“Eating kale won’t help me pull off a handstand. It’s training over and over” Roger Frampton AGE 33 – 182CM | 78KG The Body Issue 2017
COACH, MODEL, INFLUENCER
Growing up watching and idolising the likes of Schwarzenegger, Snipes and Stallone, Roger Frampton dreamt big from an early age. Action-hero big. “When I was 16 I found this old-school gym with pictures of Arnie all over the walls,” he says. “And that’s how I started in the fitness world: pumping heavy weights, aspiring to be a bodybuilder.” Frampton’s modelling career took flight around the same time he qualified as a PT, keen to share his passion for the weights room with others.
But a gym-class epiphany would later alter both his physique and the shape of his training career dramatically. “It was a gymnastics class. There were all these young kids being awesome. So I tried to do what they were doing but found I couldn’t,” he says. “That’s when I realised: we’re all born flexible, then we lose it. When you’re five years old, you’re running around the park, moving freely. Then you go to school and get educated sitting down for six or seven hours a day. Suddenly you have these 30-year-olds who have no idea what their bodies are designed for, walking into a yoga class and realising that they can’t touch their toes. We’ve been conditioned to sit still. But humans are designed to move.”
Frampton subsequently ditched the weights and now bases his training solely around calisthenics and mobility. “I want to reverse-engineer my body,” he says. “Essentially, my goal is to get back to five-year-old Roger.” To that end, Frampton no longer thinks of his daily two-hour training sessions in terms of sets and reps, but simply movement. “I could spend 20 minutes working on my wrists, another 20 minutes on my ankles, followed by hip and shoulder movements. I work on movement of the spine in different directions – flexion, extension, protraction, retraction. And I like to hang from bars – not necessarily even pull-ups, just stretching out the shoulders. I’m trying to reverse all the damage I’ve done to my body with weights. Until I can do the splits in every direction, I won’t be satisfied.”
But while Frampton’s enviable, shrink-wrapped physique isn’t made in the gym per se, neither is it made in his vegetarian kitchen. “I hate that phrase: ‘Abs are made in the kitchen,’” he says. “I don’t count calories. I have a crap diet. I finish training and I’m hungry, so I just go for the veggie option at the nearest shop. I eat veggie burgers from Mcdonald’s, microwave meals, Pret sandwiches – I just can’t eat animals. Eating kale isn’t what helps me pull off a handstand. Training repetitively, over and over again, and doing horrible stretches is what gets me there.”