The Real Reason I Nearly Left Garage Gym Athlete

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week

Podcast Transcript

 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast, Jerred Moon here, and I'm doing a podcasts quite different from normal. I'm gonna be talking to the community directly. To the community so you know who you are. Like you honestly do. I've been doing this for over a decade. You've been around for a couple years, some of you nearly 10 years, and you are really invested in what we're doing our mission, right?

You're the H2K lifers. You're the daily over decades chasers. You're the ones who have been here. You have lifetime memberships. There are a lot of people in this community, and I never wanna let any of you down. And so that is what this podcast is about, is letting you know what's going on, what's happening in 2026, and really just, you know, laying out the plan and, you know, giving you the behind the scenes of, of really what's been happening.

So how I wanna start is by talking about how things started. So Garage Gym athlete, amazing community, uh, amazing company. I've always loved doing what I've been doing. I really feel like it's like why I was put on this earth. Is to build better humans. That's always been the mission. It's always been my mission.

No matter what I'm doing, what I'm chasing, what venture I'm doing, that is ultimately the goal. And I've always been the type of person who wants to lead from the front. So if you've followed along for many years, you know, I, uh. I got some pretty sick murf times, you know, doing murf every single week, uh, for years getting better and better.

Not just doing it for the sake of doing the volume. I was actually trying to get better at it, and I had these incredible times. A lot of people in the community joined in. They did those things. Then I went a step further and I was like, Hey, you know what? I want to try and achieve the 500 mile, 500 pound back squat, five minute mile in the same day.

I got really close. I think I got up to a 485 pound squat and a five 12 mile, something like that. That's when everything broke. And a lot of you know, that I got injured pretty significantly hurt my lower back, and I still struggle with some issues from that today. I mean, it's been, what, over two years since then?

And I still struggle with some issues when, when trying to go really heavy. Like I don't have like a limp or like, I don't have anything significant that's really holding me back. But I, it devastated me, I would say on a mental. Front as being the head of garage gym athlete because I couldn't do anything that I wanted to do for a long time.

All I could do was be consistent. That's the, that's the one thing I maintained during that whole time is consistency. I still worked out, I still got things in, but it wasn't the same. The intensity wasn't there. The weights weren't there, wasn't going heavy. I wasn't going fast. And really that was the start of me starting to retract.

From the Garage Gym athlete community, and some of you have probably noticed that like I keep the podcast going and all of these other things, but I, I just started to kind of take some steps back. I don't, honestly, it wasn't like knowingly, it was kind of more unknowingly. Now that I look back on things, I just wasn't as involved in the community just 'cause I felt like I couldn't be that leader that I always was, that was leading from the front.

And you know, I talk to people about leadership all the time, and that's not leadership. Just because I can't do what I once did or, you know, wasn't as capable, doesn't mean I'm less capable to lead this community. But that's how it started to feel. And I felt like I needed to, you know, kind of take some steps back.

And in that timeframe, a whole lot of other things came online. I would say during this time period where I was kind of in this recovery phase and started to retract from the community that just kind of got me burned out in the fitness industry. You know, there's all these easy buttons come, have come online and I'm not here to throw shade on them, but I would just say it has lessened my motivation to be a part of the fitness industry.

And a lot of, you know what I'm talking about. It's like, um. There's TRT, there's Ozempic, there's chat, GPT, we can give you workouts. You know, like all these, all these easy buttons were created. And I'm not here to tell you you shouldn't take, you know, Ozempic or GLP one, or you shouldn't take TRT, that that's not really the case.

I, I'm not like, I don't think that people are cheating and, and getting results that they shouldn't get out. It has nothing to do with that. It's more from the fitness coaching angle, you know, 24 year olds hopping on TTRT. And like blowing up social media accounts and people following, they're like, oh, I can look like just people lack such an understanding of what it truly takes, even the young guns who are, you know, getting into the industry.

