MAGA gym bro Pete Hegseth has been roasted by military fitness experts for the poor form he shows in his online warrior workouts.
Former Fox News host Hegseth, 46, has been the poster boy for extreme exercise since being picked as Donald Trump’s defense secretary. This week he called U.S. servicemembers the “most elite warriors on the face of the earth.”
The Pentagon chief has also shared cringeworthy workout videos in which his gym buddy, 72-year-old Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., exercised while wearing jeans.
Hegseth has also enforced grooming and fitness standards for servicemembers, saying last year it was “completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon,” as well as calling out “fat troops.”
His latest manly MAGA mission is to make service members over 30 take testosterone screenings to “optimize your performance, your resilience, and your long-term health.”
But The Atlantic asked experts to rate Hegseth’s own fitness routines, and they were not impressed with what they saw.
In an article titled “Pete Hegseth, You Call That a Pull-Up?,” reporter Tom Bartlett claims that the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” does push-ups that “are more like half-ups.”
Hegseth and RFK Jr. launched their Pete & Bobby Challenge last year, imploring participants to do 50 pull-ups and 100 push-ups in under 10 minutes.
Videos posted by Hegseth attempting the challenge show a “substandard technique,” according to Bartlett, who noted that in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth mocked women soldiers who could only manage to do “ten push-ups at a pop” and called a transgender woman a “ten-push-up kind of guy.”
Getting technical about his form, Bartlett says while his pull-up form is “more or less textbook,” Hegseth lacks consistency and lifts his knees to his chest to provide extra power.
“This is known as `kipping’ and is forbidden in an eight-page pull-up guide published by the Marines,” Bartlett writes, noting that in one clip, Hegseth uses an underhand grip, which technically makes a pull-up a chin-up, a less challenging exercise.
A video the Pentagon posted last month said Hegseth “CRUSHED 44 reps on the bench after a morning run with the troops yesterday.”
In the video, someone can be heard telling Hegseth, “All the way down, all the way up!” multiple times before he reaches failure.
The publication also got feedback on the Pete & Bobby Challenge from Maureen LeBoeuf, a retired brigadier general.
The first and only woman to head the physical education department at West Point said nothing Hegseth did in the video would have counted had she been grading him.
“His pull-ups or chin-ups and the kicking that he does—you would never allow that. You’d stop somebody; you’d say, ‘OK, you’re done,’” she said. “He just keeps kicking, and it’s not a good look.”
Factoring in possible exhaustion, LeBoeuf pointed out the irony of fatigue and cutting corners from someone who is “real big on standards.”
Citing a Marine guide that calls out “poor quality work” that can lead to injury, Bartlett says “Hegseth’s work is, by Marine standards, poor.”
The Atlantic also weighed in on Hegseth’s form swinging a kettlebell, courtesy of retired Marine and kettlebell coach Joel Del Rosario.
Del Rosario called out Hegseth squatting with the kettlebell, and bringing the weight too close to the ground, rather than keeping the bell closer to your body and generating momentum with your legs and hips.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Pentagon for comment.
Speaking to Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast Podcast this week, I’ve Had It host Jennifer Welch claimed Hegseth is “laser-focused” on military personnel’s testosterone levels because he is trying to compensate for his own lack of it.
“I think this is the governing of low-T people,” Welch said.
“People who have high testosterone, number one, probably don’t even know it because they’ve never had to test it,” Welch said.
