And the patterns I see that emerge are always the same, it’s even a theme that I started to see in my life.

I was spending less time with the boys, not going out of our way to organise trips & the adventures we went on when we were all broke.

We have more money than ever, but we have replaced an interesting life with one of predictability.

We stopped trying new things, learning new skills, because there’s no clear ROI like there is in business.

The more I work on my business, in theory the better the profit margins and in turn the money money the business makes.

So our lives get reduced to:

• Going to the gym to do some cookie cutter program.

• Spending less time with the male friendships we cultivated, and more time with the woman in our lives.

• Focus solely on our career and business success as the only marker of winning.

Now by no means is this article saying avoid learning skills that allow you to make more money, neglect your intimate relationships or families…

But if there are some of you reading this who feel as if their lives have become a grind, become boring & monotonous

That is entirely your fault.

A Boring Life is yours to fix

The dangerous thing about the boring life is that it’s not an overnight change.

It’s death by a thousand cuts.

And going into my 30’s I see this happen across the board.

If you have an ambitious circle of friends, they are all working around the clock, so it becomes harder to catch up.

Guys are starting to get married and have kids (me included), which adds further difficulty of organising interesting things to do.

And it’s a time period where it’s no longer “cute” to be the ambitious man with nothing to show for, which puts more pressure on you to be doing well in your business or career.

So the combination of all of these different things leads to the life I described in the tweet above.

So what can you do then?

The easiest antidote to this, is by looking at your life in 12 week peaks.

You can either align this with a business quarter or the seasons (summer, autumn, winter, spring) - which align perfectly with that same 12 week cycle.

Every single 12 week cycle, you need to book a new experience, side quest or something that simply disrupts & breaks the routine an monotony of your current life structure.

This has to be held as sacredly as your business meeting or career obligations.

And it has to be booked in with your mates.

You’re going to have hundreds of opportunities to do things with your kids, your future wife or girlfriend (especially if you live together).

So use this opportunity to make sure you don’t sever you connection with your boys.

This doesn’t even need to be an elaborate trip overseas or anything expensive.

• Hiking / Mountaineering

• Camping

• Fishing

All of these things don’t break the bank and can be done relatively locally depending on where you live.

The point is to break up the repetitive nature of your current routine and to integrate these trips in once a quarter.

This is exactly what we did on the first lethal camp expedition of 2026.

Which was a multi day hiking trip in the high country (day 1 was fucking miserably and was 10 straight miles through this terrain):

But like many things in life, when everything clears up, we had some of the most breath taking views of the high country at the start of snow season & it was great was to reset the circadian rhythm and rough things out for a few days to appreciate coming back to home to a king size bed.

In Lethal Gentleman style we wrapped up the trip at Victor Churchill with some W9 Wagyu ribeye & watched Justin Gaethje cause one of the biggest upsets in UFC history (to the chargrin of the wait staff).

There is 0 excuse not to fit just ONE of these experiences in per quarter, it allows you plenty of time to grind (I appreciate progressive in life requires work, I’m not advocating being a digital nomad that is constantly travelling).

The last thing we want to do is sever the connections we have, particularly with our male friends, as there’s only certain things you can do with your boys (not many girlfriends or wives would want to put themselves through a 40lb ruck in 10 degree Farenheit weather).

Remember, it is entirely your responsibility to live an interesting life, and if your current circumstance is boring that’s entirely your fault.

You don’t need to be a millionaire to break the cycle of monotony, romanticise your life a bit, side quest & make sure you don’t look back 30 years from now and have no interesting stories to tell because all you did was work on making money and going to the gym doing a cookie cutter push, pull legs split.

Until next time,

Jack Krucial.

We are in an age where people are obsessed with tracking their health.

This is particularly common in high performing, type A men.

So they will obsess over their Whoop scores, HRV, biological age, yet they have 1 marker staring at them in the mirror that they completely ignore because they prefer to find comfort in the data that supports their bias that they are healthy.

You also have a large uptick in men who are getting blood testing done. They are measuring their free testosterone, hormonal profile, while the biggest marker of testosterone (their physique and how they look), is something that they can gauge for FREE.

Now if you have the means to afford these gadgets, tools and diagnostics, by all means, go ahead…

But as mentioned, there is a free, very accurate marker that you can check in a 2 second look in the mirror, and that is your bodyfat percentage.

This is always the #1 thing I will address with my clients, and this article is going to give you the 4 biggest reasons why…

1- Testosterone Maxxing

Whenever I onboard a client and they are concerned about their testosterone levels, whether that’s through blood testing results, the fact they are getting into their 40’s or just some subjective signs: tiredness, erectile dysfunction etc… The first thing I will look at is their bodyfat percentage.

Fat converts testosterone into estrogen, so the more adipose tissue you have on your frame, the higher probability of the sacred testosterone compound in your body that gets converted.

And this is often the advice I give way before thinking about TRT, peptides or any of the commonly rushed solutions we see in the market.

The leaner you are, the better optimized your testosterone levels are, and this is a positive feedback loop of: being lean → lower estrogen → higher testosterone → easier to preserve & build muscle mass

And that beautiful cycle repeats.

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2- Insulin Sensitivity

Being insulin sensitive is one of the most powerful markers of metabolic health because it means your body can efficiently shuttle glucose into the muscle tissue where it belongs, rather than leaving it circulating in the bloodstream and storing it as body fat.

Put simply: the more insulin sensitive you are, the better your body handles food, recovers from training, and partitions nutrients toward muscle instead of fat.

This is why body fat percentage matters so much. As body fat climbs, especially around the abdomen, insulin sensitivity generally declines, which means your body has to produce more insulin just to manage the same amount of carbs.

That’s where the problems start: worse energy, poorer nutrient partitioning, harder fat loss, and a much greater likelihood of storing incoming calories as fat rather than using them to fuel performance and build lean tissue.

From a performance standpoint, insulin sensitivity is an elite trait. It allows you to eat more strategically, recover better from hard training, and stay anabolic without constantly fighting your own physiology. This is why the leaner, more muscular athlete usually looks and performs better: they’re not just leaner visually, they’re operating with a better metabolic setup.

This is the exact reason why with each of my clients we will choose 1 quarter a year to do a ‘fight camp’ style shred to maintain & maximise insulin sensitivity and peel away any body fat (particularly if they are above the lethal standards we have developed).

3- Movement Efficiency & Kinaesthetic Skill Acquisition

The biggest mistake I made in my professional athletic career was pack on unnecessary size and bodyfat in order to improve my athletic output.

I remember vividly how much slower I moved, that I would gas out quickly and that with every pound of bodyweight added to my frame, it had huge detriments to my agility, gas tank & ability to perform.

Now this example is obviously at the highest levels of performance, but unnecessary bodyfat on your frame, particularly if you are someone who is running, sprinting, playing sports, will place significantly more strain & stress on your joints, ligaments & tendons.

It’s no coincidence that those who are overweight are far more likely to be prone to total hip and knee replacements, from the sheer stress that is placed on these areas of the body, compounded over decades.

This is also exactly why training standards such as the pull up are baked into the lethal standards criteria, because the heavier you are (and higher bodyfat you have), the harder a pull up is going to be.

It’s also why for squatting, deadlift and pressing patterns, we don’t calculate total weight lifted, we look at it as a multiple of your bodyweight.

4- Heart Health Risk Factors

It’s no secret that heart disease is the #1 leading cause of death in the United States.

And the connection to body fat is not subtle. As body fat climbs, particularly visceral fat stored around the abdomen, you get a cascade of downstream effects: elevated ApoB (the primary driver of arterial plaque), higher LDL particle count, rising triglycerides, lower HDL, and increasing blood pressure. Each of these independently raises your cardiovascular risk. Combined, they stack.

The mechanism is straightforward. Excess body fat drives insulin resistance, which forces the liver to overproduce VLDL particles, flooding the bloodstream with more ApoB-carrying lipoproteins. More particles in circulation means more opportunity for them to embed in arterial walls and begin the process of atherosclerosis. Over decades, that process is what kills people.

The leaner you are, the cleaner your lipid profile tends to be. Not because weight is the only variable, but because low body fat is a reliable signal that your metabolism is running efficiently and not generating the hormonal and inflammatory environment that accelerates heart disease.

This is why body fat percentage sits at the top of the diagnostic hierarchy. Before you start worrying about which supplement stack to run or what your latest blood panel says, ask yourself the simpler question first: are you actually lean? Because the data consistently shows that people who maintain a low, healthy body fat percentage across their lifetime dramatically reduce their cardiovascular risk profile, without needing a single pharmaceutical intervention to do it.

So Before You Start Looking at TRT, Peptides, Supplements & Blood Testing…

Focus on your body fat percentages. It’s the lowest hanging fruit, which if addressed, leads to a cascade of incredibly beneficial changes to your body, hormonal profile and physiology.

It’s no coincidence that it is something that we cover in detail in the lethal physique protocol which is coming very very soon.

It will be a streamlined protocol and something that you all have waited very patiently for instead of piecing together all of the substack articles that have been written.

Until next time.

Jack Krucial

For the modern man, fitness doesn’t serve him.

He’s a slave to it.

The obsession with ‘looksmaxxing’ has created a generation of young men whose main motive in life is to look good at all costs. This has brought young men to take steroids, get aesthetic enhancing surgeries, and chase every shortcut available, even if it ruins their health, their confidence, and their hormone profile for the rest of their lives.

We live in a world where devoting ten hours a week to purely lifting weights and pharmaceutically enhancing yourself is now the norm. Men are conned by their favourite influencer who claims to be natural but miraculously added 20 pounds of lean muscle whilst simultaneously cutting to single digit body fat.

The standard has been broken for a long time. But most men don’t realise how broken it is until you see it laid out in front of you.

Hugh Jackman at 32 was Wolverine and nobody questioned it. At 55 he looked like he’d been rebuilt in a laboratory. More muscular, leaner, more vascular than he was two decades earlier. One of those physiques is natural.

Then there’s Zyzz. The original physique god of the internet era. An entire generation of young men worshipped and built their fitness identities around. His aesthetic was the standard. The pinnacle. The thing men pointed at and said: that’s the goal.

Zyzz looks like a typical fitness influencer now…

Then look at Arnold. The most iconic physique in the history of bodybuilding. The gold standard. The man every serious lifter pointed to for decades as the pinnacle of what the human body could become. Place him next to Phil Heath. Next to Ronnie Coleman. Next to the modern open division, with their distended guts, their immovable mass, their bodies so pharmaceutically enhanced they can barely walk across a stage without waddling.

Arnold looks small.

When the gold standard looks small, the standard has lost the plot entirely. This is physique inflation. The goalpost keeps moving, the pharmaceutical requirement keeps climbing, and an entire generation of young men are destroying their health trying to keep up with a standard that has no ceiling and no relationship with reality.

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MUSLCE GROWTH IS ONLY 1 FITNESS QUALITY…

The problem with this approach to fitness runs deeper than aesthetics.

Most men don’t realise that building muscle is only one quality on the entire spectrum of human movement. One. And when you optimise exclusively for that single quality, you sacrifice everything else.

