Celebrities back Worthing-based charity’s Bare Yourself challenge

StrongMen, which supports men following bereavement, is asking people to use social media to post tasteful pictures of a part of their body they would not normally show.

Jeff Brazier Troy Deeney, Antony Cotton and Bobby Zamora are just some of the names involved.

Efrem Brynin, co-founder of StrongMen, said: “It is a serious subject but we are doing it in a light-hearted way. Most guys would rather walk down the road naked than talk about their troubles, and that was the starting point.”

The month-long Bare Yourself campaign, the charity’s biggest awareness effort to date, launched on June 1, following specific research into how men grieve.

Efrem, whose son James Brynin was killed in 2013 on his second tour of Afghanistan, founded the charity with Dan Cross, whose wife was killed in September 2015. They met through being contestants on the Channel 4 show SAS: Who Dares Wins, Efrem in the second series and Dan in the third.

Efrem, who lives in Pulborough, said: “We both used exercise as a form of healing and both saw the benefits of being put in a group of complete strangers and making different friendships.”

They used their experiences to set up StrongMen as a CIC in May 2018 and it became a charity in July 2019, offering services to help men going through the toughest of times.

Efrem said: “Grief can cause severe mental and physical health conditions which are often overlooked and even ignored, especially in men.

“James died in 2013 and I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2017, I believe as a direct result of the stress. I was 44 at the time. I’ve had a lot of issues caused by the stress, headaches, aches and pains.

“People aren’t quite so aware of the physical impact. We are trying to get the guys to not just grin and bear it, to look after themselves a little bit better, rather than let it slide.