A few months ago I sat down with a woman who has spent decades teaching the Schroth method: exercises, stretches, and breathing that reduce the effects of scoliosis.

Part of the initial appointment was to bring her an X-ray of my spine, which she fed into software that reconstructed it in 3D. I hadn’t looked at an X-ray of my spine in years, and it was quite jarring to see the degree of curvature, and the long screws inserted at the base from a fusion I had 20 years ago.

One thing she pointed out that I had never thought about was that I didn’t just have lateral curvature. Scoliosis also rotates the spine in an unnatural way.

It was then that I decided to retire the deadlift.

What the lift was holding up

It was hard to give up the deadlift. Not because of health reasons, but because of what it meant to me as a man. It felt like surrender, one more thing that I couldn’t do as the years piled on. It hurt my ego to think that I could no longer pull heavy. The deadlift told a story. I was still the kind of man who could lift heavy things off the floor.

But as you get older, you’re supposed to get wiser, and just one year prior, trying to “lift heavy, bro,” I had torn my rotator cuff in my right shoulder, and this time the tear was permanent and irreparable. So the reasonable part of me was going to win this argument. For the same reason, barbell squats went the same week, and barbell calf raises as well.

My ego had a strong opinion about all of it. I read every subtraction as surrender. Quitting anything was a loss, regardless of what the benefit might be. It didn’t care about cost or consequences.

The substitution

Here’s what giving up those exercises looks like in practice, because this is where the ego’s argument falls apart. Hip thrusts took over for the heavy pulls. The seated leg press took over for squats, and my numbers on it kept climbing after I switched over.

At 64 I was stronger on several machines than I’d ever been, with a spine that’s fused at the bottom and curved in the middle.

Eventually, the story lost its power. I kept every ounce of the training effect. The criterion, once I quit negotiating, was simple: every movement is replaceable, and the joint isn’t. A lift is a tool for loading muscle, and when a tool starts costing more than the job pays, a mechanic swaps the tool.

I’m not saying the replacements are biomechanically identical – they’re not. But they’re close enough, and they’re a lot better than quitting entirely. The muscle does not know what the movement is called.

There’s a reason beneath this. The body I train isn’t mine to wreck in order to feed my ego:

Stewarding the body God entrusted to me is the whole point. No single lift is worth more than that.

Every Sunday I write for men who are done pretending the first-half approach still fits. Subscribe if that's you:

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Your deadlift

Maybe yours isn’t a deadlift.

It’s the full-court pickup game at 55. The rec-league slide into second. The ladder to your home’s roof with nobody home. The 10K you keep entering because the man you were at 38 ran it. Somewhere in your week there’s a movement or a load that’s serving your memory more than your body.

Take an inventory: what hurts more than it should after you’ve done it? What has your doctor warned you about? Be honest with yourself about it. Try to remove your ego from the equation.

The test I’d hand you is the one my X-ray handed me: ask whether the thing serves the man you are or memorializes the man you were. The barbell doesn’t miss me, and my back hurts a fraction of what it did before.

And notice what subtraction is not costing you. I train as hard as I ever have. I push hard on every working set; I just do it on different equipment now. The men who confuse the movement with the mission end up in rehab instead of training, and rehab is where the second half stalls, one torn tendon and one bad year at a time. I’ve spent enough seasons in slings to know how that works out.

You can subtract a movement and still train. Find a workaround for the one you gave up. It can still be the most advanced set you ever perform, even if nobody applauds. It will buy you years of fitness you’d otherwise spend in recovery.

Retire the lift. Keep the man.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

In January of 2023, my tumultuous three-year relationship ended, and I sat in my Nashville apartment thinking about what a man does at 61 with two failed relationships in four years. I was divorced at 59 after 24 years. A relationship after that which consumed three more years and ended anyway. I kept returning to the same answer:

This is just how it is for you now.

I want you to look hard at that sentence, because I’d bet money you’ve said some version of it to yourself: this is just how it is for you now. It sounds like being a realist, but it can be a verdict. And I handed it to myself, without thinking there might be something more to it.

I call it “Cave thinking.”

In my book The Last 10 Pounds I wrote about the difference between a cave and a tunnel:

“You feel like you’ve walked into a dark cave and there’s no way out. The truth is that if you keep walking, you’ll see a light at the other end. You weren’t in a cave. You were in a tunnel. Everything passes.”

Cave thinking has a tell: you start arranging your life around the idea that the dark is permanent. You create routines that assume nobody else is coming. The plans cancelled with no announcement, because men like you don’t deserve the good version. The opinions that harden around your solitude like a cast. Listen to your own vocabulary for the tell, too. Cave sentences lean on “always” and “never”:

“I’ll always be alone.”

“This never works out for me.”

A man who has stopped trying talks in life sentences. I did it twice, once in Puerto Rico and once in Nashville. Different situations, the same cave. Or so I’d decided.

