Nov. 10, 2025
The 5 Pillars of Lasting Health for Men Over 40 (Call To Rise) - 15
Most men reach a point where their drive for success starts costing them their health. The long hours, skipped meals, travel, and constant pressure slowly drain energy, focus, and confidence.
In this episode, Coach Brian Parana shares the five pillars of The Call to Rise.
This is a framework that helps busy, high-performing career-driven family men men rebuild their bodies, get back their energy, and lead themselves with a healthy fit body again.
You’ll learn how to:
• Reconnect with who you are through The Call (identity and purpose)
• Rebuild your strength and confidence in The Forge (fitness)
• Simplify nutrition in The Fuel (energy and performance)
• Strengthen your habits and focus through The Code (mindset)
• Surround yourself with accountability and support in The Brotherhood (community)
Skip the perfection attitude or endless restrictive diets.
Build a strong, lean, capable body that supports the life you’ve worked hard to create.
If you’re ready to take control of your health, lose fat, and feel strong again.
This episode will show you where to start.
👉 Visit www.thecalltorise.com to learn more or apply to join the next Brotherhood.
Want help applying this to your own health, weight, energy, or lab numbers?
Coach Brian Parana offers Health Hot Seat coaching segments for men who want a clear next step with nutrition, fitness, weight loss, blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, or daily consistency.
Learn more about The Call To Rise, a 100-day coaching program for driven men over 40 who want to lose weight, improve their health, and rebuild confidence:
To connect with Coach Brian:
brian@brianparana.com
Disclaimer: This podcast is for education and coaching support only. It is not medical advice. Always work with your physician before changing medication, treatment, or medical care.
- Gentlemen, welcome back to Driven for Health. I'm Coach Brian Prana. Today's episode is more than workouts, exercise, movement, diets, nutrition, or even lifestyle. It's the path every man faces when they get caught in a picture, the mirror, the realization that they are not where they should be in their health, their fitness, their nutrition, their blood panels.
- It's a journey back to a stronger body, more focus on what's important to them, finding balance between work and real life because life has pulled them in so many directions. You might be doing well on paper. You built the career. You are successful there. You have your family. You're taking care of them.
- Do you firmly identify as a provider? Those areas you've got. You check those boxes. That is what success is required especially in our everyday society. But underneath that, the body is breaking down. You do not look the way you should. You do not feel the way you should. You hit 40 and your body seems to have been going backwards.
- Backwards by meaning that you feel closer to 60 in terms of how you look and feel than you do 30. My goal personally, I'm 42. I want to look and feel the way I do now when I'm 50. Now certainly I'll be older at 50, but I want to maintain what I have right now. We have to get out of this mindset of just give, give, give to everything else and at some point you'll be able to get back to who you are.
- You'll have more time later on when the kids are out of the house. You'll have more time when you have more money in the bank. You'll have more time when things slow down. In my experience, life just speeds up. It gets faster. I feel my buddy Chris, we work out together. He says, "Brian, that movie Space Balls," which if you're in my age group, you know Space Balls really well.
- Great parody on Star Wars, right? that scene where Barf and Han Solar are inside the flying RV trying to get away from Dark Helmet and then Dark Helmet ends up going into plaid speed. And that's what I feel like life is right now, especially with the rise of technology, AI, and just the constant demands. Uh if you have a family, shoot, you feel it.
- You know, there's always demands on needing more money to do things and pay for things. And you feel the more drive to work more to be able to do that. And I find so many men are caught up in that and they just aren't taking care of themselves. That's a huge reason why I created the Call to Rise program. It's what I built it for. Men are in their 40s.
- They're more lonely than ever. They are they are dealing with things that they haven't had to deal with in the past. Their mental and emotional capacity might be tapped out and it's not helping them stay in a healthy state of mind or a healthy body. There are five pillars that I built this program on. This is designed to get you to be the strongest self that you can.
- The call, the forge, the fuel, the code, and the brotherhood. And on today's episode, I want to break each of those down so you have a better understanding of what the heck that this program is about, what I keep talking about, and why it would be important to you. and also each stage. What part of each pillar do you need to identify with to move yourself forward in better health and you too can feel look and feel better at age 50 than you do 40.
- You could you still have the some of the best years of your life ahead of you and we want the payoff of all the hard work. You want to get to the beach and not have a dad bod in a sense. You don't want to be embarrassed about your body. You don't want to walk into a business meeting and just feel not like you used to.
- You don't want to lose focus in the middle of a productive workday. You don't want to feel old. Let's go over the pillars. The call rediscovering who you are. Every man has to face an eventual truth. It comes after a stressful year at work, a visit to the doctor, or catching a glimpse of yourself in a photo that makes you pause and say, "Wow, that's not it.
