Why Men Are Taking Grooming Beyond the Gym
For the better part of two decades, “male self-improvement” had a fairly narrow definition: hit the gym, drink your protein shake, and repeat. Getting bigger, stronger, and more disciplined became a familiar blueprint for becoming a better version of yourself. Supplement aisles expanded to fill entire walls. Somewhere along the way, protein powder stopped being a niche product for bodybuilders and became a lifestyle signifier: the thing you posted about, the thing you measured your discipline by. That obsession produced real results for a lot of men, but it also tipped into something more extreme. Pre-workout stacks with a dozen ingredients, supplement routines that resembled a small pharmacy, and a culture where a missed gym day felt like a personal failure: the pursuit of a better body started to look less like wellness and more like an arms race. Online, the goalposts kept moving too: bulking gave way to “shredding,” which gave way to chasing an increasingly narrow, almost unattain...