What I couldn’t see from inside

Here’s the part I couldn’t have known that January, and it’s the reason I’m telling you this: in March of 2023, two months after that end, I met Mai. We were married in October of 2024. The woman who rebuilt my understanding of what a marriage could feel like was eight weeks away while I was handing down a life sentence of being alone to myself.

I can’t promise you a Mai. Nobody can. What I can tell you from my own life is this: every dark season I have ever been in ended, and from the inside, every single one of them looked permanent. The dark makes the temporary feel permanent. It’s one thing it always does. I’ve watched this from both sides now:

• At 47 I was so broke I considered suicide so my wife and daughter could collect on my life insurance policy.

• At 59 I was certain the rented duplex was how the story ended.

• At 61 I was sure the Nashville apartment was the sequel that proved it.

I was wrong twice in four years, and the second time I was eight weeks from the best thing that ever happened to me.

If you're doing the walking in the dark right now, you don't have to do it without another man who's been through it. I send out an essay every Sunday.

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The walking

A tunnel only pays off if you walk. For me the walking had nothing to do with scanning for exits. It was the unglamorous work I’d already started and kept doing in the dark: my belief work, my training, my food log, the faith I was still slowly growing in. None of it made the dark brighter that January. All of it was moving me through, which is a thing you cannot measure from inside.

The moves to Puerto Rico and Nashville had taught me the difference the hard way: changing your scenery is not walking. The work is in the walking. Progress in a tunnel often isn’t obvious, and expecting it to be can reinforce your feeling that nothing is changing. You bank the work on trust that you are moving through it.

David wrote that on the far side of the night he was describing. During the night, I’m sure it must have seemed like wishful thinking. But that doesn’t make it less true.

If you’ve started arranging

You know whether you’ve done it. The verdicts you’ve handed down to yourself about how it is for you now. The camp chair you’ve set up in what you’ve decided is a cave. I’d ask you to treat every one of those verdicts as what it is: a guess, made in the dark, by the least qualified judge available, a man who can’t see ten feet ahead.

You don’t get to see the exit before you’ve earned it. Nobody does. The work you do in the dark is not wasted; it’s the walking, and the walking is the whole difference between a man who lives in a cave and a man who comes out the other end of a tunnel.

Keep walking. It’s a tunnel, not a cave.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

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Every Wednesday morning now I sit in a cigar lounge with a bunch of Christian men having a smoke and coffee. It’s an hour talking about how to live as Christ did, how to be actual disciples, and not just “Sunday Christians.” Afterwards we get to know new guys, make new friends.

It occurred to me that not one person in that room has met the man I was just 10 years ago.

They’ve never seen him. The man who could recite talk radio grievances by heart, whose marriage was thinning into surface-level politeness while he poured himself into work and called it drive. The people in that room only know the current model, and they treat me accordingly. It’s taken me a while to understand how much that’s doing for me.

The old script

For most of my first half I sat in rooms with people who’d known me a decade at a time. Family rooms, Comic-con conventions, monthly CEO group conference rooms, the same faces year after year. There’s real comfort in being known that long. There’s also a cost nobody names: a room that knows the old you keeps handing you his script.

You try on a new way of being and somebody tilts their head. “Since when do you pray?” “Since when do you turn down a third drink?” It isn’t malice. Their data on you is old, and people trust their data. So you shrink back into the man they remember, because staying consistent is easier than being new in front of witnesses.

And I ran the same play on other people, holding old friends to versions of themselves they’d outgrown, because my old read on them was easier than paying fresh attention. Old rooms do it in both directions.

Four rooms of strangers

Then the divorce at 59 took the decision out of my hands. Four moves in four years, and every room I walked into held people who had no read on me at all:

• A friend’s cigar bar in San Juan, where I was just the guy who liked an Old Fashioned at six.

• A salsa class in Nashville where nobody knew I’d ever run a company.

• A two-bedroom apartment I split with a friend, a Boston transplant who took me exactly as he found me.

And now a cigar lounge full of men who assume I’ve always been this steady, which is funny if they knew the old me.

I want to be careful here, because I tried to use new rooms the wrong way first. I wrote once that there’s no geographic answer to a spiritual problem. Moving to Puerto Rico with the old man still inside me changed nothing but the humidity. A fresh room cannot create a new man. You can show up in a new city and play-act at being a completely different man, but if you haven’t changed internally, that’s what you’re doing: acting. The old rooms pull against who you’re trying to become. Having said that, a fresh room does extend you the grace of no expectations, and grace is a better climate for growth than a room that keeps score.

What Nazareth knew

Jesus ran into this. He went home to Nazareth, taught in the synagogue, and the locals couldn’t get past their preconceptions. This is the carpenter, Mary’s boy. We watched him grow up.

Mark adds that he could do almost no miraculous work there. The hometown effect was strong enough to constrain the Son of God in Nazareth. You and I are not exempt from it in the rooms that have known us longest.