Walking. Running. Jumping. Crawling. Climbing. Throwing. Swimming. Defence. Balance. Carrying. These are the movements that defined human physicality for thousands of years. The movements that built the bodies of every man you admire in those photos. None of them were built in a gym isolating muscle groups on machines.

And there is a direct physiological cost to ignoring them. VO2 max, your body’s capacity to utilise oxygen, decreases as muscle mass increases beyond a functional threshold. The bigger you get, the less cardiovascular capacity you have. The man chasing maximum size is trading his engine for his exterior. He is becoming less healthy, less capable, and less athletic with every kilogram of muscle he adds beyond what his frame was designed to carry.

Then there’s the hormonal cost. Steroids and anabolics don’t just build muscle. In young men, they permanently alter the hormonal profile that governs energy, mood, libido, and long term health. Men in their early twenties are nuking their testosterone for the next four decades in exchange for looking slightly more impressive at 23. The standard will have moved by 25. The damage will not have.

And then there is the cost nobody talks about. The life cost.

You can’t eat at a restaurant without running macros in your head. You can’t go on holiday without finding a gym. You can’t socialise normally because everything runs through the filter of the programme. The pursuit that was supposed to make you feel more alive is making your life smaller, more anxious, and less enjoyable with every passing month.

Fitness was supposed to serve your life.

Instead, for an entire generation of men, it has become their entire lives. A smaller, more neurotic, less interesting version of the one they could have been living.

This is what physique inflation actually costs. Not just your health. Your life.

What Male Peak Performance Actually Looks Like…

Newman , Craig, McQueen, each of their physiques do not look like they spend half of their life in the gym to add 1 inch to their chest.

Lean, proportioned, athletic. Good muscle tone, good bone structure, good posture. The kind of physicality that suggests the man can do things, go places, handle himself in any terrain life throws at him. Not a single gram of excess. Not a single muscle group inflated beyond its function.

This is what we call the Lethal Physique.

Not a look. A capability set.

A physique capable in all domains of life. Combat capable. Strong. Athletic. Elite cardiovascular capacity. The body that can handle a long hike in the mountains, swim in open ocean, sprint when it needs to, fight when it has to, and move with the kind of mobility, agility, and dexterity that the gym alone will never produce. The man who can manipulate a pistol and a rifle with precision needs to move well. The man who skis black runs in Zermatt needs mobile hips and reactive ankles. The man who trains Muay Thai in Thailand needs a gas tank, not just a chest measurement.

The bloated gym physique fails every one of those tests the moment it leaves the building it was built in.

And here the best part… Any man can achieve this standard. You don’t need elite genetics. You don’t need to be on 50 peptides from China or 500mg of Test. Any man who moves well, eats well, trains with purpose across multiple disciplines, and lives an active and interesting life can build this physique. It is the natural result of a body used the way it was designed to be used.

These men trained martial arts. They lifted weights. They swam, played tennis, skied, raced, fought, and travelled. They used training as a vehicle for skill acquisition and to allow them to live the high life. The physique was the residue of that life, not the objective of it.

Compare that to what the modern fitness culture is selling. A standard that requires either elite genetics or the sustained use of steroids to achieve.

If you want the full breakdown on how to train for it, I’ve written a complete guide on how to train like a Lethal Gentleman.

When you hear the word “confidence”, who do you think of?

We have all experienced the magnetic pull of someone who has real, unshakable confidence. Not the superficial ‘fake it until you make it’ type, but the aura of someone who has deep rooted self belief & conviction in their abilities.

Funnily enough, they are often the ones who get the most hate, are often called ‘delusional’, but this is often from NPC’s that could never fathom having the level of confidence that is possible with the right system in place…

If you ask any random person walking down the street “how is confidence built?”, you’ll hear the same generic advice over and over again. That you should ‘fake it until you make it’, use words of affirmation, manifest confidence and any other self help nonsense you’ll see on any mainstream podcast.

And while that may give you the superficial veneer of confidence, deep down you know that it’s never going to feel the same as the confidence Cristiano Ronaldo feels before stepping onto Old Trafford with number 7 draped on his back.

But why doesn’t faking it until you make it work?

And how do you build real confidence?

These are the 2 questions we are going to answer now…

The pitfalls of faking it until you make it…

When it comes to building confidence, the subconscious mind is undefeated.

It always keeps score. And if you achieve anything you feel you don’t deserve, you will find a way to self sabotage the moment, the opportunity or the gift you have been given.

Whether that’s a business opportunity, a woman in your life, anything where you used game, trickery or a performative mask, your subconscious tracks every bit of fakery and mask you hide behind.

If you catapult yourself to success, and you do it in a way that’s even remotely inauthentic, there’s no differentiation between reality and faking it.

Now everything you do ‘feels’ fake & you just can’t stop faking it. You don’t even know what you’re supposed to feel at that point…

Now you begin to loathe and feel like everything is a performance, you need to save face at all costs, to uphold your image. This is what happens when you rely on work arounds, short cuts, ‘hacks’ & patch work to get to success, you’re not going to be able to enjoy the fruits of your labour.

So how is real confidence built then?

I want you to think about the most confident men you’ve ever seen…

Conor McGregor, Michael Jordan, Cristiano Ronaldo, Tiger Woods.

Most people would label their confidence as ‘delusional’, but this is objectively wrong.

What these 4 athletes all have in common, is the sheer number of repetitions & actions they took to get what they wanted.

You can call Cristiano Ronaldo arrogant all you want, but you can not take away the fact he was the first footballer at training, and the last to leave, would do step overs around the entirety of Manchester United’s training facilities (which covered kilometers), and genuinely put in more repetitions than any other player at the club.

Conor McGregor in his prime was no different, he was at the fight gym every single day for 6 hours. Drilling, shadowboxing, strength training and developing the kinaesthetic intelligence that truly made him one of the most unique fighters in the world at the time.

Tiger Woods would hit thousands upon thousands of balls daily, he was one of the only golfers who would train like an actual athlete and hit the gym, and the result was that he would out drive every one on the tour & give himself a huge advantage over the rest of the tour.

These men have earned the right, through repetition, to say things that others would call delusional. But the average person simply has not taken the amount of action, to give them this calibre of confidence.

If you want deep seated confidence that is drilled down all the way to your subconscious, the only way you will ever achieve this is through action.

Men are creatures of action. Not of manifestation. Not of words of affirmation. And not of visualization.

No one on the planet has ever achieved their full potential dreaming about a life they wish to live from the comfort of their couch.

So instead of faking it until you make it, stack relentless action.

If you want clear direction of which actions to take, that are custom to your unique situation, check out the peak potential protocol:

UNLOCK YOUR POTENTIAL

What’s the difference between the men who make it in life?

‍Who get what they want, versus the man who gets what he is given….?

‍Who settles for average and never really reaches his full potential…

‍Successful men don’t succeed how you would think...

‍If only intelligence mattered, every genius you went to school with would be a millionaire, but that’s rarely the case..

‍If it was the hardest worker, the tradesmen working 80 hours a day in extreme heat would all be successful, but most of them struggle to pay the bills...

‍If it was the most educated, universities & colleges would be full of superior men, but most are in fact trapped in their jobs spending years paying off debt...

‍And if it was only based on looks, every handsome man would be wealthy, but most male models can’t afford the clothes they/re paid to wear...‍

So why is it that we all know men that have reached their full potential without any of the things we’ve been told matter?

It’s because they have a deliberate system to create the life they want & reach their full potential, almost on autopilot... Even if they don’t realise that they have this system in their lives…

HERE’S WHY MODERN MEN FEEL STUCK IN 2026…

The reason most men feel trapped isn’t because they’re lazy, lack ambition or discipline. It’s because they’re not making real, visible progress...

‍Here’s what nobody who teaches “self improvement” wants to admit...

‍The secret to lasting happiness isn’t money,

It’s not status.

It isn’t even freedom.

‍It’s progress...

‍When a man feels like he’s moving towards his dreams...

‍That he is getting closer to the man he knows you should be...

‍He comes alive & unlocks the path to his potential...

‍He enters a flow state, he’s energized Focused & Driven.

His success almost feels automatic & guaranteed.

So when he stops feeling this progress... When he can’t remember the last time he moved the needle in his life... And he loses momentum.

‍That leads to stagnating & feeling stuck...

‍And if you relate to this, you’re probably in 1 of 2 situations:

• ‍You feel like you’re in a dead end job. It no longer challenges you. You’re coasting by. You are no longer pushing yourself…
  
  OR

• You have a business that was once built to create freedom in your life, but instead you hate that you’ve trapped yourself. You’ve built a prison with your own hands. Working harder than ever but the needle is barely moving...

‍In each of these situations, the progress you’re making feels insignificant.

Too small.

Too far from where you actually want to be in life.

‍Your goals & potential in life feel so far away that it doesn’t even feel like it’s worth the effort...

UNLOCK YOUR PEAK POTENTIAL

THAT’S WHY PRODUCTIVITY BS ON SOCIAL MEDIA IS A WASTE OF TIME…

Majority of you reading this are not just men who accept an average life.

You’ve probably even tried looking for answers…

Maybe you’ve started consuming podcasts, books, YouTube & learning from influencers & ‘experts’ to help improve your life.

Most of them will tell you to:

• Manifest

• Visualize

• Practise the Law of Attraction

• Set 10 year visions

• 5 Year Goal Setting

They tell you that if you just believe in yourself & think positive thoughts, the life you want will magically come together…

These methods fire you up for a day or 2, but ultimately nothing changes in your life…

So all you get after spending years using all of these productivity hacks is a lot of effort, with no real results to show for all of your hard work, and you are:

• Stick stuck

• Still frustrated

• Still Stagnant

WHY THESE METHODS DON’T WORK

Your brain doesn’t care if you manifest, visualise or set long term goals…

UNLOCK YOUR PEAK POTENTIAL

It needs proof.

Fast proof.

Your brain runs on rapid feedback loops.

Fast, consistent & repeatable signs that what you’re doing is actually working, that you’re moving forward and that the effort is worth your time.

‍Without these rapid feedback loops, your brain does the only rational thing anyone would do when not making meaningful progress...

‍It gives up, it makes the thing you’re working on harder & it makes you feel lazy, unmotivated and undisciplined.

This doesn’t happen because you’re weak or that you have the wrong goals...

• ‍It’s because the feedback loop was too slow.

• The reward is too distant.

And without fast & rapid feedback loops... It’s like playing life on hard mode.

‍That is why setting goals 5 years from now doesn’t work. The feedback loop is 5 years long.

‍This is why manifestation fails. There’s no action component. Without action there’s no feedback loop.

‍And this is why motivation podcasts fire you up for 48 hours, then fade... It’s motivation without action.

‍And if you’re not making progress, the brain will look for other rapid feedback loops somewhere else...

• From Social Media

• Gambling

• Drinking

• Partying on Weekends

Billion dollar companies understand that rapid feedback loops deliver the fastest dopamine hit your brain has experienced.

