#072 - 4 Mindset Shifts Every Former Athlete Needs to Hear
I break down four of the most common (and crucial) questions I hear from former athletes navigating life after sport. Whether you're in the gym, on a walk, or commuting—this is your reset button. Listen in. Take notes. Let’s get better.
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I’m sharing a solo Q&A Whether you're freshly out of sport or years removed, this one cuts deep into what really matters: rebuilding discipline, identity, and structure after athletics.
I break down four of the most common (and crucial) questions I hear from former athletes navigating life after sport:
- How do I stay motivated like I was in college? → The truth: motivation fades,systems stick. I explain how to build a personal structure that keeps you consistent.
- How can I bring that game-day mindset to real life? → Simple: Sunday is your new game day. Learn how to plan your week like you used to prep for an opponent.
- Why does my nutrition fall apart now? → You had structure before,training tables, team lifts, accountability. Here’s how to replicate that for real life.
- I feel like I peaked in college. Now what? → That athlete? Still in you. I’ll show you how to reframe your identity as a competitive edge, not a memory.
Whether you're in the gym, on a walk, or commuting,this is your reset button. Listen in. Take notes. Let’s get better.
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Key Takeaways
- Motivation fades, but systems stick: former athletes stay consistent by rebuilding the personal structure that sport used to provide, not by chasing the feeling of being motivated.
- Treat Sunday as the new game day by planning the week the way you used to prepare for an opponent, bringing that competitive mindset into real life.
- Nutrition falls apart after sport because the old structure disappeared (training tables, team lifts, accountability); the fix is deliberately rebuilding that structure for civilian life.
- Feeling like you peaked in college is a framing problem: the athlete identity is still in you, and reframing it as a competitive edge turns a memory into fuel.
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Episode Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.
[00:00:00] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the DECoding Excellence Show. Hey everybody, welcome to the DECoding Excellence Show. As always I'm your host Adam Ringler and by nature I'm a strength conditioning coach and sports scientist. Every single episode I'm trying to deliver some information, some resources, something that brings a little bit of value to your ears. This episode is no different so thanks for tuning in. There's a lot of podcasts
[00:00:53] That you can listen to and you decided to tune into this one so I thank you. Without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hey everybody, welcome to our former athlete society Q&A call, right? I do these every Thursday, 9am, rain, shine, snow, whatever. It doesn't really matter, but I am glad that you're here. If you're watching this as a recording, that is awesome. If you're live, that's even better, right? But most likely, as we're doing this, I'm just watching our accounts come in here, probably a solo Q&A call, right? For you, but listen, that doesn't mean
[00:01:33] That the questions go on answer. That just simply means I'm answering them based on the audience feedback, what was emailed to me and direct message to me and some of the comments in our new former athlete's society now hosted at AdamMingler.com. I got four big questions today, four of them each designed to challenge how we think are disciplines and maybe some of the behavior changes once the jersey gets hung up elsewhere, right? These are the questions I wish I had answered right after my final season. I thought let's lead off with these ones because
[00:02:10] I think they're the big, big rocks that often go unaddressed when we start navigating that journey from going from being an athlete now to being a professional and working in the real world and having a nine to five and losing everything that support structure that goes into what was an athlete, right? So the first question that was emailed, again, you can email me questions, right? You can also message me at AdamMingler.com. You can direct message me at any of the social medias, get your questions to me and I won't answer them. The way this works is that if you attend