Your one room

So here’s where you come in. You’ve been doing work on yourself. Maybe you’re eating like an adult for the first time in a decade, or you’ve finally cracked a Bible. And you keep noticing that around the old crowd, you snap back into the old shape within an hour.

Keep your old rooms if they’re good ones. This is addition, and it costs less than you think. A class. A men’s group. A gym at an hour when nobody knows your name. One room where the only version of you anyone has ever met is the one you’re building. Sit in it every week and let it treat the new man as a plain fact, until he becomes one. You won’t be performing there; you’ll be practicing. The difference is that practice doesn’t need applause, just repetitions. Give it three months before you judge it. The first few visits feel like wearing clothes that don’t fit yet. Keep going. Fit comes from wear.

I built Screen Rant and Game Rant surrounded by people who’d known me for years. I rebuilt myself in rooms full of strangers.

The old rooms vote for the old you. Find one that doesn’t, and keep showing up as the man it thinks you’ve always been.

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By Vic Holtreman

For men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who lost the life they built and refuse to let that be the end.

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Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com about faith, identity, and the second act.

America was founded by men your age.

The average man who signed the Declaration of Independence was 44 years old. The youngest was 26. The oldest, Benjamin Franklin, was 70, with gout he’d had for years and a walk across Philadelphia in July heat that cost him something. He signed anyway.

We tell the story of the founding like it belonged to the young. It didn’t. The whole span of a man’s life sat in that room, and the defining work got done mostly by men who were middle-aged and up, at an age our own culture writes off.

I just turned 65. According to the world, I’m supposed to be coasting. Managing the decline. Shopping for a recliner.

Franklin didn’t get that memo

At 70 he wasn’t wrapping anything up. He was starting the biggest assignment of his life. He’d already been a printer, a writer, a scientist, a postmaster. He ran away from his brother’s Boston print shop as a teenager with barely two years of schooling and rebuilt himself in Philadelphia from nothing. Then he did it again, and again. By 70 he was on his fourth or fifth act, and the one that put him in every history book came last.

Eleven years after the Declaration, they carried him into the Constitutional Convention in a sedan chair. He was 81, still in the room and still working.

Washington was 44 when he took command of an army that had no business winning. Middle-aged by any measure, old for a soldier. He spent the next several years losing more battles than he won and refusing to quit, which turned out to be the entire job.

I know something about starting over late

I’ve done it more than once, and not always well. I was 59, divorced, my money cut in half, learning to cook off YouTube because I’d never had to. That was no triumph. That was a man at the bottom wondering if the best part of his life was already behind him.

Here’s what I couldn’t see from down there: the idea that your defining work belongs to your twenties and thirties is a modern invention, and a lazy one. Every man who signed had already lived a full life by 1776, stacked with failures and dead ends and a reputation he’d now have to risk. The signing came in the second half of their story.

Every one of them had a name and money and a family that would suffer if it went wrong. They signed anyway.

Give me this mountain

There’s an old man in the book of Joshua named Caleb. Forty-five years earlier he’d been one of two scouts who came back and said the land could be taken. Everyone else was scared, so they wandered another forty years. When they finally arrive, Caleb is 85. He doesn’t ask for a quiet plot to retire on. Instead he points at the worst ground, the hill country still full of the giants that scared everyone off the first time, and says, “Give me this mountain.”

Eighty-five years old, and he asks for the mountain.

What did you already decide was finished

You’ve probably filed some part of your life under “closed.” The job you’re sure you’re too old to change. Your body, the one you let go because starting over now feels ridiculous. Your marriage, your faith, the friendships you’ve decided are set the way they are. Too late, you called it.

I write this every Sunday for the man who just felt that paragraph land. Free. Stick around.

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Too late is a story you tell yourself, and it’s more recent than you think. Franklin would have laughed at it. He was writing and inventing and arguing a nation into being at the age when you’re getting sold a scooter and a cabinet full of supplements to hang onto what’s left.

You don’t have to found a country. You have to stop treating 50 or 60 or 65 as the epilogue. The work in front of you now can be the work you’re remembered for, if you’ll pick up the pen while the oldest man in the room is still writing. That’s what I’m trying to do here.

I built two companies from a folding table in a warehouse, teaching myself code over cold coffee. ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com. I sold them, lost my marriage, and rebuilt my body and my faith on the far side of 59. I’m prouder of what I’m doing now than anything I did in the half where I was supposed to peak.

The country turned 250 this weekend. It was declared by men mostly past 40, carried through the fire by a man of 44, anchored by a man of 70. If they’d believed their best work was behind them, there’d be no fireworks to watch this weekend.

Point at the mountain. You’re not too old. You’re just getting to the part that counts.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com about faith, identity, and the second act.

There’s a photo of me from this past April. I’m 64. Five foot nine, about 158 pounds, around 10-11 percent body fat. If you saw it cold, you’d file it under good genes or too much free time, and you’d scroll on.

