If there’s any silver lining to the pandemic for country star Brett Young, it’s that he’s spending a lot of unexpected time with his baby daughter, Presley Elizabeth. “I miss the road, but I wouldn’t trade a thing because I didn’t miss any of the firsts with our daughter. I saw her first steps. I heard her first words,” the singer-songwriter tells Variety from his home in Nashville. “And I’m very aware that both of those things actually happened on a weekend, so I definitely wouldn’t have been home.”
However, Young suddenly realized he hadn’t worked out in 14 months and put on 20 pounds. With his weight at 245 pounds, he returned to the gym with celebrity trainer Don Saladino, whose client roster includes Hugh Jackman, Ryan Reynolds, Sebastian Stan and Jake Gyllenhaal. “I don’t want to play a superhero,” Young says. “I just want to look like one.”
The performer recently announced that fans can join him on his fitness journey with a program designed by Saladino and available at BY40signup.com. “All you need are just two dumbbells, and you can do it at home,” says Young, who was named new male vocalist of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2018. Incentives include swag from Garden of Life supplements, On Cloud footwear, Trifecta meal delivery and Halo sports drinks. “Luckily I’m 6-6, so 20 pounds for me is probably more like 10 or 12 pounds for the average 5-10 male,” says Young. “So the weight does come off faster, but 20 pounds is 20 pounds.”
His weaknesses are pasta and whiskey. “It’s the combination of carbs and the whiskey, but the whiskey is not just empty calories — it also steals your motivation to go to the gym,” Young says. “I kept saying, ‘I’ll go back to the gym next week.’ But when we finally got to 2021, I went, ‘Something’s got to change.’”
Young’s goal? To get healthier for his wife, Taylor, and their daughter, but also to land the cover of a men’s fitness magazine. “For better or worse, now the world knows about it,” he says. “I think the biggest thing for me was we’re going to put this out there, and now it’s up to me whether or not I’m going to be called a liar or a quitter at the end of it.”
(Picture above: Brett Young with celebrity trainer Don Saladino.)