Sons Of Anarchy Workout

A Sons Of Anarchy Star Tells Us How He Stays So Ripped

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Hey, everybody — guess what! Theo Rossi reads my stuff!

Rossi, who plays Juan Carlos “Juice” Ortiz on Sons of Anarchy is a big fan of AskMen, being a dedicated reader for about five years now. He says our articles are “very thorough and knowledgeable.”

He must have been talking about a different writer when he made that comment.

Anyway, the dude is badass, and I’m not just talking about his character on SoA. I’ve done a metric sh*t-ton of celebrity fitness interviews, and with the possible exception of Gina Carano, I’ve never spoken with someone so dedicated to working out and eating a healthy diet.

And being gung-ho about fitness is nothing new for Theo.

“Sports was my entire life as long as I can remember,” Rossi told me. “I was out with the other neighborhood kids playing stick ball and tackle football.” Theo, who is 38 years old, said he grew up at a time when kids didn’t stay at home. “After school you were out on your BMX bike, playing sports or splitting up into teams to hunt each other around the neighborhood.” To you young fellas, home video games sucked when Rossi and I were kids. Outside was the best thing going.

Rossi played soccer first, but then switched to Pee Wee football when he was 9.

“The reason I went to an all-boys Catholic school was because they had the best football team,” he said. “We won the state championship my junior year. It was super-competitive. We lost in the semifinals my senior year and it still haunts me.”

And it was in the off-season of football that Theo got a taste for the iron.

“We did a lot of weightlifting,” he said. “We did bench, deadlift and squat competitions. I was an outside linebacker, and it was all about getting as fast and big as you could for the football team. It was a more-weight-the-better kind of mentality, which caused a lot of injuries. I messed up my back and my knees.” He said they just didn’t know any better, and that there wasn’t any focus by coaches put on good lifting technique.

I can relate. My lower lumbar woes also are traced back to the high school weight room.

Rossi boxed some in high school as well, and received offers from a few different schools to play football. “I wound up going to SUNY in Albany, but my life ended up taking a huge turn and my main focus became about making money to get through school.”

Nowadays, Rossi considers himself “a borderline psychopath” when it comes to diet and exercise.

“What happened was that I came out to L.A.,” he told me. “I was always in good shape, but I was offered a film role about crystal meth addiction, and I had to lose 43 pounds in 12 weeks and get my body fat down to about 3%. I was emaciated, but I learned a lot in preparing for that role.”

Rossi believes that diet is 10 times more important than exercise, “but you can’t do one without the other.” After the movie, called Meth Head, Rossi had an epiphany about food. “I stepped out of the matrix and knew that from then on I only wanted to eat clean. I try not to eat processed foods, well, ever. If it comes from a lab or a factory,” Theo said, “I don’t want it.”

On the training side, he’s gone equally hardcore.

“I change my training probably every two months,” Rossi said. “The only thing that stays consistent is that I’ve become a pretty psychotic runner. I was going to run [the] New York [City] Marathon, but it was canceled because of Hurricane Sandy.” At the time he was doing Meth Head, he was running upwards of 60 miles a week to help drop weight.