I want to walk you around to the other side of that frame. The book that does it is out today.

What got cropped out

Outside the edges of that photo is a spine fused at the bottom and curved enough that I lost almost two inches of height getting here. Lungs that run at about two-thirds of what a man my size should have. A shoulder muscle torn past the point where surgery does any good. Thirteen surgeries since childhood, eleven of them as an adult, behind me. A motor scooter I rode on the wrong day, and the ER I woke up in. A 59-year-old version of me sitting alone in a rented duplex with a divorce finalized and his money cut in half, every reason in the world to let it all go soft.

None of that is in the photo. That’s the problem with photos.

The man in that April photo isn’t a man who got lucky with his body. He’s a man who got a bad draw and kept showing up to the table anyway, for over 20 years, through the kind of run that hands a man a permanent excuse.

I’m not the proof you think I am

Here’s the thing I most want you to take from it.

I’m not standing here as evidence that you need good genes and a clean life to end up lean in the second half. I’m evidence of the opposite. Nothing in my medical file or my history made me a likely candidate for that photo, and I got there anyway. If it worked on a body and a life like mine, the “I’m too far gone” thing you’ve been running on yourself doesn’t hold.

Earlier this month I walked you through the rest of it. The 34,000 food log entries. The 14 photos going back two decades. The stretches where the data went dark and you could match the dates to the worst years of my life. The October at 64 that turned out cleaner than the spring at 41.

This photo is the visible end of all that. The receipt sitting on top of the pile. The record underneath it has the worst years of my life baked in.

I kept the ugly parts in

The book lays three records on one timeline. What I ate, across 34,000 entries. What my body went through, surgery by surgery. And what my life was doing to me while both of those ran. Where my memory and the data disagreed, I let the data win and left the gap showing.

That’s a different thing than a transformation story. A transformation story shows you two photos and skips the 15 years. A stress test shows you the years, including the stretches I’d rather you scrolled past, because the bad stretches are the proof. A clean before-and-after proves a man can string together a good eight weeks. A documented record proves the boring fundamentals hold up against a fused spine and two-thirds of the lung capacity I should have, through the worst run of years I’d had.

Not a transformation story. A 15-year stress test. That’s the whole pitch, and I can back every word of it with a date stamp.

Where to get it

The book is The Last 10 Pounds: What 15 Years of Data and 13 Surgeries Proved About Discipline in the Second Half. The print edition went live this morning, Tuesday June 30th. Three records on one timeline, the April photo on the cover, the ugly parts left in.

Three ways to get it right now:

• Kindle, live now on Amazon: Amazon.com.

• Hardcover here.

• Paperback here.

• Or the PDF version, straight from Gumroad.

I’ll create an Audible version soon.

The first chapter’s still free at Last10Pounds.com if you want to try it before you buy anything.

I built and sold two companies, Screen Rant and Game Rant. Neither one fought me the way my own body did. But I kept showing up for it.

I can’t hand you my spine or my lungs. I can hand you the record of what I did with them anyway.

Go build yours.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.
He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com about faith, identity, and the second act.

By the end of the weekend I said it out loud, laughing: “OK, stop. I can’t stand being loved this much.”

There was another cake in front of me, candles lit, people singing, a stack of handmade cards on the table. The third cake in four days, and I’d run out of ways to act surprised.

I turned 65 this month. A week out, I figured it would be a non-event.

You know how it goes. You tell everyone you don’t care about the day, and somewhere underneath you’re hoping somebody is planning something. A few months back I’d recruited some friends and thrown a surprise party for my wife’s birthday. She was floored. Great night. With my own milestone coming up (a milestone I’m not even a fan of), I was hoping someone might be cooking something up for me.

What was on the calendar was a camping trip. Our closest friends were taking their RV out the weekend of my birthday. We don’t have an RV, so my wife and I rented a cabin nearby to be in on it all weekend. I’d been hoping for a party. I told myself, okay, this will be something.

Cake after cake

It turned out I shared a birthday weekend with a young lady who was on the trip too. The second evening, they brought out two cakes. I didn’t see it coming. It put a big smile on my face, and I thought, well, that was nice. Figured that was the celebration.

The next night it happened again. More cakes, more candles, each of us leaning in to blow them out.

We drove home on the actual day, and my wife had our living room laid out with a plethora of gift bags and boxes for me to open. She’d baked me a batch of chocolate chip cookies. I picked dinner and a movie, and my wife, who does not love science fiction, sat through the original Stargate without one complaint.

Then Monday came. We had a potluck with our church community group, the one we meet with every couple of weeks. Toward the end of the night, out came another cake. Candles again. Happy Birthday sung to me again. Handmade cards from my friends. A couple more gifts.

That’s when I laughed and told them to stop. I meant it as a joke. It wasn’t entirely a joke.

