A former IRONMAN honed his strength and stability through calisthenics training with his Equinox Coach.
Forged at Equinox is a series highlighting an Equinox member’s foray into a new workout regimen, with help from an expert Coach. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Jack Mason had 10 years of IRONMAN triathlons under his belt when he decided it was time for a new metaphorical mountain to conquer. In that decade of crushing 140.6-mile triathlons, Jack was living in an incessant cycle: train, compete, repeat.
“It’s a mental illness — all you do is grind, zone two cardio until you’re dead,” he says. “The thing about IRONMAN is you’re near the end, you’re miserable, but you cross the line and you say, ‘Oh my God, I’ll do better.’ So you sign up for another one. You're miserable, but you sign up for that [next] race. So I kept doing that.”
By the time he finished a race in Louisville in 2017, though, his perspective had done a 180. He needed a fresh goal, Jack recalls. And the best starting point was to focus on enhancing the elements of his fitness that he’d long been neglecting.
Sure, he could ride a bike for hours on end, but his mobility was poor. He could run for miles and miles, but his strength had plenty of room for improvement. He signed up for a membership at Equinox Plano and took a few personal training sessions with a Coach, who encouraged him to practice yoga and hit up the weight room more often.
But it wasn’t until earlier this year that Jack found a new challenge to fill that void: calisthenics, with the help of Equinox COACH Jeric Rosales. “When I met Jeric, I saw him doing crazy stuff — he was doing these Animal Flows, you know, cool stuff,” Jack recalls. “I'm old, so I was like, ‘I want to be like that guy.’”
The duo set out to build full-body strength and mobility, and essentially turn a triathlete into a gymnast, says Jeric. They’ve honed Jack’s kinesthetic awareness — his ability to feel the activation of the muscles in his hands, arms, core, and hips during, say, handstand variations. They’ve practiced Animal Flow (ground-based drills based on animal locomotion) to strengthen and improve mobility in the hips, shoulders, thoracic spine, and ankles, using dynamic moves like scorpions, crab reaches, and side kicks, says Jeric.
With the help of a counterweight system that offsets body weight, Jack has been able to quickly advance as he learned handstand push-ups, planche, and gymnastics ring movements like front lever, back lever, and “skin the cat,” Jeric adds.
The progress the 60-year-old has made in just six months is significant — but not that surprising, says Jeric. “I haven't trained anyone like Jack before,” says the Coach. “I've trained all ages, from young to middle age: 20, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. But Jack is very unique in that he's doing things that a 20-year-old or a teenager would do. That’s something that was like, ‘Wow. This guy is very inspiring.’ This is a guy who’s not going to let age become a factor for him. Whatever he believes he can do, he can do it.”
Here, Jack and Jeric open up about their training — including the mental toughness required of it — and the benefits it has lent both in and out of the Club.
How do your Equinox sessions differ from the style of training you’ve done in the past?
Jack: “I had an IRONMAN coach for 10 years, and he would give me an assignment like, ‘Go run around that field at a 140 heart rate for three hours, no music.’ Or, ‘I need you to go ride 150 miles at a 130 heart rate and just grind.’ What I've learned here is, warm-up is so important — your wrists and your forearms and all this other stuff you don't think about.
“The workout, it's not like benching a million pounds. Part of it is in your head. Part of it is technique. [Jeric] is always coaching me about extending your shoulders, which sounds obvious until you're upside down. Or, you know, ‘Push off your hands, push forward on your hands, back on your hands.’ So it's a lot of mental [work], but also, I feel it.
“I tell Jeric all the time, I could never feel my lats firing until, like, three weeks ago. ‘Oh, just fire them’ — that's a great strategy. Or, ‘Have your glutes fire.’ What does that mean exactly? So you can touch them, you can do all these things to make them fire, but a lot of it is just knowing your body. Unlike pushing weight with a bench press or a squat, it's a different kind of feeling.”
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How does the mental toughness you needed while IRONMAN training compare to that required of your current routine?
