muscles—and they can get
out of whack when you exercise
too hard. “One side tells your ner-
vous system, Relax, chill out. The other
side, Hey, get excited,” Miller says. “When
you become fatigued, there’s an imbalance in that
teeter-totter towards the excitatory side.”
Miller now thought that something in the pickle
juice—vinegar, maybe?—was initiating a neural
reflex in the mouth that zipped down the spinal
cord and calmed the overexcited teeter-totter. But
people who had dedicated their careers to studying
dehydration didn’t switch over easily.
It’s difficult to model muscle cramping in a lab, and
people questioned the method Miller used, which
involved shocking the big toe until it cramped.
That’s not comparable to the cramps that occur after
an athlete runs or cycles for hours, says exercise
Model: Joshua Moore/Naturally Fit
researcher Michael Bergeron, Ph.D. “For you to tell
me that there’s no sodium issue because your blood
sodium is normal tells me you have no idea what
you’re talking about,” he says.
Nothing lights up academics like a pissing contest
over a new theory. Experts quibbled over official
sports-organization opinions, sent negative reviews
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Brief Summary of information about RYBELSUS® (semaglutide) tablets
Rx Only
This information is not comprehensive.
• Talk to your healthcare provider or pharmacist
• Visit www.novo-pi.com/rybelsus.pdf to obtain the FDA-approved product labeling
• Call 1-833-GLP-PILL
Read this Medication Guide before you start using RYBELSUS® and each time you
get a refill. There may be new information. This information does not take the place
of talking to your healthcare provider about your medical condition or your treatment.
What is the most important information I should know about
RYBELSUS®?
RYBELSUS® may cause serious side effects, including:
• Possible thyroid tumors, including cancer. Tell your healthcare provider
if you get a lump or swelling in your neck, hoarseness, trouble swallowing, or
shortness of breath. These may be symptoms of thyroid cancer. In studies with
rodents, RYBELSUS® and medicines that work like RYBELSUS® caused thyroid
tumors, including thyroid cancer. It is not known if RYBELSUS® will cause thyroid
tumors or a type of thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) in
people.
• Do not use RYBELSUS® if you or any of your family have ever had a type of
thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC), or if you have an
endocrine system condition called Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia syndrome type 2
(MEN 2).
What is RYBELSUS®?
RYBELSUS® is a prescription medicine used along with diet and exercise to improve
blood sugar (glucose) in adults with type 2 diabetes.
• RYBELSUS® is not recommended as the first choice of medicine for treating
diabetes.
• It is not known if RYBELSUS® can be used in people who have had pancreatitis.
• RYBELSUS® is not for use in patients with type 1 diabetes.
It is not known if RYBELSUS® is safe and effective for use in children under 18 years
of age.
Do not use RYBELSUS® if:
• you or any of your family have ever had a type of thyroid cancer called medullary
thyroid carcinoma (MTC) or if you have an endocrine system condition called
Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia syndrome type 2 (MEN 2).
• you have had a serious allergic reaction to semaglutide or any of the ingredients
in RYBELSUS®. Symptoms of a serious allergic reaction include:
swelling of your face, lips, tongue or throat
problems breathing or swallowing severe rash or itching
fainting or feeling dizzy very rapid heartbeat
Before using RYBELSUS®, tell your healthcare provider if you have any
other medical conditions, including if you:
• have or have had problems with your pancreas or kidneys.
• have a history of vision problems related to your diabetes.
• are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if RYBELSUS® will
harm your unborn baby. You should stop using RYBELSUS® 2 months before
you plan to become pregnant. Talk to your healthcare provider about the best
way to control your blood sugar if you plan to become pregnant or while you are
pregnant.
• are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. Breastfeeding is not recommended during
treatment with RYBELSUS®.
Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take, including
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Before using RYBELSUS®, talk to your healthcare provider about low
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• inflammation of your pancreas (pancreatitis). Stop using RYBELSUS®
and call your healthcare provider right away if you have severe pain in your
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of each other’s talks, and took potshots at
each other in journals. On one side, you
had people who believed Miller: It was a
haywire neural process. Think of them
as the neurological camp. On the other
side, the dehydration camp, who felt that
eliminating electrolyte imbalances from
the cramp equation was a mistake. Fur-
ther muddying the controversy was that
a substantial portion of sports-nutrition
research is funded by electrolyte-hydra-
tion brands. No one knew whom to believe.
MARKETING TO THE RESCUE!
IN 2016, the makers of a product called
HotShot launched a 1.7–ounce beverage
that tastes like getting punched in the
face by a pack of Big Red gum. It’s only the
latest in a long line of over-the-counter
cramp remedies, including CrampX,
Sportlegs, and various formulations
of pickle juice. But HotShot inspired a
scathing editorial in an academic journal
and ignited the cramp blogosphere.
HotShot’s inventors were a pair of
nerve and muscle scientists—Rod Mac-
Kinnon, M.D., who shared the Nobel
Prize in chemistry in 2003, and Bruce
Bean, Ph.D., a Harvard professor of
neurobiology. The two scientists had been
kayaking together for years, and after a
fateful trip off Cape Cod when they both
fell victim to forearm cramps, they came
upon the neurological-function theory
and Miller’s take on pickle juice and
applied their own research to them.
Both Bean and Dr. MacKinnon are
experts on ion channels, the chemical
pores that make nerves and muscles
work. They thought that if pickle juice
was causing a calming reflex in the
mouth and digestive system, it might act
through a set of pores called TRP chan-
nels. Activating these would cause neural
interference to run down the spinal cord
to stop cramping in, say, your calf.
In their own kitchens, Bean and Dr.
MacKinnon experimented with ingre-
dients that would target TRP recep-
tors—including extracts from ginger,
cinnamon, and capsaicin (from hot pep-
Getty Images (Fields)
pers). They tested the resulting formula-
tion on themselves and their families and
then performed case studies using exper-
ANTI-CRAMP TACTICS
Whether you’re hoping to race in Tokyo,
like BMX king Connor Fields (above),
who uses HotShot, or going for a PB,
use these tips to avoid cramps.
DRINK
One problem with evaluating cramp bust-
ers is that many contain more than one
active ingredient. These three ingredients
have research linking them to cramp-bust-
ing potential: sugar, vinegar, and capsa-
icin (which gives chile peppers their heat).
JOURNAL
Keep a record of when cramps happen,
then create a list of suspects, including
heat and humidity, exercise type and
intensity, liquid and food intake, mental
state, and sleep hygiene, says cramp
researcher Kevin C. Miller, Ph.D.
STRETCH
Sleeping well, exercising regularly, and
avoiding extreme temperatures and
stress all help prevent cramps. But if you
get one, the science is unequivocal: “The
fastest, safest way to relieve a cramp is to
stretch it until it goes away,” says Miller.
PE A K PERFORM A NCE BODY
thew Wohl, HotShot’s current CEO. (Dr.
Westphal and Dr. MacKinnon have left
the company.) “We’ve done our own clin-
ical studies proving efficacy, and [there
was also] work that was done by Penn
State, which was independent of us. . . . We
are firmly in the neurological camp.”
FINDING SMART SOLUTIONS
CORRINE MALCOLM, an ultrarunner
with a degree in environmental physi-
ology, says the dispute around HotShot
represents a pervasive problem with
sports supplements. She and some former
colleagues at Simon Fraser University
coined the term bioplausible to explain
how ideas that “might work” get quickly
promoted to “do work.”
In the case of HotShot, the theory was
solid, but scientists on both sides of the
debate worried about the distance between
the claims and the data. While HotShot was
raving about being “scientifically proven,”
the studies the company used to market its
product showed that cramps were reduced
in strength and duration, says Miller. “Ev-
erybody still cramped. If HotShot works,
shouldn’t nobody cramp? I mean, it’s silly.”
Strangely enough, scientists on opposing
sides of the cramp debate have been coming
together, just not toward a miracle cure.
Many researchers now recognize that mul-
tiple factors can cause cramping, including
over- or undertraining, sleep quality,
nutrition or fluid imbalances, hot or cold
weather, and even limited range of motion.
Bergeron (dehydration camp) says
cramps generally fall into different catego-
ries, each with different causes and pre-
vention. Miller (neurological camp) likes
to think of it as a threshold. “Your recipe
for cramping might be very different than
my recipe,” he says. “Maybe I cramp when
I don’t get a good night’s sleep or I don’t eat
enough carbs. And I pushed myself a little
bit harder. If I get all three of those things
happening to me, I get a cramp. If I get two
out of those three things, I don’t cramp.”
HotShot is an official supplier of the
USA Cycling team, and they now hope
Olympic riders will use it before an event
to prevent cramps and mentally pump
themselves up. If that reduces prerace
anxiety, it might even help prevent
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 23
 BODY FRONT LINE T H E E X P E R T : COREY L. HARTMAN, M.D.,
is an MH advisor and the founder of Skin
Wellness Dermatology in Birmingham.

HELP YOUR
SKIN
WANDER THROUGH the SHIELD ITSELF
aisles of Walgreens or CVS, Since I’m Black, the
with the walls of moisturiz- melanin in my skin
ers, serums, scrubs, soaps, gives me a certain
exfoliators, and more, and amount of SPF. But
the SPF that’s effec-
you would probably con- tive against skin can-
clude that it’s super, super cer—which people
complicated to keep your with any skin color
skin healthy and looking can get—is higher
than what I naturally
good. However, it’s really
have. So I wear sun-
about only two things, says screen every day. I
46-year-old dermatologist use an emulsion
COREY L. HARTMAN, M.D.: (ISDIN Eryfotona Act-
Keep your routine simple inica Ultralight Emul-
sion) that doesn’t
and always use products leave a chalky film
with scientifically proven even though it con-
ingredients. Here’s how he tains zinc oxide.
takes his own advice.

CHANGE
SWIPE THIS YOUR SPOTS
BEFORE BED A SKIN DOCTOR’S Any patient of color
I apply a product with retinol at
night—no skin-care ingredient
GUIDE TO and anybody over
40 is going to start

HEALTHY SKIN
has more science behind it. It’s to see pigment
an exfoliant, so you don’t get changes, like sun-
acne or dull skin, and it stimu- spots or dark spots
lates collagen, which helps keep from acne. That
fine lines and wrinkles away. I bothers people more
wash my face with an exfoliating than wrinkles do. I
cleanser (SkinCeuticals LHA use Cyspera, a new
Cleanser Gel), then use pre- pigment corrector
scription retinol (Arazlo) and a that doesn’t require
hydrating cream (Senté Dermal spot treatment; you
Repair Cream) to help the retinol
penetrate and reduce irritation.
USE A MASK TO BATTLE ACNE just swipe it all over.
You have to leave it
The masks we use at my office have to be N95’s or a on an unwashed face
similar grade. We clean them, but it doesn’t take out for 15 minutes. I put it
all the oil that can clog pores, so I was having big- on when I leave the
time maskne. I started using a clay mask (SkinCeuti- gym, and when I get
TAKE A SHOT cals Clarifying Clay Masque) a few times a week
when it got really bad, and that keeps my face clear.
home, it’s ready to be
showered off.
I started doing Botox around age 30
and now do it every four months on
my upper face. Among the many bene-
fits: It stops wrinkles from becoming
etched in, it helps with collagen pro-
duction, and it just makes me look less
KEEP THE BEARD, LOSE THE PROBLEMS
mean and more approachable. I don’t I have a history of razor bumps that I’ve gotten under control with laser hair removal. It
Studio Firma/Stocksy

have to convince my male patients was life changing. Like a lot of people’s, the majority of my issues were on my neck.
to get Botox anymore, probably in part Neck hair is not necessary for a full-beard look—my patients are often surprised to hear
because I’m so open about using it. that—so I just got rid of it. I don’t get razor bumps anymore, and the hyperpigmentation
and red bumps, with their potential to scar, got better as well. —AS TOLD TO GARRETT MUNCE

24 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

 Supercharge your health
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 BODY SUPPLEMENT CHECK

PRE-WORKOUT BOOSTERS:
ESSENTIAL OR

This broad category of

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

THE CLAIM:
“Pre-workout” supplements
are a class of premixed herbal
and chemical ingredient
blends designed to spike your
energy, enhance your
alertness, reduce your
fatigue, and boost blood flow
to your muscles. They’ll help
you work out longer and
harder, with better results.
TEXT A DIETITIAN!
We hit up Dezi Abeyta,
R.D.N., a Men’s Health
advisor and author of
The Lose Your Gut Guide
WHAT’S ACTUALLY TRUE: SHOULD YOU TAKE THEM?
from Men’s Health.
They can fire you up. Pre-workout sup- With caution. Experts sug-
plements often contain caffeine, taurine, gest starting with a lower
Does caffeine actually
and B vitamins, all of which may help you dose than the one on the
dehydrate you?
feel motivated. That doesn’t mean it’s label. Nancy Clark, R.D.,
crash-proof energy, but the chemical a Boston-based sports-
compounds in a pre-workout may offer nutrition counselor, advises
enough oomph to help you push through buying a brand with caffeine from or
your session, says exercise-science third-party certification then definitely
researcher Jordan Moon, Ph.D., C.S.C.S.*D, by NSF International for not—they hydrate you.
a professor at Concordia University. quality assurance. (We like
X2 Performance Pre + Intra
Workout.) Or just consume What about those
real food: A banana, oatmeal, caffeine chews some
a granola bar, or a latte are all runners take during
good pre-workout fuel. a 12+ mile run?
WHAT’S BOGUS:
There’s not much science to the more
The safe amount is
esoteric ingredients in some of these WHAT’S ALSO BOGUS: less than 400 mg a
supplements, such as Panax ginseng Some pre-workouts advertise that they contain day, and while excess
and deer-antler velvet. Worse yet, in creatine yet don’t have enough of the compound caffeine has been
a 2019 study, scientists assessed 100 to matter, Moon says. Science has shown that shown to inhibit the
pre-workout products and found that taking creatine can, in fact, help you increase your absorption of calcium,
the amounts of nearly half of the ingredi- strength and power, but you need to take about a key electrolyte, in
ents were not disclosed on the label. And five grams a day for two to four weeks for the performance, I would
certain herbal extracts mix poorly with nutrient to build up in your muscles. Many of the hold off on making
caffeine the villain.
Sun Lee

meds or other supplements, says Moon. pre-workout products you’ll find on the market
have only three grams of creatine per serving.

26 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

PLANT
PROTEIN
NUT
Pro Football Hall of Famer
Tony Gonzalez

PLANT
PROTEIN
NUT
W
 BODY H E A LT H Y A G A I N

and his colleagues created to help people

recover from severe Covid—weren’t who
he’d anticipated. Alongside those who
had been hospitalized with Covid, which
was the population he and his colleagues
had expected to care for, about a quarter
of the patients were people who had never
been hospitalized for the disease. They’d
had “mild” acute Covid—a fever, a cough
that they’d recovered from quickly. But
months after thinking they’d beaten the
illness, they didn’t feel like themselves—
heart palpitations, brain fog, an inability
to exercise even close to how they used to.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the
country, Monica Lypson, M.D., was seeing
the same thing at a post-Covid clinic she’d
cofounded at George Washington Univer-
sity, in D. C. “The predominant patients
who show up to our clinic are people in the
prime of their lives; they might have been
marathoners or people who did CrossFit
four times a week and now can barely walk
around the block,” she says. “We thought
most people would be post-hospitaliza-
tion, but many of our patients never even
saw their physician as part of their care.”
To handle the caseload, dozens of post-
Covid clinics have popped up at major
hospitals and universities. Doctors are
scrambling to help the estimated 5 to 10
percent of people—that’s between 1.5 and
3 million Americans—who’ve recovered
from the defining symptoms of Covid (you
know them by now: cough, fever, fatigue)
and currently suffer from Post-Acute
Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC).

WHEN COVID Commonly referred to as “long Covid,”

PASC is characterized by an assortment
of lingering issues. “Even though these

NEVER GOES AWAY

Millions of people who had recovered from Covid-19
started having surprising issues—brain fog, headaches,
crushing fatigue—that wouldn’t go away. New clinics
are springing up to offer hope and solutions.
BY ALICE OGLETHORPE
symptoms alone aren’t life-threatening,
they feel like a major change to the people
experiencing them,” says Monnie Wasse,
M.D., director of the post-Covid clinic at
Rush University Medical Center. Espe-
cially because so many of those dealing
with long Covid are young and previously
felt healthy. “It feels like a slow roll into a
chronic illness,” she says, and as a result,
anxiety is often spiraling around it.
“People who were otherwise well are now

28 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH ILLUSTRATION BY ISRAEL VARGAS

wondering how long they’re going to have
these symptoms,” Dr. Wasse adds. “This
can lead to a feeling of hopelessness.”
THE SEARCH FOR THE CAUSE
DOCTORS ARE AT THE place with
PASC now that they were with Covid itself
about a year ago: While there are so many
unknowns, some promising theories
have emerged. Some experts think that
the spike in inflammation that occurred
when the immune system fought off Covid
ended up causing a lot of collateral dam-
age. It’s possible that the regulation of the
autonomic nervous system got knocked
off-kilter, so the fight-or-flight signal goes
on and off when it shouldn’t, changing
heart rate and breathing for seemingly
no reason. Or the virus itself could have
triggered the start of an autoimmune
disease similar to lupus or rheumatoid
arthritis. Until a theory has scientific
evidence supporting it—something that
hasn’t happened yet—the focus at these
clinics has turned to relieving symptoms.
They’re not prescribing, say, an anti-in-
flammatory diet, since it’s not clear yet
that inflammation is the cause.
Some experts have questioned how
many of these symptoms are from
Covid and how many might just be from
pandemic life. Clinic founders sug-
gest this symptom-based approach is
useful either way, and that the multi-
disciplinary clinics are a crucial step in
helping people feel some relief.
Because this is such a new disease,
your primary-care physician—if you
have one—might not know the right
questions to ask or even what to look for.
“This is a disease that didn’t exist 18
months ago, so there’s no specialty that’s
a perfect fit for addressing all the issues
someone is facing,” says Dr. Block.
Not only will you save time and energy
meeting with multiple specialists at a
single clinic—a cardiologist for your rac-
ing heart, a psychologist for your anxiety,
an Alzheimer’s specialist to help with
memory issues, a pulmonologist for your
difficulty catching your breath during
exercise—they all talk to one another and
share insights to improve your care and
our understanding of the disease.
“We meet so many people who had
trouble being evaluated and had what
they’re experiencing dismissed,” says Dr.
Block. “That doesn’t help their symptoms
or their emotional well-being.” Many of
these clinics are in major cities, but they
often offer telehealth, so you can get treat-
ed by them even if you live far away.
A DOSE OF HOPE
WHILE THERE ISN’T a standard
approach to caring for PASC yet, clinics
tend to run in a similar way. Doctors first
perform a series of tests such as stress tests
for your heart (maybe your racing pulse
is due to an existing heart issue, not your
battle with Covid) and a CT scan for your
lungs to rule out other diseases. If nothing
comes back to explain what’s going on, cur-
rent treatments are used to help with the
symptoms. Think antianxiety medication
or talk therapy for your mental health, an
antidepressant that could help with some
of the brain fog, compression tights to
make sure blood is flowing well, and rehab
sessions to help build exercise tolerance.
Integrative-medicine specialists might
also recommend therapies involving diet,
supplements, and sleep. “It’s a combina-
tion of art and science in terms of trying to
find the right approach,” says Dr. Wasse.
The National Institutes of Health is so
committed to finding an approach that
in early 2021 it announced $1.15 billion
in research funding to determine causes,
prevention, and treatments for PASC.
Vaccines might turn out to be part of the
solution—anecdotal evidence suggests
that some people feel better after receiv-
ing the Covid vaccine, although science
has yet to pin down why.
Clinic founders echo one another in
expressing hope. “To my knowledge, in
medical history we have never developed,
passed clinical trials, produced, and
administered a vaccine within a year, but
we made it happen,” says Soo Yeon Kim,
M.D., a cofounder of the Johns Hopkins
Post-Acute Covid-19 Team. “Under normal
circumstances, figuring out why there are
long-haulers and how to treat them would
take a few years, but with over a billion
dollars going into research, we are expect-
ing to have results much sooner.”
MEN’S HEALTH
WHAT
POST-COVID
SYMPTOMS
REALLY
FEEL LIKE
These common PASC
symptoms suggest a post-Covid
clinic could be for you.
HEART PALPITATIONS/
DIZZINESS
You feel fine sitting, but as soon as you
stand, your heart starts racing as if
you’d just sprinted around the block,
and you feel a little woozy. When you sit
down again, those symptoms go away.
INABILITY TO
HANDLE EXERCISE
More than just wishing your workout
was over after the first five minutes,
you have to stop what you’re doing so
you can catch your breath—and
you weren’t even working that hard.
Or maybe you push yourself and
finish your workout, but then you
feel drained for days afterward.
BRAIN FOG
You start to write an email and just
can’t focus on what you’re typing, or
you’re constantly walking into rooms
and then wondering what you were
going to do there. While many people
have experienced this in the pandemic
even without having had Covid,
those with PASC often have this in
addition to other symptoms.
HEADACHES
You never used to get them
and now suffer through painful,
throbbing episodes daily.
ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION
When you want to have sex, your penis
doesn’t want to get or maintain an
erection—and it’s not a one-time event.
ANXIETY, DEPRESSION, AND
OTHER MOOD DISORDERS
Instead of looking forward to things,
you dread them or feel like your emo-
tions are dulled. You also might be
sleeping worse, which doesn’t help.
| JULY • AUGUST 2021 29
 INSTANT
DOWNLOAD!

Build Big Muscle. No Gym Required.

Learn More at MensHealth.com/Dumbbells
 CHANGE FOR THE BETTER

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

TELLURIDE, COLORADO
The adventure: Conquer the Via Ferrata
You know the town for its skiing and film
festival, but the hiking trails. You’ll find
dozens of them, covering more than 60
miles in total, close to town. The must-do
is the Via Ferrata, aka the Iron Path, a two-
mile trek that includes (but is not limited
to) carved steps, rope ladders, suspension
bridges, and caves, with a peak summit of
500 vertical feet. On dangerous sections,
you can clip your harness onto a steel cable
so you’re protected if you fall.
Drive this: A Kia Telluride.
The name tracks. But you
can fit eight people in the
SUV. Those are minivan numbers—and this
beast drives like anything but a minivan.
Stay here: A 500-foot summit not enough?
Book a night at the Peaks Resort & Spa,
with access to an indoor/outdoor lap pool,
three tennis courts, and two pickleball
courts to keep you moving.

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 33

 LIFE HIT THE ROAD

FOR THE CAMPER:

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA

The adventure: Paddleboard the Three Rivers
Aka the Broad, Congaree, and Saluda rivers. They’re
all accessible through the band of national parkland
that rests within a half hour of downtown. Warm up
with the Broad River Blueway, which is wide and slow.
Then it’s up to you what’s next. The Saluda offers
quiet, tree-lined waters; the Congaree flows through
downtown Columbia, so you may hit (water) traffic.
Drive this: Sleek enough for city
streets but tough enough for
off-roading, Subaru’s Outback
Wilderness will carry you and your gear to any
stand-up-paddleboard put-in spot. Its X-Mode
function sets up the chassis and drivetrain for optimal
traction in everything from dirt to deep snow.
Stay here: Pitch a tent next to the scenic Lake Russell FOR THE MARATHONER:
at one of Calhoun Falls State Park’s campsites. If
roughing it isn’t your thing, rent a two-bedroom cabin
(with air-conditioning!) at Santee State Park, which SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA
overlooks Lake Marion, the largest lake in the state. The adventure: Trail-run (or hike) the Ninja Loop
Start at the Golden Gate Bridge parking lot,
warm up on the slow-descent Coastal Trailhead,
climb the Miwok Trail, coast down the Tennes-
see Valley Trail, power past the horse stables,
and move on to Marincello, where you’ll grind
upward until you reach views of the Golden
Gate Bridge. Refuel from the ten-miler at Copita
with tacos al pastor.
Drive this: The Ford Mustang
Mach-E EV is an all-electric
SUV with a 230-mile range,
which means you can book a hotel in San
Francisco or San Jose and still be within range.
Stay here: After hitting the trails, recover with
an in-room deep-tissue massage at the Inn
Above Tide, which has waterfront views of
Angel Island. If you’re looking for a different
kind of recovery, head a half hour north to
Sonoma wine country.

