Ebenezer Samuel: Superheroes & Men’s Health Fitness Director (Podcast)

It’s weird, I’ve reflected on this a lot in my own time, because I want to feel like I’m in cool place. A place that’s exactly where I want to be, but it was kind of a security’s room. It does all go back to Steve Heroes, I’m really boring like that.

 Welcome to the “BarBend Podcast,” where we talk to the athletes, coaches and minds from around the world of strength. I’m your host, David Thomas Tao, and this podcast is presented by barbend.com.

Today I’m talking to Ebenezer Samuel, Fitness Director for “Men’s Health Magazine.” Eb’s career didn’t start in the fitness space. He spent years as a sport reporter covering major professional leagues before he became a face behind one of the wellness’s most story magazine brands.

We chat about how superheroes inspired Eb’s fitness passion, where nerd culture and fitness culture intersect, and the most challenging things Eb has tackled in his role with men’s health. Including a pole dancing, yeah, pole dancing workout that challenged him like nothing else before.

Also, I want to take a second to say, we are incredibly thankful that you listen to this podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to leave a rating and review of the BarBend Podcast, in your app of choice.

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Eb Samuel, thanks so much for joining us. You worked out right before this recording, which I think is very on brand for you. I gotta ask, how is your quarantine fitness been?

My quarantine fitness…First of all jumping right into it, not even messing around. My quarantine fitness is actually been really good and part of that is because I think if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here to talk to you, I would be going insane, because it’s such a big part of my life.

When this got started, I had some weights. Over the years, I mean in this business, you know this job, you just collect stuff. I wasn’t really sure why I was collecting it. I always assumed it was for a zombie apocalypse or something like that.

I wasn’t really sure, but I was just collecting all these dumbbells, kettlebells, here and there. When this happened, I had stuff to work with and I really quickly mobilized as soon as it seemed like, “Oh wow, I’m really not going to be able to go to a gym for a while.”

I made sure to get a bunch of stuff, just the essentials that I considered essentials. I’ve had quality workouts. I missed working out with people, and I missed the barbell because that’s the one thing…I mean, I have a barbell, but I can’t load it up for a bench press.

There’s things you can’t do without a gym and without somebody who can spot you, so I miss that. But workout-wise, it took me a little while, then I finally got into that zone. It’s been cool, because for a long time, I was training among people and then they provide you that external motivation for sometimes when you don’t have it, but it’s been cool to sit back.

I’m training myself with the exceptions of Saturdays when I get in the session with Don Saladino. We both push each other a little bit. It’s been good to force myself to make sure that my motivation for how I’m training, how I stay intense, why I’m going up in my next set, why I’m making sure I hit my next exercise, and why I’m doing that last interval on the rower.

That has to come from me, and so it’s been good to dig deep and discover that. That answer is way too long, so I apologize.

No. That was great. I think there’s an intrinsic motivational aspect of working out at home. It’s something that I’ve certainly felt, and I think it’s bettered my perspective on, “What am I training for. Am I training just to show up and be present with someone?” which is cool, or “Am I training for my own well-being?”

Can we take the social aspect out of that and there still be enough to get me to actually show up for a workout even if showing up is just going in backyard or my living room. That makes a lot of sense.

You mentioned hoarding equipment — not hoarding equipment – but…

…collecting fitness equipment for the zombie apocalypse. You also mentioned Don Saladino, who’s also been on the BarBend Podcast. In your zombie apocalypse fitness team, is Don on the team? Does he make the cut?

How many people do I get on the team? You didn’t tell me…Yeah, Don definitely does. We’ve gotten to know each other probably over the last two or three years. There are a lot of great trainers out there, obviously. A lot [inaudible 4:51] great fitness people, but every so often, you just jive with somebody because you trained similar, or you have very similar goals and very similar styles.

That’s me and Don. We differ on enough stuff where we can enrich each other’s workout when we get together, but we’re similar in enough stuff that it’s like, “OK. We’re training arms,” so he wants to do a curl. It’s not as if I’m coming at him with something random like, “OK. Let’s do power cleans,” all of a sudden. It’s been really great. He’s one of my favorite guys.