[00:02:54] Live, you get to cut the line, you get to have your questions answered immediately, right? So if you were to come here and now it's two people in the Zoom or five people in the Zoom, I'm just polling the Zoom HADA, like anybody that's here live, you get questions and I'll provide the answers in real time, right? Now the second line is that if you somehow communicate your questions ahead of time because you know I record these, right? I record every single one of our Q&A and our account abilities and our master classes, I won't answer those secondly, right? If nobody which
[00:03:29] Has yet to happen six months, emails direct messages or shows up live, then my progative is that I'm going to, I'm just going to answer the questions I want to answer, right? The questions that I think will give this audience a little feedback. So nonetheless, first one was, hey coach, I'm struggling with this and I would like some advice. How do I stay motivated like I was in college? So that's the chase, right? That is the eternal chase for motivation, if you will. But the honest truth is, and I've said this another Q&A, but if you're relying on motivation, you are already on
[00:04:13] Shaking ground. Motivation is not a strategy, it's a mood, it's a, it's a fleeting emotional state, right? But systems are often a lifestyle, right? So in college, you probably didn't have to think about being motivated to show up for your 7A and lifting session, right? You showed up because it was on the teamwork or itinerary because your teammates were there, because your coach would text you if you miss. And you were in a system or a cog that rewarded showing up or enforced not showing up in a magnitude of different ways. And for whatever reason, that structured works,
[00:05:02] Right? So let me ask you this, what system are you in now? What system are you in now? Right? So if your current life doesn't demand some type of structure, then you have to find a way to manufacture it, right? So I call it sort of friction-free accountability. And what that means is that do you have your workouts scheduled before your week even starts? I know Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I wait train. I know Tuesday, Thursday, and one day on the weekend, I do long form zone to conditioning, right? That is a non-negotiable in my week that I'm doing something physical for my
[00:05:44] Body, for my mind every single day. Is your food prepared before your hunger arrives? So what I mean by that is do you have pre-packaged foods? Do you have protein powder? Do you have meals and tupperware? Did you meal prep Sunday or Saturday or the weekend or once during the week so that when you're hungry and you're looking for your fridge and you're like, I'm so starving, what do I eat that you have something convenient that you could go and point to and grab and consume? That's healthy for you. Friction-free accountability. Does your environment make bad habits harder
[00:06:30] And the good ones easier? So again, what I mean by that is if you do not want to eat candy bars, right? Because you're like you fundamentally understand that candy bars are not getting you closer to your goals. But you buy them every weekend. They exist in your pantry. Is that habit making eating healthier harder? I would say yes, right? If it's a temptation that is sitting four feet away from your fridge every single time that you go into the kitchen. How about the good habits easier? What is making the good habits easier? Buying healthy foods,
[00:07:15] Setting your running clothes out by the door. Maybe you have a community of people that you work out with. So it's not just working out but you're going there to see your friends and that's kind of fun. A way to track progress. Maybe a log book or a running or lifting calendar so you get to physically see progress or like our app, the bridge athletic training app where you get to see and scroll back on your app and say, wow, you know, like I was at 20 pounds when I started this exercise, but now I'm at 80. That can be motivating, right? So long story short, I will say motivation is an
[00:08:00] Unreliable friend at best. It's awesome when you see them. It's awesome when they show up. You have a good time when they show up, but you can't rely on a flaky friends. You can't rely on motivation to be there. There will be many days where motivation will not be there. Hey, motivation. Can I see you on Friday? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll be there on Friday. What time? 7 p.m. Cool. Yeah, I'll see you at 7 p.m. You show up at 6.55. Motivation isn't there. 7 o'clock rolls around. Motivation isn't there. What do you do? What do you do then? Build systems. The systems allow you to have structure
[00:08:46] And discipline in doing what the system necessitates, right? So long answer for otherwise a very short question, very preachy. I'm sorry, but this is just something I'm so freaking passionate about. The systems allow you to be successful, not your motivation, not your motivation.
