Published September 18, 2026 10:15AM
Two weird things happened when I went to my first men’s Bible study in 25 years. First, I was the only person there who pulled out an actual, physical Bible. The Super Bowl champion football player who was also there was reading verses off his iPhone Bible app, which I suppose counts.
The second weird thing is what didn’t happen: not once was the word lust uttered. When I ran with the evangelicals in my college days, you could count on the fact that, no matter what topic any particular men’s Bible study session was ostensibly about, within 16 seconds or less, the conversation would turn to—and stay on—lust. Sex. Desire. Madonna’s Erotica album talks about these things less than 19-year-old males at a Bible study.
So, the omission was surprising at least, because the Bible study I’d come to was held at Proverbs 27:17 Fitness in Oklahoma City, where a one-hour workout in the gym’s upstairs loft preceded the prayers.
Proverbs 27:17 has made appearance after appearance in recent articles and social media posts as part of the new “men’s-only” and/or “lust-free” gym trend that’s growing among a certain set of fitness enthusiasts—evangelical or otherwise conservative Christians, mainly. The goal of this gym and others like it? Stop men from cheating on their partners and/or from being distracted by women when trying to bang out their third set.
The workouts here at Proverbs 27:17 are intense but positive: loud-voiced coaches wander from man to man—one on a cable rower, another working with free weights, another on a cross-country machine—barking orders and encouragement.
So I was girding my gay loins to listen to an hour of men doing what I had seen countless men do in this situation: wrestling with, fighting with, going to war with their normal sexual urges. Trying to tame their bodies into submission.
Thank God this place doesn’t have a locker room, I thought, remembering the other reason my gay loins are girded in places like this.
Proverbs 27:17 Fitness started in November 2025 as the brainchild of Jeff Hambrecht, who pulled up to the gym in a Chevy Equinox and not the Cybertruck I was expecting. His workout program is intense—two days of strength training, two days of light cardio, and two days of Zone 2 cardio, which keeps the heart rate pumping at 60 to 70 percent of its maximum. It’s all informed by his studies in health and exercise science and Olympic lifting. He’s a corporate health and wellness director and a former college soccer player who opens up early and often about his struggles with addiction: the drinking that cost him his athletic scholarship then ramped up after he was married; the injuries that led to pain pill abuse; the pornography; the affairs.
“The best way to describe me on pain pills is, someone hijacks your body, ties you up, and then flips your life on a screen and makes you watch you just completely destroy everything, and you can’t do a thing about it,” he told me. “You’re numb. You don’t care about anything.”
Through it all, Hambrecht had athletics. But the night he came in first in his age group in the 2021 Hyrox Chicago Pro Masters North American championship, he cried himself to sleep.
“I didn’t know what I was doing—like my life was at an all-time low,” he said. “Four weeks later, I got served divorce papers in the middle of a training session.”
They will know we are Christians by our love, reads an old hymn. But these days, to those outside the church, many American Christians have made themselves known largely by their politics—two load-bearing pillars of which revolve around opposing queer marriage and abortion. Noticeably, these are two things that, at least in part, involve things people do with their genitalia. Both, in this belief system, are the end result of a culture that has let lust run amok.
Hambrecht isn’t alone. Other Christian entrepreneurs, namely Mitch Parsons, are creating men’s-only gyms meant to help their members curb temptation.
In my conversation with Parsons, he mentioned the work of Caroline Leaf, a Christian communication pathologist and author of Switch on Your Brain, who has studied neural pathways extensively. Regarding sexual urges, he said: “What your eyes look at, then your brain associates with something else. And so my brain is actually wired through the content I consume that skin equals sex.”
Parsons lives in Denver, where he’s building another men’s-only facility called The Remnant. The nonprofit often is described as a gym, though Parsons calls it a holistic training center. Its website says when it opens in 2027, it will feature a coworking space, golf simulators, a coffee bar—even a conversation lounge. What it will not feature is women.
This, Parsons said, is because coed gyms breed a toxic culture.
“In my faith, what I believe is that my eyes are for my wife alone,” he said. “And I was purposely putting myself in an environment where the culture is as little clothes as possible…I would rather not walk the line of being tempted to look at a woman in a way that’s not honoring to my wife, to the Lord, and to her. So I’m just creating an environment where that doesn’t exist.”
On one hand—huh? Parsons describes big-box gyms as “strip clubs”—and who hasn’t been in a locker room where you knew not to touch any moist surface? But think about your local YMCA. There, many of the clients are seniors who like to walk on the treadmill and gossip and listen to audiobooks. So not to go all “not all gyms,” but—maybe Mitch Parsons just hasn’t met the right coed gym.
