It’s the “rise of a new lifestyle,” as we call it, referring to those who are learning how to live a High-Performance Lifestyle [HPL] that enables people of all ages, but particularly those at mid-life, to perform at levels not seen for years or decades.
I am John Allen Mollenhauer “JAM,” I’m a performance lifestyle coach and entrepreneur. I’ve been aggregating and developing what it means to live a high-performance lifestyle for the last 25 years as an entrepreneur on a quest to learn how to live a hard-charging life and not burn out or trade my health for success, especially during challenging times.
By challenging times, I mean ambitious periods and periods where environmental changes (political, economic, etc.) just make life more challenging.
If you are reading this, you’ve likely already learned how to manage your energy like a pro and already have a performance lifestyle in gear so that you are no longer burning out, trading your health for success, or needing to leave the game (what you are up in this life) prematurely.
In a High Performance Lifestyle, now it’s about complete structure, lifestyle and goal alignemnt in your life and living the new definition of balance!
In other words, knowing what to do and why, how to do it and when at the level, intensity and consistecy that works for you across the full array of performance lifestyle skills, only now at a much higher level, and with an alignment that is simply an unfair advantage.
Right now, the idea of living a healthy, high-performance lifestyle is coming of age in the mainstream market, not just in athletics, where this lifestyle has its origins; because today, due to technology, life is more competitive, faster-paced, and candidly, it’s become a performance culture.
In a way, it’s like the next generation of survival of the fittest. If you want to thrive during challenging periods, which seem to be coming at us at an increasing frequency for a host of reasons, knowing how to live a high-performance lifestyle you can call your own becomes your greatest asset.
In a world where we’ve got access to more information and opportunity than at any other time in human history, can achieve our goals seemingly faster than ever before, while change is at it’s fastest pace ever, we are faced with a paradox; the busier we get, the less time we have to take care of ourselves, our bodies and our lives. And in a twist of fate, it’s burning people out and crushing their performance.
That’s “unhealthy” high performance, and its toll is a big reason why we’ve had the great resignation in recent years. Given a chance to get a break from relentless work, people are deciding to make changes.
More Energy, Ever Better Health, Higher Performance, Well-being, and Longevity are the Results of a Healthy, High-Performance Lifestyle.
For you, the person who may or may not be into sports or even a health and fitness enthusiast but wants to live fully engaged, at full capacity with the energy, health, and performance you need to succeed, and your family can depend on., the healthy high-performance lifestyle is for you.
But before I get into that, I want to share some more curated thoughts that I’ve read recently on the emergence of this new lifestyle from brothers Anthony and Joe Venarre of FITT INSIDER.
We love the work that they do, and we think it’s good history and perspective for you to have as you consider taking the steps and upgrading the way you live here at Lifestyle Coach JAM. I will interject some thoughts I go through them, given the idea of living a high/performance lifestyle is so new.
Insider No. 78: What FITT INSIDER Has To Say About The High-Performance Lifestyle: The High-Performance Lifestyle. Image by Anthony and Joe Venarre via FITT INSIDER
A new vertical within fitness and wellness has emerged. Say hello to the high-performance lifestyle.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: The healthy, high-performance lifestyle, to take this definition a little further, is a wider swath of understanding of human energy, the spirit, sleep, nutrition, fitness, health, human performance and productivity, and wellbeing. As the original author reviewed it, he was speaking from the standpoint of the fitness and wellness “industry.”
What it is: Combining elements of technology, athletics, medicine, and mindfulness, the high-performance lifestyle (HPL), as we’re calling it, aims to optimize human performance.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: It’s a little hard to quantify all the elements of a high-performance lifestyle since it’s all about optimizing the way you live. That points more to essential lifestyle skills than industry sectors but certainly some of the industry sectors that you will access when developing a high-performance lifestyle.
By the numbers:
- The US self-improvement market is valued north of $13.2B.
- In the coming years, the global wearable technology market will exceed $60B.
- The global sports medicine market, including athletic recovery, will surpass $9B by 2024.
- By 2027, the global alternative medicine market—including yoga, acupuncture, and meditation—will reach $296.3B.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: if you notice, all of these industry sectors are focused on optimizing human performance, and at the end of the day, that’s a lifestyle. My aim was to enable people like you to save up to 20 years or more trying to figure it all out.
