Does RFK Even Lift, Bro?
An investigation—and a thought experiment.
Since Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appears poised to be confirmed in the coming days as the nations’s top health official, and because other, more urgent news has overwhelmed me, I want to home in on something completely different.
RFK has many bad ideas about making people healthy. If they were good ideas, he wouldn’t have tried to recant them with his fingers crossed behind his back at his confirmation hearings.
But among his good ideas are two I live by: First, that exercise promotes longevity; second, that resistance training in particular (if done carefully, with good instruction and proper form) can slow certain symptoms of aging: muscle atrophy, restricted joint mobility, bone fragility, etc.
People will make all kinds of ridiculous or speculative claims about the risks and benefits of exercise, but I think these two are broadly accurate.
They also raise a reasonable question: Is RFK actually practicing what he preaches? We know he had his own children inoculated with the same vaccines he’s discouraged millions of parents from administering. It’s reasonable to wonder whether he adheres to the other tenets of MAHA.
The answer, it turns out, is more complicated than it seems!
Ok, not that much more complicated. The simple version is yes, RFK does even lift, bro. I knew this going in, because a video of him exercising at an outdoor gym dressed in blue jeans went viral about a year and a half ago, and I made fun of him for it. Partly because of the blue jeans, but mostly because he just doesn’t lift super well.
We can evaluate this by reference to his form, strength, and physique.
FORM
As I suggested above, RFK’s form is generally quite bad. His best showing, at least based on my dive through about a dozen online videos, is this set of incline bench presses.
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That’s decent form. Especially so, when you account for his apparent history of rotator-cuff injuries. The only odd thing about it is his spotter. There’s no shame in using a spotter, even if you’re very experienced, but (as I’ll detail below) that isn’t a lot of weight. And yet in the second half of the set, the spotter is doing more work than he should, possibly a lot more work than he should. If he’s overcompensating for RFK’s weakness, then all it tells us is that RFK can demonstrate good form under very light load.
The rest of the online evidence supports that conclusion. For instance, this video of him doing 20 pull-ups is actually a video of him doing zero pull-ups.
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His arms never fully extend at the bottom, he never once clears the bar with his chin let alone reach it with his chest, and he uses his lower body to generate momentum. This still requires some strength, and suggests to me that he can probably do a handful of strict pull-ups through a full range of motion, or with assistance from a resistance band. But first he’d have to get someone to help him learn how to recruit his latissimus muscles. There are a couple ways to do strict pull ups with good form, but in every high-quality demonstration, you’ll notice back muscles doing nearly all of the work, both through how they contract and how the athlete seems to try to pull their elbows together behind them.
Now this guy, Paul Sklar, is an unusually gifted athlete, and he’s “only” in his 50s. RFK is 71. He was 69 and 70 when he filmed most of his online workout videos. Accounting for his age, I could overlook the pseudo pull-ups, and even his penchant for denim (a choice that underscores his poor form, because if you exercise through full range of motion in jeans, they’re liable to rip). All forgivable. But I can not forgive these…well, his fans call them push-ups.
Or these bicep…swings? And leg…bouncies?
There may be some minor utility in doing certain movements through half- or quarter-range of motion. A vain person might do them to generate a “pump”—that is, to get blood flowing to the muscles so they appear swollen and vascular before hitting the beach or the pool. A serious lifter will sometimes train partial reps to build strength through weak parts of their range of motion. But I suspect RFK’s just not very good at them—that he’s weak in the end range and trying to move more weight than he safely can at his level of strength. As the kids might say, he’s giving more Ruth Bader-Ginsburg than Arnold Schwarzenegger.
STRENGTH
I know what you’re asking: Is RFK strong, despite his form problems? Has all this (bad) lifting paid off with any functional benefit?
It’s hard to say, in part because of his form problems, which in general (but not in every instance) would tend to overstate his strength. Someone who can actually do 20 consecutive strict pull-ups is very strong. Someone jerking up and down while hanging from a bar isn’t necessarily.
It’s harder still because there’s a large genetic component to strength, and a large consistency-of-effort component to it, and they’re both offset by aging, particularly in men older than 45 or 50. Go back to that incline bench press, where he looks most proficient. From the perspective of someone almost 30 years younger than he is, that’s not a lot of weight. Eyeballing, it looks like 115 lbs. And when that video hit the internet, a lot of people understandably mocked him for taking pride in lifting such an unimpressive load.
On the other hand, it is almost certainly more weight than the average 70 year old American man can move. But judging by his physique (more below) and his public comments about his exercise habits, he’s not average. He claims to have been working out consistently for a very long time. Decades. So is he strong for a 70 year old with lifelong dedication to strength training? Since I don’t know the answer I’ll be generous and say most men should be happy to have that much strength at his age—but I’d also guess that he’s below potential for someone of his experience and wealth, and we can probably chalk some of that up to poor execution, injury, and maybe the brain worm.
HIS BODY, HIS SELF
We have here a man who lifts, but not very competently, and who may be relatively strong for his age, but was either never that strong, or has lost a great deal of strength with years.
