ardentoshkosh

You Cannot Buy Your Way Out of This

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:11:25 GMT

Rest is part of the work, not the absence of it.

Do you have a cold plunge sitting in your garage? Maybe on your back patio? I know I do.

Maybe you didn’t go cheap and it cost you two grand, maybe more once you add the chiller. Maybe it is just sitting there next to the lawnmower or the edger you never use. I would put money on that, if it is sitting there unused, there is as good chance you do not have a consistent bedtime either. This is not me knocking the cold plunge, I love them, I am just pointing out that we will drop money on recovery and skip the parts which cost nothing. It is the equivalent of the treadmill coat hanger sitting in a lot of basements or home gyms.

This last blog on recovery is about the free shit we have available, why we skip it, and why it matters more as we age.

We already covered sleep, so we are going to move on. If you didn’t read the post about sleep, check it out here. It is one of the biggest things we can do for our mind and body and where a lot of people need to look first.

Food

You broke your tissue down in a tough session. Now you need to build it back, but you need the material to do that. Unfortunately, it takes more than good intentions.

Training hard but maybe you are eating way under what you should to recover. You wonder why you feel beat up and nothing is really changing. You won’t rebuild anything without giving your body something to rebuild with. And the timing we talked about in Part Two of this series applies here, your body expects food on some kind of schedule. Just like we expect sleep and light, so grazing all day and then nothing, or nothing all day and then everything at nine at night, is another variation of scattered input.

I am not putting numbers or macros into a blog post. That is a conversation and it is situation dependent. Better is better with food, just like with movement, but better is different for everyone.

Stress. All of it, not just the gym

You can try and itemize your stressors in your mind but your body doesn’t give a shit. It doesn’t send you a statement at the end of the month separating workout stress from home stress, from your kid being sick for a week, or your partners work schedule changing so you find yourself trying to piece together pick ups and drop offs, or the conversation with your boss on Tuesday that is still living rent free in your head. It all goes into the same bucket, which is probably overflowing.

This means, the week you may have needed to back off may have had nothing to do with your training. Slept like trash, carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, and then Thursday hits. The workout is as tough one and you just sent it, and you feel depleted and defeated on Friday. You may blame the workout but that is when you should take a step back.

Look at the entire stressor load, not just the part with weights and movement.

walking

Recovery doesn’t mean sitting on the couch. Go for a walk. Ideally outside, maybe in the morning and get that morning light we already talked about…that is multitasking, optimization, or whatever fancy word you want to connect to it. Go and move at an intensity that doesn’t require its own recovery. Regardless of what that person online is saying or that voice in the back of your head, it counts.

The Ardent Way: Restoration Part three of Three

Don’t do the opposite

I have had this conversation a few times with intros. They came from an environment where they would hit a workout a few times in a day, the same workout. I understand how people may logically get there. More work, more results. If one was good, two has to be better. That is just math and it works in other areas of life.

It doesn’t work here. More does not equal better. I am not guessing about this because there is a joint consensus statement from the European College of S[ort Science and the American College of Sports Medicine that addresses this directly. Their position is that training absolutely has to involve overload as a mechanism, but it needs to avoid the combination of excessive overload and inadequate recovery. When this is blundered it becomes non-functional overreaching, meaning your performance will drop and stay dropped. Coming back could take weeks or months (Meeusen et al., European Journal of Sport Science, 2013).

Sometimes rest doesn’t feel like effort and effort is how you prove you are serious, or so they say.

Never missing a workout can turn into an identity. Doing more can be an identity. Being extreme can be an identity. I am saying this from being this, not from a soap box. I have been that guy and I paid the price in all aspects of my life. It is a story we tell ourselves and rest doesn’t have a comfortable place in that story.

It is convenient to tell ourselves as story where the problem is just that we need to work harder when trying harder is something we already do. Deciding not to recover is not discipline. You are leaving adaptation on the table and telling yourself a flattering story to justify it.

`This gets more important every year, not less`

At 25 you can play this for a while and get away with it. Your body is made to absorb a lot of stupid.

Im not 25 anymore and there is a good chance, based on our demographic, you are not either.

Things change, everything costs a bit more (not an economy joke, but now it is), we recover slower than we once did. A tough session may hang around another day, a night out doesn’t just cost you the next morning but the entire day. All of it feels a bit insulting to be honest, but that is the arrangement. You get older and wiser because you have to, if you don’t you pay the price, and sometimes that price is steep.

This is why the recovery side ends up being the aspect which decides how long you get to keep doing any of this. You can train hard and recover poorly for twenty years, and you will spend a big chunk of those years hurt, backed off, or starting over. Or, hear me out, you can train hard and recover well and add YEARS of training to your life. Not just years of life, even though that will probably happen as well. Years of training. Years being someone who can pick up heavy shit and put it down and then go do something active on a Saturday with your kids or grand kids.

That, my friends, is the point of Restoration. It is time we reframed this concept from doing less to protecting your ability to keep going.

