A tuna shake recipe for the certifiably insane

You probably aren’t ready for this.

But you’re gonna get it anyway.

I was sitting here doing my writing warm-up — looking for the thread I’d pull to create the day’s masterpiece — when I got a text from my 14-year old nephew.

“What was in your tuna shakes?”

He started lifting a little more than a year ago, and he’s made incredible gains in a relatively short period of time.

So much so that there’s a chance he could get bigger and stronger than I am. This terrifying possibility has become my best motivation at the gym.

His mother — my sister — must have told him about one of the more extreme things I did as a 22 year old in pursuit of being as big and strong as humanly possible.

Tuna shakes.

It’s worse than it sounds.

Here’s the recipe:

Put two cans of tuna in a blender. Fill the rest with orange juice. Blend. Drink very quickly.

Why the hell would I do this?

Each can of tuna contains 43 grams of protein.

It was my first post-workout meal after a good ‘ol fashioned whey shake.

If you’re still reading, you might be wondering how it tasted.

Actually, not as bad as you might think.

OJ is a surprisingly effective masking agent.

The problem was less the taste and more the texture.

Imagine thick, salmon-colored orange juice, and you’re close.

After particularly hard training sessions (3-4 hours of strongman exercises) — I’d drink a tuna shake, then eat a frozen California Pizza Kitchen pizza. On more than one occasion, I followed it up with one or two Chipotle burritos.

Savage.

If I had to guess, I’d say it amounted to about 5,000 calories.

It did what it was supposed to do:

Whatever it takes, babycakes.