Find Your Crew
I watched a kid get crushed by a bouncy obstacle course over the Fourth of July, and it has been sitting with me ever since.
He was maybe eight or nine, already fifty or sixty pounds overweight, and he would not jump onto a single obstacle. He would step up, maybe step off, and walk the rest. His parents stood there cheering him on, but you could see it on his face: he was already convinced his body couldn't do what was being asked of it. Later I watched the same family order at a food truck. Double cheeseburgers, two orders of cheese curds, two orders of mini donuts, three Cokes. It broke my heart, because of course. Of course this is where we are.
I'm not telling you that story to dunk on anyone. I was that overweight kid too. I know exactly what it feels like to look at your own body and decide in advance that you can't. What it reminded me is how alone people are in this fight, and how much of the failure is structural. The food options were stacked against everyone there. The encouragement was there, but the system wasn't.
So I want to talk about the single most underrated tool for changing your body and keeping it changed. It isn't a diet or a program. It's community.
Willpower is a terrible engine
Here is the thing nobody wants to hear: what it took for you to lose the weight is what it will take to keep it.
You can absolutely white-knuckle a clean diet and six training days a week for a couple of months. Most people can grind out short bursts of that. But willpower fades. Motivation fades. They are not engines; they are weather. If the only thing holding your habits together is how badly you want it on a given Tuesday, you are going to lose, because there will be plenty of Tuesdays where you don't want it at all.
What survives those Tuesdays is a group of people who are counting on you.
I train my Twin Cities Kettlebell Club team three times a week over video, and the thing I love most is what happens when I'm NOT there. I'll be camping with my wife and kids, and the team still logs on and trains together. They tag each other on social media. One guy posts that he hit 20 reps per minute on his jerks with the 20s and asks what the other guy did. The other guy fires back with 24. They push each other into workouts they didn't feel like doing, because they knew someone else was going to be out there crushing it. Iron sharpens iron, and it's real. I watch it work every week.
That's not a nice-to-have. The research backs it. A meta-analysis of 27 studies found that community support measurably improves weight-loss results: people lose more and keep it off longer. There's even work suggesting that talking with your training partners after a hard session shortens your recovery, probably because connection flips you out of fight-or-flight and into rest-and-digest and floods you with the bonding chemistry that does that. We are communal animals. We climbed to the top of the food chain not because any one of us was fast or strong, but because we banded together. Using that wiring on purpose is just smart.
How to actually build your crew
The good news is that finding support is mostly a matter of deciding to. Here's where I'd start.
Start with your doctor. Get a primary care physician you actually like and click with, do your yearly physical, and ask your questions. I switched doctors recently because my first one and I had nothing in common, and the easier it is to talk to them, the more likely you are to bring up the thing that matters. Then build out a small team of providers as your means allow: a chiropractor, a movement therapist, a soft-tissue person, a nutritionist. You don't need all of them. You need the ones that move the needle for you.
Get your significant other on board. There is nobody more important on your team than the person who sees all of it, the good and the bad and the ugly. Tell them your goals, ask about theirs, and let them call you out when you reach for the whiskey or the drive-through. They see what nobody outside your house can see.
Find an accountability buddy or a group. One of my athletes runs a little text thread where people swap workout numbers and sleep scores. I do the same with a training partner; I texted him the day I finally cracked a 90 sleep score, and he came back with a 92, the bastard. That tiny bit of friendly competition is enough to keep you honest.
Join an online community, or a real team, or a league. Facebook groups, a subreddit, whatever fits. Just two cautions: keep it positive, and check the credentials of anyone handing out advice to a stranger. Then go find a team or a league that does YOUR thing. It does not have to be kettlebells. Running, cycling, powerlifting, Highland games, skijoring, I don't care. My oldest brother isn't a team-sports guy, so he's a member at a tennis club and plays tournaments, and that keeps him moving and competing for years on end. Find your thing and find the people who do it with you.
And yes, hire a coach if you can. I'm biased, I'm a coach, but I also pay for coaching myself, both kettlebell and nutrition, because a good one shortens your learning curve and saves you the one resource you can never get back, which is time. You can always make more money. You can't make more time.
A quick honest note, since I touched on weight and bodies here: this is a general principle, not a prescription for your individual situation, and if you're carrying real medical or disordered-eating history, please loop in a professional who can meet you where you are.
The internet has made support so accessible that the only real excuse left for going it alone is that you haven't put in the effort to find your people. So put in the effort. Surround yourself with people who elevate you and let the ones who drag you down fall away naturally. You become the company you keep, so keep good company.
Give the full episode a listen here.
If you've been grinding away solo and it keeps falling apart, that's not a character flaw, it's a missing crew. Come be part of ours. I've never turned anyone away over money, so don't let that stop you; just reach out and apply and we'll find you a place to start.
Vokse eller dø. — Coach Jordan