Nov. 14, 2025
Why Men Over 40 Struggle to Stay Make Progress and Consistent in the Gym - 17
In this episode of Driven For Health, Coach Brian Parana starts the Strength Pyramid series with the most important layer: adherence.
Coach Brian explains why most men over 40 do not fail because they picked the wrong workout split. They fail because the plan does not fit their real life. Work gets busy, travel happens, kids have activities, energy changes, and recovery takes longer than it did in their 20s.
This episode breaks down why the best workout is the one you can keep doing consistently. Coach Brian uses the REF framework: realistic, enjoyable, and flexible. A training plan has to match your schedule, be something you can stick with, and adjust when life gets chaotic.
Coach Brian also shares examples from his own training, travel, family life, workout partners, garage gym sessions, CrossFit background, endurance training, and client coaching to show how consistency beats perfect programming.
This is a strong episode for men over 40 who want to get stronger, rebuild their body, stay consistent in the gym, improve energy, and stop restarting every few weeks.
If you want to build real strength and muscle, you have to start with the foundation: Adherence.
In this episode, Coach Brian breaks down the first level of the Strength Training Pyramid, the key factor that determines whether any plan will actually work.
You’ll learn how to apply the REF Method
-Realistic, Enjoyable, and Flexible
Design a program that fits your life and keeps you progressing long term.
Listen in to understand:
• Why most training plans fail before they start
• How to match your program to your real schedule
• What research says about flexibility and recovery
• How to stay consistent when life gets busy
Start with adherence first, and every other part of your training will fall into place.
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If you’ve been wanting to take better care of your health but don’t know where to start, I’ve got something for you.
It’s my 30 Tips in 30 Days series, a free email plan that gives you one simple, actionable tip every day to help you improve your nutrition, fitness, and overall lifestyle.
You’ll learn how to eat smarter, move better, and build small daily routines that actually last.
Just clear steps you can put to work right away.
Join for free at go.brianparana.com/30days
and start building a healthier, more confident version of yourself today.
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:
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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.
- Best workout isn't the one with the perfect split. It's the one you can keep doing through no matter how busy work is, how much you have to travel, or how busy day-to-day family life is with kid activities after school, or all the things that are going on in your day-to-day life. This is Coach Brian. I just wanted to read a testimony from Terry.
- He sent it in the email just uh within the last week before I joined Coach Brian's the call to rise 100 day fat loss challenge. I hadn't touched a weight in years. I was tired when I woke up like I hadn't slept at all. Stiff and never wanted to bend over and honestly felt like I'd lost my body to father time.
- I used to feel like I was in my 30s but now more like late 50s. Within a few weeks of the program, I had kickstarted simple exercise routines. Coach Brian's mission brief workout. I started to notice real changes with more strength, better energy throughout the day, and I could actually keep up with my kids and look forward to my training sessions again, no matter what time of day I could squeeze them in.
- I even thought it was going to me, but I actually felt capable of handling the challenging workouts. The workouts fit my schedule, and the plan took all the guess work out of it. I'm stronger than I've been in a decade. I finally feel in control of my body again. It feels like it's at least back in the 40s.
- If you're a busy guy who's ready to get back under the weights and get your body back with a flat stomach, you can take your shirt off at the beach, see results, check out Coach Brian's program. This is where you want to start. Welcome back to Driven for Health podcast. This show is for men over 40 who want to improve their energy, strength, and overall health.
- focus on nutrition, fitness, and making this work into your day-to-day life. I'm Coach Brian Piranha, and today we're starting a new series called the strength training pyramid. If you listen to the nutrition pyramid series, those were episodes five is where it started and it concluded at episode 11. It focused on calories, macronutrients, micronutrients, nutrient timing.
- Then we had supplements, and putting it all together in a lifestyle. Now, this one builds just the same idea. It's going to help you organize your training sessions, your decisions on what you should actually be doing in your workouts in the right order, starting with what matters most. When you understand how to build the foundation of exercise and focus, effort, and energy you put into it for the time that you have, you will not waste your time and the small details.
- You won't have to worry about getting into the weeds, but we'll focus on the big major needle movers. Why the pyramid matters? There's a lot of confusion in the fitness world, of course, right? You see it in fit influencers all over the YouTubes, all these places, people argue about what the best workout splits are.
- Shoot, go to Reddit and you'll have a field day. Or even back in the day, you had a lot of bodybuilding.com forums or testosterone nation, T-nation, the forums there. The problem is that so many of these topics are secondary. It ideal rest times or perfect rep ranges. Think of it like a cart and a horse. If the cart is in front of the horse, nothing moves forward.
