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This story is part of Men’s Health‘s NFL Strong 2026 package, a series of stories that explore how athletes build and maintain strength for the ultra-physical game of football. Read all the stories here.
MAYBE DRAKE MAYE isn’t so jacked after all. He’s on the practice field near Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, right now, rolling out and firing passes with laser accuracy. His calves are well-muscled, his upper body lithe, and he moves with grace and power. He smiles easily between shots for his Men’s Health cover, and even takes the blame when he puts some extra zip on a pass that catches the receiver by surprise and bounces off his hands. He’s relaxed even though he knows that every photo will draw scrutiny from Patriots Nation and football analysts guestimating his exact weight.
Such is the life of the next megastar NFL quarterback: All eyes watch every bit of your evolution. And in Drake Maye’s case, the fans and the media have zoned in specifically on his body. Thanks to a few offseason photos, football fans have declared he’s bulked up, and the Internet is still speculating over exactly how much muscle he’s added (range: 10 to 25 pounds). Social media sleuths call him “buff” and “jacked” and “swole.” And in the spring, a reporter asked him if he was now “thicker, with two C’s.” His one-word reply to that: “Pause.”
Except Maye is none of those. “I don’t see myself as the big ol’, muscle-type quarterback,” he says. “I think there are some guys around the league that showcase that more.” The photo shoot is done now, and he’s at home, leaning back in a lounge chair on his porch, his plate-size hands folded in his lap. His shoulders round forward, elongating his arms, and his long legs are unfurled in front of him. He looks taller than his 6’4″ listed height, maybe even slightly skinny.
Or, as Maye prefers, “I’m looking kind of slim,” he says. “Slim-fit enough.”
Slim-fit.
Don’t expect that one to catch on with gym bros. It’s a strange, but accurate self-compliment, one that causes a record-scratch moment in our muscle-inflation era, when University of Oklahoma QB John Mateer’s yoked silhouette sparks an ESPN “investigation” into quarterback jackedness, and when celebs and average Joes alike (and Drake Maye fans) love the filter that adds 20 pounds. Meanwhile, Maye is fact-checking his own muscle-myth. Instagram weight estimates are off. He’s added maybe 10 pounds since last year, clocking in around 235. He expects to finish this season around 230. “I wouldn’t say I look completely like I’m in the gym all the time,” he says.
That’s not to say that the 24-year-old hasn’t transformed during the offseason. Coming off a stellar 2025 that ended with disappointment, he knows he has to improve. Maye is the alpha among a cadre of young QBs in their early 20s who are challenging the old guard of the NFL, which has been dominated by Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen, and Matthew Stafford. So this offseason, he hit the self-improvement lab—just not the way you might expect. Because sure, the Internet narrative is all about how Drake Maye slept next to the bench press, took dips in his cold plunge all summer, and guzzled 12 protein shakes daily en route to the most ab-tastic version of himself ever.
But the IRL Maye’s journey is a little more nuanced. He’s learning that greatness doesn’t have to be a solo pursuit. As he grows into his role as a leader and builds a lifestyle that could help push him toward NFL dominance, he’s doing it in a very Gen Z way: crowdsourcing accountability from friends and family, while making sure football doesn’t come at the expense of his mental health—or having a life outside the game.
Meet the new pro-athlete template. Of course, there’s extensive gym time (with a heavy focus on thoracic spine mobility…more on that later). There have also been diet and sleep tweaks—and plenty of family time, too. Maye’s doing everything possible to set himself up for a multidecade career in the NFL.
In just his second year, Maye amassed 4,394 passing yards (fourth-best in the NFL) and 35 total TDs, finished as MVP runner-up, and piloted the Pats to Super Bowl LX. After losing to the Seattle Seahawks, Maye blamed himself. Days later, he called Luke Maye, the eldest of his three older brothers, venting about how New England had gotten “spanked,” and how he should have made more plays in the first half.
