From Men's Health

This isn't how DeMarcus Ware wanted the morning to go. It’s 6:30 when he strides into his personal gym in Trophy Club, Texas, already a half hour behind on a crowded schedule.

His eyes dart from a clock to a tread-mill to his Jammer (a steel cage with two giant handles), then back to the clock. He nods his shiny, bald head. “We all make time for what’s important,” Ware says, collapsing to the floor and bending his knee into a quad stretch. “And I need this. It’s my 45 minutes before the chaos of the day.”

And it’s Ware’s only chance to unleash his own chaos, a daily dose of physicality he’s maintained since he retired from the NFL in 2017. During his 12 seasons in the league, as a pass-rushing star for the Dallas Cowboys and a Super Bowl winner with the Denver Broncos, the linebacker spent his days hurling his six-foot-four, 260-pound frame at opponents.

Photo credit: Arturo Olmos More

Ware did it as well as anyone, finishing eighth on the NFL’s career sack list. But these days, the job is less about muscle, more about megawatt smiles. At 37, he’s early into his second career, rebranding himself as equal parts OG fitfluencer Shaun T and Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan. In 2018, he competed on Dancing with the Stars. He also makes occasional appearances on NFL Network, flying wherever the Cowboys play to talk about his old team.

It’s a new world Ware loves, but tackling is unnecessary roughness here. When you spent more than a decade living for the next hit, meetings are instant boredom. Ware often fidgets during sit-down meetings—and after this workout, his day is full of them. He checks in with his team about his new iOS fitness app, Driven 2 Win, and he takes calls for various video projects. Before all that, it helps to hit, well, something. “This,” Ware says, “has replaced football as my physical outlet. I’m not able to be out there competing like I used to against the guys anymore. So I do this.”

He’s hoping to transform that outlet into a business. Since leaving football, he’s built an Instagram following that’s approaching 1 million—and although some beg him to get back into his cleats, many also want an ex–NFL badass’s training advice. He delivers with regular IG workouts as well as his new app, and he just got certified as a personal trainer himself. He already works with a handful of one-on-one clients out of his gym, and by this spring he’ll open the space to the public under the name 3Volt. (He has

an afternoon meeting about that today, too. Yes, that means more sitting.)



His morning workouts double as a testing ground for exercises he’ll use in 3Volt training sessions. “Everybody wants to be fit,” says Ware. “Now I can be a captain in their lives after motivating my teammates and being a champion on the football field. I want to train and teach them how to get the right mindset to go tackle the day.”

Photo credit: Arturo Olmos More

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