Joe Manganiello On Top Of The World

His body, career and his fiance are the stuff of pure fantasy, yet Joe Manganiello's life is incredibly real. Through it all, training has been the cornerstone of his success. Here, in his own words, Manganiello tells M&F how he accomplished his most ambitious of goals. And how you can, too.

- As told to Shawn Donnelly, photographs by Patrik Giardino

I WAS VERY artistic as a kid. When I was, like, 5 years old, my mother used to walk me up to an old man’s house where he taught chess, and he would give me chess lessons. I was always drawing, painting, and writing, and I was really into weird things. At a surprisingly young age I was reading a lot of J.R.R. Tolkien and Stephen King. I was really into comic books. I was so into comic books that I was shoplifting them because I would read them so fast that paying for them started to not make sense.

So that was one train that was running. The other train was that I was head and shoulders taller than all the other kids and coordinated.I was good at sports. The first year I played football, I was the captain of the team. Then you get into high school. Just like