The Lemonade Chronicles

Jul 29, 2026

This is Part II in a series. Best to peruse Part I to catch up a bit, before moving on to this one. Then again, fine to read this one first. Regardless, I’m tackling the question of the name — Slowfit, and explaining why this whole thing is intended to empower you with agency. Choices that belong to you in terms of your health and happiness. All in the face of certain forces, some of which have just sort of happened as we’ve strayed from our evolutionary design in a modern world. And some others of these forces could justifiably be called dark forces. Forces incentivized by things different than the things that are good for you as a human being. I’d argue its important to understand the bigger picture and some common themes at play here, so that we can stand a chance against Big Food, Big Booze, Big Shoe, Big Tech, and the like. So that we can take back control of our lives and and actually flourish.

It starts with the name I chose. Slowfit.

Foghorn Fitness is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I hear you, it’s different, a little counter-intuitive, even. Slow? I don’t want to be slow! Isn’t this the opposite of what a fitness brand should be called? Where’s the intensity? The urgency? The before-and-after? Fitness brands are supposed to promise fast. Six weeks! Twelve moves! One weird trick! No pain, no gain! Push harder! Do more! Sleep when you’re dead! Watch this 7-second video! Now this one! And this one! Stress? What stress?

That’s exactly the problem.

The Slowfit Method® is not slow in the sense that it is easy. It is slow in the sense that it is deliberate. Because the interventions that actually work are almost always the ones that take time, require consistency, and resist the cultural pressure to turn everything into a shortcut. It is slow the way a sequoia is slow. The way compound interest is slow. The way building a life you don’t need to escape from by eating something or drinking something or doom-scrolling something to distract you from this moment—is slow. Like slow food. Slow streets. Slow parenting. Slow cities.

Slowfit. Get it?

It is also, quite deliberately, the antidote to a very specific set of forces — forces that are working against your health, your performance, and your quality of life, right now, across every dimension simultaneously.

Here is what the Slowfit Method® is the antidote to. Pillar by pillar. There’s a lot to cover here, folks, so I split the topic into four parts. This one is Part II of IV. (Reminder: Part I lives here.)

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Mouth breathing and over-breathing.

You take roughly 20,000 breaths a day. If you’re breathing through your mouth, shallowly, chaotically — which most people are — you are driving down your CO2 levels, undermining oxygen delivery to your tissues, elevating your cortisol, disrupting your sleep, and suppressing your immune function. Sending a signal of danger to your central nervous system, resulting in a state of chronic arousal. This is not a minor inconvenience. It is a systemic health failure happening 20,000 times a day. All stirred up by overreacting to that email, that text message, that news media alert, that guy who just cut you off in traffic…. We live in a culture of hyper-stimulation, and the vast majority of us are making it worse by reacting with over-breathing through the mouth.

The Slowfit antidote: nasal breathing, pretty much always. CO2 tolerance training. A downregulation protocol post-workout and before bed. The Wim Hof upregulation protocol before training. Paying attention to the breath constantly. Your breath is the only autonomic function you can also consciously control. Use it. Exercise agency over this moment, right here.

YOU TAKE 20,000 BREATHS A DAY. HERE’S WHY MOST OF THEM ARE WORKING AGAINST YOU.

At the end of the last post in this series — the Mindset pillar — I teased what was coming next.

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Smartphone and social media addiction.

In Part I, I talked about Big Food, Big Booze & Big Shoe. Now we’re on to Big Tech. Adam Alter’s research in Irresistible documented the six ingredients that make behavioral experiences as addictive as heroin. In Screen People, Megan Garber warned what happens to a civilization that organizes itself around those ingredients. And in The Anxious Generation, Jonathon Haidt documented what happened to an entire generation of children. The variable reward schedule. The infinite scroll. The slot machine in your pocket, available 24 hours a day, engineered by people who understand the neuroscience of compulsion better than most psychiatrists.

The Slowfit antidote: intentional technology. Use the smartphone. Don’t be used by it. State a purpose before you open any app. Switch to greyscale. Tape your mouth at night and put your phone in another room (that sounds a little weird, but the taping is for improved nasal breathing, not to prevent you from talking on your phone—though I suppose that’s a nice side effect). Remember that your attention is the most valuable thing you own. Defend it accordingly. Don’t give it away to things that don’t deserve it. Again, agency. We have agency.

SAME PLAYBOOK. DIFFERENT INDUSTRY.

We made it! Ellie and I covered about 3,000 miles from one coast to another. Whew. A week behind the wheel offers up a fair amount of think time. And the next couple posts here will be a product of 48 hours in the driver’s seat and a lucky backlog of Audible credits.

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Requiring constant stimulus. Being held hostage to a chronic state of arousal.

What might we call this one, Big Attention? Probably still Big Tech, for the most part. The modern attention economy has trained an entire population to be incapable of tolerating silence, stillness, or unstructured time. Standing in a line without checking a phone. Sitting with a thought without immediately reaching for distraction. Being in a beautiful place without photographing it for an audience. The inability to be present in a moment that isn’t performing for anyone is one of the most consequential health crises nobody is naming.