And it's not that I feel intimidated by these people, and so I started to retract. It was more of a frustration because if you know anything about me and my entrepreneurial journey, I have multiple different companies. And it got to the point where I didn't need Garage Gym athlete to feed my family.

Like that was not a requirement anymore. I had other businesses and business partners and business partnerships that had done really well. It was just like, it was completely optional to continue to run Garage Gym Athlete. I definitely, I, we kept it going, right? Like we, we have kept going, but it came to this point where I'm like, if you hate the industry so much, like why, why be a part of it?

You know? And, and that's where things started to get. You know, really dicey for me. I just really didn't want to be a part of the industry anymore. I was like, I don't want to be associated, you know, with those people. I don't want people to think that those people are my peers, all the people who are doing things the wrong way, chasing easy wins, all of the, those kind of things.

I didn't wanna be a part of it anymore. I got really burned out. As someone who's been doing this for a long time, it doesn't matter how much we scream and yell from the rooftops of like how we want the fitness industry to be, I feel like we're never making a dent. And so it was a combination of all these things we can call 'em excuses.

To be honest, I, I don't think they're very good looking back at 'em. I, I, they're, these are just things that happened and so I started to retract even further and further from the community and it wasn't the right decision. And like I said, I'm, I'm recording this specifically for the community members who are a part of the community, and it wasn't the right decision, but that's what happened.

Okay. That's just the, the matter of fact is there's nothing. Crazy in my life that's happened. Other than those kind of things piling up, it's just the frustration with the industry. I didn't really wanna be a part of it anymore. Every corner, you know, every turn is like a new easy button. It's a new way people can cheat the system, try and get results faster.

I mean, it's the same thing we've been talking crap about for a decade. You know, people selling their six pack abs and three week programs, like all that, that junk, it just seems so amplified now. But in reality, I was just paying attention to the wrong things and I was paying attention to the wrong things because I couldn't be who I wanted to be, right?

I couldn't train how I wanted to train. I couldn't train as hard or as heavy. I couldn't go, like my performance wasn't what it used to be like. Those things just all took its toll and I thought I was about done. I knew this year was the year I was gonna have to decide, because if you're a part of the community, I didn't shut anything down.

Right? We, we still have the backend community. We are still putting out the workouts. The programming is the, the best that we can provide. Um, we, we made some mistakes there over the last year as well, and I'll talk about that. And I've kept doing the podcast. We, I kept doing all of these things, but I was like, I'm not going to.

I'm not gonna phone it in, in 2026. Like, that was the, that was kind of what I put on myself this year. I'm like, you need to, you really need to decide what you're doing. Like in 2025, we're gonna kind of keep things going how they are. But in 2026 you decide, piss or get off the pot. Right? It's, it's time to either go all in on the community or it's time to leave it behind or sell it or whatever, you know?

That's what I've been thinking about. I've been struggling and wrestling with all year, and it had, it came in waves, different points in time of like, you know what? I'm done. At some point, I, I got there. I was like, I, I think I am done with the fitness industry. I don't think I wanna be associated with it.

I think this, you know, I had a good run. Maybe this is, this is where I get off, uh, get off the ride. But every time I've tried to, every time I've thought I've made that decision, something pulls me back in. And what pulls me back in is passion. Like this is, this is why I'm here. Like, I've been thinking a lot more about my life's work.

You know, I think the older you get and the more you put yourself into something, you start to think about things a little bit differently. It's like, what is my life's work? What is, what am I giving to the world? What am I giving to other human beings? And you know, I think ultimately this is, this is my mission.

To build better humans. I mean, it always has been, but I think I lost sight of that in some of the challenges that I faced that I forgot. The mission is to build better humans and, and this is one of the greatest vessels in which I do that. I try to do that in every capacity no matter what I'm doing, no matter what business I'm a part of, but this is probably the greatest opportunity I have to build better humans to change lives.

