Two years can change a body fast. I went from overweight, tired all the time, and unable to run a mile under 12 minutes to numbers I never thought I’d hit.
Today, I can total 1,200 pounds across my three main lifts at 150 pounds body weight. My VO2 max is 56.8, my average HRV is 150, my DEXA scan showed 11.1% body fat, and my pace of aging is 0.62, the same number Bryan Johnson reports while spending about $2 million a year.
The part that matters isn’t the highlight reel. What changed my health was a long stretch of mistakes, worse lab work, a torn pec, crashed testosterone, and eight lessons that finally made the whole thing work.
The first version of my health plan made me worse
At the start, I thought hard work would be enough. I trained the way I always had, pushed the volume, and copied what looked like the best protocol on the internet.
That backfired.
I tore my pec. My testosterone dropped. I followed Bryan Johnson’s public routine almost line by line, and for a month or two my Whoop numbers looked better. I thought I had cracked it. Then I got blood work.
My iron was low. Vitamin B12 and B9 were low. Hemoglobin was low. Testosterone was falling, and inflammation was high. I was eating “healthy,” spending money, tracking everything, and moving in the wrong direction.
That period changed how I think about health. Good intentions don’t mean much if your plan doesn’t fit your body. A protocol can look smart on paper and still fail once it hits real life, real genetics, real recovery, and real stress.
So I stopped chasing perfect plans and started paying attention to cause and effect. Every improvement after that came from that shift.
Train the parts of fitness you’re avoiding
My biggest mistake was simple. I kept training what I was already good at.
I was strong. I could bench 225 for 25 reps. I could total 1,200 pounds across the big three. But my endurance was terrible. I couldn’t run a decent mile, and that weakness showed up in my energy, recovery, and daily output.
There are five broad areas of physical health: strength, muscular endurance, speed, cardiovascular endurance, and flexibility. Most people are solid in one or two and weak in the rest. Progress started when I stopped feeding my strengths and went after my weakest links.
That shift changed my numbers fast. My HRV moved from the 50s into the 200s, and my resting heart rate dropped from the mid-50s into the 40s within a year. That direction matches a NIH review on exercise and cardiovascular health, which links regular exercise with lower resting heart rate and better cardiovascular markers.
My 90-day rotation
I learned that I couldn’t push every quality at full intensity all year. When I chased endurance too hard, I got weaker. So I started working in seasons.
| Season | Main focus |
|---|---|
| Winter | Build muscle and muscular endurance |
| Spring | Improve VO2 max and speed |
| Summer | Push pure strength |
| Fall | Build cardiovascular endurance and HRV |
Flexibility stays in all year. I do dynamic warm-ups before every session, then static stretching and yoga at night.
The point of the rotation isn’t to drop everything else. I still lift during cardio-focused phases and still keep some conditioning in strength phases. The difference is where the extra volume goes.
A ScienceDirect overview of cardiovascular fitness makes the same basic point in plain language: aerobic work can come from walking, running, cycling, or swimming. The tool matters less than the gap you’re trying to close.
Your circadian rhythm decides more than your sleep
I used to treat circadian rhythm like a bedtime problem. Go to sleep on time, wake up on time, and move on. That view was too small.
Circadian rhythm sets the timing for cortisol, testosterone, growth hormone, and melatonin. It shapes when you feel sharp, when you feel flat, when you recover well, and when your body wants to store or burn energy. For me, the pattern that worked was clear: high stress in the morning, low stress at night.
The three signals that mattered most
The first signal was exercise. Morning training stacked on top of my natural stress peak. When I trained early, stress rose when it should, then kept falling through the day. When I skipped the morning or trained late, my curve stayed high, my sleep got worse, and my HRV dropped.
Even on rest days, I tried to create a small morning signal. Sometimes that meant one minute of burpees or jumping lunges. Other times I did 10 rounds of 30-second assault bike sprints to nudge the trend in the right direction.
The second signal was light. Morning sunlight in the first 30 to 60 minutes after waking had a huge effect. On training days, I did morning cardio outside. On rest days, I used a 10,000-lux light at my desk. At night, I dimmed everything two hours before bed and switched to warm light only, often with floor lamps and Philips Hue bulbs.
The third signal was meal timing. I handled food better earlier in the day. Large late meals pushed my stress up when my body should have been recovering. My Whoop showed that pattern over and over, so I started eating bigger meals earlier and stopped eating at least five hours before bed.
My wind-down became repetitive on purpose: mattress set to 13 C, shower 90 minutes before bed, prep for the next day, stretch, journal, meditate, no screens for the last 15 minutes.
Don’t copy the protocol, copy the method
Copying Bryan Johnson’s routine taught me something useful, but not the thing I expected.
What worked for him didn’t work for me because his choices come from his own data. The value wasn’t in the exact meals, supplements, or schedule. The value was in the process behind them.
Don’t copy the protocol. Copy the methodology.
The method was measure, interpret, synthesize, and iterate.
I started tracking what mattered daily, what needed a check every three months, what belonged in annual testing, and what only needed a once-in-a-lifetime look. That gave me more information, but it also created a new problem. One metric alone can lie to you.
