Shaquille O’Neal. Image via: Rob Kim/Getty Images
Lifting takes between 30 and 45 minutes a day, which brings the total to about an hour. He counts 28 others who died as well. He called 2020 a really bad year and said he did not feel like doing anything.
O’Neal lost his sister, Ayesha Harrison-Jex, and then former Lakers teammate Kobe Bryant.
He has said his arms feel good and young. O’Neal has described the same split in his own terms. Twenty minutes of cardio, then chest, biceps, triceps, sit-ups and back, and he is done. High reps suit what he likes most about training, the pump, especially in the biceps. The old routine leaned hard on bread. O’Neal has called himself a sandwich guy, with one for lunch, one for dinner and another as a snack. During his playing days the menu was McDonald’s burgers or a turkey club with extra mayo and two pineapple sodas. The turn came after a rough stretch. When you have no energy to do anything but need to stay out of trouble, he explained, food and streaming are the two options.
What goals has O’Neal set for himself?
The targets he shared in 2021 were specific. O’Neal wanted to get down to 350 pounds and be lean enough to post a shirtless photo on Instagram for his 50th birthday in March.
The seven-footer sleeps through the night now, has more energy and says he wants to train all the time. Perfection was never the goal. O’Neal still dislikes vegetables and still snacks, only in moderation. He was also trying to get soda out of his life. The changes showed up away from the scale too. His simpler fitness goal was to keep his stomach from hanging over his belt. He joked about avoiding what he calls the over-the-belt Barkley, a nod to his Inside the NBA colleague Charles Barkley, who trades jabs with him about weight.
A decade after retiring, the four-time champion weighed more than 322 pounds. He has put his pandemic weight near 415, up from 325 as a player. He also went to a doctor on his own for the first time in his life, about two years before a 2021 interview. In 2021, O’Neal swapped late-night snacks for balanced meals and regular workouts after scrolling past one Instagram post.
“I saw this 70-year-old guy on there, and he had muscles everywhere,” he said. The scale followed. The doctor had a list of things to fix, and snacking was on it. The spark came from social media. He decided to switch things up.