And yet, while listening to Parsons, I couldn’t shake my own memories of that guy at the gym I went to in my twenties who bothered women to such a degree that management had to ban him. And the other guy like that. And the other three. The bros going to these so-called “lust-free” gyms are, in some sense, owning the fact that they are the problem—something I appreciate. If only more would.
What did Jesus say about plucking out your eye? That.
Michael Ulloa is a physical therapist and fitness influencer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. But unlike most people with the title fitness influencer, Ulloa doesn’t post shirtless thirst traps to snag clients. His Instagram account is dedicated to debunking the kind of half-baked “wellness” advice that tends to start with phrases like Scientists don’t want you to know… and Doctors hate this one tip!
So, I had to ask him: Is “men’s only” just another weird fitness trend like proteinmaxxing or perineum sunning—exposing your anus to sunlight in the pursuit of better focus, libido, and yes, our favorite buzzword, longevity?
“I think that potentially, these spaces could be a good fit for some people,” he said. “But I don’t like the way that they are being portrayed—people explaining why these spaces are needed just feels incredibly gross to me.”
Parsons uses phrases like shoved in my face in describing how he’s felt about seeing women in skimpy clothing at gyms. And in an Instagram video, Hambrecht noted, “In a nutshell, one of the number-one places affairs and infidelity occur is the gym.”
Unlike Parsons, however, Hambrecht doesn’t believe normal gyms foster a toxic culture. In fact, he says it is one of the goals of Proverbs 27:17 to help men reintegrate back into coed fitness spaces. He believes his group of men can build each other up to that. And maybe men need more third spaces.
“I’m a huge fan of in-person communities that fitness tends to really cultivate,” Natalia Mehlman-Petrzela, PhD, a political and cultural historian who’s researched, written, and spoken at length on the history of gym culture, told me. “And obviously, some of them can be completely toxic and terrible. But for the most part, I think people coming together is something we should encourage—unless they’re planning, like, a revolution to kill people.”
The workout area at Proverbs 27:17 is small and located in the upstairs loft. Hambrecht and his coaches are equal parts encouraging and tough, so despite the small square footage, each guy finished his workout emitting exhausted pride. Then they gathered downstairs and sat in a circle of chairs.
Not counting Hambrecht and me, there were seven: three Black, four white. One guy was in his mid-sixties. Another was young and fit; he looked like he could be actor Connor Storrie’s little brother. Two more guys showed up with dirty fingernails—the kind that result from a day spent doing hard, grimy work. Also, there was the Oklahoma State alumnus who’d won a Super Bowl with the Steelers.
Hambrecht gives a short sermon about a 42-mile race he ran—how difficult it was, how he wanted to give up partway through, how he says God helped him finish. The biggest reference to the Bible was in a David-and-Goliath analogy. But the guys listened, rapt.
When Hambrecht finished, everyone went around the circle and shared stories. A young business owner talked about his new venture and how hard it has been to get it going. Another man, an entrepreneur, said something encouraging, and I heard the younger man’s breath catch in his throat. I turned to look at him; he was wiping tears from his eyes.
It felt less like a Bible study and more like an AA meeting. Here I’d come in wondering if I was going to hear someone’s January 6 story, and these dudes were crying and encouraging each other and using the word vulnerability a whole lot.
Everyone I spoke to—Ulloa, Mehlman-Petrzela, my therapist friend who met me for a drink at a local bar called the Patriarch to talk about male psychology—said a space like this could do a lot of good in a culture that’s wrestling with men’s roles, their actions, and their oft-described loneliness. And yet, something about the idea left us all a bit asquirm.
“I do think that is a positive social tendency that goes against the grain of so much of what we’re experiencing right now: atomization, sedentariness,” said Mehlman-Petrzela. “It’s just, how do you condition that, capture that, or channel that into something that’s ultimately positive? Hopefully, it’s bringing them to be more fully integrated into society and the rest of their lives and not alienated and resentful.”
Maybe that’s the rub: those of us outside the worlds of both hardcore fitness and religion have seen them eclipse the rest—sometimes to genuinely terrifying effect.
And yet, Hambrecht uses the word vulnerability almost as much as the word God. These men cried and laughed together. Several of them said they were on journeys away from addiction. And no, nobody brought a physical copy of the scripture, but nobody brought an axe to grind.
It was just—dudes. Hanging out. Smiles on their faces. Talking about their days. Their kids. Their lives. What they’ve been going through.
Maybe what’s weird is how weird we think that’s supposed to be.
About the writer: Nate Gunter is a journalist and editor. For eleven years, he was the editor-in-chief of Oklahoma Today. He’s a sixth-generation Oklahoman who learned to perform poetry from Maya Angelou and to write funny from Doug Marlette. He lives in Oklahoma City with his husband.