The house I grew up in

You have to understand where I’m starting from. From the day I was born to the day I left home at 24, I never once heard the words “I love you” from my parents. Not once. I spent most of my adult life pretty shut down emotionally, because that’s what you learn to do when opening up gets you nothing. A long weekend of people loving me out loud, cake after cake, handmade cards in handwriting I recognized, is not a small thing for a man built the way I was built.

Sixty, at a bar

Here’s the part that matters, and it’s why I’m telling you any of this.

Five years ago I turned 60. I was living in Puerto Rico. I’d had some friends down there, we were tight for a while, but the friendships had started to fade by then. Nobody made any plans. I mentioned my birthday to one guy outside my usual circle, and he and his wife met me at a local bar for a drink. They did their best to make me feel celebrated, and I appreciated them for it. But I drove home that night feeling like I’d been handed a consolation prize.

I was low. Single in a new city, starting over at an age when you’re supposed to have it figured out. If you’d told me that night that five years later I’d be begging people to quit celebrating me, I’d have laughed in your face.

I was the man at that bar. I write an essay every Sunday for the man who's there right now. Subscribe and the next one will find you.

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Still me, with less armor

I believe God brought me Mai (my wife) and brought me this circle of friends. I believe the work I did on my faith is what changed the man they ended up celebrating. For a long time that scared me. I liked being edgy, sarcastic Vic. I’d built a whole personality on the edge, and I remember thinking, “if I stop being that guy, who am I going to be?”

Turns out I’m still me. I still have an edge. I’m just not as nasty and mean-spirited as I used to be. Not as angry, either. Kinder and more patient than the man who sat at that bar on his 60th. Same guy. Less armor.

There’s a line in Joel where God speaks to a people who had watched life get stripped bare:

I used to read that as a nice sentiment. I don’t anymore. The locusts were real for me. The lost years were real. The restoration didn’t come because I prayed for a better party. It came on the far side of a lot of work I didn’t want to do, the repentance and the forgiving and the letting people get closer than felt safe. But it came.

If you’re in the thick of it

So here’s what I want you to take from a man five years past one of the loneliest birthdays of his life.

If you’re dreading your own quiet birthday right now, certain this is just how it is for you from now on, you don’t know that. You can’t see where you’ll be a year from now. Two years. Five. I sure couldn’t. We all walk through dark valleys, and none of us can see the far end of one while we’re standing in it.

You don’t know where you’ll be in five years. I didn’t. Do the work in front of you. Let God do what you can’t. And don’t mistake one bad season for the rest of your life.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

By the time I turned 60 in San Juan, I had a regular table and an Old Fashioned waiting at six at my friend Candido’s cigar bar, telling myself I’d figured it out.

I hadn’t. It was the latest in a string of places I’d run to since the divorce, and I already had my eye on the next one.

Puerto Rico was supposed to fix me. I had a Vespa. (Okay, it was a bright yellow Vespa, but a guy’s got to start somewhere.) When that wore thin I went to Nashville. Charles, another friend, a new roommate from Boston. A Honda Rebel 500. Salsa classes on weeknights. I was busy and tan and no closer to whatever I was chasing.

The recognition moment came during a mushroom trip, alone in my apartment. I had Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel playing on YouTube, and I fell apart completely. Everything I’d spent three years “manning up” about and refusing to look at came to the surface, and I let it run right over me.

I let myself feel everything, and it left me utterly exhausted. It was the most cathartic experience I’d ever had, and only the beginning of “the work.”

I wrote later that there’s no geographic answer to a spiritual problem. I kept changing the scenery because I couldn’t name the actual problem. New city, same man. I’d have kept buying motorcycles and plane tickets for another decade if something hadn’t finally made me stop and ask what I was running from.

The wrong target

Here’s what I missed for years: the problem is rarely the thing you think it is.

You think it’s your weight, so you buy the program, eat the same four clean things on rotation, and quit by March. You think it’s your job, so you change it, and eight months later the same Sunday-night dread shows up wearing a different badge. Maybe it’s your house, the city, your marriage, your bank balance. You rearrange the furniture and the room still doesn’t feel right.

Something’s off. You feel it the way you feel a low tire before the warning light comes on. But you can’t name it, and a thing you can’t name wins by default. It charges you interest the whole time you ignore it.

I know this because I did it for years with a passport and a credit card. I was disciplined about the wrong target. I called it a fresh start. But I was a man avoiding one honest hour with himself.

Avoidance is sneaky because it can look like progress. A flight is a decision. A new gym membership is a decision. You get to feel like a man taking action while you sidestep the one decision that matters. I had a whole itinerary of decisions and not one of them touched the center.

The audit before the repair

That honest hour is the whole game. The naming is the work. You can’t fix what you refuse to call by its real name, and we’ve gotten good at not calling it anything. We stay busy. We polish the visible stuff because the visible stuff is easier to measure than the thing eating at us.

There’s a line in Psalm 139. “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.” David, a man with every reason to act with confidence, asking to be examined instead. Not “fix my circumstances.” Instead, “search me.” He understood the audit comes before the repair.