What would you say your style of training? How would you sum up your style of training? I’ve been following you on social media for a while, you do a lot of, let’s call it super set movements focusing on a particular body part or muscle group for a day.

It seems you have a fairly, I call it specific split in your personal training but how would you sum up how your training? Maybe the better question is, what you’re training for?

What am I training in for? There’s a couple of things going on to that. Let me try to piece through that a little bit. In terms of style, I like to give myself and I don’t necessarily know if this is true. It could just be my ego beating away sometimes. I’d like to give myself as a fusion of a couple different styles.

I came up in bodybuilding. I feel like everybody who’s late 20s or early 30s [inaudible 6:15] because that was the thing, right? I came up in that very quickly realized that by the time I was this 24, 25 that that probably wasn’t the best way for me to be doing things and to reach the goals that I have.

My overall goal is pretty, I guess, simplistic. What I like to say that I want to be a superhero, and is never going to happen because I can’t fly. But I want to look strong and look the superhero part, and I want to also perform like an athlete. I want to stay quick, stay athletic, be able to run, be able to jump, be able to do at very simplistic level, cool things.

I try to make sure that my training facilitates that. I still have the bodybuilding in there because that is to me an aesthetic component. I did some very influenced by bodybuilding but I’m also very influenced by gymnastics ideas, functional training and some of the CrossFit movement.

I’m not actually crazy about everything and I don’t necessarily grab everything from there. But I grab pieces of that and I try to put it all together to give me the goals that I want. I want to be able to go into a CrossFit class and not [inaudible 7:45] .

I make sure that I have enough of that in my program but I want to maybe spend a little bit more time on my biceps than say, a gymnast or a CrossFitter, so I have that in my [inaudible 7:57] , too. I like to say I wanted to be ready for anything partly because my job requires me to be ready for anything.

Here, they may ask me to put together a video workout that has to be functional fitness. Then, the next week, they may ship me out to the West Coast to go to lift with the strongman. I try to stay versatile. I don’t know if that answers your questions at all. But that is my answer.

That answers my question, perfectly. You are just so on the nose. That’s the mark of a journalist and someone who’s like spoken on a lot of events and panels. They gave an amazing answer and they’re like, “Did that answer your question?” It’s like, “Of course you [inaudible 8:32] .”

You have an amazing answer. I want to pick up part one little thread to that.

You talk about, you want to be a superhero. I’ve actually seen you post on social media a couple of times. You basically added Marvel Studios and then like, “Look guys. I’m available here.” Just a picture of you like with a sick pup after a workout. You’re like, “I’m available, reach out to me. You need someone for that role.”

If you could portray any character on screen, Marvel or DC Universes, who would it be? Which superhero?

Namor.

Namor? OK.

Namor. Yes. Yeah, I thought one day [inaudible 9:09] God, I can’t remember. [inaudible 9:11] ? Is that the one that they’re prepping right now?

That’s correct.

Yeah. It crossed my mind but I grew up…See, that’s the thing. I grew up on comic books, too. I grew up on ’90s X-Men and Spider-Man when they were the cartoons on Fox. In fact, fun fact I like rewatch those on Disney Plus. That’s my reason for Disney Plus subscription. [laughs]

I grew up on that. The last time I’m reading comic books. I read X-Force, the Deadpool-Cable. I came up on this…I thought he was an agent at that time, I wasn’t really sure. That’s Namor. All the others are taken. If I could be one, it would probably be Namor.

I do have…If they ever went to say an Asian Captain America, I would totally be down to do that, too. Marvel, if you’re listening. Let’s get this to them.

There’s this very able guy named Eb Marvel, and he’s already in game shape. You don’t need to spend six months getting him ready for the screen as far as superhero shape. Let’s get some Asian American representation up there, and let’s get Eb in one of these roles. Even if you have to cast him as a villain. Playing a villain would be fun.

Being a villain, I feel like I have the [inaudible 10:30] thing down. I’d probably do that better than I smile.

Yeah, I’ll take it.

