After Giving Up Running Due to Knee Pain, This Is What Terry Crews Uses for Cardio

Even before Crews landed in Black Ops 7, he was a fan of the long-running shooter franchise as a way of getting quality time with his children. 'We would play these games together,' he says. 'To be a part of this, it’s a bonding experience for me and my son. It’s an honour.'

Crews says his favourite version of the franchise was Modern Warfare 2, which was released in 2022. 'Nostalgia is king at the moment,' says Crews. 'I feel there’s a nostalgia for Call of Duty as well. I think it’s a new appreciation for the creativity and making these games.'

Crews used to love running, and a few years ago, he’d regularly set his treadmill to eight miles-per-hour then crank out a four-mile run. But as he’s gotten older, he says, his knees and hips have started to ache if he runs too often.

The fix: a stairmaster, like this badass from Echelon. It’s enough to rev Crews’ heart rate, sans the joint impact that comes with running. 'Now I’ll do 45 to 50 minutes on the stairmaster,' he says. 'You get all the cardio benefits the same way.'

Not that Terry’s completely given up running. He picks his spots now, partly because he knows he needs to keep his cardio up. When he does run, he turns to his AlterG Anti-Gravity Treadmill.

Yes, this bad boy is pricey – partly because of how it changes the running experience, tweaking the air pressure in its bubble casing to essentially make your body lighter. 'It literally lets you run lighter,' Crews says, 'and that’s what I love about it. I can take 40, 50 pounds off (my bodyweight) and still run, which is one thing I love to do.'

Like plenty of ultra-fit guys, Crews loves to track his metrics, especially when he’s on set. And when he is filming, he usually burns a tons of calories, he says. 'What’s so crazy, I found, in a day, I burn 7,000 calories,' he says. 'It blew my mind.'

Whoop’s latest band offers a low-profile way to keep up that tracking. And Crews can’t help loving that, especially when he thinks back to how little data he had at the start of his career. 'I'm from an era where we didn’t have a lot of monitors,' he says.

Problem solved.

Crews definitely does a lot of calorie-burning cardio, but he still gets after it in the weight room, too. And his tool of choice remains the classic barbell – even if he does admit that he uses it differently than he did a decade ago. His days of maxxing out are done, he says, in favour of (slightly) lighter weights done for (slightly) higher reps. 'I could probably try that 600-pound deadlift,' he says. 'But why? I have to think about the reasoning. Instead of doing 600 pounds, I would do 400 pounds three times.'

It’s enough to still elicit a strong training stimulus – without completely battering Crews’ body. And it starts with a foundational barbell, like Bulldog Gears' 20kg Olympic Barbell.

Yes, when Crews played in the NFL, classic back squats were king. But these days, the classic barbell move isn’t a requirement for Crews. And heck, when Crews catches up with NFL players, he says, they don’t rely on it either. 'I hosted the Pro Bowl games,' he says. 'They don’t do squats. They do... what is it: the belt squat. And these guys are the best athletes that ever existed.'

A machine like the Bells of Steel Belt Squat allows Crews to seriously challenge his quads without battering his lower back – a perfect lower-body training combination.