They optimize Tiktok, Instagram, gambling & destructive habits to have the fastest feedback loops possible.

‍The problem is, your brain can’t tell the difference between what rapid feedback loops help you reach your full potential, versus destroy your life…

‍And if you aren’t in control of your own feedback loops… Billion dollar companies will control them for you.

‍And if you want to take control of these rapid feedback loops & your life…

THEN YOU NEED THE PEAK POTENTIAL PROTOCOL

The Peak Potential Protocol is a system designed for men who want to unlock their potential in every area of their lives.

‍It is built to create, real daily progress that makes unlocking your potential feel almost automatic & guaranteed...

‍And it taps into the Rapid Feedback Loops your brain already naturally runs on...

‍Whether you’re a high performing CEO or if you’re someone who’s barely out of school...

‍If you feel like you’re not progressing quickly enough, like you’re capable of more and if you want to maximise your true potential...

‍This protocol was designed for you.

‍The Peak Potential Protocol gives you a legitimate path to build the life you actually want.

‍Real momentum. Real Progress. Real Results you can feel starting starting today...

HERE’S EVERYTHING YOU’RE GETTING…

THE PEAK POTENTIAL PROTOCOL

UNLOCK YOUR POTENTIAL

Most men try to improve their lives through willpower alone. They push harder, grind longer, and burn out before they ever reach what they are capable of. The Peak Potential Protocol is different. It is a structured, step-by-step system built around the rapid feedback loops your brain already runs on. Not motivation. Not mindset content. A real operating system for your life, designed to create daily visible progress across every domain that matters.

MISSION ARCHITECTURE

Know exactly who you are becoming and why.

Before you can build the life you want, you need to know what it actually looks like. Most men have never been asked the right questions about who they are committed to becoming. Mission Architecture changes that.

Through a deep, structured process, you will excavate your identity, define your archetype, and walk away with a complete life mission: a north star specific enough to filter every major decision you will ever make. Not a vision board. Not a five year goal. A clear, non-negotiable picture of the man you are building toward.

LIFESTYLE AUDIT

An honest picture of where you actually stand.

You cannot close a gap you have not measured. The Life Audit is a comprehensive, honest inventory of your life as it is right now: your body, your mind, your money, your relationships, and your experiences. No filters, no performance, no comparison to anyone else. Just an accurate starting point. Because the men who move fastest are not the ones with the most ambition. They are the ones who are most honest about where they currently stand.

12 WEEK PEAK

A focused sprint plan that turns your mission into daily action.

A mission without a plan is just a good intention. The 12 Week Peak takes everything uncovered in your Mission Architecture and Life Audit and maps it into a focused, domain-by-domain action plan. A clear theme for each area of your life, a specific measurable target, the objectives that get you there, and pre-planned solutions for every obstacle standing in your way. You will always know exactly what to do next. No more guessing. No more wasted weeks.

ENVIRONMENT OPTIMIZATION

Engineer your environment so performance becomes your default.

Your environment is either working for you or against you. There is no neutral ground. This masterclass shows you exactly how to design your physical and digital world so that focus, discipline, and high performance stop being things you have to fight for every single day. When your environment is optimized correctly, doing the right thing becomes the path of least resistance.

ATHLETIC BUSINESSMAN BLUEPRINT

Elite physical performance built around the demands of a high-output life.

You should not have to choose between building your business and building your body. The Athletic Businessman Blueprint is a training and nutrition system designed specifically for the man who refuses to make that trade-off. Time-efficient, travel-proof, and built to keep you performing at the highest level in every room you walk into. Because the man who is physically sharp thinks clearer, leads better, and outworks the competition without burning out.

Most of us have lived more in our heads than in real life.

Thinking of problems that never come, failures that never arrive.

Successes and fantasies that we don’t have the balls to reach out and grab. And that leaves us anchored to the spot. Because it’s easier to think your way out of taking action than it is to get your teeth kicked in for having an earnest go.

For most of human history, men were physically required to show up. You hunted, you built, you fought. Having a strong physical vessel and foundation was an instrument of your success.

But that necessity is no longer the case. Now, you can technically live in a shoebox apartment, have your food sent to your doorstep, make money and meet women online without ever leaving your bedroom.

Society is optimised for this. And it has produced a generation of men who are extraordinarily good at preparing and extraordinarily bad at doing. Men who consume but don’t create. Men who plan but don’t pursue.

Man is created. He is not pondered.

So it’s no surprise that men started reaching for a solution. The current answer the internet has produced is retardmaxxing: pure, unfiltered action. That instinct is correct. It’s exactly why it has resonated.

But the way it is being taught is incomplete.

Pure retardmaxxing may be the first step to get out of your head. But without direction you will spend the rest of your life spinning on the hamster wheel of low leverage work, permanently. Always busy. Never compounding.

Pure retardmaxxing may get you off the couch. It will not get you to the top floor.

And if you want to move like a professional operator, with relentless action and velocity toward your full potential, keep reading.

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The Ceiling of the Retardmaxxing Philosophy

I’ve been lucky enough to track what pure retardmaxxing looks like, with a family friend I have known for over 16 years.

He was retardmaxxing before this term ever existed.

This guy has travelled across Australia collecting antiques, has accumulated millions in collectables from buses, to tractors and vintage revolvers. He’s bought a military tanker on a whim, flipped a coin for a caravan and won a donkey in the process. He’s got more stories than cents, and is the best example I have seen of building an impressive life through pure, unfiltered action.

He owns multiple investment properties, millions in antique assets and this is something cautious budgeters and planners could never achieve.

But every blunt instrument has a ceiling.

His life is chaos. He has always worked a dead end job with no progression. He is constantly doing back breaking work, has 10+ projects always in rotation and has to drive a bus to maintain his investment taxes.

He’s the type of guy that wants to do everything himself, because delegating is a waste of money.

He has speed, but no directionality. And without directionality you cannot build leverage. Without leverage, every result requires the same amount of effort as the last one. Nothing compounds. You are permanently trading time for money at the same rate, no matter how much action you take. That is why he drives a bus despite sitting on millions. The action never stacked. It just accumulated.

He’s stuck on a self inflicted hamster wheel, where just a small amount of strategy and tactical awareness could have placed him in a completely different station in life.

These are the types of people who complain about not getting ahead, who work incredibly hard but feel like they’re stuck in quicksand.

But what happens when you’re the chronic overthinker and strategise too much?

The Chronic Overthinkoooor

The more common archetype is the chronic overthinker. And modern life amplifies this particular individual and the way that they think.

Strategising, planning, and having directionality in life is incredibly important. But if you overdo it, if you think about failures before they even arise, you end up in a state of paralysis. You get nothing done. You avoid the work and replace it with analysis instead.

It makes you feel productive. But it is the most comfortable position to be in. And comfort is the trap.

There is also another version of this. Doing endless theoretical research under the belief that it is going to help your implementation phase. And it does, up to a point. But past that point it is another pseudo barometer for success, another comfortable substitute for the only thing that actually matters above all else: execution.

Most people are not taking too much action. That is a very rare position to be in. Typically it is inaction.

And I am more guilty of this than the opposite.

If I had implemented what I am about to share with you, I would have condensed five years of business success into two. But I hid behind the mirage of perfectionism. I did not want to make mistakes. I did not want to cop the scrutiny from the thousands of people who read my work. And that held me back considerably. It stopped me from releasing products. It stopped me from writing particular things. It made everything take longer than it needed to because of the over analysis of what other people think.

But the reality is this. Being in the arena is not a comfortable situation. It is far easier to be a spectator, to critique and criticise somebody else’s body of work, than it is to step into the arena yourself and have yours judged.

Neither man has the answer. The retardmaxxer has speed but no directionality. The chronic overthinker has a direction he has thought about extensively but cannot bring himself to move toward.

One is all throttle.

One is all map and no road.

Neither has velocity.

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How to Operate With Relentless Velocity

A man with velocity works both smart and hard.

He executes relentlessly, but every rep is pointed at something. He is not producing output for output’s sake. He is not grinding for the sake of grinding. Every action is moving toward a specific destination, and after every action he stops, audits, and adjusts before going again.

This is the difference between the man who makes 500 YouTube videos and stays stuck in the same place, and the man who makes 50 and breaks through. The first man is retardmaxxing. Pure reps, no iteration. The second man is operating with velocity. He executes, gets the feedback, audits what worked and what didn’t, and goes again with more precision than the last time.

I know this because I lived it. Within my tenth video I had a viral piece of content (back when I was posting martial arts content, and recorded this in a hotel when I was travelling through Europe FYI).

Not because I was the most talented or the most experienced (this was recorded on my iphone, which was sitting on an ironboard of a hotel in Madrid).

I was doing both. I had the theory and I was executing against it simultaneously. Every video was a test. Every result was data. The feedback loop was rapid because I was both in the arena and paying attention to what the arena was telling me.

That is the velocity concept & there are X things that are the secret to relentless velocity.

1. Directionality

Directionality is knowing exactly who you want to become as an individual and taking the next effective step toward that version of yourself.

There’s no use if you’re getting started in business asking yourself how you can make 100million, focus on getting your first sale, stack momentum from there.

If you’re overweight, going to the gym everyday and eating 1500 calories from day 1 is going to burn you the fuck out. What is the next step you can take to getting you into a calorie deficit? Focus on that until that method plateaus (this is exactly what I do with clients).

The better you get at identifying the next step, the better you find what obstacles are getting in the way of speeding up your velocity of getting to that next step, the better your directionality.

We do this across the physical, financial, social, mentality & experiential realms in the peak potential protocol.

But the focus should be on finding the next step you can take, and taking it as rapidly as possible.

2. The Feedback Loop

The faster you can move from executing to refining, iterating, pivoting, and re-executing, the better.

Most men run out of momentum on their goals because the feedback loop is too slow. The reward is too far into the future. The gap between action and result is too wide to sustain the motivation to keep going. What billion dollar social media companies understand, and what most men never apply to their own lives, is that rapid feedback loops create compulsive momentum. Instagram, TikTok, and every other platform engineered to keep you hooked is built on the same principle: fast feedback, constant reward, immediate response to behaviour. They use it to addict you to their product. You can use the exact same mechanism to addict yourself to your own ambitions.

Nobody in human history has applied this principle with more ferocity than Elon Musk.

In 2006 SpaceX launched its first rocket. It exploded. In 2007 they launched the second. It exploded. In 2008 they launched the third. It exploded. Most men would have stopped. Most companies would have stopped. Elon read the data from every single failure, iterated, adjusted, and went again. By the fourth launch Falcon 1 reached orbit. The explosions were not failures. They were the fastest feedback loop in the history of aerospace engineering. This is a man who watched hundreds of millions of dollars detonate in real time and called it progress. Because that is exactly what it was.

Tesla does not release a finished product and walk away. Every vehicle on the road is a live test. Software updates ship overnight. Features appear, get pulled, get refined, and get redeployed. The car you bought last year is a different machine today. Not because Tesla got it wrong the first time. Because iteration never stops. The product is always in motion, always improving, always responding to real world data that no amount of planning could have produced from a boardroom.