He’ll take industry minimum rates, I’ll be his agent. I’m going to go pitch you to some networks after this. Absolutely joking. At the same time, I do think it’s an interesting point about how, what we grow up with.

I was a big comic book nerd, still I’m a big comic book nerd. I still buy comic books. How it influences how we perceive the ideal versions of ourselves, whether we’re working out to be strong, look like a superhero, move like a superhero.

You have an interesting background, career-wise. You’re the fitness director at Men’s Health, but you had a career in content, in journalism, even before you had combined that with your pursuit of fitness or your love of fitness.

I have my own personal story about my love of content and journalism intersecting with my love of fitness. Tell us about how you came to be in this specific role where you are today.

You did your research for this one.

I’m pro. I’ve recorded like 80 plus podcasts on this thing. I’m ready to go man.

It’s interesting. I’m going to bring up this superhero thing again. It’s weird, I’ve reflected on this a lot, just in my own time because I want to feel like I’m in a really, really cool place, a place that’s exactly where I want to be.

It was kind of a [inaudible 11:58] route, but it really does all go back to superheroes. I’m really boring like that. Have you ever seen “Unbreakable”? I loved Unbreakable.

That’s one of my favorite movies. I’m not even kidding. I have made my girlfriend watch that movie with me three times. It’s an amazing film.

Yes, I’ve made my wife watch it, too. I was very disappointed in Glass. This is a training, obviously, podcast, not a movie podcast, so we don’t have to go there, but…

In the movie Unbreakable, there is a very famous bench press scene. It works.

xactly. It’s fine, that was me in my basement when I was 14. The thing to me is I’m heavily influenced by superheroes. I have every Superman, Batman, Green Lantern T-shirt, everything in my closet. I used to wear that stuff all the time and then my wife was like, “No, you need to stop.”

Heavily influenced by that. I feel like, when you grow up…I was almost like, I could not jump off a building and land safely, that’s just a bad idea. What I found is, I came to bodybuilding and Arnold and stuff like that, and those guys all looked the superhero part.

That’s half the game. The other half of the game is who performs the superhero part. You’re looking at Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, [inaudible 13:32] , these great athletes. Look at Odell Beckham a couple of years ago making that ridiculous one-handed catch against the Cowboys.

I was at that game, it was really cool. To me, it’s like athletes are the guys who…Bodybuilders look super heroic, CrossFitters look super heroic. CrossFitters and powerlifters perform superhero but it’s our athletes, CrossFitters, powerlifters, football players, basketball players who are doing these super heroic feats.

I was like, “OK, I’m going to grow up and be in the NBA.” Unfortunately, you have to be like 6’4” to be in the NBA. I’m 5’9″ so that just wasn’t happening. I spent my college years…I graduated actually, undergrad, with a degree in accounting.

It was mainly because I was trying to play sports in college and it just really wasn’t working. I realized after undergrad, “Oh wow, I’m not going to be a pro athlete.” What’s the closest I can get to a pro athlete? How can I spend time around them, learn from them, figure out ways to get as athletic as them?

Whatever I did in college and high school…I was a late blooming human in terms of growing into my body and feeling it out and stuff like that. Can I touch those people and understand how they do what they do? Because, obviously, I couldn’t figure it out.

Somehow I was always a pretty decent writer. I came to sports journalism. Syracuse had a grad journalism program. It was like one-year intensive. I was a good enough writer to get in there. I took that with the intention of, “I want to get into sports journalism,” because to me, I didn’t understand the whole training thing, or the idea of the guy behind an athlete is his trainer.

My thinking was, if I want to figure out how to dunk a basketball, let me go to the guy who dunks the basketball the best, and ask him. If I’m in a locker room, I can ask, say Kobe Bryant. Obviously, locker rooms don’t work that way. They’re completely different beasts. That was my whole idea.

Long story short, from that, I took that one-year journalism course. I was lucky enough to get an internship to the “New York Daily News” in their sports department. I left there briefly to intern “ESPN Magazine” came back to the Daily News, and didn’t leave there pretty much…

I’m covering sports, I covered a Super Bowl, I think I covered two Super Bowls, did some NBA stuff. Did a little bit of baseball stuff. Baseball stuff is not fun.

