A few years after my book became a New York Times bestseller, I was walking my dog along Park Presidio Boulevard in San Francisco, talking to my sister on the phone.

I was in a lot of pain.

Our daughter was a teenager and things were extremely hard. I had reached the point where I didn’t know how to parent her anymore. Financially, I was barely staying afloat. I couldn’t find much passion for my work or convince myself I was bringing anything useful into the world. Tonya and I were struggling too.

I remember telling my sister that I didn’t want to die.

I wanted to live.

But I could understand how somebody could get far enough into pain that it might start to look like the easier way out.

I just felt done. Like there was nowhere left to escape to.

A few years earlier, my name had been on the New York Times bestseller list.

Both things were true.

I found a picture recently from June of 2018.

It’s a selfie of Tonya, Tinai, and me. All three of us are smiling. Big smiles. We look like a happy family.

The caption I wrote was:

Few will ever fully understand. I barely do.

At the time, Tinai had decided to leave our home. She was living with friends and other family for a stretch, and one of the ways we were trying to keep some kind of relationship was to meet up once a week.

That’s what the picture was.

One of those meetings.

Looking at it now, we look happy.

And we were happy in that moment.

We were also all in tremendous pain.

That’s the part a picture can’t tell you.

The picture wasn’t fake. We really were smiling. Instagram wasn’t lying about that.

It just couldn’t show the whole thing.

I knew that because I was in the picture.

For a long time, I kept expecting certain accomplishments to tell me how I was doing.

As a kid, it was gymnastics. Maybe if I made it far enough, stood on the right podium, proved myself at that level, I’d finally feel okay.

Later it was school.

Then it became recognition for my work.

A book.

A bestseller list.

A successful business.

Money.

None of those things are meaningless. I don’t believe that. Being on the New York Times bestseller list meant something to me. Money matters a lot when you don’t have enough of it. Recognition can be meaningful.

They’re just not very good at answering certain questions.

By 2021 I had started talking publicly about one of those questions.

We have websites that can tell us somebody’s net worth. Type in a famous person’s name and there it is. An estimate, at least. Assets. Companies. Property. Some number attached to the person.

And I remember asking:

What if you could look up somebody’s self-worth?

What would come back?

How would you even measure it?

I must have been carrying the question for a while, because even then I said I’d thought about it several times before.

I didn’t have an answer.

I just knew that the number I was looking for didn’t seem to exist.

The problem is that knowing this doesn’t stop me from looking.

A year or so later, I was talking openly about self-sabotage and wondering whether some of it came from not feeling worthy.

I already knew the self-worth question.

I had already talked about it.

Didn’t matter.

There were still times when I could check a lot of the boxes and feel completely empty.

That’s something I’ve had to accept about myself.

I can understand something intellectually long before I know how to live it.

Sometimes by years.

Eventually Instagram came back into the conversation.

I remember joking about where all the happy people were.

Instagram.

Where are all the successful people?

Instagram.

Everyone is killing it over there.

The joke worked because we all know what the screen looks like.

The better question was the one underneath it.

Do you actually feel as good as it looks like you feel?

I could ask that question because I knew my own answer.

I’d been the guy with the bestselling book.

I’d been the guy smiling in the family photo.

I’d been the guy posting about work and travel and whatever else I was doing while things behind the picture were coming apart.

Again, none of it was necessarily fake.

That’s what makes this harder.

A lot of the things we use to judge ourselves are measuring something real.

A bestseller list measures book sales.

A bank account tells you how much money you have.

Net worth tells you something about financial assets.

Instagram can tell you what people responded to.

Those things have utility.

But I kept asking them to tell me something about myself that they were never built to measure.

For a while I called what I was doing lifestyle design.

I was interested in becoming better, building a better version of myself, creating the right life.

I eventually stopped believing in the upgrade.

Not because I stopped wanting to grow.

I just started getting suspicious of the idea that I had to keep improving myself before I could finally arrive at somebody I respected.

I started to see how easily I could spend my whole life doing that. Always betting the next version of me would finally be one I could live with.

I know because I can still do it.

If I could actually Google my self-worth today, I think I know what I’d want the result to tell me.

But it probably wouldn’t say anything impressive.

It would be a day when Romeo and I played hard together. We wrestled or ran around or made up some ridiculous game until we were both exhausted.

It would be Tonya and me having a difficult conversation that actually went somewhere. Something important to our family was sitting between us, and instead of avoiding it or blowing it up, we stayed with it long enough to understand each other and solve something.

It would be noticing that somebody needed something and doing it without being asked. Not because it was my job. Not because anybody was watching. Just because I could, and afterward it meant something to both of us.

Those are the moments when I tend to like the man I am.

They’re incredibly ordinary.

Nobody ranks them.

Most of them leave no record.

There isn’t much to post.

I’ve spent a lot of my life wanting to contribute something.

I still do.

I want to create things. I want my work to matter. I want to make money. I like being recognized when I’ve done something well.

I don’t think I need to pretend otherwise.

The mistake is when I ask any of those things to settle a different question.

Am I a good father?

Am I someone my wife can actually talk to?

Did I make another person’s day a little easier because I was there?

Can I live with the way I behaved when nobody was keeping score?

That’s where I seem to find the answer.

And the strange part is that I already know this.

I know what makes my life feel worth something and which moments matter. The systems I’m tempted to check can’t measure much of it.

I still look.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, Romeo pulled off his headphones, grabbed my arm, and asked me:

What does “vi ses snart” mean?

He said it in perfect Swedish. First time, I couldn’t understand him. I made him say it again, slower.

Vi. Ses. Snart.

Then I got it.

“It means we’ll see each other soon.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“You said it this morning.”

Now I wanted to know everything.

This summer I took Romeo to Sweden, the two of us, a boys’ trip to see my parents and my sister and my brothers and all their kids. He’s five and a half. It was the first time I’d ever done the whole thing alone with him. For years I'd wondered whether I could pull it off by myself. I found out I could. That’s its own thing, and maybe its own essay. This one is about what he did while I was busy finding that out.

We connected through Copenhagen, and at passport control they pulled us aside and questioned him. I couldn’t feed him answers or coach him through it. I had to stand there and let a five-year-old be interviewed.

I was nervous as hell. He put his little hands behind his back and looked up at this very serious woman behind the counter.

“Who are you traveling with?”

“My dad.”

“What’s his name?”

“Morfar.”

She looked at his passport, then at mine, then at me.

“Carl?”

She was Danish, so she knew exactly what morfar meant. Grandpa. She had a five-year-old in front of her who’d just called his dad grandpa, and a passport that said Carl.

“He calls me Morfar,” I said. “Technically I am his grandfather. I adopted his mom. It’s a long story.”

She looked at the two of us for a while and finally said, “You clearly have a connection.” And that was that.

I went from nervous, to wondering what the hell was happening, to unbelievably proud of this little kid standing there with his hands behind his back, holding his own. True big-boy status. I hadn’t taught him that. I just got to watch it come out.

We use a lot of languages at home, mainly Swedish, English, and Spanish. My parents are Swedish, and Swedish is what we all use to talk to them. My siblings and I scattered across countries as kids, and I grew up switching depending on who was in the room. Romeo hears me switch on the phone, but with him it’s mostly English.

For the first few days it was fine. Everybody defaulted to English. Then my younger brother arrived from Spain with his kids, and the dynamic changed. We shifted gears to Spanish, and Romeo was on the outside of it.

I started catching him work at it. How do you say this, what does that mean. He’d ask the cousins directly. Then on the soccer field I heard him yelling, “Pas! Pas!” He knew the English word was pass, but apparently figured that if he said it with enough of a Spanish accent, they’d understand him. I was dying.

What I loved was how little embarrassment there seemed to be in it. He didn’t know the words, so he asked. Then he used them badly. Then he tried again. He wanted into the game more than he cared about getting it right.

I kept watching him throw words out there without knowing if they were right, and all I could think was, how did this kid get so brave? I’ve been fearful and shy most of my life. Somehow he was completely willing to look stupid for a minute if it meant getting to the other side.

Then he pulled me aside. Five and a half years old, completely serious, and he said, “Morfar, I really need to learn these languages.”

That was the first time he’d ever asked me to teach him a skill. We’d played around with Spanish before, but this was different. He really wanted to learn.

By the time he handed me “vi ses snart” at 35,000 feet, I’d watched him chase language all week. But this one he hadn’t asked me for. He’d just caught it.

“You said it this morning,” he said. “You said it to farmor and farfar when we were leaving.”

That was at dawn. We’d hugged everyone upstairs and come down to the car. My brother was driving. I buckled Romeo into his car seat, then looked back up at my parents and Filippa and said it. “Vi ses snart. I love you.” Romeo waved. We drove away.

I wasn’t talking to him or trying to teach him anything. I was saying goodbye to my parents.

He heard me anyway.

The dawn goodbye I didn’t perform for him is the one that stuck.

That’s the part that stayed with me. I’ve always tried to model the best I can for Romeo. When I screw something up, I’ll tell him, “Hey, that’s not how a gentleman behaves. A gentleman does this.” That’s what we do in this family. That’s what you and I do.

But I also make snarky comments. I get irritated. I’ll call something stupid because I’m fed up. Things come out of me I wouldn’t teach him on purpose in a million years.

Apparently those are lessons too.

He put his headphones back on and went straight back to Geometry Dash, smiling ear to ear. I was smiling too. He’d handed me the whole trip in three Swedish words and gone back to his game, no idea he’d done it.

Back in January I was in Kyoto with friends, and I told them one of my dreams was to travel the world with Romeo. A few months later, there we were. I’d been thinking about all the places I wanted to show him.

I hadn’t thought as much about what he keeps showing me. He tries languages he doesn’t know in front of people and barely seems to care if he gets them wrong. I’m a guy who’s been shy and careful most of my life. He watches me at dawn when I don’t know he’s watching. Since he showed up in my life, I haven’t been the same person.

I keep thinking I’m the one raising him. Then a five-year-old hands me back my own words at 35,000 feet and I realize how much of this is going the other way.

The Shirt

CrossFit used to give its podium athletes a shirt with one word screen-printed on it, in gold, silver, or bronze depending on where you finished.

PROVEN.

You couldn’t just buy it. You had to earn it. You had to place at the top of the field, in front of a full arena, and then they handed you the shirt with the word already on it, like a verdict that had finally come back in your favor. For a long time that word made complete sense to me. It named what I had organized most of my life around. Show up, perform, be measured, come out the other side as someone who had been confirmed.

I wore versions of that word for most of my life, long before CrossFit printed it on a shirt. Gymnast. Coach. Author. Each one was a way of saying the same thing to the same invisible judge: watch this, and tell me I’m real.

What It Gave, What It Cost

Here is what the essence of the word gave me. It gave me a direction when I didn’t have one. It gave me a way to convert fear into effort, and effort into evidence, and evidence into a place to stand. A person who doesn’t know who they are can get very far on the fuel of trying to prove they’re someone.

Here is what it cost. The judge never closes the file. There is no score high enough to make the measuring stop, because the measuring was never really about the score. You win, and the win lasts about as long as it takes to notice who placed above you, or who’s coming up behind you, or how much smaller last year’s proof looks from up here. The shirt says PROVEN, past tense, finished.

By 2018, much of what I’d built had come apart. What matters is that on the other side of it, something had gone quiet. The engine that had run on proving myself had stopped running too, and to my surprise I wasn’t scrambling to restart it.

Hot Dogger

A client told me recently that I’m a hot dogger, not a soul surfer.

The hot dogger rides for the crowd. Fast, flashy, always aware of the beach. The soul surfer rides for the wave itself, for the ocean, and doesn’t much care who’s keeping score. She wasn’t being unkind. She was telling me that, all these years later, I still like to ride for the crowd.

She’s right. The engine went quiet, but it isn’t dead.

The Dinner

There was a dinner in 2019 with friends who had known me through my “louder years”. I told them I didn’t want to prove myself anymore; it had stopped being interesting to me.

Their faces subtly contorted. One of them read it as depression, and I understand why; to someone who has only ever seen you run on that fuel, watching the engine go quiet looks like the engine dying. If ambition and proof are the same thing in your head, then a man who says he’s done proving himself sounds like a man who’s giving up.

I told them it wasn’t that. There was nothing left to prove, and everything left to experience.

I didn’t say it as a statement. It just came out, and then I had to sit with it, because it was truer than I expected it to be. The effort wasn’t over, but it had changed. For most of my life the audience had been judgment. What I was describing at that dinner was the work continuing for a different audience: the thing itself, felt from the inside.

The Pitch I Stopped Believing

For years I told people the opposite. In my lifestyle-design work, I said the goal was to upgrade your personal operating system. Find the outdated code and install a better version of yourself.

People bought it, including me. But underneath it was the same assumption the shirt carried, that who you are now is not enough.

Eventually that stopped holding up; maybe I didn’t need to prove a better self into existence. I should have known how to reach the person already there.

At the dinner, I didn’t have language for all of that. I only knew I no longer wanted judgment to be the audience for my life.

I don’t want to make this sound like a clean trade, where one day I swapped one belief for a better one. I still catch myself reaching for the old measurement, especially in a group full of people who are still running on it, because old fuel still works, even after you understand what it costs. It goes quiet, and then it starts up again on its own.

The Practice Now

But I feel the difference now, which I didn’t for most of my life. I can feel when I’m doing something to be confirmed and when I’m doing something to be in it. They produce completely different states in the body. One is tight, watchful, waiting for the result. The other is just here.

The need to earn my keep is still in me. I’m not ashamed of it. It gave me direction when I had nothing steadier to stand on.

My client was right. I spent forty-four years learning to hot dog. Learning to ride for the wave instead of the crowd is slower, and I’m not good at it yet. That’s the practice now, not becoming someone new, just learning to ride without checking who’s watching from the beach.

My fortieth birthday had passed badly. Money was tight, the celebration fell apart, and the year I thought I was supposed to mark came and went. By forty-one I was feeling lighter. I told the people I was working with that it was my birthday, and they came around to celebrate and post about me online. Then more people saw the posts, and the birthday wishes began multiplying.

I liked it.

Which matters because I loved being seen. I loved the attention; and at the same time, something in me started pulling back.

Some of the attention was prompted by a platform. Some came from people who have known me for over two decades. My reaction was nearly the same either way.

If they believe this about me, now I have to live up to it.

“You better step up. People are watching.”

That looked like modesty, but it was actually me making myself smaller. I wanted to deflect it, redirect it, make a joke, point at someone else. I wanted the love without having to become the person I thought the love required.

There is a story I have carried for as long as I can remember. If I let myself be fully seen, people would start counting on the person they saw, and then I would have to keep being him.

So I stayed a little smaller than I was. Don’t be too visible. Don’t let it land. If they never fully see you, they can never fully count on you.

Here is what caught me off guard.

Since I was eleven or twelve years old, every time I have blown out birthday candles, I have made the same wish: peace and happiness for everyone around me.

I always thought of that as generosity, and maybe it is. But sitting with it, I saw the flip side. It was a way to point the light away from me. It was also fear. If everyone around me was at peace, I was safe. Nobody would need anything from me.