- This is the call. This is your identity. This is what this phase and pillar is about in the program. It's this realization that you've been living in a reaction mode, a part of you just isn't producing. It doesn't identify. It doesn't work like it did. You certainly don't look the way you used to. And you can't solve problems or keep up responding to the demands the way you did.
- Now certainly sure yeah yeah we need to delegate we need to uplevel our skill set and our abilities and business and and life but at the core that moment of truth of when you wake up and you look in the mirror you see yourself or even in the shower you step out you see yourself in the mirror you want to feel confident in the way you look and all and as long as you have that then your identity is whole.
- But if you hate looking in the mirror or hate seeing yourself in pictures or your clothes don't fit, that's not a man, that's not an identity that you want to continue on. There's a there's a gap. And in physiology and psychology, there's a gap in your identity. It's a space between where you are right now. Your current habits, your lifestyle, your behavior, your environment that you are swirling around with.
- And then we have where it is that we want to be. You want to rise up as just being a productive member of society. Of course, we want to rise up to be a leader and a guide in your family. I have three boys and a girl. It's really important that I have energy, that I have capacity, that I can manage whatever comes my way so that my kids can learn from my reactions, my behaviors, and they don't see me ending up in stress, frustration, feeling stuck, and not being able to produce at the level I want.
- So answering the call means deciding that the man you're becoming matters as much as your work, as much as other people or other situations in your circle of influence, that you are stepping into a place of leadership around health first and then body follows and then everything else improves. You start to ask, "What kind of man do I want to be in 10 years from now?" [snorts] Huge question to put on yourself and the identity that we can start shaping now and improve changes in the future.
- Once you start thinking about that question, again, I'll say it again. What kind of man do I want to be in 10 years from now? You can start answering this and start deconstructing what it looks like, what it feels like to be in that person's shoe, that identity shoes, and go from there.
- And that's what the call is, is to not only of course work on your health, but level up as a man, be a leader. The second one, pillar number two, is the forge. This is your body. This is where we want to build strength, endurance, muscle. We want to have a flat stomach at the very least. We don't need six-pack abs, per se. I find that most guys aren't trying to get on stage and be under 10% body fat.
- They just want to look and feel the best dadbot in their social circle of friends and not just feel crappy with a big belly that's a plate rest when they sit down. For most men, the problem isn't knowing what to do when it comes to exercise, when it comes to movement. It's basic. In future episodes, I'm going to be diving into how to have a strength pyramid, an exercise pyramid, just as I did a nutrition pyramid. That is coming.
- So stay tuned. In the forge, we're doing simple, effective workouts that burn fat, that change your body, that get you to lose unwanted weight. And in the terms of belly fat, you want to start taking shape into the look, the feel, the body that is going to fuel you into your 50s, 60s, 70s. We will do strength training.
- We have I have weekly challenges, fun, what I call mission brief workouts. They are challenging yet doable workouts that push you in a good way. They're about 20 minutes or so. And I have all sorts of other strength training protocols and routines. Whether you are a gym goer or not, that doesn't matter. There's so many ways to move your body and to reshape it from the inside out.
- We want to burn fat from the inside out. We want to shape the body from the inside. We want to change you physically, mentally, emotionally from the inside out. And exercise is a very easy way to build discipline, build focus, get you thinking clearer, standing taller, and having more energy. At the end of the day, when you get through the forge and the workout, then you feel empowered to go do some of the heavy lifting that you need to do in other areas of your life.
- Number three, the fuel pillar number three, it's nutrition. Nutrition is so important. Episodes 5 through 11, I laid out a very strong pyramid on nutrition in terms of calories, macros, micros, supplements, lifestyle, behavior change. There's plenty more to come. Say eating out, how to manage that, how eating in a a travel, airport, there's how to look at nutrition.
- There's so many more things on nutrition that we'll be covering in future episodes. But nutrition is the big pillar here. You cannot outwork a bad diet. We can say a thousand times. It's 80% nutrition, 20% exercise. I literally have guys in the program just walking and they're losing weight because they understand what they're putting in their body, the food that they eat, the energy that it gives them, the focus that they have, the changes that it see people see from the outside looking inward.
- Your kids will notice, your wife or partner will notice, and those at work will notice your energy. Okay, going back to pillar number two, as we age, you lose muscle mass. We do not want to do that. And you want to maintain as much muscle on your body as you can decade by decade as you get older.
- Because I always say this, the Austrian oak, good old Arnold Schwarzenegger, isn't quite where he used to be when he was younger. And it's important that strength training and he will profess it till he's blue in the face is that you need to work out. You need to move your body and build. But we fuel that muscle gain and fat loss through proper nutrition.
