ESPN
We’ve always known Bryce Harper to be big. Hell, it’s one of our favorite topics to cover.
But on the cover of ESPN The Magazine’s annual Body Issue, he took huge and swole and jacked and yoked and ripped to a whole ‘nother level.
He looks like a fucking house chiseled by Michelangelo.
ESPN
How’d Harper look so goddamn defined? In his typical outlandish fashion, the most intense and absurd way possible. Here’s an excerpt from a profile The Washington Post did on the shoot.
[It] consisted of three workouts and six meals a day until it consisted of none, that final week when Bryce Harper consumed only juice. Seven different raw juices. Over the final two weeks, before he exposed each of his muscles to ESPN’s photographers, he put salt in his drinking water so he could hydrate himself without gaining weight.
On the final day, before he stripped naked and recorded the results for the world, he rose for one final workout, but when he went to refresh himself, he spit the water out. When he arrived at the field at the University of Nevada Las Vegas for the shoot, his system was completely depleted. He shoved raw, white potatoes down his throat because he knew the glucose and glycine they contained would run straight to his muscles — which yearned for something, any kind of nourishment they could find.
“It makes you pop,” Harper said. “It makes you stand out.”
Harper at least had a reason for putting an absurd amount of effort into his looks, saying he wanted to change the perception that baseball players are fat and lazy.
“I did it for baseball,” he said. “Baseball players have such a bad rap of, like, we don’t work out or we’re not strong or this or that. Guys work so hard in baseball, it’s incredible. But people don’t know that. I wanted to show them, ‘Hey, this is our sport. This is who we are.’”
No, I don’t think that’s who everyone is. That’s just your nutso self. But that’s okay. We love you.