Maye knows the scary recent history of Super Bowl losers: Three of the last six didn’t even make the playoffs the following year. In the NFL, success is fleeting. “It’s easy to do it in one year,” Maye says. “The harder part is to do it in this league for consecutive years.”
“I’m trying to turn more into the longevity type of quarterback,” Maye says. “Being able to understand the opportunity that I have of playing quarterback, one of the fortunate positions in this league that can play for 15 or 20 years and it not be, you know, crazy for someone to do it at a high level. I’m in year three, and trying to set it up.”
Cue the Tom Brady comparisons. Good thing Maye’s been prepping for this his entire life.
DRAKE MAYE IS a cackler. No matter what he’s playing, whether pickleball (yes, he’s into it) or football or Mario Kart, he wants to laugh in your face. He doesn’t do this for fun, says Cole Maye, his second-oldest brother. He does it to demoralize you.
No one is immune—not even Drake’s father, Mark Maye. Mark starred at quarterback for the University of North Carolina from 1984 to 1987 and taught Drake how to throw a football with the kind of tight spiral that makes NFL scouts drool. Four decades after his dad starred for the Tar Heels, Drake threw his 21st career TD in only his sixth career game as a starter for North Carolina in 2022. Someone in the locker room told him he’d passed Mark on the school’s all-time passing TD list.
A young Drake Maye (with ball) rushing as his father, Mark Maye, looks on.
When Maye caught up with his family afterward, he immediately roasted Dear Old Dad. “He said, ‘That’s pretty sad, Dad,’ ” recalls Cole, 28. “And he does this cackle where he starts dying laughing. In general, Drake gets a really big kick out of…if I were to airball a shot in basketball or whiff (on a Wiffle ball pitch), it’s very frustrating for you, but he’s curled over, laughing on himself.”
Welcome to Drake Maye’s version of a killer instinct, a sense that was honed while growing up with three older brothers (Luke, Cole, and Beau, who is 25) who have always been bigger than him—and loved facing off against each other. Mark and his wife, Aimee, had plenty of room for flag football and basketball in the backyard, and all Maye boys’ birthday parties meant a day at the rec center.
The siblings’ two-on-two showdowns were intense. “He definitely was roughed up growing up,” Luke says of Drake. “He always had to play up to the standard we had. He was always the last pick, the smallest out there. But I’ll tell you what, he would not back down from guarding any of the taller guys. I don’t remember Drake ever quitting.”
Maye relished the showdowns. “I didn’t grow till later,” he says. “I think it’s just motivation to feel like, you know, I have to prove to myself and prove to them that I deserve to be in the same game as them, whether it’s backyard football, two-on-two basketball. I just feel like I’ve earned my spot.”
Drake Maye (second from left) with brothers Luke (from l.), Beau, and Cole at the 2024 NFL Draft.
Growing up, the Maye brothers competed with each other in just about everything.
He’s carried that same fire to New England. Right this instant, he’s masking it, acting hypercasual, alternating grins and nods. But he fully understands he’s following the most celebrated 199th overall NFL draft pick in sporting history. Maye reveres Brady so much that, when I ask him if the GOAT has given him any personal advice, he acts like he’s unworthy of such attention. “I think the only advice that I’ve ever felt like I’ve needed from Tom is the way he did things,” Maye says. “You ask him questions and call him all the time, that would be a disservice to what he did.”
Maye continues gushing about Brady. “The greatest to ever play the position,” he says. “He set the standard of playing the position in the NFL at the highest level, and people are trying to chase him. So it’s my job to try to learn and pick up things that he did and try to, you know, match it.”