Then there is X. Features shipped and pulled within days. Entire product changes reversed and rebuilt in real time. The conventional approach is to plan for six months, present to a committee, approve a roadmap, and ship in a year. Elon ships on Tuesday and reads the response by Friday. The feedback loop runs so fast that by the time a competitor has finished their first planning meeting, he has already tested, failed, iterated, and improved three times over.

One of the most effective tools which I use for building your own feedback loop is the end of day audit.

• Your exact outputs for the day.

• The three things you need to execute tomorrow.

• The things you have learned that need to be iterated and improved.

• And a full brain dump to power down, rest, and recharge so you come back sharper the next day.

Use a pen a paper when doing this, not your notes app or laptop.

3. An 80/20 Bias Toward Action

The ratio is simple. 80% execution. 20% strategising & planning.

Don’t get stuck watching youtube videos, reading books and listening to podcasts as the majority of your action based activities.

I have a friend who has wanted to start a business for years now, the ‘ideas’ guy.

He has been writing business plans, SWOT analyses as to whether or not the business will work, consuming Hormozi content like crack cocaine (ironic because Hormozi pushes an action based approach).

And what results does he have to show for it? Sweet fuck all.

If you look at the objective reality of most peoples execution models, it’s 80% planning, 20% executing, and we have had that baked into our brains since high school. Most of the term is spent learning and theorising, then the action based elements (the final exams & tests), make up closer to 10% of the entire year.

That’s why you see kids stressed, anxious and eventually, drilled and conditioned to think they need an MBA to start a business & other false flags of permission to start putting your balls on the line and getting your feet wet.

Flip the ratios. 80% of your time is spent relentlessly executing, 20% is spent iterating, pivoting and strategising. At a macro level this looks like:

• End of day audits (which take literally 15-20 minutes)

• End of week audits (which takes 30-40 minutes)

• End of 12 week peak audits (which take ~1 hour)

This is the full cadence we build inside the Peak Potential Protocol. But the general rule is this: protect your execution budget above everything else. Plan at the edges of your day and your week. Execute in the middle of both.

The man who flips this ratio is a operating a breakneck velocity compared to the average man who sits on paralysis by analysis.

Stop Retardmaxxing, Starting Building Velocity

You have now met both men.

Neither is stupid. Neither is lazy. One runs too hot. One thinks too long. Both are leaving an enormous amount on the table because they never installed the loop.

The retardmaxxing instinct is correct. The bias toward action, the rejection of paralysis, the willingness to get your teeth kicked in and go again. All of it correct. What it is missing is a vector. Speed without direction keeps you on the ground floor permanently, busy for decades and standing in the same spot.

The answer is velocity. Directionality that tells you where the execution is pointed. A feedback loop that runs fast enough to compound. And an 80/20 ratio that protects the execution budget above everything else.

You already know which man you are closer to. You felt it reading this.

So here is the only instruction that matters: identify the one thing you have been speculating about past the point where thinking gives you anything useful. The product, the decision, the piece of content, the conversation you keep rehearsing. Set a deadline. Take the shot. The market will calibrate you faster than your own mind ever will.

Stop retardmaxxing. Start building velocity.

The top floor is not reserved for the smartest man in the room. It is reserved for the man who runs the loop fastest and points it at something worth building.

That man can be you. But only if you get out of your head and into the arena.

J.Krucial

Networking is completely cooked. It’s dead. And that’s a good thing.

You no longer have to kiss ass and pretend to be someone you are not to win.

You no longer have to go to fake corporate events and play buddy buddy with Larry from Morgan Stanley in the hopes of getting a job interview.

You do not need to use LinkedIn’s cesspool to connect with someone you could not care less about getting to know. And you no longer have to bite your tongue, castrate your worldview, and hide who you actually are in the hopes of getting ahead.

For a long time these fake, inauthentic ways of navigating a business or career were essential. It was the only model we were taught and given.

But that has been replaced by something far more powerful.

Building a Global Syndicate. An ecosystem with enough gravitational pull to bring the right opportunities, the right contacts, and a way of life toward you without forcing a single moment of it.

Imagine hitting the tarmac in any major city in the world and already knowing exactly where to go. The local spots that never make it onto a list. The Muay Thai dungeon where the serious men train. Sitting across the table from men cut from the same cloth who feel like old friends before the first drink lands.

And while you are living that life, the ecosystem you’ve built is working on autopilot. Building connections while you sleep. Pulling the right men toward you through the skills you are developing, the pursuits you are chasing, and the side quests that make meeting men of your calibre feel inevitable rather than engineered.

This is how you build a Global Syndicate.

THE ECOSYSTEM

Every ecosystem has two primary functions: productivity and energy flow.

Productivity is yield per unit of output. I can write a tweet in thirty seconds and generate millions of impressions. That same thought, expressed in person, reaches the ten people in the room. The internet did not just change how we distribute ideas. It made the old relationship between effort and output completely obsolete.

Energy flow is simpler than it sounds. It is just people moving through your world. The right ones move toward you. The wrong ones fall away. You do not manage this consciously. The ecosystem does the sorting for you. What you put out determines who finds you. Who finds you determines what becomes possible.

For most of human history, men could only build one kind of ecosystem. In person. Local. Bound by geography and proximity. The internet changed that. It made the hybrid ecosystem possible.

A man who understands this can now slide between the digital world and the physical one, moving energy and people between them in both directions. He runs an in person event and distributes it digitally. He meets men online and converts those relationships into the tangible world. Each ecosystem feeds the other.

The output compounds.

When this is done correctly, you get asymmetric leverage. Asymmetric outputs. A life that produces far more than the effort put into it would suggest is possible.

Most online communities miss this entirely. They fill it with low quality participants, purely for profit. They have no understanding of how ecosystems actually work so they never truly build life changing relationships.

But you’re different, and below are 3 critical skills to develop to build your own ecosystem & if executed correctly, I can guarantee you that your social, financial and lifestyle will be exponentially better.

Using the internet properly

There are very few tools that allow you to reach millions of people, build a business from a laptop, get invited to a wedding in Lake Como, hold a direct conversation with a celebrity, and find yourself training alongside special forces operatives.

The internet is one of them.

I am not naive to the fact that it can be a toxic, negative waste of time. But used intelligently it gives you leverage and increases your surface area of luck like nothing else available to a man in 2026.

The truth about luck is that it has to be conferred onto you by other people. The more people who know who you are and what you stand for, the more surface area you generate. The internet is the most efficient luck surface area machine ever built. Most men are using it to consume. A small number are using it to be found.

I would have never thought shitposting on Twitter in 2020 would connect me with professional fighters who became clients, online businessmen, celebrities, and teach me how to build a business from scratch. I owe a lot to the power of the internet and the people I met along the way.

Compare that to when I worked as a physiotherapist. On a busy day I was seeing ten patients. Ten opportunities to communicate, educate, and impact someone’s life. That was the ceiling. Now I have, without exaggeration 20,000x the reach I had & educate millions of people every month. I can educate and communicate at a scale that was impossible from a clinical room, with a far greater influence on the world and a far greater surface area for the right people to find me.

But here is the part most men get wrong. In five years of building online I have pushed back constantly against friends who only cared about views and virality. Chasing mass traffic is the wrong game entirely. What you put out into the world acts as a filter. If I had spent five years making content for men with no attention span and a second grade vocabulary, how would that ever connect me to the kind of men I actually want in my life?

It would not. So the way I approach every platform comes down to one question: who does this platform actually attract? The man watching a ten minute YouTube video is not the same man scrolling thirty second TikToks. The man reading long form articles on Substack is operating at a level almost no other platform can replicate. The medium dictates the calibre of man. Build on the platforms that attract the men you want to find you.

The Art of Effortless Connection

Sprezzatura: effortless grace. It is the big secret to meeting people organically that nobody in the networking space ever talks about.

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Every man who has ever developed a truly lethal physique did not achieve it through bodybuilding.

Ali’s footwork. Tyson’s ferocity. The kind of power that ends a fight before the second round. None of it came from a leg press machine or a cable stack. It was built from the ground up, because that is where all real athleticism originates.

Your lower body is the foundation of everything. The ability to sprint, jump, carry load across distance, or drag a grown man from a burning building. All of it starts from the legs up. The lower body generates 70-80% of the force in every athletic movement you will ever execute. Sprinting. Punching. Changing direction. Climbing. Every man who has ever moved with lethal intent understood this.

Yet most men don’t train legs, or they half ass it…

They are too busy chasing beach muscles. Chest, biceps, abs. The mirror muscles. The aesthetics with no engine behind them. And they wonder why they strain a hamstring the first time they sprint. Why their body looks capable but falls apart the moment life demands real output.

Machine-based bodybuilding builds a physique. It does not build a lethal one.

This is the blueprint to build a lethal lower body.

PILLAR 1: FORTIFICATION PHASE

This is the bedrock. Before power, before elasticity, before any of the qualities that make a lower body truly dangerous, you need to be able to produce force.

Raw strength is the foundation every other pillar is built on. Without it, everything else has a ceiling.

The standards you are building towards:

• Front Squat: 1.5x bodyweight

• RDL : 2x bodyweight

THE SQUAT PATTERN: FRONT SQUAT

The back squat is the classic. The front squat is the upgrade.

Loading the bar on your front rack demands a rock solid core that the back squat allows you to cheat around. Your torso cannot cave, your upper back cannot round, your wrists cannot be weak. Every structural deficiency you have gets exposed immediately.

It also simultaneously develops wrist extension strength that carries over to everything from combat sports to carrying load. It is two adaptations built in one movement.

Most men avoid it because it is harder. That is exactly why you should prioritise it.

THE HINGE PATTERN: ROMANIAN DEADLIFT

The conventional deadlift builds strength. The RDL builds the hamstrings that make you explosive.

The distinction matters. The RDL keeps constant tension through the hamstrings across the full range of motion, rather than releasing it at the bottom like a conventional pull. This develops the posterior chain in the lengthened position, which is precisely where sprinting, jumping, and change of direction demand the most from you.

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PILLAR 2: SINGLE LEG STRENGTH PHASE

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Why are men so obsessed with gangster movies, mob bosses & outlaws?

The most critically acclaimed films ever made are about criminals.

The Godfather. Goodfellas. Scarface. The Sopranos.

Men who would never dream of breaking a law in their lives have watched these obsessively. Some of them dozens of times.

Academics call this “problematic masculine fantasy.”

Therapists call it “glorifying violence.”

They’re both wrong.

Because this isn’t about crime or hurting innocent people. It never was.

Men don’t love gangsters because they want to rob banks or move product.

They love gangsters because the gangster symbolises the version of themselves they'd unleash if the rules disappeared.

THE REALITY OF MODERN MEN

Look around you.

Everything has been padded, permitted, pasteurised and pre-approved.

You cannot say the wrong thing. Cannot take the wrong risk. Cannot offend the wrong person. Cannot move through the world without a waiver, a disclaimer, or a diversity training module standing between you and any experience that might actually test you.