Even on the one day that was supposed to be mine, I sent the wish outward, to everyone else, so it would not have to be about me. The kid already knew how to slowly avoid being the center. The adult just got better at it.

The thing is, the story I built on top of all this is not quite true.

The last seminar I did in Sydney ran six hours. I walked into the upstairs room, and the group was ready before I opened my mouth. Then the day was gone. I cut material all day because there was not enough time for it. I could have gone another six hours.

What I remember from rooms like that has nothing to do with how I looked. It is the handstand section. Someone could not hold a handstand to save their life. They would kick up, and I would stand behind them and put them into extension, with their center of mass out over their hands. Then I would let go. They would balance. Then I would watch their face while they worked out what had just happened inside their own body.

I was not performing in those instances. I had my hands on somebody, waiting to feel the moment they could hold it without me.

In 2013 I gave a talk at the Reebok booth at the CrossFit Games. I walked over with what amounted to an entourage. My business partner, my logistics coordinator, a few other people, and a group of break dancers I had brought with me that year. I remember trying to present as somebody slightly cooler than I was. I got caught in my own hype and never settled into the room.

That is the closest I came to feeling the weight the fear had promised. It came from trying to manage how I was seen, not from being counted on.

Being seen didn’t create responsibility. Rather, it created a version of myself I now had to hold up.

I took celebration and turned it into an obligation. I spent years avoiding the obligation by avoiding the attention.

Being seen and being owned are two different things, and I spent forty years folding them into one.

They Have the Wrong Guy

I understand the pattern now, but it does not mean the reflex is gone.

I published something about going back to the CrossFit community I had been away from for eleven years.

The response was larger than anything I have written in recent years. Coaches saying they learned their first bar muscle-up from one of my videos. People who took a seminar in 2012 and still teach from it. Gyms with my book on the coffee table. One man wrote that my videos were the soundtrack to his first years of training.

It was more love than I got on my forty-first birthday.

I read almost all the comments, and I felt my heart go warm, and then I felt the second thing arrive right behind it.

They have the wrong guy.

Not because I doubted they meant it, but because I know why I made those videos. I made them because I loved making them. I liked the medium. I liked who I was when I was filming them. They happened to become useful to other people.

Twenty years of work came back at me in one day, and my first instinct was to explain why it should not count.

It is the same move I made on my birthday. I just had a better reason this time.

The Wish

I still flinch. I still love being praised, and some part of me still looks for the responsibility hiding behind it.

I do not think I need a different birthday wish. I still want peace and happiness for everyone around me.

I just need to stop leaving myself out of the wish.

I’ve heard people talk about the last time they picked up their kids, but I never felt it until recently. Especially because it was not a moment; it was probably on a random Tuesday. I strapped him to my chest the way I had a hundred times, and we went wherever we were going, and at some point I took him out and set him down. That was the last time. I walked through it like it was no big deal, because on that morning it was nothing.

Romeo is five now. He walks. He runs (a lot). He tells me no (a lot too). He has been too big for the carrier for a long time, and somewhere back there was the final morning I wore him against me and felt his weight settle in, and I have no recollection of it. It just stopped happening.

I wake up at 5:00 in the morning. I work in the dark until he gets up, and then the day is his. For a long stretch of that, carrying him was how we spent a lot of our time while I walked or spoke on the phone. His body against mine, warm, heavy in the way only a sleeping baby can be heavy. I was not always enjoying it, as I was often tired. I was getting through a day. That is what I’ve realized about the ordinary. When you are inside it, and you cannot feel it leaving.

No one tells you which time is the last. You find out later by its absence. It passes as a regular day and only becomes final in retrospect.

If I had known, would I have done it differently? Held on a tad longer, paid a different kind of attention? Yes. But that is the trap inside the question. You cannot live marking every moment as the last one. The tension would break you, and it would be impossible to be present. You would be grieving something that has not even left yet.

The carrier is not the only place I feel time becoming physical.

I think about my parents aging. My father turned eighty-three this year. During the pandemic, he had one scare after another: COVID that put him in the hospital, they found out he had a stroke, followed by long COVID and a heart attack. There was a stretch where we thought that was the end of it. He came through, then spent months barely able to move, sitting in a chair most of the day. I would watch him prepare to stand before he actually stood, gathering himself for something that had once required no thought. This is a man who was active his entire life. Watching that happen to his body was watching time stop being an idea.

That is what the body does that the mind doesn’t. The mind can tell you that everyone ages, that nothing lasts, and you will nod and forget by the next scroll on Instagram. The body does not let you forget. It shows you. In the weight of a grandson that is suddenly not there against your chest. In a father who cannot get out of a chair.

Here is what I have not been able to reconcile. I am now about the age my father was when I was the age Romeo is now. The distance between the three of us is one length, repeating. He carried me. I carry Romeo. One day Romeo will be the one carrying me. It is not a sad thought. It is just true in a way I can feel, which is different from knowing it.

I am not going to tell you to hold every moment like it is the last one. We can’t.

But I have started choosing, on purpose, where to put my attention. Not everywhere and all at once. Just in the mornings I have him, while he is still small enough to want me close, wants to play, and thinks I’m larger than life. Romeo is five. He still reaches up to be carried, so I do as much as my body allows.

I was out for one final test run before the race. Half a mile in, I crossed a section of road where there had been construction. The asphalt dropped slightly where it met the sidewalk. Two inches, maybe less.

My left foot landed on the edge, and the ankle folded underneath me.

At first I thought I had gotten away with it.

I kept running.

A little pain showed up, and I told myself not to be stupid. Walk home. Let it settle. Test it tomorrow.

Halfway back, the ankle started to seize.

By the time I reached the house, I could barely put weight on it.

I knew the race was gone.

That afternoon, my neighbor Ruben came over with his wife, Anna, and their dog.

Ruben and I came through the same Spanish gymnastics system. My last national championship was his first. He went on to compete at the London Olympics.

Years later, we ended up living two blocks apart in Burlingame, California. Before Tonya and I found our current place, we even rented his house for a few months.

I told Ruben about the ankle and how disappointed I was.

Then he asked me a question.

“Are you going to the CrossFit Games?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t been since 2015.”

“They’re in San Jose.”

I looked at him.

“San Jose, California?”

“Yeah.”

Thirty minutes from my house.

At that exact moment, I was reading Annie Thorisdottir’s memoir.

Annie is one of the most important athletes in CrossFit history. Jami Tikkanen and I coached her through the years she won the CrossFit Games twice. I was sitting there with my ankle up, reading her version of a chapter of my own life, when a gymnast I had known since my gymnastics days in Spain walked into my backyard and told me the Games were happening down the road.

I remember thinking:

I should at least circle the block.

Just go look.

Why I Stopped Going

People sometimes ask why I stopped going to the CrossFit Games.

I never made one clean decision to leave.

In 2014, I was launching Freestyle. That whole Games weekend was built around the book. I had also just ended my partnership with Reebok and become part of STRIKE MVMNT. They had a booth. I was signing books, doing interviews, and trying to build whatever came next.

In 2015, our family was in survival mode. Tinai had moved in with us. Life became immediate and heavier. I still worked with Annie at times, but I was not deeply immersed in her preparation the way I had been before.

Then the Games moved away from California.

Going became expensive. It took time. It required a reason.

I was still teaching seminars inside the CrossFit world, but the Games no longer had an obvious place for me. I was not coaching an athlete on the floor. I was not launching a book. I was not needed at a booth.

Then, in 2016, I was fired from San Francisco CrossFit.

I was ashamed and furious. I wanted to tell everyone exactly what I thought had happened. I also knew I could not trust myself to speak without trying to hurt the people I felt had hurt me.

So I stayed quiet.

For a while, staying away from certain environments was part of staying quiet.

After that, my work kept changing.

Gymnastics inside CrossFit became movement.

Movement became broader questions about how people lived, worked, and led.

I created Beyond Movement, a clinic on the bridge between the body and the mind. The Insiders, a series of seminars about personal development, work, and identity. I taught them in London, Sydney, and San Francisco. They worked. I loved them.

Then I burned out.

Then the pandemic happened.

One year became another

I didn’t decide to leave the CrossFit Games for eleven years.

I kept deciding what the next year required.

Tuesday

Once I knew the Games were nearby, I reached out to Jami.

We had not seen each other in almost 8 years.

I drove down on Tuesday before the Games.

We spent the afternoon together and then went to dinner. It was easy in the way it is with people you built something with.

When I dropped him off, we both agreed that it would be great if we could see each other again.

I had work, family, and things already on the calendar.

But I made it happen.

I drove back down on Thursday, which was mostly his off day. We grabbed coffee, and then he had an athlete briefing to get to.

So I had a couple of hours and nowhere to be.

I did not go down there to make a return to CrossFit.

I went to see my friend.

The Games just happened to be where he was.

Vendor Village

Before going inside Vendor Village, I met Christine Bald.

Christine co-wrote Annie’s memoir and had interviewed me for the book. We had spent hours talking, but we had never met in person.

It was good to finally stand in front of each other.

I told her how much the book meant to me. She had captured something that was historic for Annie, but also deeply personal for the people who had lived through those years beside her.

We talked for a while.

I should have taken a picture.

I did not

Then we walked into Vendor Village.

Almost immediately, Dusty Hyland walked over.

Dusty had been part of the CrossFit Gymnastics team. We taught in the same space from opposite directions. His work was closer to bringing artistic gymnastics into CrossFit. Mine was about taking the movement principles of gymnastics and applying them to CrossFit.

We should have been friends.

We had more in common than either of us probably admitted, and there were not many people in that world doing what we were doing. But the space only seemed to have room for one of us, and so we spent years being measured against each other.

We were friendly.

We were competitors.

At times I think we were probably enemies, and I do not believe either of us wanted that.

Years earlier, an article had gone up in the CrossFit Journal warning people to be careful of “shiny things.”

The shiny thing was me.

That article created real tension. Even Kelly Starrett, to his credit, called and defended me.

None of that came from Dusty. We were both standing inside something neither of us had built.

He did not mention any of it when he saw me.

He walked over, hugged me, and said, “It’s really good to see you.”

And it was.

No argument.

No explanation.

Just time standing between us differently than it had before.

Still Asking

Then I saw Kelly from Belly Tight, who I knew through Brian Joo, a friend in South Korea.

Then José Luis and Emilio from Kallpa Fitness, friends from Ecuador.

Then one of the judges came over to speak with me.

He was Spanish-speaking. I did not vividly remember meeting him, but he remembered attending one of my seminars.

He knew details about my work that I had forgotten.

He stood there reminding me of a version of myself I had not thought about in years.

Then people I had never met started coming up.

“I still watch your videos.”

“We still use your book.”

“It is on the coffee table at our gym.”

And then another kind of comment started repeating itself.

“You should come to our gym.”

“You should teach a seminar.”

“Our members would love to have you.”

They were not asking me to come down and tell old stories.

They wanted the work now.

One of the people who said it was Annie Sakamoto.

Annie Sakamoto was one of the original CrossFit members at Greg Glassman’s gym in Santa Cruz, before there were affiliates spread around the world and before the Games existed.

She had also hosted the first seminar I ever taught.

That one became another. Then another.

Neither of us knew it would turn into more than 650 seminars around the world.

And now she was standing in front of me, asking me to teach again.

Eleven years had passed.

The work had not disappeared.

It had continued living inside other people.

Some remembered a video.

Some remembered a book.

Some remembered a seminar.

Some were still asking for the next one.

Communities remember differently than calendars do.

Sunday

Sunday was supposed to be my 10k race day.

Instead, Tonya, Romeo, and I drove back to the SAP Center and met Ruben.

Our seats were near the top of the arena. From up there, you could see everything, even if the athletes looked tiny.

During one of the breaks, I went looking for coffee.

I had not slept well. I was tired. I wanted a pick-me-up.

I walked through the vendor area and could not find any. Partly because there did not seem to be coffee anywhere, and partly because I kept stopping to talk to people.

Then I saw Katie Hogan.

Katie was one of the original CrossFit athletes and a pioneer in the sport. I had the chance to coach her in some of her gymnastics movements years earlier.

We had not seen each other in a long time.

She told me she could get us into the affiliate lounge, although she was not sure the coffee there was any good.

Then she stopped.

“Wait,” she said. “I know where the good coffee is.”

A few minutes later, we had VIP wristbands.

I had gone looking for caffeine and somehow ended up watching the finals from a suite above the arena.

Life keeps doing this.

Upstairs

Upstairs, I ran into James Fitzgerald.

OPT.

The winner of the first CrossFit Games.

I did not recognize him immediately. Then I did.

Only minutes earlier, I had been telling Ruben about him. I had been explaining that certain people become the first domino in a sequence without ever knowing where it will lead.

Without OPT, the early history of the Games looks different.

Without the early Games, Annie’s path looks different.

Without Annie, my own life looks different.

Then there he was.

We talked about his family.

We talked about what he was working on now.

Not what he had built then.

That distinction mattered.

Every conversation that weekend carried history, but none of them stayed trapped inside it.

Introducing Myself

At one point, I realized I could not find Romeo.

Eventually, I spotted him in the middle of a group of parents and children.

One of those parents was Tia-Clair Toomey.

Tia is the most decorated athlete in CrossFit Games history.

Romeo, of course, had no idea.

To him, she was another mother sitting with her children.

I walked over to collect him.

She told me he was fine.

I introduced myself.

I said my name like it might do some work. It did not.

Then I mentioned Annie.

“Oh, no way,” she said. “You coached Annie?”

We talked briefly.

That was it.

And strangely, I loved the moment.

Not because she eventually understood who I was. Because she did not need to.

She had no reason to know me.

She belonged to a later generation of the sport, long after the years when I had been most visible inside CrossFit.

History had kept going.

It should.

I did not need to be current to belong to what came before.

I was part of the history.

That is not the same as being the center of it.

What Romeo Sees

The couple sitting beside Tia owned a CrossFit affiliate in Tennessee.

Their children had grown up in the gym.

We started talking about what that kind of environment gives a child.

I looked at Romeo.

He sees his mother coaching gymnastics.

He sees Tonya, his grandma, leading AcroSports.

He sees me coach people, run, train, and still do enough gymnastics to teach him a few things.

He hears us talk about movement, practice, physical fitness, recovery, and what the body can learn.

None of it is presented to him as a philosophy.

It is simply part of the environment.

He does not need to become a gymnast.

He does not need to become a CrossFit athlete.

That is not the point.

He is growing up around adults who use their bodies, practice skills, and keep returning to movement.

Environments teach long before language does.

Explaining It to Ruben

I had also spent part of the weekend explaining CrossFit to Ruben.

He is an Olympic gymnast. He looked at some of the movements the way I once had.

The first time I saw a kipping pull-up, I thought it was cheating. I thought people were going to get hurt. Some people did.

What I did not understand was where the movement came from, what it was for, or how it fit inside a larger method.

Watching the Games again reminded me that, when CrossFit is taught well, I still believe in it.

It asks people to develop skills across disciplines and carry those skills into changing contexts.

It trains adaptation.

There is much more to say about that.

This is not that essay.

Fibonacci

When we left the arena, Romeo was exhausted.

“I don’t like the CrossFit Games.”

