MAT FRASER
CROSSFIT LEGEND
The five-time CrossFit champion’s surprise retirement doesn’t mean he’s about to slow down. He explains why true fitness is for life
In the early days of his surprise retirement, Mat Fraser was suddenly a very busy man. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. In an exclusive interview, the most successful individual CrossFit athlete in the gruelling sport’s history spoke to Men’s Health between a day of wall-towall calls about his new, no doubt soon to be successful, ventures. The king is not dead. All hail the king
At the end of October 2020, Mat Fraser won his fifth consecutive CrossFit Games title. With the pandemic raging, the Games had been delayed multiple times, changing venues from the
Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin, to a family ranch in Aromas, California. The competitive field of 40 men, 40 women and 40 teams that had been the norm for the past decade was reduced to just five men and five women – and there were no spectators. It was different in almost every way.
Yet, for Fraser, it was business as usual. He won a record 10 events and finished second in the other two by the smallest of margins. His points total of 1,150 was almost double that of the second-place athlete. He also set records in career event wins and consecutive event wins and was the first person to lead the CrossFit Games from start to finish. His fifth title passed Rich Froning Jr’s tally of four, previously considered unassailable. The mantle of “the Fittest Man in History” had a new pair of rippling shoulders upon which to rest.
Then, at the beginning of February 2021, Fraser announced his immediate retirement. After the most dominant performance in the most dominant run in the sport of fitness, the high king of CrossFit vacated the throne. Men’s Health called him at his current home in Cookeville, Tennessee, to find out why he has hung up his training shoes, how you can apply his fitness principles to your own lifestyle – and who he is backing to be the next CrossFit Games champion.
Men’s Health: What have you been doing today? Have you swapped your Metcons for a pair of slippers yet? Mat Fraser: Ha! No. We’re only back at home for 32 hours before taking off again. So, from 6am to 8pm today, it’s been a phone call organising something, every hour, on the hour. Your eyes feel like they’re bleeding from video calls, and you’re just staring at a screen, talking to yourself in a room. How do people do this for a living all the time? MH: Your announcement that you were retiring came as a surprise to the CrossFit community and wider public. When did you decide?
MF: I actually decided I was going to retire after the 2019 CrossFit Games. A few people around me were, like, “Hey, Mat, when does training start again?” I told them, “Oh, no, I’m done!’’ Some good friends spoke to me, and they all said I would regret doing it. They basically coerced me into the idea that doing one more year would be the right decision.
So, I knew the whole of the 2020 season that it was my last. I was just trying to get some ducks in a row before announcing it. I wanted to take the time to step away. I never want to make a decision when I’m in the middle of it, so I know that it’s not just because I’m sore and tired of all the training. Once it was a sure thing, it was a case of making the calls to the people who I didn’t want to find out on Instagram.
MH: For obvious reasons, 2020 was not a typical year for competitive CrossFit athletes, and the season underwent a raft of changes and delays as the pandemic developed. How hard was it to stay the course? MF: Oh, my God. It was brutal. Usually, we’ll have a 12- to 16-week build-up and taper for the Games. We start building our base, then scale things up. Four weeks out from the Games, we were told that it was delayed for three more weeks, so we had no other option than to jump back a step in our training and begin peaking and tapering again… Only for the Games to get pushed back another three weeks! Then, we got told that the Games were going to be between this date and this date – and then we didn’t have a date. Not only was training tough, but in the back of my mind was the fact that this was my last year. “What if it doesn’t happen? What if this whole year of training was for nothing? Will I have to do my last year another year?”
MH: When you crossed the finishing line in the final event to win your fifth consecutive title, you did so hand in hand with your training partner and female champion Tia-Clair Toomey. Did that make up for the slog of such a long season?
“My sole purpose was to train, eat, sleep, compete. Now I just want a change of pace”
MF: Yeah, I knew that was my last moment being on the competition floor. So, crossing the finishing line with Tia was special. Immediately seeing O’Keefe [Matt O’Keefe, Fraser’s agent] and giving him a hug, you know? My whole career, before and after every single event, I got a hug from O’Keefe. He’s the one in the warm-up area with me. He’s the one in the coaches’ area with me. At the Games this year, there were no spectators allowed, and that included [Fraser’s fiancée] Sammy. But for the final event, I think every athlete had someone else there who wasn’t nominated as their coach. They set up a tent on the other side of the field, so we didn’t have any contact with them, and I didn’t know she was there.
After we were done, O’Keefe told me, “Sammy’s over there!” I turned to one of the officials and asked if I could go over. They were, like, “Be quick, though. Don’t make a big scene out of it.” It was really special being able to share that moment with the people who have been through all the shitty times with me.
