Patrick Mahomes and the secrets of the Dad Bod: What we get wrong about athleticism
Patrick Mahomes and Nikola Joki? aren't just superstars. They challenge us to better understand the hidden secrets of athleticism.
It began with a viral photo. There was Patrick Mahomes, standing victorious in a locker room, his arm raised in triumph, his torso shirtless, his gut exposed and ⌠kind of flabby?
Maybe it was the lighting. Or a bad angle. Mahomes blamed that. Still, the evidence seemed undeniable: Here was one of the greatest athletes on planet earth, moments removed from leading the Kansas City Chiefs to the Super Bowl last January, and it sure seemed like he was rocking a Dad Bod.
It didnât hurt that Mahomes played along on X (âYoooo why they have to do me like that!?!?!? #DadBodSZNâ). Or that his teammates had poked at his physique for years.
âYou would think he was a soccer dad or something,â former Chiefs receiver Tyreek Hill once said on a podcast.
When Mahomes appeared on stage last summer with tight end Travis Kelce at a charity event, both struggled to pull a snug Chiefs jersey over their regular clothes.
âDad Bod,â Mahomes said, shrugging.
Mahomes isnât the only one. Superstar athletes in all kinds of physically demanding sports are combining unconventional body types with otherworldly athleticism: Luka DonÄiÄâs pudgy midsection. Josh Allenâs round barrel chest. Nikola JokiÄâs lack of muscle definition.
It led to a relevant question: If Patrick Mahomes can be one of the best athletes in the world, in the Super Bowl for a third consecutive year with a body that inspires memes, did that say something about him, or our own fundamental ability to understand what real athleticism looks like?
âWe are not very good at certainly seeing â but even calculating â athleticism,â said Marcus Elliott, a sport scientist and the founder of P3 Peak Performance Project, a training lab in Santa Barbara, Calif.
At P3, Elliott and his team are at the forefront of assessing some of the worldâs best athletes and searching for the hidden secrets of human performance.
Their work has led to a simple belief: Our traditional ideas of athleticism â bigger, faster, stronger â is too limited. The common measurements we use â sprint speed, vertical jump, bench press â are woefully incomplete.
âWhen something is unorthodox, our brains are always trying to find cause and effect,â Elliott said. âWe want answers for everything. And what we do in sport is we over rely on our eyes for those answers. We draw these broad conclusions from a very small amount of biased information.â
His teamâs research points to a radical solution. When it comes to athleticism, we need to do something we are not very good at: open our minds and think differently.
One day in the summer of 2014, Nikola JokiÄ, a 6-foot-11 big man from Serbia, showed up to the P3 facility in Santa Barbara, Calif. When he met Elliott, the facilityâs director, he offered a quick explanation for his presence.
âThe basketball is good,â he said.
Then he reached down and patted his stomach. Elliott thought it resembled a âbeer belly.â That needed help.
JokiÄ was 19 years old and two months removed from being drafted in the second round by the Denver Nuggets. He had come to P3 to undergo an advanced athlete assessment. When he attempted a vertical leap, he jumped 17 inches. It was, according to Elliott, the worst vertical jump they had ever recorded.
In the last decade, as JokiÄ grew into an NBA MVP and one of the best basketball players in the world, the story of his trip to P3 and his 17-inch jump has become a part of his lore. In many ways, itâs actually the least interesting part of the story.
As Elliottâs team evaluated JokiÄ, he was put through a series of tests. P3 tested his hip abduction, or how fast and far one can affect oneâs hip when moving laterally. It measured second-order metrics like how quickly he could decelerate and how high he could jump two times in a row. And it looked at a list of what Elliott calls âgranular biomechanicsâ â hundreds of variables that rate things like force production, loads and joint extension. When the tests were complete, P3 put the numbers into a machine-learning algorithm that clusters athletes into groups with similar attributes.
What was most revealing about JokiÄ was not the numbers themselves, but the players he compared to. He was right on the fringe of a group of guards that Elliot called âSwiss Army Knivesâ because of their ability to do anything on the court.
âTheyâre just like a B-minus to B-level in everything,â Elliott said. âAnd thatâs JokiÄ. He may look herky-jerky to you. But looking at the data, we think it looks really beautiful.â
JokiÄâs 17-inch vertical jump is the stuff of lore. But heâs also a three-time NBA MVP. (Aaron Ontiveroz / The Denver Post / Getty Images)P3 gave the cluster a name: âThe Kinematic Movers.â That cluster exists as a skeleton key to unlock how data and technology can unearth athletic genius and provide a fuller picture. A Kinematic Mover is not an explosive jumper. Nor particularly powerful. But grades out above average in almost everything, possessing a portfolio of some of the most useful physical tools and movements in basketball.
As a group, Kinematic Movers in the NBA have longer careers, on average, and accumulate more of the statistic Win Shares.
âI love the idea that if you can do everything pretty well, thereâs a place for you at the highest level of sport,â Elliott said.
One example, Elliott said, is Steve Nash. When Nash starred for the Phoenix Suns in the mid-2000s, winning two MVPs, he witnessed an NBA that viewed athleticism as âa code name for explosiveness.â A player might be viewed as smart or crafty or have a strong basketball IQ. But it was hard to decipher exactly what that meant.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr, then a former player and executive, had what Elliott called the âball-and-stick theory,â which wasnât too complicated: If you wanted to know if a player was a good athlete, hand him a ball and stick.
