AS HIGH-PERFORMING athletes, Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes have both been on the receiving end of public scrutiny regarding their physiques: earlier this year, Kansas City Chiefs fans began circulating the phrase “dad bod” along with footage of a shirtless Mahomes online. Retired NFL Hall of Famer Brady, meanwhile, has faced body-shaming both for being both too thick and too thin at various stages in his career.

For both men, however, the priority is the game: and in a recent NFL on Fox conversation, Brady and Mahomes acknowledged that they train very specific muscle groups for very specific purposes, looking like a fitness model does not necessarily make you a better athlete.

“You have this amazing ability to improvise, you have such great technique when you’re throwing on the run, especially to the right,” Brady told Mahomes.

“That’s stuff that I work on,” replied Mahomes. “I use those hips and that oblique muscle to really rotate through there… The people who see the dad bod, that’s for a reason—that’s the obliques. I’m getting them right.”

It’s those obliques—and his famous arm—that help Mahomes win so many games with the Chiefs, and his Super Bowl rings can attest to the fact that aesthetics aren’t everything. And as Brady jokingly added, there are some perks to not staying at 6 percent bodyfat.

“We’ve got to keep a little padding there,” he said. “We’re getting hit all the time, they don’t understand that we can’t look like those receivers all the time.”

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