Springsteen’s health regimen is simple, his physique attainable. Really.
Landon Hall
If you’ve ever attended a Bruce Springsteen concert, several bewildering thoughts run through your mind, faster than the tears that flow down the cheeks of grown men’s faces when The Boss performs “Thunder Road.”
The most obvious is this: How does he still do it? “It” meaning the whole joyous, spiritual, cathartic 31/2-hour ride he takes his followers on. The ride more than 16,000 fans went on at Honda Center in Anaheim on Tuesday, part of the E Street Band’s fall leg of the “Wrecking Ball” tour.
Hungry Heart
We know Springsteen works out regularly. And we know he swore off drugs from the start.
And what of the Springsteen diet? We know he eats at least a partly vegetarian diet these days. The website The Smoking Gun got hold of a copy of the contract Springsteen had with the venues played on the E Street Band’s 2002-03 tour. The contract rider outlines what food would be served backstage.
“All food and beverages are required to be of top quality and should be served and presented in the most appetizing manner possible,” the contract states.
On the menu:
•Homemade soup
•Quality (please no pressed/processed rolled meats) deli tray
•One bowl tuna (solid white in spring water) salad, light mayo
•Three entrees, including one vegetarian option
•One mixed green salad (no iceberg)
•One Caesar salad
•Two fresh seasonal vegetables
•One appropriate starch
Springsteen is 63, and he still belts out 30 songs a show. In between there is spirited running, leaping, strutting, diving into the crowd, and shouting at the top of his lungs in that old-time-tent-revival vernacular that brings the arena to full adrenaline rush and doesn’t let up. “Prove it All Night” isn’t just the next-to-last song on the “Darkness on the Edge of Town” album. It’s the way Springsteen lives every moment on stage.
Springsteen could not perform this kind of work if he hadn’t transformed his body nearly three decades ago – somewhere between the release of the solo album “Nebraska” (1982) and the blockbuster “Born in the U.S.A.” (1984) record, which catapulted Springsteen to a wider audience and made him an icon. He went from a spindly, 5-foot-10 fast-food junkie who was left exhausted after concerts to a 5-foot-10 power station – a trim, bulked-up sex symbol who could prove it all night and have enough energy to live an actual life in the daytime.
“When you’re in shape, you can have a life outside your job,” Springsteen’s trainer, Phil Dunphy, told Florida’s Sun-Sentinel newspaper in a story dated May 21, 1985. “But Bruce didn’t. After his performances, they used to have to carry him off stage.”
Dunphy somehow got Springsteen to start running. He got up to 4-6 miles a day, three days a week. For three other days during the week, Springsteen would work out on free weights or on weight machines in a gym.
And that’s remained his routine all these years, across nearly 30 years. Springsteen also eats a mostly vegetarian diet, and he’s never touched drugs. As a result, he remains “dispiritingly handsome, preposterously fit,” wrote David Remnick in his profile of Springsteen in The New Yorker from July of this year. Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen’s longtime friend and a guitarist in the E Street Band, said: “He has practically the same waist size as when I met him, when we were 15.”
Is that really possible? We all hear the conventional wisdom that, as we get older, we get thicker around the middle, chubbier in the jowls. Saggier, as gravity takes its toll. It’s inevitable. Right?
Not so. You can defy time as Springsteen has, even if you don’t have the vast resources of a rock star.
“It’s totally possible,” says Dr. David Heber, a professor of medicine at UCLA and director of its Risk Factor Obesity Program. If you exercise, eat a healthy diet and get enough sleep, letting yourself go isn’t a foregone conclusion, he says. A weight program is particularly important for women over 50, because as women get older their estrogen production falls, and the hormone influences muscle-building. Also, older people should lift weights because it helps strengthen bones.
“You can stay thin, you can stay lean, with healthy exercise and healthy diet,” Heber says. “In a way it turns back the clock, because we don’t look like our parents’ generation
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. A lot of us are looking younger at an older age.”
In Remnick’s profile, Springsteen divulged that he had battled depression for some 30 years, trying to heal emotional scars from his childhood experiences. His father, an often out-of-work bus driver, was an alcoholic who sometimes beat Springsteen.
“My parents’ struggles, it’s the subject of my life,” Springsteen said. “It’s the thing that eats at me and always will. My life took a very different course, but my life is an anomaly. Those wounds stay with you, and you turn them into a language and a purpose.”
Another UCLA physician, Dr. Nick Shamie, a spine surgeon and expert in orthopedic medicine at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, says Springsteen’s revelation shows how connected a person’s mental health is to physical health.
“The exercise keeps his mental health, but he’s also dealt with it by seeking therapy,” Shamie said.
“Because if he didn’t treat his mental health, he would end up like Whitney Houston. That’s an unfortunate example how an unhealthy lifestyle can not only affect your health, but mentally. So you have to have a balanced life, balanced athleticism, balanced diet, balanced exercise regimen, and a balanced mental state. And I think Bruce Springsteen is a smart guy, but he’s also lucky. He’s lucky he’s recognized what he needs to do. We can work toward that.”
Another tip from the Springsteen workout: Get exercise wherever you are. Springsteen performed in Portland, Ore., last week, and for two days in a row he was spotted at a 24 Hour Fitness.
Not at some private gym, but out in the open.
That’s our guy.
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