This is the most sanitised, risk-managed, liability-conscious civilisation in human history. And it is making men soft in ways that would be unrecognisable to their grandfathers.

A generation ago, kids roamed entire neighbourhoods on bikes from sunrise until the streetlights came on. Nobody knew where they were. Nobody needed to. They were building something: scraped knees, broken bones, pecking orders sorted out behind the school, and the quiet confidence that comes from navigating the world without a safety net.

That childhood no longer exists.

Today’s boy is helmeted, scheduled, supervised, and screened. His aggression is medicated. His competition is eliminated (everyone gets a trophy). His natural dominance hierarchies are dismantled before he’s old enough to understand what they were for.

Then he grows up.

And he enters a world of open-plan offices, HR departments, and mandatory sensitivity training. A world where the sharpest edges of his personality are a liability. Where the instinct to compete, to dominate, to build and protect and push, is something to be managed rather than channelled.

He commutes. He attends meetings. He gets performance reviewed by people he could outwork in his sleep. He comes home, opens Netflix, and watches a man in a thousand dollar suit tell a roomful of made men that he will not be disrespected.

And something in his chest recognises it.

Not the crime. The freedom.

The gangster operates in a world with real stakes, real consequences, and real rewards. A world where your reputation is built through action, not optics. Where loyalty is tested under actual pressure. Where the hierarchy is earned, not assigned by a committee.

It is the photographic negative of the milquetoast existence modern civilisation has engineered for men.

The hunger hasn’t disappeared. It’s just got nowhere legitimate to go.

That’s the crisis. And the gangster film is the pressure valve.

This article is going to cover the 3 core reasons men love gangsters & uses The Godfather & Peaky Blinders as reference points…

RESPECT IS THEIR #1 CURRENCY

Not liked. Not tolerated. Not managed.

Respected.

There is a scene in The Godfather where a man comes to Vito Corleone on his daughter’s wedding day asking for justice. He doesn’t go to the police. He doesn’t file a complaint. He doesn’t post about it online.

He goes to a man he knows will actually do something about it.

Because Vito Corleone has built something that cannot be manufactured, purchased, or faked: the kind of respect that makes men cross rooms to shake your hand and think twice before crossing you.

The modern man is starving for this.

Not the fear. Not the violence. The weight. The feeling that your presence means something. That your word means something. That when you walk into a room, the room knows it.

Instead, the modern man is in a constant state of suppression.

He’s ordered around by his boss, his wife, his mortgage, his algorithm, and a government that treats him like a liability. A society that mistakes his compliance for contentment.

He has been told, repeatedly and from every direction, that the desire to be respected is ego.

That wanting to command a room is arrogance.

That the instinct to be the most capable, most formidable man in any situation is something to be managed, medicated, or apologised for, and it’s only getting worse for the young boys in this up and coming generation…

HANDLING EXTREME PRESSURE & HIGH STAKES

Every man has a weight he carries that nobody else can see.

But we are never taught how to deal with it…

Tommy Shelby came back from the trenches of World War One with the kind of damage that would have finished most men. Buried his trauma in whisky and violence. Carried betrayal after betrayal from the people closest to him. Watched men he loved die because of decisions he made.

And still showed up. Every morning. Took the meeting. Made the call. Held the family together with white knuckles and sheer force of will.

Michael Corleone never wanted the life. He came home from the war clean, educated, in love, determined to be something different from his father. Then the world took that choice away from him. Piece by piece. Person by person.

And he carried it. Without collapsing. Without asking anyone to feel sorry for him.

What men are watching in these scenes is not the composure of men who don’t feel anything.

It is the composure of men who feel everything and show up anyway.

This is the quality modern culture has completely failed to teach. Men are told to express, to process, to share, to heal. Nobody teaches them how to hold weight. How to absorb loss, betrayal, and pressure without being destabilised. How to feel deeply and still remain the steady hand the people around you need.

That tension, between what he carries privately and what he projects publicly, is what men recognise in their own lives every single day. Because most of them are living it. Carrying things nobody else can see, with no framework for how to do it without breaking.

The numbers reflect this. Men die by suicide at nearly twice the rate of women. Not because they’re weak. Because they were handed the weight and never shown how to carry it…

I know I never was growing up, and I’m sure many of you reading this feel the same way.

LOYALTY TO THEIR FAMILY

Strip away the suits, the power, and the mythology.

At the centre of every great gangster story is a man trying to protect something he loves.

Vito Corleone built an empire so his family would never be at the mercy of men like the ones who murdered his father and brothers in Sicily. Every decision, every alliance, every enemy made, was ultimately in service of one thing: the people sitting around his table on Sunday.

Tommy Shelby dragged himself through war, trauma, and criminal empire because the Shelby family name meant something. Because his brothers needed a leader. Because the alternative was watching everything he loved get picked apart by men with more power and less honour.

This is not loyalty as a concept. It is loyalty as sacrifice.

Strip away the suits, the power, and the mythology.

At the centre of every great gangster story is a man trying to protect something he loves.

Vito Corleone built an empire so his family would never be at the mercy of men like the ones who murdered his father and brothers in Sicily. Every decision, every alliance, every enemy made, was ultimately in service of one thing: the people sitting around his table on Sunday.

Tommy Shelby dragged himself through war, trauma, and criminal empire because the Shelby family name meant something. Because his brothers needed a leader. Because the alternative was watching everything he loved get picked apart by men with more power and less honour.

This is not loyalty as a concept. It is loyalty as sacrifice.

And it hits differently in 2026.

Because this is arguably the hardest era in modern history to actually provide for the people you love. A generation ago, a single income built a home, raised children, and left something behind. Today, two incomes barely cover the mortgage application. House prices have outpaced wages so aggressively that the basic male instinct to build a fortress for his family has become, for many men, the biggest challenge of their lives…

Most households now require both partners working full time just to stay level. Not to get ahead. To stay level.

The man who wants to be the sole provider, who wants his wife to have the choice to raise their children rather than outsource that to strangers, who wants to own something real and leave something real: that man is fighting an economic headwind that previous generations never faced…

It’s no wonder men respect the gangster that never accepted those constraints.

He looked at a system designed to keep men like him poor, powerless, and dependent, and he built his own economy. His own rules. His own way of ensuring the people he loved never wanted for anything.

His family is not a footnote to his ambition. It is the reason for it…

This is precisely why The Lethal Gentleman’s Club exists.

Not to glorify the gangster. But to give men a legitimate arena for the same drives.

The hunger for respect earned through capability.

The resilience built through physical and professional pressure.

The loyalty expressed through building something real for the people you love.

And if these qualities are something you wish to develop, consider subscribing.

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How many of you still think that ‘dirty bulking’ is still a valuable way to gain muscle?

That adding that extra body fat is worth the ROI…?

Look I get it, you do look bigger, when you have an aggressive bulk, but it’s not muscle you’re adding to your frame.

It’s fat. And not only that, but the negative downsides that come with gaining unnecessary fat to your physique.

This article is going to challenge the bro science method of ‘dirty bulking’ or even ‘bulking’ in general & give you a superior, elite operator framework to follow that have used successfully with clients world wide…

Dirty bulking has been part of the bodybuilding culture for the last 30+ years.

In fact, my father & uncle were both professional bodybuilders in Australia and swore by this method…

They would purposely gain as much size as possible, they didn’t care whether it was fat or muscle, the only priority was to look at big as possible at all costs…

And the costs? Heart issues in their late 40’s & many other metabolic issues that we will cover in more detail shortly…

GONE ARE THE DAYS OF THE DIRTY BULK

Now, if your one & only focus was to put on as much muscle tissue as humanly possible, you would think that being in a high calorie surplus would be the smartest decision, right?

Well, Helm’s tested this in a study in 2023, and found no statistically significant difference in someone who is in a 1000 calorie surplus, versus someone who is in a 200 calorie surplus…

The only minor difference was that of strength progression, but the negative health effects of adding body-fat, outweighs a slight increase in strength numbers…

The man eating 1,000 extra calories a day is building no more muscle than the man eating 200 extra. He’s just getting fatter, faster, and calling it a plan.

And the ROI on that fat? Catastrophic.

Once you cross 15% body fat, your entire hormonal environment turns against you:

• Testosterone tanks, estrogen climbs

• Libido flatlines

• Energy becomes unreliable

• Cortisol spikes

• Organ inflammation increases

• Cancer and cardiovascular disease risk go up

And this is the exact reason that we advise against this approach with our clients as health should always be the foundation of performance…

SO WHAT DOES THE ELITE OPERATOR DO?

Each of our clients falls into 1 of 3 objective categories:

• Sub 10% body fat

• 12-15% body fat

• 15% + body fat

For each of these scenarios we have a specific strategy, which we are going to discuss now…

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Do you want the capability to do it all?

To be a modern renaissance man?

To be versatile, adaptable, multidimensional?

Then this article is written for you.

First, let me paint a picture for you…

Imaging waking up the sound of the ocean breeze, along the Italian Riviera…

You hike to Cala Goloritzé, & get your elite gas tank 1 mile swim in…

You’ve already moved more than the average modern man has his entire week, but you’re just starting your day.

You have the work capacity of a hot blooded thoroughbred.

You rotate from the tank top into a lethal suit, custom built to your exact measurements.

It’s time to do business, but you do things differently… The lethal way.

You do things differently to the modern man.

You have no interest being the entrepreneur that sits in his hoodie, like a recluse & who doesn’t interact with the outside world.

You mix the old school, with the new school.

You run a global operations, you have men of your ilk sprinkled across the globe, but you also know the importance of being a presence locally.

You don’t just build online, you have the offline ecosystem built to match…

You appreciate the importance of a handshake, business conducted over an eye fillet, back of the napkin deals, wheeling & dealing for the sport of it.

This is truly the rarest breed of man…

A man who is athletic, who appreciates his physical vessel & knows his body is a billion dollar asset.

And equally, a man who can take care of business, who is an elite operator & has balanced both disciplines with the same engineering brilliance you see at Le Mans.

THE HARSH REALITY…
Most Men Fall Into 1 of 2 Categories:

In my 5 years of running a business, I’ve met men from all walks of life & I’ve worked with them too.

Professional athlete’s, fighters, kinaesthetic geniuses, sportsmen & apex physical specimens… But more often than not, they bank balance doesn’t match their bodies.

And in the same token, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, statesmen & entrepreneurs, who are materially rich, but their bodies are going into bankruptcy…

And I don’t blame either of these archetypes of men, because you see, to be able to be in the top 1% in both domains, requires you to think outside of the box…

In fact you need an exact system to balance these two tall tasks simultaneously, and that’s simply not a skillset 99% of men possess…

WHY 99% OF MEN DON’T HAVE BOTH

The reason it’s so hard to be exception both in the fitness & finance domain, is that very few men have developed a system around these two areas simultaneously…

You will get immensely valuable fitness advice from a bodybuilder, but any successful businessman can’t hit the gym 6 times per week, eat 3000 calories of weighed food & continue scaling his empire…

In the same token, the business advice you get is pulling long hours, “grindset” mentality, never leave your home until your company is worth millions or you’ve reached the pinnacle of your career…

So how do we build these disciplines together? Is it even possible?