C O V I D T R AV E L
PROTOCOLS! Getty Images (paragliders, paddleboarder, runners, surfers, diver). Luanne Horting/
Tandem BASE (BASE jumper). Michael Turek/Gallery Stock (fish). Courtesy slovenia

Check the hours and

accessibility of your
destination, which may be
affected by changing
safety guidelines.

Read the CDC’s website

for up-to-date info on
traveling to different states
.info (kayakers). Courtesy brands (cars).

or regions, vaccinated or
unvaccinated.

Contact your airline for

testing requirements if
you’re traveling by plane.

Wear a mask in public.

Do we have to explain?

34
 FOR THE ADRENALINE JUNKIE:

LA GRANDE, OREGON
The adventure: Paraglide through the clouds
Cycle along a section of the 134-mile Grande Tour Scenic Bikeway, which runs
through La Grande, and take in views of the nearby Wallowa and Blue mountains. If you’re vaccinated and
When you’re done, Oregon Paramotor offers eight-day paramotor courses (think the CDC okays it, head to
paragliding but with an engine) to explore the east-Oregon skies. these three life-changing
Drive this: No lie, the Bronco Sport has a GOAT mode. That’s “goes cities while everyone
over any terrain,” a claim backed by its standard 4x4 system and else goes to Tahiti.
optional lifted suspension. Its roof rack lugs up to 150 pounds, too.
Stay here: Grab a suite at the Landing Hotel for easy access to the entire valley,
or stay farther away at the pet-friendly Barking Mad Farm Bed & Breakfast,
where pigs, goats, and chickens roam the land. Just two miles away is the Termi-
nal Gravity Brewing Company, famous for its IPA.

FOR THE ANGLER:

WANCHESE, NORTH CAROLINA OUAKAM, SENEGAL

The adventure: Fish the deep sea
On the southern end of Roanoke Island sits The small Dakar suburb
is known for its swells and
this fishing village undiscovered by most
seafood. Surfers from
tourists. Grab a six-pack, charter a boat at
across the globe flock here
the Wanchese Marina, and go battle feisty for the year-round waves.
(and delicious) Spanish mackerel and acro-
batic mahi-mahi (also delicious). Bonus: All
that reeling counts as a forearm workout.
Drive this: The Ram 1500
with eTorque Hybrid
technology averages 26
miles per gallon, and the quad cab is roomy
enough to stash tackle boxes, hard coolers,
and camping gear if you’re overnighting it.
Stay here: Each beachfront, four-bedroom
cottage at Nags Head’s Haven on the
Banks has its own hot tub and gas grill to KOROSKA, SLOVENIA
cook up your catch of the day. Afterward, Beneath Mount Peca, you’ll
head to the beach, start a fire, and take in find three miles of winding
the views of the area. bike trails in the tunnels of an
abandoned mine. Descend
even farther and you’ll
see a kayaker’s playground:
an underground lake with
crystal-clear water and
few tourists in sight.
FOR THE TRULY WILD:

TWIN FALLS, IDAHO

The adventure: BASE jump (no, honestly)
First off, you’ll have an experienced jumper with you.
Tandem BASE provides the equipment and instruc-
tion to leap from the 486-foot-tall Perrine Bridge.
You’ll work up the intestinal fortitude to sign a waiver
and then plummet toward—and eventually rest easy
in—Snake River Canyon.
Drive this: The all-wheel-drive, 158-
horsepower, sporty-as-all-get-out VW
Taos is your go-to dependable vehicle
AIN SOKHNA, EGYPT
A one-and-a-half-hour drive
when you’re about to head out and do something wild. from Cairo, the coastal city
Stay here: After a nine-minute drive from the Snake of Ain Sokhna has several
River Canyon trail, you’ll feel like you’re at home at scuba-diving reefs, a kite-
the Fillmore Inn . . . because it’s literally in someone’s surfing center, and pristine
home. The tiny bed-and-breakfast lies at the heart of beaches to take in the blue
Twin Falls, just a few minutes’ walk from Koto Brew- waters of the Gulf of Suez.
ing Co. and its more than 20 beers on tap.

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 35

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 LIFE 30/10

LOBSTER . . .
ON THE GRILL!
If you really want to
celebrate summer,
there’s no better feast
than lobster tail cooked
over an open flame.
The high-protein,
muscle-building meal
needs little else, save
for a gut-filling, fiber-
rich side or two.
BY ROBERT IRVINE AND PAUL KITA
 THE EXPERTS: ROBERT IRVINE is the longtime host of
Restaurant: Impossible and Dinner: Impossible.
PA U L K I TA is the food and nutrition editor of Men’s Health. THE FIBER 10g

Choose either of these sides

to reach the 10-gram fiber
threshold you need to stay full
until your next 30/10 meal.

THE PROTEIN 30g

Is lobster slightly pricier than chicken breast? Yes, but it tastes

infinitely more awesome than chicken breast. One eight-ounce lobster
tail contains 25 grams of protein.

B U Y I T Check the package or ask the person behind the fish counter for
the ocean of origin: You want cold-water North American lobster. The far-
ther north you go (Maine, Nova Scotia), the richer and meatier the lobster.
Lobster tail tends to be a bit more expensive than whole live lobster, but
that’s because it’s already grill-and-go.

Grilled Lobster HOW TO MAKE IT Sriracha-Buttermilk Dressing

with Charred
Onions
W H AT YO U ’ L L N E E D
1 TBSP SMOKED PAPRIKA
1 TSP GARLIC POWDER
1 TSP DRIED OREGANO
1 TSP GROUND CUMIN
1 TSP SUGAR
DASH GROUND CAYENNE
4 LOBSTER TAILS (8 TO 10 OZ
EACH), THAWED
4 BAMBOO SKEWERS
(8 INCHES LONG),
SOAKED IN WATER
¼ CUP GRAPE-SEED OIL
1 LARGE VIDALIA ONION,
PEELED AND SLICED INTO
½-INCH SLICES
JUICE FROM 1 LIME
Per serving: 353 calories,
35g protein, 8g carbs
(1g fiber), 19g fat
1. Preheat your grill to medium. In a small
bowl, mix the smoked paprika, garlic powder,
oregano, cumin, 1 tsp kosher salt, sugar, and
cayenne. Set aside.
2. Using a chef’s knife, cut about halfway
through the center of each lobster tail length-
wise. Insert a soaked bamboo skewer length-
wise through the middle of the lobster meat.
(This will prevent it from curling on the grill.)
3. Brush the lobster and onions with the grape-
seed oil and season with the reserved spice
mixture. Place the lobster on the grill, meat side
down, and add the onions next to it. Grill every-
thing until slightly charred, 5 to 6 minutes. Flip
it all; continue to grill the onions until tender,
about 2 more minutes, and the lobster until just
cooked through, about 5 more minutes.
4. In a small bowl, add the onions and lime
juice, then season to taste with salt. Serve the
onions with the lobster. Feeds 4
Preheat your grill to high. In a me-
dium bowl, whisk ½ cup buttermilk,
1½ Tbsp grape-seed oil, 1 Tbsp Srira-
cha, ½ Tbsp lemon juice, and ½ tsp
rice vinegar. Season to taste. Cook
1 cup quinoa, toss it with 2 Tbsp
dressing, and allow it to cool. In a
separate bowl, toss 2 medium broc-
coli crowns (cut into large pieces
and grilled) with 1 small shallot (thinly
sliced), 1 Tbsp capers (chopped),
and the remaining dressing. In a
serving bowl, add the quinoa and
then the broccoli mixture, top ev-
erything with 2 Tbsp shredded
aged cheddar, and serve. Feeds 4
Nutrition per serving: 324 calories,
15g protein, 48g carbs (9g fiber),
10g fat

WHY 30/10?
30g 30/10 brings you healthy, filling meals with 30 grams of protein
10g and 10 grams of fiber. For an entire month’s worth of recipes,
head to MensHealth.com/30-10.
Food styling: Jamie Kimm/Creative Exchange Agency. Prop styling: Nicole Louie.

Arugula Salad
In a small bowl, combine 1 Tbsp
white-wine vinegar, 1 small shallot
(minced), and 1 tsp honey. Whisk in
3 Tbsp grape-seed oil and set aside.
D O YO U E V E N C O O K B O O K , B R O ? In a large serving bowl, add 8 cups
baby arugula, 3 slices cooked bacon
Summer’s tomatoes are almost here, so arm yourself with (crumbled into bite-sized pieces),
Mariana Velásquez’s new book, Colombiana (out now). Her 2 avocados (cubed), and 6 peaches
gazpacho tosses in papaya, which boosts the natural sweet- (grilled and quartered). Pour on the
ness of the cold soup; cranks the heat with ground achiote vinegar dressing and top with 1 Tbsp
pepper; and is topped with charred leeks and Thai basil.
Gorgonzola crumbles. Feeds 4
Experiment with any (or all) of those add-ins and you’ll plow
through your garden bounty in no time. Nutrition per serving: 358 calories,
8g protein, 34g carbs (9g fiber),
24g fat

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHELSEA KYLE MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 39

 LIFE GROOMING

L BETTE R ! For products with a simple task—make

SMEL
your armpits smell better—DEODORANTS

S W E AT L E S S , and ANTIPERSPIRANTS can be so

complicated. Cut through the label
lingo with this decoder and find the
Sooo... right stuff for you. BY GARRETT MUNCE

Do you want to reduce how much you sweat?

YES,
PLEASE.
NOT So you want a deodorant.
Antiperspirant it is! Do you tend I’m sweating
REALLY.
It’s more All natural, or just the
just thinking
to sweat through shirts quickly? about
about the
smell. regular pharmacy kind?
sweating.

How concerned are you ALL THE

REGULAR
YES NO about plastic waste? NATURAL
PHARMACY
KIND

Do you have to apply VERY MEH Do you prefer solid

the product more Do you have
or creamy sticks?
than once a day? sensitive skin?

SOLID CREAMY

YES NO
Old Spice Swagger
Refillable Antiper-
spirant ($10.50). The
fresh lime-and-cedar-
wood scent you like.
Pop a plastic-free
refill into the reusable
case and you’ll help
the planet.
YES NO
Gillette Invisible
Solid Antiperspi-
rant & Deodorant
($5.50). With an
herb-and-lavender
scent, this gentle Art of Sport Victory
formula will keep Cool Eucalyptus Deodorant
you smelling fresh ($8). Those yellow stains on
all day long. your T-shirts are caused by
aluminum reacting to your
sweat, says Dr. Zeichner. The
arrowroot powder in this
aluminum-free stick helps
soak up excess sweat, with
an added eucalyptus scent.

Carpe Antiperspirant
Underarm Lotion
($20). Antiperspi-
rants block sweat,
whereas deodorants
Degree Victory
Antiperspirant
Deodorant Spray
($6.70). There’s no
definitive data that Odor-neutralizing baking
proves that alumi-
num-based antiper-
spirants are bad for
you, says New York–
Schmidt’s Hemp Seed
Oil & Sage Natural
Deodorant ($11).
soda is common in
natural deodorants. But
for some people, it can
cause redness or even
Native Cucumber & Mint
Deodorant ($12). When you
switch from aluminum-based
products, expect a short
purging period, says Dr. Ze- Dove Men+Care
ichner. That’s just your body Eucalyptus + Birch 0%
Courtesy brands (products)

just cover up odors.
If you’re a heavy
sweater, lean on this
eucalyptus-scented
antiperspirant to stop
sweat in its tracks.
based dermatologist
Joshua Zeichner, M.D.
This vanilla-scented
antiperspirant/de-
odorant blocks sweat
for up to 72 hours.
burn, says Dr. Zeichner.
This contains magnesium
to neutralize odors with-
out causing irritation and
leaves your pits smelling
like vetiver grass.
clearing out aluminum. (It’ll
only feel like you’re sweating
more.) This minty deodorant
contains natural moisturizers
like shea butter to keep your
underarms smooth.
Aluminum Deodorant
Stick ($6). This
woody-smelling deodor-
ant fights yellow stains,
odor, and skin irritation
with one application.

40 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

 Reshape Your Life
Bluetooth Indoor Training Bike with MyCloudFitness App

S H O P T H E F U L L C O L L E C T I O N AT M E N S H E A LT H . C O M / W H M H F I T N E S S
 Get All Out Arms, the new
program from Men’s Health
Fitness Director Eb Samuel,
plus 100s of other programs
on the All Out Studio app.

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

Brought to you by the editors of

m p
 T H E E X P E R T : V I A N N E Y R O D R I G U E Z is a coauthor of Latin Twist: Traditional and
Modern Cocktails and the host of Tex-Mex Queen on YouTube’s Identity Network.
MARGARITA
Food styling: Jamie Kimm/Creative Exchange Agency. Prop styling: Nicole Louie. Steve Sanford (illustrations).
GO TOP-SHELF You
want a bright, crisp
tequila blanco that’s
100 percent agave—
not cut with corn syrup
or sugar. Try Siembra
Valles, which has an
earthy flavor, or Astral,
which is a little more flo-
ral but works really well
with lime juice. And for
your triple sec, opt for
Cointreau, which hits all
the right orange notes.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHELSEA KYLE
LIFE
T H E R E’S ON LY ON E R IGH T WAY T O...
MAKE A
HOLY SH!T
COCKTAIL TRICK!
2
SALT THE GLASS Salt DITCH THE PITCHER Batch- REALLY SHAKE THE THING
intensifies the flavors of made margaritas sit out Bartenders go to town
the other ingredients. and gradually lose their because thorough shak-
Plus, it’s delicious in freshness. Good thing ing not only chills the
and of itself. Take a mar- the best margaritas are so drink but also combines
garita glass, run a lime easy to make: Grab your the ingredients so the
wedge around the rim, shaker, fill it with ice, and booze doesn’t sit at the
then dip the rim into a add 1½ ounces tequila bottom of the glass.
plate with about 2 table- blanco and 1 ounce Coin- Shake the cocktail until
spoons of flaky kosher treau. (A jigger has these the outside of the con-
salt and spread the salt measurements on each tainer is frosty, at least 20
evenly. Coconut, hibis- side, or you can do 2 table- seconds. The rest is sim-
cus, and lavender salts spoons per ounce.) Add ple: Strain into a glass.
all work wonders. ½ ounce fresh lime juice. —AS TOLD TO LESLEY TÉLLEZ
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 43
 LIFE STYLE

Outer Banks star Chase Stokes

wearing shorts by Katin, made from
polyester sourced from recycled
plastic bottles. Good for the oceans
(and for diving into pools).
Swim trunks ($62) by Katin.

SPLASH
INTO

Millions of tons of plas

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

44 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIC RAY DAVIDSON

 FAST
eing a trainer, bodybuilder, and nutrition
B expert means that companies frequently
send me their products and ask for my
stamp of approval. Most of the time I dive into
research, test the product out, and send the
company honest feedback. Sometimes, however,
I refuse to give the product a try, because frankly,
the ingredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d
rather drink diesel fuel than torture my body with
a chemical concoction.
Like my father always said, “What you put
inside your body always shows up on the outside.”
One protein shake that I received, that will
remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big
shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying
ingredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful
artificial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic
dyes, preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind
of proteins that keep you fat no matter how hard
you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing
for your muscles.
Disappointed after reviewing this “new” shake,
I hit the gym and bumped into my favorite
bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50, has
the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So are
his clients.
While I firmly believe that the gym is a no-talk
focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein
shake are you recommending to your clients
these days?”
Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Protein
shakes are old news and loaded with junk. I don’t
recommend protein shakes, I tell my clients to
drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake because it’s
the only all natural meal replacement that works
and has a taste so good that it’s addicting.”
Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decided
to investigate this superfood shake called
INVIGOR8.
Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has
a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators
are actual scientists and personal trainers who
set out to create a complete meal replacement
shake chocked full of superfoods that—get this—
actually accelerate how quickly and easily you
lose belly fat and builds even more lean, calorie
burning muscle.
We all know that the more muscle you build,
the more calories you burn. The more fat you melt
away the more definition you get in your arms,
pecs and abs.
The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined
to make the first complete, natural, non-GMO
superfood shake that helps you lose fat and
build lean muscle. The result is a shake that
contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a
superior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey
found in most shakes, metabolism boosting
raw coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to
promote a healthy immune system, Omega 3,
6, 9-rich chia and flaxseeds, superfood greens
like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorella,
and clinically tested cognitive enhancers
for improved mood and brain function. The
company even went a step further by including
a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity
in optimal digestive health, and digestive
enzymes so your body absorbs the high-caliber
nutrition you get from INVIGOR8.
While there are over 2000 testimonials on
Amazon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more
energy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal
fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really
impressed me was how many customers raved
about the taste. So I had to give it a try.
When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike
most meal replacement shakes it smelled like
whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so good.
Still INVIGOR8 had to pass the most important
test, the taste test.
And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good.
I could see what Zee meant when he said his
clients found the taste addicting.
I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me
burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years to
achieve total definition.
Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say, shaving
that last abdominal fat from my midsection
wasn’t just easy. It was delicious.
Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can
honestly say that the results I’ve experienced from
INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing.
A company spokesperson confirmed an
exclusive offer for Men’s Health readers: if you
order INVIGOR8 this month, you’ll receive
$10 off your first order by using promo code
“MEN10” at checkout. If you’re in a rush to
burn fat, restore lean muscle and boost your
stamina and energy you can order INVIGOR8
today at www.drinkInvigor8.com or by calling
1-800-958-3392.
 LIFE STYLE

3
WAYS TO

GO GREEN

Ralph Lauren gave its

iconic polo the ultimate
upgrade. Made entirely
THE SALVAGED SWEATER from plastic, the Earth

Styling: Cassie Anderson. Styling assistants: Hannah Yohannes and Claire Zimmerman. Grooming: Christine Nelli/the Wall Group. Prop styling: Cate Geiger. Production: Suzette Kealan/Crawford & Co.
It can take 2,700 liters of water Polo ($98.50) uses a
to make a single cotton tee. waterless dyeing pro-
You can save all the water that cess that helps the
goes into producing a new planet, resulting in a shirt
cotton hoodie by wearing this that looks good even
one by Toad&Co, made from without a Zoom filter.
recycled cotton scraps and
postconsumer plastic. It’s built
with breathability in mind and
has two side pockets for all
our gadgets. And if the hoodie
suffers wear and tear, the
brand will replace it . . . for free.
Hoodie ($100) by Toad&Co; shorts
($68) by Vuori; sandals ($30) by Reef. call for a breathable
shoe you can wear from
THE SUSTAINABLE SHORTS the office to the bar.
This one by Rothy’s
Think of joggers as performance-built
sweatpants. They have all the comfort of ($175) fits the bill, with
sweats with the added benefit of stretch for an upper made from
running (or pre-pool pushups). Even better, recycled plastic and
this pair of jogger shorts (made with recycled an ankle collar stuffed
polyester) by American Eagle houses a draw- with cushy yarn.
string waistband, bonded tape pockets, and
innovative moisture-wicking tech to draw
sweat and salt water away from your body.
AE Active 24/7 shorts ($40) by American Eagle; sneakers
($110) by Timberland.

or pound the pavement

in these water-repellent
cotton shorts by Fair
Harbor ($68), made
from 11 upcycled plas-
tic bottles. Or you
could just chill by the
pool. Everyone needs a
little downtime.

THE ECO-FRIENDLY HENLEY
A Henley hits that sweet spot
between a tee and a polo. It’s
comfortable and flattering on
every body type (including
those who maybe gained the
quarantine 15). This version by
United by Blue is made from
sustainable fabrics like or-
ganic cotton. Pair it with these
recycled-polyester board
shorts by Vuori, which were
engineered with antiodor tech
and stretch for hitting the surf
or just the road ahead.
EcoKnit Henley ($48) by United by
Blue; shorts ($68) by Vuori; sandals
by Rainbow Sandals, Stokes’s own;
Electrical Ninja surfboard ($725)
and Classic surfboard ($1,200)
by Earth Tech Surf.
BREAKING THE BANKS
WHEN CHASE STOKES, 28, flew out to
Charleston, South Carolina, for an
audition, he packed just two pairs of
shorts, underwear, and three T-shirts.
Having faced career rejection before,
he assumed he wouldn’t stay long. “My
bank account had just overdrafted
and I couldn’t even afford an Uber
from the airport,” Stokes says. “I had
to ask someone in production to spot
me some cash.”
Fortunately, this audition turned
out to be for a part on Netflix’s mur-
der mystery Outer Banks, a cultural
phenomenon among the Gen Z crowd.
And he snagged the lead role of John B
only 20 minutes after his audition. “I
never went back to L. A. after that, and
all I had were the clothes I’d brought. I
couldn’t even buy anything until I got
my first paycheck.”
Growing up in both Orlando and
Atlanta, Stokes played ice hockey
and surfed. Much like his character,
he says, he was the troublemaking
class clown in high school. “We’d use
a friend’s fake ID to buy beer or sneak
into hotel hot tubs. At the time, I was
going through my stepdad and mom’s
divorce as the oldest of four, so I was
angry and frustrated.” Also like his
character, Stokes’s day-to-day uni-
form is all about basics that keep up
with his athletic lifestyle: a button-
down, some Levi’s 501’s, and a pair of
“beat-up” Converse. “John B’s style is
a lot like mine, except his could prob-
ably use a good wash and dry.”
To prep for the (usually shirtless)
role, Stokes spent hours in the gym,
most days focusing on cardio. His
goal wasn’t to bulk up to Marvel-like
superhuman standards to play John
B. “He’s just a kid, and his day job is
cleaning a yacht,” he says. “It’s man-
ual labor. I didn’t want to give unreal-
istic expectations to young kids.”
With season 2 of Outer Banks out
on Netflix on July 30, Stokes says the
greatest perk of newfound fame is
connecting with his fans—both fa-
mous and not. “Snoop Dogg’s man-
ager told me he watches the show,”
he says. “I was like, all right, when
am I going to snap back into reality?”
—JOSH OCAMPO
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 47
 WHO DO YOU
IF BASEBALL is considered
America’s pastime, then check-
ing people out is humanity’s.
Our eyes are naturally drawn
to things we like looking at:
namely, attractive people.

