I Tried Lenny Kravitz’s Insane, Uncanny Workout

Looking at a shirtless Lenny Kravitz is like staring at the sun. Nothing about his body makes sense. The man is 60 years old with the physique of a Roman centurion: His abs are shredded with an uncomfortable degree of fidelity, and he has a legit resting eight-pack complementing the rigid V-lines angling toward his crotch. The rest of Kravitz’s frame is less impressive than his indomitable core, but he still has big, veiny rock star arms built to pulsate and flex while he holds a guitar. Kravitz has sold over 40 million records, and it seems likely that at least some parts of his ridiculous, hyperreal torso are the results of rich-guy biohacking, like Elon Musk’s miraculously regrowing a full head of hair. But there’s no doubt that Lenny Kravitz busts his ass in the gym with the sort of beguiling, acrobatic, and downright sensual weightlifting routines that only someone of his grandeur would embrace. I know because I’ve seen his Instagram.

Yes, mixed between the album promos and red-carpet thirst traps on Kravitz’s grid, he occasionally likes to showcase how he got so swole. These uploads tend to catch Lenny in his basic essence, in the sense that they are wildly uncanny. Here, for instance, is Kravitz jumping rope on a checkered kitchen floor strapped to some sort of weighted fanny pack. Elsewhere, you can find him dressed in bell-bottoms and—I’m assuming—$10,000 designer shades, doing some outrageously dexterous full-body pullups on a set of Olympic rings fastened, inexplicably, to a California-style patio. (In both videos, Kravitz has superimposed his own music over the audio, establishing a psychic connection between incredible abs and “Fly Away.”)

This is all par for the course for a man who has spent the past 40 years sporting a mesh top and ginormous platinum crucifixes. Did you really think that Lenny Kravitz worked out like you do? In a gray T-shirt and voluminous basketball shorts? Please. Kravitz can never, and will never, miss an opportunity to demonstrate his high-fidelity sex appeal. And yet, despite the culture’s lofty expectations for Kravitz’s extravagance, there is one exercise on his Instagram that left me gobsmacked. Lenny is lying on a workout bench arched to a steep decline and gripping a barbell loaded with many pounds of plates. He has on a see-through purple muscle shirt, leather pants, sunglasses, and heeled black dress shoes, despite being in the middle of a fluorescent-lit Equinox. Kravitz hoists the loaded bar off the ground in a situp motion and presses it above his shoulders before returning it to the floor in one liquid movement. It is, without a doubt, one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen someone do with a hunk of iron—none of his rock star paraphernalia slows him down in the slightest. He is showing off more strength than I’ve ever possessed, while simultaneously looking as if he just finished a double encore at Glastonbury.

I was envious, so much so that I needed to try Kravitz’s workout for myself. No matter how impressive the feat is, he’s still a 60-year-old man, right? I figured I should be able to at least approximate his routine, and maybe that would kick-start my own eight-pack journey. But there were still a few things I needed to verify before I took the dive. First, it has been well reported that Kravitz leads a strange life. The man has reportedly subsisted on all-raw diets for months at a time, and he has been celibate for the past nine years, with plans to continue that abstention until his next marriage. This is to say, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Kravitz had also cooked up his own bespoke weightlifting motions that shouldn’t be replicated by others, under any circumstances, if they wish to avoid injury. But thankfully, that isn’t the case. According to Ian Douglass, a fitness expert and writer, the exercise Kravitz is performing in that Instagram video is a little extreme but totally legitimate.

“He’s doing a barbell pullover decline situp, with an overhead press at the end. It’s a major time-saver of a compound movement which would hit your pecs and delts,” said Douglass. “It isn’t something I’ve ever advised someone to do, but if you want to get an efficient workout and get out as quickly as possible, it’s certainly an option.”

Kravitz himself confirmed Douglass’ analysis in an interview with the Guardian earlier this year. The paper raised the question of his baffling workouts, and Kravitz replied that he often gets a pump in “street clothes,” right after attending to all of his other Kravitzian duties that require him to be in full costume (rehearsals, long walks on the beach, feasts of leafy vegetables plucked straight from the garden). In other words, those Instagram posts were unscripted and unposed—Kravitz really does live like this, which was the green light I needed. The next day, I shopped for my own knockoff Lenny outfit, called up a friend to be my spotter, and made plans to hit the gym in the basement of my building to match the grind of a god.

