The seven-time Super Bowl champ interviewed the reigning Super Bowl MVP in a pre-game interview on Fox Sunday
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(734x9:736x11):format(webp)/patrick-mahomes-tom-brady-021723-b19a966c7f2647638407a275c2f90800.jpg)
Patrick Mahomes is defending his “dad bod” — again!
In an interview with Tom Brady that aired before the Kansas City Chiefs-San Francisco 49ers game on Sunday, Oct. 20, the seven-time Super Bowl champion sat down with the three-time Super Bowl champion, where the latter touched on everything from his legacy and his family to his own physique.
“I use those hips and that oblique muscle to really rotate through there,” Mahomes, 29, said, after the Fox Sports analyst complimented the quarterback on his ability to throw passes on the fly. “The people who have seen the dad bod, that’s for a reason — that’s the obliques. I’m getting them right.”
Brady, famous for his strict adherence to his own diet, agreed.
“We’ve got to keep a little padding there,” Brady, 47, joked. “We’re getting hit all the time, they don’t understand that we can’t look like those receivers all the time.”
For the dad of two, who is expecting another baby with wife Brittany Mahomes, the Chiefs star has had fun with critics who poke fun about his “padding.”
Last March — weeks after the Chiefs won Super Bowl LVIII against the 49ers — the Super Bowl MVP posted two photos of himself in a gym, alongside his teammates Marquise “Hollywood” Brown and Rashee Rice, on Instagram.
In the photo, Rice wore a shirt featuring the viral photo of a shirtless Mahomes celebrating the Chiefs’ AFC Championship win last season.
“Yoooo why they have to do me like that!?!?!?,” Mahomes wrote in a post on X at the time, and added three laughing emojis and the hashtag, “#DadBodSzn.”
But Mahomes’ midsection has the backing of his longtime trainer, Bobby Stroupe.
“I’ll be the first to tell you that I think an NFL quarterback should have at least 14% body fat,” Stroupe, who has trained Mahomes for 20 years, told PEOPLE. “It’s not from an unhealthy standpoint, but from a force absorption standpoint. You have to be able to take contact.”
“We know there’s just not a lot of quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame that have a six-pack and there’s a reason for that. We’ve got to find that fine line of performance and health. And the aesthetic part is a different conversation,” he added. “I don’t need [Mahomes] to look like a model because the way he chooses to play requires a certain type of physicality, and that physicality needs more body fat. That is a core belief that I do have for him.”