THINK YOU’RE It’s safe to assume there will

be a surplus of visual stimulation
when we all venture out of our

LOOKING AT?
Summer is here! We’re (mostly) vaccinated!
That means a return to checking people out!
Just don’t kill the vibe. BY SABLE YONG
quarantine caves. There’s noth-
ing wrong with taking it all in,
but there’s a graceful, and per-
haps even flattering, way to do it.
Trust me, it can get weird
to be on the receiving end of a
stranger’s lingering stare. I’m
just trying to go about my day,
and suddenly I’m wondering if I
should be scanning for exits or
potential witnesses. I’ve crossed

48 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH


the street to walk on the other side when
a dude’s eyes were glued to my body as he
came toward me; I’ve also switched train
cars or seats at the bar when I realized
someone was indiscriminately gawping
at me. But stepping into a room and hav-
ing someone look me in the face, smile,
and say hello? This is fine and friendly!
I know there are a lot of mixed messages
when it comes to how (or even if) men
should check people out. Many women
will tell you they’re generally aware that
they’re being looked at all the time: on
the street, on social media, pretty much
anywhere their image exists—and it can
get exhausting. Yet lots have internalized
this stuff themselves, hence the inner
conflict of feeling uncomfortable when
strangers ogle them while also appre-
ciating external validation about how
nice they look—in the proper context, of
course. It’s one thing to walk into a bar or
club and turn heads. It’s much weirder
and grosser to walk into a conference
room and experience that same reaction.
All of this is happening in the age of
“WAP” and other women’s sexual-
empowerment anthems, which means
you’ve probably noticed that women
are feelin’ themselves more. They’re
reclaiming their bodies as their own to
flaunt as they please. The key is being
supportive of that without assuming that
any show of skin or hint of promiscuity
is an invitation to voice your explicit ap-
proval. If you want to demonstrate your
support, a friendly hello—the same kind
of nonsexual greeting you’d give to your
local barista or postal worker—is totally
sufficient. Don’t make it about them
being hot is what I mean.
It’s no one’s business whom you choose
@salmanqasemi (peach). Shutterstock (eyes). Chris Danger (illustrations).
to throw your lustful gaze at. However,
making it someone else’s business—i.e.,
forcing them to react to your very obvious
ogling—is when things can veer into creep
territory. Whether the object of your lust-
ful gaze wishes to be perceived or not, they
probably already realize you’re checking
them out, and if they want to take things
further, they’ll let you know. If someone
doesn’t reciprocate your eye contact or
smile, they’re likely not picking up what
S A B L E Y O N G is a New York City–based relationships LIFE
and beauty writer. She cohosts a podcast called
Smell Ya Later about all things scent-related.
The Sliding Scale
you’re putting down. That’s your cue to
Sexy Selfie
snap out of it and move on.
Even if you’re not looking to take
Positions
things further, you can still be guilty of
TEASING
an unsubtle checkout. Just because you’re
married or otherwise off the market
doesn’t mean you automatically stop
noticing other people. (It helps to be in a
relationship with someone who acknowl-
edges this, too.) Sometimes you simply
encounter someone so hot, their hotness
acts like a supermagnet for all the eye- THE SNEAK PEEK: Tug up the
hem of your shirt—or tug down
balls in the vicinity. If you’re one of those the hem of your pants.
cool, cheeky couples who are very open
and vocal with each other about whom
you find attractive, congratulations, I
am very happy for you! Still, don’t stand
there leering, because I don’t want to feel
like I’m the target of a unicorn hunt. Not
saying you’re necessarily looking for a
third, but depending on the situation, it
could read that way.
These tips are also key in that virtual THE BOA CONSTRICTOR: Get
space known as online. You can stalk naked—but use your arms and/or
legs to cover up your private bits.
someone’s Instagram feed all you want
without interacting with it—I mean,
that’s the point of social media, right?
We’re all curious to know what people are
up to. And sometimes they’re up to some
obvious thirst-trapping. (See Channing
Tatum’s naked selfie for reference.) If
you want to put yourself on someone’s
radar, liking their Instagram post is a
generally inoffensive way to do that. But
commenting on the post with a heart or MOUNTAIN VIEW: Lie flat on your
stomach and lift your butt. Shift the
flame emoji? You are now approaching camera slightly to the side so your
iffy territory. A midnight double-tap booty is visible behind your head.
binge through someone’s entire Insta-
gram grid? You are officially doing way
too much! This will never not come off as a
cartoon eye-springing awooga wolf call.
After several centuries of society
WHOA, NELLY
positioning a woman’s appearance as
her primary value, we are lucky enough
to live in an era when women are redis-
covering and reinventing femininity on
their own terms. I’m assuming you don’t SUPERMAN: Plant your
want to blow it by making it about you, hands on your hips and show
off . . . everything.
or for you. Conduct yourself like a gent
and you might just find someone making And always (always) crop out your face before
sharing any nudes. For security’s sake.
eyes at you from across the bar (hooray,
vaccines!) this summer.
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 49
 LIFE COOL DAD T H I S M O N T H ’S C O O L D A D : M AT T L O G E L I N wrote the
memoir Fatherhood, the basis for the new movie of the same
name starring Kevin Hart and available now on Netflix.

Boring babies lie still for diaper changes.

Boring babies give you time to cry in the
shower. Boring babies don’t throw their
food all over the floor while you feed
them. Boring babies actually allow you to
feed them. Boring babies are easy babies
who, at least in my n=1 experiment, turn
into easygoing children.
Maddy traveled with me through India
and Nepal as I wrote a book. She joined
me on countless trips to Amoeba Music
to pick up records and pose for photos in
its graffiti-covered elevator. She laughed
while I tossed pumpkins off the bridge
into the L. A. River below (separate story).
Now that she’s older, I’ve learned that she
was just too nice to try to stop me. 
But here’s the thing: I didn’t know
Maddy was a boring baby and an easy kid.
I had no point of reference. She was the
only child I had.
I remarried ten years after my first
wife died, and not long after, Berd was
born. It wasn’t until she came along that I
truly learned what a nonboring baby was.
Berd wasn’t just not boring; she was wild.
I guess I assumed that she would be of
the same disposition as Maddy, and I was
absolutely positive that things would be

A TALE OF easier, especially because I wouldn’t be

parenting alone this time. Heh.
Early on, Berd refused to take a bottle

TWO KIDDOS
(rendering me basically useless as a
parent). During diaper changes, she
rolled around like an alligator wrestling
its prey. After a particularly long day with
Berd, a babysitter once said to me, “She
cannot be tamed.”
And while Maddy is a cautious,
Children are like snowflakes, each special in their thoughtful teen, Berd is now wilder than
own beautiful way . . . and this cold, hard truth makes ever. She flies through the tube slide at
parenting unexpectedly fun. BY MATT LOGELIN the park without hesitation. She jumps
off the back side of the couch with no
THERE’S THIS annoying thing pediatri- also have a two-year-old daughter. Berd is expectation that anyone will be there to
cians do when you try to pin them down the kind of kid who loves to tear pages out catch her—even though her cautious old-
on a real answer to a burning question. of books and throw chess pieces across er sister is often there, ready to save her. 
You’ll say, “Well, why does my toddler the room. I doubt that she’ll ever willingly I understand now what those pedia-
insist on waking me up at 5:00 a.m. to read a book about playing chess. She may tricians mean. It doesn’t matter if you’re
poop?” and the doc will shrug their shoul- never willingly read any book. These a girl dad or a boy dad or the dad of a
ders in an almost pitiable way and utter, character traits, it seems, are set at birth. gender-nonspecific kid—being a dad of
“Every kid is different.” I used to find this Maddy was a boring baby. I was told any child is never what you expect even if
phrase the parenting equivalent of “It is countless times by countless people that you already have one child. This is frus-
what it is,” a sort of nonanswer that seems the universe gave me the kind of baby I trating only if you choose not to accept it.
to imply I was overreacting.  needed most. My wife died of a pulmonary And here’s the twist: This actually makes
But then I had two kids. embolism one day after Madeline was parenting fun. My third daughter is due
Maddy, my 13-year-old daughter, is the born, and if I was going to survive my new to arrive on October 2. I don’t know
kind of kid who loves reading and playing reality, I was going to need a boring baby. what to expect, but I know for a fact she’s
chess and reading about playing chess. I Boring babies sleep through the night. going to be different.

50 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH ILLUSTRATION BY LIAM EISENBERG

 © 2021 Kraft Foods

IT. BUILD IT. MIX

CK IT U
TA P.
S
 From the Editors of Men's Health

Special
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OFFER
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 WHERE STRENGTH MATTERS MOST

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up your g

1
CAN YOU GET PHYSICALLY STRONGER WITHOUT
LEAVING YOUR MENTAL COMFORT ZONE?
“The body can only adapt if it faces something new, and new challenges
won’t always be comfortable,” says MH fitness director Ebenezer Samuel,
C.S.C.S. So basically, no. Your mind will adapt to the discomfort, too, and
you’ll boost both your mental and physical strength. The secret: Start
Jobe Lawrenson

small. “Every week, add one to whatever goal you’re chasing,” says Samuel,
“whether that means doing one more pushup rep every set, adding one more
minute to your morning run, or holding a plank for one more second.”

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 53

 MIND MENTAL STRENGTH

2
WHAT WENT WRONG?
Start thinking like Michael Jordan.
He’s considered himself a failure:
By his count, he’s missed more than
9,000 shots. “Twenty-six times,
I’ve been trusted to take the game-
winning shot and missed,” he’s said.
“I’ve failed over and over and over
again in my life.” How did he move on?
He moved forward. “Making a mistake
is just a source of feedback informing

4
you that you are off course,” says Lisa
Stephen, Ph.D., a career, personal,
and sports performance coach and
the owner of Ignite Peak Performance
in Vermont. “Use that data to focus
on what to do next. Then forget the
mistake. You can visualize yourself
flushing it down the toilet or releasing
it in a balloon. The point is to leave
the mistake behind and build on what
you’ve learned. You cannot perform at
your best by focusing on your worst.”
MY WORKLOAD IS RIDICULOUS. HOW DO
I AVOID BURNOUT WITHOUT DROPPING
DOWN THE OFFICE PECKING ORDER?
Learning to deploy the word no comes naturally to some of us but slowly
to others. Many people don’t use it because they fear that they’ll lose
opportunities or be seen as unwilling by employers or clients. In reality,
the opposite can be true. “My experience has been that when I say
no, my value increases,” says Elizabeth Day, creator of the How to Fail
podcast and author of Failosophy. “When you respect yourself, others
respect you more, too.” At any rate, “I can’t handle any other project” is
an easier conversation to have than “I can’t handle this job anymore.”

3
CAN I LET GO
OF NEGATIVITY
you’ll be waiting a long while. James
WITHOUT
WRITING A DAMN
GRATITUDE
5 I’M A HOPELESS
PROCRASTINATOR.
HOW DO I WORK UP
Clear, author of the best seller Atomic
Habits, advocates committing to a
schedule rather than to a deadline. If
LIST? MORE GET-UP-AND-GO? life gets in the way of what you need to do,
Let go of the concept of creative inspira- cut down the size of the task—spend
Yes, by doing something for some- tion or having to be “in the zone” to do ten minutes on it instead of the 30
one else. “An active approach to what needs to be done. There will never you’d intended—but always stick to the
purging jealousy and negativity is
be a right time to get the work done, and schedule. Just don’t give yourself the
to practice acts of kindness,” says
psychiatrist Tracey Marks, M.D., of if you’re waiting for the mood to strike, option to skip it.
Marks Psychiatry in Georgia. Start
by giving compliments and positive
feedback to others. If you’re feeling
6 I’M STRUGGLING WITH THE LOSS OF
Piotr Gregorczyk (sneakers). Studio 33 (remaining).

especially generous, pay it forward

at a coffee shop or drive-through.
There’s some evidence that acts A LOVED ONE, BUT I NEED TO BE STRONG
of generosity are linked to activity
in brain regions responsible for
FOR MY FAMILY. WHAT CAN I DO?
Being “strong” doesn’t mean holding back emotions and tears. “The way to
happiness. Still, if giving makes
show strength is not to be afraid to reveal your hurt,” says Dr. Marks. “When
you frustrated (like, what about my
everyone is hurting, the people who depend on you will look to you as a model
needs?), try gratitude without the
for how to handle themselves.” If you’re holding everything back, you may be
list, Dr. Marks says. Just spend a mo-
telegraphing that grief is shameful. To be strong, show how you feel.
ment every morning thinking about
what you’re grateful for.

54 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

7 READING THE NEWS OFTEN UPSETS AND ANGERS ME. HOW DO I RESET?
That’s understandable; the news causes stress because of the sense of hopelessness and
feelings of injustice it can evoke. To process difficult news, try creating boundaries around
how you’re getting it and find people to have meaningful conversations about it with, recom-
mends psychiatrist and MH mental-health advisor Gregory Scott Brown, M.D. Since distress-
ing news can put your natural fight-or-flight response into overdrive, do something to cool it
off, like meditation or at least watching an enjoyable non-news, nondramatic show.
Another solution: Trade passive news consumption for active discussion. Taking the Black
Lives Matter movement as an example, Eugene Ellis, the founder and director of the Black,
African, and Asian Therapy Network, points to the mental-health benefits of talking with others.
This can also help you know what actions to take. “It’s an antidote to the feelings of power-
lessness that many of us experience. When you start to engage, you discover that below the
hopelessness is connection. And when you find connection, it’s easier to know what to do.”

8
I’M DOING AN ULTRAMARATHON.
IS IT TRUE IT’S MIND OVER MUSCLE?
“Ultras are probably 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical,” says
9
Michael Wardian, a professional endurance runner who’s one of only three
people to complete the Leadville 100-mile/Pikes Peak marathon combo. To
get through an ultra or any endurance feat, “you need to have a big why.
Not just running for social media but for your kids or to prove something to
ANOTHER WAY?
yourself,” he says. Also helpful: Rely on “chunking”—setting small goals like “Yoga is an excellent way to de-stress,
reaching the next mailbox or aid station. You don’t always have to be running and it’s good for the person who can’t
to build your mental strength. “Get used to doing stuff that makes you uncom- sit long enough to meditate,” says
fortable,” he says. Set your alarm for 4:00 A.M.—or just do the dang dishes. Dr. Marks. It also brings you stress-
reduction benefits from two direc-
tions: As with meditation, you focus
on breathing, which can help relax
the body. “And by stretching tight
muscles, you relieve tension,” she
explains. You don’t have to be flexible
to do yoga, and these days there are
tons of virtual options for practicing
it. Two of our favorites are Alo Moves
and Apple Fitness+. Both offer a wide
range of classes, from hour-long stress
busters to ten-minute yoga snacks.
(A side note: Meditation really is worth
persevering with, so keep at it. Try an
app like Calm, Headspace, or Ten Per-
cent Happier to make it less boring.)

10
WHAT
SHOULD I SAY
TO SOMEONE
WHO TELLS
ME TO
“MAN UP”?
“Here, read this article.”
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 55
 MIND T H E E X P E R T : G R E G O R Y S C O T T B R O W N , M . D . , is a
psychiatrist, a Men’s Health advisor, and the founder and
director of the Center for Green Psychiatry in Austin.

MAN’S BEST such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

Having a pet can reduce stress and help
you feel a sense of connectedness. Part of

THERAPIST
what’s happening likely involves the bond-
ing hormone oxytocin, which is associated
with intimacy. When you pet your dog, for
example, the levels of oxytocin released
in your brain rise, stress hormones like
cortisol tend to fall, and there can also be a
noticeable decrease in blood pressure—all
There’s plenty of science about what pets can of which may contribute to an improved
do for your well-being. And then there’s what you— sense of well-being. In addition to these
mental benefits, pet ownership is general-
and I—didn’t expect. BY GREGORY SCOTT BROWN, M.D. ly linked to better overall health, including
lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels.
LAST FALL, like seemingly every other person you know, I adopted a pandemic Although I was aware of the science, I
pet—Kai, a rambunctious ten-month-old Lab-golden mix. After a year of watching cats’ really just wanted a dog to run with me and
tails meandering by patients’ screens or hearing puppies barking in the background, I play an occasional game of fetch. I’d had
realized I wanted a pet, too. Perhaps I needed one. pets before. My parents took me to adopt
Any mental-health professional will tell you that part of our job involves appreciating my first dog when I was nine. So as an only
the therapeutic benefit of pets. In fact, I’m asked to write letters all the time to autho- child, I still had playful company around,
rize emotional-support animals for patients who have been diagnosed with illnesses even if it meant throwing a Frisbee to a
bug-eyed Chihuahua, hoping she would
bring it back. I was aiming for a sportier
breed this time around. I found myself
thinking, Having a pet would be fun.
To be completely honest, the first few
weeks didn’t feel therapeutic at all. While
I was trying to teach Kai how to sit, she was
more interested in chewing up my wife’s
shoes or peeing underneath my desk.
I soon realized that I still had a thing
or two to learn about having a pet—and
about what she’d do for me. Friends in the
mental-health field have said the same.
We’ve seen that there’s what science tells
us pet ownership does, and there are the
subtle ways pets make us better:

They Plug You In

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

PHOTOGRAPH BY THE VOORHES

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

They Provide Structure

IT’S A GIVEN that caring for another be-
ing—a pet or a kid—requires some struc-
ture in your life. But I was impressed by MOST DAYS, the 42-year-old host of the Song Exploder podcast
how much Kai put me back into a good and its two-volume, eight-episode Netflix adaptation spends
rhythm. Now, instead of hitting snooze or his time breaking down the complex arrangements of popular
scrolling through Instagram, I awaken to
songs. But when the pandemic hit, Hrishikesh Hirway found
the Kai alarm every day at 7:30. If I don’t,
peace of mind . . . in a galaxy far, far away. Here’s how he forges
I know I’ll be scrubbing the floor. And, of
course, I have a running buddy who always Jedi-like mental strength. BY JOSH OCAMPO
wants me to run.
8:30 A.M. 1:15 P.M. 6:45 P.M.
They Put the News in Its Place BREAK A SWEAT WALK IT OFF BINGE-WATCH
A N AU S TI N - B AS E D psychotherapist I Hirway begins each Hirway occasionally After hours of splicing
know, Dixon Parnell, says his two cats day with a high- works 14-hour days and mixing audio,
don’t care much about his work or the intensity workout. out of his Los Angeles Hirway decompresses
news. Neither does Kai; when she’s ready Heart disease and garage and makeshift with a deep dive into
to play, she starts barking regardless of diabetes run in his fam- podcast studio to the Star Wars universe.
ily, so he’s conscious produce two Song He recently binged all
what’s on my to-do list. Although being
of his health. During Exploder episodes a seven seasons of Star
interrupted isn’t always convenient, a
quarantine, he would month. That kind of Wars: The Clone Wars
playful three-minute ball-throwing chal- boot up his laptop and hustle requires con- and four seasons of
lenge gets me away from the computer and join a group fitness sistent breaks. Hirway Star Wars Rebels.
allows me to return refreshed and better class via Zoom. “I have finds solace in his “You can spend so
focused. Pets are on a totally different a really serious sweet backyard, where he much more time with
rhythm, and it’s one of wanting scratches, tooth, so at some level, does a few laps every those characters and
treats, playtime, and new places to sleep. I’m working out just so hour. “Sometimes I’m in those worlds,” he
Dixon tells me that seeing his cat be all I can keep eating,” he zeroed in on a little says. The one genre
about what’s really important—sleep, nu- says. “But every year, section of audio or he can’t stomach:
trition, exercise—keeps him from being I have this abstract part of a song. I end up
true crime. “I find the
goal: That year will be feeling like my brain
thrown off-balance by things like work news hard enough.”
the year I’m in the best is being wrung out
stress or a toxic news cycle.
shape of my life.” like a sponge. When I

They Help You Slow Down

walk outside, it lets my 8:30 P.M.
K AI IS A great companion, but for some 11:00 A.M. brain return back to its
normal size.”
MEAL-PLAN
During lockdown,
people, caring for an animal fosters an SPREAD OUT
Hirway developed a
even deeper connection. For psychiatrist
and fellow MH advisor Drew Ramsey,
Recording multiple
podcasts and film- 3:30 P.M. love of cooking. He
even created a pod-
ing a Netflix series PHONE IT IN
M.D., the time he invests in grooming his cast with chef Samin
means organization Hirway’s an extrovert.
horse, Cinco, “helps me settle down and is everything. Hirway After all, he spends Nosrat, Home Cooking,
check in,” he says. That’s especially im- has a simple hack for his day interviewing dedicated to solving
portant with an animal that’s more pow- maintaining order: musicians of the Dua listeners’ dilemmas in
erful than you by a factor of at least 20, he a spreadsheet. It’s a Lipa and Lin-Manuel the kitchen. He says
adds. There’s no fighting his power or stay- combination check- Miranda sort. Once it allowed him to stay
ing on if the horse decides he’s done with list, calculator, and the pandemic struck, present and learn
you. You need to be able to read each other. chart that helps him he realized how to cook everything
keep track of his day. important those social better, from squash
After almost a year of looking after—
“I really believe in the connections were to sardines. “So many
and being looked after by—Kai, I’m finally
power of a spread- to his mental health. people were feeling
able to take her for those runs I always
sheet, because it’s the Hirway sees a thera- helpless. [The pod-
imagined, and when I throw a tennis ball, cast] was something
hub of almost every- pist and calls friends
she’ll bring it back (at least most of the thing I’m working on,” on the phone. “Some to occupy my time
Jason Raish (Hirway).

time). I’m not going to say pets are better he says. “We did all of people aren’t phone and help me feel like
therapists than we are for complicated our wedding planning people. But it’s helped I’m engaging in the
issues, but don’t overlook all that they can through a Google keep me in check and moment in a positive,
do for you. spreadsheet.” feel connected.” constructive way.”

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 57

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

THE MASSIVE POWERS OF

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

WE SPENT WAAAAY TOO MUCH TIME cooped up inside
with our families, with our partners, or by ourselves for the
past year and a half. While that meant a total loss of soli-
tude for some of us—and an abundance of it for others—
quarantine also meant the disappearance of something we
didn’t know we needed: random, chance encounters with
that individuals who habitually made small talk
felt “a greater sense of belonging” and less lonely over-
all. “Talking to people, even those on the periphery of
our social network, exposes us to new information and
broadens our perspective,” says psychologist Gillian
Sandstrom, Ph.D., one coauthor of that study. Social
Eskay Lim/EyeEm/Getty Images

other people. And science has shown that those fleeting
conversations with the grocery-store clerk or a friend of a
friend are actually really good for you.
For one, such exchanges can improve your mood, says
Juliana Schroeder, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University
of California, Berkeley. In one study, researchers found
connections can even help maintain your immune
system and increase your life span.
If pandemic life taught us anything, it’s that people
need one another. So push past those fears, embrace
the unknown, and get to know your fellow man again.
Here’s your four-step plan.

