Bodybuilding was king when I was growing up. High school, college — if you took the weight room seriously, you did chest and tris on Monday, back and bis on Tuesday, and maybe legs on Thursday if you felt like it. Mirrors. Machines. Chasing the pump. That's what training was, and I didn't question it.
It was fine. It built a foundation. But it never did much for my brain.
Then I Found CrossFit
I walked into a box for the first time and saw people actually working — not posing, not scrolling between sets, not curling in the squat rack. People showed up every day, put their names on the board, and went to war with a barbell. Sweat on the floor. Nobody telling you to wipe it up. Just people who wanted to be there as badly as you did.
Then my brain started getting better. I can't point to the exact mechanism — that's part of why this website exists, honestly. I'm the guinea pig, running the experiments, trying to match the research to what I'm already feeling in the gym. But the combination of community, hard workouts, and people who actually gave a damn about showing up — it unlocked something in my recovery that nothing else had touched.
The fog would lift for hours after a workout. Confidence came back. For the first time since getting stretchered off the ice in high school, I felt like an athlete again — not a patient, not a guy managing symptoms. That shift changed everything for me.
Then the Injuries Came
Not head injuries. That's the irony — my brain was healing while my body was breaking down.
Shoulders went first. Missed weeks turned into missed months, and the thing that was saving me became the thing I couldn't do. Two torn rotator cuffs. First surgery is scheduled for September 2026, and the doctors say it's a two-year road back to CrossFit.
Two years.
I still think about it — the barbell, the clock, the community. That feeling of walking out knowing you left everything on the floor. I'll get back there. But not yet.
The Pivot
When the injuries piled up, I had to find something else — something that kept the functional base but worked around the damage. I found Marcus Filly's functional bodybuilding approach, which takes the useful parts of bodybuilding (controlled tempo, isolation work, hypertrophy) and runs them through functional movement patterns. It wasn't CrossFit, but it wasn't the bro-split mirror culture I'd left behind either. It was a bridge.
Eventually I started writing my own programming, because I realized nobody was programming for my brain. Every program I found was built for healthy athletes. Nobody accounted for the neurological cost of a heavy set. Nobody asked how your head felt before deciding what to load on the bar. So I built my own — a hybrid approach where I could still chase the barbell but also listen to my nervous system instead of ignoring it.
That's what became the Ghost, Sentinel, and Ironhide protocols on this site. They're not the best programming in the world. But they're programming that accounts for the brain, and that apparently didn't exist before.
Why Functional Fitness Won
You get stronger at things that actually matter in your life. You pick up your kids without thinking about it. You carry groceries up three flights of stairs and you're not winded at the top. Your body does what you ask it to do, and you stop worrying about whether it will.
When you have a brain injury, that matters more than aesthetics. Your brain has been unreliable for years — you can't always trust your focus, your memory, your energy levels. Having a body that shows up when called is the one thing that keeps you grounded. It's the thing you can count on when everything else feels unpredictable.
Still Exploring
I'm not done figuring this out. The protocols work, but I'm still testing how bodybuilding-style hypertrophy fits alongside functional work. Still figuring out how to train hard enough to grow without blowing past the neurological ceiling my brain sets on any given day. That balance is the whole game.
The surgery is coming. The rehab will be long. And somewhere on the other side of it, CrossFit is waiting. That's the plan.
For now — show up, move well, listen to the nervous system, and keep building.
If you're reading this and you're stuck between what you used to do and what your body will let you do now — I get it. You don't have to grieve the old version of yourself forever. You just have to keep showing up and building whatever comes next.
For those of us training through brain injuries and busted joints and years of accumulated damage — "what works" is the only metric that matters.
— RK