Mahomes, of course, played baseball as a kid, and Elliott suspects he would grade out as a Kinematic Mover. (Heâs never been assessed at P3.) But unlike 25 years ago, we donât have to guess. The proliferation of technologies such as âforce platesâ and the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence has allowed labs like P3 to quantify what once felt intangible.
When DonÄiÄ started making trips to P3 as a teenager, he did not grade out well in traditional performance metrics. But he did have one superpower: He was in the 92nd percentile in a measure called âeccentric force,â which translates to the simple act of going full speed and then stopping, a fact first documented by the Wall Street Journal.
DonÄiÄ isnât just skilled and crafty. Heâs a physical marvel.
âWhen you start actually measuring these things, itâs almost like having a microscope,â Elliott said. âYou start being able to see this hidden world thatâs not accessible to us with our eyes open.â
And when it comes to an athlete like DonÄiÄ or Mahomes, sometimes the hidden world is just as amazing as the one you can see.
When Mahomes was in elementary school, his father, Pat Sr., took him to work with Bobby Stroupe, a performance trainer in Tyler, Texas. Stroupe had worked with all sorts of athletes, from kids to professionals, but when he laid his eyes on Mahomes, he noticed something intriguing.
Mahomes was not exceptionally fast, but he was adept at movements that felt eclectic: crawling, twisting, chopping, swinging. He was a natural at understanding momentum and space.
Two decades later, Mahomes remains a mesmerizing athlete. His traditional performance metrics â like his 4.8 40-yard dash or his squat max â are unremarkable. But when you consider everything together â what Elliott calls a âsymphony of movementâ â there are few quarterbacks like him.
He runs faster on curves than he does in a straight line and is a master at decelerating under control. He excels at what Stroupe calls âforecasting momentum,â or using his vision and depth perception to understand how fast he is moving compared to a defender. His reaction times are off the charts.
âI think the problem is you look at him and his body type is not what you would think of,â Stroupe said.
Oh, yes, the Dad Bod. The term itself is perhaps slightly misunderstood. It reached critical mass in 2015, when a Clemson student named Mackenzie Pearson earned $500 for a blog post for a little-known website called The Odyssey: âWhy Girls Love the Dad Bod.â
The origins of the post were very college. Pearson and her sorority sisters noticed that most frat guys at Clemson had a similar physique: Former athletes who had a few too many beers. They named their group chat the âDad Bod Squad.â The piece went viral and the term launched into the lexicon. When Merriam-Webster officially added âDad Bodâ to the dictionary in 2021, Pearson received an official letter.
In time, Pearson noticed her original meaning began to morph. It was never supposed to connote an out-of-shape dad.
âItâs the Patrick Mahomes (body),â she said. âItâs that version of someone that is objectively physically in good shape and attractive. But not washboard abs. Thatâs the big thing.â
When it comes to Mahomes, who is listed at 6 feet 2 and 225 pounds, part of his shape is by design. When Stroupe was a young trainer, he worked with major league pitchers, a position where increased body fat and mass often provided an advantage.
As new Hall of Fame pitcher CC Sabathia told Pat McAfee in 2023: âI always say âmass equals gas.â I need a big ass to throw hard.â
Research supports the theory. A few years ago, Ben Brewster, a pitching instructor who co-founded Tread Athletics, studied the average body weight of MLB pitchers over time. In 1994, it was 193 pounds. By 2010, it had jumped to 217. Across the same span, fastball velocity skyrocketed.
Brewster cautions that the relationship between a pitcherâs mass and his fastball velocity is nuanced and complex. But when he considers a pitcherâs general physique and his performance, he emphasizes that there is an important psychological component.
âIf they feel better being 20 percent body fat,â he said, âthereâs no reason they have to be 10 percent body fat.â
He saw a natural connection between pitchers and other âthrowing athletes,â like quarterbacks. Mahomes aims to play at 14 percent body fat, a number that provides a mix of stability, protection, flexibility and peace of mind. Which is to say it allows him to be himself, to lean into the gifts that make him special.
To this day, Stroupe tailors Mahomesâ workouts around movements â twisting, swinging, shuffling â he might use on the field. He recalls similar skepticism about running backs Emmitt Smith and Marshall Faulk, a proto-Kinematic Mover with a round face and surprisingly pudgy build. Sure, if Mahomes spent more time on traditional weight lifting, he could probably build more muscle. But to what benefit? And at what cost?
As Kelly Stafford, the wife of Rams quarterback Matt Stafford, wrote on Instagram last year: âDad bod is a requirement to be an NFL QB. Show me a shredded QB, and Iâll show you a not very good QB.â
What Elliott would like most is for people to stop relying on their eyes to determine athleticism. What is beautiful is not always functional, and itâs worth thinking about the next time you look into the mirror at the gym.
On a Sunday in October, Mahomes dropped back on fourth-and-goal in a close game against the San Francisco 49ers. As the pocket collapsed and San Franciscoâs Nick Bosa came around the edge, Mahomes took off for the goal line. When he arrived, he lowered his shoulder and bulldozed into rookie safety Malik Mustapha. The highlight rippled across the internet. Mustapha was on his back. Mahomes was celebrating.
âThat Dad Bod, man,â Mahomes said later.
Yes, it was the Dad Bod. It was a lot more, too.
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE, Brooke Sutton / Getty Images)
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