Meet the Innovators Reassembling Your Image of Health

The Wild West of fitness may be full of fads and faux science, but it’s also home to genuine pioneers. You may not have heard of them, but these are the men behind the workout kit you covet, the gym programmes you follow and the fitness advances you don’t even know about, yet...

- Jamie Millar

The Stay at Home PT

Shaun T has turned workout DVDs into a powerful business. As in, 10 million copies shifted, $35 million in sales, and franchised fitness classes on every continent. But now the man behind Insanity wants to train your mind as hard as your midriff.

I was a track athlete at high school but let my fitness slip when I went to college. I gained 50lb in my first year. There needed to be a change. At first I was going to the gym and getting on the treadmill for 10 minutes a day – because after gaining 50lb it’s not easy to run very far. Eventually I started getting really into fitness and changed my major to sports science.

I moved to LA to audition a a dancer and was teaching at a gym when Beachbody asked me to do a test tape, then a workout DVD.

The first two were dance-based. For the third, they wanted something really intense. On my first day of high-school track, the coach made us run a mile, then do stretches and drills. At that point you’d think you were done – but you still had 400m intervals to run. I was like, “I need to recreate something as intense as that in the home.” So the Insanity warm-up is those same stretches and drills, and then it’s time to work out. People are like, “This mutha is crazy.”

But think about it. When you feel like you can’t go any further and then actually push yourself to go three times longer, it becomes less physical and more mental. People tell me all the time that once they finish Insanity, every other workout becomes easy. Not because there’s no workout that could be harder, but because mentally they’re ready for anything.