Sixteen-year-old Ezra Frech has a busier summer than most kids his age. He’s going to the Tokyo Paralympic Games, where he’ll represent the United States as the youngest member of the track and field team. Although making a team stacked with full-grown men is a remarkable feat, for Frech, it’s all part of the plan: He’s dreamed of going to Tokyo since he was 11 watching the 2016 Paralympic Games on TV. Frech made a promise to himself that he’d make it—and he’s working to keep it.
Frech was born missing his left knee and fibula, and competes using a prosthetic running blade in the 100-meter sprint, long jump, and high jump. From two-a-day workouts to his work with Angel City Sports, the adaptive sports organization he founded, he has a packed agenda. But the Los Angeles-based Paralympian squeezed in a call with Men’s Journal in between to talk about how he’s preparing for Tokyo, his ultimate goals, and how he wants to become the Conor McGregor of adaptive sports. Yep, you read that right. Check out the conversation below.
Men’s Journal: You’re the youngest member of the U.S. Paralympic Track & Field team. What’s that like? Do you feel any extra pressure?
Ezra Frech: It’s interesting. I do enjoy when I have a lot of pressure on me. But in this scenario, I’m the underdog. I came in last place in all my events in 2019 at the World Championships. I know I’m going to do significantly better now, maybe even contend for medal spots in all my events. The cool thing is I’m 16 and I’m going up against these guys who are 25 and 26, and this is their job. This is what they do every day. I train really hard to be here, but I’m in school. I don’t feel more pressure; if anything, I feel like I’m coming in with nothing to lose. These other guys are grown men. They don’t want to get beat by a 16-year-old.
What do you want to prove in Tokyo?
I know I’ll have more Paralympics in me after Japan, but I do want to prove I can be a medal contender in all three of my events. I think I’m capable of doing so. At the same time, I’m coming into each of these events ranked near the back. I’m definitely not ranked for medal contention. But my coach, team, and family know what I’m capable of. For the high jump, I’m in a pretty good medal spot right now. I actually think I have a chance to win it if all goes well. But in the 100 meter and long jump, I’m in a position where I’ve got to put together something truly special. I want to prove that age doesn’t make that much of a difference; it’s really about how hard you work and how smart you are with the time you have.
What does a typical training day look like for you?
Training’s pretty chaotic because we’re balancing three events that are extremely different. They have very little in common, and all require different forms and different thought processes. I think I’m the only athlete on the entire U.S. team that does those three events. We’re balancing our time and bouncing between different events throughout the whole day. I’ll give you what yesterday’s training session was.
We did a long jump session from 8 a.m. to about 10:30-ish. I came back home, rested and recovered, then came back at 4 p.m. and did sprints, a little bit of high jump, and lifted weights. I went home, stretched, recovered a little bit, then went to bed. An average day would have about two of those two-and-a-half to three-hour sessions, with recovery in the middle.
Obviously during the school year I wouldn’t be able to spend as much time on the track with school from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. with homework and all that stuff, but in summer we’re able to hit these two-a-days where I don’t really have much going on except for training, eating, sleeping, and recovering.
How do you recover?
Recovery is such a huge part of the training right now, because we’re so close to Tokyo and I can’t afford an injury. I can’t even afford being sore coming into a training session. I use a Therabody RecoveryAir. It’s a compression sleeve to help flush out lactic acid. Then I use the Theragun to release muscles. I take active ice baths before I have a training session if I know I’m a little sore and going to need a bit of freshness in my legs. I’m constantly stretching. When I get home, I just take some food, put on the RecoveryAir, and sit in my bed for a few hours—maybe take a nap or write about the training session. I sit there and decompress. I get off my leg, give it time to rejuvenate.
How do you prepare mentally to be on the world’s greatest stage?
I’ve competed at the World Championships before; nothing like the Paralympics though. There’s a different energy, a different feeling. As far as preparing myself mentally, I have a sports psychologist I work with. I do lots of meditation with my mom. She’s heavy on the mental stuff. She makes sure I’m doing lots of visualization. There are many athletes who get in their heads and get super quiet before they compete—just put on headphones and don’t talk to anyone. That’s not me. I’m laughing, I’m cracking jokes seconds before I’m about to take the biggest jump of my life. At trials, I was making a joke with the official about how I didn’t have a girlfriend or something like that. I was messing around literally seconds before I was about to take a jump that I’d spent five years of my life training for. When I ground myself in these big moments, it’s just being myself, having a good time, laughing. That’s me. I know how I’m going to combat the nerves and anxiety. I’m just going to be myself.
What was it like getting your first running blade?
I got it when I was about 4 years old. My family went to the park and we ran around for a little bit, figured it out, played around with it. It’s very interesting because I still do the same thing when we make an adjustment. We go to the park, we go to the track, we go to an open area and I run around and figure things out the same way I did before. Not much has changed about the process.