- Okay? In training, that means you are focused on small things before you have built the basics. The goal of this series is to help you put things in the right order so your results are built on a solid base foundation. The six levels of the training pyramid wanted to go in priority and order of the structure of this thing.
- Number one is adherence and is on the bottom the base layer. You have to do the thing. That's what we're going to spend the majority of our time talking about today. Then we have volume, intensity, and frequency. We have progression, exercise selection, rest periods, and tempo. Each level supports the one above it. If the bass is weak, the whole system isn't going to work.
- You're going to struggle to get results. Example, if you're so focused on the tempo of your movements, but you don't have enough volume to elicit a change in your body in the first place, you're going This is why adherence to working out comes first. You can have the most advanced training program, but if you can't get to the gym or maybe have a garage gym or a basement gym or whatever, like just getting outside even, this won't work.
- That's what we're going to cover today is adherence means sticking with a plan long enough to see progress. It is the ability to follow through. Just like anything in life, it has to be consistent over time doing the right plan to see the right progress. To make it easy to remember, we'll use the acronym REF. REF.
- It stands for realistic, enjoyable, and lastly, flexible. These three factors determine whether you can maintain your training over time or it crumbles. Now, is this realistic? If you're a busy parent, working long hours, you travel often, six workouts a week may not be realistic. You may need your training and your real schedule to link up, not based off of, you know, what Arnold Schwarzenegger does.
- It is better to train three or four days a week consistently, then start a plan that you can only sustain for a few weeks. The best program, guys, is the one that fits your lifestyle and allows you to recover properly. Realistic training is sustainable training. I worked out on Friday, last days, Monday as of recording this episode. My legs are still sore.
- I will probably do legs on Tuesday or Wednesday again. And we'll talk about it. Maybe a cycle of workout isn't in a 7day time frame. Maybe it is in a 10day time frame. And all of a sudden, it opens up this window of opportunity. Oh shoot. If I work out three or four times in 10 days, I can totally do that rather than trying to jam it into seven days because my schedule is really busy this week.
- So, we have realistic. Now, we have enjoyable. You're more likely to stay committed when you enjoy what you're doing. You do not need to love every workout. You don't need to be motivated or have willpower every single time you go to the gym. That's just not real life. You should find satisfaction in the process though.
- And if you do not like it or even say dread the session or it keeps becoming harder and harder to go, you're doing the wrong approach. You want to choose movements, gyms, training partners that keep you engaged and the plan that excites you will produce more effort and more outcome as a result. I remember back in the day I I did the starting strength 5x5 and I loved it until the weights got crazy heavy for me.
- I'm 6 foot about 190 lbs for context. I would go into my gym, and I owned one at the time, do this, and the 5x5 squats were somewhat manageable, but by the end of the session or the sequencing, I got I had worked my way up to five sets of five at 290 pounds. For me, that was mentally crippling to continue to try to add two and a half to five pounds per set.
- The weight of the bar was mentally destroying my motivation before I even put weight on the bar because I just knew how heavy it was. Now I was okay doing it. Now if I had a partner then I might have been able to do a couple more weeks of that. An alternative, I ended up shifting to the Wendler 531, which works off of 90% of your one rep max, which is way, way, way more manageable and mentally how they structure it in five, three or one reps and then occasional max out rep sets. That was way more fun and easy to
- to step into because I saw progress and I could still get stronger without mentally being challenged. flexible. The the final part of adherence is flexibility. Life changes. It's constantly evolving. Schedules shift. Travel comes up. Family priorities take precedent. Even right now, there's been so many times in my life that I've had to adjust for a variety of different training times.
- for example, oh shoot, if I don't work out before noon, I need to just not even consider it. Especially when my kids were younger, I I could work out before noon while I was at my gym or that that was the best time. Uh when I was in my personal training days back at Lifestyles, I would work out whenever I had a break in clients or someone canled last minute, I would jump into action and go work out then.
- And now I usually work out between 3 and 5. Another time it's oh I can't work out before noon. I definitely definitely cannot work out between say 4 and 900 p.m. That is family time. There's just literally I will really upset my wife Amber if I constantly schedule workouts in times where kids are home and I should be helping with you being a parent, right? That's a responsibility I have with four kids now.
