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Fitness and Training

Jason's practical fitness philosophy spans competitive gymnastics, CrossFit, HIIT, endurance running, and the science of physical performance. The through-line is a view of the body as infrastructure: physical capacity isn't separate from mental or professional performance — it is its precondition. Bodies support brains, and every domain of high output depends on managing the physical machine underneath it.

Training Principles

Talent Is the Minor Variable

From the Ten Rules of Training: "Skill = Talent x Training." Talent is a 1–10 variable (largely fixed at birth); training quality and quantity is a 1–10,000 variable. This framing matters because most people implicitly invert it — they assume they are limited by ability when they are actually limited by effort and intelligence. Training is the dominant factor for almost everyone who hasn't approached the ceiling of deliberate practice.

The corollary: training quality matters as much as training quantity. "Too many people talk about hard work without intelligent hard work. It's the depth of insight that matters." (GSP) Training with people you consistently beat ingrains whatever movement patterns you already have — correct or incorrect. The classic gym failure mode is people going through motions while looking at their phones, accumulating hours without accumulating skill.

Do What You Need, Not What You Like

"Most people do what they like to do, and they avoid doing what they need to do." — GSP's coach. This is the inverse of the natural drift of almost every training program. People emphasize their strengths and neglect their weaknesses, ending up lopsided. The discipline to train deficiencies is what separates good from great.

The Days You Don't Feel Like It

"You don't get better on the days when you feel like going. You get better on the days when you don't want to go, but you go anyway." This isn't just motivational language — it reflects how habit formation actually works. The days of low motivation are the days that test and reinforce the underlying commitment. See habits-and-behavior-change.

Slow First, Then Fast

Skill acquisition begins at slow speeds. The mechanism is myelin formation: slow, correct repetition builds the insulating sheath around neural pathways that makes them faster and more reliable. Racing through a movement to feel productive does the opposite — it ingrains error at speed. The key is correct execution, not just repetition.

The Science of Strength

Strength has three components: maximum load capacity, endurance, and recovery speed. It is built through two mechanisms working together:

  1. Physiological cross-sectional area — the size of recruited muscle fibers
  2. Neurological efficiency — the brain's ability to activate and coordinate those fibers

The second mechanism explains why mental practice produces real strength gains. A landmark 1992 Physical Therapy study found that mental practice of ankle dorsiflexion produced 17% strength improvement, compared to 25% for physical practice — not statistically different. The mind, used correctly, trains the nervous system even without physical load.

Progressive overload is the universal training mechanism: apply a stress slightly beyond current capacity, recover, and capacity expands to meet the new demand. This principle applies not just to physical training but to any domain where capacity can be built — mental, emotional, professional. See stress-and-performance-science.

GSP's post-surgery observation captures the recovery half of this equation: "Since my knee surgery, I've started working out less and resting more. My muscle weight is growing faster than ever before." Two principles: "resting is growing" and "waiting is training." The stimulus without recovery produces injury; recovery without stimulus produces stagnation.

CrossFit

A Scientific Definition of Fitness

CrossFit offers an unusually rigorous definition: "The capacity to perform work over many time windows from 30 seconds to 3 hours across different domains and activities." This matters because it rejects the intuitive but narrow definitions most people carry — fitness as cardiovascular endurance, or fitness as strength, or fitness as appearance. Broad-domain capacity across time windows is the actual target.

This definition aligns with a generalist performance philosophy: the point isn't to be optimal in one domain, it's to be capable across many. A person who can run a 5K, do 20 pull-ups, lift heavy, and still function at hour two of any athletic demand is fit in the meaningful sense.

CrossFit as Social Technology

CrossFit functions not just as a training modality but as a social tribe with shared language (WODs, PRs, macros), shared rituals (group workouts, post-workout scores), and dietary norms (Paleo). James Clear observed that CrossFit membership naturally shifts members toward Paleo eating because of identity-based social pressure: "people like us do things like this." The gym is also a commitment device — showing up to a class with other people has much higher adherence than an equivalent solo workout.

This social architecture is part of why CrossFit produces results that generic gym memberships don't. The accountability, the tribe, and the shared language all increase the probability that you actually show up and work hard when you get there.

