APEX PWR  |  Dad Duty

Fitness Is the First Thing Most Dads Drop

APEX Co-Founder Jeron Mastrud working out at APEX

I want to talk about something I have lived and that I watch happen to people I care about.

Being a dad can be tough. Letting your fitness slip is a real thing, and I have experienced it myself. I see it with many of my friends.

One thing leads to another. Your work mounts. The pressure to be a present father builds. And something has to give.

For a lot of the dads I know, the first thing that goes is their fitness.

It makes a certain kind of sense. It is the one thing on the list that nobody else is waiting on. Skip a client call and someone notices. Miss a bedtime and you feel it immediately. Skip your training and the only person who registers it is you, and you can absorb it. So you absorb it, once, and then it becomes the thing you absorb first every time.

The Guys Who Used to Be Good at This

What gets me is who this happens to.

I am talking about former college teammates of mine. Men who put in years of strength training work to play at a Division One level, who knew exactly what to do in a weight room and had done it under real pressure, and who now just feel lost when it comes to training.

Not out of shape. Lost. There is a difference, and the difference is the hard part.

When you have been elite at something, going back to it at twenty percent feels worse than not going back at all. You know what the right version looks like. You remember what the bar used to feel like. And the gap between that memory and where you actually are is so loud that it is easier to stay out of the room entirely.

So that is what happens. They stay out of the room.

And it is not only former athletes. This is also what we hear from dads in their thirties and forties who come in for DEXA scans. They are busy, they are doing well at work, they are present at home, and somewhere in the last five or eight years their own health slid quietly to the back burner. The scan is often the first honest look they have had at themselves in years.

Sometimes what they find out is uncomfortable. Across our own scans going back to 2016, more than half of the men who come in for a first scan between 50 and 59 are carrying more than 2.2 pounds of visceral fat, the fat packed around the organs that you cannot see in the mirror. And the median in our clients in their fifties runs around four times what it does in our clients in their twenties.

That comparison is different people at each age rather than the same men followed across thirty years, so treat it as a description of who walks through our door rather than a prediction about you. But the shape of it matches what I see in the parking lot and at my kids' games, which is that the thirties and forties are when this drifts, and that it drifts quietly.

Simple Is Not the Same as Easy

Here is the question I get asked, in one form or another, every time this comes up.

Is it the easiest thing to stay on top of? No. It is not. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I run a gym.

But is it simple? Yes.

Lift two or three times a week. Eat enough protein. Walk. Sleep when the house lets you. That is most of it. Nobody is holding back a secret.

The reason that is worth saying out loud is that the two problems have different solutions. If the problem were complexity, more information would fix it, and most of the dads I am describing are already drowning in information. The problem is that it is hard, and hard problems get solved by structure and by other people, not by another article.

Why It Matters More Than How You Look

Our team includes fathers who love helping other dads get back on their regimen, build strength and regain their identity. That last word is the one I would underline.

Because at this stage it is not really about a number on a scan, and it stopped being about a shirt fitting a while ago.

It is about building a healthy version of yourself that can be around for years to come. The long version of your life, where you are still carrying things, still getting up off the floor without thinking about it, still in the game when your kids are adults with kids of their own.

And it is about setting the example for your children to follow.

They are watching. They are not listening to what you say about health, and they are absolutely watching what you do with a Tuesday evening. Whatever you model now is the default they will inherit about what a grown man does with his body and his time. That is a heavier argument than body fat percentage, and on the mornings I do not feel like going, it is the one that works on me.

There Are Two Ways You Can Get Started

Jeron working out in the back yard while his twins are asleep

If You Only Take One Thing From This

Start smaller than you think you should.

The most common way this goes wrong for a former athlete is writing a program for the body you had at twenty-one, getting hurt in week two, and losing six weeks plus most of your motivation. I have watched it happen to people who knew better, and I have come close to doing it myself.

Two days a week at a weight that feels too light is not a compromise. At this stage it is the actual plan, and the ceiling from there is higher than you would guess, because the body remembers more than you think.

Whichever path makes sense for you, the only part that matters this week is picking one.

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