And to really be a part of a community that I love. I love fitness more than you know anything else. When we're talking about in a professional capacity, and it doesn't matter how many business books I read, I read them to learn. I read them to get better, to ultimately make the businesses that I'm a part of better.

But it's just never been where my heart's at, right? Truly, my heart is in fitness. My eyes light up when I'm reading boring scientific research for the podcast, you know, like I say, boring 'cause most people find that boring. But I'm like, I can. Nerd out on this stuff for hours. And I wrote in my book, killing Comfort about a litmus test that I had learned about from an accountant where he was this, he was an accountant and he, he just kind of realized one day he is like, I can't keep doing this.

I can't keep being an accountant. Like, I just, I'm not, it doesn't light me up. I make good money, but I, I just don't wanna do it. So he, his litmus test was whatever he chose to do next, he would have to be willing to like, stay up late. Reading and learning about this given activity, and I think about that all the time.

And the only thing that does that for me truly, really is, is fitness or fitness related things. Health, you know, reading new books on health and nutrition, fitness programming, all of these things. That's, that's what I ultimately want and I have given a lot. To the fitness community, but I've just done it in my own way.

Right. I've never been a part of the main status quo fitness community, and I never will be. And we've always taken a really strong stance we don't do before and after photos. And that's not because we can't get people results, it's because we chase longevity and performance. I want people to live longer.

I want them to perform like athletes. You know, we are just against all the typical things. We don't, we don't do, you know, the six week challenges where, you know, you're, you're counting your macros and taking pictures. Before and after pictures with your, your shirt off. And we're not trying to promise things that are gonna happen in three weeks or six weeks or, or any of that crap.

And we're also not pretending like there's some new method we unlocked or uncovered that gets people results. These are all, this is all the, the crap that I see in the industry that gets me so fed up and we've just never been a part of it. And we never will be. You know, we are. The the people who are preaching daily over decades, that's what it takes.

You wanna be healthy, you wanna be strong, you wanna be fit, you wanna play with your grandkids, you wanna live a longer life. It's daily, over decades. It's work. It's a lot of hard work. That's the message here. If you wanna be a part of somebody who is doing something correctly, this is the place to be. So my promise to the community is, I'm your guy.

Right? Not, not everyone in Garage Gym athlete is a fitness professional. A full-time fitness coach has the ability to look at scientific research and, and cut through the crap of like, what is actually something we should follow and what's something that we shouldn't? And I want to be that guy for the community, right?

I, I want to invest my time to be able to help you to cut through the noise and to make better decisions, and to be the athlete who's chasing daily over decades and ultimately. Decide that this is the place that you want to be in the community you wanna be a part of. And two really big things, uh, came up in the community recently that have really, you know, taken me on this rollercoaster of like, you know what, I'm out, or I'm in.

And it was, uh, a few months ago, we had someone sign up for one of our programs and. He just wasn't super happy with the program. We had made some mistakes in inputting the programming, uh, to be honest, with just sloppiness on our part. And he wrote in the community, I guess for 25 bucks a month, you can't expect much.

And that one, to be honest, that one stung like bad. I was like. What did you, what have you done? You know, like what have you allowed this, this company to become, you know, like why, where's the quality control? Like, why, why would someone ever say that? That's never been what Garage Gym Athlete is about?

We're about. You should have incredibly high expectations for what we deliver in the programming in the community, and ultimately everything that we deliver. You should have incredibly high expectations and still pay a low amount. Like that is part of our mission for the athlete, is like, we're gonna give you way more than you were ever expecting.

And so that there is what put me on the collision course with. We're going to be better in 2026 and I'm going all in. And, and what solidified that was a recent comment. We also got in the community to highlight both ends of the spectrum. Longtime member named Brian, he posted, I'm not gonna read the whole thing.

