One of the best parts of running Argent Alpha is that I talk every day with men over 50 who want to make their lives better. I also get a close look at what holds some of them back, and the most common thing has nothing to do with the body. It is a framing problem. A man looks at what other men are doing, decides he does not measure up, and never starts. The man who does start carries the same frame with him, and a few months in it catches up with him and he quits.

It is the unintended cost of having been successful: the fear of being a beginner.

You have seen the men I am talking about. Men over 50, men over 60, and a handful over 70 are holding six-minute wall sits, which means sitting against a wall with your thighs parallel to the floor and nothing underneath you. They are doing multiple strict pull-ups, chin over the bar from a dead hang with no swing. They are rucking for miles, which is walking with 20 or more pounds in a pack on your back. You read that and assume they are a different kind of man.

They are men just like you. The one difference is that they have followed a proven process, consistently, for some time, and it turned them into athletes. They got there by getting past the same fear you have right now. Every one of them started in the same shoes you are standing in.

And this applies to more than just health and fitness.

I sat on the idea for Argent Alpha for months. I had doubts, told myself I needed to do more research, to get better before I launched. And I remember it clearly, it was sometime in September 2021 and I realized I was afraid of being a beginner. Of looking stupid, of not knowing what the hell I was doing. A coach of mine at the time inspired me to start ugly. So I did. And here we are 5 years later and the impact has been humbling. When I add up our members, newsletter subscribers, books sold, and social media followers, well over 10,000 men have been impacted. All because I started ugly.

Starting ugly is a decision. The thing that talks most men out of it has a name.

The thing that talks men out of starting ugly is the second ego.

Every man who wants to change has two egos working on him. The first ego wants to look better, perform better, and be better. It is the reason you opened this newsletter. It gets you interested.

The second ego refuses to be a beginner. It will not let anyone watch you struggle. It will not let you ask for help. It will not let you write down a number you are ashamed of. When you read about another man's results, the second ego reads them as proof that you do not belong.

The second ego usually wins. When it wins, you stay where you are, which is in decline.

It wins by telling you two things that are false. The first is that everyone is watching. The men around you are working on their own numbers. The second is that they will think less of you for struggling. When a man over 50 shows up and gives it everything, the people who see it respect it.

A question beats it. When you read that a man your age holds a six-minute wall sit, the second ego tells you he is built differently. Ask him how long it took and where he started, and you get his timeline and his method. The result on the page is the same either way. The second ego turns it into a verdict on you, and the question turns it into a plan.

Becoming harder to kill means refusing to decline, and the second ego is a direct cause of decline.

In a study published last year, older adults played a risk game after reading either positive or negative statements about aging. The ones who read the negative statements took fewer risks, and the reason was what they believed about the risk itself. They thought the odds were worse than they were. When you accept the story that decline is normal at your age, you stop taking the chances that would prove it wrong. You have more to lose than you did at 25, so you risk less, and a man who risks less gets less.

Men over 50 who become beginners anyway get measurably sharper. Rachel Wu at the University of California, Riverside had adults 58 to 86 take three to five beginner classes at once, in Spanish, drawing, music composition, photography, and learning to use an iPad. None of it was physical. What those adults had in common was spending three months being bad at things in front of other people. Six weeks in, their cognitive scores matched adults 30 years younger. A year after the classes ended, their scores matched college undergraduates taking the same tests. Wu listed what made it work: an open mind, no fear of criticism or failure, willing to take instruction, and a belief that effort will pay off. That is a description of a man who has beaten the second ego, and it is the part that carries over to your body.

Being a beginner keeps you sharp. Refusing to be one is the decline everyone tells you is normal.

Measuring your own progress takes a starting point, and if you have never had a body composition scan, you do not have one. A body composition scan puts you on a machine that reads how much of your weight is fat, how much is muscle, and how much is visceral fat, which is the fat packed around your organs. InBody is the brand we use, and you will find one at most gyms.

Every man dislikes his first scan, whatever the number says. All progress starts by telling the truth. The number says where you are starting. It says nothing about you as a man.

Some men avoid the scan. Ask one of them his body fat percentage and he will give you an estimate, and the estimate will be off, almost always well under the real number. In one study that measured people instead of asking them, 55% of overweight men said their weight was about right. We give ourselves credit we have not earned, and nobody gets better by accident.

That estimate in your head is the second ego protecting you from a number on paper. Getting the scan is how you take the number back from him. The decline you refuse to see today is the decline everyone around you already sees.

Once you have your number, the numbers other men post change meaning. The usual way men use comparison is to measure themselves against another man and come up short. That is compare and despair, and it is why a man reads about a six-minute wall sit and decides he does not belong.

In Argent Alpha, another man's result is information. It is content, meaning the method he used, the time it took, where he got stuck, and what he changed. It is also context, because it came from a man over 50 who started near where you are, following the same process, on a timeline you can see. When a man sees another man do something he cannot do yet, he asks how, tries the method, and gets help.

