Training Smarter, Not Harder

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 6years 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: Ladies and gentlemen, Nico Saraceno, senior editor of Nutritional Outlook. I am joined today by a very special guest. He is Mike DeMarco. I know many of you around MJH Life Sciences know him as the Yoda, or the guru, I'm hyping you up a lot.

Mike DeMarco: Keep hyping me, keep hyping me.

Saraceno: You have a good reputation around here. A lot of fitness-based, even just life advice and in and of itself. A lot I wanted to get into with you today because you're active on social media, especially LinkedIn. I do follow you on there. And I know recently you competed in HYROX. For many of you who might not know, you'll probably get into it, but I'm curious if you could just describe what exactly HYROX is all about, and where does that motivation for you to pursue this comes from? How did that come about? Can you maybe get into that?

DeMarco: To be completely honest, the motivation to do it was, Mike and I (Mike Jr.) and I have been training alongside each other for almost 10 years now. And last year he was just like, hey, I signed us up. I was like, all right, I guess we're doing it.

Saraceno: I can't say no now.

DeMarco: Honestly, that was the motivation. I knew that it was around, and I'd been doing CrossFit for 10 years on the CrossFit gym for a long time, competed very heavily in CrossFit, for 6 years. And then as I aged, I evolved the way I was training because it was just a lot on my body. I think that's a lot of the reason why you see a big movement and a shift in the fitness industry for many more people moving towards HYROX as a competitive outlet, or just like similar to if you were going to sign up for a race, putting that thing on the calendar, get your butt in gear to start training,

HYROX just takes the 5K and adds more fitness elements to it, which makes it a little bit more, I think, attractive for people who don't want to just run. They want to do a little bit more than just run.

Saraceno: You mentioned the running component too. My brother-in-law and my sister did it actually. We were there, I think a couple weeks ago, and they were trying to get us to sign up for it. They're like, yeah, if you're into running, it's very catered towards the runner. How do you feel about that? Do you think think it's majority just having that cardio to be able to do the running? Because my fear would be like a lot of it is strength based as well. Where does that balance go?

DeMarco: It's an interesting question because in 2025, when Mike first basically like "voluntold" me that we were doing it together in my head, I was ready because I still train cross training or CrossFit or whatever you want to call it, so using weights for time and doing stuff like that is wheelhouse for me. I thought I was ready and I figured, all right, there's 8K of running. I just need to start running once a week to blend it in.

I was really mistaken when we showed up for that first race—I underestimated how much running it was. I was of the opposite of your current mindset, which is you're more concerned with the strength base or like the fitness elements, whereas I didn't really see it as a running race. After the first time I, I respected how much running it was. Leading up into this year's race that we did the 4 months out training switched very heavily into running, and running as if I was preparing for like a 10K or a half, honestly, instead of just casually running, as in all right, I'm going to go run 3 miles, try and hold like an 8-minute mile pace, doing threshold runs and intervals and all kinds of stuff like that.

Saraceno: It's interesting. Obviously, I think the challenge for training for something like this or anything of this intensity is that you're competing against yourself in the sense that none of us are getting any older. You have to, I think realistically, be like, okay, my body is adjusting. My question for you is how do you adjust, or how have you adjusted your regimen and your training as you've gotten further along your fitness career? How do you do that so that it suits your body type?

DeMarco: You start to be smarter with regards to understanding the whole picture. So let's say early on, we'll call that post-college to 26 years old. The mindset is still like, oh, I'm a college athlete. I'm still a competitor. You also have different life circumstances in that age bracket of time. Single, no kids. And so I have more time, so I can train twice a day and not worry about, uh, having to be home at a certain time. Right. And so, you know, in that first phase of training post college, it was still very competitively driven: chasing weights, chasing times, chasing more volume.

Then, as you mature and you learn that you no longer have 15 to 20 hours a week to train necessarily, and you only have anywhere from 5 to 10—10 if you're lucky—you start to get really particular with how you're leveraging that time and you start to parse out certain elements that don't align with what you're training for in that particular moment. When we bring it back to, I said, 4 months out from us doing HYROX, I had to make compromises on different dimensions of the way I was training because I was training for something very specific, and now that we're on the backside of that for the last 2 weeks and for the foreseeable I think 8 weeks, I'm not going to run like I did, because I want to get back to strength training, and I only have so many minutes per week. I want to fill that pie chart with more strength training.