58 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

 CBD FOR
YOUR PAIN
ife really does fly by. Before I knew it, my
L 40s had arrived, and with them came
some new gifts from dear ol’ Mother
Nature—frequent knee pain, stress, low energy
and sleeplessness. Now, I’m a realist about these
things, I knew I wasn’t going to be young and
resilient forever. But still, with “middle-age” nearly
on my doorstep, I couldn’t help but feel a little
disheartened. That is until I found my own secret
weapon. Another gift from Mother Nature.
It began a few months back when I was
complaining about my aches and pains to my
marathon-running buddy, Ben, who is my same
age. He casually mentioned how he uses CBD
oil to help with his joint pain. He said that CBD
has given him more focus and clarity throughout
the day and that his lingering muscle and joint
discomfort no longer bothered him. He even
felt comfortable signing up for back-to-back
marathons two weekends in a row this year.
That made even this self-proclaimed skeptic
take notice.
But I still had some concerns. According
to one study in the Journal of the American
Medical Association, 70% of CBD products
didn’t contain the amount of CBD stated on
their labels. And, as a consumer, that’s terrifying!
If I was going to do this, I needed to trust
the source through and through. My two-fold
research process naturally led me to Zebra CBD.
First, I did a quick online poll—and by that, I
mean I posed the CBD question on my Facebook
page. Call me old fashioned but I wanted to know
if there were people whom I trusted (more than
anonymous testimonials) who’ve had success
using CBD besides my buddy. That is how I
found out that Zebra CBD has a label accuracy
guarantee which assures customers like me what
is stated on the label is in the product.
Secondly, I wanted cold hard facts. Diving
deep into the world of CBD research and
clinical studies, I came across Emily Gray M.D.,
a physician at the University of California at
San Diego (UCSD) Medical School who is
researching the effects of CBD. Dr. Gray wrote
“early results with CBD have been promising and
we have a lot of research underway now. I’ve had
several patients using CBD with good success. It’s
important that you know your source of CBD and
how to use it properly. Zebra CBD produces top-
quality products with easy to use instructions.”
After hearing it from the doctor’s mouth, I
returned to my online poll and was amazed
by the number of close friends and family who
were already on the CBD train. Apparently, I
was the only one without a clue! And funny
enough, a couple of friends who commented
were using the same brand as my buddy—Zebra
CBD. There was no consensus as to why they
were using CBD, but the top reasons given were
for muscle & joint discomfort, mood support,
sleep support, stress and headaches, as well as
supporting overall health & wellness.
Eventually, even the most skeptical of the
bunch can be won over. With a trusted CBD
source in mind, I decided to try it.
When I viewed Zebra CBD’s selection online, I
was impressed by its array of products, including
CBD oils called tinctures, topicals, chewable
tablets, mints and gummies. After reading on
their website that all their products are made
with organically-grown hemp, I ordered... and it
arrived within 2 days!
The first product I tried was the rub. Now
this stuff was strong. Immediately after rubbing
it on my knee, the soothing effects kicked in. It
had that familiar menthol cooling effect, which I
personally find very relieving. And the best part
is, after two weeks of using it, my knee pain no
longer affected my daily mobility.
The Zebra Mint Oil, on the other hand, had a
different but equally positive effect on my body.
To take it, the instructions suggest holding the
oil in your mouth for about 30 seconds. This
was simple enough, and the mint taste was, well,
minty. After about 15 minutes, a sense of calm
came over my body. It's hard to describe exactly;
it's definitely not a "high" feeling. It's more like
an overall sense of relaxation—a chill factor.
Needless to say, I’ve really enjoyed the oil.
While it hasn’t been a catch-all fix to every one
of my health issues, it has eased the level and
frequency of my aches. And it sure doesn’t seem
like a coincidence how much calmer and more
focused I am.
All-in-all, CBD is one of those things that you
have to try for yourself. Although I was skeptical
at first, I can say that I’m now a Zebra CBD fan
and that I highly recommend their products. My
40s are looking up!
Also, I managed to speak with a company
spokesperson willing to provide an exclusive
offer to Men’s Health readers. If you order this
month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by
using promo code “Health10” at checkout. Plus,
the company offers a 100% No-Hassle, Money-
Back Guarantee. You can try it yourself and
order Zebra CBD at ZebraCBD.com.

IAMS ™ HEALTHY ADULT
has real chicken as its
number one ingredient.
And its essential nutrients
help keep your cat happy,
healthy and at their
uncooperative best.
©2021 Mars or Affi liates.
MIND SOCIAL CUES
STEP
PRY YOUR EYES AWAY
1 FROM YOUR PHONE
WHY IT WORKS: Awareness of your
surroundings enhances the oppor-
tunity for social bonding. (Sociol-
ogists call this “triangulation.”) It
indicates you’re in a place with other
people, you’re experiencing some-
thing together, and you can talk about
it. The topic—the weather, a street
performer—doesn’t really matter
as long as it’s shared. Note: This is
nearly impossible to do if you’re star-
ing at a screen.
HOW TO DO IT: Comment on how
what’s happening makes you feel.
Say you’re in a crowd that’s watching
a mime (random, yes, but follow along
for purposes of illustration). You could
say, “I’ve always been a little afraid of
mimes.” The remark doesn’t demand
a response, yet it invites one—if some-
body else feels obliged to weigh in.
STEP
ACTUALLY
2 LISTEN
WHY IT WORKS: Listening atten-
tively “is one of the most socially
attractive behaviors you can engage
in,” says Harry Weger, Ph.D., a com-
munications professor at the Univer-
sity of Central Florida who studies
listening. Research has found that
people consider good listeners to
be friendlier as well as more trust-
worthy, understanding, and socially
appealing. Plus, the behavior encour-
ages deeper, continued small talk.
HOW TO DO IT: When someone says
something, paraphrase it back to
them, Weger says. For instance, if a
colleague mentions how he almost fell
into a manhole the other day, respond
with something like “Wow, if you’d
fallen into that manhole, you could’ve
broken your leg!” This forces you to
listen but also shows you’re listening.
And notice that last clause: You’re
keeping up the conversation by add-
ing to the scenario. This simple detail
33
The percentage of adult speech
that is classified as small talk.
Source: Journal of the International Society for Augmentative
and Alternative Communication
60 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH
kicks the chat back to the speaker.
Poor listeners leave people hanging.
STEP
ASK SOMETHING
3 YOU REALLY WANT
TO KNOW
WHY IT WORKS: You’ll only stay
engaged in the conversation if it’s
interesting. Smart questions prevent
small-talk drag. And you can only talk
about the weather for so long. . . .
HOW TO DO IT: Start off questions
with what, where, how, or why.
They’re unanswerable with a yes or
no—total small-talk killers—and
they “give [people] an opportunity
to reveal more about their own per-
sonal feelings,” says Weger. One
example: If you’re talking to a barista,
ask, “What would you order here?” If
they respond with “Honestly, I’m not
a fan of the coffee we serve,” you’ve
opened up a new line of discussion
and found a new reason to visit a bet-
ter coffee shop.
STEP
MOVE ON TO
4 “BIGGER TALK”
W H Y I T WO R KS : People divulge
more when you open up; psychologists
call this the “disclosure-reciprocity
effect.” Think of it almost like raising
the stakes in a poker game. The other
player will call your raise . . . or up the
ante. And the deeper your discussion
gets, the more powerful the benefits
of the small talk.
HOW TO DO IT: With honesty. If an
acquaintance asks how work is going,
admit, “It’s been really challenging.”
Chances are, they’ll either follow up
with another question or share their
own emotional experience. But you
don’t have to go negative: Share your
excitement about your kid’s baseball
season finally starting after the pan-
demic or your newfound respect for
manhole covers.
 Cats gonna cat.

Keep your cat at

their uncooperative
best with IAMS™
tailored nutrition.

©2021 Mars or Affiliates.

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

Photographs by Olav Stubberud

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 63
 HATFIELD, NORTH OF LONDON, ENGLAND, 1997—
The rain machines have
been running for nearly
two days straight.
Tom Hanks, already the winner of two Os-
cars at this point in his career, is soaked.
This particular sequence includes one of
the few times he’ll ever say fuck on film—
fucking, to be precise. Steven Spielberg is
directing the death scene of Private Capar-
zo, a brash soldier with a heart who just
tried to save a little French girl whose house
had been bombed to ruins. Spielberg has
won one Oscar for directing. He’ll win his
second for this film, Saving Private Ryan.
Caparzo is being played by a young
actor, barely 30 years old, named Vin
Diesel. He used to be Mark Sinclair, but
a few years back he renamed himself
Vin Diesel. For the movies. And right now
Vin Diesel is lying on his back in a puddle
of mud and fake blood. He’s cold. Someone
has brought a few dry towels to cover him
between takes, when the rain stops. He is
drinking a cup of hot tea.
Spielberg has assembled a company of
new kids for this ensemble—Giovanni
Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Barry Pepper, Ed
Burns, fresh off his breakthrough film,
The Brothers McMullen. But Diesel is a
new kid among new kids. Those guys had
some credits already. Diesel? He made a
20-minute short film a couple of years ago,
starring himself. Spielberg saw it and put
the guy in his movie.
It’s a complicated sequence, Caparzo’s
death. Spielberg is taking his time, build-
ing the tension. Hanks’s character, the
captain, grabs the girl from Caparzo and
gives her back to her family (“We’re here
to follow fucking orders!”), and every-
one’s shouting, and Caparzo’s pleading
that they should try to help the girl when
pop! He’s hit, falls forward onto a piano in
the street rubble of a war-torn town, then
tumbles to the muddy gravel.
In the next three minutes and 16 sec-
onds of film, there are 40 cuts. We see the
intersection from every angle. Dolly shots
from the ground looking up at Caparzo’s
face, blood and rain splattering the cam-
era. Third assistant director Andrew Ward
remembers the use of a snorkel system, a
64 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH
periscope-like tube attached to a remote
camera that allows for intense, low-an-
gle shots. We see Caparzo through a Nazi
sniper’s rifle sight.
And in several shots, we look down at
Caparzo from approximately the level of a
second-floor window.
What happened was, when they were
blocking the scene, this young kid Die-
sel, who had all of a short film and a single
indie feature under his belt—both written
by, directed by, produced by, and starring
himself—said to Spielberg, “Hey, Steven,
where’s your C camera?”
“What? Why?” said the man who had
directed Jaws and Close Encounters and
Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. and The
Color Purple and fucking Schindler’s List.
“Put a C camera in that second-floor
window,” Diesel says he told him.
Then, the way Diesel tells the story,
Spielberg did put a C camera in the win-
dow, and the shot was so good it ended up
in the movie’s trailer.
That’s the way Vin Diesel tells the story.
And he is, it should be known, a storyteller,
the product of a childhood spent watching
Sidney Lumet and early Scorsese in Man-
hattan movie houses and hanging around
his stage-actor father’s theater friends. He
wanted only to be in the world of movies,
but no one was going to hand it to him—not
a mixed-race, marble-mouthed kid with
receding hair. If he was going to be a mov-
ie star—his goal was nothing less than to
“change the face of Hollywood,” he would
say many years later—he would have to
manufacture a movie star to inhabit.
Not fake. Not phony. Truly talented. But
Hollywood. A synthetic creation forged for
the Tinseltown machine, with a name like
the fastest car you ever saw.
D OMINICAN REPUBLIC, MAY 20 2 1 —
“Oh God. Oh God! I shouldn’t
even be saying that,” he says,
cracking up. Diesel is in the D.R., living in
a house he refers to as the “campus.” He’s
talking about the Spielberg anecdote.
“But it was a blessing, and I can say that
because Steven was also the person who
said—he’ll say to this day—‘I didn’t hire
you just as an actor, Vin, I expect you to be
directing. I expect you to be directing.’ ”
He likes the “Caribbean breeze” that
blows across the campus. In the morning,
he drinks fresh-squeezed vegetable juice
with a ginger shot. He hits the training
gym on campus. Then he’ll go kayaking
with his kids or take a bike ride. Right
now he’s watching his daughter’s horse-
back-riding lesson.
Diesel grew up far from here, in a build-
ing called Westbeth, on the far edge of
Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Artists’
housing, they called it, for actors and other
artists who needed an affordable place to
live. “When I was a kid, I used to say, I know
as sure as I’m breathing, I am gonna be a
movie star,” he says.
Diesel willed himself into becoming a
movie star: Dom, Private Caparzo, Rid-
dick, Xander from xXx—he created all
these characters. But his greatest inven-
tion of all is Vin Diesel, one of the biggest
movie stars of all time.
He hasn’t directed again, but he did
become the anchor—star and eventually a
producer—of a movie franchise that may
be unprecedented in its box-office take,
its life span, its budgets, and the career Styling: Paris Libby. Photo assistant: Josue Ponce. Location: the Dominican Republic.
it created for its star. The Fast & Furious
movies have collectively grossed more
than $6 billion, and he’s in almost every
frame. This year, F9—the ninth install-
ment, shelved for almost a year by the
pandemic, due out June 25—gives us Vin
Diesel as Dominic Toretto once again.
“There’s a filmmaker instinct in Vin,
for sure,” says Justin Lin, the director of
five Fast movies. “But he never shows up
and says, ‘We should shoot at this angle or
that angle. . . .’ By the time we get on set,
every beat has been talked through—like,
thoroughly. And explored a thousand
times. That’s what I love about Vin: As
we’re developing, we’re always dramatur-
this page: Tank
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pdeceding pages:
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gically breaking down every scene. It’s
been two years of that before we even film.”
The collaboration is always in person.
Lin and Diesel not only block out fight
scenes and race sequences, they’re conjur-
ing the story—what Diesel refers to as the
“mythology” of Fast & Furious. Lin visit-
ed Diesel on campus in the D.R. just a few
weeks ago, the first time they’d seen each
other in more than a year—since the start
of the pandemic. They spent four days
together, riding bikes and sitting outside
by the water. In that time, Fast & Furious
10 started to take shape.
“It built the foundation for the next
chapter,” Lin says.
L ONDON AND TBILISI, GEORGIA, 2019—
There’s a scene in F9 in which Dom
is skittering through the streets of
London at impossible speeds behind the
wheel of a Dodge Charger. He’s trying to
outwit a truck carrying what must be the
world’s most powerful magnet. (You’ll
understand.) Anyway, there’s shooting,
and Dom notices that some bystanders are
in danger of getting killed by stray bullets,
so he thinks fast and drifts the Charger so
it can act as a shield.
The whole thing takes a few seconds.
“Emotionally, Vin and I locked that
in probably four to six months before
shooting,” Lin says. They knew what Dom
would be feeling at that moment and how
he would react to save the pedestrians.
“Every beat we film goes all the way back
to when I’m talking to Vin. As he preps,
he’s going through every beat with me.
A lot of times for these big stunts, we
have six, eight, 14 months and hundreds
of meetings with departments from all
over the world, so usually when we do them,
it’s pretty accurate.”
And yet when Lin watched the driving
sequence, filmed in Tbilisi by a second
directing unit with stunt drivers, he knew
it wasn’t quite right. “The driving was so
perfect, precise, and clinical that I felt it
missed Dom’s intentions and emotional
moment,” Lin says. “There’s humanity
behind the wheel.” He and Diesel talked
with the drivers about Dom’s intentions.
They t weaked the suspension on the
Charger—“to help tell the story of the
moment,” as Lin puts it. They went back
twice over three days to film a sequence
that Lin felt captured Diesel’s perfor-
mance as Dom in that moment—those
nanoseconds when we see on his face what
he feels he has to do.
The last step was to get Diesel actually
driving in London, cut in the stunt driv-

Necklaces
by Cody
Sanderson.
ing, and you’ve got yourself about four sec-
onds of a movie.
“When people are in the middle of the
process, trying to manifest something,
maybe they don’t spend enough time
thinking about how it will be remem-
bered—how it will be regarded,” says
Diesel. “But at the same time, you have
to identify the significance of it, in order
to get the most out of yourself—and the
most out of the people that you’re invit-
ing on the journey. So it’s not uncommon
that I’ll give a speech on set where I’ll say,
‘We’re making this franchise for people
that are no longer with us,’ which is very
real, and the implications of that are
very heavy. ‘But at the same time, we’re
making the franchise for the people that
aren’t born yet.’ When you have a unique
perspective of creating a franchise that
spans generations, you realize, okay, we
all have to be as brilliant as possible. We
have to reach as high as we can. Because
it may be more important than just a
movie. More important than two hours
of escapism. There may be something
more at play.”
Watch Multi-Facial on YouTube. Watch
Find Me Guilty (2006), directed by a leg-
end, Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon,
Network, The Wiz, The Verdict), in which
Diesel plays a wisecracking mobster
defending himself at trial. Hell, watch
The Pacifier, a 2005 comedy in which a
little girl asks his character if one day her
boobs will be as big as his. You’ll remem-
ber, or discover, that Diesel is an actor, and
a good one. “He is not Dom,” says Jordana
Brewster, who plays Dom’s sister, Mia.
“Dom speaks and walks in an entirely
different way. Vin’s creation of Dom is
genius because it’s completely different
from who he is.” Diesel had certainly nev-
er raced cars. (“When you grow up in the
city, you grow up on public transporta-
tion,” he says. “Now, I was a daredevil, so I
actually was a good driver—which doesn’t
seem to make sense, but I rode everything
with wheels in the most dangerous city in
the world. That started with skateboards
in the street at five years old, which led to
banana-seat bikes, which led ultimately to
motorcycles. Nothing makes you a better
driver than having to navigate New York
City cabs on an XR750.”)
Diesel’s occasional on-set speeches forti-
fy the Fast films by unifying an ever-sprawl-
ing cast of characters that Brewster refers
to as the family. (“We’re often forced to
give speeches, too,” Brewster says, “and my
nightmare is public speaking!”) Then there
are the dinners. “I think what I once thought
was an accident, like, ‘Oh, we’re all just
going out for dinner!’ is actually something
that he puts a lot of energy into,” she says.
Before filming began on the first mov-
ie, Brewster says Diesel invited her to the
famous Cuban restaurant Versailles, in
Miami, to talk about their characters’
relationship as brother and sister. “I was
this really green, super-nervous actress,”
she says. “And I thought, Holy shit, okay!
This guy’s for real.”
One previous family member who
doesn’t appear in F9 is Dwayne “the
Rock” Johnson, who first showed up as
Luke Hobbs in Fast Five (2011). It’s a bit of
a messy story, with vague tales of discord
on the set and Johnson calling unnamed
male costars “candy asses.” In the end, all
parties chalked it up to family squabbles.
“It was a tough character to embody,
the Hobbs character,” Diesel says. “My
approach at the time was a lot of tough
love to assist in getting that performance
where it needed to be. As a producer to say,
Okay, we’re going to take Dwayne Johnson,
who’s associated with wrestling, and we’re
going to force this cinematic world, audi-
ence members, to regard his character as
someone that they don’t know—Hobbs hits
you like a ton of bricks. That’s something
that I’m proud of, that aesthetic. That
took a lot of work. We had to get there and
sometimes, at that time, I could give a lot
of tough love. Not Felliniesque, but I would
do anything I’d have to do in order to get
performances in anything I’m producing.”
L OS ANGELES, SOMETIME AROUND 2012—
There is, of course, another member
of the family who isn’t here. Paul
Walker, whose character, Brian O’Conner,
became like a brother to Dom Toretto, and
whom in life Diesel considered kin, died in
a fiery one-car crash in 2013.
Here’s a fun fact not many people know:
Diesel and Walker used to play World of
Warcraft. Like, a lot—at Diesel’s house,
on set, wherever. That’s a PVP (player
versus player) game, and they played as a
team against strangers out in the world.
The workweeks were intense, and this was
their secret unwinding on the weekends.
And here’s the thing, Diesel says: “No one
in the world knew that they were playing
Dom and Brian.”
One day, after playing, “we were in this
bodega—we walked into this bodega, and
people just cannot believe that Dom and
Brian are walking into a bodega. We were
going to some birthday party or some-
thing for someone in the cast, and the—
one of the guys said, ‘Brian.’ One of the
guys called him Brian. And when we left,
and we were in the car, he said, ‘That’s my
favorite thing. It’s my favorite thing when
people call me Brian.’ And it always stuck
with me. Because he was so adamant about
it. To him it was a beautiful compliment. I
still think about it to this day, because it
just says so much, that there was so much
pride in this iconic character he created.
It was his creation, his superhero, and
that moment represented a simpler life,
I guess. And it made me want to protect
that even more, because that mountain
looming that is Fast 10—that’s what we
promised each other, that we would take
this franchise and end it at Fast 10.”
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 67
N E W YORK , 19 95 —He’s sitting in
a booth at the Frontier diner on
39th Street and Third Avenue
shooting the last scene of his first film.
Diesel has been to L. A., tried to get an
agent, tried to get acting gigs. Nothing—he
kept hearing he was too Black, or not Black
enough, or too Italian, or not Hispanic
enough, or too Hispanic, or whatever. (Die-
sel’s mother is white; he doesn’t discuss the
ethnicity of his biological father, whom
he’s never met. His stepfather, who helped
raise him, is Black.) So he’s back home,
working as a bouncer again—all the guys
are saying, “Hey, I thought you were gon-
na be a movie star?” But he’s scrounged up
$3,000 and he’s going to make this movie
about an actor who can’t get a part because
he’s too everything and too nothing.
He’s calling it Multi-Facial. Written by
him, starring him, everything by him.
In it he mostly wears a muscle shirt—
even in 1995 he has the sculpted upper
torso he’s known for. But he doesn’t look
much like Dom Toretto. He slings a back-
pack over one shoulder and pretty much
looks like an actor going on auditions.
About 30 blocks north of the Frontier is
Hunter College, the well-regarded public
school where Diesel was an English major
before dropping out. In 2018 Hunter award-
ed him an honorary doctorate, and he spoke
at commencement. He stood onstage
before thousands of graduates filming him
on their phones and told them about how he
had set out to change the face of Hollywood.
Toward the end of his 11-minute speech, he
said, “My only little, small advice is: If you
don’t see it out there, create it.”
Even as he films Multi-Facial, he’s
thinking about his next thing, a downtown
saga he’s written called Strays, about a
bunch of bros getting high and chasing
women—until his character, a small-time
drug dealer, meets a woman he calls “pure”
and tries to clean up his life.
He finishes filming Multi-Facial. The
film sits unedited while he moves on to
his epic, Strays. “It sat there for a year,” he
says. “I had already written Strays before
I did the short film, and I wanted to quickly
get to the feature, because that was where I
believed any hope of success would be. And
I remember my father saying, ‘What about
your short film? Is it done?’ And I said,
‘Dad, I’m trying to get my feature made.
That’s just a short.’ And I’ll never forget
it—he said, ‘Finish what you started.’ ”
So he does. He attacks the project with
voracity. To force himself to follow through,
68 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH
he reserves a screening bay at Anthology
Film Archives on Second Avenue in exact-
ly a month. He can’t get out of it now—he’s
going to will this thing into existence.
He unseals the film and edits until his
eyes hurt. He has to get it sound-mixed and
color-timed, and back then you did that at
DuArt, a film lab on West 55th. “I had all
this pressure,” he says. “I remember they
called me into DuArt to say, We want to show
you the timing. They projected it against a
white wall—it was 16mm, obviously. This
20-minute film. And the thing I remem-
ber after that is walking down Broadway,
above the subway grates, feeling like I was
ten feet off the ground. Literally ten feet off
the ground. I wasn’t walking. I was floating.
I was flyyy-ing! Jumping over subway turn-
stiles with one leap. There was no gravity.”
And then it played at film festivals,
and Steven Spielberg saw it and called him
up to tell him about this character called
Private Caparzo.
D OMINICAN REPUBLIC, MAY 202 1—
A few years ago, Diesel took his
mother to a screening of Spielberg,
the HBO documentary about the director’s
life. He remains so proud of Spielberg’s ear-
ly encouragement. “It was not just flatter-
ing, it was so supportive,” Diesel says. “And
when we saw him at the screening event, he
said, ‘Vinny, Vinny! When I hired you, Vin,
I hired you not only because of your acting
but because I believed in what you would do
as a director.’ ”
So whatever happened to that Vin Die-
sel? The one Spielberg saw, the one with
Lumet and Scorsese dreams? He hasn’t
directed a film since Strays, which was
then part of his DIY Hollywood strategy.
He’s 53 years old now, as powerful as any
actor or producer in Hollywood. But nev-
er an attempt to make a film of his own.
What’s up with that?
He laughs, and is then serious.
“My reality is, I wake up and go, ‘I haven’t
done the Hannibal trilogy,’ ” he says. He
first started talking about this 18 years
ago: his desire to make a trilogy about
Hannibal Barca, the Carthaginian gener-
al, one of the greatest wartime generals in
history, the man who in 218 b.c. led a troop
of elephants over the Alps to invade Italy.
“I promised myself I would try to make the
Hannibal trilogy. Part of creating mythol-
ogy in Riddick and creating worlds like
Fast, in some bizarre way, was preparation
for the ultimate task.” He’ll do it, he says.
But first, there is Fast 10. “On some level,
there is that voice that says, My God, you’ve
done it, you’ve created this mythology out
of scratch. But the Fast finale weighs on me.
Right now Fast 10 is Everest.”
H ATFIELD,ENGLAND,1997—The crew
on Saving Private Ryan has built
a wartime town in the Hatfield
Aerodrome, an abandoned airfield. A
British company has constructed a bridge
that the men will defend for the last half
hour of the film. Huge volumes of water are
pumped under the bridge—a fake river.
Caparzo? He died about an hour ago,
in movie time. But Diesel is here on set,
and Spielberg makes an unusual gesture:
He hands him a camera and asks him to
film. “He threw him a bone,” says Andrew
Ward, the third AD.
Diesel sits, in civilian clothes, wedging
his mushroom body into a dirty bunker in
a movie-set town, holding a camera that
Steven Spielberg gave him to help film the
climax of his big movie. He’s a multicultur-
al kid playing an Italian. Back home he’s
got a production company with a single
film to its credit, Strays. The name of that
production company is One Race. Twen-
ty-five years from now, audiences starved
of moviegoing by an enduring global pan-
demic will make their way back into the-
aters to see a film—also produced by One
Race—that might just help save the mov-
ie-theater business. It will be like no other
movie before it, the ninth installment of an
unlikely action franchise that forged a star
of the man who forged the franchise.
Says Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, whom
Diesel’s kids call Uncle Chris: “Especial-
ly starting with Fast 5, the first one where
you first got to see the dynamic of all those
different ethnicities together, if you look
back and you see the trend of power box-of-
fice movies, they all tried to diversify and
use inclusion more in their casting—
because of Fast 5. I don’t think you saw it
being done on a scale that huge. A prece-
dent was set.” Indeed, it will star people of
different races playing a family unlike any
other in Hollywood back when Vin Diesel
was too multicultural to get an agent.
In that bunker, clutching his cam-
era, shooting footage that will never
even be used, Vin Diesel is floating. He
is flyyy-ing!
ryan d’agtstint is the Editorial Direc-
tor, Projects at Hearst Magazines.
Tank by
Polo Ralph
Lauren;
necklaces
by Cody
Sanderson.
GOLD-MEDAL
SECRETS OF TH
FINALLY, it’s time for Tokyo! CELEBRATE the best of human performance
with these FITNESS and MUSCLE SECRETS from America’s best.
 Paralympian
Jamal Hill training
in Los Angeles. Watch
the Tokyo Olympics,
beginning July 23, and
the Tokyo Paralympics,
beginning August 24,
on NBC. To learn the
latest, visit TeamUSA.org.

