NOW WITH BOOSTED MAGNESIUM,

ZINC & VITAMIN D

Always read the label and follow the directions for use.
Nielsen© & IQVIA™, RMS/Sell Out Service, Vitamins Minerals & Supplements, Australia Pharmacy and Grocery, Total Value Sales, MAT to 31/03/2022.
 AUSTRALIA’S *
#1 MULTIVITAMIN
JUST GOT BETTER

NEW LOOK &

IMPROVED
FORMULA

REACH FOR
YOUR REASON
 CONTENTS

COVER GUY:
TIM ROBARDS
PHOTOGRAPHED BY:
JODY PACHNIUK

Who better to help

celebrate our 25th birthday
than TV star and fitness guru
TIM ROBARDS? In a record-
breaking fourth cover
appearance, the man with the
best body in the business reflects
on his own impending milestone
birthday (his 40th) and why it's

70
making him hungrier than ever
to achieve his goals.

HUNGRY
HEART
6 MEN’S HE ALTH
 116
INSIDE THIS ISSUE

T A C T IC S
p32 Switch Off The Noise

127
New columnist Osher GÜnsberg on
how to tune out mental static.

p98 The Dude Survives

THE BEAR-GORILLA FLOW
What do you get if you cross a bear with
a gorilla? Aside from some pesky ethical
concerns, a killer core and back! Fortify yourself
against injury by unlocking the beast within.
How Hollywood heavyweight
THE MH FITNESS AWARDS
Previously pro-level kit is increasingly available Jeff Bridges beat cancer then COVID.
to consumers. From smartwatches to smart
dumbbells, we break down the gear that could MIND
help take your fitness to new heights. p16 'Phubbing' Fix
Snubbing friends for phones is a
modern epidemic.Here's how to
end digital dependence.

p44 Enough With Hustle

Why the key to getting ahead
at work may lie in doing less.

N UT R I T I ON
p30 Perfect Salmon
Knock up this ocean’s bounty
to net a hefty protein and fibre haul.

p40 Attack Food Allergies

Adult-onset food allergies are
on the rise. Discover the keys to
keeping your lunch down.

80
DEATH BECOMES YOU
Ever wonder what happens when you croak?
Join a very big club. The world's leading expert
on near-death experiences reveals what he's
learned from those who’ve seen the other side.
20
BIG BROTHER
Actor Luke Hemsworth traded sanding floors
for the bright lights of Hollywood. Find out
how this down-to-earth bloke found a way to
emerge from you-know-who’s shadow.
FITNESS
p94 Diversity In Dumbbells
Find out how Black-owned fitness
brands are changing the gear game .
p121 Welcome To Knee Hab
Could a controversial 'cure' for
chronic knee pain transform
your athletic potential?

SEPTEMBER 2022 7
 EDITOR’S LETTER
Silver Lining
“I GET KNOCKED DOWN, but I get
up again.” You sing along defiantly as
Tubthumping blasts through the stereo, the
third time you’ve heard this anthem in as
many hours thanks to the high rotation of
the So Fresh: Hits of Winter CD in your
stacker. You adjust the volume as the
melody competes with the blare of a nearby
siren and your own car horn: another New
Volkswagen Beetle has cut you off, this one
lime green.
The commotion kicks off a fit of crying
from your daughter in the backseat. She’s
already on edge after the untimely passing
of her Tamagotchi. “You’re never gonna
keep me down.”
You’ll likely miss tonight’s screening of
Titanic with your wife due to this traffic, so
it looks like another night on the couch
watching Princess Diana tributes. What’s
more, you’ll forgo the gym for a fifth
consecutive day – a real shame as your
affinity for those new McFlurry desserts is
starting to take its toll on your waistline.
The year is 1997, your job’s a joke, you’re
broke and no one told you life was going to
be this way. Mercifully, help is on the way.
Launched with the promise of providing
“heaps of useful stuff”, Men’s Health
Australia – a monthly guidebook to fitness,
nutrition, sex, fatherhood, mindfulness
– hit the newsstands in the spring of 1997.
The past 25 years have been a wild ride, with
reckonings aplenty, perhaps none more so
than for both men and magazines.
8 MEN’S HE ALTH
menshealth.com.au Men's Health Australia @MensHealthAU @menshealthaustralia
SCOTT HENDERSON
Editor
BEN JHOTY
Deputy Editor
DANIEL WILLIAMS
Associate Editor
In the years that followed the print launch of MH, the
JASON LEE
digital revolution began to loom large, presenting an Creative Director
exciting avenue for men to research and discover aspects of
ALISON COTTON
their health in a more private setting. As a former digital Contributing Editor
editor of this brand, I know exactly what you were NIKOLINA ILIC
searching for – and let me tell you: you were NOT alone. The Digital Editor
subsequent advent and explosion of social media further JESSICA CAMPBELL
Digital Content Writer
transformed how we were able to connect with you, our
HANNAH CHAPMAN
audience. Social media offered you a line not only to our Contributing Designer
team, but the talent and experts we profile and work with
every month. Our unprecedented access to the brightest
minds in the health world remains our greatest tool in
delivering the latest health information into the palm IAN BROOKS
of your hand. Chief Executive Officer
LLOYD O’HARTE
Despite the best efforts of Men’s Health and others, 25 Executive Director
years down the line men continue to fall behind in most RACHEL SULLIVAN
areas of health and wellbeing, with higher rates of physical National Commercial Director
rachel@paragonmedia.com.au
illness, lower rates of engagement with medical services
CHRIS MATTHEWS
and much poorer mental-health outcomes. Partnerships & Integration Manager
JORDAN LOZINA
Yet the tide is turning. Male health and masculinity have Partnerships & Integration Manager
experienced seismic shifts, particularly in recent years, NATALIE WARD
with burgeoning movements around toxic masculinity, Commercial Consultant
racial and gender equality, and mental wellbeing EMILY WHITE
Content Activations Coordinator
presenting the perfect moment to marry the goals of
EMMA-ROSE GREENWOOD
optimum physical and mental health. The modern man is Content Activations Coordinator
gravitating ever more strongly towards a type of fitness
LEE MCLACHLAN
focused at least as much on the inside as it is on broad Creative Services
shoulders and visible abs. He is hungry for information, JULIE HUGHES
inspiration and practical means to enhance his health. Subscription Manager
subscribe@paragonmedia.com.au
I’ve often heard it said that it’s a tough time to be a man. PARAGON DCN PTY LTD
Perhaps, however, we needed a reckoning. And as we look ABN 73627 186 350. PO Box 81,
St Leonards, NSW 1590
towards the next 25 years, I’d argue that there has never
14/174 Willoughby Road,
been a better time to be a man; archaic stereotypes have Crows Nest NSW 2062
been dismantled and masculinity is ripe for redefining. Ph (02) 9439 1955, paragonmedia.com.au
The slate is clean and we, the men of now and the future,
can reshape men’s health in a way that supports and
nurtures both ourselves and the world we inhabit. JONATHAN WRIGHT
President, Hearst Magazines Int.
KIM ST. CLAIR BODDEN
With that in mind, our goal here at Men’s Health remains
SVP/Editorial & Brand Director
the same as it’s always been: to equip the men of Australia
CHLOE O’BRIEN
with the wisdom to live their healthiest lives, armed with Global Editorial Brands Director
“heaps of useful stuff”, so that when life inevitably does INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS
knock you down, you will get back up again, stronger and Australia, China, Germany, Italy,
Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Poland,
healthier than before. Portugal, S. Africa, Spain, UK, US
Published and Distributed by Paragon DCN Pty Ltd by
Permission of Hearst Magazines, Inc., New York, New York,
United States of America. Printed and retail distribution by
Ovato Limited. Published 12 times a year. All rights reserved.
Title and trademark Men’s Health © Hearst Magazines
International. No part of this publication may be reproduced
without written permission. Men’s Health is a registered
trademark and the unauthorised use of this trademark is
strictly prohibited. issn 13293079. © 2021 Paragon DCN.
Scott Henderson Men’s Health acknowledges the Cammeraygal people,
Traditional Custodians of the land on which this
scott@menshealth.com.au publication is produced, and pay our respects to their
Elders past and present. We extend that respect to all
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
 MH
RADAR
Celebrating 25 Years
FOR A QUARTER of a century, Men’s Health has been helping Australian men
get fitter, eat better, work smarter and build more satisfying relationships.
In the process, MH staff – writers, designers, other creatives – have amassed
a lifetime of tell-your-grandkids memories. Here’s the pick of them
SEPTEMBER, 2008
Tim Robards
Four-time MH Cover Guy
I was in my mid-teens when
Men’s Health arrived in Australia
– and it inspired me like no other
magazine ever has. Pimply and
quite skinny at the time, the sight
of the classically shot MH cover
guys made me want to train hard
and often. When I appeared on the
September 2008 cover, it felt both
surreal and like a kind of destiny.
I’ve since been on three more –
and the thrill never wanes.
Daniel Williams Associate Editor
Though I’ve been an on-and-off
sportswriter for more than three
decades, June 28 last year marked
the first time I’d spoken to Shane
a tragic
10 MEN’S HE ALTH
Luke Benedictus
Former Editor & Contributing Editor OCTOBER, 1997
In November 2018, I was at the Melbourne
Cup, cursing into my beer after backing Ian Brooks
yet another loser, when a stranger in CEO, Paragon Media
a trilby tapped me on the shoulder. My involvement with Men’s
“I just wanted to say ‘thank you’,” the Health stretches back to the
man said. “Your magazine inspired me SEPTEMBER, 2017 launch issue in 1997, when I
to lose 25kg.” was a young accountant
It turned out the man had picked up a working for the distribution
previous issue of Men’s Health featuring one of our first business. I joined the publisher
‘transformers’, Guy Sebastian, who with the help of trainers Chief a couple of years later and
and Em Brabon had achieved incredible results. Reading Guy’s became good friends and
story had motivated this man to start training. It hadn’t proved training partner with the then
easy, he admitted, but gradually the weight had started editor, Todd Cole. I’ve
to drop off. Almost a year later, he was more energetic, slept better remained an avid reader and
and felt more confident at work. supporter ever since. The
For me, it was a special moment because it was a real-life brand has always stayed true
affirmation of the MH mission to give men the tools they need to to its philosophy of giving men
lead better lives. Meeting that hat-wearing stranger was a the tools they need to be their
reminder that a great magazine can deliver life-changing results. best. Twenty years after
starting my own publishing
house, I am now proudly the
publisher of Australia’s leading
men’s brand and very excited
about its future.
Ben Jhoty Deputy Editor
In my time at MH, I’ve been ‘forced’ to
take on all manner of foolish pursuits
that have pushed me out of my
comfort zone, from fighting my
colleague in the ring to eating the
Scott Henderson Editor world’s hottest chilli. The most
The undisputed highlight of my time at Men’s Health has been the daunting, though, was the first: a
people I’ve met along the way and the stories we’ve shared with non-tandem skydive. It was the only
time in almost two decades at the
MH team are included. It’s the men and brand that I came close to backing
out of a story. But after a sleepless
night, I jumped. When the chute
opened my relief was all-consuming.
Afterwards, I knew in some way I’d
grown, which is all you can really
hope for in life, in a job, even perhaps,
when you pick up a magazine.
MH team, complete
MH is as safe as it can be in their
Natalie Ward
Commercial Consultant
My part in MH started
some eight years ago. I
remember vividly being
part of the Light Up Your
Run event in Sydney for
MH and WH. My kids
have been part of my
journey on MH, too –
every step of the way,
in fact. I’ve loved every
minute of working with
such a great team.
Jason Lee Creative Director
The No. 1 rule of CrossFit
is to talk about CrossFit to
anyone who’ll listen, ideally
in acronyms (C2B and HSPU
anyone?). My dream came
true when I was asked
to combine my love of JANUARY, 2020
CrossFit and passion for
photography by shooting a cover of
Men’s Health with the GOAT himself,
Rich Froning. My jaw hit the floor behind the
viewfinder of my camera when he started
warming up with 60kg snatches. I was super-
proud of how the shoot turned out and it
remains one of the all-time highlights in my
thick-as-a-phonebook MH portfolio.

JUNE, 2022

Christopher Riley
Contributing Editor
There was a time when the MH brand
stood for washboard abs and ripped
biceps. Then, as the world grew and
changed, so did we. Now, the
magazine seeks to inspire readers.
For me, that’s what this story (above)
is all about. I first met YP in 2019 as
part of the trailblazing rap group
ONEFOUR. A few days later, he was
sent to prison. For many, that could
have spelled the end. But YP spent his
sentence training his mind and body
for a return to the outside world. It
was a story about the power of fitness
in helping shape people’s lives for the
better. It was a story of redemption.
For anyone who has ever experienced
adversity, this story was for you.
Ian Cockerill Former Editor
My favourite MH
memory is charging
up the quarter pipe
to complete the
Urbanathlon obstacle
races staged in central
Sydney and Melbourne
in 2013. Two breathless
occasions where we
got to practise what
we preach, shoulder to
shoulder with readers.
Alex Dalrymple
Former Multimedia Content Producer
My most memorable MH
moment (and there were
quite a few to pick from)
was when most of the office
headed to Byron Bay for
a cover shoot with Chris
Hemsworth. Actually, for
me, it wasn’t just an MH
highlight; it was a highlight
of my videography career.
Chris had flown in from
shooting a film in Thailand
just for this shoot. Aside from
being a massive movie star,
he was a very friendly guy
who sat and had lunch with
us, chatting about the music
he loves and his workouts.
I couldn’t help but be a
little starstruck.
David Ashford
Former Creative Director
A week of my life that felt more ‘Men’s Health’ than any other was
spent trekking through the Andes, finishing at Machu Picchu. The
highlight? Randomly coming across a group of kitchen staff who’d
carved a football pitch in the jungle. None of us spoke the others’
languages, but we shared a glorious hour basking in our shared love
of the beautiful game in the most unlikely and exotic of settings.
Aaron Scott Former Associate Editor
Who hasn’t watched a game of professional footy and thought: how
would I shape up against these guys? So, it was a special moment,
back in 2014, when Wayne Bennett invited me on a training run with
the Brisbane Broncos. I held my own in the cardio session. But when
Bennett uttered the words “contact session” I beat a hasty retreat to
the sideline. After all, it’s a healthy man who understands discretion is
the better part of valour.
Bruce Ritchie
Former Editor
Most memorable MH
 ASK MH
Fix your focus
with a deep
work session.
Q THE BIG QUESTION
I work 10-hour days, yet I’m always
running behind. Can you help? – HM
Oh, we know the feeling. You sit down to work on
that marketing strategy, when an email from your boss
pops up – better read that. Soon, you’re on Slack looking for
a message they sent last week, when you scroll past a
financial report. Which reminds you, wasn’t there a
business article you meant to read? Better Google it . . .
Task-hopping is inevitable in today’s workplace, but it’s
a killer for productivity. Which is why we’d suggest
familiarising yourself with ‘deep work’. Coined by the
author Cal Newport, deep work is when you direct your full
attention to a task, says Micah Yongo. A novelist, Yongo
first became interested in it when writing a book alongside
his day job. Now, he develops the deep-work curriculum at
Flown – a start-up that trains members to work
uninterrupted.
Yongo points to a phenomenon known as ‘attention
residue’. “It’s like a mini-hangover your brain experiences
whenever your concentration is interrupted,” he says.
“Studies show it can take up to 23 minutes for you to regain
12 MEN’S HE ALTH
full focus after each interruption. Over the course of the
day, small annoyances can be fatal for productivity.”
And it’s not just disruptive to your work schedule. Task WORDS: SCARLETT WRENCH; LEE BOYCE; LUCY GORNALL. PHOTOGRAPHY: SUN LEE. PROP DESIGN:
completion is good for our mental health, while the
hamster-wheel existence of managing an overflowing
inbox has the opposite effect, says Yongo.
Logging in to a live, virtual co-working session (which
Flown and others offer) is one solution, providing
accountability when you’re not in the office. Yongo also
advises diarising dedicated time for distraction-free work
rather than just dipping in when you feel like it. “Don’t
overdo it: 45-50 minutes of focused work, followed by five-
to 10-minute breaks, will keep your output high,” he says.
Got a presentation to put together? Switch off your phone
and emails and block out an hour to do that and just that.
The difference will surprise you.
More good news? “Due to a process in your brain called
myelination, the more you do it, the easier it gets,” says
Yongo. Practice makes progress.
 Ask the MH girls the questions you can’t ask anyone else. They’re three
t S o l u t i o n To women who speak their mind, so don’t expect sugar-coated answers
Ancien P ro b l e m
d e r n
A Mo pproach
hould I a al ASK THE GIRLS IN THE OFFICE
Q. H o w s f o r m y n e w d ig it
r e c r u it in
plat for m
g
? W h a t would m
r s?
ost
“My new girlfriend keeps bringing
m p e t it o
wo r r y m y
ot
c
a
o
f ra i d o f an army of
of
id
up stuff from her sexual past,
A. I am n a sheep; I am afra
lions led
b y
s h e e p l e d by a lio
n . which I have no interest in. It seems like
of
an army
Alexand
er the Gr eat; b. 35
6 BC
she expects me to talk about my past too,
but I’m not comfortable with that and
feel it couldn’t lead anywhere good.
TEXT A NUTRITIONIST What’s my move?” –BK
Any good WFH snack ideas? Nik: Hmm, this is an interesting one. 
And please don’t say fruit. – JB Becky: You’re just going to have to say your piece, BK. If
Today 10:48 am
you don’t want to go into the ins and outs of your sexual
history, tell her that. It’s a perfectly reasonable position.
I’m always hungry a couple of hours Nik: Yep, I would sit down with her and explain that
after breakfast. What can I reach for you don’t want to hear about her past exploits –
that’s satisfying and good for me? and why you’d rather not go into any detail
about yours.
You want something nutrient-dense Jess: Relationships aren’t a confessional.
that won’t cause a big rise and dip in It’s up to both of you to respect the
blood sugar. Look for high-protein boundaries around what the other party is
foods or pair your carbs with a small happy to share. My view: the past is the
portion of fat to keep you feeling full.
past. And it seems a little weird that
she’s so intent on wheedling this
Gotcha . . . like what? information out of you. Like you, I can’t
see how any of it will help the
How about grilled chicken and avo on relationship. But I can see how it could
a wholemeal cracker? Or a boiled egg hurt it.
with some edamame beans. Nik: If she’s perceiving your
reluctance to spill on that stuff as a
Sometimes I just crave crisps, though… lack of trust, that would be strange
too. I wouldn’t put sexual history on
the list of things you’re obliged to
In which case, try roasting chickpeas
with a pinch of salt and spices. They’re share.
a fibre-rich crisp alternative. Becky: You’ve got to wonder why she
keeps bringing it up. It would trigger an
I just wish I wasn’t so peckish alarm or two for me around issues of
all the damn time. control, jealousy and insecurity. And
straight nosiness.
Are you eating enough at breakfast? Nik: Maybe she just isn’t aware how
Cravings and energy dips indicate your uncomfortable it’s making you, BK.
blood sugar’s out of balance. Make sure In which case, let her know in plain
you include protein, too. language.
Becky: Yeah, it could be that she’s
Just FYI, don’t discount fruit due to oblivious, because the past – even
its sugar content. It’s a good source of when it involves a subject as fraught
vitamins and minerals, as well as fibre.
as sex – isn’t an uncomfortable topic
Eat it with nuts for a slower blood sugar
response. + for everyone. She might have
absolutely no idea that you’re finding
the whole business excruciating.
I’m already raiding the fridge!

Got a query? DM us via Instagram @menshealthau

Gail Madalena, registered nutritional therapist at The Natural Balance

SEPTEMBER 2022 13
 09
22

YOUR MONTHLY DOWNLOAD OF THE LATEST LIFE ENHANCING RESEARCH

Put the big

squeeze on
muscle decline.

GAIN ’GRANATE MUSCLES SUPER SEEDS

WITH THIS SWEET TIP
As a stand-alone snack, it’s not up to much.
Try these suggestions instead
The overlooked pomegranate has been linked
to some surprising bodybuilding side effects. ADD JUICE TO YOUR SHAKES
Could it help your gym efforts bear fruit? A Plos One journal study
found that Olympic-
style weightlifters
THE POMEGRANATE has had a strange cultural – your cells’ energy centres. As we age, our bodies who chugged a glass
journey. They were the seeds that condemned become less efficient at clearing up broken-down before training were able to recover
more quickly.
Persephone to a life half-lived in the underworld, dysfunctional mitochondria, causing a build-up
according to ancient Greek mythology, and that makes muscles less efficient. This process
provided the world’s most troubling description can start as early as our thirties. Working out is POP A 250MG CAPSULE
of breasts in My Dad Wrote A Porno. The fruit has only half the battle to preserve muscle strength; Pomegranate extract
has been shown to
represented everything from death to blood to supporting your routine with good-quality whole
protect levels of blood
WORDS: ANNIE SCOTT. PHOTOGRAPHY: ROWAN FEE

fertility. Rarely, however, has it been associated
with gym gains.
But perhaps it should: a study from the
University of Washington has linked production of
the compound urolithin A with improved muscle
strength. Key to the gut’s production of urolithin A
is a diet rich in ellagitannins – a type of polyphenol
found in the ‘fruit of the dead’ – the pomegranate.
Urolithin A works by revitalising mitochondria
foods makes all the difference. flow-boosting nitric
Foods containing ellagitannins help to oxide, helping you push harder.
supercharge cells and keep muscles healthier
for longer. Apples, strawberries and walnuts are THROW IT IN YOUR DINNER
other sources of this type of polyphenol – but As well as vitamin
pomegranates are notable for their particularly C, a handful of
pomegranate seeds
high levels, as well as providing vitamin C, another
dishes up bone-
nutrient linked to age-proof muscles. Plant the strengthening vitamin K. Add to
seeds for growth. quinoa salads or slow-cooked lamb.

SEPTEMBER 2022 15
THE FEED 0922

WHY YOU WE’VE ALL DONE IT. You’re in the pub and

STOP SNUNEED TO
your mate is in the middle of a story about his
crumbling crypto portfolio. Suddenly your phone
beeps. Without thinking, you look down and see

YOUR FRI BBING

an update in your WhatsApp footy-tipping group.

E
Davo is tipping the Tigers this weekend. Is he on

ND
YOUR PHO S FOR
drugs? You begin formulating a witty missive until it
dawns on you that your mate sitting opposite has gone

NE
quiet. You look up to find him peering at you, miffed.
“Phub Sound familiar? You ignore the flesh-and-blood
bi
more t ng” might si friends sitting right in front of you for whatever hit of
han ju g
st rude nal digital dopamine your phone might deliver. Or, just as
ness likely, you’re the one who’s been rudely sidelined by a
mate’s pinging smartphone.
But while most of us have come to accept a
little rudeness as the price of having a constant
digital companion in our pocket, the reasons
behind phone snubbing (or “phubbing”) are more
troubling than you might imagine. A new University
of Georgia study has found depressed and socially
anxious people are more likely to phub their friends,
with personality traits such as neuroticism influencing
phubbing behaviour. “Some people who have high
social anxiety or depression are more likely to be
addicted to their smartphone,” said Juhyung Sun,
the study’s lead author.
Particularly pernicious, in terms of social
interaction, is the habit of constantly reading
notifications that pop up on screen, adds Sun. “People
are really sensitive to their notifications. With each
buzz or sound, we consciously or unconsciously look
at our phones.”
Significantly, the study found agreeable people –
those who are cooperative, polite and friendly – are
less likely to engage in phubbing in the presence of
their friends. “In face-to-face conversations, people
Quit being with high levels of agreeableness consider phubbing
a slave to behaviour rude and impolite to their conversational
your phone. partners,” Sun says.
If you’re worried about your level of phubbing,
you have options. First, the nuclear one: turn off your
phone. If that’s too much to bear, either switch off your
notifications or turn your phone over, a gesture that
shows a level of respect – and an intention to focus on
the person you’re with.

REVERSE
THE RUDENESS
TREND 01/ 02/ 03/ 04/ 05/
Sorry, but it’s not time to Stop when someone is If you’re the pedestrian, Give up your seat on the bus/ Stand when someone Open the car door for your
let the old ways die even approaching a thank the considerate train. No need to make a joins your table in a partner. (And catch them if
pedestrian crossing. driver with a wave. fuss. Just get up and move. café/restaurant. they faint.)

16 MEN’S HE ALTH
THE FEED 0922

LET BRAIN FADE TAKE THE WRAP

Here’s some food for thought: the latest research suggests a wisely For a younger
brain, digest this
topped taco could be your ally in the fight against cognitive decline bite-size tip.

FIBRE HAS SUFFERED something of an image

problem in recent years, associated as it is with such
unglamorous things as bowel movements, bloating
and the sort of breakfast cereals you’d find at the
back of a kitchen cupboard, with a best-before date
that’s older than your first child.
Yes, it might not have the marketing
appeal of protein, nor inspire the kind of tribal
allegiance that the debate around
carbs does – but, of all of the
nutrients on your plate, fibre
is perhaps the one that’s most
worthy of your attention.
On average, Australian men are
thought to fall short on this gut-loving
nutrient by about 10-15g per day.
But you’ll find that its benefits extend
far beyond healthy digestion and
appetite control.
According to a new study
of 3500 adults, published
in the journal Nutritional
Neuroscience, those who ate the
most fibre also had the lowest
risk of developing dementia – an
affliction that currently affects
an estimated 400,000 Aussies.
One theory posited by the
scientists is that, by altering the
composition of your gut bacteria,
eating more fibre might directly
reduce inflammation in the brain; its
role in rebalancing blood sugar, blood
pressure and cholesterol likely also
plays a part.
Notably, one type of fibre, called
soluble fibre, was more closely linked
with a reduced risk of dementia than the
insoluble kind. Among your best sources?
Black beans, avocado and sweet potato – in
other words, superlative toppings for any
meat-free taco.
Pick and choose from the ingredients below to
meet your 10g-per-meal target. Hold the mezcal.
WORDS: SCARLETT WRENCH. PHOTOGRAPHY: LOUISA PARRY.