'cause he, he, you know, he never said that he wanted this, um, out there publicly. But Brian, you know who you are. You know. He said Thanksgiving marked another year of at least 300 workouts. So if you didn't know in the community, we challenge people every year to basically do the 300 300 challenge. We're gonna do it in 2026.

Um, where you're get in, you're getting in 300 workouts, and there are multiple levels to this. I'm not gonna get into the full challenge now, but he's done this for multiple years. Right. Which is, which is incredible. Great work, Brian. And then he just talks about how this has kept him grounded and, and just things in his life.

He finished out his remarks with, here's to everyone finishing out the year they're your strong in the month of December. To ride a huge wave of momentum into 2026 coaches. Thank you for all the time and effort you put into this endeavor. It's changing lives and generations after for the better. And it's those comments that we're here for, right?

We're here to change lives and I don't, you know, sometimes a customer comes in and, and they're not. Happy or maybe they didn't fully understand something or whatever. It's not always just, it is not something you can get as a business owner, get too wrapped around like one negative experience when you have all these positive experiences.

But part of me just agreed with the first negative con, I was like, yes, we are not putting our best foot forward and that's not who I am. And that's where, that's where this decision really came into place. I was like, you're either quitting because you're not gonna have your name attached to something where you're not giving your best effort, period.

I don't wanna be associated with something. I don't want my name on something. If my best effort is not going towards that thing, I don't wanna be a part of it. And so that I knew, I was like, you're, then you either have to leave or you have to go all in. And I am choosing all in, and I'm about to tell you kind of what the plan is for 2026, but it's people like Brian.

All the people in the community who have really brought me back and realized I can be the leader of this movement. And we are changing lives and we have for a really long time. And the expectations of us should be really great. And we've gotten some, you know, other feedback from people in the community.

And I wanna kind of talk about what our plan is for 2026. I'm not here to reengage with the the fitness industry and try and be this thought leader in the fitness industry. I only want to be here for the Garage gym athlete community. That's it. I don't really care about my forward facing social media or YouTube channel.

I don't really care about those things. I care about the people who sign up and they're on the back end. That's where I've always created the most content. We've done the most education we've. Created the most support until recent times, like I talked about, and, and when I started to take those step back steps back, but that is not gonna be the case anymore.

So for all of the community members who are like, okay, long-winded story, you're back in, what does that mean? Well, we are going to be rebuilding community engagement. That's number one. Like that is our big, uh, push for 2026. We're gonna get into daily interactions with in the community. You know, we're really relaunching our track identities.

We're doing weekly engagement prompts for members, you know, highlighting weekly wins, all of these things. That's what we're doing to rebuild community engagement, uh, bringing back PR shirts, just all these things that we have always done that we have kind of slacked on lately. That's all coming back.

That's a major initiative for 2026. So if you wanna be a part of the community, if you're already a part of the community, we run our community right now in circle. I don't know if that will change. We are exploring multiple different options, but that is our main focus for 2026. The programming is always going to be the programming.

There are gonna be some minor changes there, but I always put a lot of time, effort in energy into the programming. The only thing that can get mixed up sometimes in the programming is when it goes from. Paper to app, right? Like sometimes there's some confusion there, but ultimately the programming's gonna be awesome.

It's gonna get results and I don't think that that's really ever changed. But what we're gonna be focusing on a hundred percent, 2026 is the community. And then we're gonna get big into relaunching our cycles with a ton of structure. So over the last couple of cycles, we've just kind of eased into the next cycle with minimal like.

Announcement of like, what's going on? We're gonna get way if, if you've been a part of the community, you know that we used to do this really big internal launches, not even like external marketing launches. It was just internal. Like, Hey, here's what it's about. Here's what you can expect. So we're gonna make sure that we're bringing those back.

So relaunching the cycles with structure, uh, we're gonna have. A lot more fun and competition added into the community. Uh, we're gonna do monthly challenges like we do. We've done a lot of simple things. We're bringing back, like the green dot challenge or the 300 challenge. All these things, those things are coming back.