Where we are heading

Restoration was about what happens when you’re not training. Next, is Vitality, the other side of the coin. Getting stronger, moving better, building the engine to do whatever your goal is.

If you are a client, bring this up at your next 90 day goal session. If you are not a client, book a No Sweat and we can talk about where you are and where you want to go.

`Sources`

Meeusen, R., Duclos, M., Foster, C., Fry, A., Gleeson, M., Nieman, D., Raglin, J., Rietjens, G., Steinacker, J., & Urhausen, A. (2013). Prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the overtraining syndrome: Joint consensus statement of the European College of Sport Science and the American College of Sports Medicine. European Journal of Sport Science, 13(1), 1–24.

The Clock You Already Run On

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:43:54 GMT

Timing matters more than you think. So does light.

I learned a lot with my time in the military. Sleeping on a schedule was not one of them. I could and can sleep anywhere now. Pile of rocks? No problem.

Training or deployed, the hours were based on the mission.. More rank means more responsibility, mission planning, logistics, which doesn’t translate into better sleep. Up earlier and in bed later, and you tell yourself the story that you are fine because you are getting sleep In some window of time.

One night we were out on patrol near Kabul. It was either really late or really early, I honestly could not tell you which. I know it was not daylight. We were driving a long stretch of road and I must have nodded off. My driver decided to wake me up by jerking the wheel and slamming my head into the side of the window. I was wearing my helmet, and it was deserved.

I was getting sleep. It just was not connected to anything and not at a great time. It wasn’t a purposeful nap, I didn’t even know I nodded off. Our schedule was all over the place at that time and completely mission dependent.

I thought the number was what mattered. Get 7-9 hours of sleep over the 24 hours and I would be fit as a fiddle.

I was wrong, and the number is not the whole game .

Same seven hours, different results

Your body runs on a clock. It is expecting sleep at a certain time, food at a certain time, light at a certain time. When these aspects are scattered, the the sleep you do get has diminishing returns.

This is backed up by science and not anecdotal

A study of nearly 61,000 adults wearing accelerometers found that people with more regular sleep timing had a 20 to 48 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality. Regularity has more of an impact than total hours (Windred et al., Sleep, 2024).

A second study followed more than 73,000 adults for eight years and found irregular sleepers had a 38 percent higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Meeting the recommended sleep duration did not cancel that out. People hitting their seven hours on an irregular schedule still carried the elevated risk (Chaput et al., Diabetes Care, 2024).

In the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD (thanks for the book, Nick), Chapter 6 opens with a fake advertisement. It shows a revolutionary new treatment that helps you live longer, sharpens your memory, keeps you slim, lowers your risk of heart attack, stroke, and diabetes, and leaves you happier and less anxious. Then it asks if you are interested. It would be a great ad. In the end, except you would be selling something that is free. Sleep.

The impact of sleep cannot be overstated, and it has a direct effect on every area of your life. How you handle stress, your relationships…litearlly everything.

You can see it play out in sleep loss and car crashes, sleep loss and sport performance, and sleep loss and obesity. A lot of the data infers rather than proves the relationship, but that doesn’t you can dismiss it. Plot average sleep duration against obesity rates in the US over the last fifty years. Obviously there are a lot of factors driving obesity in this country. This is one of them, and this one we do have some agency over.

A meta-analysis pooling multiple long-term studies of children found that the shortest sleepers, around ten hours a night, were 76 percent more likely to be overweight or obese than kids getting about twelve. Every additional hour of sleep was associated with a 21 percent lower risk (Fatima et al., Scientific Reports, 2015). An hour. That is the difference between one more episode and lights out.

Turn off Netflix and go the f*ck to bed and maybe make your kids go to bed.

The catch-up lie

This weekend warrior mentality is bull shit and it is the same psychology people try with nutrition.

Five hours Monday through Friday, then ten on Saturday. Eat well all week, then binge drink and eat like garbage Friday night and Saturday. Average it out and the math may math, maybe even stay inside the boundaries of the Pareto principle. The problem with this is that body does not run on averages. You are throwing a stick in your spokes every weekend while thinking that it does.

Do not get me wrong, I am not telling you to never sleep in. I am telling you that sleeping in until ten on Sunday and then trying to fall asleep at nine that night is a fight you picked with yourself, and it could be the difference between making that 5:30 class on Monday and having the weekend impact the first few days of the week.

I watch this happen on a regular basis

We have a lot of medical professionals at the gym. Doctors, nurses, techs, people who take call. Someone has to be there at three in the morning when your partners appendix bursts at 10pm on Easter and this week that someone is them.

Days, then nights, then a stretch of call where sleep is whatever they can get. It part of the job. This version of this problem is difficult, and I am not going to pretend a blog post fixes it or properly addresses it. What I will say is that when someone in that situation is stuck, spinning their wheels, doing everything right on paper, the schedule is usually a bigger factor than most of the other aspects.

When progress stalls, people focus on their nutrition or their training. They almost never look at their sleep, and rarely their environment.

