A full-day, science-backed framework for athletes training hard after 40 — every element, every mechanism, and exactly why it works.

You're not panicking because you're unfit. You're panicking because your CO2 tolerance is low. Here's what that means, why it matters, and how to fix it.

The Josh Button Podcast is back for 2026, and the first guest of the year is Dustin Lebel — a strength and conditioning coach out of Connecticut who has been on the mats for over two decades, came back to training at 36 after years off due to injury, and now coaches midlife combat athletes online full-time. He is, in his own words, that person. He gets it because he's living it.

We think in language. Every decision, every reaction, every emotional state begins with a conversation that happens entirely inside your own head — one that most people never consciously examine. Faust Ruggiero has spent 40 years as a psychologist watching what happens when people don't.

There is a layer of athletic performance that most coaches don't train — not because it doesn't matter, but because they can't measure it. Reaction time. Coordination. Accuracy. Spatial awareness. Tissue elasticity. These are the qualities that separate a fighter who looks technically capable from one who actually performs under pressure. And according to Quintin Torres, these are exactly the qualities you can develop — fast — through nervous system training.

Chris Krüger came to hormone optimization the same way I came to this podcast — through watching his father navigate the medical system, get the wrong answers, and pay for it with his health. Chris's father battled prostate cancer for six years after a life of insulin resistance and low testosterone — a cascade that the conventional medical system addressed with food pyramids, Glucerna shakes, chemo, and radiation. What it never addressed was the hormonal environment that allowed the disease to take hold in the first place.

Brian Sanders has spent eight years building what he intends to be the definitive documentary series on nutrition — Food Lies. Not a carnivore documentary. Not a keto documentary. Something undebunkable. He started a nose-to-tail regenerative meat business, ran it for four years, and lost money — because there is no profit margin on real food. That experience gave him a clarity about the food industry that no amount of academic research could provide.

Brad McDonnell a jiu-jitsu practitioner who has been on the mats for eight years, has had staph himself, has watched the antibiotic cycle destroy fighters' cardiovascular systems and gut flora, and has spent eight months down the rabbit hole of gut-skin axis research to build a solution.

David Amerland started doing karate at 13 years old, a new kid in a new school in Australia with nowhere to put his anger. He never stopped. Forty-seven years later he is a certified Taekwondo instructor who competed at black belt national level in Britain through the 1990s, a researcher who spent 10,000 hours studying neuroscience and interviewed 100 snipers to write The Sniper Mind, and co-founder of DareBee — a crowd-funded, entirely free fitness resource that serves around a million visitors a month globally and was used by Green Berets in Afghanistan.

Mike Gonzalez was a professional MMA fighter — amateur champion, second-degree BJJ black belt, fight name Limitless — who spent years training seven days a week, attending no birthdays, no weddings, turning off his emotions two weeks before every fight so he could go for the finish without hesitation. He was the best version of himself physically. He was winning. And he was completely hollow inside.

Benny Voncken is a Stoicism coach from the Netherlands, currently based in Athens — the city where the philosophy was born 2,300 years ago. He came to Stoicism through a combination of divorce, alcoholism, and an existential crisis that forced him to stop running from the questions he'd been avoiding. He found the Stoics at the right moment, immediately recognized himself in them, and spent the next several years building a coaching practice around helping others find the same clarity.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani started as a personal trainer watching the conventional nutrition recommendations fail everyone he worked with. He moved into functional and chiropractic medicine — got called a quack for it — and spent the next 15 years building a practice that asks the question conventional medicine is structurally incapable of asking: why do you have this problem?

Dr. Scott Bertrand is a US Army paratrooper, a retired chiropractor of 30 years, and the inventor of the AllCore 360 — a medical device that has been 30 years in development and is now being used in over 150 locations across six countries, from Olympic athletes and Heisman Trophy winners to children with hypotonia who couldn't hold their own head up.

Frank Bohne is 6'1". At his lowest he weighed 121 pounds. He got there through veganism, caloric restriction, and compulsive exercise — a combination he now understands was killing him. His mom got him into Johns Hopkins eating disorder unit in the summer of 2016. He nearly died before that happened. Two years later he relapsed back to the same weight. And then something changed.

Ben Pelton started with yoga and pranayama in 2012, found Wim Hof in 2016, became one of the first 26 certified Wim Hof instructors in North America, spent years teaching cold exposure and breathwork to athletes and coaches, and eventually created his own certification: the Breath Reset. He's also a BJJ purple belt who competes and coaches — and has been in an ice bath modified from a chest freezer for the better part of a decade.

Weston Rowe is 42 years old. He does construction — on his feet, up and down ladders, carrying loads, 50 hours a week. Then he goes home and runs a business. He has a 10-month-old son who has never seen a doctor. His family free-birthed at home in the bathroom. They sleep in a Faraday cage on the floor, no mattress, inclined, with mouths taped shut. He has no Wi-Fi in his house. No health insurance. And he's been eating raw meat every day for six years.

Jacob Diaz didn't come from medicine. His background was in private security and potentially law enforcement. Health was not a focal point — until COVID arrived and nothing he was seeing on the streets of New York matched what was being reported. Hospitals were supposedly overwhelmed. People were supposed to be dropping dead. He was watching homeless people in zero social distancing, zero hygiene protocols, thriving.

Adrian Benavides found Jiu Jitsu through a coworker at Chili's. He was 300 pounds, five-seven, and showed up once, nearly died in the warmup, couldn't move for a week, and then went back. Sixteen, almost seventeen years later, he is a black belt, a professor, the co-founder of Old Testament Jiu Jitsu, and one of the most direct people in a room you will ever meet.

Thomas P. Seager didn't set out to build a company. He was a 52-year-old engineering professor in Phoenix going through a divorce, running blood panels, and trying to figure out why his health had deteriorated. He needed to do ice baths. The ice kept melting in the desert heat. So he built a machine.

Ryan Aleckszander didn't arrive at his views through ideology. He arrived through lived experience — health struggles that mainstream medicine couldn't solve, and a years-long investigation into why the system keeps failing the people it claims to serve.