Jian Wong Yen’s best hour of the day happens before anyone else is awake.
He’s up at 5am; in summer it’s 4am. The world is dark and silent, nobody wants anything from him. It’s when he does his best thinking.
He eats straight away, an unprocessed breakfast of three eggs, an orange and banana before a meditation or journal session. Creatine, magnesium and omega-3 are lined up on the bench.
By 6am he’s out the door and at the gym, heavy weights and high reps to make the most of the next 45 minutes. Then a walk with his partner and a coffee, before he’s at his desk and checking his colour-coded calendar by 8am.
He counts his days from when he falls asleep and spent most of his twenties working out that six or seven hours is enough for him. You might spot him at his local sauna or ice bath before dinner at 6pm — he eats several hours before bed, though he does have a sweet tooth.
Wong Yen is the co-founder of Cold Nips, the sunrise dip club that he started with his mate Ryan Linton in 2019 — 16 people at Cottesloe for the first one, 800 at its biggest. He’s also a breathwork facilitator and can tell you what his nervous system is doing on a given morning.
Life wasn’t always so centred on health and wellbeing.
In his earlier years Wong Yen trained hard, yet like so many young adults, his weekends were blown out by partying, midday wake-ups and the obligatory fast food. His health was further put on the back burner as he travelled the world, before returning to Australia and finding a passion in biohacking and longevity protocols.
The premise of biohacking is that bodily decline is negotiable. It’s a broad term used for the increasingly popular process of making changes to the body, diet and lifestyle to improve health and wellbeing, from brain function to weight loss.
The face of the movement is Bryan Johnson, the American tech entrepreneur who spends more than $US2 million a year trying to reverse his biological age. There’s also Gary Brecka, who calls himself a human biologist and “longevity guru” with bold views that are at odds with mainstream medical advice.
In Australia, one of the clearest examples of biohacking hitting the mainstream is peptides — injectables often sold through social media and private messages promising muscle, weight loss and slower ageing. In June the Therapeutic Goods Administration released a statement highlighting its increasing concern over the growing availability, promotion and use of unapproved peptide products in Australia. It stated they can cause liver damage, severe allergic reactions and inflammation as well as highlighted that counterfeit products are being circulated.
Wong Yen, 33, is among a growing cohort of West Australian men who have arrived at some version of this, without any of the extremes.
They’re not saving for a hyperbaric chamber in their penthouse, or swapping blood and plasma with their offspring.
Rather, they’re taking a sauna after work, their pills of choice are supplements, they’re wearing a bulky silver ring that scores their sleep and have a grasp on nutrition. Research from Flinders University shows gen Z are nearly 20 times more likely to not drink alcohol compared to baby boomers.
And that men are considering not only their health, but also their long-term wellbeing, is a massive shift — though the starting point was low.
Traditionally, men have had to be dragged to the doctor, more than happy to ignore an illness with a “she’ll be right” and a few paracetamol. A low-carb beer and token side salad might be thrown in for good measure.
Yet in 2024 there were 29,123 potentially avoidable deaths in Australia, 64 per cent of them men. In a Movember survey from the same year, 53 per cent said it was normal for them to avoid a regular check-up.
The money is going somewhere else. Australia now has one of the fastest-growing wellness economies in the world, worth more than $US126.7 billion ($194.4b), with ice baths and bathhouses a massive part of it.
Alchemy Sauna’s director James Browne has seen this boom first-hand: over 1000 people are on the waitlist for its memberships (non-members are still able to attend any of the venues casually).
“The younger generation aren’t drinking at all really, and that’s rubbing off on my generation and therefore the older people as well,” he says. “Things have definitely changed the last couple of years in regards to men and their openness to health in general.”
For years, Dr Lloyd Evans watched men turn up too late. He started MAN Health Clinic in response, and about 200 men have come through the door since opening in 2023, most aged between 40 and 50. He calls it the “shock era”.