If you are a client and come in for a 90-day goal session (included in your membership), it is something we talk about. We are not just asking what you eat and how you move. We ask how you sleep. Whether you wake up feeling like you actually slept and ready for the day.

None of that shows up on our InBody scanner. It shows up in other ways, in how you feel, how you interact with people, and your energy levels.

The Ardent Way: Restoration Part Two of Three

The tool you can use while you are awake

The most useful thing you can do for your sleep happens while you are awake.

Light. I know…anticlimatic.

Researchers put light sensors on nearly 89,000 people for a week. Brighter daytime light was associated with lower all-cause mortality. Brighter nighttime light was associated with higher all-cause mortality (Windred et al., PNAS, 2024).

Light in the day, dark at night. That is the concept, and it sounds too simple to matter. I am keeping it that way. You can go deeper into the weeds if you want, but this is about taking action, so start here.

`Oh, Wisconsin…`

Our first class is at 5:30 in the morning in Oshkosh. Half the year, there is no such thing as morning light. Our windows face south and west, so even when the sun does come up, we miss out on the direct light.

Unfortunately, our schedules do not move for the seasons, so they try and move the clocks. Could you imagine if a town actually shifted everything based on the light? Or didn’t use time at all or a clock at all? Business hours, school hours, all of it. I would put money on people being happier and healthier, but alas, this doesn’t fit into our contemporary economic landscape. We need the widgets and whats-its and we need them now, regardless of the impact on our health and wellness.

So, in November we set the clocks back again, which means the clock in my truck will be wrong again, and it means a lot of you will be driving to work in the dark and possibly driving home in the dark.

Worth watching : if the Sunshine Protection Act ever passes and we stay on daylight saving time year round, winter mornings get significantly darker. If you are not proactive about it, that could be a problem. But we can have an optimistic view, a glass half full kind of mentality. Later sunrises mean people who are not natural early risers might actually be awake for one, and get morning light they have never had access to.

Either way, the move is the same. If it is dark when you get up, get outside as soon as the sun is actually up. Drink your coffee outside, or walk the dog, or park at the far end of the lot. Overcast still counts, this concept is easy and free. You don’t need a trainer or a special program, you just go and do it.

`Training is sometimes secondary`

You may already focus on training every day, so it is worth having a better understanding of why.

Exercise functions as what researchers call a non-photic zeitgeber, a time cue that is not light which can influence circadian rhythms. Regular training can help regulate your internal rhythms, which makes it a potential non-drug tool for circadian problems (Shen et al., Frontiers in Pharmacology, 2023).

There are limits. The same review is clear that the timing specifics are still up for debate, and that whether morning or evening training shifts your clock forward or back depends on the person. Light is the focus point while training is a supporting actor in the scenario.

So the takeaway is to train consistently, at roughly consistent times, and your internal clock benefits from the routine.

Have you ever had a child on a great routine and then gone off script for an event? How did that go for you? They express how they feel outwardly. As adults, we may feel the same, but the expression looks a little different, at least for some of us.

`When I was younger, I was wrong`

When my sleep was bad, I went looking for a pill, or a supplement. A quick fix which would hopefully allow me to function at a high level without as much sleep.

Medication, whatever was going to knock me out. I did not consider that my pre-sleep routine, or my sleep environment, or the fact that I had no wind-down at all might be doing the damage. I was looking for something to take instead of something to change, because change is freaking hard.

What actually worked was boring and has no resale value, so it does not get talked about as much.

I started planning my bedtime instead of arriving at it by accident. I built an actual wind-down. I dimmed the lights instead of sitting under every bulb in the house until the second I laid down. I changed what and when I was eating before bed. None of it was what I was looking for. I wanted to keep doing what I was doing, and then shut down.

Where we are heading

Part Three is the point or the series: More is not better. Better is better.

You have been trying to fix your health with movement and food, because those are the two aspects everybody talks about. Is that actually where your problem is? Or would fixing your sleep and your environment move the needle further?

Because it works in that direction too.

Sometimes people cannot find the energy to train until they fix the sleep first.

Health is not a straight line. It is not just move more and eat better. It is also a bedtime, and what you do in the hour before it. The problem is that those fixes are not as much fun to talk about.

`Sources`

Chaput, J. P., Biswas, R. K., Ahmadi, M., Cistulli, P. A., Sabag, A., St-Onge, M. P., & Stamatakis, E. (2024). Sleep irregularity and the incidence of type 2 diabetes: A device-based prospective study in adults. Diabetes Care, 47(12), 2139–2145.

Fatima, Y., Doi, S. A. R., & Mamun, A. A. (2015). Longitudinal impact of sleep on overweight and obesity in children and adolescents: A systematic review and bias-adjusted meta-analysis. Obesity Reviews, 16(2), 137–149.

Shen, B., Ma, C., Wu, G., Liu, H., Chen, L., & Yang, G. (2023). Effects of exercise on circadian rhythms in humans. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 14, Article 1282357.

