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Transcript

How to Stay Strong and Fit After 50 · Harder Than Life

• 0:00
  You didn't get out of shape because you got older.
• 0:02
  You got out of shape because you lowered the standard and called it aging.
• 0:07
  Nobody wakes up at 48 and gets old.
• 0:11
  You get old one retired standard at a time and every one of them gets a birthday as an alibi.
• 0:18
  You stopped training and called it a busy season.
• 0:22
  You started sleeping five hours and called it hustle.
• 0:26
  You quit lifting
• 0:28
  And called it being smart about your joints.
• 0:32
  In my 50s, I feel better than I did at 40.
• 0:36
  I want to be very clear about what that took because it was not what I expected.
• 0:41
  At 40, everything ached.
• 0:44
  Everything.
• 0:45
  I was training harder than ever and getting softer.
• 0:48
  And I was drinking every night and calling myself disciplined because I still made it to the gym.
• 0:54
  I lived the decline.
• 0:56
  Then I lived the turnaround.
• 0:58
  and I'm sharing it with you now.
• 1:00
  I'm not reading this off of a study.
• 1:02
  I lived it, and I will tell you what I did.
• 1:07
  Here's the lie.
• 1:08
  Aging is the one excuse nobody will ever call you out on.
• 1:13
  Your wife won't, your team won't, your friends won't.
• 1:17
  The doctor will hand you a pill and agree with you.
• 1:20
  That's exactly why it's the most dangerous excuse you'll ever use.
• 1:26
  Stay to the end of this episode, and I'm gonna tell you the one standard I refused to lower for 30 years, and then I want to hear the one you're gonna take back.
• 1:37
  The standard retired first, the body just followed.
• 1:42
  Let's go.
• 1:43
  I'm Kelly Siegel, and this is Harder Than Life.
• 1:46
  Welcome back to our Thursday solo episodes.
• 1:50
  Really appreciate you being here.
• 1:51
  If this one resonates with you, share it with your friends.
• 1:54
  You're really, really liking the fitness stuff, so I'm gonna keep rolling with it for a little while.
• 1:58
  Let me tell you a story.
• 2:00
  It's about how I opened with the 40 year old version of myself, where everything ate.
• 2:06
  I was working out.
• 2:09
  Dieting and getting chubbier went to the doctor Testosterone came back at 233 for those of you that know that is that's very low even for an old man like me at 40 what I want you to understand is this is just a receipt not the entire story I had an identity list and
• 2:31
  I used energy, perseverance, strength, sleep, my waistline, focus, sex drive, patience, literally all of these things.
• 2:39
  I thought, oh, it's all dipping.
• 2:41
  It's because I'm 40.
• 2:43
  But I was just handing away my power.
• 2:47
  And I'm going to explain to you guys how not to do that.
• 2:51
  But first...
• 2:52
  Another story.
• 2:53
  In my mid-40s, looked in the mirror.
• 2:56
  I had all the money, the muscles, and the misery.
• 3:00
  I would look at myself, and I looked like a guy who had everything, but I felt nothing.
• 3:05
  I realized my body was the only standard I was still keeping.
• 3:11
  and propping up for a life that I had given up.
• 3:14
  I wanna remind you, a standard you keep out of fear is different from the standard you keep from self.
• 3:20
  Same gym, same reps, completely different man.
• 3:25
  The first guy was running from something.
• 3:27
  The second guy was building something.
• 3:30
  This is what the Harder Than Life episodes are all about, my friends.
• 3:35
  Literally leaving that old identity behind and coming back to your true authentic self.
• 3:41
  And that's why you hear me talking much slower, much calmer.
• 3:47
  I'm doing the work on myself very, very hard.
• 3:49
  Shedding.
• 3:51
  a lot of the old habits i'm not even gonna call them good or bad just all the old habits that kept me where i was so if you want to grow we have to look in the mirror and we have to say what is working for us and what's not another story that i remember is during the pandemic in 2020 every gym in michigan was closed it was the perfect excuse to not work out handed by our great governor whitmer
• 4:19
  What did I do?
• 4:20
  I immediately, even though they said, we're gonna chill for two weeks, it's a two week quarantine, I forget what they call it.
• 4:26
  They closed the gyms, I had no gym.
• 4:28
  I ordered a home gym right off the bat because I knew it was gonna be longer than two weeks.