How did you choose a prosthetic leg for competition? What goes into that decision?
For above-the-knee amputees, the leg basically consists of three parts. The socket—where the stump or nub goes—is what holds it, and that’s where you have control. You can move it around. Then there’s the knee. There are tons of different knees, but the majority of the top athletes use the same one. And then there are lots of different blade manufacturers. The blade is the place where most of the adjustments are made—the angle, steepness. Some people customize theirs. There are certain ones for long jumping and sprinting—ones that are split down the middle so you can run the curve better. You want to find what you feel most comfortable and fastest on, that’s the big thing. Once you’ve chosen a blade, then it’s about optimizing, maximizing, and dialing in that setup.
For us, we moved the blade back a little bit so I could get the most compression out of it, then we adjusted the alignment of the knee. My femur turns a little bit when I run, so we adjusted that a few degrees to the left so we knew when the blade was coming back down on the ground, it was hitting perfectly straight. Those are just a few basics. We were making adjustments all the way up until three weeks before trials, which I don’t recommend any other athlete do, but somehow it worked out. I was able to adapt pretty quickly.
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Why did you pick your three events?
The Paralympics is interesting because there are so many different classifications, or people with different disability types. As far as my classification for people missing their legs, I have the 100-meter, long jump, high jump, and javelin. I competed in track since I was 8, and when I was younger, my dad and I would fly across the country for these big national track meets. He would sign me up for every single event. I did the 60-, 100-meter, 200-meter, 400-meter, long jump, high jump, discus, javelin, shot put. Everything.
He’s like, “If we’re coming all the way out to Madison, Wisconsin, we’re doing every single event.”
So we did every event for a while, then I settled down and focused strictly on the high jump for a few years there. But just this year, I started to focus on all three. That was a cool little transition we made through the pandemic.
A lot of the athletes I compete against only do the 100-meter or only do the long jump and 100-meter. The high jump is vastly different. None of the top guys have danced over to the high jump side. It definitely makes for difficult days and difficult competition schedule, but I think that’s what adds this cool complexity to the story. I love these three events so much.
Looking beyond the Paralympics, what are your athletic goals?
I want to be a gold medalist and a world record holder in all three of those events, and I want to do it in L.A. at the Paralympic games in my hometown in 2028. I think it works perfectly and it’s a beautiful storyline. I’ll be 23. I’ll be in my prime, and I’ll have taken over the sport where I once was the 16-year-old underdog going up against these top guys. My goal is, after Tokyo and heading into Paris, to continue to climb my way up in rankings. then eventually begin to dominate this whole sport. By 2028, I’ll come out and take three gold medals and three world records with me, and then maybe I retire after that. Who knows what’s next?
How did you start Angel City Sports?
It goes back to those track meets where we were flying all around the country. There were no adaptive sports in Los Angeles. That’s why we were flying everywhere. My dad was at my first trial competition, and he looked around and he was like, “Why the hell are we coming to Tornado Alley in tornado season to run, jump, and throw stuff?” So that was where the idea began. It sparked a fire in my dad and my family.
Fast forward a few years, and we had our first games. We called it the Angel City Games; Angel City as in Los Angeles. And then from then on, we’ve built this community of clinics, competition, support groups, this beautiful community of adaptive athletes. Now we’re helping thousands of athletes, providing sports for so many people, and giving out blades and prosthetic legs.
We’re just helping a community that really needs it. It’s important to me because I know that, yes, I was very lucky that I was able to travel around to all these competitions, but that’s not the case for many of these athletes. So we provide sports equipment, training, and competition year-round for athletes with physical disabilities in Southern California.
But it’s much larger than sports. Living with a disability isn’t easy at all. You constantly feel like an outsider. There are people staring at you 24/7 everywhere you go in public. You can feel really alone, and so to have this community where people in wheelchairs, people missing a leg or arms, can go and they’re not outsiders, that’s huge. This is a community they belong in.
Who inspires you?
There are a lot of people who inspire me. This is a very unconventional answer, but someone who I will attempt to emulate is Conor McGregor. He put UFC on the map and brought so many eyeballs to the sport. The Paralympics is at this point where it’s starting to get mainstream media attention. I feel I’m capable of bringing lots of eyes to the movement. The Paralympics are not as big as they could be, but the Games are so inspiring to watch. It’s so interesting to see these half-cyborg dudes running as fast as they can, you know? That’s if we’re dumbing it down to the most basic explanation, but it’s a beautiful movement. He also inspires me because he was the underdog. No one really expected him to do what he did, then he went out and became a sports icon. Me and him have very different personalities, of course. I don’t want to do it by talking trash. But for me, it’s the eyeballs. It’s the legacy. It’s the impact.
If you had to give one piece of advice to aspiring athletes, what would it be?