Maye is on an eerily similar track. Like Brady, he reached the Super Bowl (albeit in a loss) in his second year. In his first two years as a starter, he’s thrown for 46 TDs (exactly like Brady) and 6,670 yards (63 more than Brady). Even the way NFL pundits talk about him conjures images of Brady, who was known for his smooth, efficient throwing mechanics and the Jellycat-soft touch he could put on a deep ball. “For a guy that is so big and athletic, Drake throws a very catchable pass,” says ex–Lions QB Dan Orlovsky, now an ESPN NFL analyst. “He’s a guy that you can tell works really hard at trying to be mechanically sound.”
Which is exactly why being slim-fit matters.
THE GREAT SLIM-FITTING of Drake Maye wasn’t supposed to be about more Insta-fame. Maye’s main muscle goal was to get “a little bigger up top,” armor-plating a body that absorbed 47 sacks last year, fourth-most in the NFL. He’s trying to fit his playing style to his body, to get bigger and protect himself in the pocket, he says. “To turn into more of a long-[career] type of football quarterback.”
So he spent this offseason hitting the weight room four or five times a week—while making time for exercises that preserved his true superpower, the mobility of his spine and hips. To throw a football well, you need to be able to rotate your shoulders swiftly from side to side. Combine that with an ability to both arch your spine and round your back, and you have two ultra-powerful springs that can sniper-accurately catapult the ball in any direction.
Maye does this as well as anyone, says David Morris, the soft-spoken QB whisperer who once roomed with Brady-killer Eli Manning when the two were teammates at the University of Mississippi. Morris now runs QB Country, an Alabama-based training facility for signal-callers. He’s trained everyone from Manning to Broncos franchise QB Bo Nix to Rams rookie Ty Simpson. Maye began training with Anthony Boone of QB Country in high school. “The two things where Drake has really grown in the last couple years are hip mobility and T-spine mobility,” says Morris. “And he’s really committed to that.”
Maye’s training is full of little things that build that shoulder mobility. He loads up on medicine ball drills, which often challenge your shoulders, spine, and hips together. When his teammates hit the gym for that football staple, the barbell bench press, Maye opts to do dumbbell presses, which allow his shoulders to move more freely. He attacks all manner of rows, building shoulder-saving (and posture-fixing) mid-back muscle. And he loves landmine overhead presses, which teach his entire kinetic chain (glutes, hips, abs, spine) to transfer power to that cannon arm. “It’s all about mobility and quick transition into power,” he says.
The results of this work are all over Maye’s game tape. There he is in Week 5 against the Buffalo Bills, rolling to his right and throwing a 32-yard dime to Stefon Diggs, almost solely by twisting his shoulders before two oncoming defenders engulf him. There’s Maye in Week 10 against the Bucs, putting shoulders and spine and serious grit into a 54-yard bomb to Mack Hollins a millisecond before absorbing a big hit. “He’s not tight, says Orlovsky. “There’s some really unique athleticism there.”
That athleticism goes beyond Maye’s arm, too: He’s emerged as one of the NFL’s best running QBs. In his three seasons at UNC, he rushed for 1,209 yards, but he figured defensive freaks like Myles Garrett would crush him in the pros. “I think I wondered, coming into the NFL, if I was going to be able to, you know, really be effective running the football,” he says. “With how fast and obviously how great you hear the players are, I wondered how effective I would be, if I would be able to pick up some first downs running.”
He figured wrong. In 2024, in his second career start, he led the Pats in rushing. Last year, he ran for 450 yards (fourth-most among QBs). His calling card as a runner isn’t pure speed; it’s sneaky elusiveness. He slips by defenders by subtly shifting his hips—a skill he traces back to those backyard battles with his bigger, faster brothers.
“Change of direction has been one of the biggest things for me,” Maye says. “Being able to change direction, react and change direction—in sports like pickleball, tennis, you know, playing basketball with my best friends and brothers when I’m home. It’s one of the most underrated things about playing different sports.”
He played baseball, basketball, and football until tenth grade. And he could windmill dunk when he was at Myers Park High School in Charlotte (and yes, he can still throw down). But by age 14, Drake had fallen in love with football. “I kind of always felt like football was natural, and it felt so easy,” he says.
