How Bill Maeda Became the Internet's Favorite Shredded 56-Year-Old

A fun conversation with Bill about being all natty, what he eats for breakfast every day, and how he gets away with not stretching before his workouts.

Welcome to the HEAVIES Feelgood Routine, a series that talks to cool, interesting, and creative people about how they design their busy schedules to accommodate good habits.

If you spend far too much time, like I do, doomscrolling on Instagram, you’ve probably come across Bill Maeda’s videos, where he has become known for, say, doing weighted pull-ups on his porch or lifting a 100-pound-plus barbell with his teeth. At 56 the dude is legit inspiring.

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He first started posting videos of his workouts “for entertainment purposes only” a few years ago at the tail end of the pandemic at the suggestion of one of his daughters, and he very quickly amassed an audience of over 2 million followers. But, as he explains it, “I just don't want people to mistake me for being an internet fitness guru. I am not. I enjoy my fitness, and my version of fitness might not be the best thing for others, and I think people are smart enough to figure that out to a degree themselves.”

I was hyped to hop on a call with Bill, who was Zooming in from Hawaii, where he lives. (Specials thanks to GORUCK, pictured in the photo above, for making this conversation happen.) We talked about why he prefers short workouts, what he eats to stay fueled (white rice!), and how overcoming colon cancer a few years ago informs everything he does. This one was fun.

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Bill Maeda: Chris! How are you?

Chris: It's so nice to finally meet you! I've been a fan for a long time.

Oh, thank you! I appreciate that.

Are you at home today?

Yeah, I'm at home. We're in Honolulu. Where are you?

I'm in New York City. But my mom actually spent a few years growing up in Oahu, so we a bit of a connection to Hawaii.

Cool. It's a little warm there today, huh?

Yeah. You go outside and you disintegrate right away. So I saw a picture of you when you were a young man and you were already pretty shredded. Were you an athletic kid growing up?

It's kind of funny. I wasn't really athletic. For a while, up until maybe third or fourth grade, I was actually a chubby kid with a big round head and a little belly. I was klutzy. Even in high school, I started having a few problems. I was getting a bit rebellious—not a troublemaker, but I was wild, so I wasn't really playing a lot of sports. I tried football one year but ended up getting injured to the point where I needed a screw put in my shoulder. So that was it for high school athletics for me.

I actually didn't start until later. I was training myself. I saw Bruce Lee on TV and started doing nunchucks and push-ups.

Amazing.

I definitely wasn't a jock. I was kind of a loner. I was getting ready to be in the military, so I was that weird guy wearing a camouflage jacket. While the other guys were training for football or wrestling, I was training so I could make it through special forces selection. So I was doing my own thing. My parents bought me my own weight set, and I didn't go to the gym; I trained in my room.

Then, in my twenties, I met my wife, and we moved to LA for five years. I didn't move there to be in the movies; I wanted to see what Venice, California, was like. This was the mid-nineties when bodybuilding couldn't be bigger, and it was so great.

Where did you work?

I worked at Powerhouse and at Gold's Gym for a little bit. Then I ended up doing a bit of movie industry work. If you live there long enough and you're in the gyms, you're going to meet people who do that. My wife and I moved back here to Hawaii in 2000, and then we started FitPro Hawaii, my training company. I've been doing this ever since.

So you had no formal martial arts training? I've seen you hitting the bag, throwing kicks.

I took some Kenpo when I was a teenager. But that was a time when I was also having a lot of teenage issues, so I quit. But I practiced a lot by myself. When I lived in LA I did some Muay Thai, which was really taking off back in the early to mid-nineties. I was at Sityodtong Academy and trained there for a short time.

I've never achieved belts in anything, but I enjoy doing it. I enjoy the mechanics of it. I'm not a fighter, but I enjoy the mechanics of being able to throw punches and kicks. They're just very explosive, rotational movements. It's hard to find rotational movements that have that degree of explosivity to them, so that's why I do it.

Yeah, I did karate as a child, too, and now I do Muay Thai outside of journalism.

How old are you, Chris?

I'm 40.

Forty. Yeah, that's good times, man. That's a great age. Your body's just solid at 40. Do you have kids?

Yeah, I have a three-year-old. So fitting in all the workouts around the kid is kind of the challenge. I remember you talking about how you like to keep your workouts nice and short. Where did that philosophy come from and how to do you put that into practice?

So, I like to preface everything with I have never used any steroids, growth hormones, or any performance-enhancing drugs. I like people to know that because sometimes people might wonder, "Oh, maybe you can get away with that because you're on stuff." I have never, ever used stuff.