“This is boring.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

He was tired and done and ready to go home.

He is five years old. It had been a very long day.

Twenty-four hours later, he came home from tennis camp.

We ate lunch and put YouTube on the television.

A CrossFit Games video appeared on the screen.

Romeo clicked it.

The SAP Center filled the television.

The athletes walked onto the floor.

Then he looked at me.

“Wait,” he said. “Is that Fibonacci?”

I stared at him.

“What did you say?”

“Was that Fibonacci?”

It was.

The final workout of the CrossFit Games was called Fibonacci.

He had heard the name while he was tired, overwhelmed, and telling us how much he hated being there.

Somehow, it stayed.

I have been thinking about that ever since.

How much enters us before we understand what we are carrying.

How often we decide that nothing meaningful happened because we could not feel it taking hold.

A seminar I had forgotten was still alive in the memory of a judge.

A book I had not promoted in years was still sitting on a gym’s coffee table.

An old rivalry returned as a hug.

The woman who hosted my first seminar was asking me to teach again.

A friend from Spain became my neighbor in California.

A missed race put me in a building I had not entered for eleven years.

The most decorated athlete in the sport had no idea who I was.

My grandson had no idea who she was.

And somehow, he carried one strange word home.

I only meant to circle the block.

Instead, I found a part of my life still moving.

I used to open every seminar the same way. I told the room I was just a guy trying to figure it out, sharing what I had learned so far, and I asked them not to let me get away with saying whatever I thought was right. I said it partly to take pressure out of the room. Mostly, I said it because I wanted the experience to belong to the people in front of me. I wanted them testing ideas against their own lives, not copying mine into a notebook.

I cannot think for anyone. I can only help them reflect. If all I do is hand you my words and you carry them out unchanged, I have not taught you anything. I have given you a new thing to repeat.

The Part I Had Not Learned Yet

I learned the first part of this at my first seminar.

I arrived trying to live up to the version of me Kelly Starrett had described when he put my name forward. I followed the curriculum I had prepared instead of reading the people in front of me. When the material ran out, I finally stopped performing and asked them to move.

Show me what you’ve got.

That question became my method. It taught me to follow the person instead of forcing the person to follow my plan.

But it took me much longer to understand the harder part. Following the person also means recognizing when they no longer need you to lead.

What the Job Is

People think the job is to install something: a new operating system, a vocabulary, a set of moves you did not have before. And there is some of that. I know how to teach movement, build physical capacity, and coach people under pressure. Those things can be taught.

But they are the smallest part. If I do the work right, you do not walk out sounding like me. You walk out sounding more like yourself than when you came in. I am not there to give you my language. I am there to help you find your own.

When people leave as smaller copies of the coach, moving like him, using his phrases as their proof of belonging, something has failed, even when the room is full.

The Group I Ended

I ran a small group for over a year. Then I ended it because it worked.

I told them that I had taken them as far as I could in that format. Anything I did after that point would only be a reminder of things we had already said. I had watched every one of them take meaningful steps on their own. They were, as I put it that day, off to the races.

If I rebuilt the whole thing and reopened the doors, I would not want any of them to sign up. Not because they were done with me, but because they no longer needed the thing I would be offering. The format had done its job. That was how I knew we had graduated.

What got me was that I did not want to let go of the program. I didn’t want to let go of them. The faces, the connection, showing up every week to see who was there. I loved that. But I did not want our relationship to depend on a platform I was running. I wanted it to outlast the container.

So I told them: you cannot get rid of me. Message me, and I am there. The group ended. The relationships did not. They just stopped needing a Monday and a link to exist.

The Pull to Be Needed

There is still a part of me that wants to be quoted. That likes being the source, the one who said the thing. When I am tired, or unsure of the work, dependence starts to look like proof that I mattered.

I know what that is. It is the same impulse that almost had me open my first seminar with a backflip, performing a version of myself someone else created. For me, both come from the same fear: that if I am neither needed nor impressive, I may not matter. I have not gotten rid of either, but I have gotten faster at catching them.

The best thing I can hear is an idea we found together coming back in a shape I would never have built, in language I would not have chosen, describing a life that is not mine.

The business I could not read. The money I did not understand. The ringing in my ear that never left. I have told those stories, but what I have not written about is what was underneath all of it. The thing the collapse was quietly asking me, that I could not hear until almost everything I used to answer it was gone.

The question was simple. What was any of it for.

I had spent my whole life climbing. Gymnastics, then coaching, then the seminars, then the book. I was good at climbing. I organized my life around it. And I told myself the climbing was the point, because when you are climbing you do not have to ask what the climb is for, as the next handhold answers the question for you.

Until the wall ran out.

The Valley

In 2020, I ended up in Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley.

I did not choose it the way you choose a home. The road I had been on had closed. The business was gone for the second time. The world had stopped, and I had left San Francisco, which had been my sanctuary for sixteen years, for a flat, dry, central-California valley I could not relate to. The coastline I loved, traded for ground that looked like nothing to me. It’s where I landed when there was nowhere left to climb.

And the strange thing, the thing I still do not fully understand, is that it was there, in a place I could not relate to, with the world in pieces, that I felt more at home than I had since I left Spain in 2004.

I want to be careful about how that sounds, because it is easy to turn it into a postcard. It was not peaceful in the way that word usually means. The world was a mess. Nothing outside of me was resolved. Much of it was worse than it had ever been.

But something inside me got quiet.

I found a routine of doing nothing and everything. Walking the dog and having my morning coffee was a gift. Hours of handstands, breathwork, a run when I could fit one in. The light coming down over ground I did not think was beautiful until I kept looking at it. Day trips to Yosemite where I stood in front of something older than all of my problems and felt my own size again.

I called my parents every day. My dad has never liked talking on the phone, but he would be there, close enough to hear my voice, chiming in now and then. Because I had nowhere to go, I did not rush the calls. I was not reading text messages as they came through. I would sit by the window, or out in the side yard, looking up at the redwoods against the blue morning sky. I never had anywhere more important to be.

We talked about what was happening in the world, how we were navigating it, what we would do if we lost communication completely.

For most of my life, I thought everyone got that. A present mother and father. They don’t. I had hit the life lottery before I ever climbed anything, and I had been too busy climbing to sit in it.

The most ordinary conversation.

And I was finally in it.

None of that was extraordinary. The ordinary had been turned all the way up, until I could finally see what had been sitting inside it the whole time.

What I Had Been Doing

Here is what I understand now, standing on the other side of some of it and still inside the rest.

The road, the city, the business, the recognition, the rooms filled with people that leaned in. I had been treating all of it as home. As the place the feeling lived. And when it went away, I braced for the feeling to go with it.

It didn’t.

The city. The work. The rooms. They all mattered, but I had asked them to carry a job they could not do. I had asked them to prove that I was home.

When they went away, the feeling did not disappear. It changed shape. It showed up walking the dog, calling my parents, getting upside down, standing in front of Yosemite, looking long enough at a place I had decided was not beautiful until it was.

The climb was supposed to serve the life. Somewhere I let it start replacing it.

I had built an entire life pointed at the top of the wall, certain that was where I would finally feel fulfilled. Feel at home. It took losing the wall to find out the top was never going to do it. The top mattered. I had just asked it to be the only place I was allowed to feel whole, and no summit can hold that. It was always going to buckle under the weight of being the single proof that my life meant something.

The climbing was the long, expensive way I learned that effort and life are not the same thing. When I ask the effort to stand in for my entire life, the effort goes hollow and the life gets smaller.

The Part I Do Not Get to Finish

I would like to tell you I have this now. That I found it in the Valley and I carry it easily and the lesson is learned.

That is not true.

I still reach for the wall. I still catch myself measuring my worth by the room, by the recognition, by whether the climb is going well. When I stop moving, when I am tired, when the work is thin, the old story comes back and tells me the feeling lives out there and I had better go get it. I know it’s not the solution, but I still reach for it. Knowing a thing and living it are different distances, and I am somewhere in between.

So this is not an essay about a lesson I learned. It is an essay about a practice I am inside of. Every day I get another chance to keep the effort in its place. To let it serve the life instead of replace it. Some days I get the order right. Some days I forget completely, and the climb quietly becomes the point again until a walk, or a bad morning, or my own body tells me I have drifted.

That is Purpose, as far as I can tell.

Position is what someone arrives with. Movement is the route through. Purpose is what the effort serves. It is not a destination. It is the relationship between the climb and the life the climb is meant to protect. It is the work of making sure the climbing does not eat the life it was supposed to make possible.

So I will end where I actually am. Still inside the practice.

The climb mattered. It just was never supposed to cost me the life it was meant to serve.

That is where the work starts.

But once I have a read, the next question is not simply, what should they do. It is: what route through this is available to them.

Anníe got her first muscle-up at the CrossFit Games in 2009. She had never done one before, and then, in the middle of competition, she got over the rings. It counted. Everybody saw the same thing. A first.

She has talked about that rep differently since. She got through it, but she did not learn how to get back there. It scared her.

That was the part people missed.

A movement can count and still teach the wrong lesson.

She got over the rings, but it cost her everything she had. Will carrying what timing had not yet learned to do. Force spent where the movement had not yet given her a route. A fight through the middle that gave her no way to understand how she would ever get back there again. She had proof she could do a muscle-up. She did not have a way through it that she could trust.

By the time she came to work with me, the problem was not only physical. It had become a memory.

The Part Between

Every movement has a start, a transition, and a finish.

The start and finish are easy to see. You are below the rings, then you are above them. You are standing, then you are in the bottom of a squat, then you are standing again. Those are the anchor points.

The transition is harder. It is where the body has to change shape, change direction, transfer force, and preserve enough options for the next action. That is where change happens. And change is turbulent.

Most people could look at a muscle-up and name the two obvious parts. The pull. The dip. But that is not the muscle-up. Those are two positions. The muscle-up is the part between them.

The rings do not ask you to go straight up. They ask you to change your relationship to them. You have to get around them. A pull-up can stay mostly vertical. A dip happens once you are already above the support. A muscle-up asks something else. It asks the shoulders, trunk, hips, legs, wrists, and rings to move through a transition together. Not just higher. Around.

A person can hold a good shape for a photograph. The transition is where that stops being enough. You cannot fake the part between by arriving in a good position and holding still.

The transition is where the body stops performing and starts telling the truth.

Anníe did not have a pull problem or a dip problem. She had a transition she had learned to survive instead of pass through.

The Wrong Picture

At the time, there was a common way of describing a muscle-up. Get the highest pull-up you can, then finish in the deepest dip.

It sounded right. It named the beginning and the end. It left out the part that mattered most. The route.

For Anníe, that missing route showed up as a grip. A deep false grip. The wrist held hard into flexion. The position that felt most secure when the rest of the movement did not.

The grip was not really the problem. For Anníe, it had become the shape of the fear.

There is nothing wrong with a false grip. For a first strict rep it can be exactly the right entry point. But for Anníe it had become more than a tool. It had become the master plan. And holding that hard narrowed everything downstream. The elbows bent early. The longer route through the shoulders disappeared. Instead of giving the swing and the hips time to contribute, she pulled harder, sooner. The movement got smaller. Then it got harder.

She was trying to get over the rings with the parts of her body that had the least room left to help. That is what happens when a movement becomes a fight.

You start spending your options too early.

None of this meant she was weak. The trap was that she was strong enough to force a movement most people cannot do at all. Strong enough to muscle past the exact thing she needed to learn.

Strong Enough

People talk about strength as numbers. How many pull-ups. How much you press. How much you squat. Those questions matter. They are also incomplete.

I would ask people two questions.

How strong do you need to be to squat a thousand pounds? Strong enough.

How strong do you need to be to do a muscle-up? Strong enough.

A person can have strict pull-ups, strict dips, pressing strength, grip strength, and still not have a muscle-up they can trust. They have force on paper. What they do not yet have is a way to organize it through the task.

That is movement strength. Strength made usable: enough force, at the right time, through the positions your body can reach, with enough organization to hold the task together.

The better question is not only how much can you lift. It is whether you can apply what you have to the movement in front of you.

At that point, Anníe did not need more strength in the way most people meant strength. She needed to use what was already there.

Something She Could Feel

So we went back. Low rings. Bands. Positions. We took the gamble out of the full rep and gave her a sequence she could feel from the inside instead of a result she had to force.

Not long into the session, she came through the turnover with so much power she skipped the dip entirely and landed locked out on top of the rings. An uprise. A movement many athletes spend months trying to find.

I put both hands on my head. I did not say anything for a second. I had a picture of what a good day would look like, and she had gone straight past it.

That did not happen because I talked her into believing in herself. It happened because her body finally had new evidence. For the first time, the movement had stopped asking her to survive it.

That was the breakthrough.

It was not the part that stayed with me.

When the Hand Comes Away

I grew up in gymnastics. I know exactly what it feels like to do a skill you are scared of while a coach stands next to you.

They can barely touch you. Two fingers under your back. Sometimes not even that, sometimes just standing close enough that you know the hand is there. And you do the skill. You do it clean. You feel capable.

Then the coach steps back, and the skill changes. The hand was barely doing anything. But the part of you that was borrowing the coach’s certainty has to find its own now.

Sometimes the body is already capable. What has not caught up yet is the part of you that believes it can do it alone.

That is one of the real problems in movement, and it is almost never the problem people bring you.

Anníe found a transition she could trust in one session. Then she flew home.

I lived in California. She lived in Iceland. The breakthrough happened in a room I was standing in. Then she had to take it somewhere I would never be and find out whether it was actually hers, or whether it only worked when I was close enough to spot her.

That is the part nobody sees. Not the unlock. The return.

Back in Iceland, the movement had to become hers through repetition. Then it had to hold in competition, with everything on the line and no hand anywhere near her back.

That took longer than the first breakthrough. Getting over the rings was not the hard part. The hard part was becoming someone who could do it without me there.

How You Know It Worked

I could tell you she went on to win. She did. Back to back. But the wins are not how I know the muscle-up became hers.

Here is how I know.

It went quiet.

In 2009, the muscle-up was the story. The wound. The first thing she could not force into something she could trust.

By the time she was winning, it had become part of the work.

Then it became a rep count on the way to something else.

To me, that is the point.

She did not need to dominate the muscle-up. She made peace with it. The movement that once scared her in competition became one she could work with. Not a movement she conquered. Just how she moved.

That is what safe, useful, and long-lasting looks like in a movement. Not the prettiest first rep. Not a trophy. Not even a win.

Silence where the struggle used to be.

The Way Through

Position asks what is here. What does this person have available. What are they carrying. What can they receive.

Movement asks something different.

How does this person change shape through the task without losing their options?

And does it hold when no one is standing next to them?

Anníe had enough strength to get over the rings from the first day I met her. What she did not have was a transition she could organize, repeat, and trust on her own.

The first rep taught her she could force her way through. The work taught her she did not have to.

Movement is not getting from one position to the next. It is finding a way through that your body can organize, repeat, and trust.

Purpose decides what that movement is for.

He comes in still finishing something.