Windred, D. P., Burns, A. C., Lane, J. M., Olivier, P., Rutter, M. K., Saxena, R., Phillips, A. J. K., & Cain, S. W. (2024). Brighter nights and darker days predict higher mortality risk: A prospective analysis of personal light exposure in >88,000 individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(43), Article e2405924121.

Windred, D. P., Burns, A. C., Lane, J. M., Saxena, R., Rutter, M. K., Cain, S. W., & Phillips, A. J. K. (2024). Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration: A prospective cohort study. Sleep, 47(1), Article zsad253.

You Don't Get Stronger in the Gym

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:19:17 GMT

The work breaks you down.

Sleep builds you back.

My son was born and I struggled on multiple levels for months.

I was showing up physically, but I wasn't all there. I was at the gym before five, coffee in hand, running the morning classes. But I was not really there. The way I have described it since is that I was walking and tripping my way through a dream. I felt like I was running on a delay. People would tell me things and I would forget them, I was failing at standard tasks, and I couldn't keep things straight. I drove to work and could not tell you about the drive…I was basically teleporting.

Before I noticed all of that, I noticed my training being impacted. Movements and weights which should have been an easy win felt heavy, and the entire concept of overall wellness felt daunting. I would finish a workout session feeling like I hadn't actually accomplished anything. At times, I felt like I was wasting my time. How was I supposed to help people with their wellness if I couldn't even handle my own? So I did what most people do when the numbers stop moving and shit gets hard, I assumed I was soft, weak, and just had to suck it up, so I pushed harder.

That's when coaching got tough, the early classes were challenging in ways I had never experienced. Not the art of coaching, but the talking and being present in the moment with clients. Being articulate and useful to a group of people before sunrise took everything I had, and when you are already working at a deficit, it made the rest of the day that much more difficult.

He wasn't a hard baby…maybe I was just weak (slightly kidding). We were not going through anything special, the same struggles most new parents are presented with, and it was still enough to take me apart at the seams. It showed me how small of a margin we have when maintaining our health. It also gave me a ton of empathy for new parents and a ton of respect for the new parents we had over the years still showing up. I also realized how many people are walking around right now in exactly that state, assuming the problem is their discipline, blaming discipline or perceived lack thereof.

For me, it wasn't my discipline, I was not undertrained or lacked the "toughness" for lack of a better word, I was under-recovered. Those are two different problems which have a lot of the same symptoms, but they need opposite fixes.

You Don't Improve in the workout

The workout breaks you down, and your recovery builds you back.

The act of training doesn't make you stronger, it actually makes you weaker, and breaks you down. A hard session causes damage, depletion, and stress on your body. It is a signal to your body that it needs to adapt to keep up.

The rebuild happens post workout, outside of the gym. A lot of the recovery happens while you are asleep.

While sleeping, your body is working to repair itself. Growth hormone, testosterone, and IGF-1 climb. Your tissue starts to repair. Protein synthesis elevates. Your immune system is working while your brain clears out metabolic waste from the day. This is a nighttime operation happening when you are asleep. Missing out on sleep, you are missing some of the most important functions aiding your recovery and adaptation to the effort you put into your workout.

One night without sleep raised cortisol by roughly 21 percent and dropped testosterone by 24 percent in healthy young men. Muscle protein synthesis fell about 18 percent (Lamon et al., Physiological Reports, 2021). One night of little to no sleep. Not a month, not a week, but a single night. This makes me shudder when I think of my early 20s in the military and then college. Staying out until the early hours, getting very little sleep, and then waking up for PT. Ok, there wasn't PT in college, but there was sleep deprivation, binge drinking, and post bar gyro pizza in the early years.

Take that behavior, minus the drinking, and stretch that over weeks, and you get the version I was living after our son was born. A depletion in strength, power, and endurance. Reaction time decision making gets worse. When you look at young athletes, sleeping under eight hours has been associated with roughly 1.7 times the injury risk (Kaczmarek et al., Journal of Clinical Medicine, 2025).

You do the work, don't recover, and then wonder why you are not adapting or making progress.

That is not a character flaw, or lack of discipline (unless it is due to what I was doing in my early 20s). That is thinking the work in the gym or on the track is where progress happens, but that is just an input to the equation.

The Ardent Way: Restoration | Part One of Three

Don't reward yourself with rest

Most of us treat rest days like we treat dessert, you have to earn it. Both are problematic.

Get it backwards long enough, and rest starts to feel like prioritizing sleep is going to take away from your family time, so you prioritize the workout, and take away from the sleep.

We need to normalize turning this around. Sleep is not what you get after the work as long as it doesn't cut into your other responsibilities. Sleep makes the work you put in count. It is an input, the same as the session itself. You're not going to skip half of your workouts and expect the same results if you were hitting every one. Why would you expect that when you are getting four hours of sleep a night?

`This is not just an athlete problem`

If you do not train or workout, this still applies.