HE OLYMPIANS
Photographs by Nils Ericson
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 71
 THE

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

He might be one of the fastest guys in the water, pulling in podium finishes for the Hill’s best strategies for getting fast
50- and 100-meter freestyle in the 2019 World Para Swimming World Series. But most rec- and strong on land and in the pool:

Courtesy Ralph Lauren (Reynolds). Courtesy USA Weightlifting (Cummings). Courtesy NBC Olympics (Isles). Courtesy POBY & USA Water Polo (Hooper).
reational swimmers probably spend more time swimming laps than Jamal Hill does. The —
six-foot-four, 185-pound Hill, 26, has a typical hard-driving-athlete regimen: five training SWIM LESS, BUT SWIM FASTER
days a week, about five hours a day. But only about 40 minutes of that is actually in the pool. Hill spends every pool session doing ultra-
short race-pace training. For instance,
The expected has never really been Hill’s gig. By the time he was ten, he’d started having
1,000 yards in 50-meter intervals. For most
shoulder problems. On Thanksgiving that year, the right side of his body went limp. Within swimmers, that’s unfathomably low volume.
hours, he was hospitalized, for a time able to move only his head and speak. He was diagnosed “They’re like, ‘Dude, how are you getting
with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT), a progressive, inherited condition causing nerve faster?’ ” he says. It’s all about quality: Hill
swims each 50 hard, rests until his heart rate
damage. Rather than give up, Hill kept swimming, competing in high school and college.
drops, then does another rep. “Repetition
Angling for a pro career, he began training with USC’s Trojan Elite team, pretending is the mother of mastery,” he says.
nothing had changed. “Not only did I not want others to know there was anything wrong —
with me,” he says, “I didn’t want to believe it myself.” This despite the fact that his nerve POWER UP ON LAND
damage means “from my knees to my toes pretty much feels like I’m walking on prosthet- In his two to two and a half hours of daily
ics. I’ve never been able to do things like jump or dunk a basketball, because I don’t really strength training, Hill trains for explosive
power using resistance bands to do
have the function down there. From my elbows to my fingertips, I have about 30 percent
chest presses, deadlifts, and bent-over
nerve capacity there, so it just looks like I’m clumsy.” rows. Since a strong back is essential for
When swim coach and mobility consultant Wilma Wong saw him swim, she didn’t see swimming (and good posture is essential
clumsy. The way he got out of the pool reminded her of how some of her clients with condi- for good lifting, he says), “I make sure to
always engage my scaps—you know, the
tions like cerebral palsy did—and she asked him if he wanted to tell her something about
muscles around your shoulder blades.”
his body that would help her coach him. The moment Hill acknowledged his CMT to him-
—
self—shortly after he began training with Wong in 2018—everything changed. He started TRAIN FOR YOUR STRENGTHS
working with his disease, discovering new ways to add power to make up for muscle/nerve Hill didn’t get faster until he worked with
connections that couldn’t deliver it. “For a long time, my diagnosis was a point of shame his CMT instead of pretending it didn’t
for me. I felt cursed,” he says, adding that as soon as he stopped treating his disease as a exist. Because he can’t generate power
from his legs, for instance, he found
negative, “blessings and opportunities started to appear.” another way to get a good start off the
Hill wants to share his success with others and has created Swim Up Hill, a foundation blocks. “My torso is twisted and one arm is
dedicated to teaching millions of people—especially in marginalized and underserved com- up; it’s cocked at my hip like the hammer
munities—how to be comfortable in the water in just five hours. During the pandemic, he of a pistol,” he says. “I pop that bad boy
down, and the momentum from that arm
pivoted to online training, having people use a bowl, a bench, and a bucket to get the basics coming down and from the rotation cre-
and get over their fears. He also used the pandemic to keep training hard, on land and in wa- ates the illusion that I actually have a dive
ter, to be a contender for Team USA in Tokyo. “Even with a limit, we can be limitless,” he says. where my legs are working.”

READY, SET, GAI NS!

SPIN FOR STAMINA
Heimana Reynolds, 22, 5'9", 155 LBS
SKATEBOARDING
Skaters have a slacker image, but the fast-paced, high-
flying 45-second runs that Heimana Reynolds performs
require serious cardio and leg stamina. That’s why the Hawaiian skater and
2019 world champion hits the Assault bike for sprint intervals. He does
5 sets of 45-second intervals, with 5 seconds of sprinting all out.
Another favorite is the dumbbell snatch with a box jump: Start by squatting
in front of a 12-inch box holding a light dumbbell in one hand on the floor
between your legs. Pull the dumbbell up and over your shoulder as you
jump onto the box. Do 3 sets of 10 per side. Focus on speed.
GRIP FOR GREATNESS
CJ Cummings, 21, 5'7", 161 LBS
WEIGHTLIFTING
Despite his young age, C J Cummings is the United States’
best hope for Olympic weightlifting gold, in part because
of his polished technique. Even though he weighs only 161, Cummings
has clean-and-jerked 423 pounds. Master the clean and you can build full-
body power, too. The key: the width of your hand grip. Use a grip just
slightly greater than shoulder width; most people, Cummings says, go
too wide. “If you have a wide grip,” he explains, “your elbow will be down.”
That will cause the bar to slip. Aim for 3 sets of 3 to 5 reps, starting light, for
muscle and strength gains.

72 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

 STRENGTH 26 YEARS OLD
Jamal SWIMMING
Hill
LOS ANGELES, CA

BUILD A BRIDGE TO SPEED GROUND-AND-POUND YOUR ABS

Carlin Isles, 31, 5'8", 165 LBS
RUGBY
Sevens rugby—with seven players instead of 15 on the
field—requires speed and strength: Players sprint and
tackle, handling offense and defense, for 14 minutes. One of Team USA’s
fastest, strongest members is Carlin Isles. The ex–track star trains that
speed with drills like the hip bridge march: Lie with your back on the
floor, the backs of your feet on a 2-foot-high box. Tighten your core and
glutes, lifting your butt from the floor. Lift your right leg and drive your
knee toward your chest; keep your hips square. Return your leg to the start,
then repeat on the other side. Do this for three 30-second sets.
Johnny Hooper, 24, 6'1", 185 LBS
WATER POLO
To prepare for the aquatic ground-and-pound that is water
polo, Johnny Hooper does a lot of cardio on land, running
and cycling, as well as long sessions in the pool and gym. “Core strength
is critical,” he says, “because when you’re throwing a ball, you’re not just
using the front that everyone sees; a lot of it is torque from your sides and
obliques.” Hooper hammers his abs daily with Russian twists and side
crunches and says Michael Phelps showed him a great drill: Lie on your
back holding a 45-pound plate straight up, then raise your legs and flutter-
kick to failure. It builds shoulder stability and core strength.

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 73

 POWER 32 YEARS OLD
Joe SHOT PUT
Kovacs
BETHLEHEM, PA

STAR-PLANK FOR SPEED LEARN TO GLIDE

Noah Lyles, 24, 5'11", 154 LBS
100-METER SPRINT
The U. S. hasn’t won gold in the 100 meters since 2004.
Noah Lyles plans to change that, in part thanks to a simple
exercise, the star plank. Lyles believes this hold that targets the glutes has
helped him become even quicker. “Even if you’re born fast,” he says, “you
have to develop that speed.” To do the star plank, get into side-plank posi-
tion, your elbow on the floor, then raise your upper leg as high as possible,
keeping it straight. “You have to force yourself to stabilize in uncomfortable
positions,” he says. Stronger glutes give you more powerful hip extension
and greater speed. Hold each rep for 30 seconds. Do 4 reps per side.
Nathan Adrian, 32, 6'6", 225 LBS
SWIMMING
After battling testicular cancer in 2018, freestyle special-
ist Nathan Adrian, a three-time Olympian, had to adjust his
expectations. “I learned to reset my baseline and to set goals in small incre-
ments,” he says. One drill that’s been beneficial is to count strokes for
10 lengths and try to do as few as possible. “It’s not just going to be pull
harder or kick harder,” he says. “A lot of times it’s going to be better con-
necting what you’re doing with your kick to what you’re doing with your
hands and gliding. That comes from bracing your core and positioning
your body to be more streamlined by looking down.”

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 THE

HUMAN CANNON SHO T-PU T C OL O S SUS JOE KOVACS IS ON E OF T H E ST RONGE ST A N D

DA I N T I E ST M E N ON T H E U. S . OLY M PIC T E A M.
By LINDSAY BERRA

On his Instagram feed, there is a picture of Joe Kovacs doing a full straddle Kovacs’s tactics to boost your
jump into a swimming pool, touching both toes with the ease of a cheerleader. Except Kovacs strength, speed, and power:
—
Courtesy NBC Olympics (Lyles). Courtesy Richard Phibbs/Speedo USA (Adrian). Courtesy NBC Olympics (Snyder). Courtesy World Surf League (Andino).

is five-foot-eleven, 310 pounds, eats 12 eggs and two and a half cups of oatmeal for breakfast,
IGNITE YOUR POSTERIOR CHAIN
and lives at the top of a sport typically known for big men with big power, not bulky ballerinas.
“Everyone overlooks their posterior chain,”
But Kovacs, 32, has used his focus on mobility and the idea that a 16-pound iron shot put Kovacs says, referring to the muscles in
goes a lot farther when you “whip it rather than push it” to build a collection of precious your lower back, glutes, hamstrings, and
medals: gold at the 2015 and 2019 World Championships and silver at the 2016 Olympic calves, which work together to help you
lift with power. He does lots of Romanian
Games and 2017 World Championships.
deadlifts, squats, and kettlebell swings,
At that 2019 World Championships, in Doha, Qatar, Kovacs’s winning throw of 22.91 me- as well as reverse hyperextensions. Even
ters—just over 75 feet—was the third farthest in history and the farthest, by anyone of any Supermans—when you lie on your stomach
nationality, in nearly three decades. “That meant so much to me,” he says. “As shot-putters, and raise your arms and legs—can do the
trick. “Anytime you squeeze the lower back,
we are human cannons. The ball has to go far.” For Kovacs, the challenge has always been you’re building posterior power,” he says.
avoiding the dreaded foul, when the shot-putter touches or steps out of the seven-foot-wide —
circle during his throw. On his winning attempt, he whirled his body counterclockwise with BEAR HUG FOR ROTATIONAL POWER
aggression, landed on his right foot, and managed to diffuse all the energy he’d created, You may have tried a standing Russian twist
hopping without ever bouncing forward. with a plate, but Kovacs’s subtle, er, twist on
That unique control, coupled with Kovacs’s strength, makes him a shot-putting force. the move trains rotational power, prepping
your body to twist and lift a case of water
During lockdown, he spent quality time at the rack in his basement, pushing insane strength off to the side with ease. Grab a heavier
numbers with his wife and coach, Ashley Kovacs, a former thrower for the University of weight—a 55-pound kettlebell, sandbag,
Kentucky and the throws coach at Ohio State University, as his spotter. He squatted 800 or plate—and hug it close to your body
(hence the name “breathe-out bear hug”).
pounds for five reps and benched 650 pounds for five reps. He spends plenty of time unwind-
Stand with your feet hip-width apart and
ing that bulk, too. Kovacs warms up by running until he breaks a sweat, then focuses on hip, facing forward, exhale, and rotate your trunk
groin, and spinal stretches before ever touching a shot put. He uses yoga and gymnastics as far to the right as possible. Inhale, return
to become more bendy. “I try to get as much length as I can, because torque and separa- to center, then repeat on the other side.
tion between the upper and lower body are the X factors in shot put,” he says. “Shot put is —
rotational and it requires very quick feet, and you have to be mobile to generate speed.” FOCUS ON EFFORT, NOT NUMBERS
Concentrating on max effort rather than his
During Kovacs’s training for the Tokyo Olympics, the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, na- actual max has changed Kovacs’s mentality
tive beat every personal best with every implement (shot put, discus, and hammer) and in the weight room. If your body is fatigued
every weight in the weight room. He has no doubt he can go to Japan and return with a or you’re having a down day, you won’t be
medal. But this time, his goal is to top his 2016 performance in Rio and finish in first disappointed by lackluster rep numbers. “If
you put in max effort or max speed, the
place. “If the ball doesn’t go over 74 feet, you’re not getting a medal this Olympics,” he numbers don’t matter,” he says. “But you
says. “But I have lots of confidence right now.” have to be honest with yourself.”

TRAIN AT RACE PACE POWER UP YOUR THRUSTERS

Bradley Snyder, 37, 5'9", 155 LBS
TRIATHLON
“The idea for the triathlon swim is to be as fast as possi-
ble while using as little energy as possible,” says two-time
Paralympian Bradley Snyder. While serving in the Navy in Afghanistan in
2010, Snyder sustained complete vision loss due to an IED blast. As part
of his rehab, he started training in a pool and qualified for the Paralympic
swimming team. He’s already won seven Paralympic medals in swimming.
Now he’s competing in the triathlon. The drill that has helped him most
is race-paced training. For instance: Do 25 meters at your race pace, rest
6 seconds, repeat 30 times. If you ever fall off your race pace, you stop.
Kolohe Andino, 27, 5'11", 170 LBS
SURFING
Surfing makes its debut at the Tokyo Olympics, and big-
air master Kolohe Andino is one of Team USA’s top riders.
“Surfing is a weird sport because you spend most of your time getting in
and out of waves with your arms, but then all the work is done with your
legs and core on the waves,” he says. That’s why he does lots of classic
single-leg strength and power drills, like single-leg Romanian dead-
lifts, pistol squats, and single-leg box jumps. “I’ve jumped up to 38
inches—not bad for a surfer dude,” he says. He often combines these 3
moves by doing 3 sets of 10 reps per side with a minute of rest in between.

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 75

 THE

HIGH FLYER
When he takes the Olympic track for the 400-meter hurdles, Rai Benjamin Benjamin’s tips to add thickness to
knows he’ll be battling through one of track and field’s most rigorous events. His trademark your quads and sprint faster:
race warrants cardiovascular and muscular systems efficient enough to sustain a sprinter’s —
speed for a full lap. But it also demands phenomenal mechanics and the agility and flexibil- CRUSH THE FIRST 10
One of Benjamin’s favorite drills is the
ity to clear ten three-foot hurdles evenly spaced around the track while not losing velocity. 10-meter blowout. “Just sprint as fast as
Yet during the pandemic, he had just one way to train: He could run. Benjamin, who’s the you can for 10 meters,” he says. “But do it
third-fastest 400-meter hurdler in history (46.98 seconds is his career best), sometimes while being mechanically sound.” Keep
your chest slightly forward and your core
practiced at the University of Southern California track in Los Angeles, but by May 2020,
tight, and focus on aggressively driving
coronavirus lockdowns had blocked access there. So he changed tactics. Along with his train- your knees high with each stride. Do 5 sets,
ing partners, 400-meter stud Michael Norman and women’s track veteran Kendall Ellis, he resting 90 seconds between each.
hit the pavement. “We started practicing in the streets,” says Benjamin, who turns 24 in July. —

Courtesy Lochte (Lochte). Courtesy USA Climbing (Coleman). Courtesy NBC Olympics (Serio and Boudia).
It was a reminder that you don’t need a 400-meter loop and a host of strength-training LEARN TO LOVE BOUNDING
To forge explosive strength, hone balance,
tools to build speed and athleticism. All you need to do is run. For Benjamin & Co., that
and build the stabilizer muscles around
involved dawn 200- and 300-meter sprints on concrete in downtown alleyways. Other days his knees, ankles, and hips, Benjamin does
they’d run for miles on the beach, using the sand’s instability to strengthen their ankles and bounding drills. “Start with both feet on the
challenge stabilizing muscles—and getting a reminder to appreciate nature. “After you fin- ground, then jump forward and then hop on
one leg. Then explode off that one leg onto
ish, you just sit on the sand and you hear the waves crashing,” Benjamin says. “You’re looking
the other leg, then explode again off that
into the water, and it’s really serene, really peaceful. It kept things interesting.” leg and land.” You’re taking exaggerated
Interesting and demanding. After beach runs, Benjamin would spend an hour sprinting sprint strides and forcing yourself to con-
up a grassy hill and walking back down, perfecting his sprint form. “It was actually crazy trol each landing and takeoff on one foot.
The 3 bounds equal 1 set; do 5 sets, with 90
what we were doing,” he says. “But it was fun at the same time because we were in these West
seconds between each.
L. A. neighborhoods working out. People would come out and watch us.” —
To blast their quads, the crew dusted off their bikes and rode up a hill as fast as they could. BREATHE EASY TO GO FASTER
“You know that will never be something you ever do as a track-and-field runner,” Benjamin Yes, sprinting is intense and explosive, but
says. “But it was really fun. Every week it was something new.” And even though he jumped if you want to get faster, you must be “in a
relaxed state before you compete,” Benja-
nary a hurdle for months, it all worked. At May’s USATF Golden Games, his first big race in min says. That’s why he practices the 4-7-8
more than 19 months, he clocked a 47.13, the 14th-fastest 400 hurdles in history. breathing method recommended by
Benjamin says he was a bit “sloppy” with his technique at that event and is working furi- Andrew Weil, M.D. First he blows out all the
ously to clean it up. Blame that on his extended time away from the hurdles—and expect a air in his lungs, then he inhales through his
nose for 4 seconds. He holds his breath for
better performance in Tokyo. “I know my potential,” he says, “and I know if I run the perfect 7 seconds, then, through pursed lips, blows
race to the best of my ability, I feel like it’s going to be insane.” out that breath for 8 seconds.

SHRED YOUR ABS FORGE TOTAL-BODY STRENGTH

Ryan Lochte, 36, 6'2", 190 LBS
SWIMMING
Four-time Olympian Ryan Lochte says now that he’s older,
he has to train smarter, because his body needs more time
to recover from workouts. The pandemic—during which his weight climbed
to 205 pounds, 15 above his racing weight—didn’t help. To lose weight,
he ate more protein and produce. He also does daily core circuits like
this: 4 rounds (30 seconds on, 10 seconds of rest) of toe touches, leg lifts,
6-inch flutter kicks, and med-ball pass crunches (in which you lie down,
hold a med ball with your feet, pass it to your hands, then hold it over your
head, do a crunch, and pass it back to your feet).
Nathaniel Coleman, 24, 6'0", 165 LBS
SPORT CLIMBING
You might think climbing is only about upper-body strength,
but your legs are what should be driving you up the wall,
says speed climber Nathaniel Coleman. That’s why he emphasizes total-
body moves that build leg strength and help his upper and lower body
connect better. Two favorites: heavy deadlifts and squats. (Think 3 sets
of 5 reps at 80 percent of your 5-rep max.) For active recovery between
sets, Coleman does hangboard drills to strengthen his fingers. “I’ll hang
for 30 seconds, just from my fingers on the smallest edges that I can, so
anywhere from 15 millimeters to 8 millimeters.”

76 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

 SPEED 23 YEARS OLD
Rai 400-METER HURDLES
Benjamin
MOUNT VERNON, NY

CATCH AND PLANK FOR POWER PIKE FOR PERFECTION

Steve Serio, 33, 5'4", 130 LBS
WHEELCHAIR BASKETBALL
To crush it in wheelchair basketball, you need quick hands
and upper-body power. Steve Serio, a Team USA cocaptain,
was paralyzed 11 months after surgery to remove a spinal tumor. “We do
lots of plank variations that combine shoulder stability with quick hand
movements,” he says. For instance, do a straight-arm plank and alternate
raising one hand, then the other, as fast as possible. Once you can do that
for a minute, have someone throw a tennis ball to you while you’re in a
plank. “You catch it with one hand, throw it back, catch it with the other
hand,” he says. “It combines stability, speed, and strength.”
David Boudia, 32, 5'9", 165 LBS
DIVING
When you’re flipping through the air four and a half times
in less than two seconds, if your core isn’t tight, you’re going
to have an ugly landing, explains three-time Olympian David Boudia. “I do
core six days a week; some days are heavier than others,” he says. One
move he finds most beneficial is the leg raise: Hang on a bar, back flat
against a wall, and keep your legs straight as you lift your toes to your head,
then lower them. “We do variations—like explode up to the bar and lower
slowly. Or pike up to the middle, then left, then right.” He does 3 sets of 20
reps. Start with 3 sets of 5: Raise your legs fast and lower them on a 5-count.

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 77

 AGI LITY 26 YEARS OLD
Nyjah SKATEBOARDING
Huston
DAVIS, CA

CRUSH YOUR CORE JUMP FOR STAMINA

Ryan Murphy, 26, 6'3", 200 LBS
SWIMMING
Backstroke maestro Ryan Murphy does some creative
core exercises to give his body the stability it needs as
his arms windmill through the water. Here are two of his favorites. The
hanging med-ball throw: As you hang from a bar, someone throws you a
med ball, which you catch with your feet and throw back. It’s more athletic
and reflexive than a standard crunch. Do 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps. The stability-
ball scorpion: Get in pushup position with your feet on a stability ball.
Brace your abs and rotate one leg under your body and then back over,
bending your knee at the top like a scorpion’s tail. Do 3 sets of 10 per side.
David Brown, 28, 5'9", 165 LBS
TRACK AND FIELD
David Brown was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease at 15
months old, resulting in glaucoma that took his sight by the
age of 13. Now 28 and preparing to compete in his third Paralympics, Brown
is the first blind person to run the 100 meters in under 11 seconds. He trains
on the track with a guide but does other drills solo. One of his favorite work-
outs is “double-under death”: 30 minutes of jumping rope, using ropes
of different weights. “It’s great for conditioning and speed,” he says. Start
with a 1-pound rope for 10 minutes. Then alternate 2-minute reps with a 1.5-
pound rope and double-unders with a 2-pound rope for 5 minutes.