JUST ROLL
WITH IT
Guanajuato wraps are our
choice for authenticity.
Now pick your fillings BLACK BEANS SWEET POTATO AVOCADO RED CABBAGE VINE TOMATO SALSA VERDE GRATED CHEESE
8.7g fibre 3g fibre 3.5g fibre 1.5g fibre 1.2g fibre 0.4g fibre 0g fibre
per 100g per 100g per 50g per 70g per 100g per 20g (but add it anyway)

18 MEN’S HE ALTH
 ADVANTAGE
STAY AHEAD OF THE GAME

BIG BROTHER
Aussie actor LUKE HEMSWORTH went from Ramsay Street to
sanding floors to Hollywood. A father of four, surfer, trailbike rider,
painter and, of course, fierce older brother, he’s proof that when
it comes to forging a career, a can-do attitude and reservoir of
resilience are vital if you want to make a name for yourself
BY BEN JHOT Y

20 MEN’S HE ALTH
 HEMSWORTH IS
STEPPING INTO
THE LIMELIGHT
FOR HIMSELF.

SEPTEMBER 2022 21
 IF YOU HAPPENED to have been out one evening in Toronto about
a decade ago, you might have seen a forlorn figure, hands dug
into his pockets, shoulders stiff to ward off the cold, trudging
through the streets, wracked with doubt and heavy with regret.
That could probably describe more than a few of the frigid
pedestrians on the city’s streets that night, but this particular fellow
was Luke Hemsworth, a faded Aussie soap star and former owner
of a flooring business, among other things. He was wondering if
he’d blown his shot at a Hollywood career and the chance to make
his name in America.
Hemsworth had won the lead role on the pilot of a big-budget
show. He’d found out on a Thursday, flown to Toronto to begin
rehearsing with the cast on the Monday, only to be fired on the
Tuesday. The reason given? He wasn’t “New York enough” for the
part. As he walked the icy streets that night, Hemsworth feared he
might have made a huge mistake in pursuing his American dream.
Was he being silly striving for something that hinged so heavily on
luck and taste, when he could be, perhaps should be, staying in
his lane back in Australia? Maybe even getting back on the tools?
“I was in Toronto by myself,” recalls Hemsworth, who’s chatting
to me today from a Vancouver hotel room that overlooks the water.
“It was freezing. And they were like, ‘Well, there’s no easy way to
say it. But they’re going to recast your part’. I was like, ‘Okay’. And
I remember being bewildered. I was walking the streets that night
going, Oh, what do I do now? Is that it? Is that the end of my career
before it’s even begun over here? How do you come back from this
when you haven’t done anything?”
Good questions to ask yourself. Even better if you can find
answers to them. In his disappointment, Hemsworth leaned into
some advice from his brother Chris’s agent. “He said, ‘Look, you
can shrink away with your tail between your legs, or you can use
it and get better and come back’.”
Hemsworth knew there were things he needed to address. His
audition process had been rushed. He hadn’t nailed the accent.
Ultimately, when his big moment came, he didn’t meet it. “I wasn’t
prepared enough for the role,” he says. “I’d got it very quickly and
been rushed to Toronto. I still had the script in my hand when
I was rehearsing, which the director didn’t like. So, I used the
experience as a catalyst to get better. To become better at the
New York accent, to become a better actor. And it worked. I think
it’s a common lesson: your failures teach you more than your
successes ever do. And if you don’t recognise that, then I don’t
think you’re growing. Those failures, those knockbacks are a
chance to step up.”
In a two-decade career that’s seen its share of setbacks,
Hemsworth has never missed an opportunity to learn and grow.
He’s needed to. Home truth: not everyone is a leading man. Most
of us aren’t. And while it would be too easy to call him a character
actor, the 41-year-old father of four does a reasonable impression
of being an ordinary, knockabout bloke inhabiting a larger-than-life
world. He’s dressed today in a trucker cap and wears a Deus jacket
over a floral, Hawaiian-style shirt. Built like an AFL midfielder, which
he once was, he possesses the kind of crinkly smile that might
disarm a waitress in a country pub. His earthiness and larrikin spirit
feel like a throwback to simpler times – he even starred in a
Tourism Australia ad for chrissakes. To me, he feels like a bloke you
might have known in high school. The footy player who went
on to become a tradie, likes a punt and a beer or two. You know
the bloke.
That he’s more man’s man than matinee idol is probably a
good thing, for it just might be this everyman quality that defines
his career, helping him dissolve into the characters he portrays to
the point where you forget who he is, maybe even what his
22 MEN’S HE ALTH
surname is. You could call it his superpower, but given he’s
unlikely to front his own comic-book franchise any time soon,
let’s just say he’s done what all smart guys eventually learn
to do: play to your strengths.
B RO T H E R S IN A R MS
Hemsworth is in Vancouver to work on a project he can’t disclose
but assures me is “something cool”. He’s just flown in from a
conservation trip to Kenya, where he was tracking elephants and
is rapturous about the African landscape. “It looks kind of like the
outback,” he says. “There are bits that are really red with lots of
stunted trees. But then you’ve got giraffes and hyenas and
elephants everywhere. It was beautiful and beguiling.”
Born in Victoria, the eldest of three brothers (pretty sure you
know the other two), Hemsworth has a first-hand appreciation for
the stark beauty of the Aussie wilderness, having spent a portion
of his childhood on a cattle station in Arnhem Land. Initially, his
parents helped fence his aunt’s property before taking over the
community’s local mum-and-pop general store.
“They had a walk-in fridge,” he recalls fondly. “And I remember
because it was so hot there. That’s where you’d go when your feet
were burning. We’d go in there on the cold floor and steal
Creaming Sodas.”
In his teenage years, the family moved first to Sassafras in the
Dandenong Ranges, before later heading to Phillip Island. Summer
holidays were spent on the Mornington Peninsula, where he got
into surfing and riding motorbikes. “My grandparents lived there
and we had a holiday house we shared with a couple of families,”
he says. “And so, we would spend every weekend there surfing,
snorkelling and generally running amuck at the beach.”
As you might imagine with three boys, there was no shortage
of roughhousing going on, with reports of dodging ninja stars and
other forms of cartoonish mortal combat. “Me and Chris used
to be very combative with each other,” Hemsworth confirms.
“And then Liam came along and we found a common enemy.
So, Liam had to learn to defend himself from a very young age,
which he did very well.”
In case you’re wondering, sibling rivalry doesn’t extend to their
respective careers. “I don’t compete with them for anything in
acting,” Hemsworth says. “They might compete together because
they’re both six foot four and knock down gorgeous. But it’s fun to
be supportive. It’s fun to learn lines with them. It’s not like we’re not
critical of each other, that’s for sure. But it’s criticism designed to
take a performance to another level. In everyday life, we’re normal
brothers. We definitely try to one-up each other. We like to have
fun. We like to laugh.”
A footy family, Hemsworth played centre and half-back flank on
a couple of under-18 premiership teams for Ringwood. “I never
had the height for anything else,” he deadpans. He would love to
have taken his footy further, he says, “But I think my ambition may
have outweighed my ability.” A Bombers supporter growing up, he
eventually caved and joined the rest of the clan in supporting the
Bulldogs. “My dad was born in Footscray and he played for
Footscray reserves,” he says.
A self-professed class clown, Hemsworth discovered a love of
Shakespeare at school. “It clicked in my brain for some reason.”
While initially aspiring to be a marine biologist, he later had a brief
flirtation with becoming a pilot. “I think the idea of pretending to fly
planes was a little more attractive than actually going and
subjecting myself to the dangers that go along with it,” he laughs.
“And I always loved acting.” Eventually he did a short course at
NIDA before studying contemporary arts at Deakin University.
 TACT I CS

His first major role after uni was on Neighbours, playing the

HAMMER AND
thuggish footy player Nathan Tyson. After that he “did the rounds of
Australian TV, Blue Heelers, All Saints, pretty much everything”. And
then the roles started to dry up. That was okay. He’d had a decent NAIL TIME
run. He could have adequately occupied a ‘Where Are They Now?’
listicle on social media; forever be referred to as “the other brother”. Hemsworth does circuits to
Heck, he almost was. Almost. boost his conditioning, like
this ‘Murph’-inspired
workout. Use it to sand off
your rough edges
H A N DY M A N
Hemsworth has always been
good with his hands. He and
his dad built the family’s home
in Phillip Island. A pragmatist,
Hemsworth knew that if he was 1.6km treadmill run
going to try and make it as an
actor, he needed a back-up
plan. He just never saw his plan B
becoming his main meal ticket. But
that’s what happened.
5 chin-ups,
“There’s a reason why actors
tend to be bartenders, waiters and
+
have a lot of menial jobs,” he says.
“I did a lot of construction labouring
and worked on the side of roads,
planted plants and the only reason
10 push-ups
was that I needed to be able to drop it
all to go and do a part. I quit a lot of jobs
+
just to go to auditions.”
The carousel of manual temp jobs would
expose him to a cavalcade of oddballs and
eccentrics he would one day draw on for onscreen
15 squats
inspiration, he says. “It ends up fuelling a lot of
x 10 rounds
creativity in terms of the characters you meet. There’s
just so many strange people out there working these
jobs. You learn how to fit into a lot of situations.”
In 2007 he married partner Samantha and
began a family. Looking for more stability, he got
into the flooring business with his friend Chaz. 1.6km treadmill run
“He’d lost his licence, so I drove him around
for two years, me and him in a van going to
house after house, sanding floors,
polishing floors, laying floors. He’s a
perfectionist so I became very, very
good and from there, went out on my
own. I sort of solved two problems by
having enough money that I could
work and support the family, but
also because I was my own boss, I
could go and do auditions.”
As rewarding and secure as it
was, though, Hemsworth missed
acting. Not that he ever thought
time had passed him by. He just
couldn’t get a gig. “I never stopped
auditioning,” he says. “And I never
completely wrote it off because
I enjoyed it so much. I thought
if there’s a way to come
back to this, I’ll come back to
it. A lot of acting is being in the
right place at the right time.
I was quite happy to just
HEMSWORTH WENT
FROM SANDING
FLOORS TO REACHING
FOR THE STARS .

SEPTEMBER 2022 23
 RAPID FIRE

Favourite exercise?
Burpees.

Least favourite?
Burpees.

Cheat meal?
If there’s chocolate
in the fridge, I can’t
pass it up.

Karaoke song?
Like a Stone,
Audioslave.

Last book you read?

Empire of the Vampire,
by Jay Kristoff.

Hero?
Chris Hemsworth is
my hero. And mum
and dad.

Motto?
“At the end of the day,
it’s the end of the day”.
I guess that’s about
letting stuff go. At the
end of the day, the day
doesn’t matter. It’s a
new day tomorrow.

24 MEN’S HE ALTH
 TACT I CS

HEMSWORTH
enjoy the kids and my wife and just take it as it comes.” AND CO-STAR
When he wasn’t working, he’d paint. “I still do a lot of painting,” ISABEL LUCAS IN
BOSCH & ROCKIT.
he says. “I like to keep my hands working to free my mind.” What
does he paint? “Nothing very good, that’s for sure. But I’m a
landscape man.” Funny how the only thing these jack-of-all trades
types tend to master is self-effacement.
As the rejections continued to pile up, you wonder what led him
to keep turning up to casting calls? Hemsworth likens the battle to
break through to athletes who might fail at their first attempt to make
it at the elite level before going away and coming back stronger and
hungrier – your Justin Langers or Peter Bols of the world. “All great
athletes have usually suffered losses first,” he says.
It was the 2012 Channel 10 show Bikie Wars: Brothers In Arms
about the Milperra massacre that changed things for Hemsworth.
The meaty material and “cast of lunatics” gave him an inkling that
he might have the chops to pursue more nuanced roles. Suddenly,
all his life experience became something he could mine. “It was a
fascinating show and a wild group of actors,” he chuckles. “Matt
Nable, Richard Cawthorne, Luke Ford. These guys were all just living
it. And it was so cool and so infectious to be back amongst them. I
think that was the catalyst that drove me over to America.”
He sold his flooring business and after a brief stint in London
headed for Hollywood. By this time, Chris had become Chris
Hemsworth. Having his younger brother in LA made the transition
easier. “Chris was obviously having a lot of success and so the idea
of going to Hollywood became more of a reality,” Hemsworth says.
“All of Liam’s friends became our friends, too. We had a support
network straight away.”
He would end up working as Chris’ personal trainer on Thor: The
Dark World in 2013, an experience he enjoyed while also helping
him realise just how much he wanted to be an actor.
“While I loved training with Chris, love going to the gym and I’m
quite obsessive about the science of it, it was clear to me that I still
loved acting far more,” he says. “I think all it did was drive me further
towards acting.”
Sometimes you have to rule out what you don’t want to do, in
order to confirm what you do.

B ACK T O B A SIC S
When Hemsworth’s break finally came it was a big one. In 2014 he
landed the role of Ashley Stubbs in the sci-fi hit Westworld, although
the show didn’t actually premiere until 2016. Suddenly the chaos
and uncertainty of the industry dissolved. He had security and
structure, he and his family making their home in Malibu for the next
few years, only a short drive from the studio. “I would sleep in my
own bed, drop off the kids at school some days and then drive to
work,” he recalls.
The show’s bi-annual shooting schedule has allowed him to
work on film projects in between, one of those being the upcoming
Bosch and Rockit, in which he plays a father who goes on the run
from the law with his teenage son, played by 16-year-old pro surfer
Rasmus King. The two became fast friends in the surf in the lead-up
to the shoot, Hemsworth says. “We became best buddies. We
surfed a lot, hung out in the trailer. Very quickly on screen, you see
the love between us is real. There’s no faking it. And I drew on my life
as a dad. So, there’s a lot of that part of me bleeding through.”
Shot in Byron at the height of the pandemic in 2020, the role
was one of Hemsworth’s first since returning to Australia in 2019.
While he and Samantha had agonised about uprooting their kids
from their friends and life in Malibu, the children quickly took to the
Byron lifestyle and the chance to be around their family. For
Hemsworth, it doesn’t hurt that he can surf every day, either. “My
whole life, I said if I could live anywhere, it would be somewhere that
I could walk to the beach and surf,” he says. “Now I can walk out my
back door and there’s a beautiful beach. I’m still very cognisant of
making sure the kids are ready for school, so I’ll surf either side of
that getting-ready period between 7 and 8:30. After that, see ya.”
“I don’t think my feet were
ever off the ground. I’ve
always been a normal bloke”
Hemsworth’s plan is to base himself here, while jetting off to
shoot when he needs to. While everything seems to have fallen into
place, you sense Hemsworth has been around the block too many
times and experienced too many disappointments, to get
complacent. I wonder if his time out of acting has helped him keep
his feet on the ground now that things are taking off. His answer
doesn’t surprise me.
“I don’t think my feet were ever off the ground,” he says levelly.
“It’s probably more having a wife and kids that keeps you grounded.
And maybe seeing what my brothers have gone through, with the
paparazzi parked outside their houses and stuff like that, has given
me an insight into the pitfalls of that side of it. But I’ve always been
a normal bloke. I always liked doing stuff around the house. I like
taking the kids to school. I’ve even gone back to mowing my own
lawn. We paid gardeners when we were in the States. But if you
want the job done properly, you’ve got to do it yourself.”
I nod. I know a few blokes who would say something like that.
Bosch & Rockit is in cinemas on August 18.

SEPTEMBER 2022 25
 M US CL E

START HERE

LEARN TO GROW
WITH THE FLOW
Fire up your core muscles
while building serious strength
with the HALF-KNEELING
KETTLEBELL SNATCH TO
WINDMILL. It’s a whole lot 1 KNEEL AND DELIVER
Start in a half-kneeling
more fun than a plank stance, your right foot in front
of you. Using your right hand,
tip a kettlebell towards you;
tighten your abs and squeeze
your shoulder blades.
CLASSIC ABS MOVES such as
V-sits, bicycle crunches and plank
variations are not without their
merits. But there are far more
dynamic, not to mention
efficient, ways to train
2 SWING FOR STRENGTH
Keeping your core tight, and your
your core.
hips and shoulders square to the
The half-kneeling
front, aggressively pull the bell
kettlebell snatch to windmill might
back between your legs. Push
have a clunky name (we’d opt for THE your butt back as you do this.

BEST
HKSTW when jotting it down in
your Notes app), but it’s a smooth,
fast flow that will develop strength
EXERCISE
3 EXPLODE UPWARDS
in your abs while raising your heart
rate and adding muscle to your
back and shoulders. In other YOU’RE NOT
Swing the bell forwards,
words, it’s an invaluable tool if your DOING thrusting your hips forwards,
goal is bigger lifts, better posture then aggressively pull it towards
or beach muscle. your shoulder. Punch upwards
“This is a total-body move as it reaches shoulder height,
masquerading as a core move,” straightening your arm.

4 BRACE AND TWIST

says elite fitness coach
Ebenezer Samuel. “If your core is
weak, you’ll struggle to complete
the flow.”
The more you practise,
however, the stronger your core
will become. Aim for three sets of
six reps per side and build up to
a weight that feels challenging
but allows for – as per usual –
fluid, controlled movement.
Keeping your eyes on the
bell, push your butt back
and rotate your torso until
your left hand touches the
floor. Squeeze your shoulder
blades, then brace your abs
and glutes and drive your
torso back to upright. That’s 1
rep; do 6, then switch sides.

What You’ll Gain

PHOTOGRAPHY: TYLER JOE

ABS TOO DESK-POSTURE ELITE CORE FINISH

GOOD TO HIDE ANTIDOTE STABILITY

26 MEN’S HE ALTH
Elegance is an attitude

Regé-Jean Page

HYDROCONQUEST
 H E ALT H
01
QUICK FIX 
As the first waves
of the pandemic hit
their peak in 2020,
worldwide
antidepressant
prescriptions
surged. Yet our
demand for them
was growing long
before COVID. Since
…I TAKE SSRI MEDS?
the financial crisis of
2008, debilitating
mental illness has
trebled in young
adults. Lack of
access to talking
therapies is another
likely factor.
02
BLUES BLOCKERS
The most common
antidepressant is a class of
drugs known as selective
serotonin reuptake inhibitors
(SSRIs). SSRIs are thought to
work by boosting levels of
serotonin, a neurotransmitter
associated with good mood.
When you take your daily dose
– typically 20-60mg, if
prescribed a fluoxetine SSRI –
the drug blocks the natural
reabsorption of serotonin so
that more of it is available.
28 MEN’S HE ALTH
02 04
01 03 05
04
LONG HAUL 
Side effects are
common, ranging
from agitation to ED.
“SSRIs can also
induce a state of
emotional numbing,”
warns psychologist
John Read*. “They’re
recommended for
people with moderate
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN to severe depression,
but are often used for
WORDS: YO ZUSHI. ILLUSTRATION: PETER GRUNDY. *JOHN READ IS A PROFESSOR OF CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF EAST LONDON
mild cases.”
Treatment usually
continues for at least
six months after you
In recent years, 1 in 6 Australian adults have relied feel better, but the
drugs may be
on antidepressants to make life tolerable. But do you prescribed
really know how they impact our brains and bodies? indefinitely. 
03
SLOW BURN
05
RISK FACTORS
SSRIs usually need to be taken for 2-4 weeks before you Coming off SSRIs can be tricky.
begin to feel their benefits. When they kick in, you might Though guidelines suggest that
feel better equipped to take on challenges that feel withdrawal reactions normally
impossible amid a depressive episode – including trying last 1-2 weeks, a review by
other treatments, such as cognitive behavioural therapy. Read found it is “not
But for some, the spike in serotonin will have little to no uncommon” for people to have
effect. The rate of positive response varies from 40- 60 hallucinations for some
per cent, and a third of those taking SSRIs develop months. “Just over half report
recurring depressive symptoms even while in therapy.   withdrawal effects and, of
those, about half say they’re
‘severe’,” he says. SSRIs are no
miracle cure – but, for many,
they remain the best hope
of recovery.
 #naturallysmales

Discover our unique and limited edition timepiece collections from all over the world at one
of Australia’s finest watch and jewellery retailers.

143 Rokeby Road, Subiaco 6008 | Ph 08 9382 3222 | smales.com.au

 PERFECT SALMON
EVERY SINGLE TIME
Why grill this tasty fish and risk
overcooking it when you can gently
pan-sear it instead? Thirty grams of
muscle-building protein. Ten grams
of stomach-filling fibre. A whole
lot of awesome
BY AKIKO THURNAUER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHELSEA KYLE

To drink?
Pair your meal with The
Shadow Adelaide Hills
FOOD STYLING: PEARL JONES. PROP STYLING: JOJO LI.

Pinot Noir from The Group

($20, thegroupwines.
com.au). It's a
delicate, cool-climate
drop with perfumed
florals and bursts of
cherry. Available at
Liquorland,
Vintage Cellars
and First Choice
Liquor Market.

30 MEN’S HE ALTH
 NU T R IT IO N

30g
10g
Wait, what’s 30/10?
30/10 brings you filling, muscle-building meals with 30 grams of protein and 10 grams
of fibre. For an entire month’s worth of recipes, head to MensHealth.com/30-10.
10g
THE FIBRE
The lentils alone will push
you over the 10 grams of fibre

THE PROTEIN
you need to stay full. The
30g carrots are an easy bonus

Just 140 grams of cooked wild salmon delivers a

potent 36 grams of protein – not to mention being a
strong source of heart-helping omega-3 fatty acids

BUY IT Tasmanian salmon and King salmon (farmed

and imported from New Zealand are particularly high
in omega-3s. But bear this in mind: wild salmon brings
more flavour than farmed.

Perfect Seared
Salmon
This recipe makes four big bowls of ramen, meaning
Roasted Turmeric
you can reheat leftovers for lunch or dinner all week. Carrots
Preheat your oven to 190°C. In a large
One super-important note on reheating: remove the
roasting pan, toss 680g carrots (peeled
eggs before microwaving or they’ll explode. Just add and cut on the diagonal) with 2 Tbsp
them back to the hot broth and they’ll warm up coconut oil, 1 tsp sea salt and ½ tsp
ground turmeric. Roast the carrots in the
WHAT YOU’LL NEED oven till tender and evenly browned, about
SERVES 4 30 minutes. Feeds 4
• 4 (170g) skin-on wild salmon fillets Nutrition per serving: 540 kilojoules,
• 1 Tbsp coconut oil 2g protein, 17g carbs (5g fibre), 7g fat
• 2 limes, halved

*Consuming raw or undercooked meats, poultry, seafood, shellfish

or eggs may increase your risk of foodborne illness.

METHOD
1 Blot the salmon fillets dry with paper towels and

season both sides of each fillet with salt and pepper.

2 In a large nonstick pan over medium high, heat the

coconut oil until it shimmers. Place the salmon skin side

down in the pan and sear until the skin is evenly brown
and crispy, about 6 minutes. Using a spatula, carefully
flip the fish and sear the other side, about 1 minute.
3 Plate the fish and squeeze half a lime over each fillet.

Nutrition per serving: 1225 kilojoules,

36g protein, 2g carbs (0g fibre), 15g fat

Curry Spiced Lentils

HOLY SH!T In a medium pot over medium heat, melt 2
KITCHEN Tbsp coconut oil. Add 1 medium onion
TRICK (thinly sliced), 4 garlic cloves (thinly sliced),
2 Tbsp fresh ginger (finely chopped) and ¾
SET LOOSE tsp Madras curry powder. Sauté till the
THE JUICE onions soften, 4-5 minutes. Add 1 cup
Stubborn lemons and brown lentils, 1 cup tomatoes (chopped),
limes are no match for the and 5 cups chicken stock. Simmer, stirring
microwave. Just zap them occasionally, until the lentils are tender,
for 15 seconds, slice, 20-25 minutes. Season to taste with salt
squeeze and watch the and pepper. Feeds 4
juice inside unleash.
Nutrition per serving: 940 kilojoules,
15g protein, 26g carbs (10g fibre), 7g fat

SEPTEMBER 2022 31
 SWITCH OFF THE NOISE
In this first instalment of a new MH column by one of Australia’s most compelling
television personalities and podcasters, OSHER GÜNSBERG reveals his strategies
for quieting the insidious, negative self-talk that can drain the pleasure from your
everyday life and fill you with doubt and self-loathing. The reward: a fresh start
THERE IS A RADIO station in my head
that I sometimes can’t shut off.
I started my broadcasting career in
radio, doing the overnight shift at an
FM Station in Brisbane. For five years
in the mid-’90s I turned on the
microphone between Bryan Adams
and Savage Garden songs to
encourage people to keep listening
after the 3:20am ad break because
there was more Bryan Adams and
Savage Garden on the way.
Whenever I spoke, I would need to
say the positioning statement before I
said anything else. It’s the thing the
radio station does, and every radio
station says it to define what they do
almost every time they speak. “AM
788: More Talk, Less Sport…”; “99.6:
Music your Mum loves…”; or “FM 109:
Rock, Sport and the CheeseMan in
the morning…”
I’d take any of those stations over
the noise I can pick up on my own
internal channel. It’s a station in my
head with a distinct callsign, like KIIS
in Sydney or K ROCK in Geelong.
It’s “KFUK FM: All Negative Self Talk
– ALL THE TIME”.
You may have heard it? It’s the
station you hear after you leave a first
date, or a job interview, or when you
trip over getting off an escalator.
“Oh my God, I’m such an idiot. Why
did I do that? They must hate me!”
That’s KFUK.
The worst thing about KFUK is that
before I realised it was there, I sang
along to every song they played – and
they play the hits.
In my late teens the big song was
Women Don’t Want To Have Sex With
You Because You’re A Fat Loser by
Barry and the Binge Eaters. When I
moved to Sydney in 1999 That
Stranger Thinks You’re A Worthless
Piece of Shit by Stranger Danger was
played every hour. And No One’s
Going To Hire You Ever Again Ever
Because Of That Mistake You Just
Made by Axis of Unemployment was
a massive hit in my 30s.
32 MEN’S HE ALTH
It wasn’t until I started to work the input KFUK, but there’s nothing to
seriously with a psychologist for the back up what you’re saying so I’m just
first time that I discovered this station going to press on”.
was playing in my head all the time. The third phase was humbling for
Phil (the shrink) was a very kind a self-centred asshole like me. I had
and very patient guy, who taught me to accept that I wasn’t actually that
how just to notice the thoughts like important to other people. I might
you’d notice the music when you’re think that everyone is laughing at
buying groceries or socks or whatever. me because I tripped on my thongs
Just because the supermarket is getting off the escalator, but the reality
playing Pitbull, doesn’t mean you have is that everyone else has far better, far
to like Pitbull. You can actually just more interesting things to do than
notice the music while still being able laugh at a stranger who
to grab some miso paste and rice stumbled a bit. And
noodles, then walk away from the even if they did
store while Mr. Worldwide fades away get a giggle,
behind you. It was a revelation. they’d forget
If that pestilent music followed me
around, though, Phil taught me a way
to make it feel less potent.
Say I’m down the shops and it’s
early December. Michael Bublé has
been awoken from his hypersleep to
begin the dreaded 48 days of
Christmas, yet instead of being ‘Holly
Jolly’, the Canadian Crooner is singing
You’re a piece of shit and everybody
hates you, your wife doesn’t love
you and your daughter too – and
one more thing, your dog is faking
it when she wags her tail, Johnny
gimme the horns!”
My psych showed me how
to say “Thanks, Michael, great
singing – but I’m going to just
keep shopping for my tofu
and some Tamari”.
This allows me almost
IT WAS HUMBLING FOR A
instantly to separate myself
from the negative thoughts.
If they persist, phase two
SELF-CENTRED ASSHOLE:
is to look for evidence.
Where’s the evidence that
I’m a piece of shit? If my
wife is a bit annoyed at
me that’s one thing, but
I HAD TO ACCEPT THAT I
WASN’T THAT IMPORTANT
where’s the evidence
that she doesn’t love
me? More often than
TO OTHER PEOPLE
not, there is none. It’s
just negative self-talk.
So I say, “Thanks for

it in less than five
seconds, get on with
whatever they were
doing, and never ever
think of me again. This
was tough for my colossal
ego to bear at first, but it’s
absolutely true.
Challenging negative
self-talk might be a stretch
if you’ve never tried it, because until
you’re aware of them, your negative
ideas about yourself are as real and
valid as your positive ones. Why would
you ever question them? For me it was
learning to recognise in my body
when things felt icky, and that is
probably a sign that my brain might be
getting creative with perceptions of
the input I’m getting from the world.
Understanding that I can happily
carry on with whatever I was doing
(playing with the kids, driving to work,
a massive pitch-meeting for a new TV
project), all while that negative radio
station is blaring away, is a very
powerful thing. And after a bit of
practice, the volume can get turned
down very quickly.
Having said that, there was a time
in my life when I was quite mentally
unwell, and I was unable to challenge
those negative thoughts. Those
thoughts became so overpowering
that they essentially became real.
I had lost the ability to reframe them.
What began to happen then
For more of Osher’s insights into self-acceptance, fulfilling your dreams and getting the most
out of life, listen to his bi-weekly (every Monday and Friday) podcast, Better Than Yesterday
TACT I CS
DUMP BUTTON: CUT
OFF YOUR DOWNER
INNER VOICE.
was that these
negative thoughts
manifested into actual
reality. Because if I
start to irrationally think
that a person doesn’t like
me, or that such and such a
thing will turn out badly, then I
will constantly look for the thing that
will make my irrational thought seem
more real.
My initial defensive reactions
to people that I irrationally felt didn’t
like me would instil a negative
response in them – which to me
made it feel like they actually didn’t
like me. I WAS RIGHT!
It’s a cruel, self-reinforcing loop
that is devilishly hard to escape from.
If any of this sounds familiar, I
thoroughly recommend doing what
I did: see your doctor, quick sticks. In
my experience, getting on meds really
helped me find the space in my
thinking between thought and
reaction, and helped me to challenge
those thoughts, to reframe them and
create new neural pathways. With
practice, the new ways of thinking
about things gradually became the
automatic response.
So if you have time today, check to
see whether that icky feeling about a
person, place or thing is actually real
– or is it KFUK FM?
I should say, it’s important you
name your radio station. The sillier the
callsign, the better. Even name the DJ,
if you like. Give them a stupid DJ
voice. Anything to put some space
between rational, present you and the
irrational negative thoughts.
One final thing: if your radio
station is telling you to “come on
down to meet the street team and
get your hands on some icy cold
cans to make it all feel better”,
well, that’s something we’ll talk
about another time.
SEPTEMBER 2022 33
 M I N D

ROLLE IS NOW A KEY

PLAYER IN A VERY
DIFFERENT GAME.

MYRON ROLLE’S MENTAL

FITNESS PLAYBOOK
The NFL player turned neurosurgeon has spent his life
fine-tuning the tactics that powered his professional
transformation and help him manage stress, failure
and grief – skills the rest of us can use, too
BY TAYLYN WASHINGTON-HARMON
BANGING HEADS and fixing heads might
seem like totally different pursuits, but
Dr Myron L. Rolle says that doing the one
prepared him to do the other. Football
“has given me so much. Friends, fitness,
focus, and the intangibles:
communication, teamwork, structure,
discipline and overcoming adversity.”

