America’s Toughest Workout: Street Calisthenics Battles

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t a community park on Houston’s west side, two bare-chested men are mean-­mugging each other hard, their faces just inches apart, as a crowd howls “Let’s eaaaaaat!” around them. Any passerby on this overcast March afternoon could be forgiven for thinking a bareknuckle fight was about to go down. But this is a weighted-calisthenics battle, a one-­versus-one competition where athletes grind through a high-volume set of exercises ranging from pullups and dips on a bar to pushups, squats, and muscle-ups — an advanced move that combines the pullup and dip into one fluid motion. Within minutes, the full-throttle test of strength and stamina will have their hearts damn near bursting out of their chests and their palms torn to shreds.

Standing between the two competitors, wrapped in Prada Sport sunglasses, all swagger and muscle and testosterone, is Abu Asada, the battle’s host and one of the top pound-for-pound calisthenics athletes in the United States. Since finding Islam and fitness in prison 11 years ago, the 31-year-old has amassed more than 300,000 Instagram followers thanks to a dogged work ethic and showman’s flair. His gritty videos, a mix of underground battles, boot-camp-style street workouts, and provocative, at times sarcastic, diatribes on the sorry state of American health and masculinity have built him a cultlike audience as the popularity of calisthenics surges across the country. Love him or loathe him, among the throng of athlete influencers jostling for attention online, Abu Asada’s words have the unmistakable bite of hard truth, backed by a hair-trigger readiness to prove himself on the bars. “You don’t gotta like me, but you’re gonna respect me,” he says. “I am this.”

“A lot of people wanna roll with him,” says Carnell “Speck Nasty” Specks IV, a mainstay of the Houston calisthenics scene who credits the sport for his recovery after a 120-mph motorcycle crash that left him in a coma. Soon after Abu Asada relocated from the Washington, D.C., area last year, Specks linked up with him to host battles and free public workouts. “The South is new to calisthenics,” and interest “started multiplying” since Abu Asada’s arrival, says Specks. “It’s the intensity that he comes with, his mindset. He just really opened eyes to life-or-death [training]. Like, you wanna give up on something or you gonna really die and fight for what you believe in? Some people might misunderstand what he’s trying to do, but I see it.”

In an age of artifice and instant gratification, seasoned practitioners insist that calisthenics is the antidote to a lot of the gym-bro fakery that racks up views online but doesn’t hold up to real-world stress. The bars don’t lie, goes the old-school mantra: Weakness will always be revealed. The sport has no barriers to entry, no spendy memberships or equipment. It requires nothing more than a bar and some willpower. And where bodies start to break down lifting heavy weight in rigid planes, calisthenics is a time-tested, scalable way to bulletproof people for the long haul — one that’s emblematic of a broader fitness trend that prizes functional strength over aesthetics. “ ‘Show muscles’ don’t translate to movement and mobility,” says Mike Williams, a 41-year-old athlete and Houston-based battle judge who deepened his calisthenics practice after years of weightlifting and boxing. “This is very compelling to me, especially as I get older, because it’s really you versus you. In calisthenics, the world is your gym, so you can get it in anywhere.”

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It’s a measure of how mainstream calisthenics have become that anyone with a social media account and passing interest in fitness is now probably familiar with the muscle-­­up. The status-flexing move is integral to competitive calisthenics disciplines that span endurance (high volume of reps), freestyle (high-flying acrobatics and isometric exercises), and streetlifting, an increasingly popular format in which athletes try to lift maximum weight while wearing plates attached to a belt. None, though, is more invigorating than the battles Abu Asada hosts and competes in as part of his promotion, In the Pit. Invoking one of the sport’s venerable athletes and promoters, Sean “Doc” Peterson, he says: “This is the most physical thing you’re gonna see people do without being violent.”

“Three, two, one — let’s eaaaaaat!” Abu Asada barks into the nearest camera, and the first battle is on. Lightweight Dionte Little of Baltimore goes rep for rep with Houston native C Lo through a blistering set of pullups, muscle-ups, and dips calibrated beforehand to the men’s size and skill level. They’ve had weeks to prepare for the routine. The pair are running dead even through the first half of the set, but on the second round of weighted dips, Little takes the lead. “Do not sleep on him,” Abu Asada urges. 