For me, not having a crowd there is in my wheelhouse. Whether it’s Tia and I training together, or if I’m working out on my own, there’s not much company around; no music. When you’re in the gym for six to eight hours a day and you have music blaring, it gets old quickly. I want quiet while I train. I want to listen to my breathing. I like to listen to the suffering. Not having a crowd, not having music – it didn’t change much for me. I was right at home.
MH: “Hard work pays off ” (HWPO) has become more than your trademark slogan – it’s become your ethos. It has paid off for you, but is the “hard work” bit over now? MF: Nah, it’s just a case of moving the focus onto something else. I can talk about this now, because we’ve just released my training programme. Once I sat down to write and I got into my flow state, I figured out what would work best in terms of fitting all of this stuff into the week for other people.
I’m assuming that they have a job, or they’re in school, or they have other priorities. I’m in a very unique position where I can just train. I have a 16-hour window to get my stuff done, whereas most people really don’t.
It was a big task. But I never want to compromise on anything. I’m able to apply that hard work, just in a different way. I was joking with [CrossFit media analyst] Pat Sherwood on a call with him earlier today, and I was saying how nice it is to get to work hard and dedicate myself to something without gasping for air the entire time. I’m not under incredible physical strain, but I’m still getting to put that work in. And I hope that never goes away. I hope the fear of failure never leaves me. I hope the criticisms never stop.
I got my first dose of criticism today about my programming, actually. My first instinct was to be upset. But then I thought: “Good!” I don’t perform well when people aren’t criticising me. I’ve had people criticising me my whole career, and I use it to my advantage. MH: What sort of athlete is your programming aimed at?
MF: I’ve set it up to be scalable, and
I’m not trying to cater to the top 1%, or the Games athletes, or anything like that. I’d say it’s for people who are just trying to be better and build a good foundation. Subscribers will be implementing tools and progressions that I’ve used consistently for the past five years, and it’s stuff that I’ve never shared, because I didn’t want my competitors seeing it and applying it to themselves.
It’s shocking how many Games athletes or top-level people post their training on their Instagram. I’ve always played my cards very close to my chest, because I talk to people outside of the CrossFit space to get advice on specific things, and I have a couple of tools in my gym that I’ve never allowed to be on camera. I’ve worked with certain coaches who I’ve never publicised, because I didn’t want my competitors also reaching out to them, asking for the same advice.
MH: Do you feel that you can switch off after your day in a way that you couldn’t when you were competing? MF: Not really, to be honest. When I close the laptop at 7pm and go down to eat, I’m straight back up in my office, printing things out, going through it with a fine-tooth comb, and I’m sending it to friends or other athletes who I know aren’t following a specific routine right now. I’m doing all the programming to test it, but I want to know how long it takes other people. What may take me an hour may take someone else two hours, so I’m really trying to find that balance in everything. I still have the same problem I’ve always had: when I close my eyes in bed at night, my mind goes, “Alright! This is when we’re going to figure out all of your problems!” The wheels are always turning. But this morning, I woke up at 6am, hopped out of bed and felt great.
MH: In your photo shoot for us, you look truly relaxed. Is that because you knew that you were about to retire, or is that your normal way of unwinding before a new season starts?
MF: Yeah, my off-season is a true off-season. I find it comical when people take a rest day and call it “active recovery”, then run a 5K, or row a 10K. I’m thinking, “Dude, your body needs rest. What are you doing?” For my off-season, maybe the first week is for my body. You know the Games are brutal – they just kick your ass, chew you up and spit you out. But six days after the Games, your body has pretty much recovered. All the time after that is a mental break. For me, it was because I knew what I was about to put my body through for the next nine months. It was daunting: when I started a workout, I was scared because I knew how much it was going to hurt. I knew
“It’s nice to get to work hard without gasping for air the entire time”
how far I would try to push my body physically. So, I would intentionally stay up late; intentionally indulge in foods I wouldn’t usually eat. I’d allow myself to relax to the point where I craved that structure again. I would deliberately get a little bit chubby, so that I wasn’t happy with who I saw in the mirror and was excited to get back in the gym. You’d get to see the progress and taste that gratification of being able to pull on the rower a bit faster each time. For the life of me, I don’t know why other athletes don’t do that.
MH: Is there anything else that you think you did differently to your competitors that set you apart?
MF: Over the past few years, I’ve put time and effort into giving back to my body what I’m taking out of it. Going into the Games last year, my body felt way better than it did in 2015. I used to trash myself and demanded everything out of myself without giving anything back. I’ve been working with TB12 – Tom fucking Brady, baby! – and we’d fly one of his original body work people to Tennessee. Every other week, he’d stay with us for three nights and, between every training session, I’d get a full session of physical therapy.