It is the parent who cannot figure out why they are snapping at everyone or getting annoyed by their six-year-old's reactions even though they are age-appropriate. The nurse coming off nights who cannot tell whether they are actually sick or just wrecked from multiple 12-15 hour shifts in a row. The guy who is struggling to lose that last fifteen pounds while sleeping five and a half hours each night and blaming his willpower or the bottomless chips and salsa he devoured at happy hour on Thursday.

Lack of sleep raises your risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic problems, and mood disorders. It worsens blood sugar control. It weakens your immune response. Adults generally need at least seven hours on a regular basis, and most American adults are not getting it (Watson et al., Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2015). Our constant contact, phones, optimizing our time…shit there are a lot of reasons which we won't get into, but most of us do not get enough sleep.

I do not know when it happened, but at some point we started treating lack of sleep as evidence of a serious person. It is not the flex society has made us think it is, the real flex is getting 7+ hours of sleep a night.

More is not Better, Better is Better

If I could turn back time (Cher voice), I would tell the version of myself standing in the gym at 5 a.m. with a four-month-old at home.

Adding more was the wrong move. Not because effort is bad, or pain is just weakness leaving the body. All of the research, not what the influencer says, states effort without recovery does not produce anything. It just accumulates cost.

A program developed by someone who understands that looks different than one built to make you tired. It has rest written into it on purpose, in specific places, for specific reasons. Not as a reward for doing the work.

That is what most people have never actually seen, so we put one up.

We are going to send out an example of fifteen weeks, start to finish, with the reasoning attached. No sets, no reps, no loads. An example of what prepping for an event, maybe it is HYROX, maybe it is an out west hunt. It could be anything. This will be an example, not a prescription. But it will show you what the difference between hard work and purposeful hard work looks like on paper.

Where we are heading

Part Two is about the clock your body already runs on and the one recovery tool you can use while you are awake.

Part Three is the premise. More is not better. Better is better.

For now, one question, and be honest about it.

If you felt like your training stopped working tomorrow, would you add another session, or would you go to bed?

`Sources`

Kaczmarek, F., Bartkowiak-Wieczorek, J., Matecka, M., Jenczylik, K., Brzezińska, K., Gajniak, P., Marchwiak, S., Kaczmarek, K., Nowak, M., Kmiecik, M., Stężycka, J., Krupa, K. K., & Mądry, E. (2025). Sleep and athletic performance: A multidimensional review of physiological and molecular mechanisms. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 14(21), Article 7606.

Lamon, S., Morabito, A., Arentson-Lantz, E., Knowles, O., Vincent, G. E., Condo, D., Alexander, S. E., Garnham, A., Paddon-Jones, D., & Aisbett, B. (2021). The effect of acute sleep deprivation on skeletal muscle protein synthesis and the hormonal environment. Physiological Reports, 9(1), Article e14660.

Watson, N. F., Badr, M. S., Belenky, G., Bliwise, D. L., Buxton, O. M., Buysse, D., Dinges, D. F., Gangwisch, J., Grandner, M. A., Kushida, C., Malhotra, R. K., Martin, J. L., Patel, S. R., Quan, S. F., & Tasali, E. (2015). Recommended amount of sleep for a healthy adult: A joint consensus statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 11(6), 591–592.

We Just Call It a Good Hour

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:52:21 GMT

Why one hour in our room connects when an hour on a treadmill next to strangers won’t

There is a specific kind of tired you feel after a good class. It is not just the physical part, even though that helps. You feel lighter in a way that has nothing to do with the workout, and most people never stop to ask why.

Part One we spoke about the system, the first 100 days that turn a stranger into a regular. Part Two was about friendship, the thing you have to build on purpose after the world stops handing you people. This one is about the hour itself. What is actually happening in those sixty minutes that makes them do more for you than the exercise alone ever could. Health and wellness is not just your bodyfat, VO2max, or resting heart rate.

Because here is the thing that used to perplex me. You can do the exact same workout in two places and walk out a different person. Same movements, same sweat, same sore legs the next day. One version leaves you flat. The other version can fill your cup. For years I could feel the difference without being able to explain it. I have noticed this same attribute in other areas of life as well. Here is an example in another venue. I went to a wedding a few years ago of a good friend I served alongside in Afghanistan. I was at a table of people I hadn't seen in years, and when I left that wedding, my cup was full (those were the exact words I told my wife). I was then at another wedding of a longtime friend a few months later. It was much larger, but I left after having a good time, and it wasn't the same. Well, I found the research, and it turns out the difference is measurable.

Four ingredients

Some researchers built a scale to measure how connected people feel during a single interaction, not their life in general, one conversation, one hour. They found that connection comes down to four ingredients. When they are present, you feel it. When they are missing, you do not, no matter how many people are in the room, or how well you know them.

Read them and tell me they do not describe a good class. Shared reality. The sense that you and the people around you are experiencing the same thing at the same time. Not near each other, with each other. A hard workout is a shared reality machine, just like school, the military, or another area we spoke about in the second post of this series.