SEPTEMBER 2022 35
As he details in his new book, The 2% Way,
Rolle was a standout safety at Florida State
University, but instead of playing his senior
year, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
He returned a year later, was drafted in the
sixth round in 2010, and played three years
in the NFL until he was cut by the Pittsburgh
Steelers. After that, he put his energy into
studying for the MCAT, which took him to
Florida State University College of Medicine
and eventually to a residency at Harvard-
Massachusetts General Hospital. Many of the
processes and mental skills that helped him
find success in football prepared him to excel
in the operating room.
Rolle is Zooming from the sunny
Bahamas, but there’s no sand between his
toes. Currently a senior neurosurgery resident
and the global neurosurgery fellow at
Harvard-Massachusetts General Hospital,
he’s spent the past nine months on a
medical mission to improve care in
low-resource settings. That involved
performing surgeries at Princess Margaret
Hospital in Nassau, as well as working on
policy, training and education and doing
whatever he could to help elevate
neurosurgical treatment in the Bahamas,
especially for people who face systemic
barriers to care. In 2010, his aunt Annie
Smith, a native Bahamian, was hit by a car
while walking and died from a traumatic brain
injury. “My aunty did not see a neurosurgeon
for seven hours,” says Rolle, 35. “No MRI, no
CT scans, no diagnostic work, and she died
without any medical care. That moment
encouraged and motivated me to want to
do something.”
It’s what Rolle does: try to make a
difference. He follows his philosophy of
seeking small improvements in all aspects
of life, including his mental fitness, and it’s
helped him with everything from dealing with
hate-spewing patients and tricky surgeries to
managing stress and disappointment. These
are some of the key tactics that have worked
for Rolle.
IT’S ABOUT TAKING SMALL
STEPS OF IMPROVEMENT
TOWARDS A BIGGER GOAL THAT
SEEMS OVERWHELMING
Rolle learned one of the most important
mental skills from FSU coach Mickey
Andrews (who learned it from legendary
Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant). He’d
shout, “‘Myron, 2 per cent better on your
backpedal, 2 per cent!’ It’s about taking very
small steps of improvement daily towards a
bigger goal that sometimes seems
overwhelming,” he says. “You break it down
piece by piece and have those small victories
that empower you and motivate you.”
It also requires a sense of vulnerability,
being able to recognise and acknowledge
your own weaknesses so you can improve.
Rolle applied the 2 per cent way to both his
physical training (whether focusing on his first
step or his vertical leap) and med school
(getting extra practice tying sutures and
studying obscure cases). He even applies it
in his personal life, recently making an effort
to be more punctual and to call his parents
more often, micro adjustments that help
him incrementally become a better version
of himself.
USE FA ILUR E T O
S T OK E MO T I VAT ION
Playing in the NFL is an experience Rolle
calls his biggest failure. “I did everything I
could. It didn’t work out [as I wanted it to]. The
NFL is known for Not For Long,” he says,
referring to his brief playing career. He retired
from the NFL at 26. That experience
recharged his desire to go to medical school,
a goal he’d harboured since his older brother
tossed him, at age 12, a copy of the book
Gifted Hands, in which Dr Ben Carson
describes his journey from child in inner-city
Detroit to noted neurosurgeon. A deeply
religious man, Rolle wonders whether having
his time cut short in the NFL “was the Lord
saying, ‘This is not for you right now, and I’m
protecting you from hurting your hand or
getting a concussion and not being able to
be a neurosurgeon’.” He embarked on the
six-year journey, all the while using the 2 per
cent way to find small victories that kept him
on track.
Rolle’s hands play a major role in his work,
having converted from catching interceptions
to artfully making people’s brains whole
again. At med school, he trained himself to
be ambidextrous by using his left hand to
write, suture with shoelaces, and perform
other knot-tying and stitching drills surgeons
do. Rolle deals with the stress of surgery
by spending hours rehearsing his hand
movements, visualising the surgery the same
way he prepared for a play on the field.
“Because if A and B fail, based on anatomy
that I wasn’t expecting, or there’s a bleed or a
leak that happens that I wasn’t aware of, what
are options C and D?” he asks. “I need to
have other plans so that I’m not flustered and
paralysed in the moment. In the shower, I’ll
close my eyes and my hands move as if I’m
lifting up a part of the tissue using my right
hand with a tumour forceps, imagining myself
going through it over and over again. I
anticipate [extra blood] the same way I
anticipated a receiver running an in-route
but he runs a hitch or a stop-and-go.” If you’re
prepared for contingencies, it’s easier to
stay calm.
R E L E A SE YOUR E MO T IONS
T O S TAY IN C ON T ROL
Rolle must deal with patients with everything
from gunshot wounds to the head to
cancerous lesions on the brain. Losing a
patient is a reality of the job, but he refuses
to be jaded and acknowledges that it hurts.
“If I ever get to a point that I get so numb by
situations that are poor or negative, then I
should no longer be a physician,” he says.
“I want to feel that pain, because it
humanises the situation and makes me go
harder for the next patient and the next family.
If we have this blockade about expressing
our emotion, it will drive you to dysfunction.
You can’t have that when your hands are
responsible for lives in the operating room.”
When Rolle lost his first patient, a middle-
aged woman with a partially blocked carotid
artery, in 2013, he cried all the way home and
called his father the next day. He expected
his father to tell him to toughen up, but his
dad only affirmed his choice of profession,
noting his sense of caring and empathy. “I
don’t mind a good cry, especially in spaces
where I feel comfortable and safe with my
brothers, my wife, my parents, my best
friends,” he says. “It’s an expression of sorrow,
but also an expression that I feel comfortable
with you and I can share the emotions that
are happening to me. Crying is part of life.”
 M I N D

PLAY HARD, WORK HARDER

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

Being a Black neurosurgeon amid a white

majority brings with it unique challenges.
Rolle recalls how he’s been mistaken for
a food-service worker or a member of the
cleaning crew, and in one instance a
patient’s brother used hate language when
referring to him during a preoperative
consultation. After discussing it with another
surgeon, Rolle decided to go ahead and
perform the surgery, because he wanted to
turn a negative (the trauma of a racist insult)
into a positive (saving a man’s life). Plus, he
was a junior resident at the time and says
he needed the surgical hours.
In terms of how he focuses during an
operation, Rolle says he thinks of his family.
“My wife asked, ‘Myron, how do you get
ready for a consult when the doctor calls
you at 2am saying there’s someone with
a brain bleed in the ER and you’re dead
asleep?’ I say, ‘Well, it’s tough. You wake up,
wipe the sleep from your eyes, and shake
yourself loose’. At the same time, if this were
my aunty or my mum or someone close to
me, I’d want whoever was seeing her or him
to be ready, charged up, mind acute and
ready to go. I put myself in that position
quite often, and that pushes me to try to
be the best I can.”

SEPTEMBER 2022 37
 PUFF. WAIT. CALCULATE.
Can one simple device help you energise your metabolism?
BY MICHAEL EASTER PHOTOGRAPHY BY FREDRIK BRODEN

MAYBE YOU’VE SEEN the hype. It concerns
a simple handheld device that measures and
claims to help you “hack” your metabolism
so it can be more “fit” and “flexible”. But what
does that even mean? Is your metabolism so
easily manipulated? Or is this metabolic
measurer just another hunk of junk sold by
wellness hucksters?
First, it’s important to understand how
your metabolism actually works. Basically,
it’s the process that takes the kilojoules
you consume and then burns those
kilojoules to fuel everything you do, from a
brainstorming session to a workout. Fitbit,
Whoop, Apple Watch, Garmin – all these
trackers use their own algorithms to
estimate kilojoules burned on a basic
level. But a new device called Lumen
claims to reveal what kind of kilojoules
— those from fat or those from
carbohydrates – your metabolism is
burning at any given moment. You simply
blow into a Breathalyser-like mouthpiece
and, according to the company, Lumen

38 MEN’S HE ALTH

can even tell you how adept your body is at
switching between the types of fuel you’re
using (known as metabolic flexibility). Not
adept? You get an eating plan to help
change that, which might change how
healthy you are.
Metabolic flexibility is a real thing. A
healthy metabolism is always burning a mix
of fat and carbs, and the ratio changes
depending on factors including how
intensely you’re working out (low-intensity
exercise primarily uses fat as energy;
high-intensity uses more carbs) and
whether you’re fasting or in ketosis.
And metabolic inflexibility is also a real
thing. Scientific research has linked this
metabolic issue to some of the major health
challenges of our time, including obesity,
diabetes, heart disease and cancer. One
cause of metabolic inflexibility: a poor diet.
When you’re eating a good mix and amount
of foods, your metabolism should be able to
process them pretty well. But when you
overload your system with too much or
possibly even the wrong foods (highly
caloric processed foods, mainly), the energy
engines of your cells – your mitochondria –
start functioning like a deer in the
headlights. In the journal Cell, Duke
University researcher Deborah Muoio dubs
this inflexibility “mitochondrial indecision”.
Nutrients get backlogged and jam your
metabolism, which can lead to high blood
sugar, high triglyceride levels and excess
fat around your waist. And all that
contributes to the development of those
troubling conditions and diseases.
So you can see why Lumen thought it
smart to analyse what you’re burning when,
give you a score, and then offer diet
recommendations to prevent that backlog.
Score a 1 and that means your body is
fuelling itself mostly on fat, so you should
eat more carbs to keep your system from
tipping too far in one direction. Score a 5?
That means you’re burning mostly carbs and
you need some healthy fats to stay flexible.
Anything between those two numbers is
more of a mix, and you just keep doing you.
Michal Mor, a physiologist and one of the
founders of Lumen, is thinking far beyond
your individual nutritional fine-tuning and
says that the data the device tracks can
“improve the world’s metabolic health”.
Based on your score, you get a specific
eating plan. For example, if you score a 4,
you might get a “medium carb” daily plan of
193 grams of fat, 163 grams of protein and
180 carbs. Hitting these precise numbers
requires that you measure what you eat,
HOW
YOUR BREATH
REVEALS YOUR
METABOLISM
WHAT IT
MEASURES
You breathe out more carbon
dioxide when you’re burning
mostly carbs than you do
when burning mostly fat. All
carbs means you’re exhaling
as much CO2 as oxygen you’re
taking in. Lab machines that
reveal what fuel you’re
burning measure both
oxygen and CO2; Lumen
estimates fuel usage by
CO2 alone.
BEHIND THE
NUMBERS
Changing what you eat will
shift what you exhale, which
can alter the score you see.
On this test, you’re aiming for
the middle – a mix of both
carbs and fat. The theory is
that by knowing how your
body rolls and adjusting for
that, you can train your
metabolism to
be more flexible over time
and avoid issues like
obesity and diabetes.
H E A LTH
ideally with a food scale. (Which also means
you’re most likely going to be eating less
than usual.)
All this sounds great and techy and
hackerish and kind of cool: you’re analysing
exactly how your eating decisions and
lifestyle affect your metabolism in real time.
But here’s the thing: It’s not really all that
useful. You probably don’t need a $335
Lumen device to improve or maintain your
metabolic flexibility. To the extent that you
are able to control your metabolism (some
portion of metabolic flexibility may be
genetic), “the best way to become more
metabolically flexible is to be lean and
exercise,” says Layne Norton, a nutritional
scientist and bodybuilding coach. It doesn’t
matter if you become lean by eating carbs
or by skewing your diet towards fat. Eating
healthier foods or eating less food than you
currently do is what helps, and you can do
that on your own.
Mor and her twin sister, Merav, who
founded the company, came up with the
idea for Lumen while training for an Ironman
triathlon, as a way to track and test their
metabolism to improve performance. They
say it helps, but there isn’t much research
suggesting chasing metabolic flexibility can
enhance cardiovascular performance. But we
do know the opposite is true: people who
chase fitness performance seem to be less
prone to the risk factors for metabolic
syndrome (which are also signs of
inflexibility), according to a study conducted
in Japan. Enter the old chicken-and-egg
problem: Is someone healthy because they’re
metabolically flexible, or are people
metabolically flexible because they’re
healthy? Probably the latter, says Norton.
Follow basic health advice and your metrics,
not just on a Lumen device, will likely get
considerably better.
This is why Joseph Reagle, an associate
professor at Northeastern University who
wrote Hacking Life: Systematized Living and
Its Discontents, sees Lumen as simply
another device in the sea of health gadgets
today. “It’s just this continual churn,” he says.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing that people
have so many ways to become more
engaged with their health. This tracker likely
isn’t hurting anyone, he says. “Just taking the
step [of using a device] can give people a
sense of control and optimism.” So if shiny
new tools inspire you to follow basic nutrition
and exercise advice, Lumen might help you
out. But you can find the right balance in your
diet without a fancy Breathalyser, too.
SEPTEMBER 2022 39
 WHICH OF THESE FOODS
MIGHT SUDDENLY KILL YOU?
Adult-onset food allergies are on the rise and can make your life miserable –
or worse. Here’s what’s happening behind the scenes and how to deal with it

BY MATT JANCER PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDRE RUCKER

MARTY SPARGO WAS IN his early 20s when
a marshmallow almost killed him.
He was on holiday from university with his
friends, and they’d ducked away to the beach for
a bonfire with roasted jumbo marshmallows. A
few minutes after he gobbled one down, Spargo
began to feel funny. “My chest started getting
heavy, and my heart was pounding so hard, and
my vision was starting to distort,” he says. Panic
set in among the group as Spargo grew dizzier
and dizzier and seemed on the verge of losing
consciousness. His friends frantically called the
hospital, carried him to the car, and rushed him
to the emergency room. Spargo’s diagnosis: he
had a previously undiagnosed and possibly
late-developing allergy to gelatin, which
marshmallows are loaded with.
Although childhood food allergies get all the

40 MEN’S HE ALTH
 H E A LTH

NOT SO INNOCENT: FOODS

YOU ONCE ATE WITHOUT
ISSUE CAN TURN NASTY.

HOW TO TELL
IF YOU HAVE
A FOOD
A LLE RGY
THE USUAL
(ADULT-ONSET FOOD ALLERGY) K NOW
T HE SIGNS
SUSPECTS Talk to an allergist if
you have an itchy or
tingly mouth; hives
SUSPECTS SPECIFICALLY
and itching; swelling
in your lips, face,
Any fish with fins, including tongue or throat;
anchovies, catfish, cod, salmon wheezing, nasal
FINNED FISH congestion, or trouble
and tuna.
breathing; abdominal
pain, diarrhea, nausea
or vomiting; or
Peanuts, peanut butter, peanut- dizziness or fainting.
butter cups. But because peanuts Call 000 if your
PEANUTS are actually legumes, having airways feel
a peanut allergy doesn’t mean constricted, your pulse
you’re allergic to tree nuts. is rapid, you’re dizzy or
light-headed,
or you feel you’ll lose
Can range from crustaceans consciousness.
(prawns, crab, lobster) to molluscs
(clams, mussels, oysters, scallops,
RUL E OU T A N
SHELLFISH IN T OL E R A NCE
octopus, squid).
An intolerance isn’t
actually an allergy; it’s
a digestive-system
Sesame in all its forms, from issue. So you might
have gas, cramps,
SESAME seeds you can see to sesame oil,
nausea, heartburn,
paste and flour.
diarrhea or abdominal
pain, but you won’t
have breathing issues.
Almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, Lactose and gluten are
TREE NUTS hazelnuts, pecans, pistachios, classic causes of
walnuts. intolerance. Talk
to a doctor or dietitian
about these
attention, adult-onset food allergies have research strategy and innovation officer at Food symptoms.
become a thing, too. A recent report in The Allergy Research & Education.
Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In What they do know is that food allergies GE T T HE
Practice suggests there are more adults in the happen when your body misidentifies a protein RIGH T T E S T
US with a food allergy than children. While in a food or group of foods as a threat and Food-allergy test kits
many adult allergies are continuations from responds by pumping out antibodies that trigger look for allergy-
childhood, nearly half of the adults in this symptoms ranging from mild mouth-and-throat stoking antibodies in
report said theirs started in adulthood. And itching to severe ones that send you into your blood. The
it’s only getting worse: almost every allergy anaphylactic shock, during which your blood problem: you can have
expert agrees that there’s been a rise in the pressure drops and your airways constrict. antibodies but not
allergies. So experts
number of people reporting food allergies, Reactions typically occur within a few seconds
advise against using
says Dr Scott Sicherer, one of that paper’s to a few minutes, says Dr Pamela Guerrerio,
these as screening
distinguished authors. chief of the National Institute of Allergy and
tests. Instead, see
PROP STYLING: KELSI WINDMILLER

It’s not clear why foods you used to eat
cause trouble for you now, and researchers
also don’t yet know why more and more adults
are affected by food allergies. “A combination
of factors is likely to be responsible. It’s not just
genetics. It’s not just the environment. It’s not
just the food we eat,” says Bruce Roberts,
Infectious Diseases’ Laboratory of Allergic an allergist who can
Diseases. After that, the allergic response figure out the problem
happens every time the person is exposed to with a few test
the allergen, she says. options. Don’t dawdle.
These kinds of allergies can be annoying,
deadly or anything in between. Here’s what to
look out for and how to manage all of it.

SEPTEMBER 2022 41
 H E ALT H

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

MORE CONTACT WITH

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

BACTERIA AVOIDANCE
“People who live in farming
communities have fewer
IT TAKES JUST ONE BAD GUY
allergies than people in cities,” TO MAKE A MEAL PERILOUS.
says Sicherer. For example, in
recently industrialised parts of
China, people started to see more
allergies as lifestyles shifted to
more enclosed environments ALLERGIES: NUT A LWAYS SO OBVIOUS
and less exposure to animals,
gardening and the outdoors.
Overly clean lives may reduce R E A D T HE E X P L OR E P RO T EC T FIND R E L IE F
our ability to fend off allergies. INGR E DIE N T S YOUR YOURSE L F IN S CIE NCE
Some researchers speculate that Allergens aren’t SE NSIT I V IT Y Despite your best There’s now a drug to
overuse of other bacteria killers – necessarily where An oral-challenge efforts, a hidden help tame peanut
antibiotics – may also contribute you’d expect. test is a safe way to allergen may come allergies in kids, as
to food allergies. Always check labels figure out how much your way. If your well as a push to
and verify that an of a food would cause allergies are severe, develop more drugs
allergen isn’t in a reaction and what carrying an EpiPen for allergies,
EXTRA ANTACID USE what you’re ordering symptoms to expect. is nonnegotiable. A including some that
“It turns out the acid in your at a restaurant. Ask your GP whom generic version is would treat all types
stomach is really important for Menu blurbs often you should consult to available that may of food allergies with
breaking down food proteins so leave out important- get to the bottom of be cheaper. a single compound.
that they are less recognised by the to-you details. any issues.
immune system,” says Guerrerio.

WIN THE ALLERGY OPEN PEOPLE AGREEABLE PEOPLE

HEAD GAME
Research published in
Frontiers in Psychology
looked at the way
personality traits
affected how an adult
food allergy messed with
quality of life. The authors
had some suggestions
for everyone
Adventure seekers had more allergy issues.
Could be they were out doing things that
would expose them to more challenges, like
finding safe foods. Try: meeting novelty needs
through experiences other than food.
EXTROVERTED PEOPLE
Outgoing, expressive types had more
concerns around the personal and social
issues of living with a food allergy. Try: inviting
people to your home for gatherings where
you can control the food.
The sort who put others’ needs ahead of their
own tended to feel anxious or stressed about
allergies in social situations that revolved
around food. Try: finding ways to speak up
to others about your food allergy.
CONSCIENTIOUS PEOPLE
Responsible, organised souls had problems
finding a restaurant and were more likely to feel
bad if issues arose. Try: reminding yourself that if
a challenge hits, it’s often due to outside factors,
not a failure of planning.

42 MEN’S HE ALTH
WHO WE ARE
Founded in Denmark in 1963, we are a
global family of shoemakers guided by
respect for our heritage and craftsmanship
while seeking innovation in premium
footwear, leather goods, and leather
making.

Unique to our industry, we create our own

leather in our Gold-Rated tanneries and
produce shoes in factories we own. Design,
development, production, and retail - we
take responsibility all the way.

At ECCO, sustainability is at the core of

everything we create, design, hold dear,
and champion. ECCO promotes the health,
wellbeing, and safety of our employees, and
we respect all races, religions, and genders
and wish to provide a workplace free of any
harassment or abuse.

ECCO has a strong commitment to the

environment in its Code of Conduct
and works to constantly become more
sustainable. Our products are long-lasting
with a strong focus on comfort and quality.

#MovesLikeYou
 ENOUGH WITH HUSTLE
You can have more focus,
better sleep and way
more energy for just about
everything. All you have
to do is less
BY GINA LOVELESS

SEVEN YEARS BEFORE Glover Teixeira

earned the UFC light-heavyweight
championship in 2021, he was wiped.
“All I wanted to do was train more than
anybody,” he says. But despite his hustle
and his experience as a 35-year-old
fighter, Teixeira was no longer
competing at the same level as
his much younger opponents.
So he turned to the UFC Performance
Institute in Las Vegas for help. After trainers
there assessed everything from his workout
regimen to his nutrition and sleep, they
recommended something that surprised
him: he needed to train less and concentrate
more on recovery.
In fact, the new plan that the UFCPI sent
Teixeira even told him to take an entire day
off. (“I kind of felt guilty,” he says.) It took him
some time to adjust, but eventually he
started to access “rest mode” more often. He
stayed in bed 12 hours at a time. He built a
routine that was more in line with circadian
rhythms. And after a while, Teixeira began TWIDDLE YOUR
INTENSITY DIAL TO
winning more fights – his power, focus and TAKE A BREATHER.
energy not only returned but remained.
Rest mode isn’t something you need
a UFCPI plan to execute. Sara Mednick,
a professor of cognitive science at the
University of California, Irvine, says anyone D O W N S TAT E N O.1 D O W N S TAT E N O.2
can take advantage of what she calls the
“downstate”, daily periods of relative calm Coffee o’clock Late afternoon
that can improve your energy and sharpen Don’t try to overcome your post-lunch lull with Like you, your heart works hard all day long.
your thinking. another run to Baskin-Robbins, says Mednick. Unlike you, it doesn’t get a break, which means
“Like every animal and plant, we have Caffeine heightens stress and meddles with that days of prolonged stress can be especially
natural rhythms for our upstates and sleep. So instead, take 10 minutes after lunch rough on it, says Mednick. (If you’ve ever felt
downstates, and tapping into these rhythms to run through a 2-2-2-2-2 exercise, which will lethargic at 3:30pm, that might be your heart
optimises your energy so you have more help set you up for a more productive afternoon. saying, “It’s quitting time”.) Indulge your heart in
when you need it,” says Mednick, author of For the first two minutes, focus on the space the downstate and you might be able to stoke
The Power of the Downstate (out now). Here just outside yourself (the few centimetres your energy – or at least lower your stress. Lie
are five opportunities to shift into downstate around your body). Then, for two minutes, pay down and elevate your legs against a wall.
throughout your day. attention to your senses (smell, hearing, etc.). (Yeah, if you’re in an office, find some privacy.)
Next, spend two minutes on how you’re feeling Or, if that’s uncomfortable, prop up your hips
(sad, mad, glad) and two more on what you’re with a cushion or block. Remain in this position
thinking (This is silly and will never actually work for at least five minutes.
. . .). In the last two minutes, compare how you
felt when you started with how you feel now
(Oh, whoa, this kind of worked!).

44 MEN’S HE ALTH
 M I N D

HOW I KEEP IT
TOGETHER
When Dawan Alford wanted to create a space for Black men to talk candidly
about mental health, he launched Black Male Mental Health on Instagram in
2019. It resonated: BMMH has garnered 47,000-plus followers so far. Here’s how
the 37-year-old puts some chill in his day – Taylyn Washington-Harmon

D O W N S TAT E N O.3
After work
“In the evening, the right kind of physical
contact can help to settle our system, relax us
and help us feel secure and safe,” says Kevin 6:30AM 9AM 5:30PM
Gilliland, a clinical psychologist. So set and GREET THE THRICE IS NICE CUT THE CORD
enforce boundaries around distracting MORNING Alford checks his email He signs off for the
devices. Designate a bowl in another room Alford doesn’t live by only three times a day – at evening. “I think that
for phones and stash yours there. Power or believe in alarm 9am, noon and 5pm – a this idea of perpetual
down your laptop. Then move into the clocks. He wakes up with Tim Ferriss trick. “After grinding has been
present with your partner and/or kids. Bring gratitude and a word of these 30-minute email really embedded into
an interesting question to the dinner table. thanks, breathing deeply windows, don’t expect an our culture,” he muses.
Make a point of holding eye contact. Initiate and “acknowledging immediate response.” “What happens when
a great big family group hug. that all my body is you grind something?
working well”. It becomes dust.”

D O W N S TAT E N O. 4
After dinner
Early-evening sunlight signals to your brain
to decrease cortisol, the stress hormone, and
increase melatonin, a sleep aid. Going for a 7AM 12PM 6:30PM
15-minute walk before sunset helps to further TEND AND CENTRE TUNA TIME MENU MIXING
ease you into the restorative, pre-bed He starts his day by Alford dishes up his How do you get a
downstate, says Mednick. When you’re back drinking coffee and go-to lunch: a tuna melt peckish, picky-eating
home, ensure you’re not taking in excess nurturing his collection with avocado, lettuce tween to eat dinner?
blue light, which can jolt you out of the of 35-plus plants, which and tomato. He’s a You compile a weekly
downstate. If the idea of wearing blue-light- he sees as a metaphor for pescatarian, inspired menu of known likes à la
blocking glasses, like Nightfall ELITE Blue mental care. “I by Malcolm X’s diet – Alford, such as salmon,
Blocking Glasses ($120; blockbluelight.com. walk around spraying minimal meat and few pasta or a quiche with
au), sounds silly, fine. Your alternative is them, seeing who’s starches – and is trying cheese. “It’s dad life,” he
growing, speaking nicely to dodge the health issues says with a laugh.
avoiding screens altogether.
to them, and it’s a really he’s seen plague others in
centreing practice.” his community.

D O W N S TAT E N O.5
Bedtime
Sleep is your body’s most powerful
downstate. Mednick recommends that you
go to bed by 10 every night. That’s because
you experience your most restorative chunk 8:30AM 3:30PM 9:30PM
of rest during the first deep wave of sleep, AROUND THE WORLD MERGE WORK VINYL CHILL
she explains. The later you go to bed, the Alford does a three- AND PLAY Alford winds down by
more that wave is compressed. “When you set series of push-ups, Alford shifts into dad listening to a selection
align the downstate of your autonomic pull-ups and triceps mode but keeps his from his enviable vinyl
nervous system with that first period of dips, sometimes adding business going. After collection. “I try not
nighttime sleep, your whole restorative an 8-kay run. Living picking up his 11-year-old to fall asleep [just
system resonates,” Mednick says. “You get with PTSD, he says this daughter from school, he anywhere] around the
the most recovery from the day before, and practice prepares him for engages with followers house,” he says. “With
you set yourself up to be best prepared the any dangerous situation. via comments and DMs a vinyl, you have to
coming morning.” The good thing is, this can “I want to have enough from his phone – “things stop it yourself, so it’s
strength to manage my I can do sparingly on my like saying, ‘All right,
be easy – as long as you’ve already followed
body in ways that are device” while helping her goodnight’” – before
all the downstate-enhancing tips in the steps
most helpful.” with homework. heading to bed.
before this one.

SEPTEMBER 2022 45
 FATHE RHOOD
THE CULTURE SHOCK
You cannot both be a dad and keep up with life’s more leisurely
pursuits. Making peace with that is tough – but not impossible
BY ADAM PALLY ILLUSTRATION BY AGATA NOWICKA
THERE’S ONE QUESTION that is particularly
infuriating to a father of young children, and it
goes something like this: “Have you seen [insert
six-part, 10-hour-long HBO investigative series
here]?” The person asking the question isn’t
usually trying to start something with me (at least
I don’t think so) and either doesn’t have children
or their kids are older and can do things by
themselves (one can dream).
When I hear this question, my brain goes
numb and I’m seized with a combination of
nostalgia and panic. Do you even understand
my life right now? Are you reminding me that
I was once at least somewhat tuned in? What
is my favourite thing I’m watching right now?
Honestly, it’s Instagram Stories. If I do have a
chance to sit down, it’s likely in a room where five
iPads and a television are blasting. My phone is
my only refuge. So the last thing I watched that
46 MEN’S HE ALTH
I really loved was an alligator feeding, followed by
an omelette-cooking tutorial, which set up a
hack to get the kernels out of a bag of popcorn,
then on to a beautiful blonde playing the guitar
solo from “Bohemian Rhapsody” in a string bikini,
and, finally, Loki dancing on a British talk show.
That’s what’s in my queue.
What music have I been listening to? The
other night I was lying in bed trying to watch
some sport, and my wife was having a freak-out
that her Bluetooth headphones wouldn’t connect
and her Instagram Stories (she’s a fan, too!) were
playing out loud on her phone. So I guess the
song I most recently listened to was I’m begging
begging begging you the small waist pretty face
and big bank oh no, oh no, oh no no no no no.  instructions, or still haven’t seen whatever Matrix
Have I been to any great restaurants? Most of
the time I eat a salad in my car while I wait for my
children to get out of school. It’s a salad to give
YOU GIVE UP PLENTY WHEN
YOU HAVE KIDS. THE SANITY
TRICK? LEARN TO PREFER
THE NEW STUFF .
me the illusion that eating healthy will stave off
death, but it’s the same salad almost every day,
and by the time I’m done throwing Parmesan
crisps, tortilla chips, hard-boiled eggs and
cheese on top, the “salad” has more kilojoules
than a pizza. For dinner, it’s wine and whatever
my kids want to eat, so a steady rotation of
chicken nugs, mac and cheese and burgers.
If my wife and I get a date night out, it’s sushi,
and we drink more than we eat every time and
are checking in with the sitter to see how soon
we can get home after the kids fall asleep,
because we don’t want to put them to bed.
I used to love going to the movies, seeing
concerts, going out partying till late, eating at fine
restaurants, wearing nice clothes. I bet I would
still love it, but I don’t miss it. If you’re a dad worth
his salt, you have given up even the slightest hint
of being a cultured man for something more
important: the wellbeing of other people.
Having a responsibility to these little prick
kids of mine has been the single greatest joy
of my life. I’ve grown to realise that life is about
having people to love, people to need, and
people to need you. If that means I missed Tiger
King for Daniel Tiger or haven’t read a book for at
least three years, unless you count Lego
they’re on now – I’m fine with all that. And I’ll
catch up on that HBO series when they start
putting all their stuff on Instagram Stories.
 TACT I CS

Uhhh, Is This
Thing Okay?
Plants, like people, get
sick when neglected.
Diagnose what’s
THE SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR
happening, then treat it

NEW PLANT The problem:

Bright-yellow leaves
The fix: Stop watering your

DADS
plant so much. It’s better to
water it less and give it more
light. “If your leaf turns yellow,
that leaf is dead. It’s not coming
back,” Carter says. Just trim it
Studies show houseplants off so energy goes to the
boost productivity and healthier parts of the plant. 

relaxation. But they can

The problem: Dark-brown
feel like a project. Plant
edges around the leaves
stylist (real thing!) Hilton The fix: Now you aren’t
Carter helps you pick the watering it enough. “If it starts
right one for any home to curl up or droop, you need
to water it right away,”
BY
Carter says.

The problem: Um, it’s dying?

