Mark Zuckerberg Shares Insight into His Fitness Regimen

Don’t look at the. Try to imagine Mark Zuckerberg. Your thoughts?

Maybe you have this mental image of the Meta CEO and Facebook founder standing in the limelight while wearing a grey T-shirt in Silicon Valley. Perhaps his legless or legless cartoonish avatar from the metaverse floats before you. Maybe you see Jesse Eisenberg in your mind’s eye, the skinny actor who portrayed the aspiring tycoon in “The Social Network” (2010).

But it’s quite improbable that your mental picture resembles the one Mr. Zuckerberg shared on Monday on Facebook and Instagram (which Meta controls).

The social media mogul may be seen in the mirror, sweating slightly and dressed in a camouflage flak jacket. His jaw becomes smaller than his neck. Muscles form the top of his shoulders. His biceps swell.

He seemed to have been “completely shredded,” to use a technical word. He has the intense stare of a man who has just returned from a perilous mission, or at least the Raya profile image of the actor who portrays such a man in a Michael Bay film.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s arms are impressive, but the time he said the gruelling exercise took him—less than 40 minutes—is even more so. Doctor of Veterans Affairs Joshua Appel, who spread the word about this now-ubiquitous CrossFit exercise, considers it to be a world-class performance.

When, then, did Zuck decide to unleash his inner Rambo? How come?

When asked about his thoughts on his health and fitness, Mr. Zuckerberg remained silent.

For example, MMA relies heavily on Brazilian jujitsu, a brutal grappling-based combat sport. In an August 2022 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Zuckerberg revealed that he had taken up martial arts during the epidemic, practising with renowned Bay Area teacher Dave Camarillo.

Casey Johnston, a cultural critic who frequently writes about exercise and strength training in her newsletter She’s a Beast, hypothesises that people in Silicon Valley are drawn to sports like Brazilian jujitsu in order to reacquaint themselves with a primal fighting spirit, albeit on their own, highly formalised terms.

Mr. Zuckerberg lost consciousness while competing in his first Brazilian jujitsu tournament on May 6 in Woodside, California. He went on to win two medals and beat an Uber engineer. Veteran Brazilian jujitsu fighter and referee José Lucas Costa da Silva claims he stopped one of Mr Zuckerberg’s battles when he heard him start to snore, an indication of passing out from a choke grip.

It may be instructive that Mr. Zuckerberg is now starting to fight back after taking a lot of metaphorical body blows over the previous several years, including an election manipulation scandal, a ghost town metaverse, and huge layoffs.

Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t the first tech tycoon to bulk up, but he certainly is among the most notable. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, has acquired incredible biceps, linebacker shoulders, and vascularity in his 50s. However, Mr. Zuckerberg has some pals who claim that his new routine is nothing new.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who at age 39 has dedicated most of his life to physical exercise, entered the public consciousness as an indoor cat — the millennial archnerd outsmarting the muscular regatta princes of Harvard. He led the fencing team in his junior high and is now a serious distance runner.

Mr. Lessin claims that Mr. Zuckerberg enjoys roller hockey and surfing, the latter of which was made famous by a picture of the mogul on the water in Hawaii with a ghostly mask of sunscreen smeared over his face.

Mr. Lessin claims that Mr. Zuckerberg, who is notoriously competitive, is the “great physical instigator” of his buddy circle and is often suggesting some kind of physical challenge for them to do. On our excursions he’ll challenge me to a race up a mountain, for example. On Mr. Rogan’s show, Zuckerberg also mentioned how many of his friends had begun training Brazilian jujitsu as a result of his influence.

Mr. Zuckerberg, somewhat predictably, is quite interested in performance metrics. He claimed he could run five kilometres in under 20 minutes after posting a snapshot of a stopwatch on Instagram in April. Many readers doubted Mr. Zuckerberg’s time for the Murph Challenge, but he assured them that he had completed a modified, easier-yet-still-painful version in which the exercises are done in circuits.

Participating in a tweaked Murph challenge variant: Zuckerberg’s daughters 2 and 3. He clarified that the youngsters weren’t wearing flak jackets by posting a photo of them in the middle of a push-up during a “quarter-Murph (unweighted)”.