If you’d like a podcast version of this post, you can CLICK HERE to listen to episode 219 of Running Stronger.
—
I haven’t written a post in a while.
Or recorded a podcast.
Or made anything that took more than a few minutes of effort to create or to edit.
Honestly, there were a lot of reasons, but ultimately I just needed a bit of a break from “creating content.”
I needed a break from looking at my own face and listening to my own voice and staring endlessly at my phone in order to post something that would disappear in a few days anyway.
When I really think about it, I’m not a huge fan of “content.”
It’s representative of a lot of the problems I see in the modern world.
You could literally spend your entire life listening to and watching “content” and you wouldn’t even approach .0001% of the currently available media on the internet.
And yet we just keep making more of it.
When I think about that, it makes me realize how disconnected we all truly are.
It makes me reflect on how much importance we place on silly metrics, like view counts and follower numbers while ignoring objectively more important targets like “hours spent with friends.”
As a result, I just haven’t felt like anything I had to say was valuable enough to post.
I didn’t feel like anybody needed to hear me drone on for the 1200th time about carbs or consistency or whatever other “c word” would complete this alliterative trifecta of tired topics.
So instead, I just stopped saying much of anything at all.
I decided that I wasn’t going to make anything until I was truly moved to do so.
I wasn’t going to contribute even more slop to the internet just to fulfill some imaginary target that I set for myself.
But now, I actually feel like I have something to say.
I hope you find it worthwhile.
And even if you don’t, it will at the very least be something I believe in sharing.
It will be something that helped one or two or four of my clients that week or would have helped a younger version of myself.
I originally became a coach because I wanted to be helpful.
I was driving snowcats at a ski resort and I wanted to do something that might be potentially more useful to a wider range of people.
It sure as hell wasn’t because I wanted to become a “content creator.”
I liked working in the middle of the night making snow flat.
It presses a lot of brain buttons for me as a fairly introverted person on the autism spectrum.
But it also had a lot of downsides, one of the biggest being that it often felt a bit purposeless.
So I decided to pursue a career in fitness because it was something that had changed my life and I thought I might be able to help people.
But I quickly learned that I don’t really have an inherent knack for this marketing stuff.
In fact, I’d argue that I’m pretty allergic to most of it.
I never really wanted to be on Instagram.
Or create a podcast.
Or write a ton of emails and posts.
I just wanted to do my job well.
But in 2026… all of those things are actually part of the job.
If you don’t have them, then nobody knows or cares who you are.
And if nobody knows or cares who you are, it becomes pretty damn difficult to help them.
So in addition to learning to coach, I started learning to do all of that stuff as well.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t very good at it, largely because I never really had a model for how I could do it well and still feel good about myself.
The fitness industry is full of lies and half-truths and the most popular content tends to sell fake answers to non-existent problems for a whole lot of money.
And as someone who’s bought quite a few of those fake answers, I don’t have any interest in selling them to other people.
So instead of supplements, I sell squats.
Instead of peptides, I sell programming.
Instead of carnivore, I sell cardio.
And as you might guess, those things are inherently much harder to sell.
But they also tend to be a whole lot more effective.
I’m tired of people saying things like, “Yea, I know supplements are BS… but people are going to buy them anyway so they might as well buy them from you.”
Garbage.
Instead, I’d like to provide information that actually has a chance of helping someone.
I’d like to sell a program that might make someone stronger.
Or faster.
Or improve their back pain.
I’d also like to teach people how to think about training so they can do it better.
While I know most people have no interest in learning anything about anatomy, you really aren’t going to make very much progress if you don’t have a single clue about how your body works.
If your heel hurts and you decide after a quick chat with the internet robots that you have plantar fasciitis when it’s actually Achilles tendinopathy…
You’re not going to make a lot of progress.
You might even make it worse.
If your knee hurts and you follow a list of “5 exercises that will fix your knee pain” that showed up on the first page of YouTube…
Then you’re probably going to be in pain again six months down the line (and that’s if the pain ever went away in the first place).
Instead, if you took a couple minutes to either talk to a professional or learn a small amount of anatomy, you might actually be able to fix those pains for good.
All this to say, I’m going to start making longer stuff again.
I feel like I finally have something to say and I’d like to share it with people.
But it’s going to be the type of information I want to share.
It’s going to be the type of information I want to see.
It’s going to be the type of information that I discuss with my clients on a weekly basis to get them out of pain and perform better.
It will be stuff I’m proud to make and it will be stuff that represents who I am as a coach.
And if you have any suggestions or questions, I’d love to hear them.
Because I’m really just doing this to help people.
I don’t particularly enjoy hearing myself talk.
I just want to make a difference and this is the only way I really know how to do that.
This is the only way I really know to share what I’ve learned and continue to learn as a trainer with as many people as possible.
I’m not going to pretend like I know everything.
Anybody who does is probably deeply full of shit.
I’m not even going to pretend like I know “a lot.”
I didn’t even start really “training” until I was about 30.
Before that, I was just exercising hard.
But I’ve fallen in love with fitness and I’ve put myself in rooms with incredible athletes and amazing coaches and as a result, I’ve had a decent amount of success helping a wide range of people.
So if this helps anybody, it’s worth the time.
At least for now.
I’ll be back with another one of these in a week that actually says something about training.
It won’t just be another long screed borne of my increasingly tenuous relationship with the modern world and my place in it.