THE ELITE OPERATOR APPROACH

Gentlemen, I work 1-1 exclusively with some of the most successful men in both domains.

Businessmen, lawyers doctors, e-commerce savants, legitimate operators

And I also work with professional athletes, fighters & athletic freaks

And I see the same pattern, the businessmen want to be an athlete, the athlete’s want to be businessman…

So naturally, I fused these “wants” together.

And what I am going to share with you is a process that’s taken me 10 years of participating in professional sports as an athlete, and 5 years of business experience & condensed it into 3 actionable aspects to get started…

1 LIFESTYLE DESIGN TRUMPS ALL

The way you design your life is everything.

It’s the difference between being out of shape & being broke, to being at your pinnacle in both arenas.

You need to be hyper intentional about the way your life is designed, if you’re serious about reaching the top 1% in each domain.

You should know exactly how your day is structured, why it’s structured that way & the people you spend time with each day.

Physical fitness must be a staple of your day & even if it starts with a 20 minute walk in the morning, this should compound to daily, anabolic & elite gas tank developing training.

The most important aspect to consider, is that everyone’s lives are different, we are all in different countries, have different careers, different family commitments & are of different ages.

And this is what my elite operator clients specifically consult with me on to build something tailored to their exact lifestyles & we design around their situations.

2 TRAIN TO OPERATE AT ELITE LEVELS

The biggest misconception is that physical training takes away from your ability to operate, and that’s completely false, IF you have the right training system in place.

I get it, marathon training & heavy bodybuilding splits are incredibly demanding on your system… And make it near impossible to concentrate on work at high levels.

But The Lethal Gentleman’s training process is built on 1 core foundation.

Building an elite gas tank & work capacity to handle a voluntarily strenuous life…

When you have a high level of work capacity, you are able to juggle training hard for 2 hours per day, working for a hyper-focused 8 hours a day & still have time to be social and not be a boring melt.

Once you pair lifestyle design with a training process that makes you a better businessman, it’s game over for your competition…

3 COMPLEX SIMPLICITY

Whenever I consult with high performing men, they instantly want the fancy shit…

The things you see on social media, the cold plunge, the red light therapy device, the peptides, the supplements…

Then when I audit their sleep , nutrition, training & stress management strategies… Some can be embarrassing to say the least.

Don’t get me wrong, I love experimenting with new breakthroughs in science & exploring the current fads in the health space.

But the more complex the systems you build around your life, the less harder they are to stick to & therefore, the less likely you are to get what you want in the first place…

WHICH IS RESULTS.

The meta should be:

1. Learn from experts in a domain who have time to spend years of their life testing the complexity

2. Get them to build a simple system based on everything they’ve tested

This is why I speak with powerlifters if I want to improve my strength systems for the business.

And why I will talk to phenomenal writers if I want to improve the readability of the pieces I write…

But all roads should be to have the most simplistic system possible that maximises the results you’re getting.

Not 2 hour morning routines that waste your time and are procrastination disguised as productivity.

BE AN ATHLETIC BUSINESSMAN

Anyone reading this who is an athlete, aspire to use your physical prowess & do not avoid being a physical specimen who can conduct business.

A lot of what you learn from sports can be transferred directly (discipline, hard work & pattern recognition).

In the same breadth, businessmen, don’t sacrifice your billion dollar asset (health), for some numbers on a screen.

What if the exit never comes?

Is life only about your bank balance & the new rolex?

Truly?

These are things to think about & if this archetype resonates, I’ll flesh it out in more detail for the paid Substack of the LG Club.

Have a great weekend.

J.Krucial

The supplement industry is one of the most lucrative & corrupt rackets in modern health…

And it's not that much different to the multi-billion dollar industry of big Pharma that you all love to hate.

Some of my clients are among the best marketers on the planet.

Men who have built and scaled direct response businesses to eight and nine figures. Men who understand, at a granular level, how consumer psychology gets weaponised to move product.

And when you get them talking honestly, the stories they tell about the supplement industry are not surprising. They are confirming.

Direct response marketing built this industry. Not science. Not nutrition. Not a genuine desire to improve human health. The same playbook that sold weight loss pills in late-night infomercials in the 90s is the playbook running behind the most trusted names in the health space today. The aesthetics upgraded. The mechanism never changed.

What shocked me was not the machinery. It was the faces attached to it.

Men with PhDs. Men with podcasts downloaded by millions. Men who have built entire personal brands on the foundation of scientific integrity and optimal human performance. The same men collecting heavy cheques to endorse products that independent testing has flagged for heavy metal content, poor sourcing, and ingredients that bear no resemblance to what the label promises.

The cheque is too large to turn down. The audience is too trusting to push back. And the supplement is too profitable to reformulate.

This is not speculation. This is the industry, described to me directly by the people who built it.

Because supplements tap into the one thing every man secretly wants.

A pill that solves the problem. A peptide that replaces the work. A powder that shortcuts the years of discipline it actually takes to build a body and mind worth having.

We are hardwired for the fastest route to the outcome. The supplement industry didn’t create that instinct. It just learned to exploit it with surgical precision.

And in a world where attention spans are shrinking, schedules are overloaded, and every man is looking for an edge without the cost, that exploitation has never been more profitable.

The result is an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars annually, built almost entirely on the gap between what men desperately want to be true and what the realities of high performance…

I’ve spent a decade in elite performance environments. Professional fighters. Founders. Executives operating at the highest levels. And in that time I have never once identified a supplement as the thing standing between a man and the results he was chasing.

Not once.

What I have identified, consistently, is men who are over-supplemented and under-fuelled. Men with $400 monthly supplement budgets and mediocre diets. Men who have optimised the footnote and ignored the chapter.

So here is my approach. And it is the same approach I apply to every client who comes through the Elite Operators system regardless of their background, their budget, or their current stack.

Supplement the gaps. Nothing more.

HOW TO VIEW SUPPLEMENTATION

Start with the word itself.

Supplement.

It supplements something. It does not replace something. It fills gaps that exist despite an already well-structured performance nutrition plan.

That is the only legitimate use case for supplementation.

The question is never “what supplements should I take?” The question is: what is my nutrition plan missing that I cannot get from food alone?

Due to decades of soil depletion and industrial farming, even a near-perfect diet in 2026 leaves specific nutritional gaps that are almost impossible to close through food alone. These gaps are real. They have documented performance and health consequences. And they are worth addressing.

But the list is short. Ruthlessly short.

Everything else belongs in a separate conversation for specific circumstances. Broken bones. Hypothyroidism. Targeted clinical interventions. We will cover that in a dedicated piece in the coming weeks.

For now, the only question worth asking yourself is this: what can I not get from an already excellent performance nutrition plan?

I am going to answer that for you.

THE TRAVEL TEST

Every new client I onboard to the Elite Operators system gets asked one question before we build their supplement protocol:

“Can you travel with this?”

Because here’s what I see without fail: the men with a 15-supplement morning routine never stick to it. It collapses at the first business trip to Singapore, the first back-to-back week of client dinners, the first family holiday.

Inconsistency makes a supplement worthless. Full stop.

If your stack doesn’t fit in a travel case, it doesn’t belong in your protocol.

There’s also an opportunity cost most men ignore. The money spent on a grocery list of supplements… often $400-600 per month.

This is money that could be spent on wild-caught fish, grass-fed beef, and high-quality produce. Premium fuel should always be the #1 priority.

Subscribe now

THE LETHAL GENTLEMAN’S SUPPLEMENT LIST…

Below is the only tier of supplements that passes three criteria:

1. Documented efficacy in peer-reviewed research

2. Addresses a gap that food alone cannot reliably fill in 2026

3. Can be taken consistently, anywhere in the world

Let’s dive in….

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When was the last time you were truly in flow state?

When you felt like you could walk on water?

I’m not talking about being “in the zone” listening to a focus playlist & punching away at your laptop.

Or being ‘dialed in’ during a gym session.

True flow state.
Where you are completely immersed…
When nothing else matters…
And when you can co-ordinate your body perfectly, almost on autopilot…

Most men have never even experienced this feeling in their lives & here’s why:

THE MOST ADDICTIVE EXPERIENCE KNOWN TO MAN

If you’ve ever been in true flow state, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Everything slows down. You’re making reads and split-second decisions almost unconsciously. Your body operates with a precision and effortlessness that your ordinary self can’t replicate. You’re not thinking. You’re just doing. And it feels like nothing else on earth.

That feeling is more addictive than any drug.

This isn’t poetic hyperbole. It’s neuroscience. Flow state floods your brain with a cocktail of dopamine, norepinephrine, anandamide, serotonin, and endorphins simultaneously. A pharmacological combination no substance on the market can replicate.

It’s why so many elite former athletes spiral into substance abuse after their careers end. They’re not chasing a high. They’re chasing a state of being that sport provided, and that the ordinary world refuses to offer.

When the game ends, most men spend the rest of their lives trying to fill that void. Badly.

WHY MODERN MEN CAN'T ACCESS IT

Here’s what the productivity gurus won’t tell you.

You can get into flow state writing, creating, building. And that version is real. It has value.

But it’s not the same thing.

Sitting at a desk writing a great paragraph and slipping a punch in competition are different neurological experiences. The creative flow hits a portion of your brain. The physical, high-stakes flow hits all of it.

The difference is stakes.

Creative flow has no consequences if you fail. The sentence doesn’t work? Delete it. The business idea is bad? Pivot. There’s no cost. No threat. No consequence that your nervous system registers as real danger.

Real flow state requires real stakes. It requires your body to believe, even briefly, that something is on the line.

This is why sitting at a laptop can produce focus, but it cannot produce flow. Not the real kind.

And it’s why most men over 30, living comfortable, consequence-free lives, have lost access to the most powerful mental state available to them.

FLOW DEMANDS PHYSICAL CHALLENGE

The reason you can’t access flow state in your daily life isn’t a productivity problem. It isn’t a meditation deficit.

It’s a threat deficit.

Your nervous system evolved over millions of years to enter peak performance mode in the presence of genuine challenge. Physical threat. Competitive stakes. Genuine consequence.

Remove the threat, and you remove the gateway to flow.

This is why fatigue is the optimal state of man: His work is physical, consequential, and demands full presence. He has no bandwidth left for insecurity.

Your air-conditioned office is the enemy of flow. The absence of consequence is the cage.

The Lethal Gentleman understands this. He deliberately engineers exposure to real stakes because he knows that without them, he’s operating at a fraction of his capacity.

HOW TO ENTER FLOW STATE EFFORTLESSLY

GET IN THE ARENA

If you want your post-sport flow state back, there is one answer above all others: martial arts.

When someone is trying to choke you unconscious, there is no room for distraction. No mental real estate left for work stress, social anxieties, or the problems you can’t switch off on a Tuesday night.

All there is, is the man in front of you. The grip on your collar. The escaping space. The next breath.

Martial arts is the closest civilian approximation to combat. And combat, by design, forces total present-moment awareness. This is flow state by necessity.