Jack: “To me, it's similar in that it's the grind. My first-time IRONMAN coach said, ‘Go run the soccer field for three hours with no music. Keep your heart rate at 140.’ What am I going to think about during that? So, IRONMAN, I learned how to think about just breathing and think about nothing. In calisthenics — like today, I practiced for an hour — and I just think about the moves, not about my work problems. Mentally, it's just getting through it and staying positive, and I've learned not to get frustrated. It is what it is.
“Grind comes across as negative, but it's hard, too. My heart rate will get into the upper 140s. I'm not running. I'm just doing push-ups, but all the activity is going slow. Slow is harder than fast, because slow you have to use your muscles, you have to use your mobility and use your technique, whereas fast is kind of cheap. To me, it's the grind — 90 percent is just showing up.”
Jeric: “Calisthenics is definitely something that requires a lot of patience. It takes a lot of time. Developing those skills is not a one-day thing — it's not even a one-week thing. This is something that's long-term, that you have to develop over time, especially with the more difficult skills.
“You’re going to have good days and you’re going to have bad days. And that's something I had to teach Jack — some days you’re going to be able to hold handstands all day long, and then one day you’re not going to be able to hold it. And it's those days where we just kind of accept that our bodies are just not going to listen to us. We just have to move on to something different and listen to our bodies.
“It's in those times where your mental toughness starts to kick in, where you just have to know this is just a journey. This is something that's temporary, and I'm going to get better and better over these next few days.”
How has your calisthenics and Animal Flow training improved your performance and daily life?
Jack: “I'm kind of hard on myself…I'm not a gifted athlete. I'm a try-hard. In everything I do, I try harder than everybody else. What amazes me is when I do yoga or other classes [at Equinox], I'm stronger than I thought I was. My core is much stronger than I believe it is. I can do all this low boat, high boat stuff that I could never do before. It's all happening by accident. It's all tied to this complex movement on a bar. You have to be stronger than you think.
“I wish I'd learned this 30, 40 years ago. I tell my kids, ‘You should do this.’ It's cold in Texas today, so when it’s cold, air comes out of your tires. So this morning, I had to put air in my car tires. I can actually get down on the ground, on my feet, haunches to the ground. I could never do that when I was running. I couldn't — I wouldn't even try. But [today] I just got down to that position. And I was down there putting air in the tires, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I just went all the way down, butt to the ground, ass to grass, as they say. And I did that without even thinking about it…It's these simple things that you don't think about until you're doing them, and you're like, ‘Wow, this is a side benefit I didn't plan for.’”
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What goal are you currently working toward, and how are you tackling any challenges that come with it?
Jack: “When I first met Jeric, I saw him do crow to handstand. I said, ‘Jeric, I want to do that. How long would that take?’ He said, ‘Oh, not long — about three months.’ That was a bald-faced lie. I’m at six months and I think two years from now, we’ll still be on the journey. The more you know, the more you realize you don't. The more I learn a skill, [the more] I want to learn a different skill that's hard. So that's probably the biggest learning that I've had this whole time.”
Jeric: “If there's one thing I know about Jack, it’s that he's not afraid of challenges. He's not afraid to try new things. The fact that he's able to progress, even just slowly going down counterweights and increasing our progressions toward that end goal of the crow to handstand is enough to get us motivated.
“Small progressions are huge in calisthenics…even just holding it for one more second on a very difficult and challenging hold, that's a huge achievement in itself. And so even though this is a long-term joint journey, making those small, little progressions is going to motivate people, not just Jack but even myself and other clients that I might have.
Jack: “I don't believe in motivation. Motivation is just fleeting. Discipline is what I believe. I don't feel like going to the gym every day, but you know what? I go every day, I go twice a day most days, because it's my grind. I don't watch TV — it's priorities. So that's why, when people say, ‘How do you stay motivated?’ I'm not motivated. I'm disciplined. It's different.”
Photos by Robert Underwood