- other times in my life. Zift as a cycling app, but being a triathlete and an endurance athlete, a marathoner and all, I loved I still do love riding bike. Zift.com was this online avatar that you could jump into on your bike trainer in your basement and go bike with other people in their house cycling. And it was a lifesaver.
- I knew that if I couldn't work out earlier in the day, I could jump on this at 9 or 10:00 at night even. And then I would do the work. I would be entranced inside the system, the the world that Wattopia was of Zift. And it was amazing. I would work hard and workouts because there were other real people in this avatar world that I was fighting against or I shouldn't say fighting, but competing against. It was so much fun.
- And I would schedule a time because they would have certain times where things would launch for a training ride, a long ride, a an interval or sprint or hill workout, or even a race. So, tons of fun. That was a lifesaver to keep things a lot more flexible during COVID. Flexible schedule and not being able to work out with anyone.
- I love working out with people. I work out harder when people come. That's why I'm so sore today. I was kept adding weights on Friday to my Bulgarian split squats and my thighs are pretty sore and bending over this week and was oof. It's a little bit challenging. But I worked out and I lifted heavier as a result of having people.
- During COVID, I had to come up with a different approach because I would always default to work mode if I didn't have another solution. And a solution during COVID that kept me super consistent was this. I would lift four lifts. I would do a chest, a back, a shoulder, and a leg. I would do 10 rounds of 10 reps for those four movement patterns.
- chest could be a bench press, dumbbell press, incline, decline, dips, shoulder press, barbells, dumbbells. The pull-ups or rows were generally the ones I would do for back. Shoulders would be shoulder presses. And then we have legs would be squats, deadlifts, hexar deadlifts, step-ups, things like that. And I would spend basically the whole day I would do as many sets or reps or rounds that I could in a given time and then I would just chart it on a board and then every periodically throughout the day I would come out and do another say 10 to 50
- more reps and then go walk away. The weight was always challenging but to a point where I didn't have to warm up every time. When I was done, the goal was 10 sets of those four, which would give me 400 reps. And it worked like gang busters. So, very happy with that routine and setup that really allowed me to stay super consistent while I worked out by myself during COVID because you [snorts] couldn't be around people.
- So, there's two examples of different ways that I have allowed adherence to shift in my world. I mean, honestly, I was a marathon runner. I did triathlon. I've always lifted weights in some capacity. Did CrossFit. I did heavy strength training. Right now, in my 40s, I'm staying fit, healthy, and functional. I work out. I lift weights routinely.
- I'm generally anywhere from 12 would be a light month for me, but more like 15 or 18 workouts in a month of doing some sort of a split or a full body rotation and usually trying to do it with someone else. Chris, Dan, Andy are my workout buddies. For you, the flexible program allows you to be adjustable without losing progress.
- Again, instead of a 7-day time frame, maybe it's a 10day time frame that you think about. This allows you to train at different times of the day, swap out exercises. As long as you're doing, say it's chest workout, focus. As long as you're doing a chest exercise, you're working out that muscle and movement pattern, we are good.
- Thumbs up. Do you always have to bench press to get stronger at bench? The answer is no. You do not have to do that. Sometimes you might have to do shorter sessions to squeeze it in. Other times you might have more time to do longer. You really want to take advantage of that.
- The for a long time, going back to this, I never worked out while I was on vacation. And as you know, if you've listened to some prior episodes, we've traveled all 50 states. We've been multiple countries, continents in the last 9 to 10 years. Travel is a priority. spending experiences with my family is important especially to my wife and I am happy to oblige and go all sorts of different places.
- Therefore, I didn't work out because we go hard. We would wake up earlyish or we'd basically sleep until the kids got up and and I would sleep too because we would stay up as late as possible usually. I just think of times that we were at Disney or Universal Studios or just out on towns in different cities exploring, experiencing.
- We'd be in bed at 10, 11, midnight some nights, and then we'd sleep till 8ish, wake up 9ish, and then we have our breakfast at We were globalists for Hyatt. My wife is a a travel advisor and she manipulates things like crazy and and is obviously super smart and knowledgeable and skilled at travel. We'd have these amazing buffets, breakfast buffets with our kids, so we'd always get up and make sure that we were there by 10 before 10 to take advantage of eating out.
- And just a side note, if you have a large family, you definitely want to use hotel perks to have breakfast included on some level because it le it greatens the experience for the parents, lessens the challenge of trying to figure out where what you're going to eat in the morning, and it ultimately ends up being more convenient time-wise and moneywise to do the same because then you don't have to worry about breakfast or trying to fit it in or pay for it or whatever.
