If Mark Langowski flags you down on the sidewalk, that’s a good thing.
The 44-year-old stops New Yorkers who look particularly fit and asks them what they do to stay in shape.
This makes for great social media content – he has 1.5 million followers on Instagram and several hundred thousand more on TikTok and YouTube – and surprising responses.
“One guy said he did 10,000 push-ups a day,” Langowski told the Post. “He was incredibly muscular, but you can’t really do anything else with your day if you’re doing 10,000 push-ups.”
Langowski, a personal trainer and gym director, started making these videos a little over a year ago after becoming frustrated with the workout content he was seeing online.
“I was fed up with the narcissistic crucible of garbage that social media had become, especially in the fitness industry, where people were constantly saying, ‘Look at me, look at me doing push-ups, look at my abs.’ ” he said. . “And I was always interested in what other people did to stay in shape.”
Langowski does not appear on camera in his short videos and he strives to feature everyday, fit people, not those who work in the fitness industry.
“I’m trying to find the mother of three with three kids at home. I’m trying to find the father of Wall Street. I’m trying to find the garbage man, the policeman,” he said. “I’m really trying to get a variety.”
One of his first posts to go viral was a conversation with a “torn” UPS man in September 2023.
“I don’t do weight training, just calisthenics, pull-ups, dips, push-ups. And keep going,” said the man, who wore the maroon uniform with swagger.
When Langowski asked him how many pull-ups he could do – a common question that sometimes leads someone to demonstrate their abilities on a scaffold or a traffic light – the man replied: “Real men, they don’t count.” »
Langowski finds most of his subjects downtown, usually in Soho and the West Village. It’s not that people from uptown aren’t in shape, he said, but they don’t tend to dress in this exposed item of clothing.
New Yorkers’ fitness strategies vary.
A 56-year-old cannabis dealer with astonishing upper body definition credits skateboarding with toning his abs.
A young woman running in Central Park said she was eating pizza, donuts and “like[d] his wine.
A ‘jacked’ 40-year-old man admitted he drank 25 drinks a week and took black seed oil, sea moss, ashwagandha and chlorophyll supplements.
A 23-year-old financier outside the Trump Building said he eats “as much protein as possible.” [he] maybe” – a staggering 280 grams per day.
But certain answers keep coming back.
“No matter what they do, they are consistent,” Langowski said of his subjects’ routines.
Prioritizing strength training is another common refrain.
“They lift weights for three days [or more] a week,” he said. And, he noted, “they’re not killing themselves with cardio.”
And, despite a few outliers, most subjects tended to eat a healthy — but not perfect — diet and drink alcohol only sparingly.
“The average person I interview drinks between 3 and 5 drinks a week,” said Langoswki, who lives in Midtown East.
He does the vast majority of his interviews in New York, but he has occasionally taken the show on the road to the Hamptons, Miami and Los Angeles. He found that his subjects conform to stereotypes about where they live.
“People in Los Angeles wanted to talk to me forever. My average interview in Los Angeles was 10 minutes,” he said. And “people had a little more New Age stuff where they were like, ‘I believe in grounding.’ I have to walk where my feet touch the sidewalk for at least three hours a day. Or: “I don’t believe in sunscreen. So I walk around and enjoy the sun for six hours a day.‘”
In contrast, his Big Apple interviews are short and sweet, usually about a minute and a half, two minutes tops.
“We’re not rude, we New Yorkers,” he said. “But we have somewhere to go.”
