Rusty Rahm was perched on a stool, his legs tethered to the piece of furniture and his arms bound behind him. A man stuffed a wad of gauze into Rahm’s mouth and taped it shut, then shoved Vaseline up his nostrils.

He sat like that for more than an hour as an EMT watched.

“Obviously I was having trouble breathing at that point,” said Rahm, a 47-year-old entrepreneur who owns seven different companies and lives in Kansas City, Mo.



‘There is a primal nature in men that has been completely castrated.’ - Garrett White

“But I was a smoker — and they told me if I continued to smoke, that’s what my breathing would be like if someone tried to kick down the door and break into my home and I had to protect my family.”

“They” are the coaches of Warrior Week — an intensive program for male executives from tech, finance and other high-pressure industries to learn the “hidden science of accessing (nearly) unlimited sex, power and money as a married business man,” according to the program’s website. Rahm shelled out $10,000 for the privilege of being bound, gagged and run ragged for five days and nights in Laguna Beach, Calif., in April.

Drills included being thrown off a boat into the Pacific Ocean while blindfolded, dunked into a tank of ice water, and visiting a cemetery where the men are told they will die in 20 minutes and must first write goodbye letters to their loved ones.

“We teach them how to be a man,” said Warrior Week founder Garrett J. White, a 40-year-old blond with tattooed biceps who looks like a video-game soldier.

“Women are leading [both] across the board in business and at home . . . and living more powerfully than men today. And that’s causing complete chaos for men.”

White launched Warrior Week in 2012 to offer guidance to wayward souls like he once was. At 23, he was divorced, bankrupt and recovering from cancer. He pulled his life together and built a million-dollar real estate empire — then lost it all in the mortgage banking crisis of 2007. That’s when he reinvented himself as a life and business guru: Tony Robbins meets The Rock.

“There is a primal nature in men that has been completely castrated,” said White.

Warrior Week is a boot camp held 10 to 12 times a year, where participants receive a mix of intense physical and mental training, with a focus on emotional development (there is even a course on meditation).

Members of the so-called Warrior brotherhood range in age from 35 to 55. White said he receives approximately 500 applications for each Warrior Week’s 20 or so spots.

He added that his applicants fall into one of two categories: “They are guys who have built something and lost it and are stuck . . . and then we have guys who are even more dangerous. They’re killing it and bored.”

First up for potential Warriors is the application, with questions such as “Have you ever been punched in the face by another man?”

“I’ve been a United States Marine. Combat action, Iraq and Afghanistan,” said William Toadvine, 40, who owns car dealerships and lives in Delaware. He completed the program in March 2016. “Warrior Week was a tough application process. It was the first time I had a man tell me I was a coward.”

Toadvine wasn’t even accepted on his first go-round.

“I don’t know if I was being 100 percent honest, and I think the coach interviewing me felt that,” he said. “I had lied for 38 years straight. I had infidelities in my relationships. I was in a fourth marriage and I had met my wife [while] having an affair. I thought money fixed things; Warrior Week taught me that money wasn’t going to save my kids or show them love.”

Once in, things don’t get much easier.

The men stay at a chichi Laguna Beach hotel, but sleep a mere four hours each night, waking up at 5 a.m. for drills and calisthenics.

Doug Weed, who works for a food manufacturing business and lives in Auburn, NY, signed up for Warrior Week last May.

“It’s easy to lose focus on the things most important to you, and having the stress of a small family business, and trying to show up as I should as a husband, father and boss can be very difficult,” said Weed, 38.

His first challenge upon arriving was to recite the poem “Invictus” — with lines like “Under the bludgeoning of chance/My head is bloody, but unbowed” — from memory.

“Those who couldn’t got sent to the ice tank or had to do pocket burpees” — where one sticks his hands into his pockets, drops to the ground and lies on his chest, and has to get on his feet without using his hands — “with a 30-pound backpack on,” said Weed.

Navin Thukkaram, a tech investor who owns the juice company Indie Fresh and splits his time among NYC, Stockholm and Park City, Utah, participated in Warrior Week in April to “get back to being present.”

“A lot of New Yorkers feel the same [need],” the 41-year-old said. “There’s sensory overload, and it creates some distance from reality. I wanted to . . . specifically focus on the male psychology, the warrior mentality, that resonated with me.”

By week’s end, he was foaming at the mouth and virtually unresponsive, he said. “In the end, the will to live prevailed.” A comrade had to be hospitalized after White feared he was having a heart attack. (The man ended up being fine.)

“It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” said Thukkaram. He loved it so much that he — and his session’s 10 other participants — signed up for a year of customized coaching with White for $25,000 each.

White wasn’t always a guru. He grew up in California and Washington and played semipro indoor football after graduating from a Mormon junior college. At 22 — newly married and with a pregnant wife — he was diagnosed with ameloblastoma, a form of cancer, and had to get all his lower teeth pulled. (The couple divorced the next year.)

‘Women are leading [both] across the board in business and at home . . . and living more powerfully than men today. And that’s causing complete chaos for men.’ - Garrett White

Directionless, White drifted into the mortgage industry in 2002.