When the whole room is buried in the same interval, watching the same clock, feeling the same specific effort, you are not 12 individuals anymore. You are one room going through one thing. The treadmill next to a stranger has proximity but no shared reality. You are two people having two separate days that happen to be a few feet apart.

Partner responsiveness. Feeling understood and valued by the people around you. This is the "great job" as someone runs past. The coach who remembers you were nervous about the barbell last week and checks in. The person who racks your weight without being asked. Small stuff, except these acts are not small at all. Being noticed is an ingredient, and a room full of people who notice each other is doing something a room where everyone is wearing headphones waiting for a machine to open never will.

Participant interest. Genuine attention, people who are actually engaged with each other instead of waiting for their turn to talk. You can feel the difference between a room where people are present and a room where everyone is somewhere else. A good class has a current running through it. I am not saying every class will be like this, but we strive to make it happen. When it happens, people are in it, with each other, paying attention. The person next to you will ask you how your weekend in Door County went while you go through a squat session with 5 reps every 2:30 for 5 sets.

Affective experience. The feeling itself, the shared positive charge in the room. The laugh when the coach trips on the dumbbell they left on the floor after demoing a movement (I know because this happened to me). The collective groan when the coach reminds everyone there is still one more round in the workout. Joy, even when it is disguised as shared suffering. This is what we are talking about when we reference good energy, except now we know it is not a mystery. It is a measurable thing you can look for, and we can build it with intent.

You can do the same workout in two places and walk out a different person. The difference is not the workout. It is whether the hour had all four.

The Third Place, Part Three

The room does this with little to no effort from you

You do not have to be good at connecting to get the benefit. The room does most of the work. I would say, on a personal level, I struggle with this, but I benefit from the shared space and attention involved with our small group classes.

Think about how hard connection is everywhere else in adult life. Part Two covered it. You have to schedule it, drive to it, force it, keep the conversation going. A good class hands you all four ingredients for the price of crossing our threshold. The shared reality and experience is built into the workout. The responsiveness happens because you keep seeing the same faces. The interest and the good feeling come free once the first two are in place. You walk in as yourself and the hour does the rest. Even if you struggle to get in, know that when you leave, you will be in a better place.

As we are all pioneers in this new AI/digital age, this is something no app can copy. An app can give you the workout. It cannot give you a group of other people going through the same interval at 5:10 on a Tuesday. It cannot give you the fist bump, high five, or nudge at the end. You walked in due to the workout, but a good hour can do so much more. A good hour keeps you alive, literally. We put the numbers in Part One of this current trilogy.

the point of this trilogy

Time to land this damn plane.

Part One was the system that gets you in the door and keeps you coming back. Part Two was the friendship that grows once you are here. Part Three is the good hour itself. Three parts, one idea: this place is not a gym that happens to be friendly. It is a third place that happens to have barbells, rowers, and a water fountain (or bubbler, depending on where you are from).

We spent fourteen years building an environment that produces all four ingredients, at first on accident, but now we do it on purpose. Most of those years I could not have told you that is what we were doing. We just knew the room mattered and we protected whatever made it that way. We have had hard conversations when this sacred space was put at risk. Now I have the words for this, and we do it with intention.

Do you need to understand this to feel it? No. Shit, I didn't understand it myself for a while. If you have been in our space for any extended period of time, you have felt it. Days that were a struggle to get out of bed for the 0530 class, sucked it up and came anyway, and you left happy you made the decision to cross our threshold.

We just call it The Good Hour. Well, now we do. We have said stuff about being the best hour of someone's day, or found other catchy names for it. I am going with The Good Hour now. I feel like this phrase truly captures the essence of what we are trying to accomplish.

What to do with all of this great information

Pay attention to it next time you are in. Notice the ebbs and flows of the room and its energy. Notice the conversations, the laughter, the interactions. It may feel like background noise, but this is all a part of the whole experience. An experience which can't be duplicated by an app or just access, at least not yet.

If walking into a room full of strangers sounds like the worst hour of your week, it is possible you haven't walked into the right room. Maybe you have started and stopped working out multiple times, or felt like a wallflower compared to part of the experience. Please don't give up. Even if it is not Ardent, reach out to a coaching gym or personal trainer, set up a time to check it out, and pay attention to how the space makes you feel.

You do not have to be good at any of this. You just have to show up and let the good hour and coaches do their job. We are for anyone but not for everyone. That's why we start with sitting down and having a conversation.

Day one is a No Sweat Intro. A conversation, no workout, no sales pitch. Come find out if we are a place you can experience The Good Hour. If it doesn't feel like we are the right fit, tell us what you are looking for and we will point you in the direction of a trainer or facility which will fit your needs.

The Third Place Trilogy

Part One . The First 100 Days

Part Two . No One Tells You How to Make Friends at 40

Part Three. We Just Call It a Good Hour (you are here)

The philosophy behind this series: On Connection, Trains, and What It Means to Be Human

`Sources`

Friendship as the primary antidote to loneliness, and kindness outperforming self-care for reducing depression, anxiety, and loneliness: UCLA Newsroom, The Science of Human Connection, featuring Jaimie Krems (UCLA Social Minds Lab, Center for Friendship Research) and Naomi Eisenberger's lab.

