Latest / The WARRBuilt Podcast / EP004 - Train For The Man, Not The Mirror
Transcript
- Dan: Welcome back. This is the Warbuilt Podcast, and I'm Dan. Last episode we talked about family. Today I'm going to talk about the body that has to carry it all, which leads us to fitness, the second Warbuilt totem, and probably the one guys get most wrong. Let's start with a simple question. When's the last time your body let you down? Not just in your looks, but in real life. Did you start barking the last time you tried to take all the groceries in in one trip? You know we all try to do that. Maybe your kid said, Chase me dad at the park and you gassed out before they were even warmed up. If you really think about it, most guys don't have a fitness problem, they have a mirror problem. We're sold on the idea that being fit is about how we look. So we either chase a six pack we'll never keep, or we quit before we start because we're convinced there's no way we'll ever look like the guy in the cover of our favorite fitness magazine. I want to throw the mirror out the window for the rest of this podcast. Fitness, the way we mean it in Warbuilt, has nothing to do with the mirror. We're gonna dig in here like we dug in on family, talking about the lies all guys tell themselves. With fitness, there are two predominant lies, and almost every guy gets caught up in at least one of them. The first lie is that fitness is about vanity. Gym selfies, shirts a size too small to show off the physique, that kind of thing. The second lie is that fitness is optional. You think it's something you'll get to once work slows down or the kids are older. It's the same later we talked about with family last episode. And like I said last time, later never comes. Both lives miss the same point. What we need to understand is that we're not training for the mirror, we're training to be the man our life demands. It's not about the photo, it's all about the function. If you're anything like me, and I'm sure you are, life asks a lot out of you. And one of the main things it asks is that you have something left for your family after a ten hour day instead of just collapsing on the couch. It asks you to be the guy who can carry the heavy thing and handle the long day and handle the emergency. But most importantly, it quietly asks you to be a man your family feels safe around. Not because you're tough, but because you're capable. Somebody you love is going to need your body to actually perform someday. It might be a kid who falls or a parent who can't get up anymore, something that happened to me very recently. You don't get a memo or fair warning. You just find out all at once whether you've spent the years getting ready or getting soft. Then there's the ordinary stuff we are expected to do. Things like wrestling on the floor with our kids instead of waving them off because we're wiped out. Or still hauling our own firewood at sixty five years old without making it a project. A strong body is a useful body. It's not just something people physically admire. And let me be very transparent here. I am not a fitness guru or a trainer. I fight my own fitness demons just like all of you, and sometimes fall into the same traps you all do. I have good weeks and bad weeks just like everyone else. But getting my mind right has let me have far more good ones and bad ones. Just know that I'm talking to the man in the mirror. Just as much as anyone else. One thing we've learned in Warbuilt is that fitness isn't just one totem sitting next to the other three. It's where the other three find their foundation. You can tell yourself that the marriage is fine and the money's handled and the stress is under control. Your body doesn't let you get away with that kind of story. You either do the reps or you don't. You show up or you don't. There's no hiding from it. And that's the actual value of the gym. You said you trained three days this week, did you? That's really a question about whether your word means anything when you're the only guy checking in. Back in episode two, we talked about discipline being what you do after the feeling's gone. The gym is where you practice that exact mindset. A guy who keeps his word to himself at five AM shows up differently in the hard conversations with his wife or when the money's tight. He built something in that dingy gym that shows up in all areas of his life. Training teaches you one more thing that nothing else does. It teaches you how to be uncomfortable on purpose. The last hard rep on the cold morning you didn't want to hit the weights, but you did anyway. Every time you pick that discomfort when you didn't have to, you're building a guy who doesn't fall apart when discomfort picks him. Be it the job loss, the scary health diagnosis, the two AM phone call saying your kid needs help. A guy who's never once chosen to suffer tends to come apart. when stress and danger show up uninvited. A guy who trains has already practiced staying steady in tough situations. It's got nothing to do with muscle. It's all about who you become while you build it. Body is what every other totem runs on. Being present for your family, everything we talked about in the last episode takes energy you don't have if you've let yourself go. Leading your tribe and being able to carry a little of a brother's weight when he's gassed takes a body that can actually carry something. In the same sense, fortitude is a lot easier to find when your body isn't already on the floor. That's why fitness is a totem and not a hobby. It's not separate from the rest of your life. It's the foundation we build it on. Here's a fact most guys our age are ignoring. Somewhere in your late 30s, your body flips from building by default to breaking down by default. After 40, you lose real strength every year. You don't fight for it. Nobody tells you it's coming. You just wake up one day, weaker than you used to be, and the cycle keeps going. I'm not saying that to scare you. I'm saying it because it changes the math. If you coast, the strength you've got right now is about as good as it's gonna get. There's no neutral gear here. You're on the clock. And mother nature doesn't let you call timeouts. I feel like I address this in every episode, but it's really true. The objections are always the same and I've made them myself. I don't have time to live in a gym two hours a day, and I'm not trying to be a bodybuilder. Well, good, because I'm not either, and this isn't what the conversation is about. Capability doesn't get built in a fancy gym with a perfect program. It gets built in the basics, done over and over. Walking every day, going for a rock, you know, throwing a weight on a backpack and going. Picking up heavy things and putting them back down a few times a week, moving hard, breathing heavy, and doing it habitually. That's it. Twenty honest minutes beats the perfect two hour plan, you'll never consistently work. And consistency is the whole secret. Workouts come and go, and guys just keep hunting for the fancier one. It's the simple, boring, consistent work that makes all the difference. Don't know where start? Start where you are, not where you wish you were. A lapper on the block is an excellent place to start if that's going to push you out of your comfort zone. Don't wait for January, the perfect plan or the right shoes. A guy who starts with a sloppy plan today beats the guy with the perfect plan he starts on Monday every time. Remember how we talked about finding a brother to work alongside in the last two episodes? Same thing applies here if you're having accountability problems. Find a brother and train. Go for a ruck together. Text them the workout for the day. When your alarm goes off and every part of you wants to stay in bed, it's not willpower that's going to get you up. It's the guy who's already up waiting on you who's going to know if you don't show. This approach has worked for me many times, but let me tell you a little bit about one time it really helped. Many of you guys have probably heard about the seventy five hard program that First Forum puts on. And while it's much more of a fortitude challenge than a fitness challenge, one thing that got me through it was my brothers. We had a group text where we posted daily, making sure that we were all hitting our workouts, drinking our water, doing our reading, and all the other things you need to do in that program to be successful. That accountability got me through it on the days I didn't want to do the work and allowed me to carry the water for guys on the days that they didn't want to do it. So here's what I want you to walk away with. You're training for the day, somebody needs you to be standing. There will always be a day it counts. Your family doesn't need you shredded. They need you around and physically able for a long time. Like the last few episodes, I'm leaving you with one action to take this week. And this one is simple but not necessarily easy. Move your body hard three times before we talk again. That's it. Don't worry about the program or the transformation. Just do three workouts. Go for a ruck, a run, do some heavy lifting, whatever gets you breathing hard. And text one man and tell him you're doing it and ask him what he's doing. That's your first rep. And if the hard part for you isn't the actual workout, but doing it alone week after week with nobody checking on you, then that's what a tribe is for. Go to warbuilt dot com and get around men who will be up at five AM with you. We'll have your back and help you out. So that's it for this episode. Next time we'll talk about finance. At Warbuilt, finance isn't so much about money, it's about the difference between making a living and actually providing. So thanks for listening and remember, take care of your body. It's the only one you get and people are counting on it. Together we rise, together we are war built. Join the pack.