The Realization That Changes Everything

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: What would you recommend for somebody who may not have as much of a fitness type of background who’s looking into getting something physically intensive, like HYROX? Where is the starting point? How do they start actually jumping into something like that?

Mike DeMarco: Walking. I mean, very simply with walking. One of the simplest tools that we've leveraged here at MJH Life Sciences specifically is I'll be on a call with somebody for the first time and they'll ask me a question very similar to that. And after I help or I extract why they're even interested in that. I then start with, do you know you have a health app on your phone? Sometimes they'll say, yeah, I think I saw that one time. I'm like, alright, well, let's open it.

They'll open it and 7 out of 10 times, they'll say wait, I can't believe I never registered for this before. In real time, they're filling out their information. And 2 minutes into this, they realize for the first time that their iPhone or whatever device they have, has been tracking their steps since they've owned their phone. In that moment, the question that started with, how can I get into consistent, intense exercise now turns into, wow, I've, I've only averaged 2700 steps per day for the last 3 years.

That's the starting point. We can't even discuss doing HYROX and getting into intensive exercise until we build that base and close the gap on general activity level. Because intense exercise or any exercise protocol for that matter, will never offset lack of activity for the other 23 hours per day that you're not doing exercise.