A few things have been rattling around my head this week, and oddly enough, they share a thread. At first they seem random. Look closer and they all trace back to the same place: becoming harder to kill. And now we have a new community by that same name. Let's dive in.

We hold two LIVE events a year — the men fly in and train together in person — and our seventh lands this October. Heading into each one, I program a hard workout a week for the guys, the kind that'll curl your nose hairs, and drop it in the community. The men run it whether they're headed to the event or not.

The men plan them, compare notes, post their results, and every so often somebody fires back a good-natured "are you nuts?" They do the work anyway, because it's fun and because getting comfortable being uncomfortable is one of the things we stand for. (More on that further down, where Michael Easter makes the case better than I can.) I sit down and build each one to test a man's head as much as his body. Every workout scales to where the man is, and we push each other to jump in, do the work, and report back. That drives some esprit de corps, and yeah, we talk a little smack.

Week 1 was the Iron Standard, one continuous grind of carries, holds, and reps that tests strength and grip under fatigue. Week 2 was 500, five hundred burpees across seven days with a five-minute max effort buried inside. Which brings us to this week.

Meet Dropkick Murph.

Two names live in this one. Murph, the CrossFit hero workout named for Lieutenant Michael Murphy, the Navy SEAL who gave his life in Afghanistan in 2005 and earned the Medal of Honor for it. And the Dropkick Murphys, the Boston Celtic-punk band that makes you want to run through a wall. The original Murph opens and closes with a mile run. Ours opens and closes with a ruck. Murph does its squats, push-ups, and pull-ups as three separate movements. We fuse all three into a single rep: the burpee gives you the squat and the push-up, and the jump-and-pull adds the pull-up on top. Stringing them into one unbroken movement is something almost no man reading this has done, and I'd argue it's harder than the three on their own.

The workout looks like this:

The burpee jumping pull-up goes like this: squat down, hands to the floor, push-up, back to the bottom of the squat, then jump and pull until your chin clears the bar. The pack comes off for the pull-ups and back on for the ruck.

Set the bar to mid-forearm height, and grab a box to stand on if that makes the jumping pull-ups more doable (although you'll have to make the transition from the burpee to the box, so keep that in mind). If the reps come easy, move the bar farther from your hands, and guys who are strong at pull-ups might set it three to five inches above their fingertips.

Score your total reps and total time.

We invite you to give Dropkick Murph a shot, whether you're headed to the event or not. Cue up "The Warrior's Code" by the Dropkick Murphys before your first rep. The opening lines set the tone:

Then start the clock, and tell us how it went.

I've done pull-ups almost every week since 2010. Every so often an elbow would bark at me, nothing that stopped me. Earlier this year my left one lit up, a burn on the inside of the joint that wouldn't go away. I started calling it a hot elbow, because that's what it felt like.

I knew exactly who to call. My buddy Tim Porth co-founded Octane Fitness — good chance you've logged miles on a piece of cardio equipment Tim designed — and he built a company called Fiix Body with a couple of physical therapists to fix tennis and golfer's elbow. He's also an Argent Alpha member. When your elbow's on fire and your friend built the machine that fixes it, you make the call.

Tim listened for two minutes and told me I had classic golfer's elbow. I haven't swung a club in eight years. Doesn't matter — the tendons on the inside of the elbow take a beating from pulling, gripping, and carrying, the exact work we do.

His device goes after the root cause, the scar tissue and tendon damage underneath. I ran it every other morning as part of my Pre-Game Planning. You start with some simple stretching, and a few weeks in you add strengthening movements. Tim asks for 80% compliance or better. A few trips knocked me under that, but as far as Tim knows I hit 100%. (lol)

The TLDR: it worked.

Three reasons I like it:

The connection to Tim made all of it possible. I knew the man who built the fix, so I called him. That's the power of the company you keep (and speaking of the company you keep, multiple Argent Alpha members used it before me and got the same results).

Side note: we have dozens of men over 50 pursuing harder to kill status. When you join Argent Alpha, you tap into this network. It's better than a Google search or an AI prompt when you're looking for firsthand experience and wisdom.

With the elbow quiet, I went back to building my pull-up. I'm running Dr. Stuart McGill's protocol.

McGill is one of the most respected spine biomechanics researchers in the world, and his pull-up method throws out the idea of grinding sets. You do singles. One rep, sometimes two, with everything you've got — maximum force, maximum speed, a clean rep every time. Then you rest 10 to 20 seconds, let your arms hang, take a breath, and go again.