Anything is possible with hard work and dedication. I mean, at 11 years old I told my parents I was going to make the 2020 Tokyo team. I told everyone, in fact. And some of them believed me, while some of them thought I was just a cute 11-year-old kid saying his dreams out loud. Little did they know I was completely serious about that dream. I’ve sacrificed so much to get to this point, and I’ll only continue to do that as the years go on, but it just goes to show anything is possible. The odds of that 11-year-old making the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic team were slim. The odds were not in my favor. But the odds haven’t been in my favor my entire life.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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There’s no doubt when the weather turns colder as we settle into winter, stouts take center stage. And while we enjoy all its iterations: standard stout, imperial stout, and robust barrel-aged stouts, we think this malty, chocolate-filled beer’s close cousin deserves a little respect as well. Of course, we’re talking about the oft-overlooked porter. And the best porters, oh buddy, they’ll have you rethinking your seasonal bevvie of choice.
For those uninitiated, the porter style had its genesis in England like many other iconic beer styles. It first appeared in the 1700s and is (you guessed it) named after porters—individuals tasked with transporting luggage.
A confusing origin story
“Stout is the direct descendant of porter. In the 1700s, it was common to use the word ‘stout’ to refer to a bolder, higher-alcohol version of any beer style, much in the same way we use the word ‘imperial’ today,” says Zach Fowle, advanced cicerone and head of marketing for Arizona Wilderness Brewing Co. in Phoenix, AZ. “Porter was the most popular beer of the day, and over time, “stout porter” became a popular variant. But by the late 1800s, demand for regular porters evaporated, and stout porter shortened simply to stout.”
But more has changed between the 1800s and today than just our penchant for wearing top hats. “Today, most brewers seem to market beers as either stout or porter based on vibes, rather than on any notable stylistic differences,” he says.
Specifically, porters are known for their dark, almost pitch-black color and rich, sweet flavor profile. If you were to drink a porter and a stout side by side, you might even have difficulty discerning the differences between the two.
Stout versus porter is an enduring topic of discussion in the brewing industry. “While there’s no debating the porter came first—and stout used to be called stout porter, so it was a stronger version of a porter—the lines have become very blurred over the years,” says Rob Lightner, co-founder of East Brother Brewing in Richmond, CA.
“I would venture that even among professionals, a blind taste test would often yield inconclusive results,” says Lightner.
The difference between porters and stouts
Porters tend to be on the milder, more chocolatey end of the spectrum, Lightner says, whereas stouts are typically a little stronger and more roasty. Of course, this isn’t a hard and fast rule
Fowle agrees, “Porters tend to be fruitier, sweeter, and less bitter than stouts, with cocoa and caramel flavors in balance with dark malt bitterness. And stouts are usually hoppier, drier, maltier, and more coffee-forward—and may even have a touch of acidity.”
Whether or not they fit neatly into boxes, one thing’s for sure: both make for incredible cold-weather brews.
“As the nights grow longer, drinking a light, summery beer just doesn’t seem right,” says Fowle. “Porter is the perfect style for the transition to winter: warming and toasty yet not too heavy, with flavors of coffee, chocolate, and pie crust that correspond with autumn weather and holidays.”
It’s the perfect time to broaden your repretoire. Sweet, robust, warming, and well-suited to the season, here are the best porters to drink now.
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1. Deschutes Black Butte Porter
There are few porters more well-respected than Deschutes’ iconic Black Butte Porter. It’s brewed with Cascade and Tettnang hops as well as 2-row, Chocolate, Crystal, and Carapils malts as well as wheat. This 5.5% ABV year-round offering is great for cold-weather drinking because of its mix of roasted malts, coffee, and chocolate. It’s a robust, subtly sweet beer perfect for imbibing on a crisp fall night.
The key to 360-degree muscle: 90-degree eccentric isometrics. It might seem like we’re throwing a lot of geometry at you, but the concept behind time under tension (TUT) is simple, says Joel Seedman, PhD, owner of Advanced Human Performance: “Perform the lowering phase of a movement in a slow, controlled fashion, usually 3 to 5 seconds; pause in the stretched position, typically around 90 degrees; then perform the lifting phase in a powerful yet controlled fashion.” Believe us, a time-under-tension workout can humble even seasoned lifters…Eccentric isometrics are like the pressure cooker of training.
“Rather than mindlessly performing slow-tempo reps, you’re using the increased time under tension as a means to fine-tune your body mechanics and alignment, which requires more mental engagement and focus,” Seedman adds.
If you want to forge functional muscle mass and strength while simultaneously bulletproofing the joints and connective tissue, give this 10-move, full-body eccentric isometrics workout a go.
Directions
Perform the following moves as 90-degree eccentric isometrics following the above protocol. Use heavy weight, but not at the detriment of proper form. Rest 60 to 90 seconds between sets and 2 minutes between circuits. Perform once every 2 to 4 days for optimal results.
