THE FORMER ATHLETE'S GUIDE To
STAYING FIT WHEN COMPETITION ENDS
I spent the first few years of fitness coaching working with everyone willing to let me help them. From high school athletes to 75-year-old seniors, there was no one I would turn down. I wanted to gain a wide variety of experiences.
Over time, I knew it was important to develop an ideal client. Someone I was not only passionate about coaching, but someone I was confident I could help.
I decided to list out the characteristics of the people I enjoyed coaching and who I had the most success with. In the middle of my list, I began to laugh. Almost all the traits I was jotting down described myself.
The people that I love to coach are former high school or college athletes like myself. Now, we are busy parents and professionals struggling to maintain our fitness.
I empathize with former athletes who feel like they have lost their identity. I understand those of us whose fitness yo-yos from an all-or-nothing approach that we learned in sports. And I can especially relate to those who get bored with training when there is no competition in sight.
I do not have all the answers. But I have helped plenty of clients work through these problems, including myself. The following are my top tips for the former athlete who struggles to maintain their fitness.
01
LEARN TO LET GO
The first step in staying healthy after your sport ends is to learn to let go of your identity as an athlete. Otherwise, one of two problems will occur.
You will either fail to meet fitness goals that no longer align with your priorities and get discouraged. Or you will neglect your priorities to maintain a fitness standard that you no longer need.
Most former athletes deal with the first problem. Their only priorities used to be homework and hanging out with friends. They could train for a couple of hours every day of the week if they wanted to. Now, they are fighting a lost cause. They think they can be as fit as they were in high school or college with a full-time career and family. When their fitness begins to decline, they get discouraged. Some give up altogether.
Then there are those who never learn to let go of trying to be an athlete. This was my problem. After playing college football, I immediately started competing in CrossFit. I became obsessed with the sport. Training and studying it consumed all my free time. I started neglecting my priorities. I spent less time with my wife, overtrained and ignored injuries, and cared less about graduate school and my career. At the time, if you would have asked me to write down my priorities, I would have listed CrossFit seventh or eighth. I was living my life out of alignment.
If you want to be fit after your athletic career ends, you have to begin to change your identity. You are not an athlete anymore. This frees you from the trap of setting unrealistic expectations and keeps your priorities aligned.
The way you begin to change your identity is by changing your habits. As author James Clear points out,
"The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do."
Where you spend the majority of your time shapes your identity. When you look at your daily routine, does it reflect the kind of person you want to be? Does work take precedence over your health? Or are you continuing to spend the majority of your free time working out at the expense of time with your loved ones? How much time do you spend with your spouse? How about your kids?
I am no therapist, and I stay in my lane as a fitness coach. But helping clients adjust their priorities is essential to helping them become healthy. This is why I have weekly consultations with my clients during the first few months of working together. This allows us to develop habits that will change how people identify themselves.
If you want to identify as an athlete, spend most of your free time training. If you're going to identify as a healthy spouse, parent, and employee, you can't sit on the couch. But you also don't need to be at the gym six days a week.
Learn to let go.
02
GET BETTER AT GOING 80%
As former athletes, we played to win. Of course, we loved our sport. But most of us, as the saying goes, hated losing more than we loved winning. This tends to create an "all or nothing" mentality in sports. You either win, or you lose. It's either zero or one hundred percent effort.
That is the mentality that a legitimate athlete should have. It helps create winners. It is also a mindset that is detrimental to our health when competition ends. If you apply the "all or nothing" dichotomy to your fitness, you're going to lose.
Many former athletes think that if they are not going hard in training four or five days a week, then there is no point in working out at all. Others act like if their diet slips a bit, then they might as well stop following it altogether. It is this all-in or all-out mentality that leads to yo-yo training and dieting. For the former athlete, there are no happy mediums.
The solution is quite simple. If you want to stay fit after sports, get better at being ok with 80%. One-hundred percent compliance is unrealistic. Life is not all or nothing anymore. There are too many other priorities that compete for our attention. And as we have already discussed, your priority is no longer athletics.
It is necessary to make a quick distinction. Getting better at being 80% does not mean that you do not give 100% effort. It means that when life's other priorities get in the way, you don't beat yourself up for not "winning" at every outcome that you set out to achieve.