MH: Sounds nice. Is there anything that you are going to be pleased to see the back of ?
MF: Are there things that I’m not going to miss? I mean, hell – there’s a laundry list. I had an amazing career, but you’ve got to take the good with the bad. There’s a lot of things that you’re almost forced to do. You don’t get to pick your boss, really, and you often don’t get to pick the people you work with. Over the past couple of years, there were a lot of people who had ill intent, and there’s nothing you could do about it. You just had to shrug your shoulders and think that the pros outweighed the cons and I was going to go with it. Especially in the past three years or so. They’ve changed the structure every time: how you qualify, where you qualify, how many people make it to the Games, cuts to the field, changes to the scoring system.
I also won’t miss the fact that if
I didn’t get a full 10 hours of sleep, my day would be pooched. Last night, I had six hours, then I woke up and
I was ready to go. Whereas if I was in training and woke up an hour early, or stayed up an hour late, it would just
snowball into the next day, and the day after that.
MH: Will you miss competing?
MF: I will miss it so much. I was about to say that I will miss the relationships, but those aren’t going anywhere. If anything, they’re going to become stronger. There’s a bunch of competitors who I consider good friends but I’ve not felt like I can fully talk about my day with them. I didn’t want to tell them my mental state, my training tools, my training tactics; all that stuff. But now, I want to help them. If I have a tip, or something cool that I’ve done in my training, I want to share that with them. MH: After eight years, seven podiums and five titles, what would you tell the Mat Fraser walking into his first CrossFit session?
MF: How to coordinate your training so that you’re not hitting the same muscle groups day after day. That it’s not about bouncing your body off the rev limiter. You should not be a puddle of yourself every single day. I see it all the time in programming or in gyms, where you’re asked to work up to a heavy single for the day and it’s your third time maxing out in a week. That’s a terrible idea! I would show myself how to take care of my body. I was very late in life before I learned the value of a good night’s sleep and a cup of water.
MH: It’s rare in sport for an athlete to retire when they’re still so dominant. Was the plan always to go out on top? MF: I was lucky to have had that as an option. It would be different if we were all on NBA- or NFL-type money. That can persuade someone to stay on the field or court longer than they should. I did it with my weightlifting career and didn’t go out the way I wanted to. I accomplished what I wanted in CrossFit. I’ll still be involved as much as the community wants me to be. It was just time to stop being selfish when it comes to my training, my travelling, my nutrition, my recovery… everything. MH: What is your next venture now that your programming is out there? Your new YouTube channel, Fra5er, clocked up 115,000 subscribers after only two videos. Is that your focus? MF: The YouTube channel was the first project that we took on and we still have four or five projects on the go. I hope people see the other side of me. We stayed with some friends in December,
and one pulled Sammy aside and said, “Wow! Mat’s a lot more cheerful than I thought. He’s cracking jokes all the time. I didn’t think that side existed!” I hope the YouTube channel shows that, and the camera is going to be there with us in the gym when I have nothing on the line, so I’m not going to be stressed out if something doesn’t go perfectly. I can just have fun with it again.
I’ve said no to a tonne of opportunities for years because my sole purpose was to train, eat, sleep and compete. I just want a change of pace. There’s a lot of opportunities knocking on the door. I’m sure there will be high points and low points, like when I’m watching all of my friends compete and when someone else gets crowned the new champion. I’d be naive to think that’s not going to be hard. I’m using that as motivation to build something that I’m excited about away from the competition floor, so that when somebody else is dubbed “the fittest on Earth”, I’m not just sobbing in the corner.
MH: Who would you like to see do well and take your vacated title?
MF: One of the first people I talked to after I put up my retirement post was Pat Vellner. If he can pull it together, he is one of the best competitors out there. His last two years haven’t lined up the way he or other people expected it to. But he’s one of the very best.
I’d also take a lot of pleasure seeing [2020 CrossFit Games rookie of the year and third-place finisher] Justin Medeiros do well. After the podium ceremony, I gave him my phone number and told him to call me with any questions. He has a lot of potential. I’ve always been a fan of Björgvin Karl Guðmundsson, too. He’s the full package. I’m excited to watch the athletes compete, take notes and see how they progress. It’ll be fun to be a fan and to make it to some events.
MH: What are you doing next?
MF: We need to pack up this house, because we’re moving back to Vermont. It’s going to be one epic garage sale, then a lot of moving weights and dumbbells.
MH: I imagine your neighbours will be interested in buying some of your home gym kit…
MF: No way are they getting any of it. It’s our other stuff that’ll get sold off!