Steve Backshall
The celebrated explorer on near-death encounters and staying in shape in his forties
RECORD BREAKING ADVENTURER
STEVE BACKSHALL
TALKS EXPEDITION FITNESS, NEAR DEATH ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS, AND GOING WHERE NO HUMAN HAS GONE BEFORE
Your kids will recognise him as the face of the BBC’s BAFTA-winning Deadly 60 – in which he tracks down the deadliest animals on the planet in the name of children’s entertainment – and you probably know him from any number of wildlife shows he’s fronted in over two decades as a TV presenter. But while his work as biologist is beamed across our screens, Steve Backshall MBE is also a discoverer of new worlds. Venturing into parts unknown, his work on the BBC’s Undiscovered Worlds earned him 2020’s Scientific Exploration Society’s Explorer of the Year award, and last year he made a world-first descent of savage white-water rivers in Russia’s Far-East Kamchatka Peninsula. To go where no one has gone before requires a cast-iron mindset and unwavering commitment to face danger head on, but scaling sheer rock faces and navigating violent rapids is also dependant on a body stable, strong and resilient enough to withstand the full force of nature. Now 48, Backshall credits calisthenics and a renewed training intensity – coached into him by Wild Training founder (and former MF cover model) James Griffiths – with helping him stay expedition-fit all year round.
Men’s Fitness: Where does your passion for the natural world come from? Steve Backshall:
It’s something I’ve had since I was a kid. I can remember being really disappointed that the golden era of exploration was hundreds of years gone and that would never be my reality. But as I got into my late teens and started travelling on my own, I found that totally wasn’t true. ere are plenty of proper, ground-breaking expeditions yet to be done.
I did my rst solo expedition when I was in my early 20s: I tried to walk across New Guinea, and it was a catastrophic failure from start to nish. I was badly organised and ill-prepared. I had no communication with the outside world, and it happened to be during a time of unprecedented drought, with wild res burning across the island. So I failed, but I did spend three months in the jungle, learning the hard way about how to do expeditions, and had some extraordinary experiences along the way. at gave me the impetus to crack on with bigger and betterprepared things.
Not long after that, I went and made my own lm, in the jungles of Colombia. I ended up selling it to National Geographic, and they took me on as their ‘adventurer in residence’, which remains the best job title I’ve ever had. Essentially they paid me for the next ve years to do similar expeditions – most of them self- lmed – and turn them into television programmes, and I’ve never looked back.
MF: You’ve been all around the world, but is there one trip that stands out as the most memorable? SB:
I’m very lucky to still be doing these expeditions, and to continue having the opportunities to go places where no human beings have ever been before – in 2021! It seems absolutely incredible that can be the case, but I’ve just got back from West Africa, making the rst ever descent of a jungle river – which very nearly sunk all my crew. We were with local people who were wide-eyed throughout the entire journey, because neither they, nor their ancestors, had ever made that journey before. Being able to see an environment with completely fresh eyes is something very, very special.
If I had to pick one expedition that really stands out, a white-water rst-descent that I did in Kamchatka, Russia, last year, would be right at the top of the list of best ever
MF: In Undiscovered Worlds, you go cave diving in Mexico – how does it feel to descend into a place no one has been before?
SB: In this present day and age, if you want to be an explorer, you want to be a cave diver. ere are more miles of undiscovered, sunken cave passages than there are mapped cave passages, so it is an environment that still has an unbelievable amount of potential. If you go to a completely new location – like we were in the Yucatán Peninsula – you’re shining light on things that have never been
SB: Cave diving is one of the most logistically challenging types of expedition. Just to get to the mouth of a cave system, there could be several days of hiking through a rainforest. But you’re not just hiking: you’re carrying all your cylinders, your wetsuits, your dive cameras and all these things. en inevitably you need to abseil down to the entrance, and just doing that in all your dive gear is pretty full on.
If you do it right, you can make it pretty safe, but because you’re way out there in the middle of nowhere, anything that goes wrong is going to have catastrophic consequences. You have to be 100 per cent self-reliant – nobody else is coming to save you – and even the smallest mistake, like running out of light or kicking up bad visibility, is probably going to kill you. at is a degree of commitment that I think we are unfamiliar with in ‘normal’ life.
