Bloated and doughy, I stand before an Esquire camera in a central-London gym. Click. The 12-week countdown to full-body transformation has begun. “Alright,” says Tim Walker, my trainer. “We’ve got some work to do."
A decade ago, in the name of both reportorial curiosity and shameless vanity, I got hench.
This was for an investigation into a new twist in masculine culture: young men were sculpting their bodies in the same way the generation before them had sculpted their hair.
In 1994, cultural critic Mark Simpson coined the term “metrosexual” to describe the type of man who was unashamed of wanting to look good—and wanting to be looked at. The pioneering type who might, as generations of men before him would not, admit to having a grooming “routine”. To enjoying shopping. To preening in front of mirrors.
Two decades on, Simpson dubbed his more extreme successor, with his wanton cultivation of a physique somewhere between that of an athlete and a pornstar, the “spornosexual”. This was 2014: the first generation of Towie and Geordie Shore lads were in their pomp; Hugh Jackman’s lean and vascular Wolverine was paving the way for leading men in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and beyond to become evermore swole; and David Beckham, patron saint of metrosexuals, was giving way to Cristiano Ronaldo, whose perfectly calibrated fat-free physique was pure sporno. It was an increasingly visual age: Instagram—pre-Stories, and with video still new to the platform—was in the ascendant, and Facebook—barely 10 years old—had not yet degraded into incomprehensibility. Young men were adjusting to life through a lens, and deciding they liked it. The upshot was that, for a small-but-growing cohort, the proportions of their bodies were becoming as carefully constructed as the (increasingly skin-tight) outfits they wore.
I researched this phenomenon from both the fascinated perspective of a writer and the entirely self-interested perspective of a 27-year-old man, aware of the cultural shifts around him and wanting a (high-protein, low-carb) slice of the action. And so, as well as documenting the rise of the spornosexual I—very briefly—became one, thanks to the guidance/torture of Tim Walker, a cheerful PT from Essex, who ran a gym appropriately called Evolution of Man. His “Warrior Workout” was brutally effective. Twelve weeks of near-daily training sessions, accompanied by a spectacularly unforgiving diet. I hurled myself into the process with enthusiasm that swiftly hardened into a single-minded intensity—something that perhaps reflected my general approach to being in my 20s—and by the end I had achieved both single-digit body fat and near total mental and emotional burn-out.
When the 12 weeks were up, my sporno-physique was, of course, immediately engulfed in an influx of post-photo-shoot carbs, and soon drifted back to normality. But while my training at Evolution of Man had ended, my interest in male body image continued. Having delved so deeply into the world of the spornosexual, I continued to keep track of changes in the world of masculine identity as time went by, wondering what might come next.
Life happens. In the 10 years since that story was published in Esquire, I have experienced break-ups and new relationships, professional disappointments and professional advancement, holidays and pandemics (including one very ill-advised holiday during the pandemic, which resulted in me being locked in total isolation in a Thai hospital for 10 days: 0/10, would not recommend), and attended numerous weddings, including, happily, my own.
And then, one day, a marketing email from a Tim Walker arrives in my inbox, containing words that stop me in my tracks: “Having a six pack is not actually as good as you think.” Can this be the same man? Tim Walker, six-pack purveyor extraordinaire? “Yeah, it looks good, but it’s more about what it means. And it turns out that having an athletic physique also helps you live longer, and to feel better in your day-to-day lives.”
It is clear that changes are afoot. For one thing, the once-blokey Evolution of Man has become Evolve: an egalitarian space for all genders to train. But a far greater change is to be found in Walker’s philosophy. “I am totally head-over-heels obsessed with longevity at the moment,” his email continues.
Walker, it transpires, is no longer merely thinking about the gains one can make in 12 weeks; he’s thinking about the gains one can make over the course of 100 years. His infamous “Warrior Workout” is no more. It’s given way to a regime named “Warrior For Life”, designed not just to get you ripped in the here and now, but to deliver a comprehensive “health, fitness and longevity screening” MOT. Most astonishingly, Walker, the great no-nonsense before-and-after body transformation specialist, appears to have gone… soft?! “The point isn’t to achieve a goal. The point is to enjoy and grow from the journey.” What the hell, man.
