Singer Ed Sheeran talks about his 30 lb weight loss in the most recent edition of Men’s Health!
The evolution began pre-Covid, when Sheeran put a cross trainer in his basement and developed the habit of answering emails while clocking up some calories. The artist famously doesn’t own a phone, so email is his only form of communication, and being one of the most in-demand artists on the planet means he has a fair bit of correspondence to get through.
‘I went down in my basement and I answered my emails for two hours and just plodded,’ he explains. ‘In my mind I was like, that’s fine, I’m not on a treadmill, I’m not killing myself. I’m getting to do something I’ll be doing anyway, but I’m keeping active. So I guess that was my introduction.’
The next phase took place during the pandemic and involved overcoming a mental barrier Sheeran had to doing weights. ‘In my mind, I always thought, I don’t want to look like Arnie,’ he says.
He soon connected with PT Ali Thomas who went to the same school as Sheeran and convinced him otherwise. ‘Ali… when you see him, he’s so small but he can deadlift way more than I can. I looked at that and thought maybe I’m wrong about weights.’
Sheeran and his wife Cherry, a former pro hockey player who knows her way round a weight room herself, started doing Zoom sessions with Ali. The PT struck the right balance of easing Sheeran into the lifestyle without going too hard, too early and risking alienating him.
‘I didn’t feel fucked while I was doing it. You’d do eight reps and you’d have a break and then you’d do eight reps and then you’d have a break. So it was a bit more of a relaxed thing getting into it.’
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