A green recovery score doesn’t tell you whether your iron is low. Better HRV doesn’t tell you what your testosterone is doing. Great gym performance doesn’t tell you anything about inflammation, bone density, or micronutrient status.
I started calling this the single-vector problem. A doctor might fix one issue without looking at training side effects. A wearable tracks cardiovascular strain but not hormones. A coach can improve performance while missing what the blood work says. Each tool sees one slice.
That was why I kept breaking one marker while fixing another. Long runs improved my HRV, but the oxidative stress dragged my testosterone down. Eating huge amounts of clean food still pushed inflammation up.
Even a youth-focused AHA paper on cardiorespiratory fitness treats fitness capacity as a core health marker. The lesson for me was broader: health is a full picture, not a collection of isolated scores.
Fix the bottleneck first, then remove the decisions
Once I had more data, I made another mistake. I tried to improve everything at once.
That created noise. I spent hours reading about sleep, nutrition, supplements, recovery, and training, yet I couldn’t tell what was helping and what was hurting.
The fastest progress came when I looked for the main constraint.
Two years ago, my biggest bottleneck was body fat. At that point, perfect skin care or minor recovery tweaks wouldn’t have mattered. I needed more cardio, a calorie deficit, and three liters of water a day. After body composition improved, the bottleneck changed. My HRV looked great, but my testosterone was slipping, so I cut back on long endurance work, added more sprinting and heavy lifting, and filled likely gaps with zinc and boron.
That cycle kept repeating. Find the three biggest constraints, hit them hard for 90 days, retest, then move to the next problem.
Discipline helped, but systems mattered more. I stopped asking myself to make perfect choices every day and started removing the choices.
I split meals into fixed meals and flexible meals. Fixed meals stayed the same and matched my data. Flexible meals changed based on training and life. Then I batch-prepped on Sunday.
That prep included mason jars with protein powder, creatine, colostrum, inulin, and GOS prebiotic, plus nuts, seeds, chocolate, vegetable soups, eggs with avocado, and a month of supplements sorted in advance. The exact menu mattered less than the lack of friction.
The night before mattered too. I ran the dishwasher, refilled clean water, and wrote the next day’s work and health tasks. Once a year, I bought shelf-stable foods in bulk and reordered from the same list.
That routine saved me hours every week and made consistency far easier than motivation ever did.
Health sticks when other people are in the picture
I learned one lesson the hard way: I wasn’t going to do this alone.
When my business partner Thomas lived with me for three months, I saw how inconsistent I had been. I could be disciplined when life was calm. Once work got busy or I felt tired, parts of my routine disappeared.
Living with someone else exposed that gap fast.
We made handshake deals. If one of us skipped a routine or did something we had agreed not to do, we paid the other person. It was simple and a little painful, which made it work.
During those three months, my HRV climbed from the 50s to 110. Thomas went from the 90s to 155. Our recovery scores often moved together, which made the point obvious. Daily habits spread across a household.
The effect wasn’t only physical. Productivity rose too. During that period, Thomas grew his YouTube channel from 1,500 subscribers to 150,000.
My film director, Toki, showed me another side of the same lesson. Her HRV went from the 40s to 80s within three months, and she did it with zero cardio. Better sleep and a healthier diet were enough. At the same time, she influenced me with gratitude journaling, setting intentions, and learning how to center myself.
I stopped chasing a life built for a robot. That plan always looked perfect for about three weeks, then real life crushed it.
A routine works when it fits a human life.
Going out on a Saturday night became the test. If I got home late, I still woke up at the same time, got sunlight, and did a lighter workout or a walk. If needed, I took a 20 to 30-minute early afternoon nap. One rough day was manageable. A shifted body clock took longer to clean up.
What my routine looks like now
My days are simple because they repeat.
I wake up at 5:00 every morning. Then I weigh myself, use a tongue scraper, drink electrolytes, and check my Whoop data. If it’s a long-run day, I eat a banana before I head out.
Training depends on the phase I’m in. Right now I’m in a muscle-building phase, so I run a five-day split. Most workouts last about 40 minutes. Cardio stays in twice a week, one interval session and one long run. Every session starts with dynamic warm-ups, and evenings usually end with static stretching.
After training, I eat my fixed meals and take my supplements. Because everything is prepped on Sunday, I mostly pull food from the fridge and move on. While I eat, I often hop on a call with Thomas and sometimes walk on a walking pad.
My carbs shift with the day. Rest days sit around 130 grams. Training days are closer to 220 grams. Long-run days can reach 450 grams to fuel the work and recover from it.
Three times a week, I also do sauna, red light, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I see those as experiments and micro-optimizations, not the foundation. For most people, they matter far less than sleep, food timing, training balance, and consistency.
At night, the routine goes back to the basics: shower, prep for tomorrow, stretch, gratitude journal, quick meditation, bed by 9:00.
Final thoughts
The numbers changed because the system changed. I stopped rewarding my strengths, stopped copying someone else’s template, and stopped treating health like a collection of isolated stats.
What worked was narrower and simpler. Train your weak points, protect your circadian rhythm, fix the biggest bottleneck first, and build a plan that survives real life.
Two years was enough to move me into the best health of my life. The deeper win was building a routine I could keep.