The email gets me thinking about the lie of the land. Walker’s gym was a bellwether, at the forefront of sporno culture—if his thinking has altered, does that reflect a greater sea change in the world of masculinity?
And at this point I realise the date—astonishingly, it’s 10 years since my and Walker’s first spornosexual odyssey. Which makes it 30 since Mark Simpson first heralded the fragrant arrival of the metrosexual. If there was ever a time to dive back down the rabbit hole and see how things have developed, it’s surely now.
So I resolve to find out two things: whatever happened to the spornosexual? And, crucially, who is his successor? What new avatar has replaced him?
It’s a subject that I approach, once more, with a combination of intellectual curiosity coupled with naked (or, at least, topless) self-interest. Except, this time, I’m at a very different place in my life. At 37, though not yet old, I’m certainly no longer “young”. Instead, I feel like I’m at a threshold beyond which true adulthood lies (but then, maybe everyone feels like that, forever? Maybe this is it?) If, first time round, I was drawn to Walker’s regime because I wanted to embrace the possibilities of my youth, this time it’s because I feel the urge to fend off the encroaching shadow of old age. I’m greying, my posture is appalling, and I’m comfortably in the worst shape of my life—a state that could be described as “visibly post-honeymoon”. In short, I want what Walker is offering: the chance to blowtorch away my stomach fat in short order, while also giving myself a fighting chance at one day being a centenarian with a spring in his step. But this time, crucially—remembering the obsessive, sleepless, exhaustion of ’14—I want to improve my body without losing my mind.
I fire up an email to Walker.
We go again.
Quad-obliterating squats that leave me jelly-legged for days; deadlifts that cause my face to turn puce and the veins on my neck to bulge; bench presses that make me feel as though my chest is genuinely going to explode. The building blocks of Walker’s training—compound lifts, executed with strict form—haven’t changed. It’s just there’s a whole lot more to the programme these days.
I’m subjected to a battery of tests focused on longevity markers, such as grip-strength and flexibility, and stand barefoot on a state-of-the-art ‘InBody machine’, which ruthlessly scans my physical composition. I am strapped into some Bane-like breathing apparatus and made to sprint until exhaustion (it doesn’t take long) in a bid to log my VO2 max—the maximum amount of oxygen I’m able to use during intense exercise. It is the best indicator of cardiovascular fitness, which has a huge impact on one’s lifespan (“People with a high VO2 max are 300 per cent less likely to die at any given time,” says Walker).
Training with Walker again is strangely wonderful. Like a tailor, a trainer knows everything about you: postural defects, weaknesses, sure, but also how you cope under pressure, who you really are. After one set, he says: “Even though you know what you should be doing, you start strong, take short cuts, then try and get back on track. It’s 60 per cent good, 40 per cent bad—so that’s something in your mind.” He’s entirely right, and it’s an insightful reflection of my inner workings that feels more profound than anything a therapist has ever told me.
My test results come back. In astonishing news, my biological age is, apparently, 28. Two possibilities here—a) my sessions with Walker 10 years ago afforded me some boost in fitness and muscle memory that acted as a bulwark against my ongoing disintegration, or b) the results are, you know, wrong. Presumably, there is some truth in both. In less gratifying feedback, the InBody app informs me that my Body Type has crept from "Average" into "Overweight" (this, I fear, definitely is accurate). It also blurts out a near-infinite quantity of data points which I find incomprehensible (though it’s reassuring that, if I ever want to check my intracellular water levels or bone-mineral content, I now know where to turn). It’s a brave new data-driven world.
There’s also a radical shift in Walker’s nutritional guidance. Last time around, I was told to eat six tightly controlled meals a day; I did. In practice, having neither the time nor the skill to incorporate any variety into my eating, I inexpertly batch-cooked huge vats of the same two awful dishes, which I alternated between each day (if I close my eyes I can still taste the beef-mince-in-low-fat-Dolmio-mushroom-bolognese-sauce, which constituted meals #1, #3 and #5). But this time? All I need to do is hit the right number of daily calories (1,500-2,000, it varies) and the right ratio of carbs/fat/protein (20/30/50)—and I can do it however I like. One massive meal, 12 tiny meals, blended into a weird shake; whatever. It feels… almost… relaxed?