78 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

 THE

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

When competitive street skateboarding debuts in Tokyo, the judges will score Huston’s tips for greater agility,
the athletes based on the difficulty of their tricks (performed within a time limit) as well as power, and strength:
originality, speed, and height. The focus is on the tricks—aerials, slides, and grinds on and off —
benches, walls, slopes, handrails, and stairs. They demand agility, balance, strength, creativ- SQUAT FOR BALANCE AND STRENGTH
ity, and courage—to go for and nail moves you might land successfully only one in 50 times. Huston usually trains in the gym in his
house in Laguna Beach. One of his favor-
It’s that courage that makes the world-champion street skateboarder Nyjah Huston, 26, ite moves is a squat on a Bosu ball hold-
so hard to beat. As OG Tony Hawk wrote in Time’s 2021 Time100 Next issue, Huston’s “con- ing a 50-pound kettlebell, 5 sets of 15. “It’s
fidence and consistency have made once-in-a-thousand-type tricks a reality.” What’s more, good for your leg strength, ankle strength
Huston has never had a coach—“and I don’t think I ever will,” he says. “Skating is not like from the Bosu, and for balance,” he says.
that—it’s really up to you on how hard you want to practice and how hard you want to go.” —
EMPOWER YOUR POWER
Huston has been going hard since kindergarten, when his dad introduced him to skating.
Given his reliance on power, Huston has
His father pushed him at seven years old to skate rails over concrete (to be more technical) added explosive moves like box jumps
and to stop wearing a helmet (to be so confident that falling wasn’t an option). “A lot of the to his workouts, while building his leg
time, you know you can do a move; it’s just really hard to get that first try out of the way,” strength through cardio, such as sprint-
Huston says. “It was a constant [mental] battle because I’d be at this big rail, like I don’t ing 1,000 steps in Laguna Beach, riding
a stationary bike, and hiking with a heavy
know if I’m ready to do this. I’d be rolling up to it for a half hour to an hour, like What am I pack. He also speed-runs down steps to
going to do? Most of the time, I would end up going for it.” improve his footwork and reaction time.
Those early lessons helped Huston realize the importance of commitment. In overcom- —
ing his fears, he adopted a confident attitude toward skating new surfaces, one of the hall- STRETCH AND RECOVER DAILY
marks of his style. “Power and strength are most important for my skating,” he says. “I When Huston was a boy, his father always
made him stretch. “I’d be so confused, like,
like skating big stuff, and you need the power to get on those obstacles and take the impact
I’m eight, nine years old—I feel perfect,”
coming off. You need the strength to take the hard falls.” he says. “Now I look back and I’m thankful
Huston, who is five-foot-ten and 165 pounds, started weight training in 2018 to add mus- for it because I’m like, damn, it really does
cle, increase dexterity, and prevent injuries. “Even in tricks where you have to spin your body make a difference.” He starts each day
360 onto a rail, I felt stronger being able to get my body around in that motion,” he says. “I with a True Stretch cage session and
ground stretches for 30 minutes. He also
also noticed it helped with popping the board higher.” During the pandemic, Huston prac- uses Hyperice’s Normatec Leg System for
ticed tricks six hours a day. He’s primed for takeoff. He wishes the Olympics had added skate- recovery, as well as an ice compression
boarding earlier, “but at least it’s in there now,” he says. “I’m excited. It’s gonna be sick.” machine on his knees and ankles.

FUEL YOUR GLORY LUNGE FOR ELITE STRENGTH

Trevor Crabb, 31, 6'4", 195 LBS
BEACH VOLLEYBALL
Beach volleyball is brutally tiring: You’re running, jumping,
and diving in the sand and sun. Each rally often lasts more
than 20 seconds—and it’s 20 seconds of max physical exertion and mental
focus—and you repeat that for 30 minutes to an hour. To fuel up, Hawaiian-
raised Trevor Crabb glugs a monster power shake for breakfast before
competitions and on heavy training days. Blend almond milk, 1 banana, ½
cup of blueberries, a handful of spinach, half an avocado, a tablespoon of
peanut butter, 2 raw eggs, 1 cup of orange juice, 1 scoop of protein powder,
and a handful of ice. “It’s super creamy and super nutritious,” he says.
Tom Scott, 31, 6'0", 164 LBS
KARATE
Tom Scott has claimed 15 karate national championships,
but he’ll chase his first Olympic title when the sport debuts
in Tokyo. He will have to land punches and kicks while avoiding or blocking
incoming hits. That requires agility and strength. He develops those with
exercises like the sandbag lunge with rotation: Holding a sandbag (or a
dumbbell) at your hips with both hands, step back with your right leg into a
reverse lunge; shift the bag outside your right hip as you do this. Power back
to standing and step into a reverse lunge with your left leg, swinging the bag
around to your left hip as you do. That’s 1 rep. Do 3 sets of 8.

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 79

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

80 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY LUONG

 Travis Mills,
photographed at
his home in Rome,
Maine, lost four
limbs serving in
the U. S. Army.
Battling for strength
The Afghanistan-
war veteran puts
in the reps at his
home gym.
“NEVER GIVE UP.
NEVER QUIT.”
In April 2012, U. S. Army staff sergeant
Travis Mills survived a roadside
explosion in Afghanistan but lost all four
limbs. After his condition stabilized, he
returned stateside to continue rehab. He
knew recovery would be arduous, but then
he discovered a different way to serve.
As told to Joel Crabtree
I’M FROM a very small town in Michigan. After high school, I
played football at a community college, but I realized I was only
there to play football. I wasn’t doing well in class. I moved back
home and realized I didn’t want to be back home, either. I went to
talk with a recruiting station, and within two weeks I was shipped
out to basic training. I deployed to Afghanistan in 2007 with the
82nd Airborne Division. I deployed again in 2009.
When I returned home after my second deployment, my wife,
Kelsey, and I bought a house, and we found out we were going to
have a baby. My daughter, Chloe, was born in September 2011. I
deployed for my third time to Afghanistan early the next year.
One day, about a month and a half in, I set my backpack down
and unknowingly placed it on top of a bomb.
Nine doctors and seven nurses worked on me for 14 hours to
keep me alive. There were two nurses who took turns pumping
air in and out of my lungs. I had over 400 units of blood given to
me. When I woke up in Germany, the only person in the room
was my brother-in-law. “My soldiers. How are my soldiers?” I
asked him. He told me they were okay. And then I said, “Am I
paralyzed?” He said no. I looked at him and said, “Josh, don’t lie
to me. I can’t feel my fingers and toes.” And then he said, “You’re
not paralyzed. You don’t have your fingers and toes anymore.
They’re gone.” I’d lost both arms and legs.
82 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH
I went from six-foot-three, 250 pounds, to three-foot-six,
140 pounds. I had to ask people to feed me and give me water. I
needed help to use the bathroom. But the worst part was men-
tal. All you can think about is What if I would’ve stepped here
instead? or What if I didn’t put my bag there? I told my wife she
should leave me and take everything we had.
She didn’t. I knew I had two options. I could either sit there
and pity myself or get better. Everybody around me wanted me
to get better. And I knew there were ways to get better. I was at
Walter Reed for 19 months. I got prosthetics. I got stronger, and
I was able to start dressing myself, feeding myself—all the stuff
that you take for granted. I started realizing, Hey, I can still be
active. I can still do things.
And I found that I enjoyed helping people. My wife and I decid-
ed to start a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called the Travis Mills Foun-
dation. We organized a week with families of those who were
physically injured from combat service. It went so well we did it
again the next year. Then we got some funds and raised enough
money to buy a property for the foundation. In 2017, we opened
officially, and now we host eight families per week. We’ve grown
to be one of the top veterans service organizations in the nation.
My wife and I are now going on 13 years of marriage. My son,
Adam Wirth (Billimoria)
Dax, is three, and he’s a wild man. My daughter is nine. We’re
just going about life like we’re supposed to. There’s a slogan I
started repeating to myself while at Walter Reed, and I still live
by it today: “Never give up. Never quit.”

THE BRUSHES WITH DEATH THAT
REALIGNED ME
Zahan Billimoria has spent 20 years in the Tetons as a ski and climbing guide,
during which he says he’s had five near-death experiences and witnessed the
passing of several of his friends. Interview by Paul Kita
Q: What does it mean to survive something?
A: You relinquish life and accept death. In
your mind, you say goodbye to the people
you love. It’s less of a moment and more
of a threshold. Surviving is seeing death
as a possibility, one that might be winning
over, but then fighting back. I’ve been in
avalanches where I’ve accepted death, but
then in that moment of having nothing left to
lose, my body and mind will work together
to pull off a maneuver that works. In order to
survive, I have to win.
Q: What is your definition of resilience?
A: It’s not a word I use. My accidents are my
doing. So I choose instead to accept the
mistakes I’ve made and learn from them.
I’ve held my friends in my arms as they died
moments after I survived. I’m close with the
widows of those friends. They are resilient.
Their circumstances aren’t something of
their own doing.
Q: What has loss taught you about living?
A: When you survive something, you see the
other side of the curtain, you live in grief.
And eventually, through acceptance, you
come back and you reconnect with life. I’m
no longer as hungry for the most out-there
experiences. My choices carry a burden for
myself and other people. It doesn’t mean
I don’t yearn when I see my friends doing
things—there’s some friction, some longing.
But am I good with who I am? I’m so good
with it. I have a wife and two children. That
doesn’t leave a lot of room for sitting around
and feeling sorry for myself. I don’t have
time to feel bad.
Q: What have you learned about grief?
A: Grief can feel like someone is choking
you—like you don’t know where you are
going to get your next breath. To imagine
that there will be a life that will come after
that, a life where you will be happy again,
feels truly impossible. It’s hard to imagine
that in the life that will come after that pain,
you will be happy again. Some of that weight
and sadness will be there forever, and you
wouldn’t want it any other way. Because
that’s how you honor those that have passed
and that you survived.
What it means to ascend
Adventure guide Zahan
Billimoria says he’s made
his scars of loss and grief
a part of who he is.
THE
ABCs OF
PTSD
RECOVERY
With post-traumatic stress
disorder affecting about
8 million people a year—
and still no single treatment
that works for everyone—
researchers have pushed
to find even more therapies
that may help. Here are
four proven strategies.
MDMA: Methylenedioxy-
methamphetamine
Yes, Ecstasy. Researchers are
enhancing psychotherapies with
controlled, monitored dosages to
help people break through walls
they’re hitting in therapy. A recently
completed phase 3 clinical trial
showed that MDMA-assisted therapy
eliminated PTSD diagnoses in 67 per-
cent of people after four and a half
months of treatment.
EMDR: Eye-movement desensitiza-
tion and reprocessing
You discuss memories of trauma
while moving your eyes in certain
patterns. The technique was
developed in 1987, and though it’s
recommended by the American
Psychological Association and the
U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs,
scientists still don’t know how it
works. EMDR treatments have been
shown to reduce PTSD symptoms or
eliminate the diagnosis altogether.
TXT: Texting
Text-messaging with a therapist
could turn out to be an effective
alternative to in-person therapy, but
more research is needed. It’s the
next step to make PTSD treatments
more accessible so that there will be
fewer dropouts and greater success.
FTW: Activity-based therapies
Holistic practitioners and therapists
alike are offering white-water rafting,
surfing, fly-fishing, art therapy, and
yoga to help diminish the effects of
PTSD. Alone, they can’t do the whole
job, but they may play a valuable
role. “The goal of PTSD treatment
isn’t just getting rid of symptoms. It’s
about getting back to life and having
a sense of well-being,” says Paula
Schnurr, Ph.D., the executive direc-
tor of the National Center for PTSD
at the U. S. Department of Veterans
Affairs. —Marty Munson
 THE ISOLATION
THAT FORGED ME
Ian Manuel
Court ruling altered juvenile-sentencing policy. Manuel
writes about his experience in the new memoir My Time
Will Come, from which this essay was adapted.
THE UNITED NATIONS considers solitary confinement for more than
15 days torture. It was my condition for 18 consecutive years.
Imagine that you had been sentenced to social death, life without
parole, in a space nine feet by seven—the size of a freight elevator—
where for 22 to 24 hours a day you are trapped; where in a deadly daily
routine you sleep, wake up, shit, piss, eat—food slipped through a slot
as if you were an animal; where you are denied the possibility of human
contact except as physical or mental abuse; where visual and sensory
stimuli—the stuff of life—are only a memory or a dream; and where who
you are is defined only by your willingness or unwillingness to be disci-
plined and punished.
I managed to endure it and survive. Scientists have shown that solitary
confinement, especially of juveniles, can damage the brain, provoking
panic, anxiety, depression, loss of control, and even suicide.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” the song says.
One isolated incident
Sentenced to life
as an early teen, Ian
Manuel sustained
multiple stints in soli-
tary confinement.
During one of my many stretches of solitary confinement for a
prison infraction, I was free. I was inured to it; I had adapted to
the hellishness of my environment. As Guitar says to Milkman
in Song of Solomon: “[You] wanna fly, you got to give up the shit
that weighs you down.” I did.
I cherished my aloneness in solitary confinement. I was
rarely bored. Boredom in addition to the intensity of the incar-
ceration would have made me lose my mind, might have driven
me to suicide. I spent hours on end imagining, practicing magi-
cal thinking. Suppose the ocean is a fantastical realm. Posit two
aquatic animals: on the one hand, a swordfish whose large gills
pull more oxygen out of water than those of most fish, allow-
ing it to spend its entire life beneath the surface of the sea;
on the other hand, a dolphin or a whale, with its diving reflex,
which however long it stays submerged must periodically rise
to the surface to breathe air through its blowhole because like
humans it has no gills. In prison, an inmate who never emerges
from fantasy and delusion may be said to have slipped into
schizophrenia, having completely withdrawn from reality. An
inmate who dives deep into his imagination but is compelled
for his survival now and then to rise from fantasy and delusion
retains a firm grip on things as they are. I have always believed
that I was of the latter party.
Most of my time I spent swimming in my imagination. I had
a constant vision of my mother, at the feet of God seated in
His throne in heaven, imploring Him: “Please let my baby go
home.” I wrote rap lyrics to express my ever-shifting feelings;
read poets like Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and Eminem,
imagining myself in competition with, and trying to outdo,
them; longed for visitations from the nurse just so I could see
a female form on the wing. I dwelled on what life would be
like outside prison, what I would do once I was out. I harbored
childhood fantasies of becoming a rich and famous rap star. I
would give back to those I had left behind in prison.
Powerless as I was, I dreamed of wielding it. I would hire
lawyers—they like money—to represent the interests of prison
inmates and to abolish close management. I was drawn to fan-
tasies that gave my imagination flight, fantasies about a final
struggle between good and evil to determine the fate of the
world. Since those days, a line, often quoted by one convict I
knew, has stayed with me: “To live is to suffer; to survive is to
find some meaning in the suffering.”
On November 10, 2016, that night around 9:30, as I walked
out of Orange County Jail in prison garb, carrying the barest
possession in a bag, it had been agreed that Debbie Baigrie,
the woman I had shot, would meet me at a gas station just
down the street from the jail. She and I stared at each other and
grinned before hugging. One of my attorneys, Ben Schaefer,
was busy trying to figure out where we would eat; we were all
starving. He settled on a pizza joint downtown, not realizing
that it was ever so close to where I had shot Debbie a quarter
century before. When I got out of the car, I grabbed Debbie and
kissed her on both cheeks to acknowledge the disaster that
brought us into each other’s life.
From My Time Will Come: A Memoir of Crime,
Punishment, Hope, and Redemption, by Ian
Aundre Larrow
Manuel. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon
Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Pub-
lishing Group, a division of Penguin Random
House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Ian Manuel.

THE LAST THING Tyler Perino
remembers from the night of
March 16, 2019, is telling some
of his fraternity brothers that
he wanted to go home.
In the preceding hours, the Delta Tau
Delta pledge at Miami University in Oxford,
Ohio, had been blindfolded, spit on,
berated, beaten with a paddle, and told to
drink a six-pack of Smirnoff Ice and a bottle
of Crown Royal before playing a game
called “Chug till You Puke.” He doesn’t
remember getting dropped off at his dorm
or telling his girlfriend he felt like he was
going to die. She called 911, and EMTs
rushed him to a hospital. When he woke up
the next morning, he was told he’d had a
blood-alcohol level of 0.23—nearly three
times the legal limit.
“I never really expected it to happen
to me,” says Perino. “I don’t think anyone
expects it to happen to them until it does
happen.” He recognizes that as a hazing
survivor, he’s one of the lucky ones. There
THE
HAZING
THAT GAVE ME
A VOICE
Tyler Perino narrowly survived a
fraternity “game.” Now he’s fighting
to prevent Greek-life rituals from
claiming more victims. By Spencer Dukoff
have been at least 40 hazing-related deaths 2018 after collapsing on the floor of an unof-
on college campuses over the past decade, ficial, off-campus fraternity house. Collin’s
with causes of death ranging from alcohol Law would increase penalties for hazing
poisoning and drug overdose to head inju- and expand the crime’s definition in Ohio.
ries and trauma from falls to drowning. It would also create a new second-degree
And while victims of hazing may remain felony, aggravated hazing, which would
silent out of shame or loyalty to their carry up to eight years in prison.
organization, Perino is publicly sharing his “The more we do and the harsher punish-
experience in order to help prevent future ments we make, it’s definitely going to make
tragedies. “I have the opportunity to speak kids think twice before they do something
for those kids who didn’t make it,” he says.
like that,” Perino says. “Because they’re
As a result of that night, in connection with
definitely going to think, Hey, if I haze this
his case, eighteen of Perino’s fraternity broth-
person, or if I make this person drink these
ers were charged with dozens of felonies
beers, or this liquor, or if I paddle this person,
and misdemeanors in Butler County. He
transferred to the University of Toledo, where is it worth me possibly going to jail?”
he’s just finished his junior year. Surviving that night in 2019 irrevocably
He has also become an active supporter changed Perino’s life, but he insists there’s
of antihazing legislation. In March, he spoke plenty of light that’s come from the dark-
before Ohio’s Senate Workforce and Higher ness. “Before the incident, I was always
Education Committee, urging lawmakers to kind of shy to speak up. That incident has
pass Senate Bill 126, also known as Collin’s helped me grow in a way that has helped
Law. The bill is named for an Ohio University me become someone who stands up for
student named Collin Wiant, who died in what is right, no matter the circumstance.”

3 Ways to Help
Save Others
As an ER doctor and a U. S. Air Force veteran
who completed a tour of duty in Iraq, John
Torres, M.D., has seen people survive unlikely
situations. The senior medical correspondent
for NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and the
author of the new book Dr. Disaster’s Guide
to Surviving Everything says there are actions
you can take in challenging circumstances.
PACE // “In the military, this
stands for Primary, Alternate,
Contingency, and Emergency,” he
explains. So with your family, plan
your primary way to communi-
cate and meet, then the alternate,
and go down the list from there.
“When there’s an emergency and
you have a plan, it takes one thing
out of the equation of things you
have to think about,” he says.
Take a breath // When
someone comes into
the ER needing immedi-
ate attention, Dr. Torres
says the first thing
Move // “My father had a
famous saying: Hesitation
kills,” says Dr. Torres. “If
you’re in the middle of the
road, don’t freeze. Move.”
doctors do is take their He’s seen this in other
own pulse. That means disasters as well: Even if
taking a split second to people go the wrong way,
center yourself and be doing something makes
ready so you don’t end you more likely to survive
up in a panic. than doing nothing.

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON RAISH MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 85

 THE SHOOTING
THAT CHANGED MY LIFE
Three survivors from three separate mass killings share how they’ve changed—
physically, mentally, and spiritually—since the day of the tragedy they experienced. As told to Paul Kita
ALEXANDER DWORET was in English
class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High
School in Parkland, Florida, when a bullet
grazed the back of his head. Among the
17 killed on February 14, 2018, was his
older brother, Nick.
Therapy is something that I cherish now.
Right after the shooting, I started to see a
therapist and do EMDR. [See “The ABCs of
PTSD Recovery” on page 83.] Three years
ago, I was secluded; I stuck to myself.
I see her weekly now and I can tell her
anything I want.
I have my brother’s thumbprint tattooed
on my wrist with the words “brothers
forever” in his handwriting. My family went
to Hawaii recently and we all got matching
tattoos of the Mokulua islands in honor of
Nick’s dream to go there.
I take my health a lot more seriously now.
The gym helps me mentally. Pushing
weight can help me push out emotions
that bottle up. I’ve lost weight and
gained muscle. It’s nice to see something
change in my life.
I think hardship showed me that you can
push through. You can learn from it and
evolve. But it takes time.
86 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH
JEFF XCENTRIC has gone through
12 surgeries over the past five years to
repair the damage inflicted by gunfire
that struck him at the Pulse nightclub in
Orlando on June 12, 2016.
I bled out on the floor for three and a half
hours. If it wasn’t for blood donations, I
wouldn’t be alive. That’s why I advocate
now and work with OneBlood [a Florida-
based donation center].
Prior to Pulse, I had zero patience. I had to
be in bed for a year and be taken care of.
Through the long healing process, I was
forced to learn patience.
Survivors of the Boston [Marathon] bomb-
ing came to the hospital to guide me—with
my health but also with the media and what
to expect next. That meant so much to me.
It’s why I reach out to survivors of tragedy.
We are all interconnected in some way.
I got an ancestry DNA test and had some-
thing like 20 different results. Life is short,
but now more than ever, my goal is to travel
to every country in my blood.
I’ve noticed that people who are very
strong are people who have been through
stuff. It takes a lot out of you to be a
strong person.
JONATHAN SMITH was shot in the neck,
fractured his collarbone, cracked a rib, and
bruised a lung on October 1, 2017, at the
Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas.
The bullet is still lodged in there. The
doctors told me they can’t remove it without
causing severe injuries or possibly death.
I’ve decided that I’m alive and removing it
isn’t worth the risk, even if it causes pain.
I tried to end it all because I couldn’t deal
with the pain and suffering. I’ve learned that
strength can still be found in the deepest
places inside a person. No matter what situ-
ation we have, we can reach out for help.
When I started softball again after a year of
not playing, my teammates didn’t want me to
play for a while, but softball is my getaway.
That’s where I relieve stress.
My family grew from 20 to 30 people—my
relatives—to 20,000 people who were
strangers to me at one point but I now
recognize as my Route 91 family. Whatever
the crisis might be, nothing is going to stop
us from being in constant communication
with one another.
Now every day feels like I’ve won the
Super Bowl.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JASON RAISH