A call on his laptop that he carries the last sentence of through the door. Or he gets halfway in, turns back to the house for something he forgot, and says, “I just need a minute.” He returns still typing on his phone, barely making eye contact, moving like the session is pulling him away from something more important. Sometimes he starts negotiating the session before it begins, using one of my own lines back at me to make the room feel a little more manageable. His body is doing the thing his week is doing. Trying to hold too many things at once and not drop any of them.

She arrives differently.

The coffee cup is carried low. When I say good morning she almost scoffs, like the words are too bright for the room she is in. She runs a hand through her hair. Takes a beat, looks away, and only then sets the cup down. Her eyes are past tired. There is a version of her that is fully alive. It is not the one that walked in. Before anything else, I give her the small ritual. Come grab a chair for a minute. Pointing at a plyo box. That line breaks the heaviness without pretending the heaviness is not there.

Neither of them has told me anything yet. I already have a first signal from each. And a signal is not a conclusion.

More Than Posture

This is what I mean by position.

Posture is part of it. How someone stands, where the weight sits, whether the shoulders are up or the chest is caved. That gives you something. But it is one signal, not the complete picture.

Position is the larger pattern. Shape, energy, movement, and readiness. The pressure they came in carrying. What they may be protecting. And underneath all of it, the real question: what can this person actually receive today?

Posture gives you a signal. Position gives you a better question. The work is deciding what to do with what you learn. And you do not get the position from a glance. You get a first read, and then you have to decide whether to create space, create an edge, or stay quiet long enough to learn what you are actually looking at.

The Position I Send

Here is the part I did not grasp for a long time.

I thought reading the person was the skill. It is half of it. The other half is the position I bring into the room. Before I say a word, I have already answered them with my body.

I never decided to do this with clients. It just happens.

I grew up saluting in gymnastics. Before training, the team would line up, we would be briefed on the day, and then we would break formation with a salute. A small bow. Arms open at a slight angle, hands coming down to your sides, eyes up. I did it hundreds of times.

Now, sometimes, when someone walks into a session, once I have read the room and I know what is about to happen, I do a quieter version of it without thinking. Not every time. But often enough that I noticed it one day and realized where it came from. Arms open, hands down, eyes up. My body formalizing presence before I have said anything.

Open does not mean I am trying to make someone feel good. It means I am not asking them to perform for me. I am here to see what is actually there, and then make the next thing a little more possible.

That is a position too. Not the one I read. The one I send.

Opposite Directions

What I deliver depends on the read I have so far, and the two clients need opposite things.

The one holding too much does not need more. I know that state personally. There are days when everything in me wants to rip apart and run. I hate being in my body. I hate that someone else can see me struggling to hold the image together.

When someone arrives there, the last thing that helps is more. More intensity, complexity, correction, or questions he has to get right. More encouragement that lands as one more demand. When someone is holding too much, I do not try to take control of the state. I give it enough room to reveal what it is asking for.

The one who is slipping needs the opposite, and it is not cheering up. Encouragement can feel like someone trying to take control of an experience she is barely holding. Sometimes she pushes back against me because pushing against something can be the fastest way to feel a little control again.

She does not need a cheerleader. She needs something real enough to push against. One concrete task. One thing she can complete. Less talking from me, not more. A place to find agency without having to explain her state first. That is the edge to grab.

Same skill. Opposite directions. Almost none of it spoken.

The Wrong Read

I get this wrong. That is the part that matters most.

There was a woman I coached who came in low, and I tried to lighten it. I thought humor would help. I made a comment about not having a pity party. I meant it as a lift. It landed as a wound. Instead of pulling her up, I pushed her further into exactly the thing she was already fighting.

I have learned that the wrong read does not simply miss the person. It gives more oxygen to the thing already taking them over.

Years earlier, coaching young girls, I made a different version of the same mistake. I thought toughness was what they needed, partly because toughness was what they were asking for. But they were not able to receive more demand yet. I read the request and missed the position underneath it.

So I hold two things at once. Sometimes I know the next move before I can explain it. I feel it in my body. And that does not make me certain. It makes me responsible for staying close enough to the person to find out whether the signal holds. Instinct matters. Instinct also has to stay humble.

Before the Door

There is a reason I can walk in steady, and it happens before the door.

I am in the car, at the gate, or waiting for the door to open. It takes about thirty seconds. I use words my mother taught me.

Sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Today is a great day. I am fully available to deliver what is needed.

I do not say it because I think I need to become someone else before I walk in. I say it because I get anxious, and I need to stop carrying my own unresolved day into somebody else’s room. It is a private way of putting my noise down so I do not set it on their session.

I learned the shape of that a long time ago. Stepping onto the competition floor was like passing through something that filtered out everything that did not belong to the next ninety seconds. I could not do it perfectly every time. But most days I could cross that line and become only the person the routine needed.

Where the Work Starts

Position is not just where someone starts.

It is what they bring into the room. It is what they can receive once they are there.

Before I ask someone to move, I have to answer how they arrived.

That is where the work starts.

Not everybody’s gonna make it. Not because they lack talent. Because this work asks for something most people are not willing to give for long enough without knowing if it will pay off.

I said it because I believed it; I had seen it happen, and because the person who needed to hear it most was standing right in front of me, smiling, with no idea what was coming.

Vienna

In May of 2014, I was teaching a seminar in Vienna. I had just come from Berlin, where I had spoken on a real stage for the first time, mic’d up, presenting my framework. The book was two months from release. Everything was accelerating.

At the seminar, a tall, strong, young Danish kid walked up to me with a massive smile and a firm handshake. His name was Daniel Severin Petersen. He had flown himself from Denmark to attend.

At the end of the day he said, I would love to connect with you and see if there is any way we could work together.

I had heard that before. A lot of people said it. Almost none followed through.

I said, I am flying out tomorrow. If you meet me at the airport, we can grab a coffee.

The next morning I stepped out of the cab and there he was. Posted up on the sidewalk, waiting.

We went through security together. Got a coffee. Talked for an hour. I thought, this is a very nice kid. I will probably never see him again.

I said, write me sometime. And I got on the plane.

Twenty-Four Hours

A few weeks later, I told Daniel that if he was serious, he could come to San Francisco and shadow me for a month.

I do not think it took twenty-four hours. He had booked a flight, found an Airbnb, and told me he would be there in May.

He showed up. And it happened to be the month I was hosting the Freestyle Summit.

The Summit

The summit was my attempt to build a team of coaches who could carry the Freestyle seminar. I had assembled six people. Daniel was the newest. Nate Helming had already been in the mix, shadowing me at seminars, proofreading the book as Tony and I were writing it. He was the first person in my circle who gave me truly direct feedback. A huge influence.

Chris Espinal had come into my world at a Creative Live shoot in Seattle. I met him again at a seminar where I asked the room if anyone could demonstrate a perfect squat. Chris walked out of a group of fifty people and stood in front of everyone. I know how, he said. Watch this. It was his boldness that stayed with me.

The others were talented, committed in their own ways, and at various stages of their own paths.

I looked at that group and told them what I believed.

Not everybody’s gonna make it. But every single one of you will be successful.

Daniel was thrown into teaching a segment alongside the rest of them. He was not ready. But he had the courage to be there. And that was enough to start.

The Collapse

On August 9, 2016, one of my coaches posted about a seminar on our channels and used a word that the owners of San Francisco CrossFit considered theirs. They interpreted it as me competing with them. I was fired by email.

That firing was the first domino.

The coach whose post triggered it was the first to leave. Then one by one the others followed. Some left because the association felt unsafe. Some because we could not find alignment. Some because they were building their own things and the timing was simply right.

Nate walked out of the summit early to go work on a new project with a partner. I watched him leave and knew that would be our last seminar together. It was an unspoken parting. I wish I had done a better job of holding onto him.

Chris stayed the longest. He lived with me for a month to help me launch my online program. When I was falling apart during a Latin America tour, having panic attacks and barely able to function, Chris was the one who got me through those two weeks.

One by one, they were gone.

Except Daniel.

The Cab in London

We had just finished teaching together in London. It was around 2017. We were sitting in the back of a cab.

I said, do you want to hear something crazy?

You came to me in Vienna. You said you wanted to work together. I told you it was going to be hard. I could not promise anything. Then there were all these coaches. I told everyone, not everybody’s gonna make it. You looked at me like, what do you mean?

And now here we are. Years later. Sitting in a cab. Just you and me.

You are the last one standing.

Wellington

We were in New Zealand. A tour through Australia and then Wellington, where we taught a half-day seminar.

The day before, I told Daniel something I had been wanting to say. You are doing great. But you are running my material word for word. You are even using my jokes. Allow yourself to find your voice. Say something that resonates with you. Just let yourself go.

In Wellington, he did.

For the first time, Daniel went off script. He stopped running the steps and started having a conversation with the room. The material came out naturally because he had lived inside it for years. But now it was his.

I was standing on a box in the back of the room. And I saw little Daniel disappear. The gentle giant who had been following the prescription filled the room. Everyone gravitated toward him.

He had graduated. I just stood there thinking, there he is. He did it. He found it.

That night at dinner we both knew. The Daniel who had left Denmark for this tour was not the same one going home.

The Lady at the Next Table

At that same seminar in Wellington, there was a young woman in the audience. Bubbly. Eager. Radiating this energy you could feel across the room.

Her name was Lydia Barrington.

A few months later, she came to San Francisco. We met for a morning coffee down by Fisherman’s Wharf. She came with notes, ideas, and this drive to become the best coach she could be.

Our conversation was so alive that a woman sitting at the next table leaned over and said, whatever you guys are talking about sounds amazing.

I took that as a sign.

The Three of Us

By 2018, it was down to three.

Daniel was programming. Lydia was managing the community. I was directing. Tonya was working full time alongside us trying to make the whole thing run. Denmark, New Zealand, California. Three time zones. Pure belief and not much else.

Lydia had gone through a hard reset in her own life and was rebuilding from scratch. She had picked up calisthenics, found something in it that clicked, and brought that rebuilding energy to everything she touched.

Daniel had been flying himself out to every seminar. He even lied to his parents for a while, telling them I was paying him, because he could not explain why he was following a guy in San Francisco who was not giving him a cent. In the last year of working together, I finally put him on a symbolic retainer. That was the first time he was compensated for years of commitment.

And I was running out of road.

You Could Just Quit

By 2019, I was broken.

The tinnitus had arrived. The panic attacks were constant. I was underweight, undertrained, financially buried. Everything I had been carrying for years had compounded into something I could no longer hold.

Tonya and I were at lunch in Marin County. I told her I did not know how much longer I could go.

She said, if you cannot do it anymore, you could just quit.

I went to the bathroom and stood there.

I can just quit. I can stop. I do not have to do this anymore.

I walked back to the table and said, I am done.

The Call

A couple of days later, we got on a call with Daniel and Lydia.

We broke the news.

We all cried.

I felt like I had completely failed them. Lydia, who was so driven, pushing so hard. Daniel, who had invested in me for years. Who had paid his own way across the world. Who had been the last one standing.

And I could not go anymore. It was just done.

Where They Are Now

Daniel became a physical therapist. He went back to school, sat in the student seat, and built a new foundation underneath everything I had shown him. In a conversation we recorded years later, he told me that at some point in his studies he realized the Freestyle framework did not fit everything. That was the moment he became independent.

He said it was like wearing a shirt for years, feeling the fabric, finding the edges, and then one day realizing it was just one shirt in the wardrobe.

That is exactly what was supposed to happen.

Lydia found her voice completely. She is based in Brisbane now. She has a degree in exercise science. She coaches women worldwide, combining strength training with self-awareness. She became the coach she needed when she was at her lowest. Her words, not mine.

I look at both of them and I think the same thing. They are the real deal. And I am so grateful I got to spend time with them. That they chose to spend time with me.

What I Got Wrong

I thought I failed them when I made that call. I thought the crying on the phone was the sound of something breaking.

I was wrong.

Daniel did not need Freestyle to become who he is. He needed time inside the framework to find where it ended and where he began. Wellington was the graduation. And as he said, you have to wear the shirt. You have to tumble around in it until you break it. And then you realize it is just one shirt in the wardrobe.

Lydia did not need Freestyle to find her voice. She needed to be around people who thought differently, who questioned everything, who made it okay to not fit in. Once she had that, she did not need the structure anymore. She became the structure.

The closing was not a failure. It was the graduation ceremony. I just did not know that is what it was.

A framework succeeds when people no longer need it in the same form.

Not Everybody’s Gonna Make It

I said that line at the beginning. I believed it then and I believe it now.

Not everybody makes it. Not because they are not talented. Because this work asks for something most people are not ready to give.

But the ones who stay long enough to outgrow the thing they came for do not just make it. They become something the mentor could never have designed.

Daniel is a physical therapist in Denmark. Lydia is coaching women to be unapologetically strong in Brisbane. Nate built The Run Experience. Chris runs his own practice in Miami.

None of them needed me to get there. They just needed a place to start.

And I needed them more than they will ever know.

Chris had never been upside down in his life. A big guy. A strength athlete. A writer. He could deadlift a small car and had never once put his hands on the ground and kicked his feet over his head.

I walked him through it in about three minutes. Wall climb. Then a box. Then a kick-up with me standing there ready to catch him. He held it for a millisecond. Sweating, grinning, shaking his head. How was that? Pretty, man.

If you have been reading these, you already know what happened in that room. I did not teach Chris anything. His shoulders could hold him. His core could stabilize. His hands could grip the ground. He had all of it. I just put him somewhere his body could finally show him what it already had.

That is the work. I have said it before. That’s the job.

What I have not said is that the job has not looked the same twice.

Chris passed away two years later. Sudden heart failure in Amsterdam. He was 35. He left a wife and two kids.

I did not know him well. I think about that session anyway. Not because I did anything special in it. Because it was one session. One afternoon. And you do not get told how many of those you have left.

Twenty years of rooms like that one. Same work every time. Four completely different ways of doing it.

I did not see the four of them while I was inside them. Only now, looking back.

The Four Rooms

I went through them in order, and I did not name them until they were behind me.

In the first room, I was the authority. I had the answers. I would tell you the truth and you would follow. It worked. But it had a ceiling.

In the second room, I showed up as if I knew nothing. I asked questions. I let people tell me what they needed. I became genuinely curious. And what came back taught me more than anything I had studied.

In the third room, I became the mirror. I had listened to so many people that I could reflect their experience back before they finished describing it. Not because I was reading minds. Because human beings, placed in similar enough conditions, arrive at the same questions. I was just a clear surface.

In the fourth room, the mirror disappeared. I was no longer reflecting and they were no longer receiving. We were building together. The framework belonged to both of us. The coaching became mutual. The authority became shared.

That fourth room is where I live now. And the only reason I can get there is because of every rep in the first three.

The Tapes

All four rooms run on the same thing. An eye. And mine started before I ever coached anyone.

When I was a kid in Spain, I used to watch videotapes of athletes in slow motion. Gymnasts. Skiers. Snowboarders. I would sit in front of the television and go one frame at a time until I burned the tapes out.

My mom confirmed this recently. She said I would sit there for hours. Just one frame. Then the next. Then back. Then forward again.

I was not studying technique. I was studying the moment when everything looked right. The frame where the body was suspended in something I could not name but could feel through the screen.

I did not know I was training my eye. I did not know that what I was building was the ability to see what a body already knows before the person living in it can see it themselves.

