October 28, 2025

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A couple weeks off with cross country travel, the end of middle school volleyball and the start of high school basketball season! Let’s get to it!

Welcome to The 199! For the next few weeks, we’re going to do something a little different in this space. Instead of a weekly reflection, this will be a three-part series with a more strategic and tactical focus on a timely topic that I think about a lot. I hope you find it useful!

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The Resilience Series, Part 1: The Physical

We’re more than a third of the way through the NFL season now. School is in full swing for the kids. Personally, I’ve had another amazing CardVault store grand opening, a couple great collabs with Speed, another with Oz the Mentalist, and then there were the regular media hits as part of my role on FOX and the regular duties I have as a dad, a son, a business partner, an investor, and an owner.

Needless to say, I’ve been busy. It’s been a crazy October.

Last week it all finally caught up to me. I was rundown and a little under the weather. It happens to all of us at one point or another. Illness. Injury. No matter how careful or healthy you are, if you are in a lot of different places every week, interacting with lots of different people, doing lots of different things to maximize every waking hour of your day, eventually a bug is going to get you. It’s your body’s way of telling you to slow down a bit.

The question is: what do you do when that happens? Because life doesn’t stop when you want (or need) to stop. Work, family, relationships. They don’t go away. You’ve still got to show up for each of them as your best possible self. You’ve got to persevere and persist. You’ve got to be resilient—physically, mentally and emotionally.

In this first installment, we’re going to focus on physical resilience. We’ll talk about how to bounce back and recover from illness and injury, of course. But more specifically, we’ll dive into preventing illness and injury, since the best form of treatment is to do all the things that best decrease your odds of getting sick or hurt in the first place. After all, when we talk about physical resilience, it’s not just about how you bounce back when you get knocked down, it’s also the ability to take a hit and have it bounce off of you.

This really was the focus of my 23-year football career beyond playing the game itself. Resilience. Training and treating my body in ways designed to prevent injury, to minimize the effects of injuries when I did get hurt, and to maximize the speed of recovery. There were four main areas of focus that were key to achieving these physical resilience goals: sleep, hydration, nutrition & supplementation, and movement.

SLEEP

99% of people need 7-8 hours of solid sleep a night, ideally 9 hours if you can get it.

With the exception of a handful of notable outliers who only seem to need 5-6 hours of sleep per night to function at or near their peak, the rest of us need a full night’s sleep to be at our best. That’s because sleep is where all growth, integration and recovery occurs. It’s when the nutrients from our food are most actively deployed, repairing muscle fibers after a hard workout, for example, or integrating knowledge and memories into our brains. It’s when immune cell production increases and growth hormone spikes.

We spend ⅓ of our lives sleeping. And yet, so many people are so bad at sleep. To do it well, you should try to go to sleep at roughly the same time every night and develop a “bedtime routine” that signals to your body that it’s time to wind down. You should avoid caffeine, alcohol and eating big meals as you get closer to this bedtime. To maximize the production of melatonin, aka the sleep hormone, your room should be as dark as possible and you should stop looking at screens and other forms of blue light at least an hour before you go to bed. Your room should also be cool, if not actually cold. 65-68 degrees is the window, most experts agree. This helps your body temperature drop, which is an important part of the sleep process.

Good sleep really is the foundation for physical resilience. If your goal is to kick the day’s ass instead of the other way around, that’s hard to do when you’re a step slow and you’re yawning all the time. And when it comes to recovery from illness and injury, the only thing that should change about your sleep is MORE.

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HYDRATION

I am a big believer in proactively drinking water to prevent dehydration. I try to avoid being in the position of drinking water as a response to thirst. I always want to be ahead of the game. It’s why drinking a bunch of water is one of the first things I do when I wake up, and why you will always see me with a water bottle somewhere nearby.

During my playing career, there were days when I’d average well over an ounce of water per pound of bodyweight. Today, I still drink an ounce of water per pound of bodyweight each day, which I think is a good strategy for optimal functioning. While there is no one-size-fits-all with hydration, and your specific hydration needs will vary based on age, activity level, environment (i.e. altitude, humidity, temp), and overall health, the importance of more than enough water cannot be overstated if your goal is preventative maintenance and physical resilience. That’s because water is key to muscle pliability, which is key to flexibility, agility and injury prevention. (I’ll talk more about this in the last section.)

Proper hydration reduces cramping, it enhances nutrient delivery into the muscles, and it’s essential to the strength, power and endurance your muscles need to have if you want to be reliably self-sufficient and physically useful. If you don’t want little things to put you on IR, like straining your neck by turning to put on your seatbelt too quickly or throwing out your back by picking up bags of groceries, then you need to give your muscles what they need to be supple, stretchy and strong. It’s the difference between having muscles that look like beef jerky and muscles that look like a juicy tenderloin in a butcher shop case. That all starts with hydration.

Even more importantly, proper hydration is what allows your immune system to work at full capacity. It lubricates the mucus membranes of your lungs, nose and throat, which are the front line fighters against invading pathogens. Having enough water also helps your lymphatic system send immune cells all throughout your body. But if you’re chronically dehydrated, not even by a lot but just enough, it can trigger the release of cortisol into your system as a stress response which has a tendency to diminish the overall function of your immune system. And just like with sleep, when you do find yourself sick or hurt, the only thing that should change about your water consumption as you recover and heal…is MORE.