ROSS EDGLEY’S
4 TRUTHS
ABOUT RESILIENCE
When you spend 157 days
at sea as the first person to
swim around the coastline
of mainland Great Britain,
you learn a thing or two
about resilience. Such as:
Truth #1: “Sucking it up” won’t
make you resilient.
“In fact, it’ll break you. If you have
a stone in your shoe during the first
mile of a marathon, bearing it doesn’t
do anything for you except make you
miserable. So often, when I see ath-
letes and military recruits grimacing
during training, I ask them, ‘How is
this helping you?’ ”
Truth #2: You can’t lie to yourself.
“As I was swimming, I knew that if
I put one arm in front of the other, I
would circumnavigate Britain. But in
the reality of the moment, I had a jel-
lyfish tentacle stuck to my face and
hadn’t showered or slept properly
in months, and I made peace with it.
Accepting the situation helps you
formulate a plan. Resilience is stress
strategically managed.”
Truth #3: Know how to fight—and
Jude Edginton/Contour by Getty Images (Edgley). Courtesy Leah Muntges (Bernstein).
how to dance.
“There was a study in Frontiers in
Human Neuroscience where cyclists
who were shown pictures of people
smiling had far greater resistance to
fatigue than those who were shown
frowning pictures. It’s like what you
saw when Eliud Kipchoge broke the
two-hour-marathon barrier with a
slight smile on his face. Not once did
he seem to grimace or fight—he was
dancing the whole way.”
Truth #4: Your reasons to con-
tinue need to be bigger than your
reasons to quit.
“If you love what you’re doing, and
you’re doing it for the right reasons,
you’ll keep going.”
THE TOOLS THAT REPAIR ME
…after the hit-and-run that nearly left me dead. By Andrew Bernstein
IF ON THE morning of
July 20, 2019, you had asked
me about my favorite things,
I probably would have named
my cat, a bike, a jacket, maybe a pair of
shoes. Then, that afternoon, while finish-
ing a ride, a driver hit me and abandoned
me near death on the side of the road
with collapsed lungs, internal bleeding,
30 broken bones, a concussion, and a
spinal-cord injury that paralyzed my left
leg and bladder. I endured ten surgeries
and was hospitalized for three months.
The real work began when I got home:
learning to exist with partial paralysis.
Through lots (and lots) of hard work,
I’m back to riding and have been hiking
around my home in Boulder, Colorado.
Now, while my cat is still number one,
here are some things I love in my new life.
Photos of my glory days
I decorated the wall of my home gym
with photos from my racing at the Valley
Preferred Cycling Center velodrome
in Pennsylvania, where I competed
against Olympians from around the
world. Looking at those pictures while
doing hamstring curls or crunches
reminds me of how strong I am, the loss
I live with every day, and the community
that has always supported me.  community until I started sharing my
TriggerPoint MB5 Massage Ball
I’m in physical therapy five days a week,
and while techniques like dry needling
are essential to reducing chronic pain,
I’m also a huge fan of this dense foam
ball. I roll it under my glutes, hamstrings,
quads, back, and shoulders, allowing the
pressure to release knots. Like much of
my recovery, it hurts like hell but works. 
Wahoo Fitness ELEMNT RIVAL
As a bike racer, I’m used to having a lot
of workout data. When I started to be
able to walk farther than around my
block, seven months after the crash, I
wanted to be able to track my progress.
Fortunately, Wahoo Fitness, which I
represent at my day job, was about to
release the RIVAL Multisport watch, and
I was able to get a sample. Having infor-
mation like distance on my wrist helped
me to plan and track hikes that let me
safely extend my range.
Sitting Pretty, by Rebekah Taussig
Taussig, who is about my age, became
paraplegic as a young girl and uses a
wheelchair. Her memoir gives voice, and
meticulous research, to many experi-
ences I’ve had since becoming para-
plegic. She also helped me examine my
own ableism—both what I had before my
injury and where I can improve now.
Instagram
I’d always loved it as a creative outlet, but
I didn’t fully appreciate the platform’s
ability to connect me with a broader
recovery. I’ve met people who have sur-
vived all kinds of traumas and been able
to learn from their experiences. About
296,000 Americans are living with some
type of spinal-cord injury, and while all
of our injuries are unique, there’s a lot we
share and can teach one another.
The path forward
Andrew Bernstein, a
hit-and-run victim,
now walks the trails
around his home in
Boulder, Colorado.
87
 THE
HUNTER
u s e m o re p ain th a n gain.
c a
’s o n e d o cto r turned
But there a to r w ho’s taking on
inv e stig
e
sketchy manufacturers one fals
claim at a time.
BY STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY CHARIS TSEVIS

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 89

F FIRST IT WAS INSOMNIA.
Pieter Cohen, M.D., all complained
of sleepless nights. One woman also
had headaches, chest pain, nausea,
and fatigue. Another was depressed,
sweating, trembling. Then a trucker
showed up with yet another concern:
He couldn’t figure out why he’d just
tested positive for amphetamines.
It was 2006, and Dr. Cohen, working at
a community health clinic in Somerville,
Massachusetts, realized he had a medical
mystery on his hands. Many of his patients
are Brazilian immigrants, so Dr. Cohen,
who speaks some Portuguese, began to ask
more questions. Nothing about anyone’s
diet or exercise habits seemed surprising.
But when their lab tests started coming
back, he was shocked. A number of the
patients had amphetamines in their sys-
tem, though none said they took any. Some
also showed traces of known tranquilizers,
hypnotics, and antidepressants.
Eventually, staff members at the clinic
suggested a possible culprit. Brazilian-
made diet pills, which came in different
sizes and a range of colors (brown, red,
white, and green) were being sold in generic
packaging around the neighborhood. Dr.
Cohen asked his patients directly about the
pills, and they all admitted to taking them.
“Because people were having such signif-
icant symptoms, it just gave me the sense
that something powerful was in the pills
that was mysterious or interesting,” he says.
He got samples from his patients and
found a lab that could analyze them.
It turned out that the pills contained
dangerous amounts of fenproporex, an
amphetamine derivative not approved for
marketing in the U. S. and linked to anx-
iety, abuse, and dependence. The supple-
ment had been spiked, a practice in which
manufacturers cut corners and deceive
customers by including harmful or even
deadly ingredients in their formulas.
Dr. Cohen figured the next step was sim-
ple: He alerted his regional FDA office, hop-
ing to see the pills taken off the market, but
then . . . nothing. No warnings were issued,
no recalls enacted. After several months,
the pills were still on neighborhood shelves.
90 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH
Undeterred, Dr. Cohen wrote about his
findings in two medical publications—the
Journal of General Internal Medicine and
The American Journal on Addictions. He
created warning pamphlets and shared
them in the community through local
churches, and he talked to local radio sta-
tions and newspapers.
Once one of the main newspapers in São
Paulo picked up the story, the pills started
disappearing, probably because Brazilian
authorities got involved. Dr. Cohen isn’t
sure exactly what happened, he says, “but
the timing was a nice coincidence.”
What he never imagined was that this
probe might lead him to investigate another
toxic supplement, then another, until his
self-appointed role of policing the unregu-
lated world of supplements turned into an
obsessive quest. He now regularly analyzes
dozens of pills and powders every year,
pursuing any hunch that some dangerous
ingredient might be lurking beneath a too-
good-to-be-true marketing claim.
Adverse events related to dietary sup-
plements cause an estimated 23,000
emergency-room visits a year in the U. S.
Over an eight-year period starting in the
mid-aughts, more than 200 shady products
were taken off store shelves, according to an
analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine. And
it’s getting worse: Harvard researchers
recently found that dietary supplements
that claim to build muscle, sustain energy,
or help with weight loss were linked to nearly
three times as many severe medical events
in people 25 and under as vitamins alone.
Never mind that millions of Americans
spend billions of dollars every year on
supplements without a guarantee of even
minimal effectiveness. “Consumers in
America have the sense that the FDA is qui-
etly behind the scenes, ensuring that these
products are safe,” Dr. Cohen says. “That’s
the furthest thing from the truth.”
So he has stepped in where he sees the
FDA failing, becoming a toxic-supplement
hunter, bent on getting unsafe and misla-
beled products off the shelves. “He’s a leader
in the field,” says Patricia Deuster, Ph.D.,
the director of the Consortium for Health
and Military Performance at the Depart-
ment of Defense’s Uniformed Services
University, who studies supplements and
has coauthored papers with Dr. Cohen. “He
can really be out there in front, criticizing”
as an independent researcher not funded
by a company or employed by the govern-
ment, she says.
But being a solo sleuth and taking on both
the multibillion-dollar supplement indus-
try and the U. S. government is not without
its risks. “I think some people were proba-
bly like, ‘Pieter’s crazy,’ ” Dr. Cohen says.
“But to me, it’s fundamental to the work;
it’s an extension of caring for the patients.
Consumers are being harmed, and we need
to do something about it.”
TALL, BALD, AND FIT,
old and wears beat-up sneakers with his
scrubs. When talking about supplements,
he becomes loud and animated, laughing
incredulously about all the absurdities
he’s discovered. When he’s with patients,
however, he is calmer and carefully inquis-
itive. I visited him on a recent day during
the Covid era, and he’d added an unusual
piece of equipment to maximize that good
bedside manner: Instead of a face mask,
he sported an air-purifying respirator,
basically a hood with a clear face shield, so
that patients could read his lips and see his
facial expressions.
Dr. Cohen grew up in Lexington, Mas-
sachusetts, an affluent suburb of Boston,
the son of a lawyer and state superior-court
judge (his mom) and a professor of exper-
imental psychology (his dad). In the late
’80s, he enrolled at the University of Vir-
ginia, thinking he might become an ecolo-
gist. While studying in Brazil, he ventured
into the Amazon rainforest, where he met a
family that had to sell its beloved, ecologi-
cally important mahogany tree to pay for an
appendectomy. Another stint in the country
followed, during which he did public-health
research before heading to medical school
to help more underserved communities. “I
had all this privilege,” he says, “and I wanted
to make sure I gave back.”
 a part of the Harvard Medical School–
affiliated community health network, Cam-
bridge Health Alliance. His journey into the
supplement world deepened after he discov-
ered the local diet-pill problem and began
working to publicize it. One day his phone
rang; on the other end was a lawyer at the
FDA’s enforcement office, who sounded just
as frustrated as Dr. Cohen. The lawyer told
him, “What you’re seeing in Somerville
is what we’re seeing nationally” in terms
of weight-loss supplements being spiked
with drugs, Dr. Cohen says. And it wasn’t
just Brazilian diet pills; it was, potentially,
everything from brain boosters to protein
powders to vitamins on the shelves at bode-
gas, nutrition stores, and drugstores.  Now there are between 50,000 and north
Because many different manufactur-
ers make these products, issuing a recall
Page 88: Gretchen Ertl (Dr. Cohen). This page: Courtesy CBS This Morning. Anna Rabkina (Dr. Cohen at clinic, 2). Getty Images (supplements, 4).
that can be used to supplement the diet.
The FDA has no power to approve most
supplements before they hit the market
and little recourse to stop distribution
afterward. Look closely and you’ll see that
nearly every product has a generic dis-
claimer saying that it has not been formally
evaluated by the FDA. As a result, while
some products contain exactly what’s
listed on the label, others may manipu-
late their ingredients to cut costs or seem
miraculously effective. The first clue that
something is wrong may come only after
people have gotten sick.
When the law was passed, there were
about 4,000 supplements on the market.
of 80,000. Last year, the FDA issued only
49 warning letters alerting manufactur-
liver damage, many after taking OxyElite
Pro, one of the DMAA-containing weight-
loss and performance-enhancing supple-
ments, the state’s department of health
acted to remove the product from stores.
Dr. Cohen’s goal is to speed up that whole
process, to spur either the FDA or some other
governmental agency to act at the first sign
of trouble, before anyone else gets hurt. To
do so, he’s developed his own network of
doctors, academics, and doping experts
who share tips about what emerging prod-
uct ingredients might be harmful, and
he recruits nonprofit and academic labs
willing to analyze samples. Over the past
decade, this small pharma Rebel Alliance
has turned up an endless array of pills, pow-
ders, and botanical products containing

or seizing them directly from companies
can feel like playing whack-a-mixture.
“A lot of people would be like, ‘That’s not
my lane—let the lawyers or the public-
health experts figure that out,’ ” Dr. Cohen
says. Instead, he started studying chem-
ical structures, read about the history of
the FDA, and came to recognize some seri-
ous problems in the regulatory practices
for supplements, which he called out in
The New England Journal of Medicine as
a game of “American Roulette.”
The extremely loose rules of that game—
or how supplements fit into the FDA’s reg-
ulatory framework—weren’t formally
outlined until the 1990s, when, with body-
building and diet supplements gaining in
popularity, Congress considered legisla-
tion reining in supplement makers. The
industry objected with a well-financed
campaign, including a TV commercial
showing an armed squad seizing vitamin
C from Mel Gibson, and in 1994, Congress
passed an act governing supplements that
even one of its architects now says is faulty.
The FDA’s definition of a supplement
is any substance that contains a vitamin,
mineral, amino acid, herb, or botanical
ers about suspect products. Meanwhile, things like banned stimulants, alternate
the global supplement market grew to versions of dangerous stimulants, ingredi-
$140 billion in 2020 and is expected to keep ents with adverse effects at high doses, and
expanding fast. drugs that were unapproved in the U.S.
Case in point: In 2013, a source tipped
Dr. Cohen off that athletes using a popular
W H E N T H E F DA workout powder called Craze were testing
response has proved problematic. Con- positive for an unknown amphetamine.
sider the amphetamine derivative called The previous year, the product had been
DMAA, which is associated with heart named the “New Supplement of the Year”
attacks, seizures, and neurological prob- by Bodybuilding.com, and it was being
lems. In 2011, when two soldiers who sold in stores and through online retailers.
died while exercising were found to be When Dr. Cohen bought and tested it, he
taking workout supplements spiked with identified a chemical called DEPEA, which
the substance, the DOD banned the sale is similar to meth. (This was not, as the
of products containing this ingredient label claimed, dendrobium orchid extract.)
from its on-base stores. It also released Craze was manufactured by a Long
a warning about the dangers linked to Island–based company called Driven
DMA A-containing products. By April Sports, whose owner, Matt Cahill, had
2013, the FDA had received run other questionable supple-
From left: Dr.
86 reports of people harmed ment companies and already
Cohen sharing
by them. It issued a consumer supplement safety been sentenced for mail fraud
alert and, soon after, stopped concerns on CBS and shipping mislabeled drugs
the manufacturer from dis- This Morning in April to customers. In 2004, he also
tributing some of the prod- 2015; suiting up at developed a muscle-building
a Covid clinic in late
ucts. Until then, it had only 2020; meeting product that sparked customer
sent the manufacturer warn- about the pandemic reports of liver damage.
ing letters. in May 2020. Rather than wait for the FDA

MEN’S HEALTH |

shared the story with news outlets, includ-
ing The Boston Globe, CBS News, and ABC
News. That same week, Craze’s manufac-
turer announced it had ceased production
due to safety concerns, well ahead of any
FDA warning being issued. The product was
discontinued, creating a new kind of play-
book to help Dr. Cohen protect consumers.
In recent years, he has followed up on
tips that led to similar success at identify-
ing both an amphetamine variant called
BMPEA in several weight-loss supplements
and an unapproved neurologic drug called
picamilon in supposedly memory-boosting
products. As his public-awareness crusade
has grown, he’s found that more states are
willing to use his information to take action
ahead of the FDA and target stores directly.
After Dr. Cohen’s reports on BMPEA and
picamilon were released, Oregon’s attorney
general sued GNC and the Vitamin Shoppe
for selling products with the ingredients,
and the state of Nebraska filed a similar suit
against the Vitamin Shoppe.
The Vitamin Shoppe reached an agree-
ment with the Nebraska attorney general
to no longer sell products that contain
BMPEA. It settled the Oregon suit by agree-
ing to pay a roughly half-million-dollar fine
and pulling the products with the substances
that Dr. Cohen pinpointed from some
store shelves. It also agreed to immediately
suspend sales of anything with an FDA
warning or advisory and investigate the
safety of those products itself. In 2015, GNC
said that it had stopped selling picamilon
and BMPEA products, too, though it pub-
licly announced that the FDA had
not, at that point, raised safety
concerns about those ingredients.
GNC now claims that all prod-
ucts it sells must meet specific
standards for purity and strength.
(The company did not respond to
Men’s Health’s request for more
information.) A spokesperson
for the Vitamin Shoppe says that
vendors must assure the retailer
that their products “comply with
all applicable laws,” and all prod-
ucts are reviewed by its scientific
and regulatory affairs team before
being sold. Its store-brand prod-
ucts are also analyzed internally to
make sure they meet the expected
level of purity and potency.
Even Amazon, an emerging force
in the retail-supplement world,
says it has “proactive measures in
place to prevent suspicious, non-
92
compliant, or prohibited products from
being listed, and we continuously monitor
the products sold in our stores.” Amazon
requires companies to share a certificate
of analysis (testing confirming the make-
up of a product).
Dr. Cohen says even though some stores
and chains are taking steps to ensure the
safety of supplements amid serious short-
comings in the laws, smaller shops and
Internet sites will continue fueling the prob-
lem. With companies now seeking more
formal guidance, he’d like the FDA to issue
rulings more quickly, but that hasn’t hap-
pened. Three years ago, California’s Depart-
ment of Public Health noted that of about
750 supplements the FDA listed as “adul-
terated,” it had issued voluntary recalls for
fewer than half. “They’re simply not doing
their job,” he says of the agency.
The FDA has a more diplomatic stance.
“We appreciate stakeholder interaction
like this for raising awareness and bring-
ing needed attention to these matters,” a
spokesperson says. “We look forward to col-
laborating . . . to help ensure that products
marketed as dietary supplements are safe,
well-manufactured, and accurately labeled
while preserving the original commitment
to consumer access.”
DR. COHEN HAS
its lack of effectiveness for years—but he
never expected that he’d have to defend his
own tactics in court. The problem started
in 2014 after he read a study written by FDA
scientists about supplements that pur-
ported to contain Acacia rigidula, a Texas
shrub that had become popular on weight-
loss products’ labels.
FDA scientists tested 21 products
claiming to have the Acacia ingredient
and found that nine of them instead con-
tained synthetic material that turned out
to be BMPEA. However, the agency didn’t
list which supplements had the dangerous
ingredient. Dr. Cohen waited, figuring it
would at least issue warning letters to those
manufacturers. That didn’t come to pass.
One of Dr. Cohen’s biggest frustrations
is that even when the FDA knows about
sketchy products, it often doesn’t give con-
sumers useful information about them.
“When the months were passing and noth-
ing was happening, honestly, I couldn’t
believe it,” he says. So Dr. Cohen ran sim-
ilar research, and in 2015 he published a
study finding BMPEA in several supple-
ments for weight loss, sports, or cogni-
tive function. He listed the names of the
products and their manufacturers, as he
likes to do: It makes his research replica-
ble and gives consumers solid information
on what to avoid. A trio of senators—Dick
Durbin of Illinois, Richard Blumenthal of
Connecticut, and Chuck Schumer of New
York—became aware of the study after it
was published and started making news,
and they pushed the FDA to act.
This time, the agency quickly sent
warning letters to five companies telling
them to “immediately cease distribu-
tion.” But it wasn’t just the government
that noticed the paper.
That April, one of the companies Dr.
Cohen cited, Hi-Tech Pharmaceu-
ticals, sued him for $50 million in
compensatory damages as well as
$150 million for slander and libel
for publishing, then publicizing
in news outlets, his findings about
Hi-Tech’s supplements. The issue
wasn’t whether some of its products
included BMPEA; Hi-Tech admit-
ted in the lawsuit that they did.
Rather, Hi-Tech fought his state-
ments that BMPEA was dangerous,
hadn’t been rigorously tested in
humans, and wasn’t derived from
the natural Acacia rigidula source.
Despite the bankruptcy level
of damages attached, Dr. Cohen
wasn’t concerned at first. “I was
naively thinking, at the time, that
truthful speech is 100 percent
protected in America,” he says. It
wasn’t that simple: The case still
had to go to trial.

The good news? Harvard defended him,
covering the costs of the lawyers. The bad
news was everything else. In discovery, a
phase of litigation in which both sides seek
evidence, Dr. Cohen had to dig through his
emails to find anything related to this study
and hand it over to Hi-Tech. Then he had to
reread and analyze all those communica-
tions in case he was asked about them in his
deposition or at trial.
It got so all-consuming that in the early
mornings, before his wife and three kids
were up, or over the weekends at his kids’
sports practices, just about the only thing
Dr. Cohen did was recheck his own work.
“I spent every free moment I had,” he
says. After a six-day trial, during which he
argued that his speech was scientific opin-
ion, protected by the First Amendment,
and about a matter of public concern, the
jury found in his favor.
Hi-Tech’s CEO and law yers did not
respond to requests for comment, and while
some of its brand names that Dr. Cohen ana-
lyzed are still available, it’s unclear whether
the company has altered the supplements’
makeup. As for Dr. Cohen’s case, it was a
win but one unlikely to encourage other
independent investigators. “The degree
of scrutiny that his work was put under is
something that, honestly, I think very few
academics would like to go through,” says
Dan Levy, Ph.D., a professor of public policy
at Harvard and a friend of Dr. Cohen’s.
For Dr. Cohen, the trial had a single
upside: His work was having enough of an
effect that a company tried to stop him. “I
definitely didn’t want to have research that
is just sitting there and never read,” he says.
“I want to have a positive impact on health.”
He went right back to his research and to
calling out brand names and companies.
IN SPITE OF
suits, Dr. Cohen has not slowed down. He’s
now published more than 50 academic
papers, many skewering major manufac-
turers for being less than forthright, and in
many cases downright fraudulent, about
their products and promises. He’s made
stores more accountable for what they’re
carrying by giving state regulators action-
able information to get ahead of problems,
even if the FDA is slow to take measures.
Getty Images (supplements, 4)
Dr. Cohen paused these investigations
when the global pandemic hit, as he put
all his energy into sharing anything that
might be helpful for doctors trying to diag-
nose and treat Covid. This past March, for
the first time since the pandemic began, Dr.
THE MH GUIDE TO
S AFER SUPPLEMENT
SHOPPING
Products that promise bigger muscles,
increased energy, and weight loss are
among the most commonly spiked.
Even if you’re just buying vitamins,
here are three tips from
Dr. Cohen to make sure you’re getting
what should be in the bottle.
Stick to well-studied ingredients like
protein, amino acids, and creatine.
When in doubt, check the USADA’s
high-risk list and the DOD’s
supplement-safety program.
Avoid bold claims. Go for “protein
powder,” not a “muscle builder,” or
“ginkgo,” not a “memory enhancer.”
Look for third-party certifications
of independent testing from places
like USP, ConsumerLab.com, and
NSF International.
sports and weight-loss supplements with
labels that listed deterenol, a stimulant
that can cause sweating, nausea, and car-
diac arrest, as an ingredient.
Deterenol has never been approved
for humans in the U. S. In 2004, the FDA
determined that it is not permitted as a
dietary ingredient in supplements. That
some brands advertise it explicitly or use
scientific synonyms, Dr. Cohen says, is a
classic example of just how openly man-
ufacturers flout FDA rules. Four of the
supplements he tested didn’t contain the
prohibited substance at all, despite the
claim that they did; all the others con-
tained it or had cocktails of deterenol
with other stimulants. “It’s dizzying how
complicated these products are,” he says,
“which is incredibly frustrating from the
perspective of the FDA not doing its job.”
In the meantime, plainly hyperbolic
online reviews of some of these products
suggest how strong they might be. Of Chaos
and Pain’s Cannibal Ferox Pre Workout,
one reviewer wrote, “This stuff is just a few
levels below cocaine . . . . I can smell colors.”
Of Psycho Pharma’s Edge of Insanity Pre
Workout, a reviewer said, “As I like to call it,
edge of a heart attack.” That’s a little differ-
ent from the brand’s promise of “Exploding
Muscle Pumps, Zen Energy, Razor Focus”
and “Psycho Endurance”—all printed in
bold lettering on the front of each jug. (Nei-
ther Chaos and Pain nor Psycho Pharma
responded to requests for comment.)
another governmental authority uses his
latest round of intel to take these drugs off
the market. At press time, the FDA had yet
to act. “We appreciate studies like this for
raising awareness and bringing needed
attention to these matters,” an FDA spokes-
person says. “However, in general, the FDA
does not comment on specific studies but
evaluates them as part of the body of evi-
dence to further our understanding about
a particular issue and assist in our mission
to protect public health.”
Regardless, Dr. Cohen won’t stop sound-
ing the alarm. He understands that the
FDA is weak and its mandate woefully out-
dated. The real culprit, then, is Congress,
for failing to create new laws that solve the
problem. And whenever there’s a prob-
lem with Congress, it’s actually a problem
concerning us—the people who hire our
representatives to make laws in our name.
So he plans to keep working, unpaid, even
harder. “The better that people understand
[the issues], the better the eventual law we
might be able to have,” he says.
His next task: studying CBD products
along with more traditional supplements.
He’s also suggested a regulatory overhaul
at the FDA, both in academic publications
and on calls with congressional staff and
consumer advocates. Earlier this year, the
FDA requested legislation requiring that all
supplements for sale be registered, which
would give the agency a better handle on
the market and the ability to act when dan-
gerous or illegal ingredients are introduced.
Personally, Dr. Cohen doesn’t even take a
multivitamin. “My take is just: It’s best to go
with exercise and healthy food, and you have
to have pretty strong evidence to convince
me that something is better than that,” he
says. But he did make a small concession at
home: When his 19-year-old son got inter-
ested in supplements and his 15-year-old
son started watching TikToks on pre-work-
out regimens, he let one of them try protein
powders. Now, though, they stick to healthy
diets—not sports supplements.
He understands the pressure that comes
with comparing yourself with others, and
how anyone who has lost a step or wants
to stay one step ahead might go search-
ing for an edge. So Dr. Cohen continues
to research and write and pitch and advo-
cate, trying to get a single message to con-
sumers of supplements: Buyer beware.
MEN’S HEALTH |
Jean-Claude
Van Damme at a
private gym in Los
Angeles in May.
Jean-Claude Van Damme, now 60, has fought every onscreen bad guy
imaginable. But his biggest battle has always been against himself.
By ALEX PAPPADEMAS

