APRIL 2016 MEN’S FITNESS 89Advanced Resistive Exercise Device). He steps into its steel
platform, slips beneath a weight bar attached to a pulley, spreads
his feet shoulder-width apart and does a set of squats. He sets
down the weight, spreads his feet as wide as he can manage, into
a sumo squat — one of the most demanding, full-body-blasting
moves a human can do — then resumes lifting.
He follows this with a third set of squats, this time standing on
one foot. Then another set, balanced on the other, to work the
hip-adductor muscles. He sets the weight down, changes the load
and does a set of punishing shoulder presses. And on and on until
sweat is dripping off him, his workout gear soaked through.
It’s all part of the targeted, intensely rigorous regimen that NASA’s
physical training staff has devised in hopes of keeping the bodies
of astronauts like Kimbrough from essentially deteriorating while
being subjected to the harsh realities of space travel.
Which is why, the day we meet him, Kimbrough is here sweating
profusely through yet another training session, readying his
body for Expedition 50.
Though, in truth, he’s been preparing to go into outer- space for
his entire life.
From a very young age,Shane
Kimbrough wanted to be an astronaut. His
grandparents, who lived in Florida, would
take him to the nearby Kennedy Space
Center to watch the Apollo astronauts blast
off. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were
his first heroes.
For university he chose West Point
Military Academy — “for the challenge”,
the very same reason he yearned to fly
Apache helicopters.
Eventually he served as a platoon leader
in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq and was
put in charge of six Apaches. He and his
group flew nightly missions deep behind
enemy lines, videoing the terrain that US
ground troops would cross when they
eventually attacked. It was perilous work.
“I’ve always been one of those guys — I just
want to do what people think I can’t do,”
Kimbrough says. “If somebody says I can’t,
I’m going to do it.”
When he returned home, his flying
experience got him a job training
astronauts to land the space shuttle. Three
years later, in 2004, NASA chose him
for its astronaut corps, where he began
working with trainer Guilliams, who saw
Kimbrough—astarpitcher during his
years at West Point — as a good athlete of
average size who needed to get stronger
if he wanted to actually fly missions. “He
came from a military background and hadn’t done a lot of weight
training,” Guilliams says. “We taught him the squat, the deadlift.”
Why those lifts? “It’s a question of gravity,” he explains.
When gravity is virtually absent, as it is in space, demands on
the body change, as do the body’s responses. Watch any video of
an astronaut manoeuvering about the space station and you’ll see
that he is like a monkey swinging through trees — all shoulders
and arms. “With any muscle, if you don’t use it, the body just says,
‘OK, I don’t need it,’ ” Guilliams says. “It’s the same thing with
bone. If there’s no stimulus on the bone from standing or walking
around all day, the body says, ‘Well, I don’t need bone,’ and it
starts withering away.”
Countering the risk of bone loss means emphasising load-
bearing exercises. “Most of the bone loss we see is in the lower
back, the femoral neck, and the greater trochanter, which is in
the hip,” Guilliams says. “So we focus on hip-dominant exercises
— squats and deadlifting. Those are the main exercises we build
the whole program around. They’re also multijoint, multiplanar
movements. We wanted to move his joints in as many different
planes as we could, so we threw him everything just in case, so“It’s really challenging to
move a big, white suit that
weighs about 135kg. Being
able to control one takes
strength and technique.”Kimbrough on the
COLBERT treadmill.
In 2016 one astronaut
actually “competed”
in the London
Marathon on it during
a space mission.