Why it matters: A masculine counterpart to the feminine notion of self-care, the HPL is geared toward self-mastery. Like the woo-woo version of wellness championed by Goop, the HPL has given rise to products, personalities, and philosophies at the intersection of snake oil and actual science.
Lifestyle Coach JAM over 20 years of development from our company, Performance Lifestyle Inc, ensures that anything you will learn here is on the side of science, not snake oil. That said, there is some that is based on anecdotal evidence at this time, as scientific research is always slower than common sense, intuition, and personal discovery.
The big picture: As the category continues to evolve, the high-performance lifestyle [HPL] is creating new opportunities for people and brands seeking to push performance limits. From training and coaching programs and supplement protocols to wearables, recovery tech, and even therapeutics, unlocking our true potential is increasingly becoming a commercialized pursuit.
How We Got Here
The HPL is rooted in two related concepts: quantified self and biohacking.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: initially, yes, and still today, but as this goes mainstream, it’s going to be based on principles, practices, and strategy, with the fundamentals first (that’s where we play) and then using the best of performance optimization tools being created, from supplements to recovery gear, to food, to fitness and wearables…
The modern-day quantified self-movement got its start in 2007. According to its website, the term quantified self is loosely defined as “self-knowledge through numbers” — where self-tracking is used to answer health questions, achieve a specific goal, or follow a curiosity.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: having data, like your actual sleep data, is essential in a performance lifestyle because subjective answers are not always the best indicators of where you are.
Beyond data collection, biohacking is a form of self-experimentation. Biohacking is often called DIY biology, which takes an algorithmic approach to the human system, changing inputs to maximize outputs. Outputs, in this case, are intended to upgrade the mind and body.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: an important element of a high-performance lifestyle is biohacking which is about improving cognitive and physical performance. We espouse this as founders of REGENUS CENTER, my center, where we focus on helping people unlock their body’s resilience through detecting, correcting, and protecting their bioenergetics, proactive recovery (using such technologies as Photobiomodulation PBMT and others) and The 7 Breakthrough Energy Discoveries© we teach people, so they know how to manage their energy like a pro.
Biohacking is otherwise known as lifestyle optimization.
The Founding Fathers
The extent to which biohacking or quantified self has entered the mainstream consciousness is likely a result of Tim Ferriss and Dave Asprey having popularized it.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: good guys, emerging something new when no one else is yet dialed in is not easy.
For his part, Tim Ferriss, an accomplished investor, author, and podcaster, has referred to himself as a “human guinea pig.” An attendee of the first Quantified Self meet-up, his earliest content was biohacky—and clickbaity, too—as evidenced by posts like the one entitled: “How I Gained 34lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks”.
Over the years, Ferriss focused more on optimization and less on bro hacks. These days, his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, is a platform for deconstructing the “tactics, tools, and routines” of world-leading experts. Emblematic of the HPL as we define it, guests run the gamut from Navy SEALs and spiritual gurus to medical practitioners.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: Whenever anything new emerges, there will always be clickbait ideas to gain attention, but now the high-performance lifestyle is an actual approach to living with defined principles, practices, and strategies combined with technologies of various kinds, from sleep to nutrition, to fitness, to productivity, longevity and more.
Whereas Ferriss diverged from biohacking, Dave Asprey doubled down.
Having spent millions of dollars to hack his health, Asprey lost 100+ pounds, boosted his IQ, and reduced his biological age to live to at least 180 years old. Asprey’s efforts often border on outlandish: a walking infomercial for his Bulletproof brand—a media company, supplement line, and gym chain.
In fact, his most recent book, Superhuman: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever, sums up Asprey’s approach quite well — being provocative moves product.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: it’s good to learn from these guys; they have our respect, even if we all don’t agree on everything like high protein paleo diets or ketogenic diets.
The Patron Saint
If Ferriss and Asprey are the forebears of the high-performance lifestyle, Joe Rogan is the patron saint.
Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, is among the most-listened-to podcasts on the planet. It’s also his bully pulpit from which he advocates for self-discipline, physical fitness, clean eating, and mental toughness, among other things.
To be sure, those “other things” include conspiracy theories and countless hours of non-PC conversations that have gotten Rogen in hot water. But, more often than not, the conversations hit on self-mastery, a term central to the HPL.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: Self Mastery is central to the HPL for sure.
From Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Rhonda Patrick to Jocko Willink, Naval Ravikant, Matthew Walker, Sam Harris, Dennis McKenna, and David Goggins… the list goes on; Rogan’s guests are the high priests of the high-performance lifestyle across its various pillars.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: there are more pillars of the high-performance lifestyle than most people realize, even the “high priests.” As mentioned earlier, you don’t want to define the pillars of a healthy, high-performance lifestyle buy industry sectors or well-known people; if you do, you will miss the needles in the haystack and never fully develop the high-performance lifestyle that works for you.
My focus as a Lifestyle Coach and entrepreneur who has done a lot to define the typical lifestyle, the fitness lifestyle, a healthy lifestyle, a performance lifestyle, and the high-performance lifestyle; and I can tell you from experience that you don’t want to define your lifestyle by brands or personalities because that or they, never work for you.
Self-Mastery as Self-Care
Beyond physical feats alone, the HPL taps into existentialism, addressing aspects of spirituality, self-actualization, and even mortality.
Love it or hate it, self-care has ballooned into a billion-dollar industry. At one end of the spectrum, exercise, meditation, and journaling help proponents find balance. Meanwhile, astrology, tarot cards, and healing crystals help disciples find meaning at the other extreme.
Similarly, the HPL is tapping into meaning. Filling a void left by the collapse of traditional institutions and the changing definition of masculinity, self-mastery has become the holy grail. In HPL circles, those pursuits include stoicism, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, archery, kettlebells, surfing, contrast therapy, intermittent fasting, and psychedelics.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: This is just a flavor of what a high-performance lifestyle can encompass and why we focus on lifestyle training and coaching.
What’s next: Corporate America has taken notice, and an increasing number of companies are now offering HPL-related benefits — both as a recruiting tactic and as a way to improve work performance.
Like the expansive category of self-care, HPL isn’t without its faults. If wellness is dominated by pseudoscience, HPL is overrun with broscience. It’s also difficult to distinguish between optimization and obsession.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: it just depends on where you are learning from; here at Performance Lifestyle Inc, we are not overrun by broscience because we are developing the high / performance lifestyle for the mainstream from the start, for men and women.
Take Twitter and Square chief executive Jack Dorsey for instance. Recently, Dorsey discussed his daily routine—fasting, meditation, sauna, ice bath, sleep tracking—on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast (Greenfield is an HPLer of Asprey’s sect). Hearing Dorsey’s regimen inspired some listeners, while others walked away, questioning his sanity.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: we focus on learning how to live a healthy, high-performance lifestyle from the bottom-up, from principle, practice, and strategy (the essentials) to the technology (useful and nice to have) to the optimizing tools (that can get a bit anecdotal) but are super fun to play with and experiment with.
Looking Ahead
If the booming wellness industry is any indication, all signs point to the proliferation of a high-performance lifestyle.
For now, sleep trackers like Oura and WHOOP are leading the way. The same can be said of recovery tech from Hyperice and NormaTec, as well as Myodetox clinics. Likewise, Laird Hamilton’s XPT protocol and the Wim Hof Method from the Iceman himself have tapped into heart rate variability, cold exposure, and breathwork.
But we’re just getting started. As the pursuit of performance ratchets up and efforts to optimize everything intensifies, don’t be surprised to see more mind-bending recovery-inducing therapeutics (think stem cell, like were’ now seeing from Life Force with Tony Robbins, and testosterone replacement), and life-extending practices creep into the mainstream.
Lifestyle Coach JAM: I guess we fit into the energy-increasing, health-promoting, performance-enhancing, success-enabling, quality-of-life-expanding category.
By Lifestyle Coach JAM: John Allen Mollenhauer, Founder of Performance Lifestyle Inc, Lifestyle Coach JAM, and father of 3.
As “client zero,” entrepreneur John Allen Mollenhauer, known as John Allen or Lifestyle Coach “JAM,” was desperate to figure out how to achieve his ambitious goals without burning out, wearing out, and trading his health for success despite being proficient in nutrition and fitness. As a result, over 20 years, he learned how to manage his energy and made the most significant lifestyle change one can make. Step by step, JAM produced the never-before-assembled formulas for living a balanced and healthy, high-performance lifestyle. Today, he’s still an in-the-game lifestyle entrepreneur and a pioneering Performance Lifestyle® Coach.
Lifestyle Coach JAM delivers powerful free resources that will inspire you to get on the path to upgrading your lifestyle. Download: Rise of the New Healthy—Those Who Live High-Performance Lifestyles to Achieve Their Ambitious Goals By Living in Balance with Vibrant Health and Peace of Mind.