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NUTRITION & SUPPLEMENTATION

Regardless of its current condition, your body is a high performance automobile. Water is the oil that lubricates your motor and makes sure it doesn’t overheat or blow up. Food is the fuel that dictates how far and how fast you can go. And supplements, primarily in the form of vitamins and minerals, are the fluids, additives, and wiring that determine how efficiently the machine actually runs.

You can’t go as far or as fast as you want to, and you will never get there as comfortably as you want to, if you don’t have the proper nutrition and supplementation. And when you don’t have sufficient nutrition, that’s when things start to feel sluggish, gears get sticky, and you find yourself out of gas, stranded in the middle of the road as the world rushes past you in every direction.

What this looks like at the macro level is a diverse diet of minimally-processed whole foods that includes plenty of fruits and vegetables, .5-1g of protein per pound of bodyweight depending on whether you’re trying to maintain or build muscle, a good amount of healthy fats to help brain function, and a solid, consistent dose of fiber (~30-35 grams) to support gut health which is the home of your microbiome and 70-80% of the body’s immune cells.

The goal is to always have enough protein in your body to promote muscle growth and recovery, as well as enough carbohydrates to support your energy needs as you move through the day. The exact amount of total calories, and the specific percentages, will change depending on whether you’re trying to cut, maintain, grow or rehabilitate—but in every instance you should always consume enough of each to support the body’s optimal function throughout the day.

The real trick with nutrition in this context, though, is to do all those things for strength, energy, and recovery, while at the same time reducing and removing chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is like having a smoldering fire in your body at all times. Over time, it weakens your immune system, damages tissue and healthy organs, and leads to getting sick more easily and taking longer to recover from both illness and injury. The wrong foods, namely sugar and anything that easily converts to sugar (white rice, white potatoes, white pasta, etc.), are like gasoline that spark the smoldering fire into a four-alarm inferno that spreads and becomes hard to contain. The right foods act like a fire extinguisher that knocks the fire down and allows the body to function more efficiently.

Then, when you add Vitamin D, Vitamin C, Zinc and iron to support immune system function, as well as magnesium and B vitamins for sleep, muscle function, recovery, and various metabolic functions, you’ve got a recipe for the kind of physical resilience that makes you difficult to take down, but pathogens easier for your body to tackle.

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MOVEMENT

Great white sharks need to keep moving or they die. When a car sits in the garage for too long without being driven, especially an older car, the chance that it won’t start is very high, and if it does start the odds that it drives very poorly are virtually guaranteed.

The same is true for the human body. When you break your wrist, your arm, your leg and the bone is immobilized in a cast, muscle atrophy begins almost immediately. After 6-8 weeks, when the cast comes off, strength and flexion loss can top 30-40% and take 3-6 months to fully recover. Elderly people who fracture their hip and don’t do rehab after surgery, effectively making them bed-ridden, have a 6-month mortality rate north of 20%.

The evidence is clear. When it comes to physiology and the various functions of the human body, it’s use it or lose it. Use your body, or lose function, lose flexion, lose strength, lose resilience.

To prevent this kind of loss, in fact to reverse it and to boost recovery, you need a combination of resistance training and pliability training.

Resistance training is about putting a little heavier load on the body than it’s comfortable with in order to create enough stress that the body learns how to adapt. Another name for that adaptation is strength. You need to be strong. And you need to continue pushing that training over time so it’s always a little bit hard, and you’re at least maintaining your strength level. This way, when you’re not training, things like walking or getting up out of a chair or carrying bags of groceries in from the car are not a problem.

Resistance training isn’t just about raw strength, of course. It doesn’t just build denser, stronger muscle fibers, it also boosts neuroplasticity and creates new neural pathways that enhance the mind-body connection, give the nervous system better control of your muscles, and protects against cognitive decline. All of which add up to a more holistic kind of strength and a greater degree of physical resilience.

There are diminishing returns on strength training, however, if you don’t help your muscles recover properly. This is where pliability training comes in.

Pliability training is akin to a recovery treatment that takes your muscles from being tight, dense and stiff, to being long, unrestricted and supple. If you can keep the densest fibers in your body relaxed, and they can go with the flow of the action–even when the action involves a 255-lb linebacker trying to bury you underneath the turf–you don’t quite become indestructible, but you become very hard to hurt. Which I can say with confidence, as someone who played for 23 seasons and never missed a game to injury outside the 2008 season when I got hit low and tore my ACL and MCL.

The point is, we have to create a little stress in our body and in our brain if we want to learn, if we want to teach our muscles how to move functionally or our minds how to manage difficult problems. Physical resilience is a learned skill. You don’t just have it. You have to teach your body and your brain how to fight off adversity and how to bounce back. Resistance training is a big part of how you do that. And pliability is how you keep doing it. No matter what life or work throws at you.

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PUT IT ALL TOGETHER

In the next two editions of this newsletter, we’re going to talk about mental and emotional resilience. Both are essential to a full life dedicated to excellence and high performance. And both are next to impossible without some kind of foundation in physical resilience, because it’s incredibly difficult to think or feel your way out of a hole when, physically, you feel like crap.

Test the focus, the patience, or the resolve of anyone with chronic back pain, or someone with a sinus headache who can’t breathe through their nose. Think back to the last time you were really sick or were in a lot of discomfort. I’m willing to bet you weren’t great to be around and you didn’t get a lot done. It doesn’t mean you’re weak, it just means you’re human.

But if you can get your sleep protocols figured out, your hydration up to par (or above), your nutrition dialed in, your inflammation down, your movement on track, and you stay pliable, then you have what it takes to cultivate the kind of physical resilience to make the most of difficult moments.

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