“Within one year I was making more money than I imagined possible,” he said. He started a 100-person company; at his peak, he brought home $1 million to $1.5 million per year. He married his second wife, Danielle, with whom he has two daughters, in 2003.

By the fall of 2007, White’s empire had crumbled amid the mortgage crisis, and he sold off his businesses and home in Utah.

“When you lose your identity as a businessman, you literally lose the power to create. You become weak,” said White. “It becomes awkward to engage with powerful men. So you spend most of your time with women or men who drink all the time.”

White, a consultant at the time, said he was heading toward a second divorce as he relied more on porn and drinking.

“I wanted to connect sexually with my wife, but I operated like a huge p - - - y. I might as well have thrown my balls into the garbage disposal.”

He searched for answers in Hinduism and the writings of Eckhart Tolle. White left the Mormon church, and started going to sweat lodges, practicing reiki and running ultramarathons — anything to “help me understand why I felt so horrible.”

In 2012, he launched Warrior Week and now employs 17 staffers. “I figured out that if we gamify life . . . and you compete against yourself, it f - - king works.”

His marriage rebounded, and White — who lives with his family in Dana Point, Calif. — now estimates his net worth at around $10 million. Apparently, there are a lot of lost men out there.

While White says he’s never heard of Robert Bly and the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 1990s, during which guys beat drums in the woods to channel their masculinity, many of the tenets are similar to Warrior Week.

“There is a primal nature inside men that has been sedated, between the way that boys have been raised like me, raised by my mother, and the way that churches and society and government . . . have taught men that it is not OK,” said White.

Controversially, he believes that without an outlet for primal energy, men “go ballistic and beat women. A guy is suppressed with anger that he has no healthy release for,” said White.

Warrior Week focuses on four principles: body, being, balance and business.

“I went to a female therapist, and I just don’t think she understood,” said Steve Krebs, 38, who lives in Marcy, NY, and participated in Warrior Week in 2014. “At Warrior Week, it’s [other men] who have gone through what we’ve gone through rather than someone theorizing about it.”

White said the majority of clients aren’t there to make more money, but rather to improve their relationships at home.

“There’s nothing more painful [than] a sexless relationship with a woman you started out loving deeply,” said White. “You go to your office, you’re in power, and you come home and are not powerful.”

White teaches disciples that their wives are queens, calling up a clip from the movie “300” in which King Leonidas looks to his wife for approval before waging war.

Andy Rosenfarb, a 45-year-old acupuncturist from Warren, NJ, is a believer. “I went from sex that was kind of ‘eh’ with my wife, to . . . date nights and paying attention to each other again.”

And then, there is the end-of-the-week fistfight.

Rahm said Warrior Week dubs marriage “the ATM. If you don’t put deposits in, there won’t be anything to take out.”

Just don’t call Warrior Week a camp. “Camping is a hobbie [sic],” White corrected The Post in an email. “Warrior Week is War.”

A war waged by a bunch of middle-aged men, many of whom are admittedly out of shape. “I was scared s - - tless,” admitted Adam Splaver, a 46-year-old cardiologist from Florida who attended Warrior Week to become “a better version of myself.”

“We had to run up the mountain with two sandbags. I was like, ‘I can’t do that. I’m from Florida. It’s all flat,’ ” said Splaver, who has four children with his wife of 22 years.

“Then they said, ‘Your wife and kids are at the top of the mountain,’ ” he added. “It gave me more confidence in myself, which is very funny when talking to a very successful clinical cardiologist.”

In addition to “log work” — where the men are forced to do situps with 300-pound logs on their stomachs and carry them overhead during a 2-mile hike — there is a sadistic drill called “sand cookies.”

“You don’t know when it’s going to end,” said Krebs. “You dive into the ocean, you go into the sand and roll around, dive back into the ocean. We did it for 90 minutes nonstop.”

And then, there is the end-of-the-week fistfight.

“Often a powerful man needs to come to a place where he can be punched in the face,” White said. “We lose a lot of guys, too, because they are like, ‘Dude, I don’t want to fight.’ And we’re like, ‘Dude, you’re not at the same speed as us.’ ”

The men go to a nearby boxing ring where they are set up to spar with their brethren for one-minute intervals.

“You went through the crucible with the man they’re telling you to fight,” said Weed. “But they say this man represents someone who is going to take everything of value. You have to fight for what’s important in life.” He recalled being barely able to chew food for a week after getting knocked in the jaw.

And to think, men pay for this. Big time.

Christian Steiner, a 45-year-old Midtown resident, did Warrior Week last May and now shells out $25,000 for an annual membership with the broader “Wake Up Warrior” movement. “You could be eating steak at your favorite restaurant your whole life,” said the owner of a health care company. “And all of a sudden you go across the street to a place you’ve never been and you realize this is the best steakhouse.”

In other words, for some true believers, Warrior Week is life-changing despite its torturous lessons. Steiner said the cost wasn’t even a factor: “Add a zero to what I paid and I would do it again.”