Stormzy talks about Glastonbury Festival in the same way footballers discuss the World Cup final. He had 90 minutes to show the world who he was and what he was capable of. Ask him about Glasto and he’ll tell you how his whole career, his whole life, almost, led up to that performance. It was as if, on Friday 28 June 2019, he was destined to step on to the festival’s Pyramid Stage and, to use his language, ‘fuck it up’.
What Stormzy doesn’t know as we talk is that I was in the crowd that day. I heard the grumbles beforehand from festival-goers who weren’t sure an artist with one full album to his name had earned a go at, arguably, the biggest gig in music. Then, after his set, I was one of the thousands of people who wandered into the night having seen the festival’s first black British solo headliner conclusively prove he was worthy of the billing.
What we didn’t know at the time was how much physical preparation had gone into that performance. ‘I was trying to get into a shape I’ve never been in in my life,’ Stormzy says. ‘I’m not someone who grew up super fit. I’ve always just been kind of bog standard. I was taking my body and my nutrition to this entirely new place, while also trying to create this flipping iconic, legendary set. I had headlined Wireless, but this was a whole new beast. This was pulling all the stops out.’
MICHAEL EBENEZER KWADJO OMARI OWUO JR IS A MAN OF MANY NAMES. To his family, he’s Junior, a consequence of having a dad who’s also called Michael. To his fans, he’s Stormzy or Big Mike. To his friends, he’s known as Storms, Mike or simply ‘S’.
Today, he’s speaking to me over Zoom from his friend’s house in LA. This is where he stays when he makes what have become frequent trips across the Atlantic. Wearing a black hoodie, with the hood pulled up over his head, he explains he’s not sure what the room he’s sitting in is called (we decide on a ‘snug’), but he is sure that the white fur sofa he’s lounging on is comfier than any bed he’s ever slept in. His fans will be relieved to hear that, for the hour we speak, his personality is just as welcoming.
He’s in LA because he’s currently in album mode. This’ll be his fourth. The other three went to number one in the UK. That’s a lot of pressure. Not to mention that recording an album is always a tumultuous period in his life. ‘Every time I make an album, I’m like, “Okay, let’s start this fucking tornado and let’s get over it,”’ he says.
His reality has become very LA of late. His days usually begin with early-morning hikes up Runyon Canyon, which he prefers to call ‘very nice uphill walks’ because he isn’t ready to be outed as a hiker just yet. Meals from Erewhon – ‘like M&S and Whole Foods, but on steroids’ – often follow. He’s come a long way from Norbury, Croydon. Not that he’s forgotten the education south London provided.
‘Winter always reminds me of having fireworks fights,’ he says. ‘We would just be outside a chicken shop, me and the mandem, chilling. Then you’d just see bang, bang, bang and a group of our other friends or the older lot from my area chasing us with fireworks. All the mandem would disperse, trying to get away. That is my south London.’
By the time Glastonbury rolled around, Stormzy was 25 years old and one album deep – Gang Signs & Prayer – having been catapulted towards mainstream success with his track Shut Up. In the nine years since that song dropped on YouTube, it’s amassed over 136m views. But having a chart-topping album or a song that catches the public’s imagination doesn’t necessarily prepare an artist to perform on the biggest of stages. In the years before his appearance at Glastonbury, it’s fair to say that his athletic ability had a way to go to catch up to his prodigious artistic talent.
‘I remember I would do performances and in those days, I didn’t have my soul music, my gospel music, my R&B,’ he says. ‘So it might have been a 30-minute set of straight grime, giving it all my energy. There’d be times on stage where I was thinking, “I ain’t got nothing left in the tank.”’
To fill up his tank, he started to assemble a team that could transform him into an athlete. He freely admits he’s had help to look the way he does: the experts he’s recruited frequently appear on his social media accounts (and in the pages of MH). But as a young musician, he was proactive in making changes. When he decided he needed to improve what he ate, he hired personal chef Victoria Idowu or Chef Vickz. When he decided he needed to be put ‘through the trenches’, he hired nine-time World Masters Champion sprinter TJ Ossai as his personal trainer. Ossai remains his main trainer, with his work now supplemented by Gregg Miele, who works with Stormzy when he’s in LA.
Before Glastonbury appeared on the horizon, he’d been working with Ossai for three years. This was the point when the pair knew they needed to step on the gas. A 90-minute set would be the longest of his career to date and the most physically demanding by a distance. There was, however, an artist who was already at the stage Stormzy wanted to get to and, to this day, he’s still doing his best to catch up.
