The face (and body) behind Beachbody's 'Insanity' workout takes us back to his Jersey roots Watch video
The sun-baked stretch of Camden's North 23rd Street outside Calvary Bible Tabernacle is mostly empty, save for a musclebound man in a red polo shirt. An older man with a salt-and-pepper beard approaches, flagging him down.
"Is your name Shaun?" he shouts, moving closer.
"Mr. Shaun! Mr. Shaun!" he yelps, introducing himself as "Bunny." Dropping low to the sidewalk, he busts out a few breakdancing moves outside the church gates. His effort is earnest, if a bit rusty, but the man in the polo shirt can't stop smiling. He extends an arm to give the man a hug.
"Hallelujah!" Bunny howls, dancing down the street. "I will never forget this."
The Shaun in question is Shaun T, the fitness celebrity who made his name off late-night TV infomercials for funky dance workouts and intensive plyometric drills. Since Beachbody released his first DVD, "Hip Hop Abs," in 2007, the company says he has sold more than 8 million workout videos, including the strenuous yet popular "Insanity" program.
"This is my life," Shaun says. "People aren't nervous in my space." And it's not just in Camden, his hometown. Wherever he goes, he gets recognized at least a few times a day.
Floyd Anthony Harris, a Camden local known as 'Bunny,' busts out a few breakdancing moves for Shaun T outside Calvary Bible Tabernacle, where Shaun's grandfather was pastor. (Amanda Marzullo | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) These aren't just your garden-variety celebrity selfie encounters, either. To wit, just a moment later, Bunny the breakdancer returns to ask Shaun, 38, for help getting into in a drug addiction program. Shaun's representative takes down contact information for the man's family.
"The feeling that you felt in that moment, you have to live in that," Shaun tells Bunny, talking about his breakdance routine. "You know what I'm saying? Trust and believe. Never give up."
For nearly a decade now, Shaun T has been telling those embarking on home workouts the same thing -- "trust and believe." But long before he was conquering living rooms across the country with his positive-thinking mantra and glistening torso, Shaun T was a teen survivor of sexual assault who considered Calvary Bible Tabernacle his second home. Raised on food stamps, he wore socks with holes in them and didn't give up on his shoes until the soles were "talking."
"It builds so much character," he says of his tumultuous upbringing. Now, with a slew of workout videos to his name, he has enough money to live on a golf course in Arizona. Still, Shaun T says he gets his high from raising people up -- telling them to "dig deeper," whether that means helping someone in a wheelchair dance or driving the daily routine that helps someone lose half their bodyweight.
"Money does not drive me," he says. "It just doesn't."
Face (and abs) of a fitness empire
His voice snatches dozing insomniacs from the dim cast of their TVs at 4 in the morning.
"If you give me 25 minutes, I'll give you a life," Shaun T promises in one intense infomercial, wearing a headset mic, his face coated in sweat. His pitch is for "Focus T25," a workout that sounds like it traveled from 2029 to assassinate Sarah Connor. The routine promises all the fury of a full-blown fitness regimen in less than half an hour, sans weights.
"He comes through the screen into people's living rooms," says Lara Ross, a Beachbody executive vice president who previously worked on Richard Simmons videos. "He crosses that boundary like no one I've seen in my entire career."
Part of the sell is Shaun T's actual body. The Camden native's sculpted biceps, washboard abs ("His abs have abs!" one devotee proclaims) and penchant for dance-based cardio have likely compelled someone you know to sweat it out with one of his flashily named workouts, like the supercharged "T25" and the body-shaking "Cize." He's brawny, but not in the way bros who spend all day at the gym can be -- his muscles bulge out, but he's no Popeye.
In fact, last year Shaun T addressed critics who thought him too thin. While filming his "Insanity: The Asylum" videos, he clocked in at just 4.1 percent body fat. But the fitness celebrity says that's no personal benchmark.