- For six of us, we could easily spend $100 at a sitdown breakfast restaurant, and that's not a good use of time or money. And having a status at our hotel allowed us to be able to enjoy that and just go there. Now, I digress on that a little bit, but going forward now, I do work out when I travel because I have my older sons that want to work out.
- Uh my daughter has worked out with me. I'm able to carve out time and just go do that as we might have a downtime in the day. It's very rare, but sometimes depending on the schedule and all, I'll go work out, but usually I would just never plan on working out because I'm so consistent in my other days. And if you just for example travel, if you're going to take your shoes and workout clothes and never use them, please don't.
- It's an unrealistic expectation that only leaves you feeling bad about yourself, shame, or whatever. That just isn't helpful. In summary here, adherence is what's number one. We'll go into volume and frequency and all the other parts of the pyramid as we go so that you understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, and being truly successful.
- Now, on to the fast five. These are the questions to make it a little bit more fun, enjoyable, and question number one, what is one of your favorite workout splits? I remember back in my lifestyle days, a personal trainer, I would do this sequence of push-ups, pull-ups, and dips or shoulder presses. And I would do a a 20 10 10 20 meaning 20 push-ups, 10 pull-ups, 20 dips.
- Then I would do 18 9 18. Then I would do 16, 8, 16. Then 14, 7, 14. I work my way down to 212 of push-ups, pull-ups, and shoulder press. a fun, exciting strength training workout that I made up that hit all my upper body and I it was relatively take about 20 minutes to do and bam, I had a sweet pump. Number two, what's my favorite lift? Personally, I'm a big fan of deadlifts because you just feel strong lifting the weight off the ground or pull-ups because you can lift yourself off the ground.
- At my height of strength, I could do I lifted this 110 pound lady. She got on my shoulders on my back and just clung on like a monkey and then I did a pull-up. Somehow I got my chin over the bar and that was Oh, wow. I was pretty excited about that one. Question three, what are some of your stats in terms of strength? Well, in my CrossFit days, I would lift a quite a bit more than I did in my say endurance phase of marathons and triathons.
- I wasn't focused on strength, but as soon as I got into the CrossFit world, I did. My not too bad, but say 6' 190 to 200 lb. I was able to squat 325, deadlift 415. I lifted about 185 overhead and bench press about 225. So, reasonably strong. I was pretty happy about that. Number four is, who do you like to listen to when you work out? Well, I love a variety of different music.
- Most notable, you'll find me listening to say Eminem or 2000's hip-hop or 2000's alternative hard rock, say Lincoln Park, as an example. Uh currently I have been listening to a lot of Hans Zimmer. He is a cinematic soundtrack writer for blockbuster movies. He has some pretty epic things and and you'll definitely hear them.
- I like Interstellar soundtrack, Dunkerk soundtrack, of course, his Christian Bale, Christopher Nolan series on of The Dark Knight. That's just phenomenal. And we've got one more question here. What's a frequency that I like to follow? Well, my frequency is generally determined by life. I allow certain times of my week to be occupied with workouts.
- I try and schedule workouts. Example, this week I have four workouts scheduled with Chris to do weight training. On Friday, he's booked. So, I will try to schedule some time with my buddy Dan. And I'm going to try and schedule some time with my buddy Andy. Why? Because I work harder with someone else and I prioritize my time that way.
- Otherwise, I'm working and trying to do things for my family. So, moving on, I wanted to let you guys know that I have a 30 tips in 30 days sequence. It's a free email sequence that gives you one simple actionable tip every single day to help you improve your nutrition, your fitness, your overall lifestyle.
- easy to follow little workouts in there or recipes to implement. It is so simple that you could read it and say, "I could do this right now." You'll learn how to eat smarter, move better, and build small daily habits that actually keep you moving in the right direction. even even if you're only did half of them, you're going to be significantly better off in the next 30 days and onward.
- These are full of little tips and tricks that I use with my clients, too. To join for free there, it's go.brianpiran.com30 days. All that in the show notes for you. Wrapping up our session today. So excited that we're getting into a strength focus on working out. I'm really happy to go through all of these different layers.
- We have adherence first. Volume, intensity, and frequency will be episode 18. 19 will be progression. 20 will be exercise selection. 21 will be rest periods. And episode 22 will be tempo. I hope you really enjoy these things. I'll try to provide some sample workouts for you to take away as well in there.