Regarding my attitude on short workouts, even when I was younger, my thing was, I'd see guys do one set of bench press, then kind of talk, stroll to the water cooler, and come back. My thing, before CrossFit, was always to keep a fast or high pace on my workouts because I wanted my workouts to flow or to resemble a wrestling match. So I would do a set of bench press with dumbbells, and then with the same weights, I'd go right into rows. From there, I might go into walking lunges. I was just running a circuit of movements one after another because that simulated the grind of a fight. I liked the way that felt.

I'm not a “heavy weight” guy; I was never really inclined to be strong. I've always been very flexible for my size and proportions. I've always had good mobility. I could wiggle out of a lot of things in jiu-jitsu.

But I think when you have the kind of joints that I have, it's like if you take two weights, the same weight, and you attach a thick rubber band to one and a thin rubber band to the other—the thin rubber band has to stretch a lot farther before the weight moves. I kind of wonder if I have that kind of thing, because I can kick and punch without a warm-up and get a good range of motion. Which is why I think I’m inclined towards more moderate weights, getting a bunch of reps, and going right into an antagonistic movement. Just trying to keep things moving that way.

That’s so cool.

Now though, it's more out of necessity. Twelve years ago, I had Stage III colon cancer, so they had to remove my colon, and then I got six months of chemo. And the chemo, as you know, the effects it has on me, at least, seem to last a long time. Also based on my age and my work, it quickly became apparent that my work capacity—the capacity for my body to just take and endure training—went down a good amount. It didn't seem like my joints had the resilience, and recovery took a long time, too.

So now, by necessity, I try to keep my workouts to about 20 or 30 minutes. Now, my warm-up is always a lighter version of what I'm going to do. I don't do cardio, foam rolling, or stretching. I just do a lighter version of the exercise.

So what does that look like in practice?

Usually within about a 20 or 30-minute session, I can get about six sets, and I'm talking maybe one to three reps per set. I guess it's like that Mike Mentzer high-intensity type of training. If I had to compare it to something, I'd probably say it is. I have a limited amount of energy that I'm trying to funnel towards one big effort, and I'm not always going for a maximal lift. The risk-to-benefit on that for anybody is usually poor.

Totally.

Oftentimes, people get a little nervous when I post these videos where I'm lifting a barbell with my teeth, and the barbell might weigh 135 or 155 pounds. Then I get some feedback: "You shouldn't post that! That's dangerous! You can hurt yourself!" But if I do anything, if I post anything, and if it's just one rep, the assumption might be that it was a one-rep max. But no, I just post one rep because after that, people get bored! They don't need to see me do three reps when they all look the same!

Oh dude, yeah. [laughs] That makes total sense.

For me, if I can do 10 reps with some things, I'd rather do one to two reps with a heavier weight, controlling it very meticulously. That, to me, is a higher goal. Also, it saves my joints, and my joint surfaces are a little bit worn down, so the less friction I can put over them, the better. So by going slow through an exaggerated range of motion, that's one of my solutions.

I started doing this during the pandemic in 2020. After three years of just going slow, I trained my nervous system to go slow. It kind of got funny: when I started moving around, things started getting sore. I thought, "Wait, I'm getting more sore going slower?" But then I kind of forgot your nervous system. Life happens at a high speed. If you have to hop across a mud puddle, that's a fast movement. But if everything I'm doing is slow, slow, slow, eventually it's training my nervous system. So my movements were getting sluggish. Just walking, I felt really kind of disconnected.

So now, I still do three days of what I'll call strength training—kind of slow strength training—but I'm spending a lot more time on training my reflexes now.

What does that look like?

I hold these [weights with springs] at my sides and I'm just basically "hippie-toeing," so I'm just bouncing on my feet. If you ask someone like me to do that, "Hey, just start bouncing," I'm going to get bored. I'm getting no feedback. But these things tell me if my feet are symmetrical. You can feel if they start hitting differently. A year ago, if you showed me these and told me to do them, I would say, "Why would I do that?" But I'm realizing when I do stuff like this—these things that are just high-cycling, fast, repetitive movements—like my calves aren't as tight anymore. It's weird. When I do all these little tiny hundreds of calf raises a day, my calves are now loose and they feel good. Whereas before, they would get tight, and so I'd get the wedge and I'd do those calf raises, like bodybuilder style, and they'd end up even tighter afterwards and more sluggish.

It felt good while I was stretching them, but then hours later, and now when I train with this kind of stuff, so I'm doing hundreds of reps, but fast and small and light. Now my calves are much better.

I love that. I have tight calves, too. So are you doing that over the course of a day whenever you get free moments, or how does that look?

Yeah. That and I'll train heavy three days out of the week. Another four days out of the week, I'm working with a Torque Tank sled, which is very low velocity. If I pull and I push, I can always work really hard on that without aggravating my injuries or whatever.

When you do your heavy weight training, are you doing that early in the morning or in the afternoon?