He'll stack up to around 20 of those singles, two or three times a week, as a warm-up. His argument is simple: you can't fire at 100% inside a set of five or ten. You start strong and finish at half power as you crawl toward failure. So he never goes to failure. Every rep stays fresh.

My version bends his rule. I do a chest-to-bar pull-up every 20 seconds for three to four minutes, usually one rep, sometimes two. Wide grip, I take one. Neutral grip, one or two. Chin-up, usually two. Each session I add total time and/or a few more reps, and I stop when I can't get chest-to-bar anymore. McGill stops well short of failure by design. I ride it to the edge. Both build the pull, so run his version straight before you start bending it like I do.

Chest-to-bar, in plain terms: a normal pull-up ends with your chin over the bar. Chest-to-bar means you keep pulling until your chest touches. More range, more power, harder, the advanced end of the movement. Not for beginners, but something to aim for.

One rule sits under all of this: we do strict pull-ups. Full hang at the bottom, chin over the bar at the top, no kip, no swing to cheat the rep. Kipping has its place for advanced athletes, and it puts real load on a shoulder or an elbow that hasn't earned it yet. My take: a man has no business kipping until he owns 10 strict pull-ups with clean form. Build the strict strength first. The kip can wait.

If you're the guy at ring rows or banded pull-ups right now, this is for you too. McGill's concept scales all the way down. Same singles, same maximum intent, same full recovery. The tool changes and the bar height or angle changes, but the method holds. Rings, banded pull-ups, jumping pull-ups: pick the version that fits where you are and add from there.

In the August 1 issue I told you your standards don't have a zip code. I'm two weeks into a five-week run in Oceanside, so take this as me showing my work (and keeping me honest).

My advice on any trip that pulls you out of your routine holds: come back better than when you left. Mentally, physically, spiritually.

The reason matters more than the rule. Dig a hole on the road and you come home to weeks of clawing back to where you were. I've lived that. And when I'm staring at that hole, I'm the guy who's tempted to say screw it and sit in the drift for days, sometimes weeks after I'm already home. So I stopped digging holes. This is part of an identity shift I've made, and I've redefined what being away from home means. I still have fun out here, often more than I used to. I give up nothing.

What has to be true for it to work? You need designed standards instead of default standards across all of the Alpha 5 — Mindset, Sleep, Nutrition, Fitness, Hydration — and you have to measure your compliance against them. This flows from your Future Self. Default standards collapse the moment your surroundings change. Designed standards travel with you.

I'm keeping score, and the numbers hold up. My average Oura sleep score for the year ran 89 at home. It's still 89 here, in a bed that isn't mine, in an environment that isn't mine. Same result, different conditions, and I'll take that as a win. My activity tells a bigger story: July finished at 127% of target, August is sitting at 180%, both from Oura. I'm moving a lot more than I do at home. My weight is down a pound and a half, and that's with family and friends here vacationing while I'm working and vacationing at the same time (I do my best not to draw a line between the two). Dropping weight in that setting is a win, and it's part of my goal to be at fighting weight by our next LIVE event. My hydration is a gallon a day, same as always, hard to move a number that's already where it belongs. And my bookends held: Victory Lap at night, Pre-Game Planning in the morning, both intact and strong.

The numbers keep me on track. But they don't tell the whole story.

How I'll really know I came back better is the mirror. I look at myself and ask: how you doing? Are you living, performing, delivering, giving better than when you left? Right now the answer is yes, I'm on track. Three weeks to go, so it ain't over till it's over, but I'm feeling good about my trendline.

Your standards shouldn't change because your zip code did. That has taken practice, and it's taken living by every bit of guidance we have inside Argent Alpha. We talk about turning pro (see issue #142 for a deeper dive on the concept: https://hardertokill.beehiiv.com/p/are-you-living-like-a-pro-or-still-an-amateur-the-18-standards-every-man-over-50-must-measure). In this area I want to turn pro and stay pro. A lot of our members have already mastered it, and I'm learning from them while I'm out here. That's what a community gives you that a plan alone can't — iron sharpening iron.

Future Self, designed Alpha 5 Standards, and the R.A.D. rhythm of keeping score. That's the Alpha Triad on location, working the same whether I'm home or away.