Not that Maye would change anything about his journey to football. He believes youth athletes should play multiple sports. “One of the biggest kind of trends is kids just sticking to one sport year-round,” Maye says. “I think being able to play different sports growing up let me find what I feel like I excel at.”
He goes on: “I grew up doing that all my life, so I’ve been used to that,” he says of playing multiple sports. “When I’m not in season, [I still want to] be able to step out of your comfort zone a little bit and try things that you may not have, knowing that I can maybe expand what I enjoy, or enjoy kind of what my body would benefit from.”
Maye took another lesson from his family: Skip the alcohol. He says he rarely drinks at all, save the occasional piña colada at the beach. “I probably drink less than five times a year,” Maye says.
Maye says he never saw his dad take a sip of alcohol. Luke didn’t drink growing up. And Beau never drinks either. Even at UNC, Maye didn’t have an interest in guzzling beers. “It really hasn’t even been a thought to me,” he says. “People always joke about, you know, ‘Man, you’re not one of the boys.’ And sure, I may have missed some of those nights with some teammates, or some college buddies. But at the end of the day, I think, you know, it wasn’t worth it for me.”
He’s certainly not going to start now, either. “The taste of beer, it really wasn’t for me. I think just kind of the state you put your body in, not even the mental focus, but also the physical focus of what you lose and what you have to recover from your body the next day. Just knowing that you know what you could be doing and what you’re working toward—at the end of the day, it becomes one of those things where it gets in the way, and that’s how I felt.”
If it gets in the way of a Super Bowl return trip? Hard pass.
GETTING SLIM-FIT has involved far more than training. Up until recently, Maye lived life like a college student, with late-night video game marathons fueled by burgers and fries. But since joining the Pats, he’s gradually transformed his lifestyle outside the gym and off the field to optimize for performance (while leaving just enough room for fun).
In the spring of last year, Maye and his wife, Ann Michael, who he’s known since middle school, bought a house not far from Gillette Stadium. Maye, for the first time in his life, started tweaking his nutrition habits. And no, that hasn’t meant packing the freezer with avocado ice cream like Brady or shelling out $1 million for trainers and therapists like Russell Wilson.
But slowly, he’s making his own tweaks. Ask him his favorite foods, and he rattles off calorie bombs: cheeseburgers and fries, Cajun Alfredo pasta, and his ultimate kryptonite, the milkshake, which he says he could drink “three times a day.”
He’s, um, shaken off those habits with a steady dose of peer pressure. As a rookie in 2024, he realized he was an “oddball” with his Pats teammates because of how often he had ice cream at the training facility—and he didn’t think he had to eat right. But Pats veterans Hunter Henry, 31, and Morgan Moses, 35, told Drake his diet would catch up with him. And Luke, who speaks with Drake every few days, chimed in, too. “I’ve had the unfortunate upbringing of being able to eat whatever I want and run it off the next day, and not have to see the negative impacts you have as you grow older,” Drake says. “That’s what the veterans keep on telling me.”
Now, when he does order a burger, he almost always skips the fries. And he’s taken the first step toward protein-maxxing, slashing that milkshake intake down to two a week and adding in regular protein shakes instead. “You replace it with something else that would be beneficial for me,” he says. “And it’s been hard to balance that.”
Maye hasn’t made the conversion alone. Ann Michael, who went TikTok-viral last winter for her baking videos, has completely ditched sweets on weekdays. Maye did too. “She did it for herself,” he says. “You know, having certain people around you kind of can always help you.”
Ann Michael helps in other ways too. Her distance-running habit pushed Drake to do a little bit of running himself over the summer, and she’s helped him dial in his bedtimes. At UNC, Maye routinely stayed up past midnight playing Rocket League (he’s also a Madden fiend who won 11 dynasty league seasons against his brothers during the COVID-19 pandemic). “It wasn’t a great habit in college,” he says, “but it was just what our generation and I got used to.”
