Patrick Mahomes and the secrets of the Dad Bod: What we get wrong about athleticism

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Patrick Mahomes and the secrets of the Dad Bod: What we get wrong about athleticism

It began

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. There was Patrick Mahomes, standing victorious in a locker room, his arm raised in triumph, his torso shirtless, his gut exposed and … kind of flabby?

Maybe it was the lighting. Or a bad angle. Mahomes blamed that. Still, the evidence seemed undeniable: Here was one of the greatest athletes on planet earth, moments removed from leading the Kansas City Chiefs to the Super Bowl last January, and it sure seemed like he was rocking a Dad Bod.

It didn’t hurt that Mahomes played along on X (“Yoooo why they have to do me like that!?!?!? #DadBodSZN”). Or that his teammates had poked at his physique for years.

“You would think he was a soccer dad or something,” former Chiefs receiver Tyreek Hill

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.

When Mahomes appeared on stage last summer with tight end Travis Kelce at a charity event, both struggled to pull a snug Chiefs jersey over their regular clothes.

“Dad Bod,” Mahomes said, shrugging.

Mahomes isn’t the only one. Superstar athletes in all kinds of physically demanding sports are combining unconventional body types with otherworldly athleticism: Luka Dončić’s pudgy midsection. Josh Allen’s round barrel chest. Nikola Jokić’s lack of muscle definition.

It led to a relevant question: If Patrick Mahomes can be one of the best athletes in the world, in the Super Bowl for a third consecutive year with a body that inspires memes, did that say something about him, or our own fundamental ability to understand what real athleticism looks like?

“We are not very good at certainly seeing — but even calculating — athleticism,” said Marcus Elliott, a sport scientist and the founder of P3 Peak Performance Project, a training lab in Santa Barbara, Calif.

At P3, Elliott and his team are at the forefront of assessing some of the world’s best athletes and searching for the hidden secrets of human performance.

Their work has led to a simple belief: Our traditional ideas of athleticism — *******, faster, stronger — is too limited. The common measurements we use — sprint speed, vertical jump, bench press — are woefully incomplete.

“When something is unorthodox, our brains are always trying to find cause and effect,” Elliott said. “We want answers for everything. And what we do in sport is we over rely on our eyes for those answers. We draw these broad conclusions from a very small amount of biased information.”

His team’s research points to a radical solution. When it comes to athleticism, we need to do something we are not very good at: open our minds and think differently.

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One day in the summer of 2014, Nikola Jokić, a 6-foot-11 big man from Serbia, showed up to the P3 facility in Santa Barbara, Calif. When he met Elliott, the facility’s director, he offered a quick explanation for his presence.

“The basketball is good,” he said.

Then he reached down and patted his stomach. Elliott thought it resembled a “beer belly.” That needed help.

Jokić was 19 years old and two months removed from being drafted in the second round by the Denver Nuggets. He had come to P3 to undergo an advanced athlete assessment. When he attempted a vertical leap, he jumped 17 inches. It was, according to Elliott, the worst vertical jump they had ever recorded.

In the last decade, as Jokić grew into an NBA MVP and one of the best basketball players in the world, the story of his trip to P3 and his 17-inch jump has become a part of his lore. In many ways, it’s actually the least interesting part of the story.

As Elliott’s team evaluated Jokić, he was put through a series of tests. P3 tested his hip abduction, or how fast and far one can affect one’s hip when moving laterally. It measured second-order metrics like how quickly he could decelerate and how high he could jump two times in a row. And it looked at a list of what Elliott calls “granular biomechanics” — hundreds of variables that rate things like force production, loads and joint extension. When the tests were complete, P3 put the numbers into a machine-learning algorithm that clusters athletes into groups with similar attributes.

What was most revealing about Jokić was not the numbers themselves, but the players he compared to. He was right on the fringe of a group of guards that Elliot called “Swiss Army Knives” because of their ability to do anything on the court.

“They’re just like a B-minus to B-level in everything,” Elliott said. “And that’s Jokić. He may look herky-jerky to you. But looking at the data, we think it looks really beautiful.”

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Jokić’s 17-inch vertical jump is the stuff of lore. But he’s also a three-time NBA MVP. (Aaron Ontiveroz / The Denver Post / Getty Images)

P3 gave the cluster a name: “The Kinematic Movers.” That cluster exists as a skeleton key to unlock how data and technology can unearth athletic genius and provide a fuller picture. A Kinematic Mover is not an explosive jumper. Nor particularly powerful. But grades out above average in almost everything, possessing a portfolio of some of the most useful physical tools and movements in basketball.

As a group, Kinematic Movers in the NBA have longer careers, on average, and accumulate more of the statistic Win Shares.

“I love the idea that if you can do everything pretty well, there’s a place for you at the highest level of sport,” Elliott said.

One example, Elliott said, is Steve Nash. When Nash starred for the Phoenix Suns in the mid-2000s, winning two MVPs, he witnessed an NBA that viewed athleticism as “a code name for explosiveness.” A player might be viewed as smart or crafty or have a strong basketball IQ. But it was hard to decipher exactly what that meant.

Warriors coach Steve Kerr, then a former player and executive, had what Elliott called the “ball-and-stick theory,” which wasn’t too complicated: If you wanted to know if a player was a good athlete, hand him a ball and stick.