Talk Yourself Through It

I did not get to use that eye on other people until much later. And when I started coaching, I had no method.

I could demonstrate. I could do the movement myself. But I could not yet get someone else from where they were to where they wanted to go. So I tried the only thing I could think of.

Before you do the movement, describe what you are about to do. Out loud. Step by step.

Something happened when people narrated their own movement. They found things they did not know they knew. They would say, I think I need to tighten here, or I think my weight is too far forward. They were not repeating what I had told them. They were coaching themselves. I was just standing there giving them permission to listen to their own body.

That was the first clue. The answers were already inside them. I was not the source. I was the condition that made the answers visible.

The longer I coached, the more it felt like translating. I was not giving people new knowledge. I was taking something they already carried and describing it back to them in a language they could finally hear.

When that translation landed, something shifted in the room. Not because the information was new. Because it felt like remembering. Like I had described a feeling they had been living with for years but had never found the words for.

They did not come to learn something new. They came to be reminded of what they already knew.

And when I pushed past what they consciously knew, into the things they sensed but had not yet named, it became something deeper.

Tell me more about what I do not know I know.

That is where the real work lives.

Letting Go of the Teacher

There was still one thing in the way. I thought I had to be the movement guy.

I met Ido Portal in Berlin. We had lunch. He is one of the most dedicated people in the movement space. Philosophical. Intense. Completely committed to the craft

When I left that meeting, I thought something I had never allowed myself to think.

I can finally quit being this person I have been trying to be.

I had just sat across from someone who had given his entire life to the study of movement with a devotion I knew I would never match. And instead of feeling threatened by that, I felt free. Because if Ido had that covered, I did not need to play that game anymore. I did not need to be the movement guy. I did not need to be the reference. He could own that. And I could just be the other guy. The guy I already was.

In that moment I became more of myself than I had ever been.

That was the beginning of the fourth room. The one where I stopped needing to be the one who knew, and started building alongside the person in front of me instead.

The Handstand He Already Had

Which brings me back to Chris.

Chris Moore held a handstand for a millisecond on a day when he believed he could not do one.

He could. His body knew. He just needed someone to put him in a position where that knowledge could show itself.

That is what I do. That is what I have always done. From the kid burning tapes one frame at a time to the coach standing in front of someone who thinks they came to learn something new.

No one has ever needed me to give them something they did not have. They just needed someone to show them where it already was.

And sometimes that moment in the room is the only one you get. So it matters. Every time.

I did not understand interest. I did not understand credit. I did not understand what it meant to build a financial identity in a country that runs on one.

I was twenty-two. I had a degree in environmental science. I had been a competitive gymnast. I could do a standing backflip. And I could not have explained to you what a bank statement was trying to say.

I had some talent. I had instinct. I had the kind of confidence that comes from being good at something physical and believing that would be enough.

It was not enough.

This is a story about money. Not about making it. About not understanding it. And what that cost me before I finally chose to learn.

The Boat

Before I even got to the money part, I had to figure out where to live.

I was staying with a family friend in a little studio. It was great for a while. But while I was away for the summer, he moved his daughter into my room and put my stuff in the garage. I came back and had nowhere to sleep.

I slept in my car for two days.

I was so embarrassed I did not tell my parents. I just sat there trying to figure it out. Eventually another family friend said she knew someone with a boat. A very nice Norwegian guy who had sold me my car less than a year earlier. He let me stay on his boat in the Tiburon Keys for a few weeks until I found a place.

Picture me on this boat at night. I had found a cash flow course about real estate investing from a late-night infomercial. I had no idea what I was reading. But I thought, this has to be the thing. Cash flow. That is what matters. I was desperate to understand something that everyone else seemed to already know.

When I finally found an apartment, he invited me to dinner with his family. I asked him how I could pay him back.

Kalle, when there is somebody in need, you go help them if you can. That is how you pay me.

I have never forgotten that. I am a foster parent now. A grandfather at forty-four. I think about those words more than he will ever know.

Taking Without Knowing

I had a pattern long before business entered the picture.

In college I figured out a system. My sister taught me I could finish my degree faster by loading up on credits. My brother taught me how to study. Three passes through the material. Make a list, check it off. I was efficient and intended to graduate as quickly as possible.

But I needed notes from classes I could not attend. So I made friends. Not maliciously. I genuinely liked these people. But I would ask them for their notes, photocopy them, study from them, and show up for the test.

One night in my final year, I walked by the table where three of my friends were working late in the library. Raquel, Pilar, and Sylvia. I said, hey, I am going to dinner. When I get back, can I grab the notes from you?

They looked at me like... okay...?

Two days later, Raquel pulled me aside. She told me the truth. That what I was doing was hurtful and inconsiderate. That I was taking advantage of people without even knowing it.

She was right. I had no idea I was doing it. That is the part that stayed with me. Not that I was a bad person. That I could not see the impact of what I was doing on the people around me.

I took them all out to dinner after our graduation as a thank you for their friendship and help over the years. I picked them up in my dad’s BMW convertible, which was silly but also a fun way to say thank you. I am forever grateful to those three. Without Raquel’s honesty, I would not have the awareness I carry now about what it means to be in a truly collaborative relationship, not an extractive one.

That pattern, taking without realizing you are taking, would follow me for a long time.

Ten Thousand Dollars

My first real business was Naka Athletics.

Sole proprietor. DBA. I rented space at a private training studio called Breakaway Performance on Columbus Street downtown San Francisco. I learned how to invoice people, how to get paid with a check, how to deposit it, how to file taxes.

The most basic version of running a business.

I remember my mom was visiting and I showed her my bank account. I had ten thousand dollars in it. I said jokingly, Mom, look. I am rich.

I was not rich, of course. But it felt like the most significant thing I had ever accomplished. I had made something from nothing. In a country I was born in but that still felt foreign to me. In a language I was still learning to master. With a skill set that had no degree attached to it.

I bought my first car. I had roommates. My brother Oscar, my sister, a good friend Fito. Everything felt like it was moving.

And I had no idea what was coming.

The Partnership

I met Derek at AcroSports. He was taking breaking classes. I was coaching gymnastics. We started talking about building something together.

What I wanted was simple. I was the talent. He was the business mind. I proposed an 80/20 revenue split. He takes 20 percent for managing the business side. I keep 80 for being the one in the room.

We started an LLC. We signed the documents. I did not understand what I was signing. I thought I was keeping 80 percent of what came in. I was not. The terms I had agreed to were nothing like what I had in my head. But I did not know that yet.

I just signed and trusted. I went by feel the way I had gone by feel my whole life. In gymnastics that instinct had carried me. In business it was about to cost me everything.

I want to be fair. Derek was difficult to work with. I did not trust him. But I was also a a pain in the neck. I was the slippery talent who was too busy being popular and coaching to sit down and understand what was being built around me. If I were him, I would have been frustrated too. He was trying to build something significant and I did not have the ability to think like an engineer at the time. I could not meet him where he needed me.

I had the skill to create value. I did not have the structure to protect it.

The Boom

GymnasticsWOD launched on November 28, 2010. Only a few months after Kelly Starrett launched MobilityWOD.

It was an immediate hit.

We had daily programming that posted in blog format. Weekly video tutorials. Seminars started selling. I was traveling the world teaching. The content was resonating. The CrossFit community was hungry for it and I was one of the few doing it at that level.

I was in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.

And I did not understand the business underneath any of it.

I was popular, in demand, and coaching constantly. And I had no energy left to look at what was actually happening with the money, the structure, the company I had helped create but could not read.

Rooms I Did Not Have the Language For

During these years, people kept putting me in rooms I did not belong in. Or rather, I belonged in them and did not know it.

I would go to meetings with Derek and not realize we were sitting across from potential partners, engineers, connections to venture capital. One of the questions people would ask me over and over was, what is your exit strategy?

I had no idea what those words meant. What exit? This is my life. This is my work. There is no exit here. I was living with a YOLO mentality and people were asking me about liquidity events.

I was in the startup world and I did not even know that is what it was called.

I was an ambassador for a health diagnostics startup called WellnessFX. I believed in the product but did not understand the business model, the fundraising, or my share options. I also contributed to a fitness app built by Dick Costolo after he left as CEO of Twitter. The content they needed was a watered-down version of me. That was not anyone’s fault. But it was the worst content creation experience I ever had because what came out of it was not me.

Talent kept getting me into rooms. I did not have the language to participate in them.

The Fumble

One of the biggest opportunities I had during that era was with Rogue Fitness.

Rogue was already selling my DVDs. They had become a wholesale account, which I did not know what that meant either at the time. The relationship was real.

We started developing products together. I got prototypes. This could have been a very lucrative channel. But I could not execute. I was not fast enough at iterating on the designs. I was not prioritizing it. I could not turn a prototype into a viable product that could actually be sold.

Then we tried to do an instructional poster, the kind that was popular to hang in gyms at the time. I flew out to Columbus to do a photoshoot for it. Rogue created a design. It did not match the style of my book. So I brought in my own designers to align it with the Freestyle aesthetic. The gap between what Rogue had built and what my team was asking for got so wide that Rogue just dropped it. They had already spent money on me to produce the content.

I never followed up. I never apologized.

That one still sits with me. Rogue gave me a real shot and I fumbled it. Not because of a bad partner or a bad deal. Because I was not ready to execute on the business side of an opportunity that was right in front of me.

The Check

In June of 2013, I got a paycheck from a supplement sponsorship.

Only half of it went into my account.

I called Derek. Where is the rest of the money?

It is mine, he said.

How? I thought we were 80/20.

We are 50/50 on the business. You signed it.

I had signed it. And I did not even know.

The Separation

I had been writing Freestyle with Tony Sherbondy for about three years by then.

Working with Tony had shown me what real collaboration felt like. Two minds building something together. Trust. Shared vision. Mutual respect. It was the opposite of what I had with Derek.

On a flight back from Las Vegas, I told Tony I was going to end the partnership. And I did.

What followed was a year-long separation process, then a three-year business and money shitshow that I did not know how to navigate.

I did not know I could have dissolved the company. My options were invisible to me. I did not have a lawyer with the right experience guiding me through it. I probably could have filed for bankruptcy and been better off but I did not even know that was a possibility. I ended up paying Derek a significant amount of money to walk away from something I had built.

On top of that, I was making more money than I realized I was making. Which sounds like a good problem until you understand what it means at tax time when you have not set anything aside. I got behind. Then further behind. Then buried.

Nineteen Dollars

In February 2018, I looked at my bank account.

$19.

I sat there staring at it. And every story I had ever told myself about who I was came flooding back. The kid who never did his homework. The messy room. The papers that were never in the binder. The bored boy who resisted everything that was not stimulating enough to hold his attention.

I thought, this is who I actually am. A loser. A deadbeat. The lazy, unorganized version of myself that I had been running from my whole life had finally caught up with me.

I managed to get through it. Barely. Scraping by. Having panic attacks. Feeling like absolute garbage.

And then my dad helped me.

I had been avoiding asking for money. Avoiding it for as long as I could. The shame was unbearable. Asking my father for financial help felt like confirmation of every fear I had about myself.

When the money came through, I was at lunch with Tonya in Fresno. I started crying. Not from gratitude exactly. From relief so deep it broke something open.

How do I pay this forward? How do I pay this back? What does any of this mean?

I just did not understand money. I had never understood it. And not understanding it had almost destroyed me.

The Return

In 2019 I took three months off.

I was underweight and undertrained. I had developed debilitating tinnitus. I had been fired from San Francisco CrossFit, lost my business, separated from my business partner, and nearly went bankrupt.

I started meditating daily. Sitting with the sunset. Learning to live with myself again.

And then, slowly, after lots of exploring and twists and turns, I came back to the one thing I had always known how to do.

Training.

The thing I had once considered the bottom of the barrel in fitness. The thing my dad had pointed me toward with a magazine article about trainers making six figures. The thing I had been doing since Equinox in 2007 before any of the rest of it happened.

I came back to it. But I came back different.

Where Every Cent Goes

I know where every cent goes now.

That is not a small sentence for me. It is the distance between who I was and who I am.

I understand my costs. My margins. My taxes. What recurring revenue looks like. What it takes to run a practice as a business that does not depend on the next opportunity showing up by accident.

I am not the kid who could not do his homework. I am not the twenty-two-year-old who did not know what a credit card was. I am not the guy with nineteen dollars staring at a bank screen wondering if this was always going to be the ending.

I am building again. Slowly. Intentionally. From where I actually am. Not from where I wish I was or where the internet says I should be.

I see people build things all the time that make no sense. Cool products. Flashy launches. Big ideas with no foundation underneath them. The gap between where they are and what they are creating is so wide that the viability is almost zero.

I know that gap. I lived inside it for years. I had the talent to create value and no structure to protect it. I had access to rooms I could not read. I fumbled opportunities that were right in front of me because I was building from ambition instead of position.

I treat my personal training practice as the biggest business I have ever run. Not in revenue. In clarity.

And I know that the boring stuff is not the obstacle.

It is the only thing that has ever set me free.

What do I need to do to get fit?

Every time. For twenty-two years. Without fail. He sees me, he remembers that physical training matters, and he wants the answer. The secret sauce. The thing that will finally make it click.

So one year, when Tonya and I were in Switzerland to meet my older sister’s newborn daughter, I decided to build him a program. My parents were there. And my dad, right on cue, asked the question.

Okay. Let us start with squatting.

The Cues That Did Not Land

I tried everything I knew.

Sit on a chair and stand up. Squat with a wall behind you. Push your hips back. Chest up.

Standard cues. The kind any qualified coach would use.

None of them worked.

He was lifting his heels. Bending at the knees first. Not using his hips. Rounding his back. Every correction I gave him created a new problem somewhere else. The cues were not wrong. They just were not reaching the place where his body could receive them.

For a second I thought, maybe he is just too old. Too stiff. Maybe this is not going to happen.

But I knew my dad. He was a gymnast growing up. A diver. A good skier. Athletic and coordinated when he chooses to be. The ability was in there, but he just had no way to access it from where he was standing.

The Back Door

So I threw out the playbook.

Can you touch your knees?

Yes.

Can you touch your toes?

Yes.

Now do it with your feet together.

And something happened. With his feet together, his knees naturally fell out to the sides. His feet stayed flat. His heels stayed down. I could progressively load his hips, then his knees, then his ankles, and the shapes started coming together on their own.

I did not teach him how to squat. I found the back door into the movement. The most accessible entry point that still led to the real thing.

I called it the Old Man Squat. Because I made it up with my dad and because that felt right.

The standard was still a squat. I did not lower it. I just found a way in from where he actually was.

The best progression ramps up the novice and challenges the advanced.

Starting From the Bottom

This was not the first time I had been forced to rethink where a movement begins.

A few months earlier, I was at my CrossFit Level 2 certification.

The Level 2 is where they evaluate your coaching. You get assigned a group and a movement, and you teach it while the evaluators watch. I got the squat.

Andy Stumpf was evaluating. The room included some of the people who had built CrossFit’s education program. It was serious, and I was nervous.

Everyone teaches the squat from the top. Standing position. Then down.

I started from the bottom.