I won’t pretend one conversation untangles 24 years. It doesn’t. However, naming the thing is the move that makes every other move possible. Once I could identify what I was really running from, San Juan and Nashville stopped being escape routes and went back to being places. The motorcycle became a motorcycle instead of a costume.

What a notebook can’t do

The honest hour gets you to the table. It doesn’t tell you what to ask once you’re sitting there. You can face yourself and still circle the weight, the job, the bank balance, the same surface answers you’ve given for years. The problem beneath the problem doesn’t raise its hand. Naming it on your own, with a notebook and an hour, is harder than it sounds, because you’re the one who buried it.

That’s why I built the tool. It’s an AI that sits with you for about half an hour and asks the questions a good friend would ask if that friend knew how to drill down to the question behind the question. Identity, body, money, relationships, faith, what comes next. It presses when an answer comes too clean and asks the next one, the one you’d never put to yourself.

At the end it names the one belief that’s been driving you the whole time, and hands you a 90-day plan to start taking it back, with periodic check-ins and feedback to keep you on track. A friend who tried it said it found something in thirty minutes that thousands of dollars in counseling never did. I’ll leave it here if you want to look.

So before you book the next flight or start another program you’ll abandon by spring, stop and ask the question you’ve been outrunning. If you want help asking it, the tool is right there. Name what’s wrong. That’s where the second half starts.

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.

He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.

Ask me when I was in the best shape of my life and my gut says 2003. I was 41.

Nine weeks, a strict deficit, a stack of programs, karate twice a week. I went from 158 to 152 and dropped from 15 percent body fat to 9. That’s the experiment that started all of this.

My gut is wrong. The best stretch in 15 years of logging is October 2025. I was 64. My spine…

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I have 34,000 entries in a food logging app, fifteen years of them. Twelve dated progress photos from the last ten years, the oldest ones old enough to look like a different guy. And a medical file big enough that I’ve lost track of what’s in it.

For years those were three separate stacks. I’ve written about parts of them right here. What I track and why…

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Monday morning, leg press. Last workout I had 380 pounds on the rack, which is where I keep it these days. A few years back I’d have looked at that number and wanted to drop the pin another notch to 400 before I started my first working set. More was the entire point of being at the gym.

That wiring is still in me. I felt it Monday, the old itch to load …

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Dinner done. Dishes done. Me on one couch, my ex-wife on the other. A glowing screen across the room. We’d sit there, each alone but in the same room, for three or four hours and call it the end of the day, then go to bed.

That was my empty-nester stretch. I’d already sold Screen Rant. Game Rant was grow…

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I thought Puerto Rico would make me a different man.

It didn’t. I had to move a few times before I realized you can’t outrun yourself by moving.

I packed up my life in Utah and moved to San Juan when I was 59. Not for a job or for family. My 24-year marriage was over and I’d been divorced less than a year. I was in a tumultuous relationship, the house was…

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You’ve got four or five projects spinning. You sit down at the desk intending to make progress on one of them. Instead you work haphazardly for a couple of hours, then check out completely. You get that deer-in-the-headlights look and tell yourself you just need a break.

Maybe you don’t need a break. Maybe you need to look at the deadlines.

Pick the proje…

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Adapted from Chapter 3 of my book The Last 10 Pounds.

The body in this post is what I started with — before any of the work that became “You Don’t Need More Sets.”

I can trace the chain. It starts small and specific, becomes a cascade, and by the time I’m sixty-four, I’m standing in front of a mirror looking at what fifty years of structural compromise looks like.

Here’s what’s different about this part of the story: I can’t blame the choices I made. The body I was working with wasn’t the result of bad decisions or neglect. It was built that way. It was broken before I had any say in the matter.

Part one: the origin

I was born with a right clubfoot. It was corrected in infancy with surgery, casting, the whole protocol. It worked. I can walk normally. The correction came with a permanent cost, though: my right foot is two sizes smaller than my left. My right calf is a full three-quarters of an inch smaller in circumference. The muscle insertion is higher. The entire right leg is measurably smaller than the left.

What that means is asymmetry. Built in, structural. It doesn’t fix itself.

When I was a kid, shoes were a nightmare. I had to buy two pairs and throw one away. One shoe fit my left foot. The other fit my right. I’d walk out with paired shoes, each one wasted by half. Junior high, I wanted to try track and field. My mother said no. She was certain I’d get hurt. The clubfoot, she thought, meant I shouldn’t push it. So I didn’t, and I wasn’t that invested anyway. But I was aware, even then, that the foot was making some of my choices for me.

As I got older, I became self-conscious about it. I had a limp. It wasn’t severe, but it was there. I knew it was there, and I was old enough to know that other people could see it too. That does something to you. You carry it differently, stand differently. You start to own the thing you’re self-conscious about by changing how you move. My mother’s protectiveness fed into that. She meant well. What I got was a message: your body is fragile. Be careful. Don’t push it. When you’re young, that message sinks in deep. It becomes part of your operating instructions.

