‘I’m serious now’ – Joe Wicks on his father’s heroin addiction and why he’s not taking his shirt off for magazine covers anymore

Joe Wicks opens up to Kirsty Blake Knox about mental health, his father’s heroin addiction and why he’s quit stripping off

Joe Wicks wants to have an impact on mental health. Photo: Hamish Brown

Kirsty Blake Knox

"I’m on my way to have lunch with the Happy Pear twins,” Joe Wicks tells me. The Greystones boys are over in London for the week and Joe is very excited about it. “I love them. I love them so much,” he says. “I still don’t know the difference between the two of them. I just look at them and go, ‘Alright boys?’.”

He is a top geezer, is Joe Wicks. Full of puppy-ish enthusiasm, polite and impossible not to like. The fitness guru has built up a health empire over the past 10 years with 11 million social media followers, podcasts, bestselling books, TV appearances and tours.