But then, mellowing out is something that happens to us all, even the spornosexual. Because no party lasts forever, unless you are Wayne Lineker (and if you are, I’m so sorry).
Accepting that the sporno was never a specific individual, but rather the embodiment of an approach to masculinity, that approach can be tracked across the cultural landscape. These days, the creatine-fuelled lads of 2014 are no longer on the centre of the dancefloor. Instead, it turns out, they’re all over the place.
Some former Shagaluf group-chat admins, having long since settled down, have happily morphed into "Deanos"—which is 4chan-derived shorthand for a Barratt Home-dwelling, Fifa-playing, Superdry-wearing suburban bloke with a sales job and an Audi A3 on finance, a stereotype that is, somehow, at once derisory and aspirational.
Many lads’ pursuit of a glossy aesthetic has extended from the body to the face. It’s a quest writ large on the poreless skin, glistening teeth and suspicious hairlines of reality stars, who have now evolved into their own subgenre of person, reaching sufficient population mass that they could comfortably fill an entire city (specifically: Dubai).
Those of a more thoughtful bent have forsworn the Jägerbomb-soaked excesses of their twenties and gone on a search for individuality—one which, almost 100 per cent of the time, involves taking up Brazilian jiu-jitsu and starting a podcast. “Ice baths, red-light therapy, human-growth hormone and a master’s in life coaching,” adds Walker. “The standard path.”
And, while many spornos are now fathers, that doesn’t entail them having acquired a dad-bod. “It’s interesting how being a daddy is no longer the universally accepted excuse for giving up on your body—and yourself—that it used to be,” says Simpson. “Narcissism, or self-love, is no longer something that is necessarily totally and forever refocused on your offspring once they arrive.”
Young men have grown up in a visual culture supercharged by the battle for eyeballs and attention.
Indeed, the sporno ethos has now broadened, extending to the generations above; there is an increasing expectation that men nowadays, and their fathers, and their grandfathers, should not just get fit but stay fit, for as long as we possibly can. Approximately 60 per cent of UK men in their 50s and 60s work out, and it’s rising.
‘Training For Life’ is the ethos, and indeed the slogan, at premium fitness juggernaut Third Space (it’s also their WiFi password - no spaces, capitalised first letters)—an integrated, far-reaching approach extending far beyond the Smith machine and the free-weights. “The two mega trends of the last 10 years—one has been strength, but the other thing has been everything to do with mind and body and holistic,” says Colin Waggett, CEO of Third Space, in his Soho office.
With twelve sites, a waiting list to join, and a recent private equity cash injection of £88.5 million, Third Space is a runaway success story. Its exquisite gyms exist in a smooth, burnished, near-future world, where the lighting and ambience is just-so, and everything and everyone somehow smells exquisite (how?! It’s a gym).
Waggett, a fit and affable former rugby lad, lives the brand. He trains with a PT 9am every Monday, runs Olympic distance triathlons, and participates in Hyrox—the organised fitness event which is supplanting CrossFit as the organised fitness event of choice for people who enjoy organised fitness events.
“One in four, one in five visits to our clubs is actually mind and body oriented,” says Waggett. “So whether that be hot yoga or barre or pilates, or the frequency with which people use saunas, steam, hydrotherapy, ice, plunge—it’s people going, well, I can't just thrash myself all the time”.
Whenever I visit Third Space, as well as seeing people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, I encounter plenty of older men in remarkable shape, who often cross paths in the spa-like changing rooms and discuss their training (“Going running later?” “Nah, I’ve got Achilles tendonitis.” “So have I!”)
