Legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk is on top of his health at 58.
He skates as much as he can, and depending on the season, he’s on the water surfing and on the slopes snowboarding. But tracking one aspect of his health is a hurdle for him.
“I do track my sleep, but … OK. To be honest, it’s just more torturous than helpful in some ways,” he told The Post, holding up his smart ring.
“It’s helpful information as to like, why am I having such a hard time snapping out of it today? It’s like, ‘Oh, cause you didn’t … get enough sleep last night.’”
The athlete, who was the first in the world to land a “900” — two-and-a-half revolutions in the air — loves to fit in a siesta nowadays. “Naps are glorious.”
There’s a lovable menace disrupting Hawk and his wife’s precious shut eye: his grandson, who’s almost 2 and often stays with them.
“My wife and I, sometimes we compete, [one of us may say] ‘Well, I only got six hours.’ ‘Well, I got four-and-a-half.’”
The little one, Ronin Walker Cobain Hawk, is the son of Hawk’s son Riley, who’s also a pro skateboarder, and Frances Bean Cobain — the daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.
Hawk says he and his wife, Catherine Goodman, are often chasing Robin around. “That is a lot of movement — more than I anticipated when I was told we were having a grandchild.”
Cutting edge recovery: a gluteal fat graft
Aside from sleep tracking, Hawk says he’s only interested in cutting edge health tech in relation to injuries and recoveries.
“It’s not lost on me how lucky I am to have access to new technologies,” he said.
In March, he tore all three of his major glute muscles while skateboarding. To address it, he didn’t want to do surgery.
“Usually the only way to recovery from that is to actually have your glute muscles sewn back together, which is a very long recovery,” he said. On TikTok, he questioned why he’d choose to go through that: “To get back to 100? 100% is unattainable at my age, compounded with all the decades of other damage.”
Instead, he got a microfragmented adipose tissue transfer, taking fat from his back and injecting it into his hip. “If all goes well, you regenerate muscle there.”
MFAT is a very new treatment, with some research showing promise in use for shoulder muscle tear and hip osteoarthritis.
Patients get a small amount of fat taken out from their side or stomach area (a k a liposuction) under local anesthesia. The fat is processed immediately by washing and filtering on site.
The processed MFAT is directly injected into the injured area, providing cushioning and beneficial cells to promote healing and long-term relief.
“I’m feeling pretty good about it,” Hawk said. “I did the treatment three weeks ago and I was skating yesterday.”
The pro’s supplement stack
Given that he’s still skating, surfing and snowboarding often, Hawk is vigilant about his joint and muscle health. He takes magnesium to protect cartilage and turmeric for inflammation. He takes fish oil and a multivitamin too.
For years, he said, he’s also taken Qunol’s CoQ10, an antioxidant compound that helps the heart.
“My family has history of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and so my doctor recommended it and to balance out that out,” he said. He’s also on a “baby aspirin,” a low-dose 81-mg tablet, for blood thinning.
He’s partnered with Qunol for their Move Like a Champion campaign, encouraging people to add more movement to their life in any way that feels good to them.
With young men hoarding peptides, injecting testosterone and hammering their faces, “optimizing” looks rather than focusing on true health has been all the rage in the last few years.
Hawk’s message to optimizers: “Embrace your uniqueness.”
“You don’t want to look like everyone else,” he said. “When I was a kid, growing up skating, like I was skinny, I was awkward, I was gangly and I was skateboarding. All of those were like the furthest things from cool … you just don’t know at the time that all of these differences could be an advantage to you.”