Coaching at Dean CrossFit

Jason's first coaching experience at Dean CrossFit illustrates gymnastics pedagogy applied to a CrossFit context. For an "Olympic gymnastics day," he ran participants through floor pommel horse drills (using ab mats and physical spotting), beam walking on floor lines, stick contest progressions, and a conditioning finisher. The class had two groups: a general CrossFit morning class and the Phoenix group — men in addiction recovery replacing destructive behaviors with physical training.

The coaching identity felt natural partly because it was hereditary: Jason's mother and sister are both gymnastics coaches. Teaching pommel horse circles to CrossFitters — then watching them say "I have a whole new respect for gymnasts now" — was its own form of advocacy for gymnastics as the highest expression of athletic capability.

Go-To Workout Protocols

These are tested, repeatable protocols that require no equipment or minimal equipment:

Tabata Protocol — 8 rounds of 20 seconds work / 10 seconds rest. Exercises: burpees, tuck jumps, jumping lunges, mountain climbers, speed skaters, spiderman pushups. Total time: 4 minutes per exercise. High metabolic demand in minimal clock time.

NYT 7-Minute Workout — 12 exercises, 30 seconds on / 10 seconds rest. The lowest-friction option for genuinely busy days. Scientific validity on par with moderate exercise sessions, done in the time of a commute.

Elliptical Intervals — 1 minute easy / 1 minute hard, 5–7 rounds. An intermediate cardio option with built-in intensity variation that prevents the "comfortable plateau" of steady-state cardio.

300 Rep Workout — 20 reps each of mountain climbers, high knees, shoulder taps, squat jumps, and side plank crunches, 3 rounds. Named for the count, not the movie. A total-body conditioning circuit.

The core argument underlying all of these: "Bodies support our brains." Physical activity is the single most important lever for high performance across all domains. The time excuse doesn't hold — the NYT workout takes 7 minutes. The question is priority, not availability.

Endurance Running

The Marathon Reality

Jason's first marathon produced what he calls an honest failure: inconsistent training (missed the 18, 19, and 20-mile long runs), went out at the wrong pace (joined the 3:50 group instead of 4:10 given actual fitness), collapsed into walk/run intervals from mile 14, and finished in nearly 5 hours. Self-assessment: "I call this my mediocre marathon. It's a start."

The lesson isn't "don't run marathons" — it's that the training plan is the race. Most marathon collapses happen because people overestimate what they can hold for 26 miles based on how they feel in miles 1–6. The body's glycogen economy works on longer time constants than the emotions at the starting corral.

Dean Karnazes — Ultramarathon Philosophy

Karnazes, at 57 with 25 years of ultramarathon experience (100-milers, Death Valley 135, 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days), articulates a philosophy of self-imposed limits:

  • "Find what you love and let it kill you" — not nihilism, but commitment to something beyond comfort as the organizing principle of a life
  • "If you can just shut down your mind and just execute, you can do extraordinary things" — the mind quits before the body does
  • Recovery must be earned: rest without genuine prior effort is a cop-out, not restoration
  • He ran races in states of hallucination and draws a sharp distinction between mental exhaustion and physical exhaustion — the former arrives much earlier and more deceptively

The ultramarathon world is a laboratory for human physical limits, and the consistent finding is that the limits people believe they have are not the limits they actually have.

Guinness World Records

Jason holds two Guinness World Records in bodyweight exercise:

  • 50 Aztec pushups in one minute (2014) — this record is still standing
  • 21 burpee pull-ups in one minute (2017)

These require not just training but a very specific understanding of the movement standards, pacing strategy, and energy management over 60 seconds. Research in his notes for chest-to-ground burpees in 12 hours suggests further record attempts remain on the agenda.

Injury and Recovery

ACL/PCL Reconstruction and Its Residuals

The most significant injury in Jason's athletic history was a gymnastics landing injury in 2007–2010 requiring ACL/PCL reconstruction. As of 2026, the left knee remains slightly smaller than the right, with VMO firing sometimes off in the quad and a weaker hamstring on that side. The pain presents specifically during eccentric loading at obtuse angles — walking slowly down stairs, swing dancing — rather than at deeper flexion. The injury is managed rather than resolved.