The baseball season is a grind. I actually covered the college world series when I was interning for an NBA affiliate a few years ago. It is a grind man.

Yes. Everyday, baseball is a grind. That’s really a good word for it. The whole time I’m going in…I enjoyed it because I’m a sports fan and I’m a fan of these guys doing these super heroic things.

The Last Dance, loved it, because you watch all these highlights and it’s like, “This guy, Michael Jordan, doesn’t come out of the air. How does he do that? He’s triple-clutching our guys.”

Being around that was great. I was enjoying the experience, enjoying getting to know these guys, but the whole time, all I want to do is train with them.

One of the highlights of my journalism career before I do what I do now, is I covered the Giants for several years. I got to know guys like Steve Weatherford. I got to know guys like Victor Cruz. I got to know a couple of the offensive linemen.

All the other guys in the locker room, they’ll ask these guys about the game and stuff like that. I was the weird journalist who would go up to these guys after they were asked all their questions about football and contracts and stuff like that, and I’ll be like, “Yo, so what do you do for your abs?”

What’s your training split, Victor? [laughs]

Exactly. I remember there was one time, one of the coolest experiences that I had was probably my first year there. Again, I just wanted to…you’ve ever seen him, in ridiculous shape, right? He looks like a bodybuilder, not a punter. He was always jacked like that.

I remember being in the locker room and I had just had a conversation with him, and I’m like, “Whoa, this guy’s a punter.” It’s hard to talk to some of the bigger name players and he’s a punter and he’s jacked.

I was like, “Dude, what the heck do you take supplement-wise, because I need to get it.” Then, literally, he was like, “Send me your phone number, and I’ll text you the whole list.”

I went right out and bought all that stuff, and granted, not all of it works for me because I was young and different bodies, and stuff I didn’t realize at the time, but that’s what I enjoyed doing. It was great to cover the sports and enjoying the moments that it was interacting with these guys and learning the science of fitness.

I would love going to the combine, watching guys do the 40-yard dash, and analyzing their sprint techniques and stuff like that. Talking to scouts about this guy turns his hips better. It’s because he does this in his training, or we saw him do this. That was something I was super passionate about. I did that for, I want to say, six to seven years.

Eventually, they move you to other stuff. I did some columns and all the fun stuff. But in the back of my mind, I always enjoyed that fitness aspect. Then about, I want to say, three or four years ago….Again, I come from a newspaper, and newspapers are great, but you know journalism, the business, and how not exactly the best career move these days right…

Maybe unpredictable career move. Let’s put it that way.

 Exactly. Fair. I love everything I learned there, but I was at the Daily News and things were getting a little nuts. I remember seeing this opening for Men’s Health fitness editor.

On one hand, I don’t have any technical…I trained a couple of people, like you train some people. I had a background in it. I had some miners and stuff like that from college in it. I had some experience, but I hadn’t done it for like five or six years, and it wasn’t my career.

My career and everything I had built around was, “Hey, I want to be around these athletes.” I want to be around these athletes. That’s going to be just what I do, but I started thinking to myself, “Should I do this?” Fitness is really…When you’re on an NFL road trip, most of the media will land in that city. We’ll get in on Saturday for a Sunday game, and everybody will go out to dinner.

“I need to find the goal.”

I was the guy who…I didn’t go out to dinner. I was like, “I’ll see you guys tomorrow because I’m going to go find the nearest gym. Any city I went to, I would research a gym because I was like, “I’m too good for hotel gyms.”

Not too good these days. You’d probably kill for a hotel gym these days.

 [laughs] Exactly, for any gym. I was that guy. I’m reminiscing way too much, but I was that guy. Fitness was always…It’s like no matter what else was going. I love sports or whatever, but fitness was the backbone of it.

I started thinking, “Could I do this? Could I enjoy it, and could I love it?” The more and more I thought about it, the more I was…I would probably, as much as I love sports, to be involved in teaching fitness, especially because by then, I had tried to make fitness dovetail into my journalism career whenever possible.