"It's too much work and I like doughnuts," he says (toasted coconut or butterscotch, please). "But I still keep a six-pack." He adheres to a system that favors clean eating, but not to the exclusion of all else -- 85 percent healthy, 15 percent fun.
People consume Shaun T's workouts either on DVD -- an "Insanity" kit sells for $145 -- or on their phones and laptops through a subscription to Beachbody On Demand, the company's streaming platform, which costs about $13 a month.
Beachbody, founded in Santa Monica in 1998, claims a billion-dollar network of customers and fitness "coaches" that help sell workouts, diet plans and nutrition shakes to friends and family through social media. While some consider the pyramid-style business plan to be suspect -- each coach gets a cut of sales, and a cut of the sales of their customers who in turn become coaches -- "Team Beachbody" diehards swear by the system, which uses portion-controlled eating and "accountability" groups.
Workouts from Shaun T, one of 13 trainers in the Beachbody stable, are another tool in the program. In 2003, P90X, an advanced level workout from Beachbody trainer Tony Horton, became one of the company's earliest successes -- former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan name-checked the program in the run-up to the 2012 election.
But beyond Beachbody, the larger business of Shaun T Inc. includes his Facebook page -- "liked" 1.6 million times -- a YouTube channel with 84,000 subscribers, corporate speaking engagements, Shaun T apparel and a sneaker line with Fila. This year the fitness guru hosted "My Diet is Better Than Yours," an ABC reality competition series that pits health and fitness experts against each other in a kind of reverse "Biggest Loser" -- the trainers, not the ones who need to lose weight, get sent home.
For diehard Shaun T fans, there's also Shaun T emoji, a Shaun T podcast and a Shaun T organic meal delivery service.
Shaun T's transformation
Shaun T is a lightning rod for stories of personal growth and change -- Shaun T helped someone lose 100 pounds, Shaun T helped save a marriage. But there was a time growing up in South Jersey when even he was in desperate need of an escape.
Shaun Thompson was born in Camden and spent his early years with his mother and brother in Philadelphia. Feeling trapped by what he describes as four years of sexual abuse by a family member, he took refuge with his grandparents in Deptford.
"It completely changed the course of my life," says Thompson, who now goes by his married name, Shaun Blokker -- he wed former professional soccer player Scott Blokker in 2012. "I didn't feel like I was actually born until I was 14 years old."
His grandmother, Effie Dawson, was his "everything," he says, the "right-hand lady" to his grandfather, the Rev. Charles Dawson, pastor at Camden's Calvary Bible Tabernacle, who on Saturday mornings would go to a farmers' market to collect bread and distribute it to the community, then stand at a street corner near the church and preach with a megaphone. Today Blokker traces a direct line between his grandparents' example and his fitness empire.
"In a sense, I'm carrying that same message that my grandfather basically instilled in me," he says.
At Deptford High School, Blokker was a natural at track and field, but he really wanted to be the next Anderson Cooper. Attending Rowan University in Glassboro on academic grants and scholarships -- he still sports a tattoo from his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, on his bicep -- Blokker says he found both his career and sexual identity at college. In fact, he now credits his coming out as gay -- which his mother and "super-masculine, football-playing brother" embraced -- with helping him stay lean, because he'd notice that gay men were often in good shape.
Except that after a steady college diet of pizza and soda, he found himself 50 pounds heavier.
"I looked in the mirror one day and I was like, 'This can't happen. Like, I'm just not into this,'" he says. He discovered his true calling, he says, in the gym at the Rowan Rec Center, where he manned the front desk (and once got fired because he talked too much, before he was rehired).
"This was my sanctuary," he says, pinpointing the exact spot where he set up shop on a treadmill. He holds court each time he visits (his family still lives in the area, so he doesn't go long without a trip to Jersey) -- whether it's stepping in on a summer camp Zumba class or reminiscing with staff about that time he took the weight-loss stimulant Xenadrine and couldn't fall asleep.
Whether it was those first post-workout endorphins or something more, Blokker knew he wanted to connect to people through fitness.