Mahomes, of course, played baseball as a kid, and Elliott suspects he would grade out as a Kinematic Mover. (He’s never been assessed at P3.) But unlike 25 years ago, we don’t have to guess. The proliferation of technologies such as “force plates” and the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence has allowed labs like P3 to quantify what once felt intangible.

When Dončić started making trips to P3 as a teenager, he did not grade out well in traditional performance metrics. But he did have one superpower: He was in the 92nd percentile in a measure called “eccentric force,” which translates to the simple act of going full speed and then stopping, a fact

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by the Wall Street Journal.

Dončić isn’t just skilled and crafty. He’s a physical marvel.

“When you start actually measuring these things, it’s almost like having a microscope,” Elliott said. “You start being able to see this hidden world that’s not accessible to us with our eyes open.”

And when it comes to an athlete like Dončić or Mahomes, sometimes the hidden world is just as amazing as the one you can see.

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When Mahomes was in elementary school, his father, Pat Sr., took him to work with Bobby Stroupe, a performance trainer in Tyler, Texas. Stroupe had worked with all sorts of athletes, from kids to professionals, but when he laid his eyes on Mahomes, he noticed something intriguing.

Mahomes was not exceptionally fast, but he was adept at movements that felt eclectic: crawling, twisting, chopping, swinging. He was a natural at understanding momentum and space.

Two decades later, Mahomes remains a mesmerizing athlete. His traditional performance metrics — like his 4.8 40-yard dash or his squat max — are unremarkable. But when you consider everything together — what Elliott calls a “symphony of movement” — there are few quarterbacks like him.

He runs faster on curves than he does in a straight line and is a master at decelerating under control. He excels at what Stroupe calls “forecasting momentum,” or using his vision and depth perception to understand how fast he is moving compared to a defender. His reaction times are off the charts.

“I think the problem is you look at him and his body type is not what you would think of,” Stroupe said.

Oh, yes, the Dad Bod. The term itself is perhaps slightly misunderstood. It reached critical mass in 2015, when a Clemson student named Mackenzie Pearson earned $500 for a blog post for a little-known website called The Odyssey: “Why Girls Love the Dad Bod.”

The origins of the post were very college. Pearson and her sorority sisters noticed that most frat guys at Clemson had a similar physique: Former athletes who had a few too many beers. They named their group chat the “Dad Bod Squad.” The piece went viral and the term launched into the lexicon. When Merriam-Webster officially added “Dad Bod” to the dictionary in 2021, Pearson received an official letter.

In time, Pearson noticed her original meaning began to morph. It was never supposed to connote an out-of-shape dad.

“It’s the Patrick Mahomes (body),” she said. “It’s that version of someone that is objectively physically in good shape and attractive. But not washboard abs. That’s the big thing.”

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When it comes to Mahomes, who is listed at 6 feet 2 and 225 pounds, part of his shape is by design. When Stroupe was a young trainer, he worked with major league pitchers, a position where increased body **** and mass often provided an advantage.

As new Hall of Fame pitcher CC Sabathia told Pat McAfee in 2023: “I always say ‘mass equals gas.’ I need a big **** to throw hard.”

Research supports the theory. A few years ago, Ben Brewster, a pitching instructor who co-founded Tread Athletics, studied the average body weight of MLB pitchers over time. In 1994, it was 193 pounds. By 2010, it had jumped to 217. Across the same span, fastball velocity skyrocketed.

Brewster cautions that the relationship between a pitcher’s mass and his fastball velocity is nuanced and complex. But when he considers a pitcher’s general physique and his performance, he emphasizes that there is an important psychological component.

“If they feel better being 20 percent body ****,” he said, “there’s no reason they have to be 10 percent body ****.”

He saw a natural connection between pitchers and other “throwing athletes,” like quarterbacks. Mahomes aims to play at 14 percent body ****, a number that provides a mix of stability, protection, flexibility and peace of mind. Which is to say it allows him to be himself, to lean into the gifts that make him special.

To this day, Stroupe tailors Mahomes’ workouts around movements — twisting, swinging, shuffling — he might use on the field. He recalls similar skepticism about running backs Emmitt Smith and Marshall Faulk, a proto-Kinematic Mover with a round face and surprisingly pudgy build. Sure, if Mahomes spent more time on traditional weight lifting, he could probably build more muscle. But to what benefit? And at what cost?

As Kelly Stafford, the wife of Rams quarterback Matt Stafford, wrote on

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last year: “Dad bod is a requirement to be an NFL QB. Show me a shredded QB, and I’ll show you a not very good QB.”

What Elliott would like most is for people to stop relying on their eyes to determine athleticism. What is beautiful is not always functional, and it’s worth thinking about the next time you look into the mirror at the gym.

On a Sunday in October, Mahomes dropped back on fourth-and-goal in a close game against the San Francisco 49ers. As the pocket collapsed and San Francisco’s Nick Bosa came around the edge, Mahomes took off for the goal line. When he arrived, he lowered his shoulder and bulldozed into rookie safety Malik Mustapha. The highlight rippled across the internet. Mustapha was on his back. Mahomes was celebrating.

“That Dad Bod, man,” Mahomes said later.

Yes, it was the Dad Bod. It was a lot more, too.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE, Brooke Sutton / Getty Images)

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