[00:09:08] All right, question. Coach, how? How? I'm trying to read this one. This is weird. I'll coach, how do I bring that game day mentality to every day? All right, so during your college days, you probably had film, right? So you play the game and then you watch film. Maybe highs, what went well, lows, what went poorly, and everything in between, right? You get a gets cut up by your coaching staff, film people. It's concise. It's easy. You see the highlight plays. You see the low light plays areas where you can do better. But ultimately film sessions
[00:09:56] Acted as maybe like a reset for you, right? So you get to review what went well and what didn't go well. You get to understand the opportunities that you could improve, right? And that allowed you to prepare better next week. So I think if I were to try to answer this, how do you build that level of review in your weekly practice, right? Not because you're competing. You don't have that, but how do you mentally go through the week and chart your wins and chart your losses and search for opportunities to get better, right? And I put it that way because your game day, how you showed up
[00:10:54] Maybe in college for game days was probably somewhat a outcome of how you prepared all throughout the week. You don't prepare. You probably showed up pretty poorly on game days, right? So now that you don't have film review, you don't have coaching staff chopping up film, you don't often celebrate the highlights and what you did well in the plays and possessions or run back film of what you did poorly throughout the week. Do you have some system to be able to do that sort of assessment every week? Now that you're a professional now that you're not
[00:11:38] An athlete. So do you look back on the previous week and assess your lifts, assess your foods, assess how you sleep, assess where your stressors are coming from, no different than preparing for an upcoming opponent. But I think if you're just winging your way through the week, you're playing to lose. You're not really competing to win the week and you're not showing up and dominating game day. You don't have a game day mentality if you're just really nilly and going through the week. I think the hallmark or at least the opportunity that you had as a
[00:12:23] Athlete, you got to feel that structured competitiveness and the anticipation for a game day, the build up towards game day. Now that you don't have a defined game day every day is game day, right? You're competing in the competition of life at this rate. How do you still build the structure in for periodic reviews, right? So I would encourage you try to find a way to get film mentally or from a review standpoint every single week. Maybe that's journaling or something like that going through your training locks. But I would start with that. I think that would be
[00:13:08] How I would key in or trying to dominate every single day. Question three. So what does coach what does why or actually why does my nutrition fall apart? Listen, I the more detail in some of these questions, the better I can I can answer them, right? But I think generally I'm going to have to speak in generalities for this question because it's kind of big. Two reasons that I think athletes that are disciplined in how they fuel in preparation for an outcome and now former athletes like you and me and everybody else that's exhausted our eligibility,
[00:13:51] The two reasons nutrition typically falls apart, right? And I think the first one is that and this is real, this is so real. And even if you're not, sorry, if you're not a runner, I'm going to use an example of a runner in this case, you get this, right? But you had consequences. You had consequences. That's the number one. There's a feedback loop as an athlete. So what I mean by this is that if you skipped breakfast, let's just say you skip breakfast during your college days, you probably felt that at morning lift or you felt that at
[00:14:33] Morning conditioning or you felt that later in practice, right? You're lifting and you got a cramp, oh, man, you know, like coach probably choose you out or something like that and you go see the athletic trainer, they sub you back in. There was a feedback loop. You did something or you didn't do something in this case. And then you got feedback later in the day. Oh, I felt terrible at practice, right? I used the running analogy because if you didn't fuel before a long marathon run or a 10k or something, you're doing a, you know, grand canyon, rim to rim, aren't an empty stomach with no
[00:15:10] Fuel, you will feel that, right? There's a feedback mechanism and all that, right? The second way, I think I would approach answering this is that you also probably had constraints as a athlete, right? So you had training table, most likely, you had a meal plan, you had set lift times. Again, there was structure in what you did and structure in your day. And now, none of that really exists for most of us. So it's no wonder that it's harder to find that thread that allows you to know that, oh, it's 10 a.m. I can go to the cafeteria and get breakfast. And at 1230, I
[00:15:56] Got to go to the AT and start getting my ankles taped. And I'm going to grab a protein bar then. And, you know, practice is at 130. So make sure I get some gatorade. Like there's no cadence and structure and schedule to a lot of people stays outside of what they do at work. So now that none of that exists, it's kind of harder, right? So what I often tell former athletes is this is like, eat as if you were still playing the game, right? But you might not have three hour practice. So you could scale back some of the the fueling, right? But you still need to prioritize