After watching Beyoncé’s Homecoming, which followed her 2018 Coachella performance (Beychella), he dived deep into all things Bey and was inspired by her ability to sing, stay in key, hit high notes and do the most ‘insane choreography’ with ‘fierceness and energy’. Beyoncé, he says, is the ‘greatest to ever do it’ and an inspiration on and off stage.
‘There’s a part in Beychella where she talks about her diet, and I was thinking, “Yeah, now I want a nutritionist,”’ he says. ‘“I want to be someone who is able to deliver a live set for 90 minutes with full energy and not stutter on my vocal, not be out of breath, not need to take a break, just be almost like a superhuman on stage, the same as I’ve seen Beyoncé.”’
We’ve got the exclusive training plan that helped Stormzy get into the best shape of his life. Created by strength and conditioning trainer Gregg Miele, click the cover below to access a sample of his four-week training plan.
Performance nutritionist James Collins, who’s previous work includes stints with Team GB Olympians and a seven-year period as head of nutrition for Arsenal Football Club, joined Stormzy’s inner fitness circle.
‘He said, “I’m headlining Glasto, I need to have energy to go from a normal 60-minute set to a 90-minute set and also I need to look like I’m in the best shape, so when I take my top off it needs to have real impact,”’ says Collins. ‘We discussed how we would do that working together, alongside TJ and his chef. My role really was, how do we get him to peak at Glastonbury for that big moment?’
AROUND THE END OF SEPTEMBER 2024, STORMZY SLID INTO HIS FITNESS TEAM’S GROUP CHAT. He announced he was going to be on the cover of Men’s Health and he needed to ‘lock in’. The goal this time was to keep his mass, strength and size, but add more definition. Just like his Glastonbury performance, there was an inevitability to this milestone, and just as he did to prepare for the Pyramid Stage, he has well and truly put the work in to get ready for it.
Whenever Stormzy has a fitness goal, whether it’s a tour coming up or a magazine shoot to get ready for, he pays a visit to Collins, who performs a ‘sum of eight’ skinfold measurement on his client. To do the test, Collins has Stormzy strip down to his boxers and then uses calipers to measure skinfolds, or pinched-together skin, at various sites around his body – including his biceps, triceps and abs. After their last meeting, Stormzy’s total sum of eight measurement was recorded as 44.7mm. For reference, below 50mm is the usual benchmark for professional athletes, such as Olympians and Champions League footballers.
Collins won’t be able to test Stormzy in person before the shoot, but given his progress over the previous months, he estimates the artist’s sum of eight score will be around 39mm come shoot day, which ‘would be equivalent to elite athletes we work with,’ he says. Stormzy is undoubtedly an athlete now and he’s been living like one for a while.
‘For Glasto, I used to roll with my scales,’ he says. ‘James would always be like, “Listen, this is just a rough thing,” but if James said 200g of yoghurt, I’m pulling out my scales and my bowl, and I’m weighing my yoghurt. People would be like, “Oh, that’s extra.” But it’s just because of the way my mind works. I feel better if I’m able to follow a script or I’m able to tell myself, “Okay, you’ve done this today, so well done.”’
‘Extra’ would also be a good way to describe his attitude to training. In January 2024, Stormzy shared a day-in-the-life video on his TikTok account as he prepared for his tour of Australia. Multiple publications, including this one, picked up on the fact that if you added everything – workouts, padel matches and dog walks – he’d be training seven times a day. The real number, he explains, is six.
His most intense days start with a 12-minute abs routine, because his abdominals can be ‘quite stubborn’. That’s followed by an hour-long padel session, with his recently recruited padel coach, John Leach. Then he has an actual gym session with Ossai, where he tries to split his attention between cardio work and strength training. After the gym, he’ll go home and walk ‘the boys’ – rottweilers Enzo and Boss. Later in the day he’ll do a second workout, which is usually 12 to 15 minutes of high-intensity work. ‘I can do that anywhere, so I roll with my mat, either with me or in the back of my car, so if I’m in the studio, I can just pull out the mat, go to a room and do that.’ Finally, Stormzy finishes his day with a game of padel. A normal day is like that, but with one, two or three of the workouts removed.
That’s general training, but when it came to Glastonbury, preparation was more specific. He started by training on a tennis court or in a studio space with a microphone in his hand, then whenever Ossai said ‘mic’, he’d stop working out and jump into performing. ‘I always used to do the Big For Your Boots verse because that’s the most difficult in terms of breath control,’ he says.