Once again, I know what you’re asking: How can he look so jacked if his muscles aren’t super functional and he isn’t stimulating them very well?
The answer to that question is steroids.
This isn’t speculation. There’s a whole, weird subculture in fitness social media, where over-competitive gym rats opine at length on whether this or that other fitness influencer is juicing or natural. “Natty,” as they say. But that’s not a fun game. I know RFK is on steroids because he said so. Specifically he claims to take testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), under the watchful eye of his doctor. He says of his regimen, “I don’t take any steroids,” but testosterone is a steroid hormone, even if it’s available by prescription at much lower doses than people who really abuse steroids use.
And assuming that’s all true (that he has a good doctor, and follows that doctor’s orders, with the narrow goal of averting the health and quality-of-life consequences of low testosterone) I see no problem or reason to sneer. I don’t even really care if RFK has a quack doctor who’s supplying him with much higher doses of TRT than his baseline testosterone levels indicate. The health risks of juicing are well known, and the people who choose to do it anyhow take the risks because their baseline physicality is unsatisfying to them and leaves them in distress. It’s actually very human, which is why his supporters don’t view it as hypocrisy.
But I do find something disheartening about them and their selective compassion. About who they treat with generosity of spirit, who they don’t, and why.
There is enormous overlap in our new political alignment between the admirers of middle-aged and older men who use steroids (RFK, Joe Rogan, Sylvester Stallone) and people who are obsessed with and judgmental of transgender people.
This is only an analogy, not a comparison. The psychology of male aging is not the same thing as gender dysphoria. But the analogy becomes clear when you ask physically active older men like RFK why they take or contemplate taking steroids of any kind.
RFK describes it euphemistically (or, rather, with a bit of tossed-off charlatanism) as part of an “anti-aging” regimen. (I assure you he is still aging.) But what it usually means (and I say it with some confidence because it’s occurred to me, too) is that he wants the attributes and capabilities of his younger body back. He in some sense feels that the 25 or 35 or even 45 year old version of himself is the true expression of Robert F. Kennedy.
Bracket politics, and RFK’s record of deception, bracket every question you have about whether he believes the bad ideas he propounds or not: I sympathize with this psychological yearning.
I’m only at the very beginning of the downslope, 12 years on from the end of my 20s, but they feel like yesterday, and it’s jarring to suddenly notice muscles becoming more rigid, mobility more limited, recovery more prolonged.
There’s nothing wrong with it—it’s natural because aging is natural—but so too is the physiological nostalgia that comes along with it. Plastic surgery isn’t natural, and the social pressures that drive demand for plastic surgery aren’t natural, but ‘wanting to look and feel like I did at peak physical performance’ is totally natural.
And so it would be an easy measure of grace for people over 40 who’ve been swayed by ideas bouncing around the man-o-sphere—who might admire RFK, but have been made suspicious of “gender ideology”—to mine their own internal nostalgia for empathy.
If you’ve experienced it, then you know what it feels like to find your own body becoming alien. You know how psychologically taxing it can be. You know that it’s enough to make people inject themselves with powerful hormones and carve up their flesh. It’s enough to cause severe depression and other kinds of psychological crises. If you can grasp that, because you’ve experienced it personally or watched it happen to a spouse, you should be able to understand why your neighbor changed his name from Jane to John, or why your child’s classmate has begun inquiring about puberty blockers.
Why would you participate in tormenting defenseless strangers, just because the way they feel alienated from their bodies is slightly different from the way you feel alienated from yours? To be consistent, should we deny prisoners access to fitness equipment? Should we kick middle-aged men who use TRT out of the military? Should we disqualify RFK on the grounds that his steroid use is incompatible with “an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle”?
I don’t think RFK should be Health and Human Services secretary, and I don’t think he’s led an honorable, truthful, or disciplined life. But his desire to reclaim youth through medications prescribed by his doctor has nothing to do with it.
I really enjoyed this, start to finish. I especially appreciated the last part.
I often think about the double standards of body modification. Transgender people are fighting to retain the right to modify their bodies with the same drugs and surgeries that are available to everyone else.
“Trans people need to learn to appreciate the sex assigned to them by God almighty.”
Why not, “This woman needs to learn appreciate the small breasts assigned to her by God almighty.” Same for people who think their noses are too big, jawlines too soft, stomachs too flabby, butts too big or too small.
Bodily autonomy shouldn’t apply only to some.
Thank you for writing this!
This is a great dissection -- interesting and truthful. And, body dysmophia comes in many ways to many people in -- RFK Jr. after decades of abusing his body with heroin is now addicted to TRT; Musk is addicted to Ketamine. And so what. But, the lack of empathy--of awareness is notable. Transgenderism --so what.
Sidenote: the phony lifts, the jerking the bar up and down is classic -- and really a 'tell'. Fun break from all of this other firehose of awful news--but, makes the point: RFK Jr., like all of them, is a grifter and a con man.