[00:16:33] Eating and fueling, right? And so that means like prioritize and things like protein, like it's your job. I've talked about that on this channel all the time. One gram of protein per every pound of lean mass. Keep your post workout nutrition diode in, right? We should be nailing that and taking advantage of our workouts. Make carbs work for your training, not against your lifestyle. So that carbohydrate fuel source should help you get through your workout, maximize your workout, help you recover that glycogen storage after your workout. But maybe bracketed around the most
[00:17:13] Physically active portion of your day. You're not ultimately a civilian. You're not like a normal or what some people call narts right now, an athletic related people. I don't call them narks. I find that somewhat mean. But you're a former athlete, right? So that's a different biology, different psychology and physiology, right? So we need to take a need to take an account for those things. So if you're sitting next to somebody in a cubicle, to your right, don't eat like your coworkers. Don't do it. Don't do it. Eat like somebody whose metabolism still remembers what it's like to do
[00:17:53] Six AM sprints, right? That memory is still in you. So you have to feed it accordingly. I don't want this to go super long. So I'm going to answer one more question. And that is coach, I feel I get this one all the time. Coach, I feel like I peaked in college. Now what? Listen, that one hits, you know, like you win a championship, you win a conference tournament, you become the most valuable player or conference accolades, how you win a national championship. And you don't go pro. What what's next? What do you what's next? A QPR meeting, right? So I think
[00:18:36] A lot of former athletes, they they carry this little silent fear in them, right? That their best years are behind them. That those were the best years. But what I often try to remind athletes when I'm talking to them about this is that that athlete is still inside you, right? They're not gone. They're just unemployed. They don't have their next athletic endeavor that they're being paid to do. So let's not forget that you spent a decade or more or sometimes multiple decades developing discipline, resilience, grit, a team first mentality, right? That's not gone. Now that you
[00:19:20] Don't compete. But if you treat your athletic identity like it's expired and it's it's dead, then you're probably missing out on on the best part. And the best part is this you know what's more powerful than just the idea of being a former athlete. It's that a former athlete now who can weaponize all of those traits in real life. That's what's more powerful. So you know how yet like you learned through playing days how to suffer use that in business, right? You learned during your college days how to go hard and recover. So use that in your family. You learned during the
[00:20:07] Playing days how to ruthlessly compete. So use that in your discipline, right? Weaponize the things that you've learned during your college playing days, right? So your identity isn't washed up. It's just it's seasoned. It's just laying dormant. We just got to find new avenues to utilize all of the skills that you learned during your playing days. And that's that's a different type of edge. That's an edge that normal people don't have. All right, I'm looking at the time. I think that's going to wrap up our Q&A today. We covered a lot. I'm trying to think of it at the first
[00:20:48] Question. We white systems beat motivation, right? Motivation's leading. We talked about trying to build some structure into weekly reviews, reviewing what went well, what didn't go well, things like that. Talked about fueling how to eat like an athlete in our normal lives, right? When your coworkers don't, when they're eating pizza and you're eating chicken breasts, right? That's fine. That's fine. You got different goals. You have different aspirations. And then we talked about just recently, why your athletic identity, your athletic past self is still your greatest advantage.
[00:21:30] Don't forget that. It's not a hindrance. It is a weapon. And we should use that. If any of this hits, if any of this resonates, let me know in the comments of this video below. Shoot me a message inside our community. You can email me at my website. And listen, like, remember, like, you know, being a former athlete, I didn't, I say former. I didn't say a finished athlete. I didn't say an expired athlete. I didn't say an athlete that's done. Just said a former athlete. So keep it going. I'll see you guys all next Tuesday on our
[00:22:05] Accountability call. Keep training. Stay strong. Stay healthy. And let's dominate, dominate this upcoming weekend. Hey, everybody. That's going to be it for this podcast. As always, if you missed any of the episodes here in the Decoding Excellence Show, you can go and explore the back catalog. I host all of our episodes not only on every sort of podcast hosting site, whether it's Spotify or whether it's a YouTube or anywhere else, but you can go to my website. It is Adam Ringler.com forward slash podcast from there. You can listen to all of the interviews, whether it's other sport
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