Where are the Men in Wellness?

These days it feels like wellness has become something of a status symbol. The boutique gym memberships, the twelve-dollar smoothies, the cold plunges people describe with near-religious reverence. It’s as if being “well” has suddenly become a way to signal that you’ve made it. But I can’t help wondering: are we actually becoming healthier? Or just getting better at crafting the illusion?

And then there’s the other thing: where are all of the men?

I know someone who hosted a recent break-dancing wellness event and they were trying desperately to get more men to attend. But like so many wellness events these days, if you look around the room, you’ll see it’s mostly women. At some point, I guess, the men either opted out, or they weren’t really invited in. And that raises a bigger question that I can’t stop turning over: how do we bring more men into the wellness movement?

Because here’s what I’ve come to realize: many men do want to be well. But they want to do it on their own terms. And that’s not resistance so much as biology and upbringing. Most men have been taught to see needing help as a failure of character. That independence is strength. That anything too emotional looks like weakness.

But what if we flipped that dynamic on its head?

What if men weren’t just invited into wellness but trained to lead it—for other men? Think about how yoga went mainstream: not through some sudden enlightenment, but through plain old accessibility. Teacher trainings became widespread, and suddenly yoga scaled. What if we took that same principle and applied it to social wellness? A kind of “Mental Fitness for Men” boot camp that is run by men, for men.

Men don’t always want to admit they need help, but many are eager to help others. That’s what we have to harness—by making it not so much about mental health, but about things like leadership, discipline, brotherhood and hard work. We need to try something new, especially when so many of the current social and cultural divides—some of which showed up more clearly in the last election—can be traced back to the loneliness, disconnection, and identity loss that so many men are experiencing.

You can’t shame men into wellness. What you can do is meet them where they already feel strong. Places like the gym. Fitness, I’ve found, can be a very effective gateway drug to mental health and social wellbeing. These men in the gym, the “muscleheads,” they know all about discipline. They understand effort and they believe in transformation—they’ve just always been taught that it’s something that only happens from the neck down.

These are the guys I want to reach. The ones who idolize Thor, Joe Rogan and the Liver King. The ones who love MMA. That’s the image a lot of men still chase: the warrior-king. That’s the mindset that can potentially breed super-toxicity. But, it’s also where we can find the greatest potential for helping them to change their own lives. And, if we can bring awareness to that group of men, we won’t just help them, we will help everyone that they influence.

That’s the real flex.

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