Part two: the cascade

Here’s how the body works: one thing isn’t just one thing. That leg-length differential, smaller right foot, smaller right calf, smaller right thigh, creates a pelvic asymmetry. One side of the pelvis is slightly higher than the other. The body compensates. The spine curves to make up the difference. That’s how structural scoliosis develops.

The scoliosis isn’t just a sideways bend. It’s also rotation. The vertebrae twist. The ribs twist with them. When your rib cage is twisted and compressed, it changes the shape of the space inside. Less room for the lungs. Less room for full expansion.

That’s why I can’t breathe like other people do.

My lumbar spine is fused at L5 to S1. I had that done in my early forties. It was necessary. Fusing vertebrae means those vertebrae don’t move anymore. The joints above and below have to work harder. That’s a trade I made and would make again.

Then there’s the pectus excavatum, a depression in my chest wall from the thoracic twisting. It takes up room that the lungs need.

Put it together: clubfoot at birth. Pelvic asymmetry from the leg-length difference. Structural scoliosis with rotation. Thoracic cage distortion. Pectus excavatum. Lungs that have sixty-six percent of the capacity they should have. Each thing flows from the one before it.

I got my lungs tested. 66% of predicted for my baseline. Restrictive pattern. That’s the medical way of saying my lungs can’t expand the way they’re supposed to. Not because the lungs themselves are diseased. Because the cage around them is too small. It’s like trying to blow up a balloon inside a box that doesn’t fit.

Part three: the surgical timeline

I’ve had eleven adult surgeries, two as a child.

The clubfoot correction came first, when I was an infant. Hernia repair in childhood. Then the real machinery kicked in.

Right ACL replacement sometime in my late 30s. Lumbar spinal fusion, L5 to S1, around the same time. Those were the foundation-level surgeries.

Knee surgery again in March 2014 for the meniscus. Sinus surgery in 2016. Eye surgery that same year to correct the onset of double vision. September 2017: pectus bar surgery. The thought was that pulling the sternum outward would give the lungs more room to expand. It didn’t work. In November 2020, a second surgery to remove the bars. Two surgeries to learn that you can’t fix the rib cage problem when the problem is the spine. September 2020: prostate surgery.

Then a snowmobile accident. Violent tear to the rotator cuff when I hit the ground. Surgery in April 2021 to repair it. Four weeks into recovery, I reached for something I shouldn’t have been reaching for. The bicep tendon detached from the shoulder, right where the first repair had been made. Bicep tendon reattachment in May 2021. Two surgeries in four weeks.

I did okay for a long while. Then I got stupid in the gym. I’d been running my usual weight and reps on barbell press for a long time. I decided to go heavier: a 5x5 protocol. The rotator cuff gave out right at the previous repair site. June 2024. I went through surgery, and a few months afterward, the supraspinatus detached and retracted so far it was irreparable. They couldn’t reattach it. I’ve got most of a rotator cuff now: the teres minor and subscapularis intact. One big one gone, and another at less than 100%.

Eleven adult surgeries. That doesn’t even count the clubfoot correction, the hernia repair, or the Vespa wreck.

Part four: January 2022, Puerto Rico

I’d taken an introductory scuba course. The weight belt wasn’t calibrated right. I’d make an adjustment and start sinking. Then a small counter-adjustment and rise very quickly. Over and over for an hour. When it was over, I got on my Vespa and left the parking lot.

The next thing I knew, I woke up in a hospital.

I’d blacked out, presumably from the repeated rapid pressure changes. The Vespa went into a palm tree. Deep gash on my arm that needed stitches. Cracked vertebrae in my neck. Broken nose. My left knee had grade three tears in the ACL and MCL. The doctor wanted to operate.

I was done with surgery. Not afraid of it. Exhausted by the recovery. Six months to a year of rehabilitation every time. I just said no.

Over time, the knee stabilized. Not perfectly. I learned which movements to avoid. For walking and for the workouts I do, it’s held up.

Part five: breathing at sixty-six percent

I can lift weights. But squats and deadlifts, my legs will still have strength to give before my lungs run out. Then I stop the set. I step back. I’m heaving for breath. Sometimes it takes a couple minutes to settle back down.

Sometimes I’ll be sitting on the couch. Not moving. Not exerting myself. I start to feel short of breath. There’s a tightness, like I can’t inhale fully. It’s like breathing through a steel belt cinched around my ribs.

When I lie down to fall asleep, it gets worse. The position changes how the rib cage sits. I feel like I can’t take a full breath. Sleep gets harder.

I started doing Schroth exercises recently. They’re designed to counter the rotation and curvature. The intent isn’t to straighten a curve that’s been there fifty years. It’s to make the spine and rib cage more flexible. I’m already feeling a difference.