The fix: Try a new pot. For
SHOW STOPPER plants that dislike dry soil,
Bird of Paradise stick to metal and glazed
This tropical plant pulls a room pots, which retain moisture. If
together, though it requires near-daily your plant prefers to stay dry,
attention. Lots of light and humidity is opt for pots made of clay or
key. $44; interiorjungle.com.au stone, which pull moisture
away from soil faster.
Light / Water

WINDOWSILL WONDER BATHROOM BUDDY TOUGH GUY

Zanzibar Gem Pothos plant Chinese Evergreen
If you travel a lot and/or forget to water Also known as devil’s ivy, this plant grows Don’t let its delicate look fool you: this
plants, go with a low-maintenance one, in low light. Put one near a window in your flowering plant is durable and can grow in
Carter says. Pop this next to a window.  humid bathroom – the steam will help it most environments. Place it in indirect-to-
And don’t sweat watering – it thrives on thrive even if you fail to water it. low light and fertilise it once or twice a
neglect $69; bloomd.com.au $50; cheekyplantco.com.au year. $89; indoorplantshed.com.au

Light / Water Light / Water Light / Water

SEPTEMBER 2022 47
 TRIE D
A ND TE S TE D

LAB APPROVED

COATS OF
2022

ARMOUR
Braced to brave the sting in
winter’s tail? The MH Lab team
faced the elements to select the
best weatherproof jackets for
your outdoor cardio endeavours

DRESSING FOR for the weather

is notoriously difficult at this time of
year: a biting wind and sudden
downpours one week; birdsong
and T-shirt conditions the next.
But if you’re keen to start training
outdoors again, don’t let an MH
unpredictable forecast dampen WINNER
your spirits.
Running outdoors has multiple
benefits, from boosting mood and 1
burning extra kilojoules to
increasing muscle activation. Throw
in a few bench dips and burpees
(damp grass permitting) and you
have a peerless engine-building
workout. When others quiver at the
1 STRONG STARTER 2 FAST, NOT LOOSE
mention of brutal metcon, you’ll be 82/100 90/100
breathing easy.  Decathlon Evadict Men’s Trail Montane Unisex Podium
But you need to make sure Running Waterproof Jacket, Waterproof Pull-On Jacket,
you’re fully equipped for the ($139; decathlon.com.au) ($199; terratribe.com.au)
occasion. That’s why we tasked the
Men’s Health Lab with assessing PERFORMANCE PERFORMANCE
the best waterproof jackets on the DESIGN DESIGN
market. Through a rigorous testing EASE OF USE EASE OF USE
process, we found out which
products’ claims hold water – and COST EFFECTIVE An affordable all-rounder, SPEED DEMON Montane designed this
which are liable to leave you high this jacket was designed with runners at all jacket with a focus on speed and
and not so dry.   levels in mind – whether you’re a newcomer performance, claiming to use one of the
Our recommended jackets
WORDS: HARRY BULLMORE; TESTING: YANAR ALKAYAT

are all made from lightweight
materials, offering a close,
comfortable fit, but can be stuffed
into your rucksack without breaking
stride. Get up to speed with our
elite selection.
bagging your first few kilometres or a seasoned
strider boasting some serious mileage.
EXPERT OPINION We liked the fit of this
jacket, which provided enough room to layer
up underneath without being too loose. The
reflective stripes helped panellists feel safe and
the elasticated waistband made sure it didn’t
ride up.
lightest breathable fabrics around. Its
race-day credentials are enviable, though
the absence of pockets will be a miss for
some enthusiasts. 
EXPERT OPINION This half-zip jacket
packs away into a natty bag that can fit
in the palm of your hand. It also offers
protection from both wind and rain, making
it a trail runner’s best friend.

48 MEN’S HE ALTH
 GE A R

RUN UP
THE SCORE
3 CUSTOM FIT 4 HIKING BUDDY Our panel of 24 runners 5 RACE READY
77/100 85/100 judged on these criteria 79/100
Keela Saxon Jacket, OMM Halo Jacket, Inov-8 Raceshell HZ Unisex
($183; ebay.com.au) ($196; catch.com.au) Jacket, ($204; catch.com.au)

PERFORMANCE PERFORMANCE 1/ EASE OF USE PERFORMANCE

DESIGN
EASE OF USE
ON YOUR BIKE This jacket will suit runners
and cyclists alike. The Flylite Aqua fabric is
both lightweight and waterproof, while
Velcro straps and toggles around the neck
and wrists allow you to customise the fit.
EXPERT OPINION Heavy rain and driving
winds couldn’t touch our testers in this
hardy jacket. The arms were a bit too baggy
for our liking, but we were big fans of its
adjustable elements and handy back pocket.
DESIGN Jackets had to be DESIGN
EASE OF USE flexible and easy to EASE OF USE
put on and take off.
HIGH AND DRY This jacket is made to MAIN EVENT For regular race-goers,
withstand harsh mountain weather, so it’ll this ultralight jacket might be more your
take a jaunt around the countryside in its speed. It’s built for the fleet-footed, with
stride. It’s under 100g, too, so won’t weigh Inov-8 even using semi-transparent
you down as you push for a PB.  2/DESIGN material so your number will be visible
Hoods, zipped pockets at all times – smart thinking. 
and toggles to adjust fit
EXPERT OPINION With its well-fitted
earned points.
hood and cuffed wrists, the OMM Halo is EXPERT OPINION Impressed testers
sure to keep you dry, scoring top marks in said the material was so lightweight and
our waterproofing tests. We liked the breathable it was easy to forget they were
design, though some said the looser fit wearing a jacket at all. Some found the
flapped about on faster runs. zipper was a little bit high and tight
3/PERFORMANCE around the neck, but the clean design
Waterproofing claims won plenty of admirers.
were put to the test in
the lab and the field.

SEPTEMBER 2022 49
 RAISING THE TONE
In the impossibly sexy shape of the ALFA ROMEO TONALE, the luxury Italian car
maker is redefining its values – and leaving hoary motoring cliches in its wake
BY ANDREW CHESTERTON

I’M GOING TO let you in on a little

motoring-writer secret. You know all those
over-used tropes you read in reviews all the
time? Well, they’re mostly bollocks.
The truth is that nothing actually handles
like a go-kart (no, not even a Lotus, which
actually produces a drive experience that’s
far more violent, like you’ve been trapped in
a giant washing machine on its fastest spin
cycle). And if you truly want to ride in
something that ‘corners like it’s on rails’,
then you’d better get yourself a train ticket
and a good book for the journey.
But there are always exceptions. And
Alfa Romeo is one of them. Because, yes,
the Italian brand really is stuffed full of
passion like an over-filled cannoli. And, yes,
historically, their cars have aged just as
gracefully as a dairy-filled breakfast pastry.
But all that, says Alfa Romeo’s new
global boss, Jean-Philippe Imparato, ends
with the brand’s new and impossibly sexy
Tonale small SUV. Oh, and please read that
with an Italian accent. Nobody wants to
drive a toenail.
This is a man so laser-focused on
changing Alfa Romeo’s reputation for
questionable quality that he slowed
production of the Tonale to just 25 cars per
week, meaning each vehicle was dutifully
inspected to ensure it met his standards
before letting it loose in the wild. To put that front-end combine to deliver something speeds with gentle inputs, soaking up the
output into perspective, Toyota builds that definitely stands above the typical cabin ambience (which locks out plenty of
almost 25,000 cars per day. plain-Jane pack. road noise), and trying to drive past
So, has it worked? The short answer But if the fact the Tonale doesn’t feel like reflective surfaces so you can catch a
is yes. While Alfa Romeos of old were your standard Alfa Romeo is the good glimpse of its svelte exterior styling.
always a hoot to drive, they were sorely news, the bad news is that it doesn’t really But the signs are good for the future
lacking in things like build quality, nice drive like one either. A front-drive, modestly here. For now, the Tonale has just two
cabin materials and technology. The Tonale powered small SUV doesn’t scream Italian output options, with a 1.5-litre turbo-petrol
flips that script entirely. performance, I know, but the Tonale’s engine tuned to deliver either 96kW and
Its build quality feels excellent, like it’s attempts to act like a sports car can be 240Nm or 118kW and 240Nm. There’s
been screwed together by the same people pretty grating. also a 48-volt mild-hybrid system on board
who make sure submarines are watertight, There’s plenty of grip at the front, almost to reduce fuel use and emissions, and
and the tech stuff in the cabin is great, no body roll, and the steering, while lacking to provide a little extra boost under
thanks to a big 10.25-inch central screen, in feeling, is super sharp. But it also feels a flat-footed acceleration.
a second 12.3-inch screen in the driver’s little tightly wound, and on tight, twisty Next, though, is a high-performance
binnacle, wireless Apple Car Play and roads, altogether too busy. The seven- plug-in hybrid variant, which should deliver
Android Auto, wireless phone charging speed dual-clutch gearbox is constantly more than enough petrol-electric power to
– and even Amazon’s Alexa onboard for changing cogs to magic up some extra really take advantage of the Tonale’s
digital help. grunt, and the engine noise is too loud and impressive ride and handling set-up.
It’s also predictably gorgeous, inside and obnoxious, without actually producing And so a new Alfa Romeo is upon us.
out, which is no tiny feat in the small SUV much in the way of extra speed. And it’s one that might finally – and perhaps
space. Its curvaceous styling, massive A true sports car this ain’t, and your best mercifully – say arrivederci to the whole
20-inch alloys and angry, mesh-filled bet is to keep it humming along at city ‘Italian car’ schtick.

50 MEN’S HE ALTH
 M H GA R AGE

“It feels like it’s been screwed

together by the same people who
make submarines watertight”
HEAD-TURNER: THE ALFA
ROMEO TONALE IS
PREDICTABLY GORGEOUS,
INSIDE AND OUT.

SEPTEMBER 2022 51
 ONE IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE. SIX WEEKS TO TRAIN. GO
BY ALE X MITCHESON
PHOTOGR APHY BY JACK BUSSELL

Hunting High And

Low For Mindfulness
OUR WRITER ESCHEWS THE MEAT AISLE AT HIS LOCAL SUPERMARKET TO VENTURE INTO NATURE
AND EXPERIENCE THE PRIMAL SENSATIONS ASSOCIATED WITH KILLING FOR YOUR DINNER

If your survival depended

on it, could you kill?

52 MEN’S HE ALTH

FOR AS LONG AS I can recall,
the evolution of man has
fascinated me. How we went
from crawling around in dark
caves to sending 2am R u up?
messages is a complex and
contentious journey. The long
and short of it is, as a species, we
had to adapt and survive, and
those who did would pass on
their genes. A key element in
the wild kaleidoscope of early
ancestorial life was hunting. If you
failed to forage or return
successfully from a hunt, there
were no shiny florescent-lit
supermarkets to save the day.
You went hungry. Or worse,
after going hungry for a while,
you died.
Eamon Waddington has been
hunting and fishing for as long as
he can remember. Originally from
Victoria, he migrated north and
now resides in Newcastle, and is
a part-owner/guide at Broadside
Hunting in the Hunter Valley. The
organisation offers hunting
courses dealing in authentic
experiences (miles from screen
time) and a primal connection to
what once was. After a rural
upbringing, he eventually found
himself locked into the busy 9-5
carousel of adult life: eat – sleep
– work – party – repeat. He
laughs: “For me, going out and
partying started to get old”. Fast
forward a few years, and a
longing for something different
began to manifest. So, while
leaning into his countryside roots,
he would soon appreciate that
Saturday mornings spent out in
nature were just the tonic. It
wouldn’t take long before hunting
became a passion, and, along
with a group of friends, he would
secure a prime piece of unspoilt
land in the Hunter Valley for
regular hunting trips: Broadside
Hunting was born.
HOPE AND PREY of trail running shoes, I’m given a a good while. Though we’d
So, in the 21st century, where pair of binoculars to wear across battled changeable weather
does hunting have a place? Does my chest and we head off into yesterday, we’d got our reward:
it even have a place? Time and the darkness. sipping coffee before a view I
again, I’ll find myself wandering The three of us had tackled won’t forget quickly; specifically,
aisle after aisle of readily available some serious terrain the previous a jet-boiler packet cappuccino at
food, taking in attractively day, characterised by tall tussock 1100 metres with nothing but
portioned cuts of meat or fish grass and hidden rocks – the valley floor beneath us — utter
and wondering, Should it really perfect environment in which to serenity and not a pretentious
be this easy? And while I’ll admit roll your ankle. Consulting my barista in sight.
to having my fair share of anxiety smartwatch, I see there are Interestingly, the complete
— I mean, who doesn’t at some roughly 20,000 opportunities to lack of anything instils a
point these days? — it does make do so on some of the steepest considerable sense of calm
me curious to know if hunting and deepest hiking I’ve seen in and a discernible drop in my
could play a role in improving
mental wellbeing.
I wake to a stir outside my
swag. A quick glance at my
phone confirms it’s just gone
5am EST. Zipping back, the
dense cold air of the morning
hits me and I let out a long,
visible breath. It’s a chilly 6º
Celsius. Generating a palpable air
of enthusiasm, the others mill
about slurping coffee, pulling on
their camouflage gear and
rubbing weary eyes. I join the
activity and throw down a banana
and muesli bar, chasing them
with much-needed liquid
caffeine. It isn’t long before
Eamon, my guide for the day,
grabs me and our other
participant, Jack, and tells us Despite being armed and
ready, the hunters went
we’ll head out shortly. Apart from unrewarded on day one.
camouflage gear and a trusty pair
Into The Wild: the quiet
and focus required for
hunting can make it a
form of meditation.
SEPTEMBER 2022 53
stress levels, which had been
high since I’d arrived at camp. I’m
naturally a chronic overthinker, so
being sans phone signal —and
immersed in an environment
which I know is unequivocally
off-grid — has diminished the
chatter in my head. And though
we didn’t manage to get anything
on our first day, actively stalking
prey has pushed everything else
on my mind out of contention. I
have been fully present from the
word go.
54 MEN’S HE ALTH
We didn’t need to get
ourselves a kill to eat or
survive, but the level of
concentration and mindfulness
required had an elevating
effect on my mood. Could
hunting be a form of
meditation? The Cambridge
English Dictionary defines
meditation as the act of giving
your attention to only one
thing, either as a religious
activity or as a way of
becoming calm and relaxed.
I know deep meditation can take
years to master, but on the face
value of things, it appears hunting
meets the criteria.
THE KILLING FIELDS
A new day breaks, and we find
ourselves standing at the foot of a
hill just as the first rays of sunlight
bathes the expanse of valleys,
ridge lines and mountains around
us in a lavender glow. Eamon has
swapped his compound bow
from yesterday for a rifle and tells
Lethal Force: an
unsuspecting deer has
seconds to live as a
skilled hunter takes aim.
The kill done, the
confronting task
of skinning and
carving begins.
us there are deer up ahead.
Chances are high we will make a
kill. “This doesn’t look too bad,”
I quip, noting the gradient. Eamon
grins back at me. “What you see
isn’t the whole picture,” he says.
“There’s a plateau and then
probably double again. I hope
you’re up for it.”
Before finding myself on the
rugged slopes of the Hunter
Valley – far removed from
civilisation – I was aware the
going for this course was going to
be rough. It was never going to
involve leisurely trail-walking and
toasting marshmallows by the
fire. Long days of negotiating
steep ascents/descents at
altitude and the possibility of
humping our spoils back to camp
made me want to arrive prepared.
Rewind six weeks, and I had
incorporated climber-machine
intervals, long, slow spin-bike
sessions and supersets of
specific leg exercises into my
regular training. Plus, whenever
I found myself out for a surf, I
tortured myself with a training
method I’d learnt years back: for
every second wave surfed, you
paddle into the beach, turn
around and paddle back out.
Strange as it looks to anyone
watching, it’s incredibly effective
and a rugged lung-and lats
burner. As we tuck into the first
five minutes of climbing,
I feel the dividends of these
preparations, with my legs just
about recovered from the
previous day.
Hunting is much more
technical than most people think,
and avoiding detection is your
primary concern. Luckily, thermal
effects provide the perfect cover.
As day breaks, the cooler air at
the top of the mountain runs
down towards the lower ground,
creating conditions favourable to
remaining unsniffed out.
Stopping to take in the towering
escarpment in dim amber light,
we spot two separate groups of
deer. Observing from a distance,
we discuss our options. There’s
something dignified and tranquil
about taking our time while
“SECONDS LATER, THE KNIFE
HANDLE IS THRUST MY WAY –
IT’S MY TURN TO GIVE IT A GO”
watching these graceful
creatures. Even though I sense
that one of them will soon meet
its maker, I can’t help but feel a
sense of purpose and
commitment to the task at hand.
We hatch a plan and steadily
approach one of the groups,
crawling and moving without
haste. Eamon stops ahead, and
I find myself looking over his
shoulder as the gun barrel is
brought into view. This is it.
Moments pass before a loud
crack is followed by a swift
bolt-action reload and another
shot. I see a deer up ahead drop,
and the others surrounding it
scatter instantly.
Standing over our fallen prey,
we can see the first shot was
deadly accurate, hitting the rib
cage and almost certainly
causing an instant or rapid death.
Jack and I pull the deer down to
some flatter ground to start
skinning and butchering the
animal; its legs and hoofs still feel
warm. With the morning sun now
striking our backs, it’s in this
moment I’m unsure how I’ll
handle the minutes to come.
Jack, our photographer, says
he’s keen to take the skin as a
memento. In no time Eamon has
swiftly pulled the animal onto its
back and made long incision
lines across the torso, around the
legs and shoulders, before
easing the thick skin away with
angled slashes of his blade. The
sight transfixes me. Seconds
later, the knife handle is thrust my
way — it’s my turn to give it a go.
It’s hard to explain, but a sort
of primal sense starts to override
my emotions. I’m calm and
collected, somehow making
quick progress. “You’re actually
pretty good at this,” says Eamon.
“Have you done this before?” I
assure him I haven’t; the closest
thing I can think of is skinning a
salmon fillet for a poke bowl.
Other than that, I’m with most
people and fall into the
‘I like meat in a packet and ready
to cook bucket’. Confronting as it
is, though, the faster and easier
I peel back the skin, the more it
becomes a cathartic process.
And as bloodthirsty as this might
seem (sorry, vegans), I find
gratification between the
moments of discomfort.
With the hide completely
removed, we take the hind legs
and back straps, taking turns
carefully removing the meat
between plumes of condensed
breath. Once done, a strange
sense of achievement washes
over me.
It’s only now as I look back at
the carcass that I notice the
glassy eyes staring into
nothingness. In this moment, I
feel the utmost respect for this
fallen animal and the visceral
experience it’s provided us.
Standing in this pristine
environment — still early on a
Sunday morning — having
butchered an animal with my
bare hands, I can’t help but smile.
I’d gladly take this over waiting in
line for coffee and smashed avo
any day.
SEPTEMBER 2022 55
MH
 NO SWEAT
Step up your sportswear game with
elevated looks so chic you’ll actually feel
guilty perspiring in them

PHOTOGR APHY BY LIAM CHANDLER ST YLING BY ALI COT TON

TALENT ADAM FISHER LOCATION MALIBU CRE W, MANLY

Jacket ($420) by SIR. X

Jordan Barrett ; tank ($99)
by Common Threads;
shorts ($79) by AG BC;
watch ($19,800) by Hublot;
sneakers ($160) by Puma;
socks ($39) by Futur.

SEPTEMBER 2022 57
 With so much sport
on right now, from
the Commonwealth
Games to the Rugby
Championship to
the FIBA Women’s
Basketball
World Cup in
Sydney (tickets.
womensworldcup.
basketball/), it’s only
fitting that you dress
the part.

Hoodie ($110) and track pant

($99) by Teamm8; cap ($79)
by Polo Ralph Lauren; watch
($19,800) by Hublot;
sneakers ($160 by Puma;
socks ($80) by Rototo.

58 MEN’S HE ALTH
 STYLE

Windbreaker ($100) by Under

Armour; polo ($139) and
track pants ($219) by Polo
Ralph Lauren.

SEPTEMBER 2022 59
 Tank ($69) and shorts ($79) by
Teamm8; watch ($38,000) by
Hublot; sneakers ($290) by
Adidas; socks ($80) by Rototo.

60 MEN’S HE ALTH
 STYL E

Jacket ($420) and pants

($420) by SIR. X Jordan
Barrett; shirt ($160) by
Venroy; sneakers ($190) by
New Balance; cap ($79) by
Polo Ralph Lauren.

SEPTEMBER 2022 61
Jacket ($198) by Under
Armour; T-shirt ($59) by
Lulu Lemon; shorts ($150)
by Venroy; shoes ($160)
by Adidas Original; socks
($80) by Rototo.

Jacket ($198) by Lulu

Lemon; shirt ($140) and
shorts ($120) by Venroy;
shoes ($359.95) by Ecco;
socks ($39) by Futur.

62 MEN’S HE ALTH
 STYL E

Rugby jumper ($189) and

tracksuit pants ($219) by
Polo Ralph Lauren; watch
($19,800) by Hublot;
sneakers ($290) by Adidas;
socks ($25) by Nike.

SEPTEMBER 2022 63
 NORMAL TO DRY SKIN
NON-FOAMING GEL TEXTURE HIGHLY FOAMING GENTLE GEL TEXTURE FOAMING TEXTURE

NOT SURE
WHERE TO
START?
CERAVE HAS
A CLEANSER
FOR YOU

NORMAL TO DRY SKIN NORMAL TO VERY DRY SKIN

CREAM-TO-FOAM TEXTURE FOAMING OIL TEXTURE

3 ESSENTIAL CERAMIDES OPEN CAMERA

to moisturise and help support AND SCAN TO
the skin barrier LEARN MORE

GOOD SPORTS
The casual versatility of the sports watch makes it more in demand than ever before
EARLIER THIS YEAR, someone wrote into
The New York Times with a style conundrum.
The woman’s husband was a scientist/
engineer who had long worked in Tokyo,
where the dress code was formal business
attire. But he’d now moved to Silicon Valley
where things were considerably more
casual. “What to do with the 50-plus
beautiful silk ties in his closet?” the dutiful
wife asked. “I am thinking of turning them
into a psychedelic quilt.”
Now, at Men’s Health, we, of course,
enjoy psychedelic quilts as much as the next
person. But this woman’s plaintive appeal
highlighted the changing nature of the way
we get dressed. After all, when was the last
time that you willingly knotted a tie? Sure
there are still weddings and funerals, job
interviews or those regrettable appearances
in court. But ties feel increasingly
anachronistic in the modern world,
particularly after COVID accelerated the
collective unbuttoning that was already
taking place on a grand scale.
Today, even those with proper grown-up
66 MEN’S HE ALTH
jobs have largely ditched the suit and tie,
with the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP
Morgan also switching to business casual.
Blame it on the prevailing work-from-home
lifestyle, but a sartorial reset has taken hold
that favours comfort and versatility over
pocket squares and Windsor knots.
When it comes to our wristwear, this
swing has triggered a rise in the popularity of
sports watches. To clarify, in horological
speak, “sports watch” refers not to a
timepiece you’d wear to time your splits in
the gym, but one that offers solid water-and-
shock resistance, has a screw-in crown and
reasonable lume – as opposed to, say, a
fragile dress watch on a leather band that’d
nestle under your dress-shirt cuff.
The beauty of a steel sports watch is its
versatility. This is a wrist-bound companion
that’s sufficiently robust to withstand a quick
dip in the ocean or a bracing hike through
the rain. Stylistically, a sports watch has
always been able to pass muster with
T-shirt and jeans, but now – much like the
humble sneaker – it’s acceptable in more
TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph
$8500
formal circumstances, too. Indeed, even
at the Oscars, you’ll see tuxedoed men
on the red carpet with chronographs or
dive watches jutting out from beneath
their cufflinks.
Essentially, a sports watch is the Swiss
Army knife of timepieces in that it’s a jack of
all trades that will rarely let you down. This,
in turn, makes it a good shout if you’re
looking for a one-watch collection. That
also means you can probably justify
spending a little bit more on it than a
watch you wheel out only occasionally.
Consequently, sports watches are
more likely to pass the “cost per wear”
equation – which breaks down to: total
cost of the watch x annual maintenance/
number of days you’ll wear it. Given that a
well-made Swiss watch can happily last you
for decades if treated with a modicum
WORDS: LUKE BENEDICTUS
of care, suddenly that hefty price tag might
not look quite so daunting. Plus, just think
about how much cash you’re going to
save now you can make your own
psychedelic quilts.
EXCLUSIVE OFFER
SUBSCRIBE
& SCORE
12 ISSUES
FOR JUST SAVE
29 %

*Saving is based on your first 12 issues. After your first 12 issues your selection of recurring credit card payment ensures your subscription will
continue at $37 every 6 issues. You can cancel your subscription at any time and you will continue to receive magazines delivered through to the
end of your last billing period. We do not provide refunds for partial billing periods. Offer valid in Australia and New Zealand only until 04/09/22.
Paragon DCN Pty Ltd is collecting your personal information for the purpose of processing and managing your subscription. We will handle your
personal information in accordance with Paragon’s Privacy Policy, which is available at menshealth.com.au/privacy-policy.

68 MEN’S HE ALTH
 MH SUB SC R IPTI ON OF F ER

F
YOU
R EE
NG LIV
Shave S ING
kincare
Kit valu
ed at
$98

menshealth.com.au/subscribe
02 94391955
SEPTEMBER 2022 69
 HUNGRY
HEART

70 MEN’S HE ALTH
 TACT ICS

Knit by Acne from The

Outnet; pants by Bassike.

THIS ISSUE OF MEN’S HEALTH MARKS A RECORD-BREAKING

FOURTH COVER APPEARANCE BY TV PERSONALITY AND
FITNESS GURU TIM ROBARDS, WHO’S NEVER
LOOKED FINER. BUT AS HE REVEALS IN THIS
FRANK AND WIDE-RANGING PROFILE, HE’S ALSO
NEVER BEEN MORE ACUTELY AWARE OF THE
PASSAGE OF TIME, NOR SO RESTLESS TO
FULFIL HIS AMBITIONS BEFORE
IT’S TOO LATE
BY DA NIEL WILLIA MS PHOTOGR APHY BY JODY PACHNIUK ST YLING BY A LISON COT TON

SEPTEMBER 2022 71
Shirt by R.M. Williams;
corduroy jeans by
Patagonia.

72 MEN’S HE ALTH
 TACTI C S

O
F ALL THINGS, THE BINS ON HIS STREET IN
EASTERN SYDNEY HAVE BECOME SIGNIFICANT IN
THE LIFE OF TIM ROBARDS. WHY? BECAUSE
THEY’RE A MARKER OF TIME, AND TIME HAS
BECOME PRECIOUS TO HIM. “YOU KNOW, I WALK PAST
THEM, AND I SEE THE BINS HAVE GONE OUT, AND I THINK,
THAT’S ANOTHER WEEK,” SAYS ROBARDS. IN THE ENSUING
FORTNIGHT IT’S, “THERE ARE THE BINS OUT AGAIN
. . . AND THERE THEY ARE AGAIN. THEY’RE A CONSTANT
REMINDER OF ANOTHER WEEK DOWN. AND IT SCARES ME.”
An approaching milestone birthday coming my way . . . there was a gap . . . But being flesh and blood (with his
– Robards turns 40 on the 1st of a full-field 100 per cent sprint . . . and sights set on a goal that may or may
October – has intensified this dread pop.” He ended up having the tear not be reachable), he does have
of time slipping away while there’s still surgically fixed because he wasn’t worries, of course – and doubts – and
so much to do. The clock’s ticking – prepared to stop sprinting as a they gnaw away at him.
and every tick is a miniature explosion concession to ageing. And he’s proud The difference between Robards
in his head. of his rehab: the doc said he’d be in a and many of us, perhaps, is that he’s
It hasn’t helped that, of late, his knee brace and on crutches for six intent on doing everything in his
famously cover-worthy body has weeks post-op; Robards tossed them power to become what he wants
been breaking down more than it after one. “I wouldn’t advise that for to be: a big-screen actor of
used to, buckling under the weight everyone, but because of my consequence. Maybe, ultimately, he
of stressors it might once have chiropractic background, I knew how won’t quite make it. He accepts that.
absorbed. He rattles off his most to protect it.” But it won’t be for want of trying – or
recent injuries: a hamstring, ripped off Robards chats with Men’s Health for want of a plan. He keeps hitting
the bone; a biceps, same thing; and on the balcony out back of The obstacles – mainly casting directors
the last one, a rectus femoris Boathouse restaurant in Sydney’s who see, in Robards, a handsome
(quadriceps muscle), torn at the start Rose Bay. It’s a pristine winter’s reality-TV regular rather than the
of a touch-footy game. “I didn’t get morning and the harbour behind us accomplished actor he believes he
the chance to do a proper warm-up,” is glistening in the sunshine. Defying can be. But he won’t quit.
Robards recalls. “I managed a couple the chill in a T-shirt, Robards looks a “No one sees the work that I’m
of leg swings, a couple of high knees, million bucks. Watching him sipping doing behind closed doors,” he says.
and at my age that’s not good his soy cappuccino, you’d reckon he “I’m working my butt off to be so
enough. Suddenly, the ball was wouldn’t have a worry in the world. good that they can’t say no.”

