About Stay Ready

I weighed 367 pounds. Years of putting my software engineering career ahead of my health had caught up with me. When I started working remotely, even the small reasons to move disappeared. No walking around the office. No colleague nudging me to step away from my computer.

I'd go to the gym, hurt my elbow or knee, and stop. Months would pass before I tried again.

I had two children. I wanted to be around for them and be able to keep up.

I stepped on a scale and decided I'd start exercising next month. What actually started it was smaller. I was sitting at my computer, hungry, and instead of going to the fridge I went for a hike in the woods. I fell a few times. Once, from the other side of a hill, I heard someone remark on how hard I was breathing. I'm not ashamed to say that stuck with me. Being ready stopped being an idea. I kept walking, and eventually I joined Summit Strength in Milford, New Hampshire, and started working with a personal trainer.

I began to understand how the pieces fit together: why deadlifts could mean doing less work elsewhere, and how to eat to lose weight while trying to keep muscle.

That understanding mattered when my shoulder started hurting as my bench press reached 185 pounds on the bar. After something felt wrong during benching and then pushups, I talked to my trainer. We changed my grip, lowered the weights, adjusted the rep ranges, and worked on shoulder strength and form. Eventually, I built up to a 250-pound bench.

Previously, pain had been where I stopped. This time, I had help finding a way forward.

I should say what the rest of my life looked like, because it wasn't only my body. I'm a software engineer, a husband, a father, the one people count on. I have ADHD. The stress was real, the time was never there, and the brain fog was constant: staring at my monitor without reading it, taking "five minutes" to scroll that turned into two hours, getting annoyed at whatever interrupted it. I won't tell you lifting fixes any of that. I can tell you what it did for me. Lifting often, and lifting heavy, cleared my head in a way nothing else had. It also made me pay attention to what I ate, which helped more than I expected. Training and eating in step with each other did as much for my head as for my body.

I wanted that reasoning to carry into the sessions I did on my own. I tried and paid for several training and nutrition apps. Each had things I liked, but I was still left wondering why a workout had been suggested, whether I'd done enough, and what should change when I wasn't feeling right.

That experience shaped Stay Ready. I'm building it to connect your training, nutrition, and recovery so what's happening with your body helps shape what you do next, and you can understand why.

I'm still working on my own health while building this for people whose careers pushed theirs aside, and for anyone trying to start again.

These days, doing things with my kids feels like fun instead of a task. I've carried both of them for over a mile. On a family bike ride, I was the only one pedaling. When they wanted to keep going, I could.

The bigger change is what they ask for. They used to ask me to get off the phone, or whether they could watch YouTube with me. Now they ask me to do pushups with them. My son is five and my daughter is three. I bought them toy barbells, and they deadlift and squat with them, eat their protein, and flex. They look at health differently than I ever did as a kid. My wife has started her own health journey. The people closest to you don't just depend on you. They watch, and whether you want them to or not, they follow.