I had everybody get into the squat position first and coached from there. It was how Kelly Starrett sometimes had us warm up, and it made sense to me. Start where people get stuck. Build from the transition point, not the start.

In my evaluation, they noted it. They said it stood out because I started in a completely different way than most coaches. And what they said next stayed with me.

We do not care what technique you use. We care about the one that works. And what you did worked.

Fifteen years later, another athlete who was taking that course with me, Zach Forrest, mentioned it to me out of nowhere. He said he still remembered how I coached that squat. That was a good feeling.

Beyond the Gym

This principle is not only about squats. I have used it with coaches, athletes, founders, and people trying to build businesses. Sometimes the progression is not a drill. Sometimes it is one video, one conversation, one small step they can actually take.

Too easy and nothing changes. Too hard and the person protects.

The standard stays the same. The entry point changes.

Twenty-Two Years

My dad has never stuck with it.

Every time I see him, we start again. I give him something simple. He likes it. He realizes there is no quick fix, that it requires a change in lifestyle, a continuous effort, something you have to do every day. And he drops off. I come back. We start again.

Twenty-two years of this.

I can help strangers find a way into their bodies in an hour, and still not make my own father choose the thing he keeps asking me for.

Right now he is working with a good friend of mine, a physical therapist and trainer in Spain. That makes me happy. Although I have not been able to succeed with him myself, he at least has some consistency. It only took twenty-two years.

One of the things he does appreciate about my coaching is that everything is quickly learned and so simple and accessible you cannot deny it. But I think that is also part of the problem. When the barrier of entry is too low, it can be easy to dismiss. Oh, I will just do it tomorrow.

That is the paradox. The physical entry point has to be low enough to access. The commitment still has to be meaningful enough to respect.

The best progression in the world does not solve commitment. That is not its job.

A progression builds the bridge. Walking across it is still yours to do.

What the Body Showed Me

When I was watching my dad struggle in Switzerland, something shifted in me.

I almost let my knowledge limit my thinking. I almost said, he is too old, he is too stiff, this is not going to work. And if I had stopped there, I would have been wrong. Not because the assessment was inaccurate. Because I had not yet asked the body to show me the way.

Can you touch your knees? Can you touch your toes?

That was the moment I began to understand something I would carry with me into every seminar, every coaching session, every conversation for the rest of my career.

The body often shows the way in. We just need to learn how to see it.

A couple of days later, I was teaching the same entry point to advanced athletes at a seminar in Iceland. That is when the idea became clear.

A good progression is not beginner work.

It is access work.

The best progression does not lower the standard.

It makes the work reachable.

In the mornings I volunteered at the Marine Mammal Center in the Marin Headlands. Physical labor. Long hours. Then I would drive across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco to coach gymnastics at AcroSports on Frederick Street for $13.50 an hour.

The building was the old girls’ gymnasium from Polytechnic High School. Tall ceilings. Tight space. It smelled like chalk, resin, old sweat, and a little bit of feet. Rotations ran all day. Thousands of kids moved through that gym every week.

I had about six boys. Ages six to eight. A couple were naturally talented. Mateo had less obvious natural ability but loved gymnastics and worked harder than anyone. Eli was quiet and peculiar, always somewhere else until it was time to work. And then there was Asha. Homeschooled. Eccentric. Long hair, sometimes dyed, always a little dirty. The kind of kid who said things that made you stop and reconsider everything.

It was a rec program. No competitive team. Most of the kids played soccer or basketball on the side. That secretly annoyed me. It meant gymnastics was not their main focus.

But my ego wanted them to be great.

FILA

I lined them up small to tall. FILA. That is what we called it in Spain. You line up, you get your welcome, you hear what to expect, and then off to practice. We closed that way too.

I liked the culture I grew up in. So I brought it with me.

I ran conditioning circuits. Gymnastics-specific shaping. Hollow bodies. Arch positions. Handstand holds until their traps burned and their backs felt like they were going to snap. Flexibility where you hold a position and push yourself to the point of wanting to cry.

I was the loudest coach on the floor. The office staff knew it. Everyone on the gym floor knew it.

I was not angry at them. I was not trying to hurt them. I just wanted it to feel like a real session. In my judgmental twenty-two-year-old opinion, every other program in that gym was soft and needed to harden up.

The parents seemed to like my style. The kids did pretty well. But something was off. The vibe was broken. The drive was not aligned. It was just not something that was going to last or produce anything meaningful.

I was reproducing the only system I knew.

The Treehouse

I was driving into the city one afternoon, and something woke up in me. It was not a grand idea. I think I was just tired. Tired from the early mornings at the Marine Mammal Center. Tired of the drive. Tired of hearing myself repeat the same old-school thinking that was not reaching them.

So I sat them down.

I asked them what they actually wanted to learn.

Asha said he wanted to jump out of his treehouse and survive.

I laughed.

That laugh broke the tension in the room. And in me.

One by one, the other kids started sharing what they wanted. Specific things. Things that mattered to them. Not to me. Not to USA Gymnastics. To the kids.

And for the first time, I realized they were leading me.

Their Standards

We did not abandon gymnastics. We tapped into it.

Before the shift, I was always trying to hit numbers. Hold the handstand for a minute. Three sets. Exact recovery times. Circuits with targets. Constantly chasing metrics that meant something to gymnastics and nothing to them.

After the shift, I stopped chasing numbers and started working with time and focus. If we had fifteen minutes on the floor, we spent that time on drills and movements that connected to what they were actually building toward. 80% of the session focused on their goals. 20% was dedicated to the foundation, the sport-specific work that would give them a sharper and stronger base.

We did not lower the standard. We changed the entry point.

The standard was still gymnastics.

The reason had to be theirs.

Once they had a reason to move, they were open to structure. Once they had purpose, they stopped resisting the process. They had agency. They could lead. And because they could lead, they were willing to be led.

Eli

But changing the format did not mean I had changed.

Even inside the new structure, I was still the loudest coach on the floor. I still pushed. I still carried the old pattern with me, even when the system around it had shifted.

One day I pushed Eli too far.

He was already tired. I did not read it. I kept going.

Then I looked over and saw his head drop. He had longish hair, enough that his bangs would hang over his eyes. His arms and shoulders just fell. He was looking off to the side. Crying quietly.

I walked up to him. Hey Eli, are you okay?

He did not say anything. Just looking away.

I grabbed him gently by the arms and got down on my knees. What is going on?

He was not speaking.

Do you want to do it a little differently? Do you want to take a break? Come back when you are ready. You tell me what you need.

That was all I could offer. The loudest coach on the floor, on his knees, asking a quiet kid what he needed.

I had changed the format. But the wound was still coaching.

The X Team

Eventually, something happened that I did not plan.

This group became what we called the X Team. The Exhibition Team. They started performing real gymnastics routines in front of their parents. A competition format, but without judges. The goal was not to score. The goal was to perform by feel. To move in the most elegant, expressive way they could. To embody the art in artistic gymnastics.

Kids who had been climbing on things they were not supposed to climb on were now performing for an audience. On their terms. With structure they had chosen to accept.

That was never the plan. But it was always the point.

What I Was Really Doing

I did not see any of this then.

I was twenty-two. I had just walked away from gymnastics feeling like a failed athlete. I did not live up to what I imagined I could be. Too tall. Too weak. Too scared. The whole list I had been carrying since I was sixteen in Spain.

And there I was, standing in front of six boys in a rec gym, running them through the same system that had failed to find me.

I was not coaching them. I was trying to prove something through them. That I was serious. That I could produce results. That I was great in ways the mold of gymnastics had never allowed me to express.

The suffering was not standards. It was my wound dressed up as discipline.

What They Taught Me

Danny and Luke were the most talented kids I coached at AcroSports. They both eventually left to pursue other sports.

Mateo, the one with the least obvious natural ability, stuck around the longest. He just loved it. His father appreciated the guidance. And Mateo kept showing up.

Talent does not predict commitment. Purpose does.

The kids who stayed were not the ones with the most ability. They were the ones who had found a reason to be there.

They did not need my system first.

They needed a reason to care.

Purpose did not lower the standard.

It made the standard reachable.

Same leg press. Same bench press. Same basic squats.

Same gym. Same coach. Same blue shirt. Same twenty-something former gymnast making it up in real time.

But the work was not the same.

With one man, I became an engineer.

With the other, I became the steady guide.

Same movement. Different purpose.

The Blue Shirt

It was 2007. My dad sent me an article saying personal trainers were making six figures a year. That was the first time I thought, oh. This could be something I could do.

I found an opening at Equinox in downtown San Francisco, inside the historic Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building on Pine Street. From the outside it looked like a bank. On the inside it was a modern, high-end gym with new rubber floors and that specific Equinox scent they used as part of their cleaning products. I remember walking in and thinking, this is kind of next level.

There was something about working in the financial district that made it feel like a real professional job. Not just coaching. A career.

I had no experience in traditional strength and conditioning. The only gym I had ever trained in outside of gymnastics was a bodybuilding gym one summer as a teenager when our facility was closed. That was it.

They handed me clients and I figured it out as I went.

Two of my first were assigned to me for their complimentary session when they signed up. Both of them signed up to train with me. A blue shirt with no credentials beyond a gymnastics background and whatever instinct I was running on.

Their names were Charles and Kai.

Charles

Charles walked in and shook my hand. His hand was cold. He could barely look me in the eye. He was overweight, very pale, and so quiet I was not sure he wanted to be there.

We walked up the stairs to run his body composition test and fill out his intake form. He started sweating before we reached the top.

He was jittery. Shaking. I remember watching him try to stand still, rolling front to back on his running shoes. He could not find stillness in his own feet.

This was the most uncomfortable person I had ever met. In his body. In his own skin. Everything about him said I do not belong here but I am going to try.

I made a decision right there. This guy needs me to be a gentle but firm guiding hand. That is what I was going to be for him.

I did not have to try to be anybody but me. Just a human hanging out with another human.

Kai

Kai walked in with a warm, yet extremely serious, smile and a firm handshake. Pitch black slicked back hair. Shiny white teeth. Bronze skin. Piercing eyes.

He was not tall. But he had presence. He knew the importance of showing up fully. Good posture. Solid stance. He had already decided how the room was going to go.

Controlled. Confident. Direct. He wanted to get better at golf and have his rotational strength dialed in. He told me exactly what he was after before I had a chance to ask.

The Engineer and the Steady Guide

We started on the same program. Leg press. Bench press. Eventually, free standing squats, though Equinox at the time did not believe in full range of motion squatting because it was considered too dangerous.

Then one Saturday morning, Kai and I were on the leg extension machine, just following the program. And he looked at me and said, how is this going to help my golf?

It caught me off guard.

I probably gave him an answer like, “Oh yeah, this is good for developing quad strength, good accessory work, building the muscles around the knees, could give you some stability.” But I remember going home that night and thinking, wait a second. These are not transferable skills. I need to up my game. If I cannot meet him where he needs me, I am not doing my job.

So I stopped following the program. I started doing kettlebell work with him. Unilateral loading. Free weights. I started incorporating my gymnastics core strength work. And that lit his brain up. He started to feel like we were actually collaborating. Not coach and client. Two people working on a problem together.

That was the biggest shift. The moment it went from program to partnership.

Kai grew up in Hawaii. Humbly. He wanted to work on Wall Street in New York. He applied everywhere until one day he got a call. If you can be here tomorrow at 8 AM, the internship is yours. Hawaii and New York are far apart. In less than 24 hours he made it there and got his position. He started getting coffee and sandwiches. Eventually, he learned the business and became a senior financial advisor.

That is who Kai was. When there was a target, he found a way to reach it. Golf was no different. Neither was training. He treated the training like a tool to get where he wanted to go. And I mean that in the best possible way. My job was to be precise, ready, and keep up.

With Charles, the work was never about precision.

I became the steady guide. The person he could be his awkward, sweating, uncomfortable self around and still push. He did not need engineering. He did not need kettlebell swings or rotational strength. He needed someone who was not going to flinch at how hard it was for him to just be in his own body.

And he worked. Quietly. Relentlessly. He was the most consistent client I had. He showed up every session. He did every rep. He never complained. He was one of the least physically prepared people I had ever worked with yet one of the most impressive.

I remember the moment I first noticed it. He was getting slimmer. And not just slimmer. His biceps were starting to pop out. I remember thinking, “Oh, wow. It is happening.”

One day, I encouraged him to get new workout clothes. And when he walked in wearing them, I found it so endearing. It was almost like a proud dad moment. Which is ridiculous because I was in my mid-twenties and he was older than me. I had no business being his dad. But as his guide, I felt really proud.

I think I loved that man.

What I Could Not See Then

I ran the same program. I coached the same exercises. I showed up as the same person. But the work was not the same.

For Kai, the work was precision. Understanding. Mastery. The body as a vehicle for performance.

For Charles, the work was trust. Safety. Permission. The body as a place he could finally belong.

I would say it like this now: coaching is part engineering and part art. Kai pulled the engineering out of me. Charles pulled the art. I did not choose which coach to be. They revealed it.

They Followed Me

Both of them followed me out of Equinox.

First to a place called Breakaway Performance, a private training studio where I could run my own business and stop being an employee. Then to San Francisco CrossFit. Which was in a parking lot.

To see these two men go from the financial district to a grungy parking lot just to keep working with me spoke volumes. About their loyalty. Their willingness. Their trust.

And it was at that parking lot where Kai started to change.

He opened up. He started to guide me. Almost like a mentor.

He had this phrase: “Everybody is right, everybody is wrong.” Context matters.

He would also tell me, “You have to elevate yourself.”

He did not say it as criticism. He said it as investment. As if he believed I could be more.

He took me on a trip down to the Titleist Performance Institute. Not because he needed me to learn something for him. Because he wanted me to grow so I could help him grow.

He was developing me so I could develop him.

That was one of the most powerful coaching relationships I have ever been in.

And I was supposed to be the coach.

Opposite Directions

Funny enough, they were both in finance.

On paper, they looked like two versions of the same demographic. In the room, they could not have been more different. And over time, they both changed. But they changed in opposite directions.

Kai, the guy who walked in like he owned the room, became softer. More open. More willing to show the big heart he had underneath all that polish. Precision gave him a place to stop performing and start feeling.

Charles, the guy who could not make eye contact, became someone who stood in his own body like he trusted it. He did not become loud. He did not become someone else. He became more of who he already was, just without the weight of believing he did not belong.

Eventually Charles moved to Atlanta. But when he came into town, he would come visit me and we would do a session together. That stayed with me.

Kai moved back to Hawaii to take care of his mom.

When our coaching relationship ended, I did not lose anything. I just gained. And I hope they both know how much they shaped my coaching and my thinking.

Behavior Always Has Context

I understand now that behavior always has context.

What looks like resistance in one person may be protection in another. What looks like intensity in one person may be mastery in another. What looks like confidence may be armor. What looks like weakness may be a body asking for enough safety to try.

This is not only true in the gym.

Silence is not always withdrawal. Sometimes it is peace. Sometimes it is punishment. Sometimes it is protection.

Intensity is not always confidence. Sometimes it is mastery. Sometimes it is fear. Sometimes it is devotion.