• 4:32
  But in the two weeks that I waited for my gym to arrive, I did the pushups, the calisthenics, the running around my neighborhood.
• 4:39
  And then when my equipment got here, I trained like crazy.
• 4:44
  What that was,
• 4:46
  was a standard that I put versus my goal.
• 4:49
  That became my new standard.
• 4:51
  Even though I had the goal of getting in the best shape of my life, it was more of the standard of my mindset that I wanted to fix.
• 5:00
  If you've been following me for any amount of time, you know that me growing up, this body was literally to protect myself, to protect me from the savage beatings.
• 5:09
  So they became my standard.
• 5:10
  And reminder, a standard is something you refuse to live below.
• 5:14
  It's that,
• 5:15
  that baseline of where you're gonna be.
• 5:17
  And it's the test of what happens when the excuse is airtight.
• 5:21
  Most guys my age,
• 5:24
  I have goals, but no standards.
• 5:26
  The standards is what you refuse to ignore.
• 5:30
  And it's the thing that you can't say no to, even when you want to.
• 5:35
  My standards, I keep raising them.
• 5:38
  And as I raise my standards, the things that aren't for me fall off.
• 5:41
  So if people start hammering you about your standards and saying, you've changed, say, good.
• 5:47
  Thank you.
• 5:47
  That's what the goal is here.
• 5:50
  I also used to say a lot, I'll sleep when I'm dead.
• 5:54
  I used to wear that as a badge of honor.
• 5:57
  Four or five broken hours.
• 5:59
  I'd wear exhaustion like it was a medal or a badge of honor.
• 6:04
  Little did I know my body was breaking down while I was bragging about it.
• 6:09
  Now I get up at 3.59 a.m.
• 6:12
  And I'm in bed at 830.
• 6:14
  I get seven hours.
• 6:17
  But the single biggest physical change of my late 40s happened in bed.
• 6:21
  It was sleeping, not in the gym, not doing more workouts, which we'll be talking about in my next story.
• 6:27
  But it was the rest and recovery.
• 6:29
  A weak body will create a noisy mind.
• 6:32
  And the noisy mind is running your company.
• 6:36
  It's dating your partner.
• 6:38
  It's married to your spouse.
• 6:40
  It's the father.
• 6:42
  You do not want a noisy mind.
• 6:44
  So you ever heard me say, look good, feel good, do good.
• 6:48
  or just be good.
• 6:49
  So my worst decision last year happened in the body that I stopped maintaining.
• 6:53
  Sleep isn't a rest.
• 6:55
  It's a decision for quality insurance.
• 6:58
  It is a non-negotiable.
• 6:59
  It is a must have.
• 7:01
  I know it sounds so funny coming from harder than life, which is grit, grit, go, go, go.
• 7:08
  These are non-negotiables that you're going to hear about all culminated in this fifth story, which is, if you've been following me for any time, the 555 workouts I did last year.
• 7:19
  up until february march of 2026 i knew one year it was go forward more more more more no excuses just excuses don't get results you'll hear me say that all the time let's go work harder more intensity raise the bar let's go let's go let's go i said let's do something impossible let's do 500 workouts at 50. and when i got to the 500 workouts i could have made it to 600 and i just felt nothing and luckily i didn't keep going to the 600 but
• 7:48
  I blew past the 500 and didn't feel a thing.
• 7:51
  Two of my coaches and my therapist said, hey man, that's not someone that's healed.
• 7:58
  You still got some work to do.
• 8:00
  And I dug into that IFS therapy deep and turns out they were right.
• 8:04
  This year, my word is slow down and I stopped counting.
• 8:08
  I've missed more days this year than probably the last several years of working out.
• 8:13
  And I could sit here and make excuses and say, I'm not 25 anymore.
• 8:17
  I was trying to be 25.
• 8:18
  I was trying to be worthy, loved, not be a quitter.
• 8:23
  but nobody told me to do 555 workouts.
• 8:27
  It's absolutely insane.
• 8:29
  And what changed after 50 wasn't my recovery time.
• 8:33
  It was my capacity and my smarts.
• 8:36
  You don't get to skip the discipline, but you get to do it smarter by sleeping with the proper amount of protein, walking instead of doing massive cardio, stretching and proper strength training.
• 8:49
  Hopefully this is telling you that what I'm trying to get across this, this is all mindset, man.