- Not weird diets, not any of that nonsense. We want to boost metabolism. Get it firing on all cylinders or hot as it can be to melt fat. We want to focus on lean protein sources. We're going to focus on fibrous foods, vegetables, fruits, starchy carbs for good energy, and healthy fats to help keep your testosterone up and your good healthy hormone functioning going on.
- [snorts] This will also improve digestion. So, if you are plumbing, being a little fast or slow for your liking, you'll get regular there. I promise. because you won't have to rely on Metamucil shots or fiber gummies or any of that nonsense. You'll be eating food that fuels your body. And when you fuel yourself correctly, you will notice a significant difference day in and day out, hour in and hour out.
- Pillar number four, the code. We want to lead yourself even under the daily pressures that you have. This is about mindset, a framework of how you manage travel, work stress, family commitments, crazy busy schedule, your daily meetings, and everything that shows up getting you off your rhythm. This is when the code comes in.
- We want to not build on willpower and motivation. We want to build on an unshakable mindset that builds on itself that builds towards discipline that builds towards habits, behaviors, responses that are innate in you. that when you get a challenge that comes your way, you step up and step out and move in the direction that fuels success that you get resourceful to finding the answers that help you move forward. You are able to reset.
- You're able to structure your abilities in a way that you actually leverage strengths and minimize weaknesses or even improve them because you have bandwidth now to manage the day-to-day stresses life and opportunities that show up for you. We want to focus on hitting pause. We want to focus on getting resourceful.
- We want to focus on separating emotion from action. And that you whatever comes out of your mouth or comes forth in movement and action in your body keeps standards high for yourself. And we go through unwavering amounts of effort to build a strong mindset and a code at which you live by. Lastly, pillar number five, the brotherhood.
- so important that you do not have to do this alone. So many men have that same attitude that they their dads had. I don't ask for directions, right? I don't stop at a gas station and ask for directions. I don't ask for help. And that is quite frankly You will not get farther ahead in life if you don't get the right support.
- If you're a business owner, an entrepreneur, you're constantly asking for support of team members. You're hiring out the right type of people to pull into your organization. You are seeking out better say good old Alex from says money models. You're finding better ways to serve your clients to attract the right type of customer and person.
- You're doing this through leveraging other people's capacity. And this why would you so many people will have no problems hiring another employee but they won't hire some counsel, some help to get their health, get their body in alignment with who they are and think of themselves as but don't appear to on the outside.
- It's a big struggle and everyone can use some direction, support, and accountability. Now, certainly you have myself. I've been doing this for 23 years. I literally talk to people every single day, hours and hours, trying to encourage, motivate, inspire, lead, direct, create analogies, stories, inspiration for them to change into the positive of what they want and even beyond.
- People don't realize what their true capacity is. Even if you're a high performer, you still can do better. There's still say someone ahead of you that you could improve upon and make yourself and at the very least you have yourself. Your future self is relying on you to be healthy, to do the things. And that's the other part of the brotherhood is you have other like-minded men to be able to connect with.
- These are all driven guys that love their families, that want to be successful in business, that want to provide and be leaders in their social circles. And we're able to cover all sorts of different challenges because what you're experiencing isn't unique to anyone else. They are all dealing with the same issues of con time constraints, mindset constraints, family constraints, calendar constraints, work constraints, travel constraints.
- There's all sorts of issues that people are having to deal with. Studies show again and again the men in supportive communities stay consistent twice as long, even three times as long that they dig deeper to be held accountable to the identity that they of of what they feel, what they are, what they want to present themselves to be.
- And when we can leverage that against not only having a leader like myself or the men in the group, then we're able to leverage that against yourself in the best way possible. So you step up and you show up and you build the health, the body, the life that you want. There are the five pillars. The call, the forge, the fuel, the code, the brotherhood.
- Each one brings you back to a healthier body, a stronger body, more purpose, more drive, more focus, more productivity, and we build off these foundations of sciencebacked information implemented into the easiest way possible. We prescribe sciencebacked nutrition, exercise, and mastering your mindset, and leaning into your future identity while connecting to others to be a modern man in today's crazy, hectic world.
- These five pillars are a road map to be successful in the future. If you're feeling pulled to get in better health, better energy, flatter stomach, have more oomph with with your your partner, and lead your family, your kids, and be that role model that you identify with. Consider visiting the calltorise.com.
- Go there, look at what we have to offer and the type of programming. This is the first step to claiming back your health. Okay? We're going to step one step at a time and improve your health, your fitness, your lifestyle. I'm Coach Brian. I hope to see you on the inside and lead and guide you to the best health that we can have for you.