My Amazon order consisted of a cheap pair of lithe imitation-leather pants and a snug fishnet top. I paired those with some Doc Marten booties, and, assembled together, I had an outfit that would be perfect for the red-light districts of Central Europe. But who was I to judge? Kravitz’s methods may be unconventional, but at 60 he has the type of body I would’ve killed for at 22. There is clearly a method to his madness, even if I was already harboring concerns about my total range of motion as the pants, slowly but surely, created an airtight seal against my skin.

Here is my No. 1 takeaway after working out like Lenny Kravitz. That man might be the strongest human being on the planet. I’m not sure if anyone comes close. I’m far from a gym rat, but I do know what I’m doing with a barbell and a couple of free weights. I can reliably get my body weight off the rack, I have watched a lot of YouTube videos about protein intake and squat forms, and after a particularly fruitful afternoon in the lab, I can at least give off the illusion of someone with muscle definition—you know, before my arms deflate down to their resting positions. So, let me tell you that when a friend and I jury-rigged a weight bench to resemble the sharp decline from which Kravitz was doing his barbell situps, fear began to bloom in my gut: I was about to be exposed and humiliated by a man twice my age.

Together, my friend and I loaded up about 80 pounds onto an EZ bar. This was likely a fraction of what Kravitz had been lifting on Instagram, but given how unconventional the exercise was, we wanted to start small. My friend stood at the other end of the bench and grabbed tightly onto my boots, while I stared up at him through the milky lenses of my sunglasses. (Remember, for reasons I will never understand, Lenny always seems to exercise with shades on, even when they appear to threaten his equilibrium.) I was contending with two challenges here. Lifting a loaded bar over your head while nearly upside-down, without the support of the rest of your body, is really hard. But more existentially, we weren’t equipped with Kravitz’s equipment. If you watch the video on his Instagram, you’ll see that he’s completing the motion with a platform specifically designed to keep his feet locked into place, providing him with a good amount of sturdiness.

Meanwhile, I was in a chintzy home gym with no such Equinox-style expertise whatsoever available to me. This meant that I needed to keep my balance on a precarious, slippery downward-sloping bench, trusting my friend—who is very much not a personal trainer—not to lose his grip on my legs while I maneuvered the weight. If any of those factors were fumbled, there was a good chance I’d be tumbling to the ground with a shattered esophagus. These were high stakes.

Unfortunately, the very moment I heaved that curling bar off the ground, everything went horribly wrong. My back began to slip down the bench, causing the bar to tilt off its axis and into the unknown. I believe I managed to get one terrified “Oh shit!” out before ditching the weight, evading a severe gym-related accident. We needed to reconsider our approach, and after messing with the dimensions of the bench a bit, we shamefully conceded and squared down the plates to something even lighter. I slipped on some dinkier plates, reducing the total mass of the bar to around 50 pounds—maybe a tenth of what Kravitz had been working with—and got to work. This was much better. I was able to dedicate the bulk of my focus to keeping steady on the bench. The weight itself was more of a formality. At last, I was re-creating Kravitz’s exercise without the fear of paralysis.

Nothing about this process was comfortable. Leather pants are oppressively cinched in any context, and they’re made even more uncomfortable when you’re completing an outrageously precise exercise circuit. Sunglasses—while vital on a run or in the middle of a decadent outdoor yoga class—can practically blind you in the sepia lighting of a subterranean gym. (I didn’t mind the fishnet top, though. I expect to be wearing that thing at workouts all summer.) Also, even with the comparatively tiny amount of weight I was lifting relative to Lenny’s haul, I can confirm that the “barbell pullover decline situp, with an overhead press at the end” wiped me out. It is too complex, is too nimble, and hits too many muscles at once for my feeble mind to comprehend. The discipline to maintain form on the triceps pulldown machine can sometimes overwhelm my faculties. I had no shot.

I suppose that brings me back to my biggest takeaway from the experience. Lenny Kravitz and I are truly built different. I knew that subconsciously before I attempted to work out like him, but the biophysical proof—to live within my inferiority—was sobering. Do one set in the Kravitz plan, and you’ll be convinced that the man will live till he’s 150. Personally, I’ll be sticking with the yeoman’s squat rack, dressed in my T-shirts and basketball shorts, now and forever.