I’ve watched high-performing executives… men who can’t silence their minds outside the gym, who become completely and utterly present the moment they step on the mat. Not because they’ve mastered meditation. Because someone is actively trying to hurt them.

Take the combat sports pill. Striking, grappling, it doesn’t matter. Get in the arena where presence isn’t optional.

EXPOSURE YOURSELF TO THE HARSH ELEMENTS

The mountain doesn’t care about your quarterly targets.

When you’re flying down a black diamond run, threading through trees at 60mph with nothing between you and the rocks below but two thin planks and whatever skill you’ve built, your brain has no choice but to enter flow state.

Every neuron is locked onto the terrain in front of you. Reading the snow, adjusting your edges, processing information at a speed you didn’t think was possible. The board meeting you’ve been dreading? The client who won’t sign? The email you’ve been overthinking for three days?

These thoughts evaporate in your brain.

This is the brutal elegance of high-consequence environments. They don’t ask for your presence. They demand it. And in doing so, they give you access to a version of yourself most men never meet.

The backcountry. Open water. A technical climb. A fast descent. These arenas operate on the same principle as combat — al consequence makes real focus non-negotiable.

Seek out the environments that raise the stakes. Because when the cost of distraction is measured in something other than an awkward email, your brain stops drifting and starts performing.

TO GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD YOU NEED TO RAISE THE PHYSICAL STAKES…

Not meditate more. Not journal. Not optimise your morning routine.

Raise. The. Stakes.

You likely haven’t pushed yourself hard physically for years, even decades.

And a hard gym session is a good start, but it doesn’t hold a candle to when you give your brain no choice but to lock in.

• Martial Arts

• Adventure & Expedition

• Pushing your body to physical exhaustion

Each of these can also be tools to take your mind away from a gruelling business week, a nagging boss or just allow you to get out of your head for once in your life…

In a world where it’s pre-frontal cortex dominant, we need to maintain the ability to get out of our logical brain & into the primitive side of it.

We’ve been hard wired to believe as men that the harder we work, the more successful we become…

But if this was the case the men who are working 80 hour weeks, in the sweltering heat, labouring & doing back breaking jobs would all be rich… But we know that isn’t the case, don’t we?

Now I am not arguing that you need to have a solid work ethic to get what you want in life… But something that’s far more important is adaptability.

The ability to evolve, pivot, iterate, transform… And let go of your old ways, character traits & frameworks if….

You are not getting results.

When it boils down to it, every ‘marker’ of success.

The rolex, the car, the penthouse apartment overlooking the city… These are just symbols of capability & the ability to get results…

And ‘grinding’ your ass off & getting the same results as a man who makes it look as the italians say ‘sprezzatura’ (effortless grace), is a far more admirable path to aspire toward.

Many of you will mistaken this message for being lazy, looking for get rich quick schemes, taking shortcuts & avoiding the work you know you need to do.

But it’s not about that.

It’s about being as efficient as possible towards the results you want in life.

Not over complicating things for the sake of it.

Not turning something into a grind that doesn’t have to be.

If you can get the same objective results from hitting the gym 3 times per week, why would you want to get that same outcome training twice a day, 7 days a week?

When you start to think in this lens, it allows you to think more about output over how many hours you clock in.

It’s time to start admiring the man who gets what he wants as effortlessly as possible.

Who surgically works to build results.

Who doesn’t waste years, ‘doing it his way’, but instead learns from world class mentors & practitioners who can speed up their development.

If you’re in a phase of your life now where all you feel you’re doing is grinding, sit back & really analyse…. Is this mode of operating really giving me results?

If the answer’s no, it’s time to switch up your approach.

I am personally working on a peak potential protocol which covers this in more detail & will help build efficiency & clear direction in your life.

If you’re interested DM me ‘protocol’ & I’ll put you on an early access list.

J.Krucial

Most men think that building an elite gas tank is only about zone 2 cardio, VO2 max sessions & leveraging oxygen.

Now while we also have discussed the benefits of zone 0-1 training in this article here, using rucking & other intelligent training methods…

An underrated & advanced method of elite gas tank development is something NAVY SEALs use in their training in order to be able to handle high stress environments & still perform at an elite level….training their nervous system to stay calm when carbon dioxide is flooding their bloodstream and every fiber is screaming to breathe.

CO2 tolerance training.

The fear of excess CO2 in your lungs is one of the most powerful & primitive we have.

In fact, you can lose the function of the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for fear….

And your brain will still freak out if it detects excess levels of CO2…

he first thing you do in any stressful situation, like getting into a cold plunge or stepping into the ring for your first sparring session...

The bodies immediate reaction is to inhale more frequently & hyperventilate.

While this can be beneficial in some circumstances, the untrained man hyperventilates himself into exhaustion while the elite operator stays calm, breathes less, and performs longer.

The good news: CO2 tolerance is completely trainable. And this is exactly what Navy SEALs systematically develop through their selection process…

The ability to override primitive panic responses and operate when every signal says quit.

This article breaks down the exact training methods you can use today to build elite CO2 tolerance, raise your lactate threshold, and forge mental composure under pressure without expensive equipment, dangerous breath-hold protocols, or adding hours to your training week….

ELITE GAS TANK BREATH WORK

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Type 1: The one who makes watching sport their entire life.

They’ll have the boys over for beers & sportsball.
They care more about their teams success than the success of their own lives.
They have more belief in their favourite athlete then themselves.

Unfortunately, this is the more common sports fan…

Type 2: The one who leverages sports & is in the arena, not a spectator.

Someone who wants to stay athletic for life, even if they’re past their sporting primes.
Who are still hungry to compete.
Who enjoy the physical benefits of continuing to test your physical will.

We are going to touch more on type 2 today…

SPORTS WILL GIVE YOU WHAT THE GYM NEVER WILL

Most ‘washed up’ athletes transition into the gym.

Whether that’s bodybuilding, lifting weights or any other ‘traditional’ method of staying in shape…

Now, while this is certainly better than nothing, you lose an apex quality that you can only get from playing sports…

AGILITY

Being agile is an essential part of not only having a lethal physique that is highly capable, but also aging gracefully (your longevity guru’s never talk about this).

Yes, VO2 max matters.

Yes, strength matters.

But having agility, reaction time, ability to jump, manoeuvre & control your body with balance is going to be the #1 quality preventing you from falling as you get older….

THE AIM IS TO BE AN ATHLETE FOR LIFE

There are so many of you reading this article, that ‘used to be’ studs.

Who looked up to your favourite athlete & wanted what they had.

Who did the extra sessions, who did 1000 reps a day, who treated each competitive game as if their future’s were on the line…

Who had hopes & dreams, that have slowly been stripped from them.

And while I can’t promise this article will give you a second wind at a professional sporting career, I will share with you why you should be an athlete for life, and never let the desire to compete in the arena to be taken away from you…

Because the reality is, so many men lose their spark, not because of their age… But because they no longer compete, they no longer push themselves & they are no longer in any arena.

Working jobs that don’t light a fire in their hearts, going for a jog & lifting weights & other dull forms of exercise, because it’s good for their health, but not because it inspires them…

What I will be covering today, are the core sports lethal gentlemen immerse them selves in, and compete until the day they die…

MARTIAL ARTS

You’ve probably seen the surge of 40+ year olds getting involved in jiu jitsu…

Why is that? Because they want to feel capable again.

Being a martial artist does not mean striving to make the ufc, it’s learning to be capable of violence & getting all of the secondary benefits of training in this environment.

• Camaraderie & brotherhood with other men pushing themselves to exhaustion.

• The ability to defend yourself, your family & your loved ones.

• To learn how to suck at something, then progressively improve week by week.

• To always have a white belt mentality in life.

The ability to strike & grapple does not have any age restriction & I have even shared how you can balance lifting with martial arts in a previous piece I have written.

TENNIS

Tennis is not only one of the most aristocratic sports on the Lethal Gentleman list, it’s an elixir for longevity.

A study in copenhagen showed that tennis adds ~10 years of life expectancy, compared to those who are sedentary[1].

Tennis builds full-body strength, bone density (23% higher in older players vs. inactive peers), grip strength, and balance, reducing fall risks that plague those over 65. It cuts heart disease risk by over 50% with 3 hours weekly play and boosts cognitive function through quick reactions and mental engagement.

When you look at being an athlete for life as more than just getting paid to play sports, it opens up much more enjoyable options for health versus walking on a treadmill for fitness.

If you properly Train Like a Lethal Gentleman.. You will also be dominating your local & masters events as you age.

WATER & SNOW SPORTS

Part of being a lethal gentleman is mastering all terrains, this includes both water & alpine environments.

Swimming is an essential skill & open ocean swimming tests this ability. Learning how to surf is another layer that not only requires high levels of swimming, but also balance, proprioception & mastery over your own body.

Downhill skiing has also been shown to offer a variety of health benefits. Regular downhill skiing correlates with lower rates of hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, diabetes, stress, and memory issues, alongside healthier lifestyles overall. It supports healthy aging by improving physical self-concept, motivation, and health-related quality of life in those over 55 [2].

STAY ATHLETIC TILL THE DAY YOU DIE

Even if you’re past your physical prime, staying athletic is crucial to maximise your life.

Whether you want to explore the world, adventure, test your physical limits, or simply be able to move & be mobile for decades to come, sport plays a massive role in this journey.

Ask yourself this:

Is it easier to stick with a sport you love/loved playing growing up…

Or doing sterile cardio in an air-conditioned gym because your favourite health guru said you need to do zone 2?

I would argue the first option is not only a better use of your life, but you’re far more likely to stick with it.

What if going against mother nature makes your life 10x harder than it needs to be?

And instead of trying to work against nature using ‘discipline’, ‘motivation’ & ‘grindset’ mentality… You make your life easier for once…

There’s no prizes for suffering, so long as you win, that’s all that matters, right?

WE ARE MORE DISCONNECTED THAN EVER…

We are further removed from nature than we ever have been.

We blast our eyes with blue light before bed instead of aligning with the sun.

We escape the element using air conditioning & heating.

We avoid walking & commuting from place to place, and drive everywhere instead.

And even worse…

We are starting to outsource our feelings to machines.

Whoop,oura and garmin to tell us how we feel & how recovered we are.

Chat GPT & AI to counsel us through our problems (which is incredibly dangerous btw - but we can cover this another time).

We avoid feeling anything at all, and want technology to tell us how we feel.

And the average man has lost his ‘gut feel’ he once had, and it’s been replaced by IBS & other gut health issues across the board.

HOW TO LEVERAGE THE SEASONS OF LIFE

What I am covering is a concept that I have been experimenting with over the last 6 months, and that is seasonal lifestyle design.

This means, winter is treated differently to summer.
Spring is treated differently to fall… and so on.

But why?

You will notice that once you live this way, you’re no longer trying to fight the elements.

It’s going to be far easier to surf in summer than it would be in the dead of winter.

It’s going to be far easier to stay indoors during winter, than when it’s beautiful outside.

So why not use this to our advantage… Let me explain each season in further detail.

