24 menshealth.com.au
A
TACTICSHAMMERED: THE
TRAINING THAT LETS
YOUDOTHISTAKESA
TOLL ON YOUR BODY.“Your kids don’t care how big your guns
are or how much you can squat”
says some players take their NRL
careers for granted: “They get
into first grade and think they’ve
made it.” Not MacDougall, who
played 195 NRL games over 16
years and won two premierships
while never once feeling
complacent. “I ripped in,” he says.
“I played ever y game like it was
my last.”
Which made sense, because
the end often looked nigh.
Twenty-five times he went
under the knife, including nine
ops on his left knee. “People
ask me what my
best achievement
was. For me, it
was overcoming
setbacks,” he says.
“Winning grand
finals and playing
for your country
were great, but the
thing I’m most
proud of is that
there were times
when the doctors
told me I’d never play again and I
would always come back.”
The entrepreneurship
started from a condition his
mother placed on his pursuing
football: he would have to go to
university. She hoped for a single
qualification. But MacDougall
developed an insatiable thirst
for learning. While many of his
fellow players whittled away
their free hours on PlayStation,
MacDougall studied... for
20 years. As well as a bunch
of diplomas in exercise and
sports performance, he has
Masters degrees in business
administration and business
coaching. In no small way these
have been the making of him.
When he retired in 2011 at the
age of 36 he fig ured he’d become a
high performance coach. But then
came a turning point: his best
mate and father-of-three dropped
dead at 44. In his
grief a mission
began forming in
his mind.
Around this
time he accosted
the conservative
politician Tony
Abbott at an NR L
wellness event.
MacDougall
told him what a
disgrace it was
that junk food companies were
sponsoring the event. Abbott
gave him short shrift. “He said,
“Mate, if you really cared you’d do
something about it and not just
whinge’,” MacDougall recalls.
That night, MacDougall
resolved to act. Ruminating on
his own approach to nutrition,
he decided a meal-replacementshake could help a lot of guys. Men
need boundaries and simplicity
when it comes to food, he reckons.
With a shake you can tell them:
make this; it’s tasty; now drink it;
that’s breakfast or lunch done.
“Because choice doesn’t
work,” he says. “I know. If you put
food in front of me I will demolish
it. I have no handbrake.”
His shake’s gone gangbusters,
MacDougall says, because it’s
a good product. But many good
products f lop. His has soared on
the back of pinpoint branding and
marketing. And MacDougall is its
perfect salesman: an indefatigable
force of nature who lives the ideas
he can’t stop talking about.
For fitness nous, MacDougall
was ahead of the game in his
league days. He turned up to
training one day in compression
tights, only to be sent home by
a club legend. Another time he
hauled bags of ice into the team
hotel. His teammates thought
they’d be drinking beers within
the hour until MacDougall broke
it to them the ice was for his bath.
He also had reservations about
workload. “We were training
for the sake of being full-time
athletes and to justify the pay
packets of a lot of staff,” he says.
“We were training too much and
doing a lot of activities that were
putting stress on the body withouthelping performance.” After
retiring, MacDougall initially
kept exercising like a footballer,
chasing strength and power by
shifting big loads in the gym. But
then came an epiphany: I don’t
have to do this anymore. “Sure,
I could still deadlift 200kg, but I
couldn’t walk the next day.”
Today, MacDougall is about
getting more for less. “Economists
talk about the 80/20 rule,” he says.
“Twenty per cent of a farmer’s
seeds will give him 80 per cent
of his crop. So what’s the 20 per
cent of your health and fitness
investment that’s going to give you
80 per cent of your return?”
Were you to train for an hourDOG’S DINNER
Here are MacDougall’s
Top 10 “man superfoods”.
Build your diet around them.- Eggs •Walnuts •Berries
- Salmon •Greek Yoghurt
- Oysters •Oats
- Whey protein
- Spinach•Avocado