We are the most comfortable men who have ever lived. We have climate control, a chair built for our spine, food three steps away, and every sharp edge sanded off the day. We are also among the softest and sickest men who have ever lived. Michael Easter lays it out in The Comfort Crisis.

His term for the mechanism is comfort creep. Every convenience raises the floor of what we'll tolerate, and that floor keeps rising until a cold room, a long walk, or a hard conversation registers as real hardship. The body and mind adapt to whatever we feed them. Feed them nothing hard, and they lose the ability to handle hard.

Life sends hard anyway, and it always does: a health scare, parents in cognitive decline, a job loss. A man who can't handle a cold shower, a 5-mile ruck with 35 lbs on his back, or reflecting on how his week went with a bunch of peers is not ready for the discomfort life will inevitably bring. Here's the good news: you can train this.

Easter's fix is to put a little hard back into the week on purpose. He rucks — walking under a loaded pack, taught to him by a former special operations soldier — because carrying weight over distance is one of the oldest kinds of hard work there is. He points to misogi, taking on one genuinely difficult physical challenge, the kind that used to mark a boy becoming a man.

Rucking is core to how we train. It shows up in our special workouts, including the Dropkick Murph above, and it anchors our zone 2 work. Nearly any man can do it, and it scales two ways: change the weight or change the distance (or both). It even handicaps like golf. Some of our guys ruck with 10 pounds and some carry 50, and every one of them gets the work that fits him today. That's exposure, adaptation, and recovery, one loaded walk at a time.

Pick the hard yourself: a loaded ruck, a cold finish on the shower, a workout that scares you a little the night before. You set the dose. Comfort is earned, so enjoy the good life you built, then go do something hard on purpose. That's what makes the comfort mean something, and it's what has you ready when life gets hard on its own.

None of this is as random as it looks. A man who trains hard on purpose because it's fun, fixes the elbow instead of babying it, keeps his standards in any zip code, and refuses to let comfort make him soft is running one operating system. That's the thread. It's how the men in our community live, and any man reading this can start living it too.

For four years I've had one thing to offer a man who wrote me and said I need to fix this. Go all in. Join Argent Alpha, commit for a year, make the investment.

For the man who's all in, that works. I've watched 250-plus men between 51 and 78 run our process and get results that hold — body fat down, muscle mass up, A1C moving to normal, prescriptions gone, first pull-ups, rucking miles under 20-plus pounds. They're accomplished men who ran the process, and the process delivered. It works when you actually run it. We built accountability into it and designed it to be sustainable. It doesn't run on motivation.

Going all in takes three things at once. A man needs to be Ready, Willing, and Able. He has to know it's time, want it badly enough to change how he lives, and be in a position to invest.

Most men have one or two. And for four years I had nothing for that man except keep reading.

There's a fourth thing underneath those three, and it's the one men wrestle with longest. He has to believe the transformation will happen for him personally. Most men don't have that belief on day one. They earn it by watching men their own age, with their own problems, do the work and get the result. I have plenty of guys who will testify to that.

So I built something.

Harder to Kill runs a live workshop every month for men over 50 who want the fat gone, the meds gone, and their strength back. It's also a place to share, learn, support each other, and grow together.

We record every workshop and add it to the library, so what you own grows month after month whether you make a given Tuesday or not. Every workshop comes with a playbook and tools you can put to work immediately. And there's a bonus that only goes to the men in the room live.

You'll see a few Argent Alpha members in there too — guys who want to be a guide for the men just getting started.

You get a free digital copy of Harder to Kill, my bestselling book, when you finish the short Kickstart course inside. Show me you're serious and it's yours.

I want to over-deliver so completely that you can make an informed decision about your future self. The only clock in this is the one you're already on. We're over 50. We aren't getting any younger, and the body doesn't wait for a convenient year.

Join by August 18 and your seat is free — free for life. A real founding seat: no credit card, no expiration, every future workshop, playbook, and tool yours for good. After August 18, a seat is $47 — one time, for lifetime access to every workshop we run. And I'm holding that price until we hit 500 members. Then it goes up.

Someday is the busiest day of the week. That day never gets on the calendar by itself, so put this one on it.

The workshop starts Tuesday. The first Harder to Kill session is:

August 18 — 1 PM Eastern / 12 Central / 11 Mountain / 10 Pacific. The topic:
The Number Your Doctor Never Checks. Join by the 18th and you're a founding member, free for life.

👉 Join now