SEPTEMBER 2022 73
 TURNING POINT
You ask Robards how he feels about
nearing 40.
“Whoa, yeah . . . hmmm,” he says,
before falling silent. And straight away,
from a solid base, your respect for the
guy goes up a notch, because he’s
doing you the courtesy of thinking,
processing his feelings rather than
pressing play on a stock answer.
“Should I use the term midlife crisis?
Very mixed feelings,” he says at last.
“Part of me just keeps kind of . . . there’s
a little bit of a freak-out, you know?
Because in my head, I’m still 25.”
Back in 2012, Robards was
approaching an earlier milestone – 30
– while logging absurdly long hours as
a chiropractor across three Sydney
clinics. The physicality of the work,
combined with a sense of financial
stagnation, had unsettled him. To get to
the point, an unusual offer arrived: the
chance to star in the first series of The
Bachelor. Newly single and assured by
recruiters he’d be choosing from 25 of
the country’s most wonderful-in-every-
way women, Robards said yes. “It was
a bloody daunting decision,” he says.
He reckoned there was a 50-50 chance
the show would turn him into a pariah or
a laughing stock. “But, in the end,
I had to back myself that my values
would come through no matter what
the situation I got into. And my parents
backed me up on that: ‘You’re honest,
you’ve got integrity,’ they said, ‘and that
will shine through’.”
Unsurprisingly, Robards had been
benignly misled. Of the 25 maidens,
he says, perhaps five were potential
partners; the rest were what he calls
“characters” whose role was to drive the
narrative and concoct drama.
Still, for Robards, The Bachelor was
a personal and professional watershed.
It was there he met lawyer Anna
Heinrich, whom he married in 2018,
and in 2020 they welcomed a daughter,
Elle. The show bestowed on Robards a
national profile, which he leveraged to
become an online fitness entrepreneur
(therobardsmethod.com) and go-to
talent for the producers of reality-TV
programs (Australia Ninja Warrior,
Dancing with the Stars, SAS Australia);
he’s also now the face of and
74 MEN’S HE ALTH
ambassador for health and wellbeing
giant Swisse’s brand new Swisse Active
sports nutrition range. But it was his
two-year stint (2018-20) on Neighbours
as billionaire businessman Pierce
Greyson that illuminated for Robards
what he’d like to do for a crust for the
next two or three decades.
Alas, the frustration of it all!
Since before he arrived on Ramsay
Street, Robards has been forking out for
acting- and voice-coaching, either in
group classes or one-on-one. “It’s not
easy going into classes with new
people all the time,” he says, “and I sign
up for night classes, weekend classes.
Look, it’s a lot of learning lines that go
nowhere, but that’s part of it. You just
want that opportunity. I’m coming in
late, and I’m kind of waiting for the
next job, and essentially between acting
gigs you’re unemployed, so nothing
in our lives is secure when it comes
to finances.”
Casting directors have been
telling his agent that Robards is “too
commercial”, a phrase Robards has
pondered. What, he’d like to know,
does it mean exactly? That he’s too
recognisable from other gigs and
wouldn’t be believable in character?
That he didn’t go through NIDA or
WAAPA so would be too raw for serious
dramatic roles? That he’s been tainted
somehow by his reality-show
appearances? “Fortunately,” says
Robards, “the problem is not that
they’ve seen me [act] and don’t think
I’m good enough.”
He’s come to believe that his best
chance of breaking through lies in the
US, where his clean-cut look would
seem to be more in-demand than it is
in Australia. Here, he says, film and TV
producers tend to prefer more lived-in
faces to fill grungier roles in darker
productions. If he were single and in his
20s, he says, it would be a “no-brainer”
to make the all-or-nothing leap to LA –
to jump off the proverbial cliff and hope
to grow wings on the way down. But
that’s not a responsible option for a
young father. And, anyway, nowadays, a
lot of auditioning can be done remotely
from the other side of the world. It’s just
that wretched ticking clock that’s
making him nervous.
BY THE LOOK
OF THINGS
It’s odd to hear a guy as striking and
ripped as Robards talking about his
looks as a limitation. Wanting to keep
it real, you ask him when he first
realised that his appearance gave him
a certain . . . power.
His response is to tell a roundabout
and thoroughly endearing story about
growing up in Newcastle, where, as a
bright Year 7 student at Lambton High
School, he yearned to try out for the
rugby league team but doubted he was
strong enough to play. So, he started
using his mum’s modest gym set-up at
home, lifting weights most nights until,
by Year 8, he’d added several kilograms
of muscle to his frame, enough to try
out for the team and make it as centre/
winger renowned for his rugged and
fearless defence.
Then, aged 14, something
happened. Already fitted with braces for
his teeth, a few pimples appeared on
his face. His mother, Tanya, took him to
a salon, where a beautician prescribed
an ongoing course of marine ampoules.
Robards believes those ampoules
turned those few spots into a stubborn
outbreak of cystic acne.
“I did not feel like a good-looking
guy at all,” he says. “I felt like the ugliest
guy in the school. Imagine talking to
girls, not knowing if one of your pimples
has busted and you have pus on your
face. There’s nothing more confidence-
killing than having to keep touching
your face to check whether it’s burst
open.” When it came to self-
improvement, he reasoned, “the only
thing I could do, the only thing I could
work on, was my physique.”
As it happened, Robards became a
regular reader of Men’s Health (we tell
you this only because it’s important to
his story, not to self-promote – promise).
Unlike the muscle-monsters featured in
body-building magazines, the MH cover
guys inspired him; he wanted his
physique to look like theirs when he
was grown up, and he reckoned that
was possible if he kept training
intensely and consistently. In the
meantime, he figured, his workouts
would keep him robust enough for
footy. “Men’s Health was the only
 TACTI C S

Sweater by Jac And Jack;

corduroy jeans by
Patagonia; boots by
R.M. Williams.

I HAD TO BACK MYSELF THAT

MY VALUES WOULD COME
THROUGH NO MATTER WHAT”

SEPTEMBER 2022 75
 RAPID FIRE

Favourite exercise
Can’t go past the
bench press.

Least favourite
Squatting. It hurts my knees,
but I still do it twice a week.

Favourite movie
I loved Top Gun: Maverick.

Last book you enjoyed

Listening to Dave Grohl’s
book, The Storyteller, had me
tearing up in the gym. And
Greenlights (by
Matthew McConaughey).

Cheat meal
Spaghetti bolognese.

Biggest fear
Stagnation.

Favourite holiday
destination
Italy.

Childhood hero
Arnie.

Secret talent
I play piano.

Singlet by Thrills;
Prepare pre-workout
sachets by Swisse Active.

76 MEN’S HE ALTH

FIND WHAT YOU’RE PASSIONATE
ABOUT – AND DON’T HALF-ARSE IT”
reference and inspiration I had,” he
says, “apart from the odd Arnold
Schwarzenegger movie.”
By the time he reached senior
school, Robards’ braces were gone, his
face had cleared up, and he’d sculpted
his body into a teenage work of art.
“And suddenly, I had one of the cutest
girls in the year wanting to date me. I
was like the nerdy guy who went
through the ugly-duckling phase and
came out all right.”
For Robards, the whole experience
was a multifaceted lesson. Firstly, it
showed him the value of focusing on
those things you can change (in this
case, his body) and learning to live with
the stuff you’re stuck with for now
(braces, problem skin). “At that stage,
I was pretty much the only guy I knew
who was training with weights. It was
my little secret weapon.” Secondly, he
realised that the patience, discipline
and dedication he’d developed by
pumping iron could be applied to other
facets of his life. Recently, his iron-
forged mental strength has helped
keep him upbeat while plugging away
at acting. “Because, day by day, you do
these shitty little scenes and auditions
– and you suck – but you know that if
you put the work in day after day after
day . . . you just have to trust that, down
the track, the results will be there.”
Here’s another point about Robards’
frog-to-prince tale: because he’s lived
the flip side of head-turning looks,
he seems to have none of the
smugness you detect in those
who’ve been lifelong heartbreakers.
“I know I’ve got certain looks and it
helps with things,” he says, “but at the
same time I don’t ever want to rely on
those. I hope it’s a mixture of everything
that people find inspiring. I would so
much rather get a compliment about
the way I made someone feel as
opposed to how I look. ‘You inspired
me on Ninja Warrior . . .’ – that, to me,
is worth 50 times someone going, ‘Oh,
you’re gorgeous – can I get a photo?’”
That said, he feels some pressure
to maintain his appearance. While he’s
never, he says, had any substance
injected into his face, he does get a
facial now and then. And he dyes his
hair and beard to keep the greys at bay,
though this is a “professional necessity”:
he reckons he’d struggle to land a role
as a thirtysomething were he a grey fox.
As for his rig, he says he’s never
touched a steroid and never would:
he would like to inspire young guys the
way the MH cover models of yesteryear
inspired him; he wants to show that
physiques like his are achievable via
nothing besides hard work and strict
nutrition. “Yes, I’ve got certain genetics,
but I’ve also worked my arse off,” he
says. “People say, ‘How long have you
been training for?’ My answer is,
‘Twenty-seven years’. When this shoot
comes out, that’s the product of 27
years’ training, pushing myself to the
limit in the gym.”
THE PRIORITY
PRINCIPLE
You sense with Robards that as much
as he’s craving a break professionally,
he’s a family-first guy. The oldest of
three children, he was forced to grow
up fast after his mum fell ill shortly after
giving birth to his brother, James, who’s
11 years Robards’ junior. For seven
years, she struggled with ME/CFS, the
symptoms of which included terrifying-
to-witness seizures.
“It was a struggle and a stress, and
at the same time it shaped me because
I had to find some strength for my
brother and sister,” Robards says. “Dad
[Colin, an accountant who became the
owner of a building company] worked
from eight in the morning to seven at
night, so I was half-raising the baby
while mowing lawns for money from the
age of 11.” Young Tim was close to
his sprightly maternal grandmother,
Doreen, a “sensei” who schooled him in
the language of Chinese medicine and
the ways of the East. She was central to
his burgeoning interest in health – and
TACTI C S
to his holistic view of it. “There are a
lot of things you’ve got to do to be
healthy,” he says. “The better underlying
balance that you have – your
homeostasis – the more likely it is that
all these things that are out there to get
us will potentially bounce off you. That’s
what you want – balance between your
various systems – instead of looking for
that one magic hit.”
You mention to Robards how he’s
still married to the woman he chose on
The Bachelor, and that you assume
he’s happy. “Yep. It’s a normal
relationship, [so] you have your ups and
downs, but the thing I remember my
dad saying back in the day is that, if
you’re ever questioning [your
relationship], the simple thing you come
back to is, do they bring you up or do
they bring you down? And Anna brings
me up. There aren’t too many people
you can say, hand on heart, bring you
up.”
You ask him what, as a father, he’d
like to do just as well as his own dad
did, and something he’d like to do
better for Elle’s sake. He cites his dad’s
work ethic and can-do approach, and
how he practised what he preached. On
the other hand, he says his dad had a
relatively narrow take on how you make
it in this world: study hard, go to
university, find a career.
“I’m a bit more open,” Robards says.
“I reckon you find what you’re
passionate about, and when you find it,
don’t half-arse it. Do your best at it, and
if your passion changes, then swap. Do
more of what you love in life but commit
to it.”
A BETTER MAN
If Robards’ various turns in the world of
reality TV are stymying his acting
ambitions, that would be spectacularly
unfair. While it’s easy to sniff at these
shows – at the hype, corniness, silliness
– look closer and you’d have to
acknowledge that appearing on them
takes more mettle than most of us
SEPTEMBER 2022 77
 I’M A GOOD LEARNER. AND WHEN
I WORK HARD, I WORK HARD”
possess. Take Dancing with the Stars:
as a contestant, you’re going to need to
work tirelessly to avoid humiliating
yourself, and even then, the chance of
failure at some level or another is
off-the-charts high. Why, you ask
Robards, has he taken so many risks?
Why not lie down for a while in a
comfortable rut?
“I was talking with [SAS Australia
instructor] Ant Middleton about this
the other day, and he was saying
[paraphrasing Dwight Eisenhower], ‘If
you’re not progressing, you’re
regressing’,” says Robards. “And for me,
again, time is of the essence. You’re put
on this earth for so many years. If I don’t
feel I’m making the most of every single
day, then I feel like I’m taking life for
granted, that someone else could be
doing it better, so give them a chance.”
A chance to prove himself was all
Jacket by North Robards hoped to receive from his
Face; shirt by Aqua Blu;
corduroy jeans by Neighbours castmates in 2018, when he
Patagonia. sensed some of them doubted him – saw
78 MEN’S HE ALTH
him as a pretty-boy impostor. Keen to win
them over, he showed them his most
serious side, knuckling down to the task
of nailing scenes. Looking back, he
knows he was green, but also that his
skillset expanded exponentially during his
stint. “You know, I’m a good learner,” he
says. “And when I work hard, I work hard.”
If his acting wasn’t enough to change
minds and win admirers, he adds, he had
a trick up his sleeve in the form of his
chiropractic skills, which he used
successfully on various Neighbours
colleagues when they were wracked by
some pain or another.
If he has a regret about Neighbours,
it’s that he didn’t make Pierce Greyson as
interesting as he might have been. Citing
how Samuel L. Jackson invariably gives
his characters an idiosyncrasy – a limp, a
lisp, an afro – Robards says that “were I
going back in now, knowing what I know,
I would probably give [Greyson] more
quirks from the start, so then I would have
had more to play with.” But feeling his
way at the time, “I kept him too simple”.
Even if his screen aspirations are
never realised, acting has made him a
better person, Robards says. “Because
what it teaches you – and this is a great
life skill – is to have empathy; to take the
time to understand where other people
are coming from. Like characters in a
show, people – no matter how
disagreeable they may seem – rarely if
ever view themselves as fundamentally
flawed. To them, their behaviour is always
justified based on their unique view of
the world.
“So, in everyday life, if I’m struggling
to get through to someone, or if I’m in
conflict with someone, or I just don’t
like someone, I will now say to myself,
Okay, we’re obviously headbutting over
value systems, so I need to think like
they think and see the world through
their lens.”
Yep – attitude is everything. All
Robards needs now is a way to see those
bins without freaking out.
 TACTI C S

Chino by Polo Ralph

Lauren; shoes by Ecco.

RAISE THE BAR

“When I have only 20 minutes
to smash a workout, I’ll do
a barbell complex,” says
Robards, who for this shoot
was tipping the scales at
92kg (heavier – read: more
muscular – than he’s been for
quite a while). Give yourself 5
minutes to do these 6 moves
as a superset – 10 reps for
each. The time you have left is
your rest period. Do 3 rounds.
“You’ll be cooked.”

1/ Deadlift
2/ Bent-over Row
3/ Clean
4/ Military Press
5/ Squat
6/ Lunge (10 per leg)
Note: Robards uses a 40kg
barbell for the entire circuit.
He also uses the new Swisse
Active sports nutrition range
– pre-, mid- and post-workout
sachets – to stay on top of his
high-calibre game.
Disclaimer: To be consumed in conjunction
with a nutritious diet-and-exercise program.
Not a sole source of nutrition.

SEPTEMBER 2022 79
Tree Change: what
if life continues after
leaves break from
the branch?

t h
D ea
80 MEN’S HE ALTH
 MIND

o
B o
e ms Y
What happens when you die? It’s a question all intelligent mortal beings ask
themselves at some point. The best people to ask? Those that have died and
come back and, in many cases, changed their lives as a result. We sat down with
one of the world’s leading researchers into Near-Death Experiences to discover
what he’s learned from those who’ve met their maker and lived to tell the tale
BY BEN JHOT Y

SEPTEMBER 2022 81
 n the late 1960s, a young doctor
named BRUCE GREYSON was eat-
ing spaghetti in a hospital cafeteria
when his pager went off. Startled
by the noise, Greyson dropped his fork,
splashing tomato sauce everywhere,
including on his tie. He cursed under his
breath as he wiped the sauce off with a
wet napkin. It would leave a stain that
would change the course of his life.
As Greyson details in his book After: A Doctor Explores
What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and
Beyond, after dialling the number on the pager’s
display, he learned that a woman called Holly was in the
emergency room following a drug overdose. Greyson
grabbed his lab coat, buttoning it up to hide the stain on
his tie, before heading down to the ER.
He found Holly unconscious but in a stable state and
after doing some routine checks, went to the family lounge
at the far end of the hallway. There Holly’s roommate
Susan was pacing back and forth. Feeling a little hot in the
windowless room, Greyson undid his lab coat and moved a
fan closer to him, before sitting down to talk to Susan.
He questioned Susan about her roommate, trying to
establish if Holly may have been doing drugs or suffering
from mental health problems. At one point he thought he
saw Susan shudder slightly. Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and was
After concluding the chat, he returned to Holly’s room elected a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric
where she was still out cold, a ‘sitter’ confirming that she Association. But he never forgot about Holly and her knowledge of
hadn’t stirred since he left the room. Greyson left for the his stained tie.
night, quietly congratulating himself that no one had It would lead him to begin a sideline career studying the experiences
noticed his sauce stain. of those who’ve temporarily shuffled off their mortal coil, only to
When he returned to the hospital the next morning, shuffle back on again. In the mid ’70s he worked with Dr Raymond
Holly was now awake and able to talk. He introduced Moody at the University of Virginia. Moody’s book, Life After Life, was
himself to Holly, who responded with a sentence that the first to use the term Near-Death Experience and the acronym NDE.
would dumbfound Greyson. Greyson would learn that his experience with Holly wasn’t unique; that
“I know who you are. I remember you from last night.” there were accounts of NDEs dating all the way back to Ancient Greece.
“You looked like you were asleep in the ER last night,” He would discover that NDEs are common, affecting roughly 10-20 per
Greyson replied. “I didn’t think you could see me.” cent of people whose heart stops. And he would observe that NDEs don’t
Holly’s reply: “Not in my room. I saw you talking with discriminate: they affect everyone from nannies to neuroscientists.
Susan, sitting on the couch. You were wearing a striped tie Over the course of 45 years, Greyson compiled a collection
that had a red stain on it.” of the accounts of over a thousand ‘experiencers’, who filled out
Holly proceeded to recount the conversation Greyson questionnaires for him. He also established clinical guidelines to
had with Susan, detailing all his questions along with quantify NDEs that are still in use today. Known as the Greyson
Susan’s pacing and his moving the fan, without any scale, the 16-point questionnaire attempts to measure the depth of an
mistakes. As Greyson writes in After, “the hair rose on individual’s NDE.
the back of my neck and I felt goosebumps. She couldn’t So, what are some of the key characteristics of an NDE? They often
possibly have known all that”. include a brilliant light; being drawn into a tunnel or darkness; a
To this day Greyson still can’t account for how Holly sense of overwhelming peace and unconditional love; a sensation of
knew what she did. Raised in a household that encouraged leaving the body, sometimes floating above it; a life review, or return of
scepticism and critical thinking, the experience was, memories from the past; and encounters with deceased loved ones or
Greyson says, “a frontal assault on my worldview”. divine beings. Less common are experiences that may be frightening or
Greyson would go on to have an esteemed career distressing rather than peaceful.
in academic psychiatry. The 74-year-old is currently Of the thousands of NDEs reported, one of the most puzzling and
Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral frequently cited is that of Pam Reynolds, an American woman who

82 MEN’S HE ALTH

Once your pulse
stops does your
soul take flight?
underwent brain surgery in 1991. Despite having her eyes taped shut
and her ears blocked, upon waking she was not only able to describe an
NDE but the bone saw used to cut into her skull.
Throughout the course of his research, Greyson has tried to
maintain an attitude of intellectual honesty and openness when
investigating cases such as these, while maintaining his natural
scepticism. He refuses to take sides in a binary debate between those
who see NDEs as spiritual experiences and those on the materialistic
side who insist they are the result of purely physical changes in the
brain prior to death. “I think there is enough evidence to take seriously
both a physiological mechanism for NDEs and continued functioning
of the mind independent of the brain,” Greyson writes in After.
If this sounds like fence-sitting, well, it is. But while even
entertaining a spiritual explanation for NDEs invites a degree of
scorn in scientific circles, in a field as confounding and difficult to
investigate as this, you could argue Greyson’s is a rational position.
Consider for a moment the corporeal mechanics of NDEs. Heart
failure precipitates a rapid decline in brain function, with brain waves
flatlining within 11-20 seconds. At that point the brain is effectively
unplugged machinery, as useless as an old microwave you dump on
your nature strip for council pick-up. Or it should be. In fact, this is the
period, before resuscitation, in which researchers believe NDEs occur.
Materialistic explanations for NDEs posit that in the event of
a health catastrophe, such as a cardiac arrest, oxygen deprivation
puts the brain on a war footing, as it frantically, possibly manically,
attempts to repel morbidity’s onslaught. A cascade of neurochemicals
may trigger euphoria. Stimulation of the brain’s temporoparietal
junction, a region associated with self-perception that may be
impacted early in a neurological crisis, can cause feelings of
MIND
disassociation, providing a possible explanation for out-
of-body sensations. The appearance of deceased loved
ones could be due to dysfunction in the brain’s dopamine
pathways, with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients
known to have vivid hallucinations of ghost-like figures.
Similarly, oxygen shortage to the retina (retinal ischemia)
has been identified as a possible explanation for the long
tunnel and bright light many NDErs report.
Some researchers believe a sleep disorder called REM
intrusion, symptoms of which include paralysis and
hallucinations, could account for some of the fantastical
elements reported in NDEs. A study at the University of
Kentucky of 55 people who’d had NDEs found 60 per cent
reported some history of REM intrusion compared to 24
per cent in a control group. Others point to the cognitive
similarities between NDEs and the altered states induced
by psychedelic drugs such as ketamine and psilocybin as
evidence of an exclusively brain-driven phenomenon.
One of the more compelling pieces of evidence
supporting a materialistic position came from a 2013
study at the University of Michigan, in which researchers
euthanised rats with an injection of potassium chloride,
causing their hearts to stop beating. For up to 30
seconds afterwards the researchers detected patterns of
synchronised, high-frequency electrical activity known as
gamma waves. The intensity of the spike, the researchers
speculated, could suggest that different parts of the brain
were communicating with one another more actively
than when the rats were awake. Could a similar surge of
activity occur in humans, they wondered? The answer is
a qualified yes. Recently, the journal Frontiers in Aging
Neuroscience reported on a 2016 case involving an 87-year-
old man, who exhibited a similar 30-second spike in high
gamma-type brain signals before cardiac arrest. This
activity then declined for about 30 seconds after his heart
stopped beating before ceasing completely.
Greyson examines many of the accepted brain-based
models in After, concluding that while each may address
one particular facet of NDEs, none can convincingly
account for the entire experience. In his opinion, the
truth remains out there.
One thing he does know for sure is that NDEs
transform lives, turning atheists into spiritualists,
entrepreneurs into philanthropists, sceptics into
believers. Many experiencers, he says, feel more loving
towards themselves and others, more compassion for
others, have an increased sense of meaning and purpose
in life and less interest in material possessions, personal
recognition and competition. Perhaps most importantly,
they often no longer fear death. “The fear of death makes
us afraid of almost everything,” says Greyson, who
appears spry in rimless spectacles and a blue polo shirt, as
he chats to me from his house in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“We don’t want to take chances because we don’t want to
risk getting hurt and if you’re not afraid of dying anymore,
then you don’t mind taking chances, which means you live
life to the fullest. There’s a saying, when you lose your fear
of dying, you also lose your fear of living.”
Ultimately, whether you consider NDEs a spiritual
gateway, afterlife appetiser or neurological fire drill, that
may be their most important and lasting lesson.
SEPTEMBER 2022 83

Men’s Health: You were drawn
into the world of NDEs initially
through your experience with
the woman called Holly. Do you
think you would’ve started
researching them without that
personal experience?
Bruce Greyson: I think I probably
would have because I had
encountered a few other near-
death experiences in my clinical
work and found them very puzzling.
Then when Moody published his
book Life After Life in 1975 and
said that there were lots of these
around, I thought, well, we don’t
understand this, we better study
it. I felt that was the obligation of
a scientist: to study things we
don’t understand.
MH You grew up in a household
that fostered scepticism and you
sought to approach research into
84 MEN’S HE ALTH
NDEs with an open but sceptical
frame of mind. Why is it important
to take that approach in research
generally and NDEs in particular?
BG Well, it’s very easy in any field
of research to let your biases affect
either what you see or how you
interpret what you see. So, it’s
important to try to keep an open
mind. I must admit that when I
started looking into NDEs, I still had
that materialistic mindset and I just
assumed that I was going to find
some physiological explanation for
them because that’s the only world
I knew. I didn’t know anything about
a spiritual world.
MH You say in the book that the
confounding nature of NDEs
would force you to become
sceptical about your scepticism.
Why was that?
BG Well, there were things that
happened in NDEs that were not
compatible with the materialistic
worldview that the mind is simply
‘what the brain does’ and nothing
else. Some of that comes from
people who leave their bodies
and can describe things
accurately from a visual
perspective outside the body.
Some of it comes from people
who claim to encounter in death
deceased persons that no one
knew had died yet.
MH As you say, you’ve moved
away from the materialistic view
that the mind is a product of the
brain and now believe they are
separate, but related entities. Is
that the only way you can explain
the possibility of the continuity of
consciousness after death?
BG Well, if the mind is just ‘what
the brain does’, then when the brain
Return to Sender:
life is often richer and
more vibrant after a
near-death experience.
dies, the mind must die also. The
mind has to stop, so that model
cannot explain it. But there are
problems with the other model that
the mind and brain are separate
things and somehow interact. I
can’t explain things that way either.
So, I don’t have an answer. I have
just the facts that it [an NDE]
happened. I can’t explain how.
MH What do you make of the
study on rats at the University of
Michigan where after their hearts
stopped beating there was a
burst of electrical activity in
their brains?
BG I think it’s an area people
should look at, but that rat study
did not really show very much.
If you actually look at the data
they reported, it was a very tiny
amount of electricity, not
anywhere near the activity of

“Peoplecanseesurprisingthings
theycouldn’thaveguessed”
the brain before the rat was killed. It
lasted about 30 seconds and that’s
all. NDEs often go longer than that.
If the rats were anaesthetised
before they were killed they did
not have this burst, and of course,
many NDEs do occur under
anaesthesia. So, there are a lot
of reasons why this research didn’t
really make sense when applied
to NDEs. Now there have been
people who’ve tried to do the
same type of work with humans
with variable results. By and large,
our clinical experience over the
last 70 or 80 years shows that
when people’s hearts stop, the
brain waves generally go flat
within a matter of 10 to 20
seconds and there is no burst
like that.
MH Some of the sensations
common in NDEs can be
induced by psychedelic drugs,
particularly feelings of oneness
and interconnectedness. You
speculate that the brain could
be a filter and that when different
parts of the brain are allowed
to interact with each other,
that we might be able to
access the full spectrum of
stimuli available to us. Is that
what may allow NDEers to see
different perspectives on their
body and their existence?
BG Well, the idea that the brain
filters the stimulation it gets is kind
of an obvious thing. Right now,
you are listening to me talk to you
and you’re not paying attention to
things like how your shirt feels on
your body or what your bowels
may be doing. Your body is
perceiving them, but your brain
is filtering them out, so you’re
just paying attention to one thing.
Our brains do that. They are
designed to filter out things that
aren’t important to us right now
in order to help us survive in the
physical world. It’s not designed
to help us contact deceased loved
ones or a deity, if there is one.
There are various things that can
disable or weaken the filters, one
of them being psychedelic drugs.
There are other ways that spiritual
traditions have developed over
the centuries. Meditation and
so forth. But one of the most
reliable ways is by coming close
to death.
MH The phrase often used by
NDEers is that their experience
was ‘realer than real’. That same
phrase is often used by people to
describe lucid dreams. Between
lucid dreaming, psychedelic
drugs and NDEs, are these hints
that there is potential for the brain
to do a lot more than what it does
to survive?
BG That’s right. I have looked at
lucid dreaming and I can’t say that
I’m very impressed by it. I am a lucid
dreamer myself, but I don’t think my
lucid dreams are realer than real
and I have lucid dreams almost
every night. I know that I’m
dreaming and I can, if I don’t like
the way the dream is going, change
it or wake myself up. But I know that
it’s a dream when I’m having it and
it doesn’t feel like it’s real.
MH The proportion of people
whose hearts stop who have
NDEs is somewhere between
10 to 20 per cent. Do you think
it’s possible that many more
people have them, but don’t
recall them?
BG Well, there are certainly
people who have them, but aren’t
willing to talk about them. So, for
that reason, there may be more
than just 10 to 20 per cent. I don’t
think it’s a huge number though,
because if you look at how the
experience changes people’s lives,
people who describe a near-death
experience have much more
dramatic changes than people who
come close to death, but don’t
report an NDE. So, I tend to think
those people who don’t report
NDEs probably haven’t had one if
they don’t have the after-effects.
MH There are so many
astonishing stories that you cite
in the book. Is there one that
really stands out to you?
BG It’s hard to pick one. But the
story of Jack, who at roughly the
age of 25, was hospitalised and
had his nurse go off on a vacation.
He then had a near-death
experience while she was gone
and he met her in the NDE, not
knowing that she had died in a car
accident while she was on vacation.
No one else knew it at the time
either. That really kind of blew me
away. I couldn’t get my head
around that one. There are others
where people just have sort of
‘routine’, if you can use that word,
out-of-body experiences during an
NDE and can see very surprising
things that they couldn’t have
guessed. Those are also really hard
to explain. I think as a psychiatrist,
what has the most profound effect
on me are the experiences that
lead to dramatic changes in
people’s lives afterwards.
MH Yes, as you say in the book,
the majority of NDEs are positive
for people. Is that why they’re so
transformative? Obviously, the
negative ones could be
transformative as well.
MIND
BG That’s right, they can be.
They tend not to be as powerfully
transformative as the positive
ones and I think that’s because
the negative ones are so painful
for people to remember and to
talk about that they try to suppress
it and not deal with it. But I do
know many people who had
frightening near-death experiences
and took that as a warning to
turn their lives around and they
have had very pronounced effects
from it.
MH For the people who have
positive experiences, what
specifically causes them to
change their lives?
BG Well, most of us define
ourselves by fairly superficial
things: our gender, our
nationality, our political
affiliation, our profession and
so forth. People find themselves
in an NDE without any of those
labels. Yet they feel better than
ever before. They feel more
whole, more complete, more
loved and just more joyful. When
they come back into the body,
it’s hard for them to take these
labels seriously anymore and
they tend to become much less
interested in things of this world,
not only material possessions,
but they also take less seriously
things like power, prestige, fame,
competition, because they see
these things as being irrelevant
or very temporary and they’re
much more interested in spiritual
things, not religious things
necessarily, but with spirituality.
What they usually mean by that
is a connection to other things,
to other people, to the natural
world, to the divine and that
makes them much more
SEPTEMBER 2022 85
 “I became these
ripples that were
just going out in
all directions”
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALISHA TODD

SEPTEMBER 2022 87
F I TN E SS

EXTREMELY AND

88 MEN’S HE ALTH
 HE ALT H

INCREDIBLY
HOW TO WORK OUT
SAFELY AS CLIMATE CHANGE
BITES AND IT BECOMES

AND
OUTSIDE
BY MH WRITERS PHOTOGR APHY BY DA N FORBES

SEPTEMBER 2022 89
 HE ALT H

ERHEATING
able to resist heat better if you
ELECTROLYTES: FRIEND OR TREND?
Do you need them? in 400 -800ml of water, says
begin your workout with a lower If you sweat a lot during an dietitian Brian St. Pierre. Salty
body temperature, says Casa. intense workout that lasts longer sweaters can go higher on
If you’re doing something than 60 minutes, a drink with electrolytes; LMNT packets
relatively short in duration, like electrolytes is probably smart, contain 1000mg of sodium ($29
running a 5K or playing a game says endurance coach Kim for 12; saltydownunder.com).
where you can rest between Schwabenbauer, founder of Fuel No idea how salty your sweat
sets, precooling may help you Your Passion. is? Patches by Gatorade can
perform better and stay in your estimate your sweat rate and
groove longer. If your workout What should you look for? sodium loss ($240 for a two-pack;
is over an hour, the impact wears Sodium. Its loss is a limiting ebay.com.au).
off. Cooling techniques that factor in performance as exercise
cover a large part of the body – goes on. It also helps you retain What about
ice baths or exposure to cold air fluid and it keeps your thirst other electrolytes?
– are better than strategies like mechanism working properly. They’re nice but not required.
iced wristbands. Potassium balances sodium and
How much sodium helps with muscle contraction.
SIP. SIP. SIP do you need? Magnesium and calcium are fine,
Water is your MVP. “Your You generally want a product to but don’t obsess over amounts.
body temperature goes up faster provide 300 -400mg of sodium – MM
when you do intense exercise in
the heat if you’re dehydrated,”
says Casa. No scientist will
guesstimate how much
you should drink during a
workout, because that depends
on how hot it is, what workout
you’re doing, how much you
sweat, and more. But guidelines
from the American Council on
Exercise say that after a workout,
you should replenish about 700ml
of fluid for every 500g of weight
lost during exercise.
– Marty Munson

STICK TO A HYDRATION PLAN DRINK AHEAD OF TIME

COREE DeANDRE
WOLTERING, YEDLIN,
Record-holding ultrarunner Right back, Inter Miami CF soccer team

“ONE OF THE FIRST trail races I did was an Xterra in Vegas in
April 2015. It was already over 100° F [38° C} on race day,” he
says. Critical to making it through was adhering to a hydra-
tion plan: every mile, his watch beeps, which cues him to
drink. He slugs 120-150ml ounces at a time, as noted by hash
marks he makes on the bottles in his North Face Hydration
Vest ($300; thenorthface.com.au).
AT THE WORLD CUP IN 2014, refs were given the authority
to grant hydration breaks in the game. These happen if it’s
around 32° or warmer and last for three minutes. For Yedlin,
prehydration is the key. That means replacing every 500g of
water he lost during practice the day before, stirring in Drip-
Drop electrolytes ($72 for 16 packets; desertcart.com.au). At
halftime, he usually dons an ice vest and cold, wet towels.   