I think there was one year the Giants had something like seven ACL tears on their team. I did a feature on that because to me, I was super interested in, “How can all these guys have ACL tears? Is it something in their training that’s off?”

It was probably the most boring story to read, if you look it up because I basically talked too much to doctors and talked to a bunch of trainers about balance between hamstrings and quads, and rotation or moving laterally and whether overtraining and all that stuff.

It was probably the most boring story, but I had more fun reporting that than anything. I remember thinking about that story and I was like, “You know what? I would love to go to Men’s Health, and just be able to sort of influence, not in an influencer sense, but just influence fitness in terms of help to guide coverage, create stories, bring new ideas, and be in that world.”

I applied for it and was lucky enough to get it. The last three years have been so off the hook awesome.

One of your roles at Men’s Health is that you try things out. You mentioned earlier in the podcast that you might be sent to the West Coast to lift with the Strongman. You might need to go to a CrossFit class and do something functional or film a video with functional fitness. You try a lot of things out. One thing that I loved reading your take on was when you tried out pole dancing…

..and I believe you worked out with J. Lo’s trainer from “Hustlers,” right?

Yeah.

Take us through that experience.

 First of all, that was a very, very last-minute story. It came together at the last moment. Her pole dance instructor was super nice. Johanna Sapakie, I think, her name was. I would legitimately want to do it again. First of all, it was a very drop-in, drop-out trip.

I flew into Miami…I want to say a couple of days before…It might have been a day before the Super Bowl or something like that.

No, if it was after that. I can’t remember when, but I flew in and flew out the same day. I was tired. You go into this studio, and again, by this point in my career, I’ve taken on enough of these challenges, if you will, to know to never underestimate anything because even if it looks easy, it’s super hard.

First of all, pole dancing is…I know we think of it in certain fashion or we might…but she is like classically trained [inaudible 25:01] and stuff like that. Her form on everything was brilliant. Then, she’s trying to teach me all this stuff.

The thing that caught me off guard the most — and again I have some gymnastic background — I like playing around with hold float in yoga and dragonfly. I love doing that stuff. I thought I would be ready for this. I think I’m fairly strong so I thought I would be ready for this. The thing I was not ready for was the bar because that bar is just not your friend.

It’s hard when you try to create a grip on it. It’s amazing the fact the way she was able to create a grip on it from so many angles and with so many parts of her body with armpits, elbows, the crease behind your knee, her ankle. She was able to create grip with it there.

I’m not like the toughest guy in the world in terms of “Hey, I’m just going to just grab it and, you know, not let go.” I was like, “Why does my knee hurt?” She was like, “No, that’s just the pole.” That was probably the thing that caught me the most off guard.

It was fun and very challenging. She was trying to compress, obviously, a lot of time with J. Lo into a pretty robust two-hour lesson. By the end, I was dealing with the bar. Then, I was able to pull off these holds, a couple of them.

Again, my stuff was sloppy. It was never going to be clean because I was so trying to figure out how to hang out, how to hang up-side-down on the bar, whatever. The thing you have to do there, and the thing that’s super fun is you have to find a neutral pelvis if you will in space.

If you can do that, and that is not something that I tend to do well at first, especially when I’m grabbing a four-inch pole that’s trying to savagely attack my hands and every part of my body. If you can find that, then you can pull off some pretty cool stuff.

I’m not great at that sense in an instance. It’s fun. There’s a lot of core strength involved as you can imagine and a lot more shoulder stability strength than you might think. Again, I was assuming it was going to be a lot of core. The shoulder stability stuff caught me off guard a little bit.

What is something that you would like to try in your role at Men’s Health? What gets you up every morning and makes you think, “You know, Eb,” because you’re speaking to yourself with a third person here in my imagination, “this is what I really want to do. This is like an athletic feat I want to try,” or, “This is the type of person I want to train with or learn from.”

Wow! There’s so much, because that to me, anytime I can get out of my training group and just experiment with stuff, I love it. Because, I also feel like to let you bring something or the thing I try to do is anytime I get to do any of this cool stuff, I want to attempt to…I feel like I won for our magazine.

