Bill Maeda, who has 2.2 million followers on Instagram and more than 450,000 subscribers on YouTube, is not your conventional fitness trainer.
He eats McDonald’s. He does not count reps. And he sometimes has clients exercise for just 10 minutes a day.
While that approach might sound counterintuitive in an industry often built on intensity, for Maeda, 57, fitness has never been about punishment or perfection. It is about something far simpler: finding a way to move that people can actually sustain.
Maeda, who has family roots in Japan, was born in the US state of Kentucky and raised in Hawaii. As a child in the 1970s, he was active and outdoorsy, and he was more comfortable hiking and camping than doing organised sport.
While his classmates gravitated toward football and track, Maeda’s path was more self-directed. He wanted to train for a possible military career and, fascinated by the physiques of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, began lifting weights.
“I wanted to look like Rambo,” he says.
For Maeda, fitness is about finding a way to move that people can sustain, not punishment or perfection. Photo: Instagram/billmaeda