As the gap widens, some guys watching start taunting the quality of C Lo’s reps. “Fuck you! My money is clean,” he protests in frustration, calling his opponent a “midget.” “Whoa — I knew it was gonna get spicy up in this bitch!” shouts an amped-up spectator, one of about 30 now gathered around whooping with their cellphones out. Little musters a final round of pulls and burpees to hit 182 repetitions in 15 minutes. “It’s Mister Midget to you,” he claps back, launching into a victory dance that draws peals of laughter.

The battle is lost, but everyone exhorts C Lo to “finish your food!” — or complete the set, a sacrosanct rule of calisthenics, which he does to maintain respect. By the time the next battle is underway, the tension between athletes is gone. “We come out here, talk some junk, slap each other up, but it’s good,” says 27-year-old Adrian Melo, one of Abu Asada’s top students. “We need this as men.” 

With the sport still in its nascency and no supreme governing body, the rules and routines to be completed in calisthenics battles vary by competition. Whichever promoter is hosting a given battle devises the specific parameters of each contest based on who’ll be facing off, as Abu Asada did for Little and C Lo. Sometimes there is prize money at stake, predetermined by an event sponsor or thrown down on the spot (or both), but more frequently, as today in Houston, the battles are just for hard-won pride.

Although several women are watching from the sidelines, the vibe at battle events is hypermasculine, unapologetically so. Abu Asada contends that men have become “weak” and “distracted,” going to the gym to preen and ogle women, driven by vanity and lust rather than self-betterment. While that posture could come off to some like a manosphere caricature, Abu Asada’s growing traction online suggests he’s tapped into a deep-seated yearning for accountability and personal reckoning in a culture that’s bloated from overindulgence. Today, just a small fraction of the general adult population can perform a single strict, unassisted pullup. “This is why we get feet on soil outside,” he says in one video. “This is why we go to war on ourselves outside, and when we are done, we’re reborn.”  

A major challenge of hosting battles is holding competitors to a high technical standard amid the chaos, a tall order that Abu Asada tries to enforce without favor. When his own barber fails to heed a warning about improper muscle-up form, he disqualifies him. When another man tries to jump in as a replacement, auditioning with some muscle-ups, Abu Asada’s critique sends him stalking away in a fury. (“I’m not trying to embarrass you,” he says, “but you gotta know your place in the pecking order, homes.”) In subsequent battles, dreaded “chicken wing” muscle-ups and other violations result in continuous “no rep” calls — meaning those reps didn’t count — that cause some athletes to break down on the bars, now streaked with blood. Abu Asada is unmoved. “We’ve given you years to get quality reps,” he snaps. “I’m the bad guy ’cause I enforce the rules?”

Much to his relief, the co-main event is a master class of clean technique pitting light-heavyweight Melo against Carlos Espejo, a powerhouse from Harlem who once held the Guinness World Record for most muscle-ups in eight hours. Both are in sterling form, banging out crisp repetitions through a relentless, 135-count set that has them sucking air, weight plates crashing on the ground, until Espejo finally stalls on the barbell burpees, unable to close his hands around the bar. “Game time!” Abu Asada roars, bringing the contest to an official close. “Goddamn, that was a dogfight!” In his post-match summary, he thanks both men for “laying it on the line,” before jabbing a finger at the camera and snarling: “Now, you do it! Get out the car, miss. Get off the sideline, tope. Get off Instagram Live. Get everybody’s johnson out ya mouth and put in some pain today.”

With the battles done, Abu Asada leads a grueling public workout. He’s due to compete in a month’s time on the undercard of a battle event dubbed “King of New York,” the mecca of calisthenics, and is locked into an intensive training regimen of muscle-ups and squats to maximize his work capacity.

He concludes by attempting his “Samson Challenge”: 10 repetitions under 60 seconds of a two-pump burpee Zercher clean squat (where a barbell is pulled up from the ground, tossed up in the air, and caught in the crooks of elbows) with 225 pounds that’s as nasty as it sounds. He cranks out eight reps before dropping the barbell — a display of raw power that also serves as a middle finger to puritanical rivals he calls “Bambi-leg boyz” who say barbell squats don’t belong in calisthenics.

“Pressure exposes everyone, including myself,” he intones over the clip later posted on his Instagram, which challenges viewers to see how they measure up. “This is why the top one percent of one percent look calm while everyone else is unraveling.”