Close friendship decline, 3% to 12% over three decades: Survey Center on American Life, The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss, 2021.

The third place concept: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 1989.

Conditions for friendship formation (proximity, repeated unplanned interaction, settings that encourage letting your guard down): sociological framework often attributed to Rebecca G. Adams and colleagues, widely discussed in adult friendship research.

Survival and mortality figures referenced from Part One: Holt-Lunstad, World Psychiatry, 2024 and PLOS Medicine, 2010.

No One Tells You How to Make Friends at 40

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:47:50 GMT

The first 100 days get you in the room.

This is about what you build once you are there.

Somewhere in your twenties, the hand-outs stop, which was the premise in the first iteration of our current trilogy. Just to recap: School hands you people. The military hands you people. Your twenties hand you people. Then one day you look up and nobody is handing you anyone anymore, and the people in your life are the ones you keep on purpose, even if you shouldn't have, or lose by accident.

I felt this one a few times in my life. When I left the military, either post deployment or the final exit, I did not just leave a job. I left a built-in roster of people who had to know me, who I ate with, worked with, and had amazing and terrible shared experiences with. The Transition Assistance Program, if you have done it, does not prepare you for the peer scramble, lack of connection, and the voice in your head telling you that you are fucking up.

Most people have lived a version of this in one way, shape, or form. The job change with a big move, the divorce, the kids growing up and their personal friendships taking precedence to your presence. None of it means anything is wrong with you. Adult life quietly dismantles every system that used to make friends for you and replaces them with a couch, a phone, and thoughts of inadequacy.

This is The Third Place Trilogy for a reason, and I feel like I should explain the idea made famous by Howard Schultz, but coined by a sociologist named Ray Oldenburg who wrote about the three anchors of a life. The first place is home. The second is work. The third place is where your people are, the spot you show up to on purpose, where somebody notices when you don't. Church did that job for generations. So did the corner tavern (Cheers), the bowling league, and even the VFW. For a lot of reasons, which I am not going to address, those are gone now, and nothing moved in behind them.

That empty slot is the literal problem. It also impacts your health more than you realize.

This is not a soft skills conversation

It is not an end result, and I have to remind myself of that all the time.

A researcher named Aaron Antonovsky spent his career on a question that sounds obvious but mostly gets ignored. Not what makes people sick, but what actually moves a person toward health. He landed on a model worth borrowing. Picture health as a line. One end is total ease, the other is total dis-ease, and every one of us sits somewhere on that line right now. We are always somewhere on it. Stress nudges us one way. Sleep, food, movement, and the people we love nudge us the other.

There is something this model leaves out, and the person way smarter than me who built it left it out on purpose. A finish line. There is no point on the spectrum labeled done, and there is no point labeled perfect. There is only the direction you are heading and the question of what is moving you forward an inch at a time. This reframes the project of you, because that is a lifelong individual project. You are not trying to arrive. You are trying to keep tilting toward ease and living your BEST life. Whatever that looks like to you.

Friendship is the one relationship in your life with no institution behind it. Nobody is in charge of it but you.

Perfection is not a higher rung on that ladder. It is a different game, and it is one nobody wins, but our phones and algorithms like to make us think we can. When the target is perfect, every normal human week, not the 90 seconds of an influencer's life you scrolled past, reads as a failure. Miss two workouts, eat the thing, sleep badly for a stretch, and the all or nothing scoreboard says you blew it, so you might as well stop. That is not a willpower problem. That is a target problem.

This is not a soft skills conversation

Friendship Formation

Sociologists have known for decades what it takes for friendships to form, and it comes down to three ingredients: proximity, repeated unplanned interactions, and a setting where people let their guard down.

Interestingly enough, this sounds like a gym. Not just a coaching gym, but even an access gym.

You get the same people in the same room at the same 5:10 class, week after week. The repetition happens without anyone scheduling it, because you do not plan a hangout with the person on the rower next to you, you just both keep showing up and the reps accumulate on their own. And the guard? Gone. Try maintaining a polished front, a mask, while breathing, huffing, heaving, sweating, and cussing in the back half of a workout (unless you cut reps…we see you.) You see people struggle, fail, recover, and come back. They see you do the same. That is the fast lane to being known, the real known I spoke about in Part One, not the social media version.

This is why the first 100 days system exists in the shape it does. Every piece of it is aimed at getting those ingredients working for you instead of against you. Over 14 years I have seen amazing friendships form within these walls. Friendships which have outlasted the gym membership and I still get to see them flourish because of social media (maybe the one good thing about it.) I see current and past members taking trips, their kids playing together, being there for each other during the big life moments. Not forced by an institution but forged within a shared space by proximity and choice. It is fucking beautiful and while members come and go, this is the lasting impact of a third space.