“Some guys look around them and they can see close friends, who’ve always been fit and well, who’ve suddenly been diagnosed with heart disease or early bowel or prostate cancer,” he explains. “It’s the shock of hearing their stories that makes them feel they should get things checked.”
Fatherhood also prompts them towards his office, so does watching a parent’s health come apart. Evans was 18 when he became a father himself, and says it changed how he thought about his own health.
By his reckoning, a first appointment at 40 can be 10 or even 15 years too late.
“I think we should be thinking about our longer term health, chronic disease, preventative health from our teens,” he says.
The reason men don’t, he says, is built into the system. Women typically enter the system on a schedule, starting with their first period before appointments for contraception, cervical screenings, pregnancy and perimenopause follow.
“There are touchpoints, and men don’t have that,” Evans explains.
Nothing in a man’s life tells him this is the year to have his cholesterol checked. Blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol are all measures that can go hidden for years and are far easier to deal with in your 20s than your 50s.
“We’ve got to be proactive, not reactive. Don’t wait for a problem to happen to act on it,” Evans says.
Part of the issue is the limits of general practice, with a standard appointment running five or 10 minutes, long enough for a script and little else. His own clinic gives clients an hour up-front, then three to four hours across three months to collate family history, work, sleep, protein and what a realistic training week looks like.
That time is the difference between general advice and the tailored plan Evans offers.
He uses his father, a retired police officer in his mid-60s, as an example.
“He was great with management, strategies, problem solving and fighting crime, but crikey, he couldn’t tell you what a normal blood pressure is,” Evans laughs.
Then there are the peptides of it all, something Evans speaks carefully about. It’s a corner of the internet that mostly sits outside the system as they’re readily injected based on information spruiked in a podcast or by an influencer rather than a doctor.
Some peptides are approved by the TGA and are very well studied, insulin among them. The ones circulating are not.
“We have some peptides with zero human evidence, data or research,” Evans says. “Or in some cases tiny amounts of human research, but again, nowhere near enough for the TGA to say ‘yes, these are safe and effective and we’ll approve these products’.”
Some have been around 20 or 30 years, have gone through trials, and failed them — either for safety reasons or because they did nothing.
“Unfortunately what happens is people and companies pick up those peptides and bring them back into the limelight,” Evans says.
Wong Yen has clocked the prevalence of peptides, but he’s not tempted. Life has taught him that nothing that comes easy is worth having.
Evans believes the focus should be shifted to the things that would actually make a long-term impact: sleep, diet, exercise and socialising. Though he won’t turn a patient away for asking about peptides.
“It is very hard to get men to engage with their health, so if something interests them and gets them asking questions, I do think we should congratulate them on wanting to be better informed,” he says.
“I’ve got a lot of guys throwing the concept of longevity around, too, and I’ll jump on it, because I’ll be honest — whatever motivates guys to see me, I will take it as a positive first step.”
Because whether it starts with a podcast, a sleep score, a mate’s diagnosis or a $30 sauna session, a man who is thinking about his health is more likely to notice when something is wrong.
Wong Yen’s own reasons for living the way he does are more than the way he looks and feels. He lost his grandfather and his father within a month of each other when he was 27.
Wong Yen’s grandfather was 103 when he passed away, active until he was 101. His father was 66, and died four years after being diagnosed with cancer. During that time he did everything he could to focus on his health.
“Dad passed away at 66, way too young, which I believe a lot of his illness was linked to emotional hardship he faced when younger, so everything he did then couldn’t fight past it,” he says.
What Wong Yen took away from the heartbreak wasn’t a strict protocol.
“It highlighted to me that health isn’t just the physical choices we make, like the training we do or the food we eat, but how we show up to life every day of our lives — physically, emotionally and spiritually,” he says.
Tomorrow he’ll be up again in the pitch-black, eating his three eggs while the world sleeps. Not because a podcast told him to, but because he’s lived the other version, and he isn’t going back.