Resistance is not always laziness. Sometimes it is confusion. Sometimes it is self-protection. Sometimes it is someone saying, I do not feel safe enough to move from here yet.

The mistake is assuming the visible pattern tells the whole story.

It does not.

The behavior is the movement. The purpose is what the movement is serving. The position is where the whole thing starts.

Before I Knew I Was Being Taught

I think about Kai and Charles more than they will ever know.

Not because the training was remarkable. Especially in the beginning. It was basic. Leg press. Bench press. Squats. Nothing special.

But something was already happening that I did not have words for.

I was not just coaching movement. I was responding to something underneath the movement. The position each person was starting from. The need each person was carrying into the room. The purpose the work was actually serving.

I did not call it that then. I did not have a framework. I did not have Position. Movement. Purpose. written on a whiteboard. I was just a blue shirt at Equinox trying to be useful.

But years later, when I finally put those three words on a piece of paper crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, I realized they were not new.

They were what I had been doing all along. I just could not see it yet.

The Pattern and the Purpose

This is what most people miss.

They see the behavior and think they understand it. They see silence and assume it means one thing. They see intensity and assume it means another. They see two people doing the same exercise and assume the work is the same.

It is not.

A squat is never just a squat. A conversation is never just a conversation. A reaction is never just a reaction.

The movement is what you can see. The purpose is what it is serving. The position is where the whole thing starts.

You cannot change a pattern you have not learned to read.

That is what Kai and Charles taught me before I knew I was being taught.

Madrid. Summer camp. Last day.

We had been doing two-a-days all week, and I remember standing by the high bar with blood soaking through my wrist wraps. Not from one dramatic injury. From open calluses. Ripped skin. Wrists torn up from trying to make something work that would not work.

I was training an endo.

It is a basic skill in gymnastics. Young kids learn it early. You circle around the bar with your legs in a straddle, outside your arms, then come back up toward handstand.

For the life of me, I could not hold my legs in place.

I was also working on my dismount.

A double back off high bar.

Simple by gymnastics standards. Not simple in my body.

A few years earlier I had flown off the bar and hit a wall. I needed stitches. My teammates had been bullying me before the turn, telling me I was going to die. I believed them.

Then I watched another gymnast let go late on a dismount, land on the bar with both legs, and break both of them in competition.

Then I saw another kid land poorly off a rings dismount and suffer an open fracture. Blood on the competition mat.

I did not have language for it then. I just knew that every time I prepared to let go of the bar, my body remembered things my coach was not coaching.

The cues kept coming.

Duro.

Get tight.

Relax.

Go faster.

Go slower.

The words were not wrong exactly. They were just not reaching the place where the problem lived.

No one helped me find leverage. No one helped me find control. No one helped me feel safe. No one translated the technique into something my body could receive.

So I kept trying. And I kept failing. Other kids were getting it. I was not.

Eventually the feeling became bigger than the skill. It was not just that I could not do the endo or release from the bar the right way. It was that I could not figure out what everyone else seemed to understand.

I did not cry. I shut down.

There was no life in me there.

The System Could Not Find Me

Looking back, I think that was the beginning of the end of my gymnastics career.

Not because I stopped loving movement. Because I started believing the system could not find me.

And when a system cannot find you long enough, you start assuming the problem is you.

I told myself I was low talent. Too long and lanky. Like I did not fit the mold. Too weak. Too scared. Not built for gymnastics. Not tough enough. Not coachable enough. I went through the whole list.

Later in life, I overcorrected. I went to college and tripled down on getting work done. I wanted knowledge. Credentials. Proof. I wanted to show that I was a high performer. I wanted to win. Win at everything.

But underneath that was a simpler wound.

I could not figure out what other people were understanding. And because no one had helped me understand it through my body, I decided I had to figure everything out myself.

That made me introspective. Self-reliant. Obsessive about patterns.

It also made me a coach.

The Source Code

Years later, in 2009, I experienced something different.

I was at San Francisco CrossFit. Kelly Starrett was there. Adrian Bozman was there.

And for the first time, I felt coaching land in me.

Kelly had a way of speaking that pulled you in before you realized you were being taught. He could capture attention, tell a story, challenge you, and suddenly you were inside the concept.

He used enough technical language to make the mechanics clear. But he did not stop at mechanics. He got underneath the movement. He could find the feeling behind the skill and make it usable in the moment.

I had never experienced that from a coach before.

Gymnastics coaches had taught me dogmatic techniques. Kelly was teaching movement skills.

It felt like someone had finally given me the source code. Not a new trick. A new way to see.

Three Words on the Golden Gate

A few seminars later, I was on my way to teach a four-hour workshop at TJ’s Gym in San Rafael.

My business partner was driving. We were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, and I was sitting in the passenger seat trying to figure out how the hell I was going to open the session.

I had the content. I had taught plenty of movement sessions before. I knew the progressions. I knew the drills. I knew the gymnastics pieces.

But I needed an anchor.

So I took out a piece of paper and wrote three words.

Position. Movement. Purpose.

They came out at once.

I do not remember trying to invent anything. I do not remember sitting there and building a framework in some intellectual way. It was more like I wrote down the three things I knew for certain.

The body has a position. The body moves from that position. The movement is always serving something.

That was enough.

When I got to the workshop, I put Position on the whiteboard first.

The room got quiet.

Not dramatic. Not theatrical. Just quiet. People were listening.

And for the first time, I did not need to remember material. I had a lens. I could organize everything coming through me in real time.

That was the day the framework became real. Not because I had invented it in a notebook. Because I had been trying to solve the same problem my whole life.

How do I help this person get from where they are to where they want to go — without pretending they are someone else?

That question had been there since Madrid. It was there when the cues did not land. It was there when the system could not find me. It was there when Kelly finally reached me.

The Kids Taught Me Purpose

It was there when I started coaching kids at Acrosports and made the same mistake I had grown up inside.

I lined them up. Small to tall. I made them repeat. I made them work. I wanted them to suffer enough to understand what hard work was. I had mistaken suffering for standards. I crushed them. And they resisted me.

They were not defiant. They were just uninterested. Messing around with each other, climbing on things they were not supposed to climb on, doing everything but what I had planned. My coaching was not reaching them.

Eventually I stopped. I sat them down and asked what they actually wanted to learn.

One kid said he wanted to run up a wall and backflip off it. Another said he wanted to jump out of his treehouse and survive.

I chuckled.

Not because it was silly. Because the whole room changed.

For the first time, we had a reason to move. They did not need my system first. They needed a purpose. Once they had that, they were open to structure. They had agency. They could lead — and because they could lead, they were willing to be led.

The kids taught me purpose. The adults taught me position.

The adults wanted freedom too. They wanted basic tumbling, cool tricks, something to take home to their backyards and trampolines. But their bodies could not absorb the same path. They were stiff. They lacked proprioception. They were slower to progress. Their joints hurt. One guy could barely split his legs thirty degrees and still wanted to tumble. I thought he was going to snap in half.

So I did what I had been taught. Tape it up. More tape. More drills. More trying.

Until I realized the obvious thing I had been missing.

They did not need to be forced through gymnastics. They needed their bodies prepared for the thing they wanted to do. They needed a way in from where they actually were.

That became my work. Not getting people to perform a method — finding the position they were starting from, the movement they were making from there, and the purpose the movement was trying to serve.

Position. Movement. Purpose.

Reading Bodies

At first, I used it to read bodies.

Someone walks in. Before they touch a barbell, before they say a word — I am already reading. Position: where are they? What shape is the body in before anything begins? Movement: how do they change from one position to the next? Where does the pattern break, hesitate, compensate, protect? Purpose: what is this movement actually trying to do?

A squat is not just a squat. A powerlifter squats one way. A weightlifter squats another. Squatting to poop in the woods is another way. Same general movement. Different purpose. Different expression.

That was the first version.

But the longer I coached, the more I realized I was not only reading movement.

I was reading people.

Reading People

A body has a position. A person has a state.

A body moves from that position. A person acts from that state.

A movement serves a purpose. A behavior serves a need.

That is when the framework stopped being only about fitness.

In the body, position is shape in space. In life, position is where you actually are.

Your state. Your beliefs. Your situation. Your body. Your constraints. The story you are living inside.

In the body, movement is the change from one shape to another. In life, movement is what you do from there.

Your behavior. Your reaction. Your next action. Your pattern. The way you participate.

In the body, purpose is the function the movement serves. In life, purpose is the need underneath the action.

The fear. The mission. The protection. The desire. The thing the pattern is trying to solve.

Same Movement. Different Purpose.

This is why the same behavior can mean completely different things in two different people.

Silence can be peace. Silence can be punishment. Silence can be protection. Silence can be fear. Silence can be restraint.

Same movement. Different purpose.

And this is why so much coaching, leadership, parenting, teaching, and training goes sideways.

People try to change the movement before they understand the position. They try to fix the schedule before they understand the state. They try to fix the argument before they understand the need. They try to fix the business before they understand the body running it. They try to fix the output before they understand the operating system.

So the same pattern keeps returning.

Not because the person is lazy. Not because they lack information. Not because they need another universal prescription. Because they are trying to change a pattern they have not learned to read.

You cannot change a pattern until you understand the state it starts from and the need it is serving.

When the Framework Left the Gym

I saw this outside the gym for the first time in South Africa.

I was in Cape Town teaching a seminar. The next morning, I was having breakfast with someone who had attended. He was a CrossFit practitioner, but he also worked in the startup world.

He told me that Position. Movement. Purpose translated directly into the work he did building teams and products.

I cannot remember his name. I have thought about that conversation more than he will ever know. Sometimes the person who changes how you see your work is someone you meet once over breakfast and never see again.

He saw something I was not ready to fully say yet.

This was not just movement. It was a framework for development.

That breakfast was the first time I felt the framework leave the gym.

I did not have the courage to fully claim it yet, but I knew he was right.

The Signal

I would say this differently now.

I used to say the body never lies.

I still understand what I meant.

The body gives the first signal.

Breath. Tension. Energy. Timing. Pressure.

But a signal is not the whole truth.

The body gives information. The mind builds the story around it. Action reveals what we actually chose.

That is why feel matters. Not because feeling is always right. Because feeling is often first. And if you skip the signal, you perform from the story.

That is what I was doing on high bar. My body was not refusing the dismount because I was weak. It was holding a memory. A wall. A threat. A teammate’s voice. A broken body on the bar. Blood on a mat.

The movement problem was real. But the position was deeper than the technique.

No amount of duro could reach that. No amount of go faster could reach that.

The cue was trying to change the movement. No one was reading the position.

I do not say that as blame.

I say it because it became my life’s work.

I spent years thinking the system had missed me because something was wrong with me. Maybe I was too tall. Too weak. Too scared. Too low talent. Too hard to coach.

But the longer I coached, the more I realized something else.

A system can be useful and still miss the person. A cue can be correct and still fail to land. A movement can look simple and still be impossible from the wrong position.

That became the work.

Position. Movement. Purpose.

Where are you? What are you doing from there? What is it serving?

When I watch someone hesitate before a release now, I do not see weakness. I see a body holding something the mouth has not said yet.

That is where the work begins.

You cannot change a pattern you have not learned to read.

Not just organizationally — though yes, my gymnastics bag was full of chalk, bloody bandages, broken grips, and dirty shirts. It’s still in storage somewhere in Spain. It probably smells exactly like you can imagine.

Messy emotionally. Messy brain. Messy room. My mom used to joke that when I walked into a space I would move through it with my arms out to the sides, knocking things off shelves and walls as I went. Little body. Big mess.

In school I couldn’t focus on reading. I remember sitting there supposed to be following the words on the page and instead watching a little stick figure in my mind doing parkour across the letters — running, jumping, flipping from one to the next. My backpack had a binder in it but the papers were never in the binder. They were wrinkled around it, loose, going everywhere.

But put me in a gym and everything organized. The progression gave me peace. The structure gave me stability. My mind and body finally had somewhere to go.

I have spent my whole life trying to find that gym in everything else I do.

In 2021 I got a call from my friend Gabriel Jaochico — BBoy Wicket — telling me that Breaking was going to be in the Olympics in Paris and they were building Team USA. He said: We’ve never done this before. We know you have some experience. Any chance you’d come talk to us?

After the first call I knew this was going to be much more than one conversation.

I dove in. Connected with the coaches. Started connecting with the athletes. Learned how everything was working. And then had the opportunity to join the governing body and become part of the coaching team.

I walked away.

The politics. The agendas. The tension of coming in as an outsider — a gymnast in a Breaking world. I had seen this before in gymnastics federations. Everyone out to get something. This group wasn’t for me.

But I held onto two strings. My dream of the Olympics. And a genuine connection to the athletes and the path they were on.

So I proposed something. The anti-agent agent. I would help them become the CEO of their own career. A team of one. Run like a high performing organization — with strategy, vision, professional relationships, personal brand. I would be the advisor. The board. The person who had been in their shoes before, or close enough to feel what they were feeling.

My mantra for all of them: not everyone will make it. But every single one of you will be successful. Meaning every one of them would create a succession. Capture the moment. Build something that would serve them long after the Olympics were over — whether they made it there or not.

This was the closest I had ever been to the Olympics. And I was going to make it count.

What followed was a masterclass in what AI can do — and what it can’t.

The brands started reaching out directly to the athletes. Then one of the world's biggest technology companies came in through a third-party agency. The contract was long, verbose, boilerplate language, copy-pasted and jargon-heavy in a way that made it nearly impossible to parse.

At the time AI couldn’t handle a document that size in one pass. So I went paragraph by paragraph.

First I asked it to translate everything into plain language — no jargon, common man terms, anything a tenth grader could understand. Then I asked it to find the connections between points, and more importantly the tensions — places where one clause could conflict with another. Then I told it to ask me as many questions as it needed to understand what we were trying to achieve. I answered. My athlete answered. And then we went back through the contract and built the redlines together, one paragraph at a time.

I was nervous. I had no legal training. I was doing this on instinct and on AI.

Then I shared it with my old business lawyer. He looked it over and said: it looks good. All the redlines are positive. Send it.

That was my proof of concept. Something had shifted.

What I realized in that moment was that AI wasn’t just executing tasks. It was forcing me to think more clearly before I even started. It was pushing me to organize the mess — not by cleaning it up, but by giving it a throughline. For the first time I could move through complexity with confidence. I could translate technical language into something I could actually deploy my vision against. I could operate at a level that previously would have required a team.

The business of one — the solopreneur fully equipped from top to bottom — was right at the horizon. I could see it.

But here is what AI did not give me.

It did not give me the personal accountability that came from being emotionally invested in human beings going through one of the most brutal processes in sport. The financial pressure. The physical toll. The mental and emotional roller coaster of trying to qualify for the Olympics — knowing that your window is small and the odds are stacked against you. I wanted these athletes to come out of it, if not unscathed, at least with battle wounds that served them. An inflection point. A career foundation. The feeling of having truly gone pro.

AI could not feel that. I could.

It did not give me Rose Kiernan. An organizational and operational force who elevated my sense of accountability beyond just performing for myself or the athletes. Working alongside her I wanted to show up as a true teammate. That standard — another human being holding you to something — is not something a tool can manufacture.

And it could not build trust.