According to the Anti-Doping Agency there are one million steroid users in the UK. 98 per cent of them are men
Because training with Walker has highlighted my numerous postural deficiencies – long-unresolved, and only further accreting as time goes on—I’ve come to Third Space in a desperate attempt to finally shake them. In its Soho gym, I work with two trainers, Loui Fazakerley and David Etheridge; they assess my gait and movement patterns, and tackle the various micro-compensations I have developed over years: tiny coping mechanisms that have gradually bloomed into fairly serious imbalances. Unlike the satisfying pump of lifting weights—“I’m coming day and night,” as Arnie memorably/distressingly announces in 1977 body-building documentary Pumping Iron – these movements are simply frustrating. The “gains” are entirely incremental, the stuff of micro-millimetres. But the next day I inevitably wake up feeling drastically more mobile—taller, even. And I can’t help but suspect that, in years to come, if there’s anything I’ll be grateful for, it will surely be day-to-day mobility, not a set of traffic-stopping pecs. Though, if Walker and Third Space had their way, I’d have both.
The urge to look better for longer has become a massive focus of the fitness industry a whole. McKinsey’s 2024 report identified “Healthy ageing” as one of the “trends defining the USD1.8 trillion global wellness market”. At the top end, not even longevity will do—the current captains of industry, the tech bros, having long completed capitalism, are all now focused on living forever. Jeff Bezos has reportedly invested in Altos Labs, a startup working on “cellular rejuvenation programming”, so that he can remain eternally in his Amazon prime, while tech oligarch Bryan Johnson is attempting to reach immortality via an unfathomable regime that involves receiving transfusions of his own son’s blood, dining on an incomprehensible mulch of powders and supplements and assiduously measuring the frequency of his nightly erections. One can only wish them luck (although, if I purchased immortality and discovered it involved spending eternity with Bezos and Johnson, I suspect I’d want my Ethereum back).
Of course, no matter how proficient the older generations get at narcissism, they’ve got nothing on Gen Z and younger. How could they? After all, their predecessors merely adopted vanity—this lot were born into it, moulded by it. “My gym is awash with late-teen and early-twenties boys flexing and posing, often very professionally, thanks to YouTube, and taking selfies in the changing-room mirror,” says Simpson. “You can’t get in or out for the mass preening.”
It’s unsurprising. Young men have grown up in an entirely visual culture—supercharged by the battle for eyeballs and attention spans between TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. It’s an environment where everyone is de facto head of marketing for their own personal brand, and people want to stand out.
Writer Clive Martin vividly described what he termed “the modern British douchebag” (a counterpoint to Simpson’s spornosexual) for Vice in 2014. When I ask him his thoughts on modern workout culture, he reports the rise of an even more aggressive aesthetic. “Stuff like TRT [testosterone-replacement therapy], Tren [a steroid, as well as a drug originally used to fatten up livestock], hard lifting and a very swollen, superhero look is actually very popular now,” he says.
Inevitably, as the social-media landscape has become brasher and more extreme, so too have the physiques of the fitness influencers wishing to conquer the algorithm.
According to the UK Anti-Doping Agency, there are more than one million steroid users in the UK, with 98 per cent being male. In The Guardian, Stephen Buranyi writes about needle exchanges across the UK, reporting a huge upswing in steroid users, and the men who use them seemingly ever-younger and more naive. “The ages of this are definitely trending downwards,” says Martin.
Body dysmorphia is on the rise. A study in 2021 by the Campaign Against Living Miserably found 48 per cent of men aged 16-40 have struggled with body-image issues. (This research was co-commissioned by Instagram, in what’s surely a case of “the call is coming from inside the house…”) According to the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee’s 2022 report, “The impact of body image on mental and physical health”, 28 per cent of men aged 18 and above had felt anxious about how their bodies looked. Eleven per cent had felt suicidal.
Julie Cameron, associate director at the Mental Health foundation, sees young men as caught up in an impossible bind: “You’ve got to be soft, be gentle, be caring, but also be hyper masculine, with a chiselled jaw.” At the same time, Cameron feels men are underserved emotionally: “I am not sure whether boys really get the space to discuss what that means for them.
I do think, as a society, it’s important for us to really question, actually, has that whole area just become more confusing?”