‘Greatness on Demand’

Calisthenics, or the use of one’s body weight and gravity to build muscle and endurance, dates back as long as people have prepared to fight. The word is derived from the ancient Greek words kallos (beauty) and sthenos (strength), and the practice originated with the Spartans around 600 B.C. as training for and alongside combat sports. A thousand years later, Shaolin monks in China cultivated the form to defend their temples against looters. In the 1800s, German gymnasts and educators popularized calisthenics in Europe, where it was prescribed as an “acceptable form” of exercise for women. Near the turn of the 20th century, American Herman Koehler published his Manual of Calisthenic Exercises, a seminal text that standardized physical training in the U.S. military. Starting in the 1950s, breakout TV star Jack LaLanne promoted daily body-weight exercise to help Americans get into better shape at home.

But for those who know, the calisthenics ethos that paved the way for today’s social media stars was born in the parks of New York City circa the 1990s. Long before smartphones and Instagram, a vanguard of athletes evolved the street workout, experimenting with dynamic movements and building up their endurance by stacking repetitions and sets with commitment to strict form. “It was quality with everything — not just the movement and the exercises, but the way that we carry ourselves, our attitude, everything that we put out,” says Zef Zakaveli, 49, considered by many to be the godfather of the culture.

In the 2000s, the cream of the calisthenics scene had coalesced around Brooklyn’s Wingate Park, where pioneers I-born, Giant, Make-Tricks, Beast (Lord Vital), Tech, and Calisthenics King set the standard. “It was like a party atmosphere, more of a family, like a neighborhood thing,” Zakaveli recalls, inclusive yet fiercely competitive. Workout teams like the Bartendaz, Bar-Masterz, Bar-Barians, B-Xtreme, Harlem S.E.A.L.S., Team Wingate, and the Barstarzz competed late into the night and through the winter, pushing the limits of what was possible. Zakaveli invented the clean muscle-up and one-armed pullup to the shoulder (among many other firsts). But it took nearly a decade for the sport to break out nationally, with Hannibal Lanham, better known as Hannibal for King. The improbably ripped Queens native was living in a homeless shelter when a July 2008 YouTube video of his gravity-defying maneuvers on playground bars — planche dips where his torso remained parallel to the ground, front-lever flutter kicks, and close-grip muscle-ups so effortless he looked like he might take flight — went viral, setting a precedent for current mega-influencers like Chris Heria, Frank Medrano, RipRight, and Abu Asada.

Low-key by nature, Zakaveli nonetheless has a kind of celebrity status among calisthenics aficionados in Europe, where the level of competition is ahead of the U.S. “It’s a shame to say it,” he says, “but [the Europeans] are the strongest guys.” On the endurance side, Italian Sergio Di Pasquale and Spaniard Javi Alés are world beaters. In streetlifting, ­Russian Mathew Zlat has dipped 195 kg. (430 pounds) and Frenchman Ludo Adamantium recently pulled 125 kg. (276 pounds) in ­competition — staggering numbers that keep climbing. I’d assumed this was because they had a head start, that Soviet-style strength training and gymnastics had filtered across the continent. Zakaveli says it’s the other way around.

“They learned it from us — they’re influenced by us!” he exclaims. “If you go to whoever is strongest now [in Europe], ask him who influenced him, and then who influenced him, it all goes back to Bar-Barians.” Indeed, on a 2011 visit to judge a competition in Ukraine, Zakaveli says, the man credited with coining the term “streetlifting,” Vitaliy Shovkoplyas, told him personally that he’d been first inspired by the New York vanguard. Since then, the Europeans’ obsessive devotion to form and training has kept them at the cutting edge of the sport. Germany-based FinalRep has emerged as streetlifting’s governing body, with codified rules, rankings, and affiliated competitions on four continents; and the annual Calisthenics Cup in Cologne is the leading global event for bodyweight battles. “Guys [in the U.S.] are caught up in clout, like more of a rapper lifestyle,” Zakaveli says.

Zakaveli is living proof that his calisthenics method works, not a passing fad but a way of life. For his 50th birthday, he plans to complete his infamous G.O.D. (“Greatness on Demand”) set: 50 pullups to 50 straight bar dips, done seamlessly without letting go of the bar. He continues to travel the world, offering Bar-Barian workshops from Italy to Chile. And though he stands by the purity of his foundational “reps and sets” blueprint, he respects the next generation of athletes who are putting their own stamp on the sport.

“Abu Asada [is] like the new era of this — he’s creating his own lane,” says Zakaveli, likening Abu Asada’s hybrid brand of calisthenics and weight training to an offshoot of CrossFit. “He bridged into the calisthenic world to gain that following. He’s found his niche, and I’ve watched him progress over a couple years. And he’s just scratched the surface.”