Um, we are going to improve app engagement. So again, a. You can see everything's around the community, everything's around engagement, and I, we just want to add value beyond the programming, so making sure that we're having you focused on your habits, nutrition, recovery, sleep, lifestyle, and then we're gonna start providing more resources, all again internally, PDFs, guides, things that you might need might help you along this journey that are exclusive only to members.

Again, going beyond that like. I, I don't care what it costs, I don't care if we were able to charge a dollar for a member, we're still gonna give the best damn experience you could possibly, you know, want for the Garage gym athlete in our community. And that's what we're gonna be doing in 2026. Um, we're gonna be doing, we're gonna be adding some new tracks.

I don't wanna talk about those too much yet, but we are gonna be switching up some tracks. Just to get people more engaged and more realistic. As we, as I start to look at this as like 10 and 20, 30 year project, again, my life's work. What do I wanna build? I'm looking at my programming methodologies. I'm looking at the latest research on longevity and performance and how we can implement that in the best possible way.

So new tracks to represent and reflect on what I've been learning, what I've been building, and then we are going to be making sure that we. Our supporting community members inside the app, the circle, you know, where we're, where we host the community as much as possible. So making sure if you're posting videos, if you want a form review for form check, we're there.

If you need help with something, you have a question. We're responding really fast. If you've noticed at all, we started to pick these things up. It's not like we're waiting for 2026 to, to launch, but we have putting, been putting together the plan of like how we want to tackle 2026. This, these are all the things that are coming.

So ultimately what I'm here to say is I'm back. I'm back in the community. I had retracted for one reason or another over the last couple years. And again, this is all like behind the scenes stuff. If you've never been a part of the community. On the back end, you wouldn't even know what I'm talking about.

That's why I'm recording this specifically for the members who do know. And so your expectation of me and of Garage gym athlete, make it as high as you possibly want 'cause we're gonna be there to help you. Again, I'm focused on what's my life's work, what am I here, what was I put on this earth to do? And I think this is a large part of that, and I wanna support everybody who's going to support us.

To the best of our ability. If you want to do things the right way, you want to chase daily over decades. You want to be here to make a change, not only for yourself, but for your lives. Whether you know, whether your your kids' lives, everybody down the chain, uh, as Brian said, we're making impact not just in.

Someone's health and fitness, but for generations to come, your kids are seeing it. I have kids who I'm training. I'm gonna be sharing that a lot more in 2026. How do you add these things into your life? I really want to focus on the community, not social media, not any of this crap. I really just wanna focus on making Garage Jam Athlete the best damn community on the planet.

I think that we've been there before, I think. My lack of leadership in some regards on the community side is what ultimately has made the community less engaged and, and not as good as it could be. But it's coming back. I'm coming back fully in 2026 and so I'm really looking forward to doing that. So if you are one of our long-term members, I appreciate you sticking around even through this like low.

Like I said, we kept everything going. It's not like we didn't shut down, we didn't like anything like that. I just am, I have not been operating at the capacity. That I would expect of myself. And so that's gonna change in 2026. So if you've stuck around even for this lull, I really, really appreciate you and we're gonna have a kick ass 2026.

It's gonna be awesome. We're gonna have a lot of challenges. We're gonna be doing a lot of things, and I really wanna see you there. So if you are a community member, still a part of the programming. Start engaging inside the community. We would love to have you. And then if you are a community member, were a community member looking to be a community member, go sign back up.

Go to garage gym athlete.com. Sign up for a free trial, and join the best damn community for Garage Gym athletes on the planet. Aside from whether or not I took a step back or not, it's still that it always has been. And that's not because of me. That's because of each one of you who are in the community interacting with one another and challenging each other to be better, be better humans, and ultimately hold each other accountable.

So I appreciate each and every single one of you. Well, that's it for this one. I really appreciate you all. If you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you. It's time for us to start killing some comfort.