Bob Weir has been a legend of the music scene since founding the Grateful Dead in the ’60s with Jerry Garcia. And he’s still very much Truckin’ at the age of 73, as he just demonstrated on social media, sharing a short video (on TikTok of all platforms) of the workout routine that he performs before a show these days while touring with his band, Bob Weir and Wolf Brothers.
Using a pair of TRX straps, Weir completes a series of moves including lunges, side lunges, and squat variations. “The key here is that Weir isn’t training to build big muscles—he’s working on better movement, which makes sense for an older guy who spends his days up on stage performing,” says Men’s Health fitness editor Brett Williams. “He’s focused on moving in multiple planes of motion.”
Training more than just one plane of motion and working your muscles from multiple angles is a useful way to build functional strength in your everyday life, as well as boosting your performance in the gym. “Usually, we stick in the sagittal plane (front-to-back) movements for just about every workout we do,” says Williams. “But Weir is hard at work including frontal plane (side-to-side) movements with side lunges and the mace work and transverse (rotational) movements with his TRX-supported twists.”
Elsewhere in the TikTok video, Weir can be seen swinging a gada mace, an ancient move which has become one of his exercise go-to’s over the years. “The practice goes back thousands of years,” Weir told Men’s Health in 2019. “The old original martial art was learning how to swing a big heavy thing and keep your balance and keep yourself collected. You can feel when you’re slipping from the proper form; there’s a timelessness about it.”
Hershey Park Pre-show gymming. 📷: Dead Co. Gym Safety Advisor.
Weir’s longstanding commitment to fitness has persisted over time, but he is constantly seeking new and fun ways to stay in shape. He took up running in the ’70s and will regularly “go for a trot” wherever he happens to be on tour. More recently, he got really, really into CrossFit.
“At my age, if you let it go, it ain’t coming back,” said Weir in his Men’s Health interview. “I have a lot of stuff I want to get to. And I gotta fuckin’ live to do it.”
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