Part six: the current inventory at sixty-four

Fused spine from L5 to S1. Structural scoliosis with a kyphotic component, the forward curve, the way the thorax rounds. Right shoulder on a three-fourths rotator cuff. The supraspinatus is detached and gone. The infraspinatus is torn. I’ve got the teres minor and subscapularis still functional. It’s not nothing, but it’s not a full set of tools either.

Restrictive lung pattern. Two-thirds the breathing capacity most men my size have. Bilateral knee ligament history. The right knee is older damage. The left knee is from the Vespa wreck, the grade three tears that never got surgery. Both are compromised in different ways. My left knee is going to need a full replacement at some point. I can feel it.

I’m an inch and three-quarters shorter than I was in my twenties. The spine collapses slightly in the thoracic region. The body gets smaller. Congenital right leg asymmetry. Right foot two sizes smaller, right calf three-quarters of an inch smaller, right thigh smaller. That difference is built in. It doesn’t go away.

This is the body that did everything you’re about to read about in the rest of this book.

Whatever you’re working with is probably less compromised than this. You didn’t pick the body you got. What you do with it is the only part you control. Most men spend their second half hiding behind less and calling it a reason.

Decide which one you are.

Adapted from Chapter 3, The Last 10 Pounds. Out summer 2026.

The Last 10 Pounds is how I stayed lean across 15 years of surgeries, a wrecked knee, four moves, and a divorce, on 66 percent lung capacity and 34,000 logged food entries. The Kindle edition is available now for $9.99. The first chapter's free on my website:

READ CHAPTER 1 FREE

Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties. He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com about faith, identity, and the second act.

For years I tracked everything I ate. Logged meals, snacks, protein shakes, the handful of pretzels at 10 PM. I’ve written about what that data taught me about protein and staying lean at 64. I built a whole system of accountability around what went into my body.

Except the drinks. Those I’d eyeball. Or skip. Or log one when there were two.

I didn’t reali…

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I was in my twenties, a fry cook with no plans for the future, and convinced I could be an amateur card counter. I wasn’t. I couldn’t count past +6 without losing track of the conversation at the table. But I’d read a book about it and that was enough for me to believe I had an edge.

Then I found a classified ad. Back when those were still a thing, some …

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I wear an Oura ring. It tracks my sleep, my heart rate, my steps, my workouts. It knows when I lift. It knows when I do housework. It knows when I ride my motorcycle for two hours on a Saturday afternoon.

Last Friday I did 15 exercises in 43 minutes: seated leg press, Romanian deadlifts, pull-ups, incline press, rows, overhead press, cable crossovers, leg extensions, leg curls, face pulls, Pallof press, triceps pushdowns, curls, calf raises. One working set each, slow controlled reps to failure on every movement. I walked out of the gym spent.

The ring said I burned 2,680 calories that day.

The day before, I cleaned the house, moved some boxes in the garage, did some reorganizing in the kitchen, ran a few errands, and sat at my desk the rest of the afternoon. The ring said I burned 2,570 calories.

A difference of 110 calories. That’s a handful of almonds.

Two completely different days, and the ring treated them as basically the same.

The Flatline

I’ve worn this ring for almost three years. 1,086 days of daily calorie data. Here’s what that data actually shows.

On days I did strength training, the ring logged an average of 2,682 total calories burned. On days the only activity was housework, it logged 2,570. Walking-only days came in at 2,567. Rest days, where I barely moved, still hit 2,460.

From the hardest training day of the week to a day of doing nothing, the entire spread is 222 calories. That’s the contribution your workout makes to the number on your phone. Your resting metabolism and general movement throughout the day account for everything else.

The ring records every one of these activities. It knows the difference between a barbell and a broom. It just doesn’t care when it adds up the day. A calorie burned under a squat rack and a calorie burned pushing a vacuum both land in the same column.

And that’s where it lies to you. Not by withholding data, but by flattening it. By treating all effort as equal output.

It isn’t.

That said, knowing your actual daily burn is worth more than most men realize. Without a tracking ring or watch, you’re relying on whatever number your food app assigned you based on your age, weight, and a dropdown menu that asked if you’re “lightly active” or “moderately active.” That’s a guess. A 300-calorie guess in the wrong direction adds up to 30 pounds in three years. The ring gives you the real number. That matters. The problem isn’t the data. The problem is thinking the data tells you the whole story.

Three Men, Same Scale

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After my divorce, my net worth was cut in half. I rebuilt it in eighteen months through crypto. I should’ve taken that money off the table and put it into traditional investments. The kind that would’ve generated a solid five-figure monthly income without touching the principal. Secure and stable. Done.

Instead, the thoughts came.

If I could just double f…

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I bought a grey Volvo SUV.

I need you to understand how wrong that was for me. I’d spent 20 years building two digital media companies from nothing. When I sold the first one, I bought a C7 Corvette. When I sold the second, I bought a C8. I was the first person in Utah to have one. I felt like Tony Stark every time I got in that car.

Then I moved to Puert…

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