Every man whose results you read about started by writing down a number he was not proud of. Two of them, with their full numbers from first test to latest, were in last week's issue. Read them as content and context.

Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy wrote a book called The Gap and the Gain. The gap is the distance between where you are and where you want to be. The gain is the distance between where you started and where you are now.

Take a man who starts at 30% body fat and wants 15%. He loses about a pound of fat a week, which is the rate we plan around in Argent Alpha, and he holds his muscle. Some men lose more and some lose less. Twelve weeks later he has taken ten pounds of fat off his body.

Measured against 15%, he is still nowhere near it. He did everything right for three months and the report reads the same as the day he started. That spread is where men quit, and they quit in the weeks they are winning.

Measured against his first scan, those twelve weeks read as ten pounds of fat gone and his muscle intact. That's called winning! Both readings are true on the same day. The meaning we assign is the key. Choose the gain, not the gap.

Track both numbers. The gap tells you what is left and keeps you honest about the work ahead. The gain tells you the process is producing. You measure your gain from your own first scan, and from nowhere else.

The second ego comes back for you here. When you are behind on the gap, you stop posting your number. You tell yourself you will post it once it moves, and you have already started quitting. That is the same fear that kept you out in the first place, showing up months later with a better excuse.

The next milestone beats it, because it is close enough to reach. A year of work is too far away to pull anyone through a bad week. Your next scan is four weeks out. You hit that, set the next one, and carry the same process into your sleep and your training. There is no finish line, only near term milestones, so there is never a point where stopping makes sense.

The men around you matter as much as the milestones. In Argent Alpha, the standard is every man reports where he stands each week. When someone goes quiet for a period of time, somebody asks him about it. The key is to stay engaged with the community, it's the connective tissue that gets you through the plateaus, the valleys and the hard times. Most men quit alone, in a week nobody was watching.

Argent Alpha members choose to be beginners on purpose, and they keep choosing it after they no longer have to. Twice a year we hold LIVE, a multi-day event where members train and work together in person. The next one is at Camp Foley in Minnesota, October 2 to 4. In the weeks before each event we issue demanding workouts to get ready. We switch things up and do hard things none of us would do on our own, which puts men who have trained for years back in the beginner's shoes. The men going next month are doing that right now.

Every man posts his numbers every month, including the months they go the wrong way. Our fitness standards are scalable, so a man who cannot do a strict pull-up starts with the version he can do today. Every standard has a beginner level, because every man came in at one.

Time on that process is what turns a man into an athlete. Twelve months from now, you have twelve scans behind you. You know your body fat percentage, your muscle mass, and your visceral fat the way you know your account balances, and you can say all three out loud without flinching.

You are training with men who expect more of you. We all have so much potential and we need other men who remind us of that, who expect more of us.

You walk into your doctor's office with your own numbers and he asks what you have been doing. You might even walk into a new doctor's office; your old one simply didn't get it. He was overweight himself, a legal version of a pill pusher and you upgraded to a physician who walked the talk himself.

You may still remember your first InBody scan but that memory will fade. Why? Because you are no longer that man. That past self is gone. You've become your future self.

Every man doing that today started with one test he did not want to take.

One action this week: go get your body fat tested.

We use InBody and we test monthly. Monthly is the cadence because we train for the test, and because daily and weekly readings swing on water, food, and sleep in ways that tell you nothing. A month is long enough for real change to show up. InBody machines are widely available. Search "InBody scan near me" and you'll find one. The scan takes about ten minutes.

DEXA is excellent and will give you your number. It costs more than InBody, there are fewer locations and more friction in getting an appointment, and it gives off a small amount of radiation. Most men will not run it monthly.

There are home tools like Hume. Testing at home is my last recommendation, because going somewhere to test is part of the ritual and part of what you train for. If a home tool is the only one available to you, get your number and take the reading seriously.

Write the number down and put the date next to it. That is your starting line, and every scan after it measures from there.

Then bring it to men who post theirs every month. The link to join is at the bottom of this newsletter.

Harder to Kill is the membership for men over fifty who are done guessing about their health. Bring your number and post it with men who have posted theirs. Every month we run a live workshop, record it, and add it to the library with a playbook you can work from. Argent Alpha members come on as guest speakers and show you how they did it.

You get the Kickstart Course, and when you finish it my book arrives in your inbox. You get the Road to 15%, the step-by-step model for getting to 15% body fat. You get the replay of The Number Your Doctor Never Checks, which covers the test you just booked.

Argent Alpha has helped over 300 men become harder to kill (that we know of), and thousands of others based on my Amazon bestselling book and over 200 newsletters.

Think differently, and decide to start.

👉 Join Harder to Kill here

Read — Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, Tom Vanderbilt. A grown man spends a year as a beginner at chess, surfing, singing, and juggling, and reports what it did for him.

Read — The Gap and the Gain, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. The book behind the measurement method above.

Listen — The Jordan Harbinger Show, episode 575, Benjamin Hardy on the gap and the gain. Covers why high achievers stay in the gap and how to get out.