To be able to have a healthy diet, try to get enough sleep, and feel good about yourself at the gym, it helps you on these exhausting tours. It’s exhausting to tour and it’s exhausting to constantly give out energy. So, it’s good to go to the gym. Now when I go to the gym, it’s like, ahhh. I don’t have to do anything but worry about my legs for the next hour. I don’t have to answer to an agent. I don’t have to answer to my manager. I don’t have to worry about performing. I don’t have to write a joke. It’s a kind of clarity that helps you in the midst of all the insanity.
They say you get your best ideas in the shower. It’s because the shower white-noises out anything else, and you can let your mind wander. Any way you can let your mind just wander around is always a good way of bringing in thoughts, especially for me. When I’m joke writing, I don’t know that I can do it that well when I’m running through an airport, but I can if I’m just letting my mind go off.
What are you doing in the gym normally?
My trainer, Andrew Kusovschi, I found online and he is fantastic. He has me on a program. Today was upper body. He has me doing a bunch of stretches, obviously, before. I have to do some rowing, which sometimes I skip because I’m lazy. I did a barbell bench press. I have to do three sets. Then I had to do the chest press machine, three sets. I had to do dumbbell lateral raise, three sets. Machine assist, close grip pull up. They’re all three sets. Chest-supported T-bar row, single arm tricep pull-down. Then at the end I have to do some stretches as well, and mark in the app how much I lifted versus last week.
He changes it up every four weeks. Right now, because I’m prepping my body for new types of workouts and to go heavier, he has me split my body Monday to Friday. So it’s day one, lower A, is what he calls it. Day two, upper A. Wednesday, cardio and abs. Thursday, lower B. Friday, upper B. He’s splitting upper and lower body throughout the week, different workouts, and it’s mainly lifting. I do a little bit of cardio. I also live in New York, so I walk literally everywhere. But it’s a lot of lifting weights, and that’s what I like doing the best.
When you talked about tracking the progress, comparing one week to the next, are you competitive with yourself?
No. I just like to slowly progress, as long as my body feels good and I feel like I’m pushing myself a bit. But a lot of this is also diet. He’s written out my diet and then sends it to me through a company called MegaFit Meals. I have my whole diet laid out: what I have to eat on leg day versus what I have to eat on upper body day, and how many carbs I am taking on this day, and then balancing out how much weight I’ve gained. It’s pretty boring. It’s a lot of chicken and rice, a lot of beef and sweet potatoes, a lot of yogurt, oatmeal, protein powder, banana and peanut butter smoothies, stuff like that. It’s pretty boring.
You’re one of those annoying people who’s optimized their life.
Yeah. But I like it. I like having rules and I like routine and I like structure. I don’t like feeling out of control. But then when I went to Mexico for a week, it’s like, well, fuck it. I’m going to eat all the tacos, I’m going to have pancakes for breakfast, I’m going to have a margarita. For me, that’s going crazy. Then the week comes back and my body—because I work out so much and I eat so strictly—my body is ready to jump back in. When I go to Italy for two weeks, I’m like, I don’t think I should be having carbonara twice a day.
That’s what I would do.
I do do it! I keep getting carbonara. It’s a problem. The longest I lived in Italy was in college when I was a foreign exchange student in Umbria for four months or something. Then last month I went to my cousin’s house in Sicily. But I’m in Italy often, at least four times a year.