`What's Next?`

If you are already part of a gym community, ours or anyone's, you are sitting on the infrastructure to make a difference. The workout got you in the room, and the friendship part is on you, put yourself out there. It starts embarrassingly small. Adults overestimate how weird it is to go first and underestimate how the person across from you is thinking the same thing. We need to collectively get out of our own heads, throw caution to the wind, because if you are in that late 30s, 40s, 50s…time is ticking and we are on the downhill slide. I personally work on this every day because most of what I write about comes from my own struggles and failings. My own insecurities, troubles, and me not knowing what the fuck I am doing.

If you do not have a third place at all right now, that will chip away at you, and this is not anecdotal. Science. Remember: it is fixable, and not by becoming charming or a low-key sociopath. You fix it by being repeatedly present somewhere, show up and make sure there are people. Here comes the shameless plug, the call to action as they say: We happen to have built a place where connection is a big part of the first 100 days. A system instead of a coin flip, and read part one of this series if you want to understand more.

Day one is a No Sweat Intro. A conversation about your life and what you want, no workout, no sales pitch. Bring the fear that you won't know anyone, your insecurities, and your true self. I will meet you with all of mine too. This is the exact problem this whole place was built to solve, as well as getting you to Live Your Best Life, whatever that looks like for you.

The Third Place Trilogy

Part One . The First 100 Days

Part Two . No One Tells You How to Make Friends at 40 (you are here)

Part Three. Coming soon

The philosophy behind this series: On Connection, Trains, and What It Means to Be Human

`Sources`

Close friendship decline, 3% to 12% over three decades: Survey Center on American Life, The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss, 2021.

The third place concept: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 1989.

Survival and mortality figures referenced from Part One: Holt-Lunstad, World Psychiatry, 2024 and PLOS Medicine, 2010.

You Were Never Supposed to Be Perfect.

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:47:50 GMT

Health is a spectrum, not a finish line.

There is a number you have probably chased, we all have. A version of yourself that lives mostly in your head and partly on someone else's feed, due to these sweet ass algorithms which seem to dictate our lives. (Side bar: if you take social media off your phone, you will be happier. At the very least, turn off the notifications.) You have probably also missed it, then felt like the miss said something about who you are. You may wonder how all of these other people seem to do it, but you can't.

It does not. That is the first thing I want you to know. If you stop reading this right now, cool, just take that little bit with you.

We are going to spend the next three posts on a concept I focus on, with members and with myself. I call it weights and balances (it's real, Sue). Not just how much weight you can lift, though that counts. The bigger idea is that a good life, and a healthy life, is not built through perfection. It is built by tipping a scale in a positive direction. You want the good to outweigh the bad in a way that actually fits the life you have. I like to tell people, we want the gym to support your life, not the other way around. 13 years ago, I would have said something different. I would have wanted to see you six days a week, plus yoga Sundays with Dr. Kim.

This concept sounds simple. The rea son it is hard is that almost everything around us sells the opposite.

Health is a spectrum, and perfection is not on it

It is not an end result, and I have to remind myself of that all the time.

We do not blame people. We build systems. If something is not working, the plan was wrong for your life, not the other way around.

ardentoshkosh

You Cannot Buy Your Way Out of This

Rest is part of the work, not the absence of it.

Food

Stress. All of it, not just the gym

walking

The Ardent Way: Restoration Part three of Three

Don’t do the opposite

This gets more important every year, not less

Where we are heading

Sources

The Clock You Already Run On

Timing matters more than you think. So does light.

Same seven hours, different results

The catch-up lie

I watch this happen on a regular basis

The Ardent Way: Restoration Part Two of Three

The tool you can use while you are awake ﻿

Oh, Wisconsin…

Training is sometimes secondary

When I was younger, I was wrong

Where we are heading

Sources

You Don't Get Stronger in the Gym

The work breaks you down.

﻿ Sleep builds you back.

You Don't Improve in the workout

The Ardent Way: Restoration | Part One of Three

Don't reward yourself with rest

This is not just an athlete problem

More is not Better, Better is Better

Where we are heading

Sources

We Just Call It a Good Hour

Why one hour in our room connects when an hour on a treadmill next to strangers won’t

Four ingredients

The Third Place, Part Three

The room does this with little to no effort from you

the point of this trilogy

What to do with all of this great information

The Third Place Trilogy

Sources

No One Tells You How to Make Friends at 40

The first 100 days get you in the room.

This is about what you build once you are there.

This is not a soft skills conversation

This is not a soft skills conversation

Friendship Formation

What's Next?

The Third Place Trilogy

Sources

You Were Never Supposed to Be Perfect.

Health is a spectrum, not a finish line.

Health is a spectrum, and perfection is not on it

`This gets more important every year, not less`

`Sources`

The tool you can use while you are awake

`Oh, Wisconsin…`

`Training is sometimes secondary`

`When I was younger, I was wrong`

`Sources`

Sleep builds you back.

`This is not just an athlete problem`

`Sources`

`Sources`

`What's Next?`

`Sources`