FOR YEARS, Tyler James Williams thought of himself as a "hard gainer"-a guy who just can't pack on muscle. He played an adolescent Chris Rock on the sitcom Everybody Hates Chris for much of the mid-aughts, but nearly a decade later, well into his 20s, he was still getting calls to play a certain type. "I was trying to read for roles that were my age and I couldn't get out of high school," he says.
That formerly stuck student went on to become a particularly impressive schoolteacher: Williams, now 30, is best known as the rigid but adorable Gregory Eddie on the ABC mockumentary Abbott Elementary, for which he's earned an Emmy nom and cemented his status as an Internet thirst trap. But that journey included several hard lessons about his health. In fact, it nearly destroyed him.
In his early 20s, for instance, he hired trainers, lifted heavy, and force-fed himself. Once, he chugged a shake with 1,600 calories, only to throw it all back up. In late 2017, at age 24, the five-foot-nine actor crested 130 pounds while juggling a role on Criminal Minds with travel for the period crime drama Detroit. "I was really pushing my body to the limit," he says. "By the time December hit, it just crashed. Everything shut down." Williams had searing stomach pain and couldn't keep anything down-not even the doctor-ordered colonoscopy prep-soa gastroenterologist at NYU Langone diagnosed himusing X-rays. The verdict: His bowels were so inflamed and clogged with scar tissue that he had less than a one-centimetre gap in his terminal ileum, part of the small intestine near the pelvis. It was a massive flare-up from Crohn's disease-a disorder he didn't even know he had.
Denne historien er fra January - February 2023-utgaven av Men's Health US.
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Denne historien er fra January - February 2023-utgaven av Men's Health US.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Can Marvel Regain its Superpowers? - Critical savaging. Box-office meh-ness. Cultural irrelevance. How did the MCU lose its dominance over all screens, and what will it take to restore it?
For the next 11 years and 20-plus films, Marvel Studios sat atop Odin's High Seat.Its movies grossed billions upon billions of dollars, their casts were stacked with Hollywood legends, and people like me (and probably you, too) were invested. When Spider-Man: Far from Home concluded what Marvel Studios called The Infinity Saga-the overarching story of its first 23 movies-it did so with the promise that there was so much more to come.Then an evil worse than Thanos himself besieged the planet: Covid-19 blacked out theaters and blocked MCU releases for all of 2020. When Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings emerged to lead the Phase Four charge in 2021, things were, somehow, off. The epicness of it all was... missing. In what was supposed to be a pause before the next classic blockbuster marathon, Marvel seemed winded instead.
6 A.M. With...Marcus Freeman - The head coach of Notre Dame football challenges himself by training daily and lifting heavy.
Marcus Freeman finishes his one-mile warmup run at the same place every morning: in front of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, in the middle of Notre Dame's campus in South Bend, Indiana. I always look at that clock, because it tells me that time's running out, he says. It's a reminder that time's running out at Notre Dame and in life. He walks by the Golden Dome, pausing at the Sacred Heart of Jesus statue as a way to center myself and feel grateful for this life, before he hits ND's athletic complex for his leg-and-chest-day workout.
Tren Nation - How an obscure bovine steroid became gym Gen Z's favorite social-media muscle flex.
Not anabolic steroids. Not testosterone. Not creatine or multivitamins or a high-protein diet. No, Frank and Jesse (who both spoke on condition of anonymity because trenbolone is deemed illegal) immediately jump to trenbolone, which has quickly developed a rep for increasing muscularity and decreasing body fat all at once. Among bodybuilders it's known as the god of all steroids for its potency. To teens and young men, it's simply tren, a ticket to the prototypical social-media-friendly physique. Why? Frank, who's now 18, explains tren's growing popularity with all the confidence and expertise of someone who Googled tren once (mostly to see how jacked it made cows), watched hundreds of hours of tren content on Tik Tok, and made a ton of tren jokes. If the only thing you care about is putting on muscle, he says, it really does seem like tren is the thing to take.
Say What? - Hearing loss isn't just a thing that happens to your parents. Nearly one in five people in their 20s show signs of it already. And it puts your brain and well-being in danger, too. Luckily, new tech can help. Listen up.
Hearing loss isn't just a thing that happens to your parents. Nearly one in five people in their 20s show signs of it already. And it puts your brain and well-being in danger, too. Luckily, new tech can help. Listen up. An estimated 15 percent of American adults-that's about 38 million peoplehave some level of hearing loss, according to the CDC. Research increasingly suggests that untreated hearing loss can lead to other significant health issues, including depression and Alzheimer's disease.
Back-Round Check! - Tap into next-level total-body strength and supercharge muscle gains by learning when and how) to round your back in the gym.
Lift with your legs, not with your back. It's a cue many trainers use anytime you bend down to lift something heavy. It makes sense, too, since conventional wisdom holds that rounding your back with heavy weight leads to injury. But if you look closely at a strongman like Tom Stoltman hoisting a 300-kilogram (661-pound) Atlas stone, you'll notice that his spine isn't ramrod straight at all. Instead, he's almost hunching forward, curling his entire spine around the stone. And if you scroll fitness social media long enough, you may come across an exercise called the Jefferson curl, which asks you to stand holding a light barbell, then lower the barbell while simultaneously rounding your back as much as possible.
Christian Mccaffrey is Him - He's entering his eighth season in the NFL, but the league's most electric running back is not slowing down.
Every off-season for the past seven years, Christian McCaffrey, the San Francisco 49ers' All-Pro running back, has met up with Brian Kula, C.S.C.S., a trainer he's worked with since eighth grade. They talk about any injuries and any niggling pain from the previous season, do a battery of strength and movement tests, and then create a program "to turn CMC back on."
A Merciless Sun
Just over a year ago, Kekoa Lansford watched from a hilltop as the Maui wildfires incinerated his hometown.
ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT'S ME, JAKE
How societal menace and serial disrupter JAKE PAUL is trying to change the sport of boxing, influence influencer culture, and, gulp, maybe change the world, too.
THE REINVENTED QUARTERBACK
A 2023 bookended by injuries pushed the Bengals' JOE BURROW to reconstruct his entire approach to fitness and nutrition.
THE WRECKING BALL WIDEOUT
DK METCALF pursues an old-school path to hardcore strength: PUSH. YOUR. LIMITS.