Having undertaken my own investigation, my conclusion is: yes. Over the past decade, men have become subject to a dizzying array of exhortations, an ever-expanding range of unachievable standards to aim for and value systems to adopt. Increasingly, this extends past the way they look, and informs the way they think, live and exist. Beyond protein and push-ups, it’s a never-ending ecosystem of podcasts, powders and productivity protocols.
I see this first-hand at Evolve. Alongside Walker, I’m trained by his protégé, a puppyishly enthusiastic Portuguese PT named Mario Areias. He would have been a teenager when I first trained with Walker. Now, he’s a 26-year-old man making his way in London, charged up with a sense of the possible, keen to take on the world and absorb any and all big ideas he can. And, when he’s not encouraging me in slightly idiosyncratic English (“Don’t come too quickly,” he advises, sagely, when I’m not taking sufficient time in my squat), he delightedly shares whatever new lifestyle augmentations he’s taken on that week: the multiple books on sleep he’s been listening to at 1.5x speed; his dalliances with intermittent fasting; his hyperfocused, goal-setting teetotalism; his extreme money-saving; the influencers he follows to improve his #mindset; the plasma platelets he has injected into his scalp to pre-emptively stave off male pattern baldness; how he poos (a squatty potty he bought after hearing about their benefits on Instagram, since you asked). He and his peers are earnestly trying to understand it all, do it all, have it all.
Towards the end of my training period, I lie on my back in Third Space’s stretching area, and whilst Etheridge coaches me through one of the many basic daily movements I am somehow bad at (this time: breathing!) we get chatting. He’s 24. I quiz him on what it’s like for him, navigating the world, and he swiftly becomes animated about social media. “I think there's more pressure on people to be further ahead in life all the time,” he says, “Like you should be achieving all these things plus running a six figure online business with nothing but your laptop, sitting in Costa.” It feels to Etheridge a system that sets people up to fail. “I think the biggest problem is everyone is somewhat disappointed in themselves. People get upset that they're not the masters at something, but they're trying to do 16 different things at the same time.”
Etheridge is particularly troubled by the onslaught of fitfluencers each barking a different, conflicting message—eat vegan! Eat only meat! Train every day! Train less! “They say they’re backed by science. But if they all are… what are we supposed to think?” says Etheridge. “So I regularly feel down on myself—I feel lost in terms of what I want to do in my training.”
Etheridge’s reaction to social media’s current incarnation is unsurprising. A decade ago, Instagram was a photo-sharing app that had just introduced the ability to share 15 second video clips. In 2016, the app stopped its displaying posts chronologically, and launched its algorithm. Then, in 2017, TikTok arrived, it’s For You Page offering a hypnotic, never-ending torrent of shortform video content, delivered via aggressive, constantly-refined algorithmic curation. In 2020, in an attempt to keep up, Instagram and Youtube launched their Reels and Shorts, and Instagram began to radically favour video content over still images.
This straightforward battle for tech dominance and market share has had real world implications for the way humans interact, do business, and exchange ideas: in 2024, Instagram and TikTok are coalescing into intimidating, brash, corporatised environments which favour the loud, the shameless, and those with the resources of a production company. The threshold for participating in a manner that has any cut through whatsoever has grown far higher. You either actively Create Content or you passively receive it - the latter being infinitely easier and more addictive than the former.
And so the industry pressure Etheridge feels is understandable—if you’re a fitness professional who doesn’t leverage your social media presence into a constant stream of didactic rants, motivational slogans, and faux-humble ‘confessional’ posts about overcoming confidence issues, all with the aim of growing your subscriber base and converting them into paying customers…? Pffft. Do you even grift, bro?
I ask Etheridge what podcasts he listens to. “Hah, I’ll tell you which podcasts I avoid!” Go on? “Stephen Bartlett, big time,” says Etheridge, “Fucking numpty.”
Avoiding Stephen Bartlett content online can feel close to a full-time job. The Bartlett-ification of the internet seems close to complete—he seemingly sits at a central node in our current always-on discourse, dispensing slickly-monetised conversations with everyone about everything.