MF: Are you ever fearful in those situations? SB: De nitely, and fear is very
useful. Fear is something you need to have: it stops you from making stupid decisions. But it does need to be kept under control. e way I do it is through breathing techniques and focusing on simple tasks. e only time I’ve truly panicked was cave diving, when I was waiting in a chamber with a dive woman called Katie, and we were there for about half an hour just lying on the bottom. After a while we ran out of small things to check and monitor, and you end up thinking, Woah, hang on, we’re a kilometre underground in a cave no one has been before, with the ceiling directly above our heads. Your heart rate goes up and your blood starts pumping – and that’s bad, because you use up more oxygen – so you just have to distract your mind as best as possible.
MF: You must have witnessed the decline of the natural world rst-hand in the areas you’ve revisited – has that shocked you?
SB: A lot of the places that I go back to over
seen before by human eyes. ey are stunningly beautiful, these caves. ey’re magni cently decorated with stalagmites and stalagtites, and some of them even have the remains of ancient, stone-aged animals inside them: mastodons, cave bears and long-extinct mammoths. It is breathtaking.
expeditions. We found a river that has never been paddled before – it’s Class V white water [extremely di cult, long, and violent] – and we ran it with a team of incredibly strong paddlers. It was just mesmerising, and the sensation of being able to say, “is is completely new; no one has ever seen this landscape from this vantage point before” is awesome.
MF: e stu we see on TV is the result of serious planning and hard work – can you give a sense of some of the unique demands of the job?
“Being able to see an environment with completely fresh eyes is something very special”
and over again have gone downhill massively. In places I used to dive in the early 90s, for instance, you would see an abundance of sharks, and now you see none. Places I used to go – particularly South-East Asia – you would see an in nity of rainforest, but now all you see are palm oil plantations. ere are a lot of places it can be really grim to go back to, but we have to use that as impetus, and we have to nd ways to learn from what’s happened. One of the most powerful tools I have is the ability to show natural wonder to lots of people. Simply highlighting an animal’s plight, or showcasing the beauty of a landscape, can be a very powerful tool.
MF: Moving onto tness, how do you stay in expedition-ready shape all year round? SB:
e critical thing for me is making sure my tness is very malleable and adaptable. Right now, I’m heading out on an exploratory diving expedition. e last one I did was a white-water paddling expedition, and the next one will be climbing, so I need to make sure I can bounce from one activity to the next. What I’ve found is, if I can focus a lot on things like calisthenics – which give you really good strength-to-bodyweight ratio, power and exibility – I’m less likely to get injured and more likely to be able to apply my strength in the real world.
It’s really important to keep up the cardiovascular tness, and my goto bit of kit in the gym is the Olympic rings. ey’re all about grip strength and hauling your own bodyweight around – which is what it’s like when you’re rock climbing, or paddling, or simply carrying big loads. at kind of functional strength is just so valuable.
MF: How does the set-up at Wild Training [the gym Backshall uses] help with that? SB:
I don’t want to turn this into too much of an advert – I don’t get anything free o the founder, James! – but the guy is so inspiring. I haven’t met anyone who stays as on top of all of the trends and all of the protocols in modern training. I rst met James after a big rock-climbing accident in 2010, when I broke my back in two places and destroyed my ankle; I really needed to make a comeback, and he completely rebuilt me. We looked at all kinds of functional exercise, he completely rescheduled my training programme – which had been based around lots of long cardio – and gave me sessions that could be done much quicker. Most of my sessions are half an hour now, whereas they used to take hours, but I get just as much out of them, if not more.
MF: How do you stay in shape when you’re away from the gym?
SB: ere are two things I always take with me: suspension straps and a skipping rope. Used right, the straps can replicate everything I need, and the rope provides a really good, high-intensity cardio workout in ten or 15 minutes.
MF: Finally, have you ever been put in serious danger by any of the animals you’ve lmed with? SB:
One incident immediately springs to mind. We were swimming with crocodiles in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana – which is already fairly dangerous! But it was made much, much worse when we swam face rst into a hippo. I think, retrospectively, you could have ipped a coin as to whether we lived or were killed in that situation. It was pure chance that the animal was so surprised by seeing us there that it gave us the time we needed to bolt out and get to the surface – otherwise we would have been history.
“You could have flipped a coin as to whether we lived or were killed in that situation”