Photographs by Maggie Shannon

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 95

 IT’S JEAN-CLAUDE
VAN DAMME CALLING.
He asks, “How are you?” and before he can
hear an answer, there’s a commotion on
his end—phone-fumbling sounds; a tiny
Chihuahua freaking out; Van Damme’s
wife, Gladys Portugues, laughing; his
own low chuckle. 
“Ah la la,” sighs Van Damme, back on
the line. It sounds like French for What
can you do?  
“I’ve got my dog next to me on the table,”
he explains, “and we just got back from
the Caribbean”—again the dog yaps, and
Van Damme says, “Lola, stop it” in a firm,
don’t-test-me tone—“and she is so jealous
of my wife, it’s unbelievable.”
Lately Van Damme and Lola have also
been in France, Belgium, Italy, and Monaco.
“So Mademoiselle Lola is now spoiled,
because she’s been going from hotel to
hotel.” He speaks to the dog one more time,
his voice high and sweet—“Right, Lola?”—
and then chuckles, as if delighted to know
there’s a creature in the world that loves
him this much. Heh heh heh heh.  liness that led him to drugs, about his
There’s another explosion of tiny barks.
Van Damme laughs. “Lola. Stop it.” He tries
again, more sternly. “Lola. Stop. Stop. Stop.”  speaks of his former self as Van Damme,
Van Damme turned 60 last October. In
his time on this planet, he’s been a nobody
from Belgium, a global box-office sensa-
tion, a coke-torqued tabloid train wreck,
and a ’90s-kitsch punchline. When he was
38, he told interviewers sincerely that he
believed he’d be dead of a massive heart
attack by 50—and this was after he kicked
the drugs, recommitting to work and fam-
ily and fitness and Gladys, who’d cared
for their son and daughter, Kristopher
and Bianca, during the years Van Damme
spent letting his demons drive.
Van Damme and Gladys got divorced
in 1992, as his wild years ramped up, but
they remarried by the end of the decade,
making Gladys his fifth wife as well as his
third wife. If not for her? “Impossible for
me to talk today,” Van Damme says. Mean-
ing he wouldn’t be alive. His implosion was
well-documented—gossip columns and
leaked divorce-court depositions painted
the usual picture of an uncontrollable
superstar enslaved by his own appetites.
Writer-director Steven E. de Souza told The
Guardian that Van Damme was “coked out of
his mind” on the set of 1994’s Street Fighter,
when he could be persuaded to show up.
96 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH
He’d cleaned up by 2008, when he
starred in JCVD, playing himself as a
faded action-movie star trapped in a hos-
tage situation at the post office. The film
is a comedy, but in its most astounding
sequence, a crane lifts Van Damme out of
the scene he’s in and into the rafters of the
set, where he speaks directly to the cam-
era—or possibly through it, to God—for
six tearful, mostly improvised minutes,
in French, about the luxury-hotel lone-
years of self-destruction and addiction
and the guilt he still carries with him. He
la Bête—the Beast—and seems convinc-
ingly and maybe irreparably broken as a
person. “I got out of it,” he says at one point.
“But . . . it’s all there. It’s all there.”
VAN DAMME IS AN undisputed icon of
action cinema, a living cautionary tale
about the dangers of believing your own
hype, and a symbol of cheeseball ’90s
excess. Since JCVD, he’s continued walk-
ing a path of self-awareness about all of
this, winking knowingly at the more
swole-headed aspects of his cinematic
legacy in projects like the brilliant Ama-
zon Studios meta-comedy series Jean-
Claude Van Johnson—Van Damme in
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind mode,
playing an aging action star who’s secretly
a superspy, among other fun-house-
mirror versions of himself—and the 2013
Volvo ad in which he does his trademark
split between two moving semi trucks
while Enya sings “Only Time.”  the dancing fool from Kickboxer.
Perhaps you’ve seen GIFs of Van Damme
dancing in voluminous khakis and a
suspender-strapped tank top in 1989’s Kick-
boxer. So has Van Damme, and at jcvdshop
.com you can buy a hoodie or a coffee mug
with a dancing Jean-Claude on it—and
you can also see present-day Van Damme
modeling some of these items, cosigning
our ironic enjoyment.
Maybe you saw him dancing again last
year, mixing up martial arts and early bal-
let training and freestyle dad-at-the-rave
moves in EDM duo AaRON’s “Ultrarêve”
video, directed by his daughter. Perhaps his
disarmingly sage and serene social-media
presence has come across your timeline—
inspirational quotes on the importance
of patience, accented with context-
appropriate Bloodsport screenshots.
Maybe you haven’t seen all or any of the
30-plus feature films and TV-show appear-
ances he’s made since the year 2000, but
the later part of the career’s going well, too.
Van Damme’s name can still get an action
movie made, so there is always a script with
a title like 6 Bullets or Assassination Games
or The Hard Corps or Replicant that calls
for Van Damme to play a guy named some-
thing like Samson Gaul or Vincent Brazil
or Philippe Sauvage or Edward Garrotte.
These days, it’s easier than ever for
aging-but-still-recognizable action stars
to grab top billing and a quick paycheck
in exchange for a few glorified-cameo
minutes of screen time in movies that can
be misleadingly packaged to fool some
sucker at a Redbox kiosk. But Van Damme
actually shows up and stars in his movies,
even if he keeps his stunt doubles slightly
busier than he used to, and he brings to
the work a weathered, actorly gravitas that
might surprise you if you know him only as
That’s how he’s spent the past decade or
so, performing a split bridging viral silli-
ness and the solemnity of the action hero
in winter. But his new movie—his first
project for Netflix—doesn’t slot comfort-

ably into either category. It’s called The Last
Mercenary. He plays a former secret agent
pulled back into the game, does the splits,
and kicks people in the face, per tradition.
But he also struggles to connect with a long-
lost son, nails a few deadpan moments, and
slips on a tux to pull a heist—and he does
it all in French, a language he grew up
speaking but has rarely acted in. There are
a few meta jokes about Van Damme’s Van
Damme-ness, but mostly it’s JCVD pulling
off the kind of warm and goofy action com-
edy he’s never had the chance to try before.
This is a new zone for Van Damme, who
until now has done his best work as an
actor in subdued, haunted-man roles with
a narrower emotional register. “He’s not
like that in real life,” says The Last Merce-
nary director David Charhon, a longtime
fan who wrote the film with Van Damme in
mind. “He’s sparkling, luminous, funny.
I said, ‘It’s amazing that no one’s shown
him in a movie how he is!’ ”
THE CARIBBEAN VACATION was his first real
time off in years, Van Damme says.   I’ve been around the world so many times.”
“I bought a mini motor yacht,” he says.
“My little Lolita, my dog, and a captain
and a stewardess, and you go from island
to island. You anchor, you swim. Go eat
some grilled fish. Come back at night.
There’s no sound. No paparazzi. No phone,
because WiFi is very weak.”  science calls this the U-curve, a reference
They were out there three months—just
the old man, his Chihuahua, and the sea.  life and rebound when approaching retire-
“Every day I was having the ocean in
front of me,” Van Damme says. “Which is
basically everything. It’s beautiful, but it’s
nothing. So you see infinity. You have time
to see everything and nothing. And to think
about something else. To think about: What
else should I do in my life to be completed?”
When Van Damme speaks of his own
death, this is how he speaks of it—calmly,
as if it were an item pending on the sched-
ule. It keeps coming up, though, almost
out of nowhere. At one point, he pauses
midsentence; says, “Don’t worry—it’s not
Covid”; then blows his nose hard, a honk
that echoes through the room. When he
returns to the phone, he’s suddenly talking
about a routine surgical procedure he has
coming up, his anxiety about it. He worries
only about not being here for his family.
“I’ve made some good money. I’ve got
some properties. I want to make sure my
children understand the value of every-
thing. And then I’ve got no problem to go.
He has arrived at this point meditatively.
“Makes me feel good, by the way—they say
most successful men are from 60 to 70,” he
says. “Second position is from 70 to 80”—
heh heh heh—“if I can make it, agewise.”
By “successful,” he means happy. Social
Van Damme
continues to push
himself physically,
in part to stay
mentally healthy.
to the way happiness tends to dip at mid-
ment age. What “retirement age” means
in a Van Damme context is subjective. Sly
and Arnold appear poised to work through
their 70s, after all, and so does Jackie
Chan. And besides, Van Damme’s been
defying the odds for years. 
In Belgium in the 1980s—when he was
a former Mr. Belgium and the holder of a
few karate-tournament titles—he opened
a gym, which he named California Gym,
after a place he’d never been. He ensured its
success by placing “all the beautiful machin-
ery, the chrome ones, for the ladies, in front
of the window, so people saw all these beau-
tiful women training.” He made a pile of
money, put it in the bank in his father’s
name so he couldn’t touch it, and moved to
Los Angeles with only $3,000 in his pocket,
figuring if he couldn’t make it with $3,000,
he wouldn’t make it with $5,000, either. 
In L. A., five years passed. Van Damme
learned English, slept in his car, deliv-
ered pizzas, laid carpet, drove a limo, and
racked up mostly ignominious screen
credits—blink and you’ll miss him as
a unitard-clad Venice Beach dancer in
1984’s Breakin’. He carried around karate
magazines with his picture on the covers
in case he ran into a producer who could
give him a job. Of course, that’s not how it
works, but it ended up working for him. 
MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 97
 The story is that Van Damme saw the
producer Menahem Golan, a cofounder of
Cannon Films, at a restaurant. He showed
how high he could kick by kicking up and
over Golan’s head, and that’s how Van
Damme booked Bloodsport.  bona fide movie star—playing twin Van
This is more or less true, but it leaves out
the part with Van Damme calling and call-
ing and hearing nothing back from Golan,
coming close to giving up, and sitting in
his apartment thinking, It’s over; I cannot
do more—which is when his phone rings.
He’s summoned to Golan’s office. Golan
says to his secretary, “Karen, bring me
Bloodsport,” and Van Damme is handed
the script that will change his life, no sil-
ver platter necessary.  asked him to look into the camera and cel-
In the film, based on the too-wild-to-
fact-check recollections of a novelist,
martial artist, and self-professed ex–CIA
operative named Frank Dux, Van Damme
plays a soldier who goes AWOL to fight in
a secret, full-contact martial-arts tour-
nament in Hong Kong. It’s as if the script
had been crafted for the express purpose
Van Damme with
a karate magazine
from 1991, the kind he
once carried to help
sell his potential.
of creating the need for a Jean-Claude
Van Damme type of actor.
Released in 1988, Bloodsport reportedly
made $50 million on a $2 million budget,
and by the early ’90s, Van Damme was a
Dammes in Double Impact, battling Dolph
Lundgren as a zombie-cyborg Vietnam vet
in Universal Soldier.  which much of the foregoing was a symptom.
He was a meaner, prettier Arnold 2.0
with a rockin’ mullet, unafraid to bare
his ass onscreen (or brag about his abil-
ity to crush a walnut with his glutes). In
1991, dressed in Patrick Bateman sus-
penders like a cocky junk-bond trader,
Van Damme sat with Arsenio Hall, who
ebrate his newfound heat by saying, “Yo,
I’m large, baby.” Grinning, Van Damme
turned to the camera and said something
that sounded like “Yo, I’m enlarged, baby.”
A f ter Tim ecop ma de more tha n
$100 million in the mid-’90s, Universal
offered him $12 million for three more films.
Van Damme—now enlarged, yo, at least in
his own mind—asked for $20 million. Since
he had built himself up from nothing, now
you could tell him nothing. So went the next
few years—gluttony, ego, bad choices. A
$10,000-a-week cocaine habit. A tabloid-
ugly divorce from his fourth wife, Darcy
LaPier. Reported DUIs, an attempt at rehab,
an eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder, of
By not dying in the ’90s, he’s lived to
watch the world become less interesting, a
process that seems to have started for him
even before all human interaction shrank
to the size of a Zoom window. “I’m kind of—
how do you say?—blasé, kind of bored,” Van
Damme says. “Because everything now, it’s
on the screen.” If this is how life’s going to
be from here on out, he’s glad his work
allowed him to hang out in Kazakhstan and
Indonesia before everything changed. But
he’s also hopeful about the future. 
“Every two-thousand-something-five-
hundred years, we are changing constel-
lations,” he says. “In all the biblical books,
the Koran or the Torah or the Gospel, they
have the fish as a symbol. And now we are
entering the constellation of Aquarius—
it’s a totally different cycle of life, if you
understand cosmologies. It’s very import-
ant, this coming couple of years, in terms
of the human cycle.”
MAYBE IT’S EASIER to see the cyclical qual-
ity of things when you’ve cratered your
career at least once and have found your-
self on the upswing again, flying private
to Paris to make a movie for Netflix. Call
it a comeback if you like, but the truth is,
Van Damme’s already had a better 21st
century than any other action star of his
approximate vintage. 
That includes the nearly $315-million-
grossing Expendables 2, in which he
squared off with Stallone for the first time
as arms dealer Jean Vilain, and Kung Fu
Panda 2, with his voice cameo as a croco-
dile who fights a peacock played by Gary
Oldman. (Listen for Van Damme in next
year’s Minions: The Rise of Gru; he’s the
voice of Jean-Clawed, a villain with an
enormous crustacean pincer for a hand.)
But it also includes some smaller, darker
films, in which the cumulative spiritual
consequences of a life nearly squandered
seem to be written on Van Damme’s carved-
stone Buster Keaton face. 
The best of these films are the two
deranged quasi-sequels to Universal Sol-
dier that he made in 2009 and 2012 with
Lundgren and director John Hyams. The
latter, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning,
 Van Damme
with his wife,
Gladys, in the The star anchoring JCVD in 1986’s No
early ’90s. Street Fighter in 1994. Retreat, No Surrender.

is almost certainly the only Van Damme conscious, and the experience was a rev- good movie, click out. Because I’m a thinker.
movie ever compared to the work of Werner elation. After that, he says, “I was able to So when I do the bicycle and the yoga and
Herzog, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, jump from martial arts to telling the truth, the training and the gym, I don’t think.”
and Gaspar Noé by The Paris Review. basically—not to act.”  And there’s the work, which has become
In the later Universal Soldier movies, about conserving energy until just the
Lundgren and Van Damme have been res- THAT MONOLOGUE he delivers five years later right moment. “Every time I can sit some-
urrected so many times that they no longer in JCVD might be his peak as both an actor where, on the set, not just stay on my feet,
remember why they’re determined to kill and a truth teller, but it also seems to come I save everything I can save,” he says. “So
each other, but they keep trying anyway; a from a dark and perhaps inescapable emo- what you have to do is save the car. Don’t
series that began as a comic-book treatise tional place. The movie is now 13 years old; drive that car to the market. Drive another
on the horrors of war becomes a grim met- Van Damme is asked what the Van Damme one. Only drive this one on Sunday.”
aphor for the bloody-knuckled monotony of of today makes of the Van Damme who He owes it to Gladys to keep kicking.
an action star’s professional life.  ad-libbed that speech. “If not, I will be rotting at home,” he says.
The Bouncer (2018) isn’t as conceptual— “That’s a good question,” he says. He “Not as a human, but mentally. And my
it’s basically a Taken movie with a touch stops. Gathers thoughts. “I’ve passed that wife will feel so bad to see me this way. She
of The Wrestler, starring Van Damme as bump. I went down, and I came back up in a knows I like to construct.”
a single dad mixed up with Eurosleaze rearranged kind of way. That beast you saw He is aware of the Bloodsport reboot,
counterfeiters. But it’s also quiet and did go to the garage”—he makes a vroom- long in the works. “If they don’t do it, they
mournful: Van Damme moves slower, gets vroom sound—“for a big adjustment. Yes, are crazy,” he says. But his interest is else-
Grooming: Juanita Lyon using Dermalogica. Getty Images (1991). Alamy (1994). Everett Collection (1986).

knocked around, seems to feel every hit. it’s possible. Quote me: ‘Yes, it’s possible.’ I where. There’s a film he wants to make
He’s turned into the kind of actor whose repeat, quote me: ‘It can be achieved.’ ” called Headlock, which he says will be a
presence can elevate a routine script, He’s learned to keep the beast in check. martial-arts epic with whiffs of Rocky.
imbuing it with emotional weight.  He’s found healthier ways to get out of his The script is by Oscar-winning Green Book
The way Van Damme sees it, this new head. He rides a stationary bike, tries to cowriter Nick Vallelonga. Van Damme
chapter of his acting career began in find the pace where the rhythm of the cycle explains the story and its visuals in a few
2003, with In Hell, his third and final syncs up with his heartbeat.  impossible-to-follow sentences—some-
collaboration with Hong Kong cinema “When you are at that level,” he says, thing about the color red increasing in
legend Ringo Lam, who died in 2018.  “you click your brain out of your body, put intensity, about his character waking from
“[Lam] said you have to play a guy who is it somewhere, in the iCloud, okay? And a coma and a twist involving a second coma. 
more honest than you are in real life,” Van then you start to feel the muscle. You start At the end, he says, “I die for love. Oh my
Damme says. “And when he said that, I to breathe, feel the inside. You start to God, what a movie! I know they want to
understood, click. The way you are sitting. feel the machina—the machine—and the [remake] Bloodsport, but they’re gonna
Legs together. Not like a movie star. Don’t beating of your heart.” put—sorry for the expression—tits and
put your hands around the sofa. Who the He does yoga, too, as he has for 25 years. ass and all that bullshit. It doesn’t belong
fuck do you think you are? Proper. Back “It’s a big cure,” he says. “You can clean lots of to me anymore. I’m 60—I want to do
straight. You have a boss. You’re an employee. carbon dioxide inside your body by breath- something beautiful.”
You are receiving a check, every month.” ing. That’s what I do. And then also go to the
It was the first time Van Damme had gym, train every day. That’s the best way mlex pmppmdemms has written for GQ,
ever rooted a performance in his sub- to feel good. And also watch sometimes a The New York Times, and Grantland.

MEN’S HEALTH | JULY • AUGUST 2021 99

 METROGRADES
THIS MONTH
GREENEST

1. Burlington, VT
2. Virginia Beach, VA
3. Buffalo, NY
AMERICA’S 4. Honolulu, HI
5. Greensboro, NC

GREENEST 6. Portland, ME
7. Boston, MA

CITIES 8. Anchorage, AK
9. Madison, WI
10. Fargo, ND

N O T- S O -
G R E E N E ST
91. Salt Lake City, UT
WITH THE pandemic (sort of, maybe) under control, vaccinated 92. Wilmington, DE
life has left us with a sense of What planetary threats can we 93. Baton Rouge, LA
tackle next? The good news is that some U. S. cities already have 94. Anaheim, CA
a head start on earth-killing, buzz-killing climate change. Our
95. Birmingham, AL
researchers assessed 100 of the most populous cities for air qual-
ity, green space, LEED-certified public buildings, and chemical 96. Memphis, TN
usage (which included toxic-release totals, drinking-water vio- 97. Louisville, KY
lations, number of Superfund sites, and resident proximity to 98. Houston, TX
the sites). These are the U. S. cities where it’s easiest to be green. 99. Indianapolis, IN
100. Los Angeles, CA

1 4 7
BURLINGTON, HONOLULU, BOSTON,
VERMONT HAWAII MASSACHUSETTS
This city raked in the most top 10 The Big Pineapple had one Boston had the highest green-
scores across categories—its air of the highest scores for the space score of all 100 cities.
clean, its buildings green, and its number of LEED-certified public Credit goes to its 930 parks. (Every
vast stretches of parkland pristine. buildings—a whopping 534 of resident lives within a ten-minute
(Feel free to use that as a motto, them. LEED buildings must meet walk of one.) If you’re not a Bosto-
Burlington.) The Queen City is also indoor-air-quality standards. Good nian, consider planting a tree: One
the first U. S. city to run entirely air may stave off respiratory mature tree absorbs 48 pounds of
on renewable energy—and it’s allergies, fatigue, and even prob- CO2 a year. The average car emits
been doing so since 2015. lems with concentration. 0.78 pounds of CO2 per mile.

To see where your city ranks on our list of 100, go to MensHealth.com/greenestcities.

METHODOLOGY: Air quality (including unhealthy ozone days, particle pollution, greenhouse-gas emissions, and resident traffic proximity) made up 30 percent of our weighted rankings. Chemical usage (including total chemical
disposal, drinking-water violations, Superfund sites per county, and resident proximity to hazardous waste) accounted for 30. Green spaces (including parks per capita, percentage of city land used for parks, and resident proxim-
ity) represented 30. The number of public LEED buildings per capita made up the final 10. Sources: County Health Rankings, EPA, the Trust for Public Land, U. S. Census Bureau, U. S. Green Building Council, city and county records.

Men’s Health (ISSN 1054-4836) Vol. 36, No. 6 is published 10 times per year, monthly except combined issues in January/February and July/August and when future combined issues are published that count as two issues as indicated
on the issue’s cover, by Hearst at 300 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019. Steven R. Swartz, President & Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Mark E. Aldam, Chief
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Operating Officer. Hearst Magazines, Inc.: Debi Chirichella, President, Hearst Magazines Group, and Treasurer; Kate Lewis, Chief Content Officer; Jack A. Rohan Jr., Senior Vice President, Finance; Kristen M. O’Hara, Chief Business
Officer; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Copyright 2021 by Hearst Magazines, Inc. All rights reserved. Men’s Health is a registered trademark of Hearst Magazines, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and at additional mailing
offices. Postmaster: Send all UAA to CFS. (See DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address changes to Men’s Health Customer Service, P.O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593-1500. IN CANADA: Postage paid at
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100 JULY • AUGUST 2021 | MEN’S HEALTH

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