For example, you may set out to workout four days a week and meal prep your lunches. As you are ready to crush the week ahead, your spouse and children get sick, or your boss asks you to work overtime. Your plan to eat grilled chicken and fresh broccoli turns into grabbing fast food. Or your schedule to work out during the week turns into skipping the gym altogether. That is the thought process for former athletes who think fitness is an all-or-nothing game.
I help my clients when, not if, life gets chaotic by guiding them towards achievable outcomes. Instead of trying to meal prep all day, pack a sandwich for lunch. Rather than taking a week off exercise, reduce the time or amount of your gym sessions, train at home, or go on walks.
Here is some quick math that illustrates my point:
6 months @ 100%, 0%, 100%, 0%, 100%, 0% = 50% compliance
6 months @ 70%, 90%, 75%, 95%, 80%, 75% = 80% compliance
The winners rarely get too high when things are going well or get too low when they are not. Their games are about wins and losses, but the success of their season is about consistency. Fit people, like championship athletes or teams, aim for consistency, not perfection.
03
REDEFINE WINNING
As a former athlete, it's hard to be consistent when you are no longer competing. Most of us are outcome-driven individuals. We like to win. The "thrill of victory and agony of defeat" is what kept us in the gym and disciplined in our diets.
When you lose competition, you often lose the motivation that comes with it. This is the most challenging barrier to staying fit for former athletes. It is hard to work out, eat vegetables and go to bed on time when there is nothing you get to win for it.
The good news is that you do not need to make yourself into a process-driven individual to stay fit. Don't try to change your personality. Change your definition of winning instead.
In most cases, winning will no longer take the form of beating someone else in a sport. But that is not the only way to win. You can still pursue competitive outcomes. There are several ways to do this. Here are some examples of how I help keep former athletes excited about their fitness:
Participate in a Local Competition
Beat Yourself in Training
Create Metrics to Chase
01 Participate in a Local Competition
One of my first clients, Jason, is a former high school baseball player. He is now a husband, father, and full-time firefighter.
Jason loves to compete. He tends to lose focus when he does not have something he is working towards. So, we always make sure to design his training blocks around a competitive event.
Jason's next event is a sprint triathlon. He has never done one before, so a lot of his training is entirely new for him. It has helped reinvigorate his excitement to work out and his motivation to ensure his nutrition is consistent.
P.S. Notice I did not use the word "compete." That would ruin my earlier point of "learning to let go" and keeping your priorities in order. Jason would have to train several hours a day to hang with the other athletes at this event. He would be living his life out of alignment.
02 Beat Yourself in Training
One of the simplest ways to create a purpose for your training is to beat yourself in workouts. You don't have to go to a competition to compete. You can compete with yourself in the gym.
I recently did this with my client Austin. He is a former competitive gymnast and high school football player. During our initial consult, Austin told me that he needs a specific purpose for his training. Losing weight on the scale is not enough to keep him engaged. For example, even though he hates to run, he ran several miles in a Spartan Race with his wife.
The first thing I did for Austin was create a couple of tests that we would design his training around. We agreed on a strength, aerobic, and gymnastics test. I set dates on when he would retest each one and shared these with him during our weekly check-in.
Austin's primary goal is to improve his physique. Despite most Instagram posts, those changes do not happen overnight. The training tests we created have helped keep Austin motivated. He gets to achieve smaller wins along the road towards his larger goal.
03 Create Metrics to Chase
For the former athletes who love to win but do not care about workout scores, I design other metrics for them to chase. For example, my client Aubrey is a former high school basketball player. Now, his training focuses on improving his recreational golf game. Aubrey does not care too much about his specific results in the gym. Fitness competitions and workout scores don't appeal to him, but numbers still do.
The programs that I use for coaching make it easy to track quantitative metrics. So, a few months ago, when Aubrey's compliancy in training was slipping, I created a new challenge for him. The goal was to reach 80% compliance in his training and nutrition protocols. If he did, he would buy himself a gift (likely something to do with golf). This small challenge allowed Aubrey to win at his fitness with a clearly defined score.
But for former athletes who have spent the majority of their life under the guidance of a coach, having someone to hold them accountable can be helpful to stay on track.
I’ve paid to have my own fitness coach for the last 6 years and I wouldn’t be able to speak from authority on health without one.
If you’re a former athlete who has been struggling to maintain your fitness after your sport has ended, I would love to help you look, feel and perform like an athlete again.
Below, you can schedule a 15 minute “game plan” call with me so that we can start to map out a plan.