In the last decade, the Fitness Industrial Complex has gone ballistic, exploding into an ecosystem of online snake-oil salesmen offering preposterous diets (the Liver King), quasi-scientific ‘protocols’ (barrel-necked health guru Andrew Huberman), optimisation and biohacking techniques (butter-in-coffee fanatic Dave Asprey), or, frequently, a combination of all of the above (Ben Greenfield, Tim Ferris et al). At the top of the mountain sits Joe Rogan, now a perma-podcasting trillionaire, broadcasting his every unfiltered musing from a compound in Texas, high on mushrooms and elk meat and his own legacy-media-crushing reach.
But the thing is, other than the purveyors of the truly reprehensible—a glancing nod here past the sigma grindset creeps and down to the sinister/embarrassing shadow of Andrew Tate and his disaffected Discord acolytes squatting in the foetid bowels of the internet—it feels unfair to specifically resent anyone for responding effectively to the conditions of the era. Don’t hate the player, hate the gamified experience that is consuming digital information, in an age where everything’s a ‘feed’ but nothing feels remotely nutritious.
And while the effects of our mediated landscape—an endless digital barrage of ideas, or at least, marketing schemes dressed up like ideas—are most keenly felt by young men like Areias and Etheridge, as modern life becomes increasingly digital and algorithm-driven, we are reaching a saturation point, and these sorts of impulses now exert a pull on us all.
Because metrosexuality, and everything that has followed after, has always been about the opening of Pandora’s box; it is about male identity finally becoming subject to the same external pressures women have faced since the dawn of recorded history. It was never about moisturiser, or men becoming “girly” or “gay”. “It’s about men becoming everything,” Simpson explained at the time. Now, it seems, there’s just so much more “everything” to become.
I am 12 weeks, and 12.5 kilos, down. Walker’s done it—he has shredded my body without shredding my nerves. “The overall approach has changed. We’ve not been anywhere near as intense,” he says. “Last time, it was just about how you looked. But now I also want it to be about how you feel, how you perform, you know?”
On the day of the “after” shots, I feel, briefly, like a superhero. That said, Walker reminds me that my final form—tanned, shaved, tactically dehydrated—isn’t truly representative. “It’s like Photoshop,” reminds Walker. “It’s not real life.”
Speaking of not real (surely), according to my test results, my biological age has gone from 28… to 26. Bryan Johnson, eat your heart out. (NB Bryan Johnson: please do not start eating people’s hearts.) More plausibly, my VO2-max score has crept up, albeit modestly—from 45 to 47. It’s a reminder that, to make truly profound changes, you have to commit for the long haul. “No crash diet or 12-week plan can make up for decades of filth,” says Walker (VO2 score: 54, the bastard). “Only long-term training gets the big improvements.”
And it’s big improvements that Walker is thinking about next. He reveals that Warrior For Life is actually a beta test for a bigger, more ambitious plan he’s working on—one that he’ll be running for a strictly capped number of clients. Those who secure a place will have lucked out. With his distinctive combination of good nature, lightness of touch, casually worn expertise and boundless enthusiasm, Tim Walker is the best personal trainer in the world.
So what has come after the spornosexual? In a word: anxiety.
Or rather, the sporno hasn’t ceded the throne to any one successor. Instead, his way of thinking has been disseminated, like a scoop of protein powder in the breeze, and the impulses that drove this once-marginal figure are now ubiquitous. There are still plenty of overly muscled young men about, but the aestheticised male is no longer a phenomenon that can be squeezed into one tight-T-shirt-wearing cohort. He’s everywhere.
Sporno culture is now all around us, to the point that it has become inescapable. “Today, it is absurd to point it out,” says Simpson. “It is simply the water in which everyone swims.” To build on Simpson’s analogy; today, we are all increasingly subject to myriad powerful currents, a whirlpool of impulses, pulling us treacherously in multiple directions, as we try not to drown. This, surely, is the era of the Malestrom—sorry!—and we are all navigating its Gymshark-infested waters.