SUMMER

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Push harder.
Red line every session.
Fail every rep.

Suffer more than the guy next to you.

The high intensity obsession has taken over.

Mike Mentzer’s handful of brutal sets pushed to absolute failure. VO2 max sessions that leave you face down on the floor. The idea that if you’re not destroyed after training, you wasted your time.

And the logic tracks.

If 2 hard sets deliver the same strength gains as 6, why do 6? If 10 minutes of hell matches 90 minutes of steady cardio, why wouldn’t you take it?

Less time. More suffering. Faster results.

I get the appeal. I trained this way for many years…

The idea that you can walk into a gym 3 times per week, crush yourself for 30-45 minutes, and walk out having done everything you need to do. No wasted time. No fluff. Pure, concentrated suffering.

There’s something deeply satisfying about that. Especially for men who are already stretched thin across business, family, relationships. The gym becomes the one place where the equation is simple. Work hard. Get out. Move on.

And the fitness industry has made it incredibly easy to believe this is the optimal path.

Two brutal sets instead of six. Ten minutes of redlining instead of an hour of “boring” cardio. The promise that intensity is the shortcut every busy man has been looking for.

The problem isn’t that this approach doesn’t work.

It does. For a while.

The problem is that it builds nothing lasting.

You can make a massive difference to your fitness in 12 weeks of punishing, soul-crushing training. Absolutely. But then what? You keep redlining. The injuries start stacking. The burnout creeps in. And six months later you’re back to where you started, wondering why the shortcut didn’t stick.

We see this all of the time with ‘health coaches’ in the bodybuilding industry who will do an aggressive 12 week cut with their clients, as soon as the cut is over, they relapse, rebound, binge, stuff their faces, and end up exactly where they started…

Here’s the truth I refused to accept, and I’m sure many of you too…

Wanting to achieve anything exceptional in life requires time. Reps. Lots of them.

You wouldn’t expect to run a multimillion dollar business just doing 3x 45 minute work blocks per week, so why do we have this same warped perception when it comes to our health?

YOUR HEALTH IS YOUR BILLION DOLLAR ASSET

Every business, every deal, every moment with your family, every adventure… It all runs on one thing. Energy.

Not money, connections or ‘network’.

Energy is the ultimate currency. It’s the fuel behind everything you will ever build, create, or experience in your life.

The training processes #1 aim should be to build as much energy capital in your life… So you can spend it.

The same way you would spend money… Energy you can use to train more, energy you can use in your business or career. Energy you can use to support your family. Energy you can use to explore, travel & see the world.

Now more than ever, this is a necessity for modern men. And that’s been taken away from us as modern life is architected to remove every possible reason to move. The car replaces walking. The desk replaces physical labour. The couch replaces everything else. You haven’t failed. The system was built to make you sit.

BUT HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED TO MOVE DAILY?

This number is going to shock you. 2 HOURS. Not 10 minutes of HIIT. Not 20 minutes of sprints…

2 HOURS.

Why 2 hours? Credit to , & , for providing me with the awareness of these particular studies and concepts. As I have learnt more about endurance sports, the methodologies & systems they use have been very inspirational toward the development of the Lethal Training System.

Herman Pontzer’s research on the Hadza tribe, one of the last true hunter-gatherer populations on earth , found that these men moved roughly 90 to 120 minutes per day at moderate intensity [1]. No gym. No protocol. No optimization. Just the natural rhythm of surviving and building a life. And they achieved a mean VO2 max of 56.7… A number 99% of you reading this do not have.

Meanwhile, the average Western man’s primary movement is walking between machines in the gym, or walking from the couch to the fridge… And we wonder why the state of health is in shambles….

The gap between how much we move and how much we were built to move? About 90 to 120 minutes per day.

That’s where the two hours comes from. It’s not arbitrary. It’s the distance between what we are and what we’re supposed to be.

And here’s why it matters beyond just “being fit.”

A VO2 max of 50 results in a four-fold decrease in the risk of death. Four times less likely to die. From anything. That number has been replicated across massive mortality studies. It’s one of the strongest predictors of how long you actually live [2].

But here’s the part that should genuinely terrify you…

To maintain a VO2 max of 50 at age 75, you need approximately two hours of aerobic movement per day [3]. Not to improve. Just to maintain. And the research is clear, a man who trains consistently throughout his life at 75 has roughly the same fitness as a typical 25-year-old who does nothing.

The men who don’t maintain? They’re already heading toward the sedentary line by their mid-50s.

Two hours a day isn’t a training goal. It’s a standard worth pursuing.

You don’t have to get there tomorrow… But it has to be where you’re heading.

PILLAR 1: VISUALISE & PLAN YOUR IDEAL LIFE

I get it, this sounds like some woo woo manifestation hippy advice.

But it’s not.

After my professional sporting career ended, I spent an entire decade training like a headless chicken. Bodybuilding for one month. Powerlifting the next. Some random program I found online after that.

Then I’d fall off, lose momentum, and start the cycle again.

The reason? I was training for vanity, cosmetics & no real purpose.

I was not thinking long term… And I was a burnt out athlete who had been redlining since I was 16 trying to make it as an elite.

That is the exact reason I created The Lethal Gentleman’s Standards, principles, philosophies & ways of life. It gave me a purpose to train and move after my professional sporting career was over.

Now I have ambitions within the realms of martial arts, golf, tennis, open water swimming & so many other forms of movement.

Without a plan or vision for what this training will actually do for you… You won’t stick to it, and that’s why when clients come to me saying they want to get leaner and that’s it…. I teach them to think exponentially bigger than that.

A good place to start with this concept is reading The Lethal Mindset piece…

PILLAR 2: START EMBARASSINGLY SMALL

If I ran you through my current training schedule, you would probably never think you’d have the time or bandwidth to train a minimum of 12 hours per week…

But I didn’t start here… I started by walking.

Firstly, 10 minutes upon waking up… That then turned into 30 minute blocks between client meetings & work.

Not only did this help build the foundations of my gas tank, but it also allowed me to start stacking wins.

Every single client I’ve ever worked with comes to me with the same plan.

“I’m going to completely overhaul my life. Train twice a day. Cut all processed food. Sleep 9 hours. Cold plunge every morning.”

And every single time, it collapses within two weeks.

Early in my consulting career, I’d let them do it. I’d build the overhaul plan. Watch it fall apart. Then we’d start again.

I refuse to do this now because I have never seen it work in practise.

Gradual change = longer lasting that overnight overhauls.

PILLAR 3: GET SERIOUS ABOUT LIFESTYLE DESIGN

If you’re serious about getting this much movement into your day, you are going to have to aggressively audit your lifestyle.

• Can you replace the netflix with a walk?

• Can you cycle, walk or commute in any way to your work?

• Can you help your child’s athletic development where you’re both getting fitter in the process?

• Can you use a walking pad when you’re working at your desk?

• Do you have any interest in hobbies or sports that would help you add more movement to your routine?

This is a question I often ask my clients:

“If I said you needed to move for 2 hours each day & if you did this every single day for a year I’d give you 5 million dollars, would you be able to find time”?

The answer is almost always a yes… Your health is worth far more than 5MM… So it’s time to start treating it accordingly.

HOW I SETUP THIS LIFESTYLE DESIGN SYSTEM…

Now that you have the 3 pillars, let’s apply it with clear cut examples & standards to build toward.

This is not something you will do overnight, it’s a gradual process, BUT…

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Gentlemen,

I hope your 2026 is off to a strong start.

The energy this year feels different.

The Lethal Gentlemen’s Club team is also expanding.

We are working on in person events, updated systems for clients & building the best team on the planet to equip men with the skills they need to dominate in all arenas of life.

I greatly appreciate the DM’s particularly from the Gents that are sharing this message with their friends, brothers, fathers….

Building yourself into a Modern Renaissance Man is a lifelong pursuit.

One that grows & develops as you enter each year, each decade & each new prime of your life.

The goal for the substack is also to offer more lethal mindset, productivity & life philosophies… all for free.

The reality is that I will only ever have the bandwidth for a very small handful of clients, my aim for Substack is to spread the Lethal Gentlemen’s message globally.

So without further a do… Let’s rip into January’s Protocol.

THE LETHAL TRAINING PROTOCOL - JANUARY.

PROTOCOL OVERVIEW

DASHBOARD

DOWNLOAD JANUARY’S PROTOCOL

Download by clicking the button below…

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We have had exceptional feedback on the Physical Standards that build a Top 1% Physique… But that’s only one piece.

Physical supremacy without business skills turn you into an idiotic gym bro.

To be lethal, you need to be a modern renaissance man.

You need high standards for yourself & who you choose to have in your circle.

Non-negotiables that govern how you move through business, relationships, and life itself.

The character traits that command respect when you walk into a room; not because you’re the strongest, but because you’ve systematically engineered yourself into someone who cannot be ignored.

Because here’s what you already know:

• You can be physically elite and still get walked over in negotiations.

• You can build wealth and have your family resent you.

• You can master combat and fold under different kinds of pressure.

• You can have capability and no code governing how you deploy it.

Most men optimize for single domains. They become one-dimensional specialists…strong but broke, rich but weak, capable but directionless.

The Lethal Gentleman refuses this compromise.

So here they are.

The nine lethal standards that forge dangerous capability and refined character in equal measure.

The systematic code that transforms physical supremacy into complete dominance across every arena that matters.

Study them. Embody them & Execute relentlessly.

1. EXTREME PROFESSIONALISM

Be professional. Reliable. Punctual. Composed under pressure. Possess relentless drive, work ethic and exceptionally high standards.

2. LEGACY & LOYALTY

Lead by example. Honor your word. Provide for your family. Forge unbreakable bonds. Support your brothers.

3. ELITE EXECUTION

Be the man in the arena. More moves. Talk Less. Do more. Deploy with speed. Build elite teams. Deliver results, not excuses.

4. CLASS & REFINEMENT

Be a modern renaissance man. Charismatic Educated. Cultured. Charm effortlessly, dress sharply & develop impeccable taste.

5. RELENTLESS REPUTATION

Be unbreakable. Never quit. Never surrender. Conquer your mind. Thrive in competition. Forge an iron mind.

6. TACTICAL ADAPTABILITY

Be adaptable. Versatile. Gritty. Thrive in chaos. Improvise and overcome. Conquer every obstacle.

7. LETHAL CAPABILITY

Be lethal, not a victim. Killer instinct. Martial mastery. Soldier mentality. Refined aggression.

8. LIMITLESS DURABILITY

Be unbeatable. Infatigable. Strong. Robust. Violently explosive. Relentless. Outwork your competition.

9. BUSHIDO

Be a modern samurai. Integrity. Courage. Compassion. Respect. Honesty. Honor. Duty. Self Control.

THE STANDARDS ARE EXPANDING

Over the course of this year, I will be doing deeper dives into standards across all domains. I am working behind the scenes to further polish firearm standards (for now this is kept exclusively for my clients who are doing firearms training).

I will also be building systems for focus skill development that you can apply to any business or career that you are in.

Stay Lethal.

J.Krucial.