As One Ages, Supplements Become About More Than Nutrition

In this conversation with Nutritional Outlook Senior Editor Nicholas Saraceno, Mike DeMarco, a wellness coach who is known around MJH Life Sciences as something of a fitness guru, gets candid about his evolving relationship with competitive training, including a recent turn at HYROX, the fitness race format combining 8 kilometers of running with eight functional workout stations.

DeMarco's entry into HYROX was characteristically unplanned. Mike Hennessy Jr., with whom he has trained for nearly a decade, simply signed them both up. But the event turned out to be a meaningful inflection point. After 6 years of competitive CrossFit, DeMarco had already begun pulling back from the high-volume, high-intensity format, not because he lost interest, but because he started listening to his body more carefully. He describes that transition as one a lot of athletes in their late 30s and beyond are making, which helps explain why HYROX has grown as quickly as it has. It offers a competitive outlet with a structured goal, something to put on the calendar, without the cumulative joint stress of traditional CrossFit programming.

What surprised him was the running. Coming in with a strong conditioning base, DeMarco assumed the 8 km of running would be a minor adjustment. It wasn't. In the months leading up to his second race, his training shifted dramatically toward running-specific work, threshold runs, intervals, and longer steady-state efforts more typical of half-marathon preparation than a general fitness program.

The broader theme running through the conversation is one many athletes in their late 30s and beyond will recognize: the shift from chasing volume and PRs to making deliberate choices about how limited training time gets spent. Post-college, DeMarco says, he had 15 to 20 hours a week to train. Now it's 5 to 10, and every session has to earn its place in the schedule. With HYROX behind him for now, he's already pulling the pie chart back toward strength work, a conscious rebalancing that reflects how he thinks about training as a long-term practice rather than a short-term performance chase.

With it being Men’s Health Week, he also dives into how his body and exercise regimen has changed over the years, along with the ingredients/supplements he recommends.

The transcript of their conversation can be found below.

Nicholas Saraceno: This week that we're filming is actually Men's Health Week, so I thought it was very appropriate to talk to you. But I'm curious in terms of performance and longevity for people you've worked with or for yourself personally, what types of ingredients or supplements—you don't have to get into brands or anything like that—but what kind of things do you turn to in terms of like performance in that regard?

Mike DeMarco: Food first always, but I'm a lifelong protein supplement, creatine supplement, multivitamin, and then everything else will get taken care of with food. Even if I'm eating really well, let's say you go through these cycles of like doing really good meal prep for weeks at a stretch, but even in those stretches, still taking a protein supplement because it's still covering your bases, and ensuring that I'm going above and beyond a protein goal.

I think one of the biggest things on the supplement side, especially as you age, is that people look at the supplements purely for the nutritional component. But I've recognized that when I'm consistent with the supplements, there's actually a mindset component because as I'm ingesting the supplements, I'm also like, I don't want to waste them. I don't want to waste my training. As I've matured in terms of training, I've seen supplements for that factor too, beyond just the nutritional component.