Other ongoing physical issues: residual neck pain and stiffness from a bike accident, and shoulder/clavicle tightness on the right side from sleep position. The picture of an ex-competitive athlete in his late 30s carrying the accumulated record of years of high-level training.

Performance benchmarks despite these: Murph in 31:41 unweighted (2017), 32:40 (2023), 58:15 weighted (2025); active CrossFit Games competitor (athlete #2508558).

The RICE Protocol

Rest, Ice (20-minute intervals in ice water), Compression, Elevation. Physical therapy is dramatically underutilized by non-elite athletes — most people ice briefly or not at all, skip compression, and return to training before tissue is ready.

Visualization During Injury

Mental practice preserves neural pathways during enforced physical rest. During a year-long knee recovery, Jason practiced skills mentally every day. Upon returning to training, he executed skills on the first attempt that he had only done a handful of times pre-injury. The mechanism: visualization maintains the mental representations and neural patterns that physical practice built — the motor program stays encoded even as the body heals. See performance-optimization and stress-and-performance-science.

Exercise as a Brain, Mood, and Self-Regulation Intervention

The case for training is usually made in terms of strength, endurance, body composition, or longevity. The under-appreciated case is cognitive and psychological. Aerobic and resistance exercise don't just support the body that supports the brain — they directly modify brain structure, mood, executive function, and even cravings. Headline findings:

  • Depression: Blumenthal & Babyak's 1999 RCT found aerobic exercise matched sertraline for treating major depression in older adults; the 10-month follow-up (Babyak & Blumenthal 2000) showed exercise had lower relapse rates than medication — exercise as a durable identity change, not just a mood lift.
  • BDNF and neuroplasticity: Cotman & Berchtold (2002) and van Praag (2009) show voluntary exercise upregulates brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus, driving neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity.
  • Acute learning boost: Winter et al. (2007) — two 3-minute sprints at peak effort improved vocabulary acquisition by 20% vs. rest or slow running.
  • Older-adult cognition: Colcombe & Kramer's 2003 meta-analysis (18 RCTs) found ~0.5 SD gain in cognitive function from aerobic training in older adults, largest effect on executive function.
  • General self-regulation: Oaten & Cheng (2006) showed a 2-month exercise program improved unrelated self-control domains — smoking, eating, procrastination, spending — not just fitness.
  • Craving reduction: Taylor, Ussher, & Faulkner's 2007 systematic review — a single 10–15 minute bout of exercise measurably reduces cigarette cravings and withdrawal symptoms.
  • Köhler motivation gain: Irwin et al. (2012) — in group exercise where the weak link's effort determines the team outcome, individuals work substantially harder than solo or in disjunctive (best-performer-wins) conditions.

See exercise-and-brain-health for the full treatment of these seven topics with mechanism details and coaching applications.

Emotional Regulation and Physical Performance

One of the most underrated intersections of fitness and performance is emotional regulation. As a competitive gymnast for 16 years (10 at the national level), Jason learned early that physiological control is a performance skill:

"Messing up in gymnastics isn't like missing a shot in basketball. When you miss the bar, a steel bar is coming into your face or you're flying onto the ground at a bad angle."

The baseline for regulation is unglamorous: sleep, food, hydration, and movement. These aren't optional for high performance — they are its prerequisites. Beyond the basics:

  • Breathing activates the vagus nerve and triggers the parasympathetic system. Box breathing, extended exhalation, diaphragmatic breathing — the specific method matters less than the fact of doing it. Under pressure, slow down first.
  • Progressive muscle relaxation — tensing and releasing muscle groups sequentially — gives the adrenaline somewhere to go and signals the body that the crisis is over.
  • Familiar music (noise-canceling headphones, pre-performance playlist) activates the parasympathetic system via familiarity and emotional safety, without additional cognitive load.

The deeper point: founders and professionals who treat themselves as "floating brains" — ignoring their body until it breaks down — are operating on a false model. "Your brain and your body are connected. Emotional regulation, physiological regulation, is one of the most important and underrated skills you can have."

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