If Mark Langowski marks you down on the sidewalk, it’s a good thing.
The 44-year-old stops New Yorkers who look especially fit and asks them what they do to stay in shape.
Doing so yields great social media fodder — he has 1.5 million followers on Instagram and several hundred thousand more on TikTok and YouTube — and some surprising responses.
“One guy said he does 10,000 push-ups a day,” Langowski told The Post. “He was incredibly ripped, but, like, you can’t do anything else with your day if you’re doing 10,000 push-ups.”
Langowski, a personal trainer and gym manager, started making the videos a little over a year ago after becoming frustrated with the exercise content he saw online.
“I was sick of the narcissistic cesspool that social media had become, especially in the fitness industry, where it was constantly, ‘look at me, look at me do push-ups, look at my abs,'” he said. . “And I’ve always been interested in what other people have done to stay in shape.”
Langowski doesn’t appear on camera in his short videos, and he makes an effort to feature everyday people who are in great shape, not those who work in the fitness industry.
“I try to find the mother of three with three children at home. I try to find the father of Wall Street. I try to find the trash, the police,” he said. “I really try to get a variety.”
One of his first posts to go viral was a conversation with a “ripped” UPS man in September 2023.
“I don’t do weights, only calisthenics, pull-ups, squats, push-ups. And go on,” said the man, who was wearing a brown uniform, jokingly.
When Langowski asked him how many pull-ups he could do — a common question that occasionally results in showing off their skills on scaffolding or at a traffic signal — the man said, “Real men, they don’t count.”
Langowski finds most of his subjects downtown, usually in Soho and the West Village. It’s not that people in the city aren’t in shape, he said, but they don’t tend to wear it to the show.
New Yorkers range of fitness strategies.
A 56-year-old cannabis dealer with amazingly defined upper body credits skateboarding for toning his abs.
A young woman jogging in Central Park said she ate pizza, donuts and “like[d] its summer.”
A 40-year-old “skinny” man admitted to consuming 25 drinks a week and supplemented with black seed oil, sea moss, ashwagandha, and chlorophyll.
A 23-year-old financier outside the Trump building claimed to eat “as much protein as [he] maybe it can” — 280 grams per day.
But there are some answers that keep coming up.
“No matter what they’re doing, they’re consistent,Langowski said of his subjects’ routines.
Prioritizing strength training is another common refrain.
“They’re lifting weights for three days [or more] a week,” he said. And, he noted, “they’re not killing themselves with cardio.”
And, despite some outliers, most subjects tend to have healthy — but not perfect — diets and drink alcohol only in moderation.
“The average person I interview drinks 3 to 5 drinks a week,” said Langoswki, who lives in Midtown East.
He does the vast majority of his interviews in New York City, but has occasionally taken the show on the road to the Hamptons, Miami and Los Angeles. He found that his subjects fit the stereotypes of where they live.
“People in LA wanted to talk to me forever. My average interview in LA was 10 minutes,” he said. And, “people had a little bit more new age stuff, where they were like, ‘I believe in grounding. I have to walk where my feet touch the pavement for at least three hours a day.’ Or, ‘I don’t believe in sunscreen. So I walk around and get the sun for six hours a day.‘”
By contrast, his interviews in the Big Apple are short and sweet, usually about a minute and a half, two minutes tops.
“We’re not rude, we New Yorkers,” he said. “But we have somewhere to go.”
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Image Source : nypost.com