You aren't disciplined. You're just impatient.

In my mind, hard sessions felt serious. If I walked out of the gym feeling absolutely destroyed, I thought, “Good. That’s what it takes.” If I had something left in the tank, I assumed I had undertrained.

For a while—when I was just starting out—that mindset actually worked. Early on, simply adding more intensity did move the needle.

But then came 2017.

As I’ve written about in previous chapters of this journal, 2017 was the year I failed to qualify for the CrossFit Games. And that failure forced me to take a hard, uncomfortable look at what I was really doing.

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I wasn’t skipping sessions. I wasn’t lacking effort. If anything, I was pouring everything I had into my training.

My sessions weren’t short. They were long—one to three hours most days, sometimes pushing four. I was stacking heavy barbell work, high-intensity conditioning, skill work, and accessory work (because I always thought I needed “more”). I took very few true recovery days. Everything felt important. Everything felt urgent.

And instead of improving... I plateaued.

Actually, it felt like I was getting a little worse. My bar speeds slowed down. My conditioning didn’t feel sharp. The small aches and pains never fully went away. But I kept telling myself the same lie: “If I just do a little more, it’ll click.”

That is the trap.

Training hard every single day doesn’t make you disciplined. It makes you impatient.

I had confused effort with effectiveness. And as a Masters athlete, that is a dangerous mistake to make. We don’t have unlimited recovery. We don’t bounce back the way we did at 25. Pretending we do doesn’t make us tougher; it just shortens our runway.

Most Masters athletes don’t struggle with working hard. They struggle with working hard too often and in the wrong places.

They turn moderate “Yellow” days into intense “Orange” days. They turn “Orange” days into redline “Red” days. And then they wonder why they feel flat, beat up, or stalled.

I call this the chronic grey zone.

It’s a state where you are going too hard to fully recover, but your training isn’t structured enough to force true adaptation. I lived in that grey zone for a while, and it almost ended my competitive career.

That realization was the turning point. Here is what my training looks like now:

Most importantly, I am intentional about my intensity. I don’t just “go hard” because I feel good that day. I use the intensity spectrum we built inside Bolder Athlete to structure my week. Every session has a color-coded prescription: Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red.

These are not suggestions. They are prescriptions.

That structure protects me from the mistake I made in 2017. Back then, everything drifted toward Orange and Red. Now? I only go Red about twice a week. Sometimes less. And when I do, it is deliberate. It has a purpose. It fits inside the rhythm of the week.

Progress isn’t built from constant intensity. It’s built from rhythm.

Push. Build. Restore. Repeat.

Because of that rhythm, when it’s time to go hard... I’m actually ready to go hard. That’s the difference. Hard training still exists in my week, but it lives in the right place.

Intensity without structure is ego. Intensity with structure is performance.

As a Masters athlete, you don’t need less intensity. You need intelligent sequencing. You need to understand that adaptation happens between your sessions—not during them. If you constantly redline, you never fully adapt.

The goal of training is not to feel worked. The goal is to improve.

If you’re over 40 and still serious about performance, hear this: You don’t need to prove your toughness every day. You need to protect your trajectory.

There is a version of you five years from now that still wants to compete.

Train for him.

Stay Bold!

Jason

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