Biceps win races, as Hunter McIntyre is fond of hashtagging – but lungs are pretty important, too. Here’s how the competitive fitness scene’s biggest character built an elite set of both
HOW I BUILT MY BODY
34:13 McINTYRE’S MURPH TIME
At his cabin in California, Hunter McIntyre sculpts his body with some unconventional tools. ‘The Sheriff’ – who set the men’s record for functional fitness race Hyrox this March, after winning the World Championships in 2020 and 2022 – chops logs, lifts stones and flips tyres. Sometimes, he throws an axe into a tree stump... while balancing on a unicycle.
McIntyre rarely pauses before charging head-on into the next challenge. When Men’s Health first spoke to him, back in 2020, he had recently broken the record for CrossFit hero WOD Murph. Shortly after, he began training to run the fastest marathon for a man over 200lb (90kg). In the end, he got hurt and realised, ‘I can’t have one ass and ride two horses.’
So, how does McIntyre ride the twin horses of strength and endurance, but not half-arse either? ‘Just periodisation, man.’ He alternates endurance blocks with strength, fully focusing on each in turn. A great week for McIntyre, when he’s not travelling, is six hours in the gym and 10 to 14 of cardio. Alongside training and competing, he also has a fitness platform, HAOS Training, and supplements brand BLDR.
When he speaks to MH from Boulder, Colorado, at the foot of the near-vertical Flat Iron mountains, McIntyre is gearing up for two hours on his single-speed bike, ‘Magnus the Mountain Slayer’, which builds ‘almost unstoppable’ physical and mental capacity– because if McIntyre doesn’t pedal, he falls off. In the gym, he’s working through a back squat cycle: pick a weight you think you’d be lucky to get 10 reps with, then don’t stop until you’ve done 20. You need an alter ego, says The Sheriff – one that comes out when necessary. He self-talks by relentlessly badmouthing himself, repeating only two or three words so he doesn’t get distracted. At school, teachers said his only life path was taking pills for his ADD; he ran, wrestled, drank, got arrested for stupid stuff. After rehab, he realised that, to be worthy of people’s time, he had to do something worthy with his.
54:07 McINTYRE’S HYROX WORLD RECORD