"When I realized the way I felt -- more than the way that I looked, more than how many pounds I weighed -- is amazing, I literally said to myself, 'If I can get as many people to feel this way, I could help a lot of people,'" he says. He changed his major from communications to health and exercise science.
Shaun 'Shaun T' Blokker in his younger days with friend Mandee Casey at the Rowan University Rec Center. (Courtesy Mandee Casey)"From a kid he was always dancing," says Blokker's brother, Ennis Thompson, who still lives in Deptford and teaches Shaun's routines at a local gym. Tina Pinocci, associate vice president at Rowan, recalls how Blokker would draw up to 100 students for his hip-hop aerobics class -- "We had to have a building manager because we had to cut it off," she says.
After college, Blokker settled into a comfortable job as a health program manager at Wyeth, a pharmaceutical company. He taught dance classes at night, but wasn't happy. One good audition with a Los Angeles dance agency was all it took for him to move to Hollywood. Blokker's brother made the trip from New Jersey with Shaun in "Focusina," his jam-packed Ford Focus.
After the move, Blokker struggled financially and had to strip to make ends meet. While he says the people at church might raise an eyebrow, he's never regretted the decision.
"It got me to where I am today," Blokker says. "I stayed true to who I am, I stayed true to my morals."
'Hip Hop Abs' and 'Insanity'
In 2006, Blokker booked his dream gig as a backup dancer for Mariah Carey, but when Ross, the Beachbody executive, spotted him teaching his hip-hop class at the Equinox in West Hollywood, his fitness fate was sealed. From there, Beachbody collaborated with Blokker on "Hip Hop Abs," which used a system called "tilt, tuck and tighten to help people dance their way to chiseled abdominals.
When the company set about auditioning trainers for an intense new (non-dance) workout, Blokker's ears perked up. He filmed filmed a 15-minute reel, and Carl Daikeler, Beachbody CEO, was sold.
"He just has the ability to make it look easy and make it really interesting and inspiring," Daikeler says.
The final product, called "Insanity," created with Beachbody fitness experts and released in 2009, delivered cardio, plyometric and ab drills in a tough "max interval training" format. Unlike any number of its predecessors, it promised no magical shortcuts.
"You saw the struggle," Blokker says of the hourlong workout. "You saw me struggle." In 2013, "Focus T25," what Ross calls Shaun T's most successful program to date, packed the punch of a full-blown workout into a bite-sized 25 minutes and found a celebrity fan in Missy Elliott.
Following that, in 2015, came Cize, a dance workout filled with "pendulum swings" and "step snaps." Devotees of the regimen, who swore by its potential to not seem like exercise, began posting their own Cize dance videos on Facebook and YouTube.
'Trust and believe'
It was in a gym, too, that Shaun T found love. On a chance meeting in New York in 2010, the fitness celebrity met Scott Blokker.
"We had been hanging out for a little bit, maybe a couple weeks, and he's like, 'Have you Googled me?'" says Blokker, now a regular in Beachbody videos and the president of Shaun T, Inc.
Shaun insisted he'd only have to type in his first name, but Blokker was skeptical he had met the next Madonna.
"I had no idea who he was," he says. They married in 2012 in New York. Given their heavy travel schedule, they later decided they didn't want to fly back to East Coast weather and moved to a golf course near Phoenix.
Shaun, currently working on a memoir, is now more than financially stable, but Blokker sees his husband going the Rachael Ray route, possibly becoming something of a lifestyle brand. He doesn't go long without a Snapchat post for fans and he does his own workout videos "religiously."
"People have a love-hate relationship with me and so do I," Shaun says. "I'm like, 'He's a nightmare.'"
During a recent tangle with the "Pure Cardio" portion of Insanity, the fitness motivator heard himself say, "The stronger you get, the better you'll feel."
He started laughing.
"It's weird because I motivate myself," he says. "But if I don't believe in my own message, how can I expect anyone else to?"
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.