Training the Body for War

Late on a Friday afternoon, Abu Asada is at a warehouse gym somewhere in east Houston’s never-ending sprawl, dripping sweat. He sprints and bear crawls down the center of the training area, then goes straight into a cycle of Zercher barbell walks (holding the weighted bar in the elbow crooks), box jumps, and ring muscle-ups. “This is a de-load week,” he informs me, meaning lighter than usual. In the flesh, at six feet one, 215 pounds, he’s even more impressive than in his videos. Not the turgid bulk of a juiced-up bodybuilder but the primed, explosive physique of a dangerous man who trains for the worst of days.

Born Anthony Watts to a Black father and a white mother who divorced when he was a child, he grew up in suburban Maryland with a rebellious streak that got him in trouble. He started using drugs as a teenager; at 20, he was locked up for four years for trafficking marijuana and carrying a firearm. While inside, Abu Asada’s best friend died of a fentanyl overdose, and he was stabbed three times. After seeing another inmate bleed out on the ground during a prison gang war, he hit the yard, doing hundreds of burpees, pullups, and sit-ups a day. “For me, prison was a blessing because it allowed me to train my body for war,” he says.

On getting out in 2019, he married a woman he’d known since high school and had a daughter, the first of three. Initially, he worked construction jobs for $12.10 an hour, but continued training whenever he could, determined to help people get in shape to atone for “breaking people with some of the things I used to sell.” For the next four years, he drove a delivery truck for D.C.-area homeless shelters, coaching clients at a gym in the mornings and evenings, and hand-delivering homemade sea-moss smoothies on the side.

In September 2021, Abu Asada was invited to his first battle, in Brooklyn. He lost: “I just hit the wall.” The volume and density of exercises “shocked my nervous system,” he says, “and turned me into a monster.” Other losses hardened his resolve, as his on-camera persona and habit of stoking controversy started gaining momentum. His first viral video, a June 2022 clip about the chasm between working out and training with purpose, catapulted his follower count from 4,000 to 20,000. On any given day, he might rant about the perils of glorifying street life, eating fast food, or skipping leg day. He’s also known to respond to keyboard warriors in person. In a viral June 2025 video, he pulls up to a hostile Philadelphia park to “colonize” it, thrashing a neighborhood hero in a battle as locals melt down. “You’re not going to find anyone within the one-versus-one culture that’s more hated than me,” he says. “Somebody has to be the bad guy.”

One of Abu Asada’s most incendiary themes is “victim weight” — that anyone under 200 pounds is liable to get manhandled. He doesn’t mean this literally, of course. Instead, it’s a way of calling on people to intensify their training while fanning the kind of frothy online animus that algorithms reward. “Every time I throw it out there, it gets hella engagement,” he says. The “positive controversy,” he adds, is all part of a “funneling process” to the goods and services he offers. These span personal coaching, merch, and an array of health products, like Himalayan shilajit resin (a supplement said to boost energy and performance), he says earn him six figures a year.   

For all of his side hustles, Abu Asada is adamant that calisthenics athletes should earn a decent livelihood like any professional. In 2023, he competed in the Urban Fitness League, an extreme calisthenics league that was poised to be the “NBA of calisthenics.” The UFL (later rebranded UFX) struck a multi­year broadcast deal with Fox Sports, and athletes were paid win or lose ($1,000 per event, plus another grand on top for a victory), traveling the country to compete before live audiences. Although the venture elevated calisthenics athletes to an unprecedented level of national prominence, it foundered after two seasons when the lead investor pulled funding. “You can’t really rely on someone else to see your vision through,” says Peterson, the league’s director of calisthenics. In hindsight, he says, it was too “vanilla,” divorced from its blacktop roots. “But the athletes got a real opportunity to know what it’s like to be pros — and they’ll never go back to a version of that that’s beneath them.” 

Toward that end, Abu Asada maintains a brisk schedule of In the Pit events to keep building the fanbase and showcase top talent. These include members of his own Team Work Horse, one of the strongest rosters in the U.S., several of whom saw their social media profiles soar after battling on Abu Asada’s cards. He’s also one of the top competitors in USA Streetlifting, the premier league of its kind in the country, which makes him a very rare breed: an elite athlete-promoter who embodies both the stamina of endurance battling and the power of streetlifting.

Once America’s best secure the committed sponsorship they need to stop multitasking and train full-time as pros, he’s convinced they will excel on the global stage — and he wants to lead the way. “That’s what’s saving the [Europeans] now, and they know that. But we’re coming.”

