You’re Not 25 Anymore

You’re not broken. You’ve just been trying to force your life into plans never built for it.

This episode isn’t about motivation. It’s about what happens when high-performing men finally stop blaming their willpower and start rebuilding their systems from the ground up.

Inside, Coach Spencer breaks down:

• Why your body feels slower, softer, and more resistant than ever
• How stress, underfueling, and grind culture wreck your metabolism
• What it really looks like to build a body that matches your career, without blowing up your life to do it

If you’ve been telling yourself “I just need to lock in again”… this one will hit.

DM “DESIGN” on Instagram @spencerhgallo and let’s map your real game plan.

If this episode hit home, make sure you’re subscribed. This is Fitness by Design, the podcast for high-performing men ready to stop winging it and start leading with their body.

For more stories, strategies, and hard truths:

Follow me on Instagram – @spencerhgallo
Connect with me on LinkedIn – Spencer Gallo
Or shoot me a text, I read every single one.

Let’s keep building your edge, one episode at a time.

Transcript

0:34

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Cut the music. Cut the music. Cut the music. You are not 25 anymore. I know it. You know it. The mirror knows it. But the real problem right now is that You're walking around right now feeling like you're pushing 55 or 60 years old and you're barely into your forties. That's not age, man. That is a consequence. That's wear and tear, and honestly, it is a complete and utter warning, light and red flag that most guys just keep trying to ignore. Welcome back to Fitness by Design. I am Coach Spencer, and this episode is a wake up call for the man who is done Pretending that just work harder is still the frigging answer. Because let me be clear with you right now, if you are the guy who has built the career, built the income, maybe even has the house and the family, but you are standing in front of your closet every single day trying to remember which dress shirt doesn't make you feel like you're about to pop a button, this episode is for you. We are not talking meal plans, we are not talking motivation. We are gonna talk about what it actually costs you to keep living in a body that does not reflect the man that you know you were supposed to be What it's actually gonna take to change that. So let's dive in. here's what nobody says out loud. You've earned everything that you have. The job title, the team, the income, the recognition, the family, the house, the kids, all of it. You put in the reps, you play the long game. You're the guy that people come to when things need fixing. The one thing that you haven't fixed is your health and your body and that gap between what you have built on the outside and how you feel on the inside eats at you every single day. You used to feel powerful, athletic, in control, and now you're unbuttoning your pants. When you sit down at dinner, you're dreading going to pool parties, worrying that you're gonna have to take your shirt off. You pretend that you didn't hear your kid when they asked you to come play because you know you're not gonna be able to get back up off the floor. And yeah, it's easy to chalk it up to age to say, man, I'm not 25 anymore. But here's the part that most guys aren't realizing and don't talk about. You didn't slow down because of your age. You slowed down because you spent the last decade fighting against your body without ever learning how to work with it. You tried to cut carbs, you tried fasting. You've done 75 hard tracked every single calorie, and every single time you went hard for a couple of weeks, life hit and you fell off track. And the truth is you never even had a real system to begin with. You just had short bursts of effort, followed by long seasons of feeling guilty that you couldn't stick with it. That's not age, that's just misalignment with the system. So let's talk about what's actually going on inside of your body. You have trained it to survive not to actually thrive. You've trained it to run on caffeine, stress, and absolute pure all out hustle. You've skipped meals, you've skipped sleep, you've skipped the lifts, and now your metabolism isn't slow. It's basically saying, go fuck yourself. It doesn't trust you anymore. So it holds onto that fat. It tanks your energy screws up your hunger signals, and because of the years and years of yo-yo dieting. You have trained it to expect some level of extreme either overworking, under recovering or starvation, followed by complete and utter binges, and you didn't mean to do it. I totally get it. I've been there. But when you've been winging it for a decade, those results speak for themselves. This is why nothing feels easy anymore. Why you can't just lose weight by going into a quick calorie deficit and cutting out carbs for a couple of weeks Progress starts to feel like you're pulling teeth. It's why you feel like you're going all in, and then you still look in the mirror and feel like you're just getting worse or not changing at all. It's not about your effort, it's about the environment that you're in, specifically that internal environment that's burned out and you have no new plan that can fix it until you rebuild what's actually underneath it. So how do you fix it? Great question. You stop playing the game of restriction and you start building a system of reinforcement. Now what does that look like? Well, that's three meals a day. Yeah. That includes breakfast, have high protein, nutrient dense, satisfying meals that don't leave you starving two hours later because you need more fuel in your body, not less of it. It looks like strength training three to four times a week. You don't need to punish your body. You don't need to walk out sweating, feeling like you just swam a frigging marathon, but you need to rebuild your body. You're not trying to chase that soreness or that sweatiness or that heart rate zone. You're training for strength, for function, and for confidence. You need to move every single day. Now, this isn't chasing 10,000 steps on your fucking apple watch. It means giving your body the signal that you're not just stuck in a chair 12 hours a damn day. Walk. Breathe and be present. and then let's talk about sleep. Man, this is not negotiable. Seven hours of sleep is absolutely minimum. If you want to truly recover and see the results that you want, no more. Oh, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Nonsense. Fuck that, man. No more of this. Well, I'll sleep when I'm dead. No, we're not gonna do that anymore. You need sleep just like you need oxygen. So you need to prioritize it or you're gonna to live off of five or six hours. Then finally track how you feel. Now, I'm not just talking about the scale here. Sure, the scale is a great tool, but are you finding that your cravings are better? Are your lifts getting stronger? Are you waking up feeling more like a human being again? Or do you still feel like a zombie because that's how you know it's working or not? And when you build that kind of system, the results are gonna come. But more importantly, you start to feel like yourself again. You start waking up and you start seeing it. Your gut's slowly fading away. Your lifts are feeling solid again. If there's muscle where there used to be that softness, you glance in the mirror, not because you're obsessed with how you look, but because you're starting to actually recognize the guy staring back at you again. and then one day your wife says something, nothing crazy, just a quick, hmm, comment after you get outta the shower, but it lands your coworkers start to notice it too. Maybe it's your posture. You're carrying yourself better in meetings. Your kids, they're not just watching you anymore, they're mirroring you. They want to come work out with you. They want to eat healthy with you, and they see you playing on the floor with them again, because now you're showing up not as the guy who used to be in shape and not as the guy who says, oh, back when I was in college. But as the guy who rebuilt his body, rebuilt his confidence, and he did all of it without blowing up his life to do it. That is the real win. That's the reason this matters. This isn't about getting abs. It's about waking up proud of what you see every single day. It's about having enough energy to show up strong for your family, your team, and yourself without needing seven cups of coffee and a nap in the middle of the day to do it. You don't need another fitness program. With more rules and more restrictions, you need a base that can hold steady when work gets tactic when your kid gets sick. Life doesn't go according to plan because newsflash, it's never going to go according to plan.'cause if your plan can't survive that real life, it's never gonna work. And it wasn't built for your life to begin with. Now you've built the career. Now it's time to start building the body that matches it. So if this hit for you, like really hit for you and you're tired of pretending you just need to try harder on your next program, DM me the word design on Instagram and let's map the game plan. Not a plan to just grind your face off, but a plan that actually works for your life, not against it. This is fitness by design. And remember, you are not 25 anymore, but you damn sure don't have to feel like you're pushing 60,