SEPTEMBER 2022 91
 TAKE ACTION

LET COOLER HEADS PREVAIL

For my birthday last year, I made my own Paris Agreement: to personally slash my carbon footprint by about 30
per cent. One year later, I took stock. Far from being a buzzkill, the climate resolutions I made, below, have left me
healthier, happier and blissfully immune to people scolding me about the occasional burger – BRAD WIENERS

1 2
GO ON A CLOTHING DIET
OF ONLY 10 NEW ITEMS
Clothing makers waste tonnes of
water and spew out 10 per cent
of all the heat-trapping carbon
emissions on earth. Even if you
donate your hand-me-downs, too
many items end up in landfill. So,
a clothing diet. Eleven months in,
I’d added only eight items (not
including socks and undies). I prize
my new clothes – a pair of Allbirds,
a Friends of Friends flat-brim hat
– so much more.
3
ONE DOUBLE-DOUBLE
PER MONTH
Cutting meat out of your diet is
an efficient way to reduce carbon
emissions. But I live five minutes
from an In-N-Out Burger, and my
two teenage boys are growing by
the foot. By taking a “cheat day”
approach, I was able to slow my
fast-food roll without feeling like
a failure for caving once in a while.
Next year, I’m stepping up to
weekday vegetarian.
CHECK THE FRIDGE
Tempted to use an old fridge for
beers or meat storage? Don’t.
Refrigerants contained in air-
conditioners and refrigerators
can be extremely harmful to the
environment. Recycle your old
fridges to save on energy costs
and when buying a new one look
for the energy-rating label – the
more stars it has, the more
efficient the product is.

4 DON’T FLY UNTIL MY

NEXT BIRTHDAY
The pandemic made it easier, but
5 DUMP JUGS FOR STRIPS
this will be hard to abide by for
a second year. I’m not swearing
off all flights, but I’m vowing
to take fewer, longer trips and
explore other transit first. Almost
everything that’s overheating
the planet is like flying, which
“saves time” by allowing you to do
something faster. Slowing down,
even taking the long way, I’m
finding, is better for nature as well
as for my mental health.
I bought my last bottle of laundry
detergent in June 2021; from now
6 GO ELECTRIC
on, it’s sheets (or strips) of laundry
detergent that dissolve in the
wash and won’t fill landfills. This
move saved us some cash, too,
because my sons never seemed to
get the concept of “concentrate”
and typically used three times as
much liquid soap as needed. Now
they peel off one sheet. Done. Try
Activated Eco Laundry Detergent
Strips ($36.95 for 32 sheets;
banish.com.au)
I found researching EVs
overwhelming. First, I didn’t want
to pull an e-car into the driveway
only to charge it with fossil-
fuel-generated juice. So a big
first step was a rooftop solar
array. Now that that’s up, when
we switch, we’ll be driving solar-
powered cars. I put $1000 down on
a Ford Mustang Mach-E – the only
way I could guarantee a test drive.
(Any day now.) My younger boy is
asking for an e-bike, so we know
what his summer job is for!

EASY WAYS TO GREEN UP YOUR WORKOUT

What to do Ways to do it

RU N A GR E E N Join a group like the Climate For Change to raise funds to support climate
RACE action. The group is entering this year’s Melbourne marathon on Oct 13
(climateforchange.org.au).

REFILL Plastic from those little nutrition packets builds up . . . and often ends up in our water
ways. Cut down on waste with the GU Energy Flask ($10) – it holds five servings of
energy gel.
M A K E YO U R Sports-nutrition and protein-powder brands such as Vivo Life aim for zero-
NUTRITION waste packaging and organic ingredients. Form, a performance-nutrition brand,
CARBON-NEUTRAL uses compostable packaging and doesn’t include a plastic scoop.

PLOG WHEN Originating in Sweden and gaining ground globally, plogging simply involves
YO U J O G carrying gloves and a rubbish bag and collecting garbage as you run. – LISA JHUNG

92 MEN’S HE ALTH
 HE ALT H

STAY COOL
WITH THESE
ECO -MINDED
FITNESS BRANDS

Patagonia blends
synthetic and natural
in its Capilene Cool
Merino shirt ($119.95)
to keep you dry during
brutal sweat sessions.

Nike‘s new DriFit

Aero-Bill ($35) has
perforated panels for
ventilation and is made
out of 50 per cent
recycled materials.

Miir bottles, like the

Climate+ 20 oz Wide

“SLOWING DOWN IS Mouth ($40), keep

your water chilled

BETTER FOR NATURE and are made using

sustainable practices.

AS WELL AS FOR MY
MENTAL HEALTH”

Allbirds favour natural

materials. Its Trail
Runner SWT ($220)
is made of merino
wool, eucalyptus fibre
and rubber. – LJ

SEPTEMBER 2022 93
THE RISE OF

FITNESS GE
Since the dawn of dumbbells, there’s T
HE FITNESS-EQUIPMENT
landscape has never been this
been a stunning lack of diversity among expansive. Ever since the
pandemic sparked an uptick in sales of
the owners and operators of fitness-gear home gym equipment, gear companies

brands. Here’s how a new generation of
entrepreneurs is changing that MILO F. BRYANT
ANTHONY “BUDDY” LEE CHAD PRICE DANYEL SURRENCY JONES
have been in overdrive, pumping out
everything from adjustable dumbbells to
BY
connected cardio machines to fully wireless
recovery boots.
But amid all that innovation, something’s
still missing. Scan the companies driving
the next generation of workout gear and
you’ll see little diversity. Most major fitness
brands have overwhelmingly white
ownership. While the equipment offerings
have grown increasingly diverse, the faces
that bring you that equipment have not.

94 MEN’S HE ALTH

AR BRANDS
“The disparities and inequality that exist
for Black people in general exist in so many
ways [in the fitness industry],” says Percell
Dugger, founder of Fit for Us, an agency
that advocates for and empowers Black
fitness professionals and underserved
communities. Dugger can name only
a handful of Black gear players.
“Being in business, the ability to grow,
the scaling and marketing, it is vastly
disproportionate. We don’t have the
opportunities or network to attract the
support needed.”
There are few statistics about
underrepresentation among fitness-gear
makers, but here’s what we do know:
regardless of industry, Black-owned
businesses face immense challenges.
According to a 2020 poll commissioned by
Groupon and the National Black Chamber
of Commerce, 74 per cent of Black
small-business owners still struggle with
a lack of capital and investment resources,
and 59 per cent say they experienced
some form of racism or bias when they
started their business.
Despite that, a generation of Black
fitness entrepreneurs has emerged. They’ve
fought hard to get ahead while learning
firsthand how much the lack of
representation has hurt others like
them – and how it may be damaging the
entire fitness-gear industry. For every
would-be gear maker who hasn’t been able
FIT NE S S
to succeed or grow their company, these
Black fitness-brand owners stand as role
models – and proof that it’s possible to
overcome oppressive odds, even if you
shouldn’t have to.
“They’re creating a new way of
[succeeding],” says John Butler,
a professor at the University of Texas
at Austin’s McCombs School of Business
who specialises in entrepreneurship.
It’s a way that hinges on lived experience
that allows them to see the world
differently – and their products can
help everyone make greater gains.
Here, in their own words, is how
three successful Black entrepreneurs
managed to forge ahead.
SEPTEMBER 2022 95
 Lee’s jump rope
technology is a
gamechanger.
THE
TRAIL BLAZER
As president of Buddy Lee’s Jump Rope Technology, ANTHONY “BUDDY” LEE,
64, originated the swivel-bearing tech that’s in jump ropes today
I
WAS BORN in Birmingham,
Alabama, and raised in Richmond,
Virginia. My dad was a Vietnam
veteran, but he wasn’t the same when he
came back. It was up to my mum to take care
of six children. Honestly, we struggled. There
were many days I went hungry, but those are
good lessons because when you’re at the
bottom, you grow to understand that the only
way out is up.
I was introduced to rope jumping by Mr
Herbert Rainey, my next-door neighbour. He
was a fourth-degree black belt in karate. He
was jumping rope one hot summer day and
put that rope in my hand just before 5 pm; it
was after 9 pm before I put it down. I took
that rope with me everywhere after that day
– school, basketball courts, everywhere. I
incorporated it into all my wrestling training,
too. I’d jump with the rope to improve my
athletic conditioning and get my heart rate
up, and then I’d go into a match and finish it
off in one or two minutes.
I wanted to make the jump rope even
better, so 27 years ago my business partner
and I invented the swivel-bearing jump rope
that became a patented technology in 1997.
We looked at the smaller ball-bearing
technology they use for fishing rods and
tested it on athletes, and their speed and
96 MEN’S HE ALTH
Powerhandz
gives ballers a
killer assist.
THE
VISIONARY
DANYEL SURRENCY JONES, 46,
created Powerhandz, weighted
conditioning started increasing drastically. basketball gloves meant to
Every good jump rope that’s out today improve your dribbling skills,
uses some form of our technology. in 2014. The product is now
We are the originators and the pioneers of
sold in more than 80 countries
jump-rope training and the swivel-bearing
technology, but there are still issues. The only
loan I qualified for was a share-pledge loan,
where I had to have the same amount of
money in the bank. So a bigger business loan
to help me expand my company didn’t exist
in my mind. There was no way I could ever
get the necessary capital, so I accepted
this reality.
Other companies with deeper pockets
and backing have copied our technology and
been able to do a tonne of marketing. You
really can’t compete with that, but we’ve
done everything right in terms of our
positioning to become the official rope for
the U S Olympic teams, which use our training
techniques. We were Michelle Obama’s
spokespersons for fitness with the Let’s Move
campaign. We created a Preferred Course
and jump rope for CrossFit, and we partnered
with TRX – but now many companies have
created their own branded ropes.
I simply know that I cannot ever give up.
My mission in life remains the same: to help
the entire planet of people get fit and strong
in mind and body.

B
EING A COUNTRY Florida girl from Jacksonville,
becoming an entrepreneur was not included on my
vision board. I wanted to be a nurse when I was growing
up, because my neighbour was a nurse. When you’re not exposed
to different careers, you don’t tap into your passion; you do what is
normal. That is what you’d see in the history of the Black community
– until now. We are finally learning our strength.
I’m still astonished by what we’ve created with no blueprint.
Powerhandz started with one vision and one mission in July 2014.
The best ideas come from a personal need or solution. When Jason
Williams revealed to Slam magazine that he used gardening gloves
to improve his electrifying ballhandling, it was game over, especially
once my cofounder added weight resistance to gloves to take his
training drills to a more complex level.
Powerhandz was self-funded in the beginning. We have received
loans and a line of credit and closed a few small funding rounds.
Understanding how to accomplish generational wealth and
obtain funding for a new venture were foreign conversations for
first-time African American entrepreneurs. Our goal was to build
a dope e-commerce brand, educate people and serve the community.
However, this one product and one mission gave birth to our global
mission in multiple sports.
I had been in the healthcare industry for 16 years prior to
launching Powerhandz. I was the youngest, the only Black, and
typically one of two female managers at the table. I will never forget
attending a boardroom meeting as a director at the age of 25 when
one of the older executives looked around the room and decided to
ask me to get his coffee. Or when my VP informed me that he didn’t
know how to manage women because we wear our emotions on our
chest. These experiences led me to this very moment in time.
Today, I see a shift occurring for Black and women entrepreneurs.
We have support from professional athletes like LaMelo Ball and
serial entrepreneurs who are investors in our company. At one point
I told the team, “I wonder if we should let a white male be the CEO of
this company?” I wanted to let someone else be in the elite position
of a company we worked so hard to create, because that’s what I felt
was going to help us gain access and scale quicker. Wow! In hindsight
that discussion was heartbreaking. And I’m glad we didn’t do it.
FIT NE S S
THE
REINVENTOR
CHAD PRICE, 38, teamed up with two friends to
start Kettlebell Kings 10 years ago. Since then,
the company has rethought the classic kettlebell,
pioneered online kettlebell education and built a
fitness community that goes beyond its product
N
EHEMIAH “BUBBA” HEARD and Jay Perkins are the
two other founders at Kettlebell Kings. We met when we
were 18. Bubba, who like me is Black, played football with
me at Rice. Jay, who is white, lived in Austin and went to the
University of Texas. After graduation, the three of us went into the
corporate world, but it didn’t take long for us to realise that we were
all too ambitious for that pace. The eureka moment for me was the
actual results from using kettlebells to train. I saw results, but more
importantly, I saw how easily the exercises translate to real-world
improvements in your daily life.
We started the company in 2012. To build awareness, we used
free content, such as videos and weekly workouts, to gather email
addresses and we partnered with the top organisations in the
kettlebell community to officially support and sponsor their events.
But we had the toughest time getting funding. There were times we
would go into a bank and we would ask them to give us a road map
of the numbers that we needed to hit to establish lines of credit,
but no one ever offered that information. We certainly thought
about sending Jay into the banks alone. That way the banks
would only see a white face. Instead, we initially bootstrapped it
with what we had in our savings. We didn’t get any access to capital
until after our first five years in business, when we started taking
some short-term small-business loans. We’ve been working with
pennies and reinvesting everything we can into the equipment for
our growing client list every single year, year after year.
We’ve actually thought about dangling Jay out there for a lot of
things! We were officially a Black-owned business, but we had to
consider race and its impact on our business. We have to consider
how racism affects getting our supply out of China and who
represents the brand to a Chinese manufacturer, for example. A
better example may be how the brand helps or promotes social
change. The one #BlackLivesMatter post our company posted led
us to lose social-media followers. It’s sad, but it’s true.
Kettlebell Kings
have cash
registers ringing.
SEPTEMBER 2022 97
 JEFF BRIDGES has played RUGGED, MYSTICAL ICONS
like HIMSELF on film for decades (and decades!). He’s 72 now.
Never expected TO BATTLE CANCER and THEN COVID.
And yet? He abides

BY A LE X PA PPA DEM A S PHOTOGR APHY BY BE AU GRE A LY

98 MEN’S HE ALTH
 TACTI C S

Jeff Bridges poses

for Men’s Health at
a studio in Santa
Barbara, California.

Jacket by John
Varvatos; T-shirt by
Buck Mason.

SEPTEMBER 2022 99
OH,
,
WOW
MAN
It’s JEFF BRIDGES. Alive and well, at 72.
Like, really well, from the looks of things.
He’s walking around a photo studio in Santa
Barbara on a hot, still Tuesday. When he
walks, he leads with his rib cage, his weight
in his heels, his whole posture telegraphing
a wide-openness to the world.
He’s been telling me where that posture
comes from – it’s thanks in large part to these
isometric exercises he learned from a trainer
named Eric Goodman, which are designed
to get the muscles in the backside of your
body to work together to support you better,
so that the burden of carrying your weight
around the planet doesn’t fall solely on your
poor, embattled joints, and which have freed
Bridges from some hellacious back pain – but
he’d rather show me.
And that’s how he ends up standing over
me, a fatherly hand on my shoulder, helping
me bend, saying, “Hinge! Hinge!” as I try
and mostly fail to hinge myself, and then, to
demonstrate how I should be holding my body,
he takes a bit of my hair and tugs it upward,
not hard, just firmly, directionally.
He doesn’t seem, at all, like somebody who
was on the verge of death just last year. He
was, though. In 2020, the Dude was diagnosed
with cancer, specifically lymphoma, and just
as he was pulling through that, he caught
COVID, and because the chemo that had
knocked the lymphoma down to size had also
left Bridges severely immunocompromised,
the COVID really kicked his arse, making
cancer look like a cakewalk in retrospect
– and because he is Jeff Bridges, and was
already a pretty spiritual guy, all of this did
not engender anything you’d call a spiritual
awakening. But it’s got him thinking more
about things – about time, mostly, and about
100 MEN’S HE ALTH
the specific strain of neurosis with which
he’s always approached his work, and about
what he wants to leave behind when it’s
actually all over.
“Times like those,” he says, “when you’re
facing your mortality, all of your game plans
come to the fore. Your philosophies, your
spiritual beliefs. What’s made you you all
these years gets tested and brought to the fore
big-time. And that is only available in those
times, I believe. But what’s fortunate is that
what you learn in those times can linger and
you can apply those to the rest of your life.”
HE’S FINE NOW. IN REMISSION.
Done with everything – done with the special
diet, done with the supplementary oxygen.
Back at work as if nothing even happened.
Busy promoting his new FX series, The Old
Man, on which he’s an ex-CIA operative
haunted anew by a lifetime of choices he made
in the past, a role that happens to be Bridges’s
first-ever series-regular TV gig in roughly 50
years of acting, a chewy part on a twisty spy
series that lets him play off TV legends like
John Lithgow and Amy Brenneman.
Bridges shot half of the first season
before COVID and cancer and went back and
finished the rest; he’ll tell you all about it. And
about what he learned from almost dying. But
he’ll tell you in a circuitous, Bridgesian way,
circling around a point and riffing off into
abstract space, forgetting things (sometimes,
he says, “I ask my mind for a word and it
just flips me the finger”, which could be a
symptom of post-COVID brain or just old-
man brain, he’s not quite sure) and then
remembering, or just rolling on to the
next thought, enjoying the journey
of the chat without stressing unduly
over the destination.
“He says this constantly,” says
Brenneman, who plays a divorcée who gets
more than she bargained for when she falls
for Bridges’s character on The Old Man. “He’s
like, ‘Don’t you think sometimes, like, the
acting is just an excuse for us to hang out
and talk?’ ”
“He’s just happy to talk about the way
the universe works for an hour,” says
Old Man cocreator Jonathan E. Steinberg,
“and it’s great. And it’s all coming from a
place of being just fascinated by the world.
It’s fun to be around somebody who’s willing
to kind of just see things and note them and
be willing to talk about them and not be
as concerned about what we’re supposed
to be doing today.”
Another part of working with Jeff Bridges,
his collaborators all say, is that every so often
you find yourself stopping and thinking,
Holy shit, it’s Jeff Bridges.
His IMDb credits span seven decades.
He’s played cowboys and country singers,
good men and flawed men and men who want
very badly to kill Iron Man. He came into the
business already halfway famous, because of
the name he shared with his father – Lloyd
Bridges, of Sea Hunt and High Noon and later
Airplane! and Seinfeld – but he also came in
with whatever intangible quality separates
icons from mere actors.
As a younger man, he always had a rare
grace, and he’s aged no less gracefully –
The Old Man deepens and complicates the
growly, inward-turned presence Bridges
brought to recent films like Hell or High
Water and Bad Times at the El Royale. If
icon still feels, even after all these years, like
an awkward descriptor to hang on him, it’s
because he’s worn that status so casually
for so long. Decades ago, legendary film
critic Pauline Kael said he “may be the most
natural and least self-conscious screen actor
who ever lived”.
The overall Jeff Bridges-ness of Jeff
Bridges, his iconicity, sneaks up on you.
Sometimes, Brenneman says, when
she’s in a scene with him, she can’t help
thinking of Peter Weir’s Fearless, from
1993, with Bridges as a plane-crash survivor
whose experience scrambles his whole
psychospiritual map.
“Fearless is a huge movie in my internal
landscape,” Brenneman says. “That look on
his face as the plane’s going down – there’s
moments that are kind of beyond language,

in that movie, for me. So I have those flashes,
where that face is looking at me [in a scene],
and I’m like, ‘Oh my God – it’s that face’.”
Jon Steinberg remembers being a kid on
the floor of his parents’ bedroom, watching
Bridges in King Kong and Tron a million
times. He grew up to be a creator of TV shows
like Jericho and Black Sails. In 2017, the
producer Warren Littlefield approached
Steinberg and his Black Sails partner Robert
Levine with a pitch for a series based on a
He shared his diagnosis
with a Lebowski nod: new
shit has come to light.
Thomas Perry novel about a loner retiree
who’s hiding a bloody and morally murky
covert-ops past.
“I think, almost right away, we started
talking about [doing] Unforgiven in the
spy genre – the opportunity to do what that
movie did for westerns in the Bourne space,”
Steinberg says. “And that got really exciting.”
The minute they started talking about
who might play Dan Chase, the titular Old
Man, Bridges’s name was first on the list,
TACTI C S
Steinberg says, “and I was
sceptical that it was realistic.
He’d never done TV. I was
fully aware that he was a
guy who could do probably
literally anything he wanted
to do, and I felt like we
were going to be in line
with 35 people trying to get
his attention.”
Bridges is also, famously,
very hard to book, for
anything. The question of
whether or not to accept a
particular piece of work fills
him with anxiety, even when
the work is tempting. It’s said
that the Coen brothers had
to talk him into playing the
Dude in The Big Lebowski,
a part that’s now one of the
pillars of his legend, and
then when they wanted him
for the John Wayne part in
their remake of True Grit,
they had to talk him into
that, too. He even had to be
wheedled into playing the
whiskey-pickled country
singer Bad Blake in Crazy
Heart, the role he went on
to win an Oscar for.
“All of them,” he says, a
little sheepish. “All of them.
And this one’s no different.
I resisted this a lot. I had
a lot of good reasons not
to do this.”
But when Bridges
hesitates, it’s usually for one
big reason, whether it’s Jon
Steinberg or the Coens or
Marvel on the other end of the
line: “The basic concern of,
once you engage in this, you
can’t engage in that – and you
don’t even know what that is
yet! But you know it’s going
to take you away from your
family, from music, from your art – all these
other things you’re going to have to focus on
less, if not at all.”
So he resisted The Old Man, for a while,
not because he wasn’t interested – he’d read
the book and liked it – but because he was
interested, and he knew he’d get sucked in,
which is how he works.
“Once you get hooked, it’s surrender,”
he says, laughing a little. “Then it’s, Take me,
eat me, have your way with me.”
SEPTEMBER 2022 101
JEFF BRIDGES’ ROLES OVER THE YEARS
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, ’71
THE FISHER KING, ’91
SOMETIMES, BRIDGES SAYS,
operating with that level of commitment
can keep him from enjoying the work. He’s
constantly having to remind himself of what
his mum, Dorothy Bridges, used to say every
time he went off to make a movie: “She would
say, ‘Remember, Jeff, have fun. And don’t take
it too seriously.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, fuck, I forgot.
That’s right.’ ”
It’s like when he played Robert Downey
Jr.’s nemesis in Iron Man, released in 2008,
the film that launched a billion-dollar
megafranchise, which has involved Bridges
not at all, because he died at the end of the
first one. Or maybe he didn’t – Bridges
isn’t sure.
“In the script they gave me, they open the
suit and the suit’s empty,” he says, “So who
knows? Maybe I’ll be – what was my name?”
Obadiah Stane.
“Obadiah Stane,” he says. “Maybe
Obadiah Stane will come back, somehow.”
Honestly, he doesn’t sound hugely invested
in whether this happens or not. But he was
happy with Iron Man as a finished product
– “I’m biased,” he says, “because I’m in it, but
that’s my favourite superhero movie” – and he
dug working with director Jon Favreau.
“The way he worked with the suits, the
Marvel people, was amazing, because we
would show up not knowing what we were
going to shoot,” he says, getting a kick out
102 MEN’S HE ALTH
HEARTS OF THE WEST, ’75
THE BIG LEBOWSKI, ’98
of the memory. “We’d be writing it in our
trailers, and then all the guys from the studio
would be there tapping their foot.”
But at first, he says, taking that now
unthinkably loosey-goosey approach to the
making of a massive tentpole superhero
film was a source of huge anxiety, because
in order to work, he needs to commit, and in
order to commit, he needs to know what he’s
committing to. Early on, he says, “I was really
in a terrible state. Y’know I got to know what
I’m saying. What’s the script? I gotta know
my lines, so I can prepare! And then I made
this little adjustment. Jeff, you’re making a
$200 million student film. Relax and have
some fun.”
That’s how it goes. Bridges resists and
resists, and then when he gives in, he gives
them everything. One day, Steinberg and
Levine got a call that Bridges wanted to do
The Old Man, and then a few months later,
there he was on set, a 70-year-old man
shooting a brutal close-quarters knife fight
in an overturned car.
He didn’t do all his own stunts, of course,
but according to Steinberg, “You’d be amazed
by what he did do. He did quite a bit. It was
important to us that it feels honest, and a
lot of that solution was Jeff doing a lot of it,
fighting his way through it. He doesn’t half-
arse anything, and [the knife-fight scene] is a
scene where he’s got to go to a really dark place
to get to an emotional moment and a scene
where he’s got to roll around on the ground
KING KONG, ’76
IRON MAN, ’08
with a stuntman and be in a life-or-death,
knock-down-drag-out fight, and it’s all fully
committed to.”
They’d shot four episodes and parts of
a fifth when the pandemic shut down their
show along with pretty much every other
show on earth.
In October 2020, the week they were
supposed to go back into production,
Brenneman heard Bridges was out with
a sore back. “And the end of that week, he’s
got cancer,” she says.
He announced it later that month on
Twitter with a Lebowski reference: new
shit has come to light. He mentioned the
great doctors he’d been seeing and said his
prognosis was good. But by that point, 2020
had already been one of the bleakest, meanest
years in recent memory, a year of endless
injustice and unthinkable loss, and the idea
that it might end with the Dude dying of
fuckin’ cancer seemed depressingly on-brand.
It was hard not to expect the worst.
“I’ll give you a little of what that trip was
like,” Bridges says today.
It went like this: sometime that summer,
MOVIEWEB.COM; IMDB.COM; FX NETWORKS
he’s exercising, stretched out on the floor
in Santa Barbara. He rolls over and feels
something like a bone in his abdomen
where a bone shouldn’t be. His wife tells him
to go get it checked out, but it doesn’t hurt,
so instead they go through with a planned
vacation – three months at the Bridges
family’s place in Montana.
 TRON, ’82 THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS, ’89
TRUE GRIT, ’10
“I’m sweating at night,” Bridges
remembers, “but that’s because the nights
are hot. And my legs itched. Those are all
symptoms of this lymphoma that I had – I
didn’t realise that. But I was feeling great.
Had no pain.”
He gets back to California about a week
before he’s supposed to be back on set as Dan
Chase. Decides he’ll go to the doctor, see about
whatever’s going on in his abdomen.
“I get it checked out,” he says, “and they
tell me that I have a nine-by-twelve-inch
lymphomic mass in my stomach. Nine by
twelve! A huge fucking thing. Like a baby in
my stomach, man.”
So they call in the specialists. They start
him on chemo. The chemo does its thing.
Bridges feels sick, but he feels all right. He
feels as much love as a man’s ever felt, from
everybody. He celebrates his 71st birthday in
December 2020, him and 50 friends laughing
together one Zoom call, and it’s the best
birthday he’s ever had.
Then it’s early 2021. Bridges goes in
for another scan at the hospital in Santa
Barbara and the news is good. The mass in his
stomach, Bridges says, has “imploded down to
this little thing the size of a marble.” He sends
joyful emails to Brenneman and Steinberg,
grateful to the universe.
This is in January. As it happens, it’s
January 6. Bridges is glued to the TV like
everybody else – “I’m watching the, what
do you call it, the revolution or whatever the
TRON: LEGACY, ’10
hell. The failed revolution” – and then he gets
a letter from the chemo-treatment centre,
telling him he’s been exposed to COVID. And
that’s when things get really scary.
Chemotherapy, Bridges explains, “strips
you of all your immune system. So the COVID
made my cancer look like a piece of cake. The
cancer never hurt. But the COVID, oh God.
Because I had nothing to fight it, and that was
wild. I was on death’s door with the COVID.
My wife would say, ‘How is he? He’s going
to live, isn’t he?’ And the doctor would say,
‘We’re doing the best we can’. It was that kind
of thing. They weren’t saying, ‘No, he’s going
to be okay’. ”
Maybe this is no big surprise, but Bridges
took a pretty Zen approach to the possibility
of his own death. He says he drew on
everything he’d learned from a lifetime of
spiritual practice, everything he’d learned
about letting go and not knowing and simply
bearing witness to a situation, which he
says sometimes put him at odds with the
practitioners of Western medicine who were
treating his cancer.
“This one doctor,” Bridges says,
“would come up to me and say, ‘Jeff,
you’ve got to fight, man. You’re not
fighting. You gotta fight!’ And I said,
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
I’m in surrender mode. I’m practising
getting ready to die. If anything, my action
would be closer to dancing – I’m dancing
with my death.”
TEXASVILLE, ’90
THE OLD MAN, ’22
BUT THE DUDE SURVIVED.
He beat COVID as well as cancer. (“There’s
still something in there,” he says today. “They
don’t know if it’s scar tissue or whatever it is.
But I’m in remission.”) He went back to finish
shooting The Old Man, almost two years after
completing the first four episodes – two years
of seeing only masked faces, two years that
seemed like a weird dream.
I ask Bridges if he felt like a different
person on the other side of all this, in any way
he can quantify.
“More the same,” he says after a second.
“Deeper the same, rather than different.
Deeper the same.”
Long before cancer and COVID, he’d
already done a fair amount of thinking, he
says, about mortality, and the fact that he will
not be here forever. The book he’s carrying
around with him today is Four Thousand
Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by
the British journalist Oliver Burkeman. Four
thousand weeks, Bridges explains, “is how
many weeks you got if you live to around 80.
That’s not too many, you know what I mean?
And my buddy, he actually did the math –
you’ll live to 76 with 4000 weeks. It’s a little
less than 80.”
Burkeman’s big idea, contra to just about
everything anybody’s ever written about
time management and productivity, is that
no matter how we optimise our lives, we will
SEPTEMBER 2022 103
Bridges loves acting
but also fractals,
playing music and
all his side projects.
Shirt by All Saints;
jeans by John
Varvatos.
never have enough time to meet the demands
life places on us. Bridges opens the book,
adjusts his glasses, reads out loud:
“ ‘The trouble with attempting to
master your time, it turns out, is that time
ends up mastering you’. I love that,” he says.
Burkeman suggests that “the dictatorship
of the clock, the schedule, and the Google
Calendar alert . . . [makes] it all but impossible
to experience ‘deep time’, that sense of
timeless time, which depends on forgetting
the abstract yardstick and plunging back
into the vividness of reality instead.” Bridges
loves that idea, too.
“Clock time is relatively new,” he says.
“Back in the feudal times, they didn’t have
clocks, man. It was a whole different thing,
time. And we’re trying to jam in as much as
we can. We feel like we’re left out if we don’t
do this bucket list. And we miss what’s right
104 MEN’S HE ALTH
in front of you. We can miss the present.
I say, ‘That’s not what I wanted. I want this
and this and this and this’. And you miss what
you’re given.
“And it’s not like I’ve figured it out,”
he says. “I’m an anxious cat, man. I resist
life big-time.”
In this moment, I’m feeling the
dictatorship of the clock myself. Bridges
has to hit the road soon, and I’ve still got
questions. I point out that on The Old Man,
he and John Lithgow’s character – a
high-ranking government official whose
connection to Bridges’s Dan Chase goes way
back – are both thinking about their legacies,
about how they’ll be remembered once their
past actions come to light. I ask Bridges if he’s
been thinking more about his legacy, given the
events of the past few years.
“It’s so wild,” he says. “There’s this new
thing – it’s not only kids, it’s just a modern
thing to aspire to, which seems so bizarre. ‘I
want to be an influencer when I grow up’. And
I want to be an influencer! Why not? That’s
what I want to do. Make a difference.”
And then he’s off, swinging from vine
to conversational vine, talking about
Buckminster Fuller and the way flocks of
birds and schools of fish change direction as
one big group, and that’s when Bridges says to
me, “You know about fractals?”
I say ‘Yeah’, tentatively, and Bridges,
sounding almost suspicious, says, “You’ve
seen the fractals?”
And I say, even more tentatively, that I’ve
seen some fractals in my day, and Bridges
says, “The latest kind of fractals?” And
at that point I have to admit that I am not
really up on the latest advances in fractals,
and Bridges tells me to get out my laptop