‘Colossal and Thunderous’

I myself started practicing calisthenics in my late twenties to counter the effects of an erratic lifestyle. Reporting on conflicts around the world, as I’ve done for the past two decades, is far from a healthy or predictable existence, and calisthenics helped me stay in shape over lengthy, stressful overseas assignments. From guerrilla camps in the Myanmar jungle to remote desert outposts in Afghanistan, it was just a matter of finding a bar, ledge, or tree branch to get in workouts that have become nonnegotiable for my well-being. Eventually, I installed a pullup bar at home; I improved my muscle-up, and as repetitions multiplied, I started adding weight.

The first time I saw one of Abu Asada’s underground battle clips, in 2024, it hit me with the force of a thunderbolt. Men of all shades and sizes testing themselves in a furnace of pain, iron sharpening iron — a visceral departure from all the slick, generic fodder choking the feed. I missed this. I needed this. And there surfaced a feeling that I hadn’t had since college: the desire to compete.

Admittedly, I stalled for a while. At 45 years old with five kids and a job that had me hopping on airplanes on short notice, there were always excuses to delay. But every time I watched another clip, the call intensified. So I signed up for my first streetlifting competition and hired a Russian pullup master named Dima Vlasov to coach me remotely. A few days later, I caught a flight to Libya to shoot a documentary that had me staking out late-night gyms in Tripoli and Misrata to keep up with my prescribed training. Such circumstances were, in Vlasov’s words, “not optimal.” In my case, they never would be.

Three weeks later, in mid-April, I flew back to New York to compete in the Empire State Classic, a USA Streetlifting event in the classic format of a one-rep maximum pullup and dip. At a black-box gym in Harlem, I find a convivial sub-tribe of athletes, mostly men but a few women, warming up. During weigh-ins, I meet several first-timers inspired by social media clips. A veteran says the first competition is just about “getting familiar with the stage,” as I soon learn the hard way.

Opening with pullups, I start with 70 kg. (154 pounds) on the belt, a safe number to get on the board. After moving the weight easily and clearing the bar, I’m stunned to hear the announcer say “no rep.” Apparently my knee moved slightly. Shaken, I redo 70 kg. on my second attempt and then jump to 80 kg. (176 pounds) on my third and final pull, but fail to heave my chin above the bar.

Severe jet lag is not helping. On my first dip attempt, I walk up to the box wearing headphones and miss the judges’ “go” call, earning another “no rep.” On my second, I successfully lift 110 kg. (243 pounds) and then go all-in on 120 kg. (265 pounds) on the last. The crowd rallies behind me, and I nearly lock out, revving with adrenaline, before buckling. By the end of the day, two New York state records had fallen. And though far from the debut I’d envisioned, my totals are enough for third place in the light heavyweight -94 kg. division (under 207 pounds); the winner, Dion Lynch, is the defending national champion. On the podium, I’m already thinking ahead to the next competition.

“Our progress as Americans is skyrocketing right now — the numbers we saw today for first attempts were all-time records when we started,” says Eugene Jimenez, the founder of USA Streetlifting. The federation, which started in Brooklyn in April 2023 with roughly a dozen participants, has since expanded to seven states and counting. More women are competing. And while, he notes, Europeans are still pulling weights that upper-tier ­Americans are dipping, American athletes are closing the gap. ­Women’s phenom Danae Morgan has locked a 57.25 kg. (126 pounds) chin-up, the current world record. Texan Nicholas Cerean has surpassed a 100 kg. (220 pounds) chin-up and 40 kg. (88 pounds) muscle-up in competition, his sights set on 50 kg. (110 pounds). And last year, Abu Asada became the first American to total 500 kg. (1,102 pounds) across four events — pullup, dip, squat, muscle-up — putting him just outside the world top-10 ranking in his weight class. “We have a lot of strong athletes here,” says Théo Lopez Marques, a French-born two-time U.S. national champion. “Now, it’s [time] to have them take streetlifting seriously.”

Similar to well-established competitive fitness formats like CrossFit and Hyrox, major sponsorship will be critical in building out the culture and giving athletes the resources needed to train full time and compete with the world’s best. Nike is already dabbling in Europe, where it has partnered with London-based calisthenics collective PnP to highlight street workouts, including a “last man standing” muscle-up contest. Why not the U.S.? At a time when sports leagues have degenerated into grown men running into each other at full speed (see the creatively named “Run It Straight”) or slapping each other to sleep (Power Slap), calisthenics in its various forms offers all the intensity and edge-seeking athletes and audiences crave — without the head trauma.