Trust has a mechanical framework — integrity, competence, consistency over time. You can understand it intellectually. But underneath the framework is a feeling. Something that has to be embodied, not just executed. Something that is nurtured slowly through shared experience and genuine investment in another person’s outcome.

I learned this the hard way.

Five athletes. Agreements made as simple and clean as I could make them. Nobody signed. We did handshake deals instead. One honored it fully — all the way through. Rose took over one of them to run on her own. The others — some partially, some not at all.

I failed to fully materialize what I had built. But the lesson was there, permanent, and mine.

You cannot automate trust. You cannot negotiate loyalty into existence. The tool can build the structure. It cannot make people choose to honor it.

There is a lot of hesitation in my world about AI.

Coaches who feel like using it waters down their skills. People who believe it gives them away to the technocrats. Athletes who worry it will make them replaceable. These concerns are not wrong. At a technical and knowledge level AI will displace things. I operated through an entire negotiation process without a lawyer physically present. That cut my costs significantly. That is a real disruption.

But here is what I know.

Just like the internet. Just like every major technological revolution before this one — if you are not watching closely, learning the skills, understanding what is happening, you are missing something. And it doesn’t have to be something to fear.

The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.

AI is the same.

A tool of extraordinary power that will serve you if you know who you are. And consume you if you don’t.

This is one reason I started writing here.

Not about AI. About us. About the body that leads before the mind catches up. About the boring work that sets creative people free. About the method you didn’t know you had. About the mission that finds you when you stop performing and start serving.

Those essays were never really about movement or discipline or style or coaching.

They were about learning who we are.

Because the tool needs us to know that. It needs our specific unreplicable experience to be worth anything at all. It takes our mess and gives it a throughline. It takes our wisdom and makes it scalable. It takes the human layer — the feeling of aliveness, the fear, the commitment, the sitting with emotions until they become clarity — and makes it exponentially more powerful.

But it cannot create that layer. Only we can.

I am not an AI expert. I am genuinely excited about what this moment makes possible. And equally convinced that it requires us to be more mindful, more connected, more willing to have the hard conversations than ever before.

The tool raises the ceiling. It does not build the foundation.

That has always been the work.

And none of it came from AI.

It came from saying yes to a phone call. From caring about people going through something brutal. From showing up even when the structure didn’t hold. From being emotionally invested in human beings — not contracts, not outcomes, not deliverables. People.

That is the human layer. It doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet. It shows up in Paris.

So here is the challenge.

Not to adopt AI. Not to fear it. To know yourself well enough that when you bring the tool in, you know exactly what to give it and what to keep.

The tool won’t save you.

Knowing who you are will.

And you’ve been building that your whole life. Whether you knew it or not.

Index finger, left hand. Index and middle finger, right hand. Occasionally the right thumb gets involved, but rarely. That’s it. That’s the full system. Three fingers across a full keyboard, hunting and pecking my way through every email, every essay, every word of a book that would eventually land on the New York Times bestseller list.

I never took a typing class. I started, but I never followed through. So I developed my own method — slower than everyone else’s, functional enough to get the job done — and I’ve been using it ever since.

I want you to hold that image while I tell you how the book got made.

It started in Kelly Starrett’s garage.

Kelly was my mentor at the time. He had co-founded San Francisco CrossFit, launched MobilityWOD, and landed a book deal with Victory Belt Publishing — a deal that would produce Becoming a Supple Leopard. One afternoon I was in his garage helping with a photo shoot for the book. Glen Cordoza, Kelly’s co-author, was there running the shoot.

At some point Kelly looked over at Glen and said: “Glen, you need to get Carl a book deal too. He’s got it.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. So I just kept helping with the photos.

Two weeks later I got a message from Glen. Erich Krauss — the founder and head of Victory Belt — wanted to talk. There were two requests. Send a writing sample. And find a co-author.

The first person I called was Tony Sherbondy.

Tony was a client. I had been coaching him in acrobatics at Acrosports in San Francisco— he practiced capoeira and wanted to learn a round-off back tuck for an upcoming event. But Tony wasn’t just a movement practitioner. He was a PhD student in neuroscience at Stanford. Our coaching sessions often turned into conversations about the body and the brain and how they talk to each other. We had talked vaguely about writing something together one day.

When I called and explained the opportunity, he said yes immediately. Without hesitation.

We got together and wrote our first assignment. A sample piece about learning to perform a push-up. Two paragraphs. We were pretty pleased with ourselves.

Until my business partner walked in and we asked him to read it.

He said: “I don’t like it.”

I can’t remember exactly what his reason was. But I remember the feeling — the air going out of the room. We shipped the sample anyway. The next day we had a contract.

The spoken agreement was that we would write a gymnastics workout book.

So we got to work. Every week, Tony and I met for a few hours at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto. We wrote — or tried to write. At first it was just concepts in text form. Tony called them nuggets. He started organizing the nuggets in a piece of software called Scrivener, and slowly the shape of something started to emerge. We could see it in the menu — all these pieces that might one day connect into something coherent.

We also voice-recorded a lot of our conversations. Tony would go home and transcribe them. Those transcripts became raw material.

We did this for at least a year.

And then, slowly, we both started to realize: this wasn’t a gymnastics book. It wasn’t even a fitness book. It was something else. A CrossFit book, sort of. A movement book. A philosophy book disguised as an instruction manual. We couldn’t put our finger on it.

Until we said: this isn’t working. We’re going in circles. We’re never landing the plane.

We put the book on hold. I remember thinking — this is never getting done.

Then Tony called me while I was driving home.

He had just seen Al Gore’s Our Choice — a pioneering interactive book-app for iPad that reimagined what a book could be. Text woven together with hundreds of photos, videos, animations, interactive graphics. Tony said: this is what we need to do for your work.

The next morning we met at the Starbucks inside the Lucasfilm campus at the Presidio in San Francisco. We sat down and started building. Tony asked questions. I answered. He wove it into a framework. We wrote for hours without stopping, with a clarity we hadn’t had in a year of trying. By the time we were done, we had the end-to-end structure of an app — a tool that would serve the coaches who came to my seminars.

When we finally came up for air and started talking about actually building the app, Tony stopped.

He said: this isn’t just an app. This is the book. The book is the manual for your seminar.

From that day on, we finished the manuscript in eight months.

But what made the book what it became wasn’t just Tony and me.

Because we were building toward an app, Tony was already connected to the development and design world through his work at Addepar, a wealth management platform where he was one of the early employees. He introduced me to two of his coworkers — and roommates — Nick D’Amico and Ryan Smith. Nick and Smitty.

They were young designers. And they were exceptional.

Tony suggested: if we want to make this special, we should all work together.

So the four of us became a team. Tony and I wrote. Smitty and Nick built the visual world — illustrations, style guides, grids, fonts, layouts. They brought the book to life in a way that no fitness or exercise book had been done before. We knew exactly how we wanted it to feel. We pushed each other. We trusted each other. Nobody was following anyone else’s lead — we were all leading together.

I had never felt that way on a work project before. Four people becoming one mind. One project.

Tony was more than a co-author. He had his PhD and he became my advisor — the person who could take what I knew in my body and help me understand it in language. Smitty and Nick pushed me to understand what coherent design actually does — how a signature aesthetic creates a feeling in the person who holds the thing in their hands.

We wanted people to put this book to work and live on their coffee table. Not their bookshelf.

When the manuscript was complete and it was time to actually produce the book, our publishing house wasn’t pleased.

They called it too complicated. Not in line with what they do. Even though we had all flown out together to meet with them in Las Vegas, share the vision, agree on materials. When it came to the layout, we had broken all their rules. For a moment they were ready to dismiss all the design work entirely — years of thought, every deliberate choice, gone.

We held the line.

We managed to get them to let us do it our way. They trusted us. It worked. We got the product the four of us felt proud of.

The CrossFit Games that year were unlike anything I had experienced.

We had pre-ordered a specific number of books for the signing. We sold every single one. And then we ran out.

So there was Tony and Erica Pfeiffer — my logistics coordinator and executive assistant, the person who made everything actually function — driving between every Costco in the area, buying back every copy of my own book they could find, then reselling them at the games. I was at the table. They were doing the work that made the table possible.

That’s what it looks like when something works. Not glamorous. A little chaotic. Impossible without the right people. Completely worth it.

When it was over I flew to Sweden for vacation.

I was there when Tony called.

He said the publishing house needed to talk to us. There was a problem with the cover.

My stomach dropped. The cover was the signature. It was the piece that made people recognize the book immediately. The design that made it feel like no other fitness book that had ever existed. We had been presenting it for months. It was the thing people connected with before they even opened a page.

I got on the call with Erich Krauss and our publicist. They said: we have a problem with the cover and we need to change it.

I said: what happened? What’s wrong with it?

They said: we don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re on the New York Times bestseller list. We need to add that to the cover.

I wrote a New York Times bestseller.

With one index finger on my left hand, and an index finger and a middle finger on my right. Three fingers. Hunting and pecking across a keyboard for years, sitting across from Tony at Coupa Cafe and the Lucasfilm Starbucks, voice recording conversations and transcribing them, writing nuggets in Scrivener, going in circles for a year, almost giving up, then finding the thread and not letting go.

I am not a writer. I am not a reader in the traditional sense. I didn’t study the craft. I don’t have the credentials. I have the thing I’ve lived and built and carried — and the people I was lucky enough to find who could help me shape it into something real.

Tony now lives in Brazil. Married. A child. We don’t talk as often as we’d like, but every time we do, we’re on exactly the same wavelength. We will be close for the rest of our lives.

Some of the most meaningful work either of us has done — separately or together — was writing Freestyle.

The credentials don’t build the thing. The people do. The process does. The willingness to go in circles for a year and stay in the room anyway does.

You don’t need to be a writer to write the book.

You just need the right people in the cafe with you.

And three fingers is enough.

Long. Painful. Relentless. My coach always told me I was hard working — which was true, but it was also the thing I had to be because I wasn’t the most talented. When I finally left gymnastics I felt like I had paid my dues. I had suffered enough. I didn’t want to inflict any more of that on my body.

So I stopped.

It didn’t take long before I was sitting on the terrace one summer afternoon, shirt off, my mom looking over at me and saying:

“Oj, Kalle... du är lite rund om magen.”

Swedish. My mom’s first language. The direct translation is: “Oh, Kalle (my nickname)... you’re a little round around the belly.”

She wasn’t being cruel. I think she was genuinely surprised. The son who had trained six days a week his whole childhood was sitting there without a six-pack. It woke something up in me. I am human. And apparently I am not immune to what happens when you stop.

That was the beginning of a relationship with training that has never been simple.

Here’s what I know about myself and movement.

I love it. I am fascinated by it. I have dedicated my life to understanding it and teaching it. And I dread it. Both things are true at the same time.

When I haven’t trained in a while, or when I’m tired, or when I’m feeling pain — all my demons come out. It is the most vulnerable I can be. The uncomfortable feeling of being in a body that isn’t performing the way I know it can. The gap between my current level and my inner potential. That gap is brutal to sit in.

And the thought of disappointing people makes it worse. For some reason — maybe the effortless effort, the performance of ease — people overestimate me. They assume I’m always in shape, always moving, always embodying what I teach. The thought of showing them otherwise makes me furious at myself.

When I stop training I lose my worth. I lose my north.

In 2014 I separated from my business partner. Barely making it financially. I had just published my book — a New York Times bestseller on the outside, a broken human on the other side of it. We were in the middle of foster adopting our teenage daughter. Everything was falling apart at once.

I needed out.

So in 2015 I told my colleague Diane Fu that I was done. Finished. I would never coach fitness or movement again. Mark my words.

I meant it.

Two days after returning from Romania — where I had celebrated my mother’s 75th birthday — I woke up with a ringing in my left ear.

It didn’t go away.

A week later I was in Atlanta teaching a seminar, going crazy with it, panicking. I went into a meditation to try to work through it. I passed out. Woke up the next morning and the ringing was still there — but something had shifted. I was on the witnessing side of the tinnitus instead of the suffering side. Like I had been pulled out of it just enough to breathe.

Two weeks later, I closed my business. I had to say goodbye to the last two members of my team — Daniel Severin Petersen and Lydia Barrington. I felt so ashamed telling them it was over. They were the best teammates I ever had. Committed. Driven. I hope they know how much gratitude I carry for their loyalty, their work, and their friendship.

Three months off. Nothing.

Except for one offer that came to go to China — my book had been translated into Mandarin — but there was a virus going around and the trip got canceled. And then the pandemic broke out and the whole world stopped with me.

I tried going online. I failed. Another forced break.

What saved me during that time was Miguel Sant’ana and Lucas Robinson.

Miguel was doing handstand coaching online. Lucas, an old friend from San Francisco CrossFit, offered to program for me. Together they got me back to training — back to being connected to my body. It was the most focused training I had done since my gymnastics days. Something quiet and essential came back online.

Fast forward to 2023.

I had tried everything. Online coaching. Mindset and emotional fitness. I had coached breakers qualifying for the Olympics with Team USA. I had run a beta test for a sports agency — the anti-agent agent, cutting out the middle man. Nothing was fully converting. The runway was running out.

I asked my wife to shoot straight. How much time do I have?

She gave me 3 months.

A week later I had my first client. By the end of the year I was rolling. Now I’m full.

I would never have gone back to training others without Diane Fu and Liz Donahue in my ear. Diane — the same person I told in 2015 I was quitting forever. Liz, an old client from my gymnastics days, who said: you can do this with your eyes closed. Don’t let training others be beneath you.

It felt like failing. I’m glad I went back anyway.

The price of stopping is steep.

As steep as the hill Sisyphus rolled his rock up. When you stop the rock just comes rolling back down. The problem is you don’t notice right away. It happens gradually, quietly, until you’re in Hawaii with your shirt off and your mother-in-law takes a video of you from behind and you have to do a double take because you think there’s a floaty around your waist.

You ask your daughter to be honest with you. She says: “Dad, let’s just say you’ve been better.”

Zig Ziglar started writing his book See You At The Top — the one that opens with “you can be who you want to be and do what you want to do” — and then looked down at his 42-inch waist. The gap between the vision and the reality. The dissonance between what you desire in your heart and what you know is possible in your mind and what you see when you look in the mirror.

That dissonance is brutal on self-esteem. It creates clarity problems. It generates an enormous amount of wasted mental energy justifying why you are the way you are instead of moving toward who you know you’re capable of being.

Appearances aren’t everything. But you know when you’re off. You always know.

Training is not about longevity. It’s not about general health. Those things matter — I want to live long, I want to be healthy — but they’re not why you need to move.

You need to move to feel alive.

That’s the gift. That’s what the body gives you when you show up for it. Not the metrics. Not the performance. The feeling of being connected to the animal that you are. The mind that works differently when the body is moving. The north that comes back when the movement comes back.

I lost that. Multiple times. Completely. And I know what it costs.

So I’ll make this simple.

You know what’s off.

Tackle it.

Not tomorrow. Not when the circumstances are better or the motivation arrives or you feel ready. The feeling doesn’t come before the movement. It comes because of it.

The rock is at the bottom of the hill. It’s been there a while. You know it. Start pushing.