Best Time-Under-Tension Workout for Total-Body Strength
Circuit 1
Marius Bugge
A. Barbell Back Squat
Set a squat rack up with heavy weight, then grasp bar and step under it. Squeeze shoulder blades together, then stand to unrack bar and step back with feet shoulder-width apart. Inhale, hinge at hips and slowly bend knees to 90 degrees. Pause, keeping natural arch in low back, then extend through hips to powerfully stand. 3 x 4-6 reps
Marius Bugge
B. Renegade Row
Start in the top position of a pushup with hands shoulder-width apart on moderate-to-heavy dumbbells (shown). Explosively drive right elbow back to row dumbbell toward ribs while balancing on opposite hand and feet. Pause, then slowly lower weight, stopping a few inches above floor. Switch sides after all reps are done. 3 x 5 reps each side
Circuit 2
Marius Bugge
A. Dumbbell Bentover Row
Stand with feet hip-width apart, holding two moderate-to-heavy dumbbells in front of thighs, palms facing you. Push hips back and hinge torso forward so it’s nearly parallel to floor, soft bend in knees. Dumbbells should be near shins. Drive elbows back to row weights toward ribs. Pause, then slowly lower down for 3 to 5 seconds. 3 x 4-5 reps
Marius Bugge
B. Incline Dumbbell Chest Press with Legs Raised
Set an adjustable bench to a 30- to 45-degree angle and lie back with dumbbells in either hand. Engage core and lift legs off floor, flexing feet. Press weights overhead, palms in. Slowly lower to 90 degrees, staying tight and compact. Pause, then drive weights up directly over chest. 3 x 4-5 reps
Circuit 3
Marius Bugge
A. Dumbbell Bulgarian Squat
Stand lunge-length in front of a flat bench, holding heavy dumbbells in each hand by your sides, palms facing in. Rest the ball on top (shoe’s laces) of your right foot behind you on the bench. Slowly lower your body until your front thigh is parallel to the floor. Pause, then drive through your heel to stand. Switch sides after all reps are complete. 2 x 3-4 reps each side
Marius Bugge
B. Single-leg Romanian Deadlift
Stand with feet hip-width apart holding dumbbells or kettlebells. Drive right leg up, foot flexed, knee aligned with hip, making a 90-degree angle. Hinge at hips as you slowly lever your torso toward floor, lowering weights and driving right leg back for counterbalance. Hold, then squeeze glutes to reverse. 2 x 3-4 reps each side
Circuit 4
Marius Bugge
A. Pullup
Hang from a pullup bar using an overhand grip with legs extended and feet flexed. Engage lats and draw shoulders down your back, then pull yourself up until chin is higher than hands. Pause at the top, then slowly lower. Pause at bottom, then reset before your next rep. 2-3 x 4-5 reps
Marius Bugge
B. Kneeling Overhead Barbell Press
Hold a bar with moderate-to-heavy load at shoulder level with forearms perpendicular to floor. Kneel at end of bench with feet flexed to grip edge for support. Inhale, engage your core and glutes, then press the bar overhead, pushing your head forward so it passes your face, exhaling at the top. Slowly lower until elbows are at 90 degrees, then hold to maintain tension. Begin your next rep from here. 2-3 x 4-5 reps
Circuit 5
A. Dumbbell Pushup
Place hands on dumbbells (this provides greater range of motion) at shoulder width and feet wider than shoulder width with just toes touching the ground. Keep head neutral and hips high to increase tension on core, chest and tris and reduce stress on spine. Slowly lower to the floor. Stop once elbows hit 90 degrees, pause, then push up to start. 1-2 x 6-8 reps
B. Biceps Curl
Stand with feet hip-width apart with moderate-to-heavy dumbbells in each hand hanging by sides. Engage biceps to curl the weights up, keeping upper arms still. Pause at the top, then lower slowly. Don’t let arms drop all the way down to keep greater time under tension on biceps. 1-2 x 6-8 reps
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If you haven’t picked up a jump rope since elementary school, you’re missing out on a fantastic cardio workout. Not only will you burn a ton of calories in a short amount of time—200 to 300 calories in 15 minutes—but jump ropes can also improve your coordination and agility. Better yet, jumping rope doesn’t require much space, so it’s easy to do at home, and it’s often more mentally stimulating than jogging or swimming.
Choosing a Jump Rope
When deciding which jump rope is best for you, it’s important to determine what your goals are. While lightweight speed ropes are popular for cardio-focused training, weighted or drag ropes will be best for those focused on strength training.
No matter what your training goals are, we’ve got you covered with this roundup of 10 jump ropes from top brands including Crossrope, TRX, Rogue, and more.
The Best Jump Ropes of 2022
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