We feel like we’re left out
if we don’t do this bucket
list. And we miss what’s
right in front of you  Bridges, she had two black eyes and a broken
. . . the present
and Google “hardest fractal”. And while
I’m digging the computer out of my bag, he’s
explaining, “This guy Mandelbrot came up
with this formula, z equals z squared plus c.
And when that diagram is made in a visual
sense, it’s basically a window into infinity.”
I can’t connect to the studio’s WiFi, so
we end up elbow to elbow, me and Bridges,
watching computer-animated diagrams
of fractals on the cracked screen of my
iPhone – kaleidoscopic geometric patterns,
evolving endlessly, as if we’re zooming
deeper and deeper into a universe
of microscopic particles.
“See that first shape – that’s the initial
shape. Some call that the fingerprint of God.
Now just watch this for a second. Give it a
couple of minutes before you get the whole gist
of it,” Bridges is saying.
“Just keep watching it. Watch what
happens. You think you know where it’s
going, right? Watch what your mind is doing
as you watch that. What’s the conversation
that you have with your mind as you watch it?
Pay attention. Look at the detail. Look at the
fucking detail, man.”
We’ve been looking at this for kind of a
while, long enough that Bridges has forgotten
why he wanted to show me the fractals in
the first place. And yet it’s all connected. We
have, somehow, zoomed down to the root of
Bridges’s anxiety. As much as he loves acting,
as much as it fires him up, he also gets fired up
about fractals, and about playing music with
his band, the Abiders, and about this company
he’s involved with that makes guitars out
of sustainable wood, and when he resists
engaging in this or that new acting project, he
does so “because I know it’s going to take me
away from all my little side projects that I love
so much.
“So whatever I’m attracted to, I get”
– he mimes recoiling, makes a sound like
somebody’s showing him a snake. He shrugs.
“Funny dynamic.”
Bridges’s assistant is hovering. We have
five minutes of clock time left.
“Let me just say this one thing,”
TACTI C S
Bridges says to me. “You married?”
I am, I say. Bridges is, too – since 1977,
to Susan Geston, whom he met in Montana
in 1975 while shooting the movie Rancho
Deluxe. It’s a good story. Geston had been
in a car accident, and on the day she met
nose. A makeup artist snapped a picture of
the moment they met, and 10 years later he
sent it to Bridges. Bridges still carries it in his
wallet – a picture of a goofy young actor in a
cowboy hat meeting a beautiful girl with a
banged-up face.
“It was love at first sight,” Bridges says
now. But even that wasn’t enough. “I resisted
marriage so much, man. I resisted getting
married because it’s the same thing – it
takes you away from all the other things. All
the other chicks, man, and all these other
adventures that you don’t do.
“And I resisted, I resisted. And I said, If I
don’t marry this lady, I’ll spend my life – this
is my fear – I’ll spend my whole life saying,
That was the one, and I let that diamond slip
through my fingers in the sand. And finally
the caveat I gave myself, that allowed myself
to get married, was: You can always get a
divorce. I said, Okay. ”
So they got married. And honeymooned
in Hawaii.
“So now we cut to the Seven Sacred Pools
in Maui,” Bridges says, “and I’m just smelling
the rotting mangoes and I’m pouting. Sue
says, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Nothing’. She
goes, ‘Oh, let’s annul this. This is terrible’. I
said, ‘No, no, no’.
“And she put up with that pouting shit for
three years and didn’t kick me to the curb,
thank God. I finally got with the program
and said, Oh no, she’s not trapping me. I got a
gift, a wonderful gift, that I was questioning
and didn’t want to accept. And now we’re
celebrating our 45th wedding anniversary,
man. Three kids, three grandkids.”
Susan Bridges got exposed to COVID
when Jeff did.
“We shared an ambulance to the hospital.
Oh, man,” Bridges says, sounding like there
was still no place he’d rather be than right
there with her, that it was somehow another
gift from the universe, terrible and beautiful,
all at the same time.
alex pappademas is the host of the
Big Hit Show podcast and the author of
Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant.
SEPTEMBER 2022 105
106 MEN’S HE ALTH
 H EA LT H

Pillow Talk: reframe your

attitude to sleep so you
don’t ‘stay woke’.

For Shakespeare, sleep may have been

“the main course in life’s feast” – but with
irregular work hours, sleepless children
and financial anxieties to contend with,
too many of us are going without. Here,
a panel of pros for whom a solid kip is
paramount shares its tactics
BY TOM WA RD

SEPTEMBER 2022 107


Get Ahead
1 Of The Game
“Good sleep starts the
moment you wake up,”
says Alastair Lockwood,
an ophthalmologist at Feel
Good Contacts. “Light
absorption during the day
– both natural and artificial
– helps your body stay alert,
then increases the quality
of your sleep.” Lockwood
advises breaking your desk
shackles with a workout
or run, and buying a desk
lamp with a daylight bulb
for the months when
sunlight is scarcer.
Get Back
2 Into Books
“Read novels!” enthuses
Ollie Gallant, DJ and host
of the Gutology podcast.
“The one thing that
transformed my sleep
was reading fiction. It
takes you away from the
stresses of the day in a
way TV doesn’t.” Often
wake up in the night?
“Instead of thinking,
‘Crap, my alarm goes off
in two hours’, I’d reframe
it: ‘Great, I can read this
book’. In 15 minutes, I’d
be asleep.”
An inten
sive f itn
long list
of things
need to b
e f re sh t
on my le
gs befor
for secon
d-tier Be
team. “N
ormatec
simple s
t r e t ch c a
108 MEN’S HE ALTH
Beat
6
Draw Up
3 A Schedule
The Clock
“If you have a young family,
a supportive partner is
important,” says Rajesh
Nair, consultant urological “Checking the time can heighten anxiety about not being
surgeon at St Thomas’ able to fall asleep,” explains Lockwood. “If you have a
Hospital and Harley Street.
“I do complex operations
clock you can see from your bed, take it out of your room,
that can last up to eight or turn it around to face the wall.” Don’t underestimate the
hours, so I need my sleep.” ill effects of ambient lighting, either – the glow of a phone
Nair suggests writing a or clock, the flash of a passing car. Blackout blinds or an
weekly sleep plan. “It might
eye mask are essential night-time items for Lockwood.
be Monday, Tuesday you’re
busy, but Wednesday your
schedule is lighter so it
doesn’t matter if you sleep
less,” he says. “That way
you and your partner know
in advance whose turn it is
to wake up.”
Listen To
4 The Buzz
Having served as an army
nurse in the Balkans, Iraq
and Afghanistan, Phillip Hall
– a counsellor with Help for
Heroes – has bedded down
everywhere from freezing
police cells in Kosovo to
military bases in the Middle
Tick-tock, you don’t
East. “The key thing is stop . . . worrying
having a fan on,” he says. about sleep.
“Even in a war zone, that
white noise blocks out
those little jolts that might Get Some Air
keep your subconscious on
7 As a pilot for a major
alert. I do the same if I’m in airline with 16 years of
a hotel or at home.” experience, Tim Wings
(not his real last name)
has plenty of experience
operating on minimal thrust.
“We use the Karolinska
Sleepiness Scale, a
numbered scale on which
5 if we’re too tired, we’re
C o m p re legally not allowed
PHOTOGRAPHY: AGATA PEC, PHILIP HAYNES, ROWAN FEE, DAVID SYKES
ss To De
c o m p re to fly,” he explains.
e s s regimen ss
can add “I often leave home at
keeping s oreness a 4.30am and might do three
you up a nd stiffn
o t ra in a t n ight – no ess to th short-haul flights in a day.”
g ain by 6a t ideal fo e
e I go to sl m . “I like to ge r t h o s e who For powering down, he’s a
eep,” say t some c
s L iam Fras o mpressi proponent of breathwork.
lgian clu er, who p on
b K MSK l a “If I’m struggling to sleep,
has a go D e i nze and y s football
od range the Cana I’ll breathe in for three
o f recove d a nation
n really r y produ al seconds, hold for three,
help blo cts. But e
od f low i ven a exhale for three,” he says.
n your le
gs.” “It gets my body in the right
frame of mind.” A good way
to nix pre-sleep turbulence.

Do A Mental
8 Clear-Out
As an A&E doctor,
business owner and
parent, Qian Xu’s shift
patterns are the definition
of “erratic” – and zoning
out on the job is not an
option. When she does
get a chance to sleep,
she struggles to silence
her mind. “Rather than
keeping it all in my head,
I’ll write my thoughts
down in my notes app,”
she says. She also sets
calendar reminders for
everything she needs to
do the next day. Mental
offloading is a study-
proven strategy for
reducing pre-sleep
anxiety – and far superior
than “just trying not to
think about it”.
Set A Later
9 Alarm
Much is said about exiting
the office promptly, but early
morning presenteeism is
a problem, too, with habitual
overtime linked to lower
productivity. The world won’t
fall apart if you’re not at your
desk for 8am – as cancer
surgeon Nair knows. “Sure,
there are days when you’d
like to get into work early,”
he says. “But there are those
days when you have to be in
early, and knowing
the difference is
key.” When a
later start
means a
stronger
performance,
Nair has
his priorities
in order.
Reframe
10 Your Rest
“When sleeping in a tent
in Iraq at 42°C, and
knowing you could be
called to attend to
wounded soldiers at
any point, you need a
strategy,” says former
soldier Hall. For him,
shifting his focus to
relaxation – rather than
just sleep – helped. “I
might have seven hours
off and only sleep for four
hours, but I’ve spent the
rest of those hours giving
my mind time to wind
down.” The stakes might
not be as high in your
household, but taking the
pressure off could help
you win the battle.
What-supp? Hopefully
not you.
HE ALT H
Know And When
12 Your Limits 13 All Else Fails…
Working flat-out is a false Just give up and get up,
economy. While many of us says Galal Yafai, the
feel guilty about easing up British flyweight boxer
at work, stress and sleep who won gold in Tokyo.
deprivation will ultimately “When I’m fighting the
hinder your ability to next day or making
perform to your best. weight, it can be pretty
Practise self-discipline, says hard to sleep. There are
Look To surgeon Nair. “Recognise, occasions when I haven’t
11 The Light ‘I need X hours of sleep to been able to sleep more
“I have a whole-body function’ and don’t than four or five hours.
red-light therapy compromise on that,” he I don’t fight it. I get up,
machine in my clinic, says. “I don’t let patient care then try to sleep again
Skin Aesthetics, and suffer. If I’m tired, I think, in a few hours.” Research
that really helps me ‘If this were my family shows our emotional
and my clients,” says member, would I want reaction to missed sleep
Dr Xu, who is also them to have this level of can be more damaging
an aesthetician. care?’ If can’t fully deliver, to productivity than our
Preliminary studies I’ll ask someone else to do physical tiredness. A
suggest exposure to it.” Say it with us now: strategic daytime nap is
this type of light does d-e-l-e-g-a-t-e. your ally. If not, strap on
improve sleep quality. your gloves, slip into your
Use-at-home red light best suit and face the
panels are also new day swinging.
available. “It
stimulates the body’s
production of
melatonin,” she says.
Two sessions a week
should keep you in
the pink.
14
Get Some
Supplementary
Assistance
A reliance on sedatives can be harmful and delivers
diminishing returns. Fraser prefers to keep it natural
when he needs to be match-ready. “I take a shot of tart
cherry juice, which is a type of anti-inflammatory. It
promotes sleep and helps my body recover.” If he wakes
up in the night, he’ll sometimes take a melatonin tablet.
“If you’re changing time zones, taking something to
force your body to sleep can be good,” he says.
SEPTEMBER 2022 109
In October 2020, DREW MANNING,
a then-39-year-old personal trainer
turned fitfluencer best known for
his unique brand of weight-loss
challenges, stood in front of a
camera inside his kitchen in Salt
Lake City, Utah. In front of him was
a large pile of Halloween sweets.

“Are you guys ready for this?” Manning asked before rolling up his
black T-shirt to reveal an ample stomach, stopping just short of what
he’d taken to calling his man boobs. “I need some breathing room
for my belly,” he told the camera, slapping his stomach a few times
with an audible smack-smack-smack.
The challenge was simple: over the next 15 minutes, Manning
would try to eat as much of the pile as he could, bingeing his way
through chocolates and other sugar-laden treats. The stunt joined
several other extreme eating sessions, posted to his Fit2Fat2Fit
YouTube channel and promoted to his million-plus followers across
Instagram and Facebook. Every episode lasts about 12 minutes, with
close-up shots of whatever he’s gorging on, from pancakes to steak
and potatoes.
After each stunt, though, Manning felt terrible. “You literally
can’t do anything for the next six to eight hours,” he tells Men’s
Health. “So, we always had to schedule [these shoots] towards the
end of the day so that I could just lay down. I kind of hated doing
these because I knew they were for entertainment. They would get a
good amount of views, but at the same time it’s just like a day of your
Manning’s attention-
life wasted.” grabbing stunts helped
For the Halloween video, he’d added some variety by comparing him rack up clients.
his efforts with those of his girlfriend, Julie, who documented the
same thing separately. But all of these stunts were part of a larger,
stranger goal: to gain 25kg in four months, and then try to lose it all A Problem Shared
in another four. Having started seven weeks earlier, Manning was For those unfamiliar with Manning’s emotion-first brand of life
scheduled to hit peak weight just in time for his 40th birthday in late coaching, empathy is perhaps the most important selling point. He
December, kicking off what he called his Back2Fit challenge, which has spent nearly a decade finding ways to signal that he understands
anyone could join for the new year. the experience of wanting to lose weight and is therefore able to
To accomplish the radical weight gain, Manning had to go connect with and help people in the same situation.
big, doubling his daily kilojoule intake and ceasing to exercise Manning rose to fame in 2011 when, after claiming that
completely. By the day of the Halloween challenge, the 6ft 1in (185 he couldn’t relate to his clients’ supposed lack of willpower,
cm) PT weighed close to 102kg, up from about 83 kg two months he launched his original Fit2Fat2Fit challenge on YouTube,
earlier, though that wasn’t immediately obvious until he showed his intentionally gaining and then losing 34 kg. That attempt went viral,
belly. The lifelong athlete and weightlifter’s bearded face was still and he wrote a New York Times bestseller about his experience.
thin and his shoulders remained broader than his hips. His biceps Unlike many of the other fitfluencers populating your feed,
were large and his forearms well-defined. whose self-discipline and muscular physique seem to be part of their
Eventually, Manning hit the wall with a king-size bag of Skittles, wide appeal, Manning’s fame is tied to first making some obviously
which he chewed into a wad before coaxing it down his throat. A unhealthy choices, and then trying to undo them.
few times, he put his hand to his mouth like he was about to be sick. Along the way, Manning has built a million-dollar health empire
Finally, about five minutes later, Manning raised his last Twix to by selling products that promote a ketogenic diet, along with his
signal he was out. Julie ate more than he did in the end, although own line of nutritional supplements, workout apps and online
she, too, ended up leaning against the counter, sweating. coaching. He says his programs have helped more than 500,000
“I wanted her to feel my pain and to experience what I clients, and he has more than 53,000 YouTube subscribers,
experience,” he says later in the video. “Well, I do,” Julie says 267,000 followers on Instagram and a million followers on
while holding his hand. “I have empathy.” Facebook, where he sports #TeamEmpathy T-shirts.

112 MEN’S HE ALTH


“No one cares how much you know until they know how much you
care” is a favourite slogan.
He doesn’t believe that gaining and losing so much weight so
quickly can permanently impact his body. “What I’ve been told by my
doctors is that your body is pretty resilient. It can handle abuse,” he
says. “If you treat it right consistently with a healthy lifestyle, it can
reverse a lot of the damage.”
Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician at Harvard
Medical School, disagrees with that assessment. This kind of rapid
weight cycling “actually interferes with the signals between the
brain and gut, particularly in the hypothalamus, which is the part
of the brain that regulates weight”, she explains. For Manning – as
well as anyone else who yo-yo diets – that can make losing weight
progressively more difficult.
But his latest challenge poses bigger questions. The science has
become increasingly clear that dramatic weight-loss journeys similar
to Manning’s are neither practical nor sustainable for most people, and
that how much you exercise may be a better predictor of your health
than your body size. A growing movement no longer sees ‘fit’ and
‘fat’ as mutually exclusive. Would Manning’s brand of performative
empathy continue to age well?
WE IG H T LOS S
“IT’S NOT ABOUT
GETTING SKINNY
OR HAVING A SIX-
PACK. IT’S ABOUT
FALLING IN LOVE
WITH THE PROCESS”
Spreading the Message
Manning was born to evangelise. He
grew up in a strict Mormon household
where everyone would wake up at 5am to
read scripture, leaving him exhausted
before the time came for his wrestling
or football practice. While he excelled
at sports, he says his parents were
unimpressed. “I never felt worthy or good
enough, no matter what I did,” he says.
At age 19, Manning deferred his
enrolment at university to join a church-
mandated missionary trip to Brazil.
Six days a week for two years, he’d put
on his collared shirt, smart trousers
and shoes, suffer through the tropical
heat and go door to door offering bibles
and the opportunity for strangers to
pray with him, join the church and be
Manning packed on baptised. When Manning speaks about
29 kg by doubling his
kJ intake and that time with the Brazilians, it’s easy to
quitting the gym. hear some of the early values he’d bring
to Fit2Fat2Fit. “No matter what had
happened, no matter where they’d come
from, no matter what their life was, they
were still worthy to be loved,” he says. “That [experience] kind of trains
you to listen to understand people instead of listening to judge.”
And the fitness industry is filled with judgements that Manning
says he’s against. “It’s not about getting skinny. It’s not about having
a six-pack,” he has said on his weekly podcast, The Fit2Fat2Fit
Experience. “It’s about falling in love with the process because you’re
worth it. You’re worth it to have a healthy lifestyle.”
Of course, what constitutes a healthy lifestyle is debatable,
especially as weight-loss companies drown their products in
euphemism. “Right now, the culture is a mess on synonyms such
as ‘wellness’ and ‘detox’,” says Adrienne Bitar, a professor of American
studies at Cornell University and author of Diet And The Disease Of
Civilization. “No one’s willing to say, ‘I’m just trying to lose weight to
look good’.”
In addition, fitfluencers often have a financial interest in the
products they recommend. Manning has received sponsorships from
a paleo supplement and snack label, a frozen food company and a
monk-fruit sweetener brand, among others.
During his recent extreme transformation, Manning argued
that weight gain was associated with emotional challenges, too. On
27 December 2020, he released a video of himself celebrating his
SEPTEMBER 2022 113

“ANY TIME I DO THESE EXTREME TRANSFORMATIONS,
THERE’S A LITTLE BIT OF CRAZINESS INVOLVED”
40th birthday while standing shirtless in his kitchen with a gold
plastic chain that said “Old Dude”. He claimed he was heavy enough
that he had to buy new clothes and needed anti-chafing cream. He also
wasn’t sleeping well and had a weaker libido.
“This journey was way harder than I thought it was going to be,”
he told the camera before stepping on the scales. In four months, he’d
gained 29 kg and more than tripled his body-fat percentage to 26.2.
Most people will never gain that much weight that quickly. “For
the average person, the primary weight gain is over the holidays,
and it averages several pounds,” says Brad Schoenfeld, a professor of
exercise science at Lehman College in New York.
But Manning didn’t have 15 years to gain that weight. That’s
where the eating contests, some of which included foods that were
chosen by polling his followers, came in. “Any time I do these extreme
transformations, there’s a little bit of craziness involved because I
have to catch people’s attention,” Manning says. “But it’s in the hope
that people consume the messaging of, ‘Hey, we need more empathy in
the fitness industry’.”
A Man With a Plan
In January last year, Manning set out to prove first-hand that his
methods for weight loss work. He launched his Back2Fit program,
which features a paid online app that includes recipes, a keto-based
meal plan that limits kilojoules to 8370 a day and video workouts.
The plan wasn’t created with help from a dietitian, but Manning
endorses its efficacy. Following the program, Manning cut out nearly
two-thirds of the kJ from his bulking diet, but the plan was still fairly
complicated, says dietitian Abby Langer, author of Good Food, Bad
Diet. Many recipes require lots of ingredients, including expensive
ones such as wild-caught salmon, and steps that seem labour-
intensive. Because the plan is ketogenic – a diet where you eat lots
of fat and very few carbs – participants need to follow it strictly and
indefinitely. “If you start eating carbs again, you’re going to gain the
weight back,” says Langer.
Manning’s workouts consisted of conventional high-intensity
interval circuits. For instance, the first Back2Fit workout was five
rounds of 45 seconds on and 15 seconds off of four movements: banded
deadlifts, body-weight bridges, squats and lunges. For cardio the
next day, subscribers walked fast for 30 seconds and then slow for 30
114 MEN’S HE ALTH
Manning first pulled
this stunt over a
decade ago, gaining
then losing 34kg.
seconds, 20 minutes in total. As the program progressed, the moves
got more complex (pull-ups, bent-over rows, kettlebell deadlifts), the
work intervals got longer and the rests got shorter.
Even for Manning, that portion wasn’t easy: the first day, he
documented himself huffing and puffing. But Professor Schoenfeld
says that, as a fitness pro, he still had a huge advantage over those
who’d never seriously exercised. “It’s much easier to gain muscle while
losing body fat in someone who has previously had a lot of muscle,”
he says. Mentally, Manning admitted that he had an edge, too. Not
only had he done this experiment before, but he’d also built up nearly
a lifetime of habits around exercise and eating certain foods, and his
professional reputation depended on him losing the weight.
And then there’s the factor that the fitness industry is notoriously
cagey about: genetics. Dr Stanford says that a child of two parents
who are medically obese has a 50-85 per cent chance of also becoming
that size, “even with the optimal lifestyle modifications”, such as a
healthy diet and exercise. Either way, weight-loss plans
can be difficult to sustain – physically, emotionally and, in some
cases, financially.
It Starts in the Mind
Throughout the latest challenge, Manning made it a point to be
emotionally vulnerable with his followers, talking openly about the
infidelity and addiction to pornography that led to his divorce in 2015,
ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: ELLE STALLINGS; DREW MANNING; JOHNNY PREHN
and alluding to his conflict with the Mormon church, from which he
was suspended for having premarital sex. He’s now a single parent
who shares custody of his two daughters.
However, he declined to give many details about his and Julie’s
break-up in late 2020, as he neared his maximum weight. Instead,
what he focused on was his “emotional eating” of ice cream and wine.
“Food does give you these little dopamine hits that temporarily numb
the pain of life,” he said on his podcast.
Not everyone agrees with this depiction of weight gain. “This
idea that you are fat because something is wrong or unresolved is
exceedingly toxic,” says Virgie Tovar, a self-described “fat activist”
and author of You Have The Right To Remain Fat. The problem, Tovar
says, is that this mentality shifts blame for not losing weight when
dieting on to the person and not the plan, which may be flawed,
especially if someone is seeking results as dramatic as Manning’s.

Manning has been
frank about his
struggles with
emotional eating.
When it comes to the idea that some people “emotionally eat”
because of some unresolved trauma, Tovar argues that their shame
is often tied more to how they’re perceived and treated than to an
internal crisis. To actually empathise with them, says Tovar, you
should “unseat the narrative that being a higher-weight person is
bad, and not just bad for your health, allegedly, but bad in terms of
your morality, your physical appearance, your capacity to lead, your
viability as an employee, as a patient, as a boss”.
For Manning’s part, he seems to have intentionally added as much
shame as possible to the weight-gaining process. The first half of the
challenge, he explains, “is about training your brain to be lazy. So,
sleeping in, not making my bed, not meditating, not journaling, not
eating healthily, just eating whatever you want whenever you want,
not being disciplined at all”. Though Manning typically shaves his
stomach, chest and armpits, he let his body hair grow out as he gained
weight. “It’s kinda funny letting yourself go,” he said on his podcast.
By December 2021, nearly one full year since Manning announced
the Back2Fit program, more than 8000 people had signed up.
Manning says roughly half of those who join the program complete it,
and that the average weight loss has been 15 kg.
Some adopters have rave reviews. Kyle Wheeler, 35, lost 54 kg and
says he used to be almost unable to walk up the stairs to his home or
sleep without snoring so loudly that his fiancée would leave the room.
“My cardio could be 10 times better and, mentally, emotionally, I’m
still working through stuff,” Wheeler says. “But it works for me and I
was one of the laziest, most negative people I knew.”
Then there’s Jessica Rose, 44, who completed Back2Fit and
Manning’s Complete Keto meal program. She’s lost about 16.5 kg but
has “been mostly focused on continuing to get stronger and build
muscle and less focused on the number on the scale”. She’s going
through a divorce and planning to move across the country, she adds.
“I feel like going through Drew’s programme, getting healthier and
WE IG H T LOS S
losing weight has helped with my mindset and proven to me that I can
do hard things.”
The Final Cut
In May last year, the week before his final weigh-in, Manning began
taking drastic steps to shave off his last few kilos. “If I don’t make
weight, I don’t care. I really don’t care,” he said on his podcast. Then,
five days before the weigh-in, he cut his daily kilojoules in half to 4200
a day and ate primarily chicken breast, tuna and egg whites. “The
meals didn’t look good, guys. It was not appetising,” he told those
listening. When he stepped foot on the scales, Manning clocked in
at 82 kg, just under his goal.
When Men’s Health asked Manning if he ever considered going
in the opposite direction for his final weigh-in and missing his goal,
he says that he did. But he was also influenced by his company’s
investors. “It’s not just my decision,” he says. And, ultimately,
he thinks he erred on the right side. “If you don’t have certain
boundaries, if you don’t have that balance of tough love, then
empathy can lead to enabling.”
Manning still appears as muscular, lean and shirtless as ever in
his social media posts. In recent months, he’s launched the Back2Fit
2.0 program, which upgrades many of his original offerings and
introduces new experts on life change. One is Tasha Lynn, a mental
health coach who shares journaling prompts, meditations, group
support and stories from her life. “You see, weight loss and physical
transformation start from within,” Manning wrote in an email
introducing Lynn to his followers. “Starting from a place of self-love
makes the physical transformation process so much easier.”
It’s hard to miss the seductive implication: if you want to look like
Manning, you can copy his workouts, meal plans and supplements
and, most importantly, his attitude. After all, doesn’t he know what
you’re up against? He’s been there. Twice.
SEPTEMBER 2022 115
 e b a t e.
s t g y md e at-
g e s w
y o u r big tions. We n
d t o be ko u t o p
o u nt o
? s e
” u mor e w o r c an c
I C A L t y o u
o r E L L IP T a a a aay nd the ki
E A D M IL L h a v ew t s t o fi
“TR days, yo w produ u c
t t h e se b e s t ne
Bu t e d the
te s

Specialized Sirrus 6.0

The superlight carbon-fibre construction means
it’s built for any ride, whether you’re gutting out a
workout or cycling to visit a friend. Specialized’s
Body Geometry touchpoints prevent you from
feeling stiff on long trips. $3400; specialized.com

116 MEN’S HE ALTH

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

BEST
RUNNING
SHORTS BEST
Puma x First
Mile Woven RUNNING
Running Shorts EARBUD
These aren’t
just comfortable;
Shokz
they’re also made
OpenRun Pro
Most options shut
of recycled fibres.
out the sounds of the
$32; au.puma.com
outside world, which Best Swim Shorts
is great for music ROKA SIM PRO II
but not for general Neoprene buoyancy shorts
safety. Shokz delivers perfectly position your body
strong audio that also for extra speed as they keep
lets environmental water out and maintain
noise through. comfort for a range of body
BEST $269; jbhifi.com.au types.
RUNNING SHADES
District Vision x New Balance
Keiichi Standard
They sit easily on your head and feature antifog
tech that keeps your vision clear even during
your hardest runs. $325; districtvision.com

Best Technique Tool

FINIS MANTA
SWIM PADDLES
Finis’ biggest strapless
paddles let you go fast
while correcting your form
BEST – pushing you to extend and
ALL-AROUND catch and teaching you to
apply even pressure on each
SNEAKER stroke. $29; finisaustralia.com
Nike React Infinity
Run Flyknit 3
A perfect balance
between stability and
flexibility, it’s equally
powerful for sprinting
ultrafast on a manual
treadmill and pounding
out a five-kay run.
$230; nike.com
Best Goggles
COBRA ULTRA
SWIPE GOGGLES
You’ve gotta see the
competition to beat them,
and the Swipe antifog tech
in these lets you reactivate
your antifog coating after
extended use.
$100; arenaswimming.com.au

SEPTEMBER 2022 117

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

Garmin Fenix 7 Solar

This ultimate outdoor watch
tracks key fitness metrics,
plays music and offers spot-on Best Foam Roller
GPS – all while providing
TRX ROCKER
up to 22 days of battery
Its shape anchors the roller
life with solar charging.
in place, letting you apply
From $1199; garmin.com
pressure to tight muscles
by rolling your body across
BEST its surface.

