01BODY
Capability
How strong, fit, and physically useful can I stay without turning training into another full-time job?
The Dadin the Glass
Strong. Capable. Present.
How do I show up fully in the life I have?
I’m 41, married, and raising four kids. I’m testing what helps me stay capable and present for myself and the people who matter most—and being honest about what doesn’t.
Why this exists
Being there takes more than good intentions.
Work / kids / recovery / marriage / time
Work, kids, health, marriage, friendships. It is easy to give your best energy to whatever is loudest and leave too little for yourself and the people you love.
The second half makes that harder to ignore. I do not want to drift through it. I want the strength, clarity, and capacity to be present in the life I actually have.
I started The Dad in the Glass to test what helps and tell the truth about what does not. Not from the finish line. From right here.
Never teach from the mountaintop when the real story is that you are still climbing.
Latest episode
Was Five Days Still Worth It?
I audited whether my five-day training week was still earning the time, energy, and recovery it consumed.
The question
Was my five-day week still worth what it cost?
The audit
I weighed the results against recovery and the time it took from the rest of my life.
What happened
Five days produced results, but recovery and life cost were becoming expensive. A three-day structure is the next hypothesis to test.
The Second Half Scorecard
Before you fix anything, figure out what is actually slipping.
The Second Half Scorecard asks twelve honest questions across capability, energy, time, fatherhood, relationships, and direction.
It gives you a baseline you can print and helps you choose one 30-day experiment to run.
Free / five minutes
Find the pressure point.
Rate the last 30 days. See all six areas side by side. Leave with one test worth running.
Get the ScorecardFree access by email. Future updates are optional. Your answers stay in your browser.
What gets tested here
The questions get bigger than fitness.
Fitness is where this started because the feedback is brutally clear. But the same tradeoffs show up everywhere else.
02FUEL
Energy
What actually improves recovery, sleep, focus, and capacity, and what is mostly noise?
03DAD
Fatherhood
How do I become more present without pretending a dad with work, four kids, and a real life has unlimited time?
04BOND
Relationships
What keeps marriage, friendship, and community alive when adulthood makes isolation incredibly easy?
05MIND
Headspace
What helps when anxiety, pressure, identity, or mental health start running the show?
06NEXT
Direction
How much ambition is enough, what deserves the next decade, and what needs to be left behind?
Recent episodes
Latest from the channel.
Episode 03
Why Five Days Was Too Much
Five days produced results. The cost in recovery and time called for a closer look.
Episode 02
Fit For What?
Getting rid of a dad bod did not answer the deeper question.
Episode 01
Seven Fitness Tests at 41
Before changing everything, take an honest look at what is already true.
About
I am Joel.
I am a husband and dad of four. For a long time, it was easy to think of getting older as something happening somewhere off in the future. It is not anymore.
I care about being strong enough to use my body, healthy enough to stick around, present enough that my kids actually know me, connected to people I care about, useful to my family, and awake enough not to sleepwalk through the next twenty years.
I am not especially interested in pretending I have solved any of that. I am interested in finding out what actually works.
Do not miss the next experiment
Take inventory before another year disappears.
Take the free Second Half Scorecard. Name what is slipping, then pick one experiment you can run in your actual life.
Get the Scorecard