The pair then took that work into rehearsals, with Stormzy practising his set at the largest studio space in Europe, Fly By Night Rehearsal Studios in Redditch, just as any athlete would. ‘I’d have days where I would eat exactly what I’m going to eat on the day so that I’m prepared. And then, when I went off stage, I’d have my electrolytes,’ he says. ‘We did these intricate things just to keep me super prepared.’ With that preparation came confidence, which Stormzy has taken into the rest of his career. After Glastonbury, he says, ‘Give me any headline slot in the world and I’ll fuck it up. I don’t say that with arrogance. I say it with full confidence.’
THERE’S A QUOTE STORMZY TRIES TO LIVE HIS LIFE BY. It’s attributed to the entrepreneur Alex Hormozi and it goes: you don’t become confident by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by having a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Glastonbury proved to Stormzy that he is the artist he believes he is. It’s by no means the only evidence. Consider the awards – the Mobos, the Brits and the Ivor Norvello, to name a few. Plus his three number-one albums: Gang Signs & Prayer, Heavy Is The Head and 2022’s This Is What I Mean. And the moments that stand alongside Glastonbury – such as his 2018 Brits performance, where, with controlled aggression, he used his platform to call for justice for victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.
Not that professional confidence has always translated into personal wellbeing. In both interviews and his music, Stormzy has spoken about his struggles with mental health. In 2017, aged 23, he talked to Channel 4 News about suffering from depression and finding the strength to share his struggles with the world. He was widely praised for his candour, with a Guardian opinion piece saying his frank admission could help reduce the stigma around mental health and give other men – black men, in particular – the confidence to speak up and seek help.
In music, too, Stormzy has spoken about dealing with mental ill health. On the track Lay Me Down he raps, ‘Man’a get low sometimes, so low sometimes, Airplane mode on my phone sometimes, Sitting in my house with tears in my face, Can’t answer the door to my bro sometimes.’ While on the song Rachel’s Little Brother, he talks about bottling up his emotions and spilling all to his therapist.
Today, he compares mental ill health to ‘a tornado in a library’, with bouts of depression ‘throwing all these thoughts and words and sentences around’. Talking helps, he says, acknowledging that’s ‘one of the most clichéd and probably frustrating things for anyone who’s going through something to hear’. With age, he’s learned other strategies, too. ‘As I’ve grown,’ he says, ‘I’ve learned that I’m someone who thrives on structure. I feel like a lot of my mental health before was because of a lack of structure. I was almost living in the chaos of my thoughts and the world that was created for me by becoming an artist.’
Like many people, then, it’s not that he wants to work out early in the day or restrict what he eats; it’s that he needs to. ‘Waking up this morning, going to the gym, I’d much rather not do that. I’d rather scroll on TikTok or have a fry-up. I’m not naturally disciplined, so I need structure.’
‘My breakfast today was a spinach and egg skillet. I don’t want to eat that. But there’s something I do want and that is to be in shape, and have great shows. So that’s what I eat.’
STORMZY THINKS ABOUT HIS LIFE AS IF IT’S A VIDEO GAME. Days that are completed 100% flawlessly – where he eats clean, trains and gets everything done – bolster his confidence. ‘Over the course of six weeks, 12 weeks, 18 weeks, if I can get loads of 100%,’ he says, ‘then I know I’m where I’m meant to be. When I go on stage, I’ll know I’ve got it in the tank. I won’t be doing Big For Your Boots’ second verse and thinking, “Where’s this second wind going to come from?”’
On the flip side, he knows that days completed at 40% – when he goes off diet and skips training – are likely to knock him off course. ‘Days where I have a 40%, the next morning you would think I ran someone over,’ he says. ‘It’s just regret. I hate it. If I have a 40%, the next day needs to be 160.’
He accepts this isn’t always a very healthy way to approach life. But when he needs to lock in, it helps him and he usually achieves his 100% days. That’s happening so often right now that he feels bulletproof. Tabloid speculation about his personal life or social media gripes about when he’ll release new music – none of it affects him. Right now, he has two goals: to create a great fourth album and have a great MH cover. ‘If I make a great album and I have a great cover, that’s more important than anything I think, isn’t it?’ he asks.
One of those has already been checked off. And the undeniable amount of evidence from his life, from his career and from the hard work he puts in suggests fans won’t have to wait too long for the other.
This profile originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Men’s Health. Out now. Subscribe to Men’s Health by clicking here.