I give us a better product if I actually learned something there. I try to carry something back to my training with it and too, I feel like it makes my training that much stronger because it makes me more well-rounded and ready for the next thing. None of which answers your question.

But still good background. I appreciate the context.

Yeah. I think the two things I would love to do, one is somebody who I would just love to train with, and that would be…Oh, there are two people I’d love to train with. One is the Rock, and I’m pretty sure everybody says that.

That’s a default answer. You got to give someone beyond that, too. That’s like the middle space in a bingo card. That’s a freebie.

Yeah, you’re not wrong. The other person I would love to train with is Henry Cavill. That goes back to again the superhero thing, because he played Superman, and Superman is my all-time favorite.

Also the way he’s…He’s always been in pretty shape, he’s changed his body. If you look at, say the “Immortals 2” too, when he played Superman, then coming in for “The Witcher.” The shoulder mobility because he did a lot of his own stuff for that. That would be a guy I want to train with, just like he’s prepping for something. I can imagine that training is fun.

Again, I program my own stuff. I think that’s important for my role at Men’s Health to…even though, I can go in and I don’t mind somebody else. I like to train with Don because we can work like that.

I program my own stuff. I think that’s important. It would be nice and fun to, “Hey, get that name a role, Marvel, if you’re still listening and have somebody else basically look at me and say, ‘OK, you need to work on this and this and this to complete or to get that superhero look. This is exactly how you’re going to get there,'” and just go through that and be scared.

That’s one thing. The NFL combine when…It’s interesting, probably every year since I was 19. When I was 19, this did not go well, but I would check the…As soon as the NFL combine was done, I would go through and I would check in, especially when I was 19. When I got older, I tweaked how I did this.

I would look at the very bottom of the list and see who was the worst guy of benching 225 and see if I could beat him. That was like fours and fives, and I was happy when I got six. I’ve done that every year. I’ll check the combine and I’ll see how many guys I can beat.

Some years it’s good, some years it’s like, “Oh my God, OK, that’s good. I could be a quarterback, right?” I would love to just go through the entire NFL combine, and almost deal with the stresses you got because you have to learn all those different mechanics.

You have to learn all those different kinds of skills. I can say, broad and they’re learning them as a skill. They’re not just going out there and using natural ability, but they’re learning them as a skill.

You have to perform in one after the other, after the other. I would love to go through that experience and have to…I would love to go through it twice, once on the fly, just as “Hey, what I am right now?” and then once after having trained for it and see what the difference is.

I’m going to pitch this to Netflix right now. Eb and David do a combine. It’s going to be like a suit of a mockumentary film. It’s going to be us starting from nothing or you starting from something and just taking us through a year of training to participate in the NFL combine.

If you want to feel good about yourself, Eb, you have me there right alongside you because I won’t make the progress you will. I’d watch it. That’s must-see TV. Must-see TV.

That’s good. ESPN 30 for 30, man, let’s do it.

What if I told you that only one of these editors knew what he was doing?

It might not be me.

Yeah. I also do voice-over work for ESPN. If you’re looking for a new voice for 30 for 30, I am available, but I’m not cheap. No, I’m absolutely kidding. Eb, it has been fantastic to get to know a bit more about your background, your career, your passions, and as a fellow comic-book nerd, still active comic-book nerd, I can certainly relate.

Where’s the best places I should ask for people to find out what’s going on with Eb Samuel, his work at Men’s Health and also your social media accounts.

Menshealth.com, obviously, there’s a lot of my work on there. That’s a really good start. We have an app, the all out studio app. That’s @alloutstudio on Instagram. I have a bunch of work outs there. If anybody wants a very directed program that I’m giving them, and then obviously, I try to stay really consistent about posting on Instagram.

That’s @ebenezersamuel23. That’s all my stuff that I really want to give people so that they can figure out their workouts. On TikTok, I post all my random super-heroic nonsense, so that’s @ebenezer5 if anybody wants to hang out there.

Eb, thanks so much for joining us, really appreciate the conversation.

No problem. Thank you for having me out.