Most of it is in the afternoon. Most of my clients, I start early, and I've just kind of trained my system now to do this around 5:00 p.m. Ideally, I would like to do my workouts earlier in the day. My ideal would be to wake up, go work out, have breakfast—kind of like the life my clients have [laughs].

I remember you saying at one point, too, that you're not super particular with your diet and eating restrictions and stuff. Is that still the case, or did you have to change that at all after colon cancer?

I'm more particular now because the diet that I would say might have contributed to my cancer. In hindsight I was sick. I realize now I was going through a bad place where I was eating one to two pints of Häagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry's a day. I would sometimes also eat an entire box of Hawaiian Host chocolate macadamia nuts.

Oh wow.

For breakfast, I would have an entire box with a cup of coffee, and that to me was normal. And then I'm going out training people. And by the way, there are a lot of trainers that do that, man.

I mean, you must have a lot of energy after you eat that.

People eat that, and then they go home, and they're just all down. And that was me. So now, my diet is still... I still take plenty of carbs because I need carbs. People can say what they want about ketones; fine, they can keep their ketones. I've tried keto and carnivore and all those things. I need carbs. Basically, I eat local style—the way I always have. I get meat, I get eggs, I get white rice, and some days that meat might be spam, might be bacon. I'm not going to be that guy that's like, "Okay, I don't eat that."

My job has always been active. Every job I've had, I was always on my feet. And so that to me, I think, is what gives me a little more dietary leeway.

My body has formed around this metabolic lifestyle since I was a kid. And so I believe there's a lot to when people talk about getting in their 8,000 or 10,000 steps in a day. There's a lot of power in that.

Do you do three meals?

I do. I stopped intermittent fasting about a year ago. I work with Marek Health; they're a company that does my blood work and stuff. My blood markers, everything. I've been with them for about two years now, and everything's improved: my testosterone and this and that. But there were certain markers that were a little bit puzzling. And then they found out that I was intermittent fasting, which wasn’t great for someone with my metabolism and my lifestyle and my job. So we decided that I should be eating breakfast.

I've been doing three eggs with white rice and butter, and I sauté that all in a titanium wok, and that I have every day. And that is perfect. It's super clean. It just sits, your blood sugar is stable. It's almost like medication for me. Three eggs, a little white rice, and some butter. And I'm good, man.

And I still have coffee. I pull myself a double espresso and I pour that over ice with some heavy whipping cream.

That sounds great right about now.

Right now in Hawaii, it's summer, so the mornings are warm. So I like a little iced coffee, and I just nurse that all day. I used to drink six, or I should say three doubles a day. I'm trying to get that down.

Aside from the sort of fast-twitch stuff you've been doing, is there anything you've been doing in terms of recovery that’s been helpful? Are you sleeping well?

That's a good question. When I was on the special forces thing in high school, I think I messed up my circadian rhythm. I'm still kind of stuck on four to five hours of sleep per night. I have been training it to get about six now. I normally have to wake up at 4:30 to be at work on time.

To me, lying in bed and waiting to sleep or just trying to stay calm is a higher discipline than pushing myself hard on a run. It takes me more discipline just to lie there and be okay with not falling asleep and not getting annoyed and just staying calm. Getting enough sleep is now, I'm looking at it as a discipline. It's not incidental the way it used to be.

Is there anything else that has really made a difference that you can feel lately?

If there's one thing I would have to say, and this is like no one wants to hear this, but people talk a lot about how addicting the consumption of social media is, just doom scrolling or whatever. But not a lot of people talk about the addiction to posting. A lot of social media accounts don't grow as fast as mine did. Mine grew really fast when I started posting a few years ago. Growing fast on social media is like fentanyl.

If you think you're having a problem scrolling on Instagram, try growing at 10,000 people a day. Every time you post anything, you could post your dog, and you have 20,000 more followers.

Crazy.

Then at dinner you have 20,000 more. That becomes, for a guy like me, and I was pretty damaged at the time, and I've got a pandemic and everybody's freaking out, I really went a little overboard on that. And so going back to your question, I am focusing on minimizing—or I shouldn't say minimizing. I'm trying to, instead of just posting three videos of just whatever every day, I'm just going to make one, but I'm going to try and put a voiceover on it, maybe a little lesson on it that'll give you a little more value. I’m trying to post less and respond less to comments, because I have found that the more time I spend on this, it becomes toxic.

I started this whole thing just as kind of a goof. It was fun. And, especially after cancer, no matter what happens, it'll still serve as a digital log of what I did on any given day.

So, going back to your question about what’s been making a difference, I just want to keep the social media healthy for me. My number one goal is to be a good father to my daughters. I was never a social media guy. I'm kind of a very low-tech individual. And anything that will help me spend more time with my family, I am all for it.

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