He still doesn’t maniacally track sleep on his Apple Watch, but he’s rejiggered his entertainment habits to be in bed by 10 nearly every night. First, he convinced his brothers and friends to game with him at 8. Then he’s stopped staying up late to watch football and basketball (except for Monday nights, because the Pats have the day off on Tuesdays).
The regimented schedule ensures he rests—but leaves room for the rarest thing you’ll ever hear a franchise QB talk about: work-life balance. “It’s just the nature of growing up and maturing,” says Maye. “Just enjoying the peace and the escape from my job or my sport or what I do for a living, and having that time away from the sport, and realizing that that’s important for your mental health.”
Just months into the new rhythm, his body and mind have responded: less fatigue, more calm, more confidence. That’s been the goal of this offseason journey all along. “I’m feeling better,” he says. “Trusting how your body feels is the biggest part.”
Now comes the hardest part: Drake Maye has to deliver in year three, in a league that’s seemingly moved on from hyping the Pats.
In Maye’s mind, he and his still-young Patriots team sit in the role of baby brother. Because the biggest NFL offseason buzz has been about how the Rams went super-Saiyan by adding Myles Garrett, and how coach John Harbaugh just might instantly remake the Giants, and how Mike McCarthy and Aaron Rodgers are running it back one more time in Pittsburgh. And did you hear about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s über-exclusive Madison Square Garden wedding?
That hasn’t left much room for Patriots love, even with the addition of All-Pro receiver A.J. Brown. “There’s no way I could be into anything more underrated,” says Maye. “I’ve got to prove to people around the league and prove to ourselves what we’ve built, and what we’re building.”
A smile cuts across Drake Maye’s face, then gets a little wider (the start of a cackle, maybe?). After all, he’s never minded being the baby brother.
Maye-Back Muscle
This offseason, Drake Maye wanted to add size and strength, but not at the expense of his shoulder mobility, which is key to a big arm and healthy, pain-free shoulders, too!
DIRECTIONS: Do the exercises in order at the start of your next upper-body day. This can easily function as your full workout (just go hard on the presses). You can also follow with three sets of dumbbell rows and pushups, too.
Around The World
Stand with your back against a wall, then walk your feet forward till you’re a foot off the wall, only your shoulders and backs of arms touching it. Arc your arms upward, making a big circle against the wall; continue to push your arms hard into the wall as you do this. Return to the start. That’s 1 rep; do 2 sets of 8 per side.
Landmine Push Press
Set up a barbell in a landmine, then stand holding one end in your right hand, weight just above your shoulder, feet slightly wider than hip width. Tighten your abs. Bend your knees slightly, then explosively stand (you may shift onto the balls of your feet as you do this) and press the weight upward. Lower back to the start. That’s 1 rep; do 3 sets of 6 to 8 per side.
Half-Kneeling Open Book
With your right shoulder touching the wall, kneel on your right knee with your knee almost touching the wall. Your left knee should press a medball into the wall. Extend both arms in front of you. Push your right hand against the wall; as you do this, reach your left arm behind you, aiming to touch the wall. Watch your left hand as you do this. That’s 1 rep; do 2 sets of 8 to 10 per side.
Photographs: Brian Lowe
Groomer: Liz Washer/Artists With Agency
Production: KCG Productions
Visual Director: Sally Berman
Director/Executive Producer: Dorenna Newton
Director of Photography: Jesse Ciulla
Video Editors: Will Klein and Kyle Orozovich
To read other stories in Men’s Health’s NFL Strong 2026 series, click here.
Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S., is the fitness director of Men’s Health and a certified trainer with more than 10 years of training experience. He’s logged training time with NFL athletes and track athletes and his current training regimen includes weight training, HIIT conditioning, and yoga. Before joining Men’s Health, he served as a sports columnist and tech columnist for the New York Daily News.