Hoka Tecton X
Hoka reinforces this pair
with two carbon plates
that deliver both forward
and lateral energy return.
That means you’ll stay
balanced and nimble on
R’S
even the rockiest E D I T OU R I T E
of switchbacks.
$319; hoka.com
FAV O

Best Grab-and-Go
Massage Gun
BEST HYPERVOLT GO 2
WATER BOTTLE “I take this 1.5-pound [680g]
powerhouse everywhere
Nathan SpeedDraw Plus because it fits easily in any
The strap on this 530ml flask is so backpack or duffel bag.
comfortable that you’ll barely realise It’s the ultimate on-the-go
you’re carrying it. Bonus: there’s room back loosener.”
in the zippered pocket for just about – Ben Court,
everything. $85; amazon.com.au

Best Recovery Boot

THERABODY
BEST JETBOOTS
The first fully wireless air-
RUNNING HAT compression boot features
Brooks Carbonite four pressure settings and
The extra-breathable material keeps your head cool 240 minutes of battery life on
and reflective tech on the brim keeps you feeling one charge. It’s post-leg-day
safe during night runs. $60; brooksrunning.com.au bliss. $1520; jd-sports.com.au

118
 Beats Studio Buds
These speakers sit
securely and provide
crisp audio through
cleans, bench presses
and even handstands
(if that’s a thing you do).
$159; jbhifi.com.au

NordicTrack iSelect
Voice-Controlled
ED
Dumbbells F A V OI T O R ’ S
Nordic teamed up with URIT
Amazon for these weights, E
which adjust from five to
50 pounds (2-22kg) with
voice command. $658;
addtocartaustralia.com.au

BEST
TRACKER
Whoop 4.0
“It tracks the metrics I need –
heart-rate variability, sleep – with
no excess and it’s built to take
a pounding in the gym.”
– Ebenezer Samuel,
Free with subscription, $82 without;
shop.au.whoop.com

Rhone Tech
Short Sleeve
This breathable top moves
with you when you reach
overhead for pull-ups
and chin-ups thanks to its
seamless construction.
BEST $89; revolveclothing.
com.au
WORKOUT SHOE
Reebok Nano X2
A redesigned heel clip
stands firm even during
the heaviest deadlifts and
a flexible foam springs
back during plyo drills. BlazePod
$200; reebok.com.au These light-up pods challenge
reflexes and agility. Tap the
highlighted pod after every rep
of push-ups or sprints or
while holding a plank.
From $329; blazepod.com

SEPTEMBER 2022 119

 MH Essentials
A DVERTI S I N G F EATUR E

Your monthly guide to what’s happening and what’s new

CHEER THE OPALS AT THE WOMEN’S WORLD CUP

Don’t miss your chance to see the world’s best basketballers in Sydney for the FIBA
Women’s Basketball World Cup 2022. Be there to cheer on the Opals as they battle it
out on home soil; watch Team USA defend their crown; or see Olympic silver

KILLER READ
medallists Japan challenge the competition with their incredible pace.
Be part of it!
Queensland in 1976 Visit womensworldcup.basketball/
churns with corruption.
When Detective Ray
Windsor defies it, he is
exiled deep into the
state’s west. It’s easy out
there to feel alien in your
own country. A town ruled
by fear. A cop who won’t
be broken. Read the
pulse-pounding debut
thriller that pulls no
punches.
Visit allenandunwin.com

TIMING IS
EVERYTHING
Ready to rock some
wrist candy? The
Longines Ultra-Chron’s
COMBINE YOUR STRENGTHS instantly recognisable
43mm cushion-shaped
Ready to put your fitness to the test? The world’s premier training competition, UA steel case is fitted with a
COMBINE, is coming to Sydney on September 17. Benchmark your performance diving bezel that boasts
against 150 athletes in tests that will challenge your agility, stamina, vertical, a sapphire insert and
power, endurance, strength, speed and cognition, with cash prizes up for grabs. accents coated with Super-
Visit uacombineau.com LumiNova®. $5,600
Visit longines.com

EYES ON THE PRIZE TALK THE TORQUE

Award-winning Australian For the ultimate in two-wheeled onscreen
skincare, Handsome, action check out Harley-Davidson’s Free
now includes a hard- Rider series, made in collaboration with
working antioxidant eye motorcycle enthusiast David Genat.
cream, with green tea, Appealing to both spirited
caffeine and Kakadu adventurers and passionate riders
plum, to get to work on alike, it features epic rides, celebrity
dark circles, puffiness guest appearances, plus
and fine lines. It’ll keep in-depth customisation and
you looking and feeling new product overviews.
handsome. Visit biketorques.com.au
Visit ha.ndso.me
124 YOUR ULTIMATE TOTAL-BODY WORKOUT 127 CHANNEL THE BEAST WITHIN 128 HOW A BUSY MAN MAKES GAINS

B E C A U S E F I T I S T H E N E W R I C H

WELCOME TO
KNEE HAB
Ben Patrick, better known as Knees
Over Toes Guy, has a controversial plan to
help you beat chronic knee pain – and
transform your athleticism in the process
BY THE EDITORS OF MH
PHOTOGR APHY BY MICHAEL
SCOT T SLOSAR

SEPTEMBER 2022 121

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

SHAKE UP
THE JOINT
Knee pain – or a lack of faith in your
knees’ ability to withstand hard training
or intense competition – puts a cap on
your athletic potential. Here are the keys
to a joint strategy that will reap rewards

BAD KNEES. The words his knee extending so far

conjure images of popping
joints, morning runs turning
into jogs and walks, and
pizza-box-height vertical
leaps. You probably know
a few people who have bad
knees – an estimated 1 in
5 Australians who are over
the age of 40 fight chronic
knee pain. You might even
have a pair of less-than-
stellar knees yourself.
Ben Patrick, 30, knows
bad knees well. Patrick is
in front of him that it goes
beyond the tips of his toes
(hence his “knees over
toes” handle). The way he
sees it, every foundational
athletic movement (running,
jumping, lunging, squatting)
requires you to move knees
over toes. Watch your
knees as you descend a
flight of stairs and you’ll
notice that Patrick is right.
But if it’s so natural, what
makes his advice so

Knees Over Toes Guy, a
social-media sensation/
knee-rehab guru whose
training methods promise
to end knee pain and juice
athletic ability. Patrick
himself suffered from bad
knees, and he says he still
remembers being called the
“old man” of his high school
hoops team, back when he
had knees so bad he could
barely jump 60cm high.
You’d never know that from
checking his Instagram
(@kneesovertoesguy) now,
though. His 1.4 million
followers watch him drag
sleds, train with elite
CrossFitters and
weightlifters, and throw
down dunks.
Patrick’s secret: he
regularly pushes his knee’s
range of motion to its max,
bending the joint so deeply
that hamstring touches calf,
special? Well, his advice
runs counter to what
doctors and trainers have
long recommended: when
you lower into the bottom
of a squat or lunge, you
should never let your knees
pass beyond the tips of
your toes. The reasoning for
this conventional wisdom is
relatively simple. Imagine a
straight line shooting up
from your toes; keeping
your knees behind this line
helps them stay safe by
never stressing the joint. In
limiting your knee’s range of
motion, you build strength
without ever running the
risk of aggravating it.
Patrick disagrees. “The
knee that can go farthest
and strongest is the most
protected,” he says, quoting
the late Charles Poliquin, a
legendary strength coach.
“The moment I read that, I
1
Reverse Sled Pull
WHY: Each step back forces you onto the balls of your feet, before you straighten your
knee and drive into your heel. “With each step backward,” says Patrick, “you are
loading the knee for greater strength.” But the sled provides gentle resistance, since
it’s delivering only horizontal force.
DO IT: Load a sled. Wrap a harness around your waist. Walk backwards. Take 20-30
steps per leg; do 2 or 3 sets. You can do this daily as part of your warm-up.
knew it was true because Patrick has no formal knees-over-toes movement
of everything I’d been training in medicine or but only if you have hip and
through.” So he encourages physical therapy, and glute control.
his clients and online qualified experts don’t fully Brad Schoenfeld, a
subscribers to do exercises embrace his theories. renowned trainer and
that actively drive knees in You can learn plenty from muscle researcher, says
front of toes, like extreme his approach – but not he’s “not aware of any
split squats and reverse every move will erase your evidence showing that
sled pulls. knee pain. intentionally forcing the
The social-media knees to go over the toes
explosion around Patrick THE RISKS during squatting and other
has refocused the fitness Traditional methods of knee lower-body exercise
conversation onto the knee strengthening start with the improves joint health”.
joint itself – and exercises joint above your knee, the And personal trainer
that help stabilise it. But hip. Many experts value Dan Giordano, the chief

122 MEN’S HE ALTH

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

3
4
Heels-Elevated Goblet Squat Reverse Nordic Curl
WHY: If you struggle to flex your WHY: This isn’t a regular part
ankles, you likely can’t drive your of your training, but it is a solid test of
knees over your toes during standard your knee’s range of motion. Do it once
squats. But by elevating your heels, a month.
you erase that limitation and can squat
low. “You build strength with a full DO IT: Sit on your shins, abs and glutes
range of motion,” Patrick says. tight, knees wide. Maintain a straight line
from shoulders through knees as you
DO IT: Stand with your heels on weight lower backwards. Stop lowering if you
plates, a weight at your chest. Bend at feel any pain in your knees, pause, then
the knees and hips, lowering your return to the start. Do just a few reps (2-4
torso as low as you can. Pause, then is plenty), and focus on lowering slowly.
stand. Do 3 sets of 15.

medical officer of Bespoke
Treatments, can’t rationalise
pushing a painful knee to
its limits to kick-start
healing. “Medically
speaking,” he says, “you
should offload the joint and
transfer mechanical stress
to the hip to allow the knee
to start healing itself.”
Translation: at some
point, yes, you can drive
knees over toes, but if
you’re recovering from a
knee injury, strengthen
your glutes first as a
nonnegotiable first step.
THE REWARDS
If you’ve already built that
glute strength, Patrick’s
exercises can help you take
your knee strength to the
next level and bulletproof
the joint, too. “He’s done a
great job of bringing
significant parts of training
to the forefront,” says trainer
Brian Harrington, who works
with high school and
university hoops athletes.
That starts with his
singular focus on knee
flexing. His extreme split
squats, for example, ready
your knees to handle the
awkward positions you
might land in during games
of pickup basketball or
even tag with your kids.
His exercises also serve
to cushion your knees
against impact. That’s the
beauty of the tibia raise.
You’ve done calf raises
before, but the tibia raise,
which Patrick has helped
popularise, strengthens the
front of your lower legs,
which work to decelerate
your body on every stride
and jump – and protect
those knees.
Another Patrick favourite
is the reverse sled pull,
which gently works your
quads every time you
straighten your legs and
pull the sled back, building
muscle to help stabilise
your knee. All these moves
subtly enhance your
athleticism, too, letting
you build the same spring
and stability that Patrick
showcases regularly
on Instagram.
Your key: don’t start with
moves like Patrick’s extreme
split squat. Ease into
knees-over-toes training
with the four moves above.
(And keep strengthening
those glutes.) Don’t let your
knees dictate terms!

SEPTEMBER 2022 123

THE 9-MOVE TOTAL-BODY BLASTER F I T N E SS F I
Head outdoors for a go-anywhere, no-equipment workout that helps
you build strength and torch kilojoules – while having fun, too W E IGH T S
-F
X
PHOTOGR APHY BY T YLER JOE
BULK-UPREE

DIRECTIONS: Do this workout 3-4 times WORKOUT

a week, resting at least 1 day between
sessions. All other days, go for a 20-minute SKATER
walk or run.
LUNGE
Start standing on your
WARM-UP right leg, knee bent
slightly. Swing your left
foot behind your right leg,
then leap to the left. Land
on your left leg, left knee
bent, then repeat the
process to leap back to
the right. That’s 1 rep;
do 5, blasting your glutes
and inner thigh muscles
and building the
athleticism to move
quickly from side to side.
After each set,
immediately do 5
two-footed lateral jumps,
leaping from left to right

WALKING LUNGE and then back. Rest 60

seconds. Do 3 sets.
TO SPRINT
Do 5 walking lunges per leg. On each, take a
large step forward, then bend at the knees and
hips to lower your torso until your thigh is
parallel to the ground. Turn and sprint back
to your starting position.

REVERSE
WALKING LUNGE
TO SPRINT
Do 5 reverse walking lunges per leg.
On each, take a step backwards, then bend
at the knees and hips to lower your torso until
your thigh is parallel to the ground. Sprint back
to your starting position.
SUPERMAN HOLD TO SPRING PUSH-UP
Lie on your belly, arms and legs outstretched. Lift your arms off the ground. Squeeze your glutes,
lifting your straight legs 3cm from the ground (A). Hold, then place your hands in push-up position.
Push up explosively, driving your hands off the ground (B). Land and lower into your next rep. Do reps
for 30 seconds, then rest 30 seconds. Do 3 sets.

124 MEN’S HE ALTH

PUSH-UP WITH
ALTERNATING
T ROTATION
Do a push-up, lowering your chest to within 3cm
of the ground (A). Press back up. Lift your right
hand from the ground and reach it towards the sky,
rotating your chest to the right as you do this (B).
Return to push-up position and repeat on the other
side. That’s 1 rep; do reps for 30 seconds. Rest 30
seconds. Do 3 sets.
CORE CIRCUIT
DIRECTIONS: Do these exercises as a circuit. Do not rest between
exercises. Rest 30 seconds between each round. Do 3 rounds
WINDSHIELD WIPER
Lie on your back. Lift your legs straight up. This is the start.
Keeping your shoulder blades glued to the ground, slowly
rotate your straight legs to the right until your right leg
touches the ground. Return to the start; repeat on the other
side. That’s 1 rep; do 10.
FEATURED TRAINER: DeVentri Jordan is a founder
of the GameFace Training program at Life Time and has
worked with professional athletes, including NFL QBs Cam
Newton and Teddy Bridgewater. He specialises in
workouts that build athleticism.
PICTURED HERE: Dane Fischer is a New York City-based
fitness trainer and fashion model.
A
SUITCASE CRUNCH
Lie on your back, arms extended, lower back pressed into the
ground, legs 3cm above the ground. This is the start. Pull your
knees to your chest, squeezing your abs as you do. Return to the
start. That’s 1 rep; do 10.
STAR PLANK
Start in a right-side plank, left elbow on the ground, abs and
glutes tight. Raise your right hand towards the sky. Raise your
right leg as high as possible. Hold for 30 seconds. That’s 1 rep.
Do 1 rep on each side.
SEPTEMBER 2022 125
Sydney • 22 SEP – 1

BE PART OF IT
Tickets on sale now
 THE BEAR X START

GORILLA FLOW 1
Keen to make yourself impregnable to injury? The
key is to get animalistic with your training, starting
with this back-and-core strengthening move BEAR DOWN
Start in bear-plank position,
BY BRE T T WILLIAMS PHOTOGR APHY BY PHILIP FRIEDMAN back flat, knees off the
floor. Your hands should
YES, STRONG, POWERFUL back and be below your shoulders,
core muscles can help protect your gripping kettlebells. Look at
shoulders and your spine. But if you truly the floor. Squeeze your abs
want to prevent back pain and injury, you and shoulder blades.
also need all that beef to be mobile.
“Your torso is always changing positions,

2
twisting and turning and shifting,” says
elite trainer Ebenezer Samuel. “And you
need to train your back and ab muscles
to be ready for all that movement.”
That’s where the Bear x Gorilla Flow,
one of Samuel’s favourite back exercises, ROW, ROW, ROW!
comes in. Most row exercises force your Drive your left hand into the kettlebell
torso to maintain a static position as you hard, then row the right bell toward your
do rep after rep. This flow starts you in rib cage. Pause and squeeze your abs and
a bear plank, but after you’ve shoulder blades, working to keep your hips
and shoulders square to the floor. Lower it,
done a row rep on each side, you
then repeat on the other side.
jump forward, shifting the
position of your hips and spine
into a gorilla stance. That teaches

3
your spine to be ready for
anything, and it rockets up your heart
rate. Growls and grunts optional.

GET GORILLA
Jump forward so that both feet are planted
just outside the kettlebells. Squeeze your
glutes and hamstrings, pulling your butt down.
Make sure your shoulders are higher than your
Who’s This Guy? butt; you’re now in a gorilla stance.
Cliff Rodgers is an NASM-
certified trainer based in New
York City and a member of the
Men’s Health Strength in
Diversity Initiative, which helps
trainers from marginalised
communities jump-start their

4
careers with education,
mentorship and visibility. FINISH
Rodgers was diagnosed with type
1 diabetes in 2017 and has since
committed himself to educating
clients about proper diet DOUBLE UP
and exercise. Squeeze your shoulder blades and row both
bells towards your rib cage. Return the bells
Follow him on Instagram at to the floor. Jump back to a bear plank and
@cliff_no_hanger begin another rep. Do reps for 40 seconds,
then rest for 40 seconds. Do 3-4 sets.

SEPTEMBER 2022 127

6AM WITH . . .
THE ECO-SNEAKER KING
As co-head of Allbirds, a billion-dollar shoe
company, Tim Brown has learned to relax his
workouts. But he still knows how to go hard, too
BY BEN COURT PHOTOGR APHY BY JAKE
THE CHILLED AIR off San
Francisco Bay. The screech
of seagulls. The jostling of
waves under the Golden
Gate Bridge. The crunch
of dirt underfoot. When Tim
Brown runs, he leaves his
phone behind and focuses
on nature and his breathing.
His favourite run is a
five-miler (8km) along San
Francisco’s waterfront from
Crissy Field to Hopper’s
Hands, a sign at the base
of the bridge that he
high-fives. Then he loops
back to the start.
“Exercise, for me, is time
alone, and it’s a way to reset
mentally,” says Brown, 41,
the co-CEO and cofounder
of Allbirds. “I disconnect
from technology and I take
in the beautiful views and
let my thoughts go. The
Hopper’s Hands run is as
good as it gets.” The idea
of Allbirds wasn’t conceived
during one specific run, but
he says that regular
exercise sessions helped
him create – and now
sustain – the company.
“It’s difficult to take an idea
from nothing to something,
and often you get stuck or
feel overwhelmed. Going
for a run is a way to
problem-solve and often
sparks me to attack
challenges afresh.”
SMALL STEPS
Brown’s relationship with
exercise hasn’t always been
so cerebral. The New
Zealand native played
professional soccer for
eight years; in 2010, he
128 MEN’S HE ALTH
Brown is wearing Allbirds’
new technical runner, the
Tree Flyer, and its Natural Run
shorts and T-shirt, both made
with eucalyptus-tree fibre and
merino wool.
STANGEL
competed in the World Cup
with the New Zealand
national team. “As a
professional, you’re pushing
yourself hard every day and
measuring everything,” he
says. “Now I’m more
flexible. But I learned that
we have a tendency to
overestimate what we can
get done, or get good at,
in the short term and
underestimate the long
run. I believe deeply in the
compounding impact of
gradually getting a little
bit better – in work, life
and fitness.”
These days, the father of
two kids under five typically
trains every other day for an
intense 30-45 minutes.
“My target is every other
day, but two consecutive
days off or on is fine, and it’s
CORNER-OFFICE
not something I
obsess about,” he
CORE SESSION
Brown has a standard series of
says. In any given moves to strengthen his lower
week, Brown back and abs. Do them as a
normally does two 3-round circuit. Do each move
for 1 minute. Repeat 2 times.
outdoor runs plus a
gym session or two, 1 Right-side plank
and he’ll also mix in Squeeze your core and glutes
a yoga class or bike 2 Lunge with a T-twist
ride. Whatever Extend your arms and twist your
exercise he does, torso every rep. Swap sides after
30 seconds.
he tends to chase
it with a series of 3 Push-up Aim for 15-20 reps.
core moves. 4 Hip-bridge march
Brown may not Lie on your back, feet near your
train with the butt. Lift your hips. Raise and
maniacal fervour lower each leg.
he had in his soccer 5 Standing split Stand on 1
days, but he does leg. Raise the other leg behind you
still set benchmarks as you fold forward and extend both
for himself. One is arms. Hold for 10 seconds per side.
running six miles 6 Left-side plank
(9.6km) in under 40 Squeeze your core and glutes.
minutes; it’s an

intense test of speed
and stamina, requiring a
roughly four-minute pace
per kilometre. “I’m
competing with no one
other than myself, and it
never fails to give me a
sense of where my fitness
is compared with my peak,”
he says. “I also get a sense
of achievement from
pushing myself. Usually I’m
falling short, and it will be a
nudge to be more
consistent and eat a little
better or rest a bit more.”
Although he says his
running time is his personal
time, he does of course
check out what other
runners are wearing. “Every
single time I see someone,
I always look at the shoes
– it’s part of the job,” he
says. Brown and Joey
Zwillinger, an engineer and
renewables expert,
cofounded Allbirds in 2016
with a simple premise:
running shoes were just
too flashy and too
plasticky. They thought they
could do better by using
natural materials like
merino wool, eucalyptus
fibre and midsole foams
made out of beans. The
company’s minimalist and
sustainable sneakers
caught on as part of the
office-casual uniform of the
Silicon Valley set and
other climate-change-
aware consumers.
Allbirds now makes trail
and running shoes,
complete with their carbon
footprint noted on the sole,
as well as workout wear.
“Sometimes when you
hear that a product is
sustainable, the
assumption is that it’s less
good,” says Brown. “Our
belief is that natural
materials, in the context of
exercise and performance,
create better experiences.
That’s our journey, to
engineer products out of
natural materials that create
better experiences.”
Exercising every other day
is helping him get there.
BETWEEN
INTERVALS
Frenemy workout?
“After warming up, do 5
three-minute intervals at
the fastest pace you can
maintain. Rest 1 minute
between intervals. It’s
only a 19-minute session,
but you’ll be wiped out.”
Go-to recovery food?
“Bananas. Easy to
grab and go.”
Motivational mantra?
“Sometimes when you’re
going out the door,
you’re not quite sure you
want to do it because it’s
cold or you’re a little tired.
But then there’s that
feeling on the other side
of it, having done it.”
While endurance runs are the bedrock of Brown’s
workouts, you don’t want to be a one-trick pony
when it comes to fitness. Push-ups build strength
in the entire upper body (above); then target your Fantasy training partner?
balance and core with single-leg holds (below). “Roy Keane, the fiery
Irishman who became
Manchester United’s
midfield general. I’ve
always admired his
competitiveness.”
Fitness goals
when you’re 100?
“Being alive would
be a good start!
Doing some exercise
every other day and
maintaining that
drumbeat would make
me very, very happy.”
SEPTEMBER 2022 129
 WHEN I WAS 14, I was a member of a youth club Subsequently in life I’ve had a few occasions
in Glasgow. For the Easter long weekend we’d where I’ve been pushed to the limits of what I can
gone to the south of England and were returning deal with. There was this one incident when my
by bus. We came to this big junction just north of family was on holiday in Italy and my daughter had
the Midlands called Scotch Corner, where we a very bad accident on a bicycle and suffered a
stopped for petrol and then this little old bus brain injury. She wound up in hospital, blind and
continued into the Pennines, a trail of hills that paralysed on a ventilator. But over time, she also
runs down the centre of England. At the highest found that ability to bounce back. In fact, my
point of the Pennines, the bus conked out and daughter had twins in January this year.
we were stuck. The weather was pretty bad – it Now if you’d told me at the age of 14, when
had just started snowing – so nobody got out. I was recovering from my injury that, “Things will
The two bus drivers immediately set to work get better”, I wouldn’t have believed you. But now
trying to fix the problem. They realised the petrol I know differently and it’s a lesson that’s been
wasn’t getting into the carburettor, so they reaffirmed by my daughter’s experience. During
started siphoning petrol directly into it from an some periods of your life, it’s very hard to bounce
open can. Gradually the bus filled with fumes. back, but that accident taught me that eventually
That’s when the engine must have backfired as you will.
suddenly the bus burst into flames.
I was sitting three or four seats back from the – So You Want to Live Younger Longer?
by Dr Norman Swan is out now.
front door. There were flames everywhere and
I didn’t want to panic, but I hesitated too long
DATE: while other people jumped out of the bus. Once
March 27, 1967 I’d got my thoughts together, I moved towards
11.40am the door where the fire had started and was
NAME: confronted by this sheet of flame. When I tried
NORMAN SWAN to breathe, there was no air to breathe in. There
was this young girl in front of me, trying to get
FEAT:
out, but she couldn’t get the window down. I
As a teenager, the future voice of
managed to force it down about nine inches and
medical common sense
pushed her out. As I pushed myself out the
was involved in a terrifying
window, I remember feeling this overwhelming
accident that taught him about
pain. Then I blacked out.
the human capacity to endure.
I came to on the road, completely dazed.
As I walked away from the bus, people started
pointing at me. That’s when I looked down to see
that my trousers, socks and part of my shoes had
burnt off along with my skin.
Nobody died in the accident, amazingly. But
the fallout of my injuries was several weeks of
very painful recovery. It was an incredibly
frightening experience for a kid and I developed
PTSD as a result, although nobody knew what
that was in those days and my parents certainly
had no understanding of it. I’d get these
flashbacks and, even to this day, if I go into
an enclosed space like a plane, I’ll check where
the exit is just in case I need to get out in a hurry.
Why do I say that accident made me a man?
When you experience trauma, you learn what is
of value in life. I learned that what saved people’s
lives on that bus was the fact that many of us
looked after each other before we tried to look

“TRAUMA after ourselves. The other thing about trauma is

FORCES YOU TO
that it forces you to discover what you can cope
with and come through.

DISCOVER WHAT
That trauma taught me that, no matter how
bad something is, eventually, when times get less

YOU CAN COPE

bad, then you will bounce back. It’s not like I
came out of that experience like some steel-

WITH AND COME

PHOTOGRAPHY: SUPPLIED

belted commando, ready to take on the world.

What I learnt was that, with time, you can get

THROUGH” through a bad experience and come out the

other side.

130 MEN’S HE ALTH

REACH NEW HEIGHTS
Explore with purpose and help improve access to basic education, health
and environmental conservation for remote Himalayan communities
The Himalaya is not just a vast adventure
playground. For local communities life is
anything but easy.

For over 20 years, the Australian

Himalayan Foundation has worked
in partnership with the people of the
Himalaya to deliver sustainable health,
education and environmental programs in
Nepal, the Indian Himalaya and Bhutan.

You’re invited to join our upcoming Himalayan treks, supported by World Expeditions:

Photo: Brigitte Muir Photo: Kelvin Law Photo: Garry Weare

DUDH KUNDA NEPAL IN THE LADAKH WITH

WITH BRIGITTE MUIR
MARCH 4 - 22, 2023
Explore the less frequented trails visited
by only a handful of trekkers each year
to reach the sacred waters of Dudh
Kunda with Brigitte Muir.
FOOTSTEPS OF HILLARY
MAY 18 - JUNE 5, 2023
Follow in the footsteps of Sir Edmund
Hillary as you take this special trip
through the heart of the Everest region
in Nepal with Mike Dillon.
HEATHER MCNEICE
JULY 3 - 18, 2023
Discover a remote land on this
unforgettable trek. Adventurer Heather
McNeice takes you on a journey through
the heart of the Himalaya.

Take the first step, visit

australianhimalayanfoundation.org.au
info@ahf.org.au Ph: 02 9438 1822
GO DEEPER
Mechanical Diver 200m