“Is the momentum of streetlifting picking up? Absolutely,” says Cristian Lema, a judge and competitor. “Is it gonna be colossal and thunderous? Absolutely. How long is it gonna take? Shorter than you think.”

‘Welcome to the Dark Side’

Abu Asada also happened to be in New York the weekend of the Empire State Classic, and he came to battle. At a multifloor parkour venue in East Williamsburg, he and Team Work Horse pull up in a late-model sprinter van as crews converge from the five boroughs, in a scene that brings to mind the opening of The Warriors. Some start repping out pushups on pipes on the sidewalk. Others warm up on the bars inside with freestyle tricks and flips, to the delight of the gathering crowd. The Calisthenic Prince, a 29-year-old self-­described “bar magician” set to battle Xtra Money in the main event, jokes around with his Bushwick pals, cool and confident. “[Xtra Money] not a slouch, but he just not me,” he brags, polishing his smile with a miswak twig. “I’m amazing — I’m beautiful on the bar.”

Two of Abu Asada’s Team Work Horse members battle against New Yorkers, winning handily. “It’s BTA all day: Belt to ass!” says Jeremiah George, 21, of Baltimore. But Abu Asada’s opponent is a no-show. After all of the training and covering a cross-country flight to battle for $2,500, the lack of backbone sets him off. “My wife about to spit out another baby in three weeks; I’m not supposed to be here — I gotta put food on the table,” he shouts. Slapping a stack of cash on the deck, he issues an open challenge. “If you wanna battle, have your money right.” No one wants the smoke. He performs his set anyway, grinding out dozens of muscle-ups and squats with a 100-pound dumbbell to set an example.

Almost three hours after the event’s scheduled start time, Xtra Money arrives in his signature black balaclava. “Main event,” Abu Asada announces. “Let’s pop this shit off.” The crowd, now totaling more than 200 people, closes in as Xtra Money and the Prince square up for the cameras, then launch into a diabolical set that promises pain — and lots of it — for $500 and citywide bragging rights: 100 burpees, 50 muscle-ups, 75 dips, and then 75 squats with a 65-pound dumbbell.

The men are roughly even through the first 100 burpees, dropping and popping like well-oiled pistons. The energy in the room is electric, fans screaming from the rafters to the walls. But it soon becomes clear that the Prince, for all his panache, is not prepared for a dogfight. As Xtra Money extends his lead into muscle-ups that are consistent if imperfect, drawing jeers from some, he gasps for air against the suffocating mob, dazed and dehydrated. After weeks of online hype and trash talk, the bars have exposed weakness. “That pullup bar can’t save you,” yells Abu Asada.

By the time Xtra Money is pushing through the final set of squats, his mask is peeled back to breathe. The Prince, meanwhile, struggles to finish his dips and then quits on squats before friends push him back to save face. And it’s not long until the Prince quits for good. “I’m good, I lost,” he says, as taunts erupt from the crowd. It’s a decision that will haunt him. On a live­stream later that night, he’s in tears lamenting that he didn’t finish his food. Scores of social media followers have fled. So-called friends have turned cold. He vows to come back and battle stronger.   

“This was the most hostile event I’ve ever been a part of,” Abu Asada says afterward. He praises Xtra Money for completing the routine and silencing all the haters. His Workhorses went 2-0 on the day, affirming their reputation as the East Coast team to beat. In the coming months, they would be tested in battle events from Baltimore to Atlanta. “It’s gonna be a cold summer — the coldest one,” he promises, then signs off with his signature catchphrase, asserting his status: “The one, never the two. Eaaaaaat!”

A few weeks later, I’m back home in Mexico getting ready to train when a new Abu Asada post appears on my Instagram feed titled “MAX PULLUPS 44 Yrs Old.” The man doing the pullups is me. After the Houston battle a month before, some of the competitors held an impromptu contest. Near the end, Abu Asada called me up, and I managed to get 33 in one go. They were not strict repetitions, however, and the post quickly goes hyper-­viral as trolls and supporters spiral into arguments about proper form and what constitutes “middle age.” In other words: positive controversy. Last I checked, the video had racked up more than 5 million views. 

A message soon followed from Abu Asada, stamped with a laughing emoji. “Welcome to the dark side my friend!”

Contributing editor JASON MOTLAGH has reported from around the globe for Rolling Stone. He embedded with ­vigilantes for his story on Haiti’s gang wars in the January issue.