• 8:54
  We're talking about physicality, but it's much mental game as anything ever.
• 8:58
  And when you master that mental game, everything else falls into place.
• 9:02
  Your money, your relationships, your business, your fitness.
• 9:06
  Now, I got one critic in my social media that says, admit that you take steroids.
• 9:11
  And I've done enough episodes on what I take and what my supplements are, but I have literally been the same weight.
• 9:18
  for 30 years.
• 9:20
  I'm five foot nine, so everybody knows that I'm not very tall.
• 9:24
  And I've been between 210 and 220 since college, 30 years, 34 inch waist, six pack at 50.
• 9:32
  And the funny thing is, you go by doctors, the BMI says I'm overweight.
• 9:35
  But the way the mirror says to me, I'm good.
• 9:39
  I feel good.
• 9:40
  I've shared this with you guys, how I do things.
• 9:42
  210 to 240 grams of protein a day across five meals.
• 9:46
  I supplement with my good friends.
• 9:49
  Clean eats.
• 9:49
  It's hard to cook that many meals.
• 9:51
  So my boy, Don.
• 9:52
  Connects me with Clean Eats Kitchen meals.
• 9:55
  They're good, delicious, affordable.
• 9:57
  Cannot miss meals.
• 9:58
  Can't.
• 9:59
  That's the smartest thing about this.
• 10:00
  That's the smart about being 40 or 50.
• 10:02
  I drink my gallon of water and now I make certain I stretch.
• 10:08
  Because you don't get a choice when you get my age.
• 10:10
  I will tell you that is a cheat code of everything that I've said.
• 10:13
  you stretch and you sleep and work out five to six times a week you will meet your goals this allows you to own your body really be the agent of your body because you're going to own it you're not renting this body you own this body for the rest of your life so the standard i never lowered wasn't the weight on the bar it was showing up every single day for 30 years and measuring to get better every standard you take back
• 10:42
  in the body shows up in business and the family within 90 days.
• 10:49
  I've lived it, my friends.
• 10:51
  You've came this far and I appreciate you.
• 10:52
  Hopefully you got some good advice out of this.
• 10:55
  I'm going to keep this one very, very short because this is just a mindset thing.
• 10:58
  And I want you to pick one standard.
• 11:02
  You retired and blamed it on age.
• 11:04
  I'm going to spin this a little different too, is for you youngsters thinking that you got all the time in the world,
• 11:09
  Pick a standard.
• 11:09
  Write a number that it used to be or that you want it to be and hit seven straight days starting tomorrow and log it.
• 11:16
  Winning is boring, but winning is more fun than fun is fun.
• 11:19
  So do it anyways.
• 11:21
  Age gets blamed for a lot of quiet surrenders, both young and old.
• 11:26
  And not all of them are age.
• 11:28
  In fact, I just presented you a 15-minute argument on how it's not about age.
• 11:34
  I lift some of the heaviest weights I've ever done.
• 11:37
  I push myself to the intensity I've never done before.
• 11:40
  But I also offset that with more sleep than I've ever gotten in my life.
• 11:45
  More water, more stretching, more, more, more, more, which is also...
• 11:48
  Wes, drop the standard you're taking back this year in the comments.
• 11:52
  I'll read them all.
• 11:53
  If you want additional information or more stuff about this episode, I didn't go into too much detail because this is mindset.
• 12:01
  send me an email, kelly at harderthanlife.com.
• 12:04
  And if there's anything you want a special fitness episode on or a mental episode, just shoot me a thing.
• 12:10
  I read all those emails.
• 12:12
  No AI, my friends.
• 12:13
  And share the show, please.
• 12:15
  Remember, face your fears, live your dreams.
• 12:17
  This was Harder Than Life.
• 12:18
  I'll see you next Thursday with another fitness episode to make us feel better.
• 12:22
  Love you all.
• 12:23
  Be awesome, be kind, be harder than life.
• 12:25
  Please rate and share this podcast.
• 12:27
  I'm active on all social platforms and love to hear from my Segal supporters.
• 12:31
  Each and every episode is sponsored by my company, National Technology Management, the easiest and best IT company to do business with, delivering peace of mind with technology every day, even simplifying cybersecurity.
• 12:42
  Visit TrustNTM.com for more info.
• 12:45
  Until next week, be harder than life.