The Slowfit antidote: presence. Meditation. Long walks without AirPods. Books instead of feeds. The deliberate cultivation of your own inner life, which turns out to be where performance actually lives.

Meditation, for example, is backed by so much research now, folks. It’s a huge miss not to be doing this on the regular. I wrote about the benefits of a meditation practice here.

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Across every Slowfit pillar, there is a version of the world that is working against you — a faster, louder, more addictive, more profitable version of health and fitness that extracts value from your attention and your body and returns chronic disease, fragmented focus, and a vague sense that something is wrong.

And across every pillar, there is a choice.

You can eat the food that was engineered to make you eat more of it. Or you can eat real food.

You can pour yourself a drink to numb the edges of your life. Or you can learn to be comfortable in your own skin.

You can breathe through your mouth, shallowly, without thinking. Or you can close your mouth.

You can let the back pocket slot machine rent your attention. Or you can be present in your own life.

You can run on the hedonic treadmill until your knees give out. Or you can find a reason.

You can outsource your social life to a platform. Or you can show up for the people in front of you.

You can grind yourself into cortisol-flooded exhaustion. Or you can dose yourself intelligently and recover like it matters.

You can live as though sleep is optional. Or you can train in your sleep.

That’s the Slowfit Method®. Not a program. Not a protocol. A framework for making the better choice, pillar by pillar, day by day, for as long as you’re here.

Slow. Deliberate. Yours.

Stay tuned for Part III.

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There’s an App for that! Want to dive deeper into nutrition, breathing, movement, or any of the other Slowfit pillars? I built an app for that. The Slowfit Method® app puts Coach Keir AI in your pocket — trained on all ten pillars and with an ever-growing knowledge base—the whole sh-bang. Ask it anything about managing your health and happiness. More than one hundred people have already downloaded this app without a dime spent on marketing, and I’ve got nine 5-star reviews on the App Store. Check it out!

GET THE APP

Call Me. Curious about 1:1 coaching? I’ve added an easy way to book a free 30-minute introductory call with me to learn more about the Slowfit Method® and/or my AI Coach app, to discuss your training goals, or to explore what a private coaching relationship might look like. No pressure, no pitch — just a conversation.

BOOK HERE

—

Stick around.

Best,

Keir

Keir J. Beadling is a human performance coach, founder of Foghorn Fitness, and creator of the Slowfit Method®. He coaches athletes and everyday humans in San Francisco and worldwide. More information is available at foghornfitness.com.

P.S. A heartfelt thank you to the folks who have already donated to this year’s Napa Ride to Defeat ALS—Donna, Ryan, Beth, Morley, Jeffrey, David, Jeremy, and Doug. Thanks to these fine people, I’m halfway to my fundraising goal. The ride happens in September. If you’d like to add your support, you can do that here.

Foghorn Fitness is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid Substack subscriber.

WHY IS IT CALLED THE SLOWFIT METHOD®? (PART I of IV)

July 29, 2026Healthai coaching, artificial intelligence, Health, human performance, mental-health, personal-training, wellnesskjbeadling Leave a comment

Jul 27, 2026

People ask me about the name. Pretty much from the moment I suggested it, even. “Hey, whaddya think about Slowfit?”

Slowfit. It sounds like the opposite of what a fitness brand should be called. Where’s the intensity? The urgency? The before-and-after? Fitness brands are supposed to promise fast. Six weeks. Twelve moves. One weird trick. No pain, no gain. Push harder. Do more. Sleep when you’re dead.

That’s exactly the problem.

The Slowfit Method® is not slow because it is easy. It is slow because it is deliberate. Because the interventions that actually work are almost always the ones that take time, require consistency, and resist the cultural pressure to turn everything into a shortcut. It is slow the way a sequoia is slow. The way compound interest is slow. The way building a life you don’t need to escape from by eating something or drinking something or doing something to distract you from this moment—is slow.

Here is what the Slowfit Method® is the antidote to. Pillar by pillar. There’s a lot to cover here, folks, so I reckon I’ll split the topic into four parts. This here is Part I. Today we’re going to tackle Big Food, Big Booze and Big Shoe.

Foghorn Fitness is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber on Substack.

Ultra-processed food.

And I’m not just talking about Doritos. Sixty percent of the American diet is now engineered in laboratories to override your satiety signals and create compulsive, escalating consumption. Dr. Chris van Tulleken spent a month eating 80 percent ultra-processed food and watched his body and brain deteriorate in real time. Robert Lustig has spent decades documenting how the food industry deliberately conflated sugar with food and sold us chronic disease as a lifestyle. Herman Pontzer proved you cannot outrun a bad diet.

The Slowfit antidote: eat real f*cking food. Four words. OK, three if you take out that one I put in there for extra oomph. Bottom line is, if your great-grandparents wouldn’t recognize it as food, it probably isn’t.

EAT REAL FOOD. THE REST IS DETAILS.

Jul 20

I wore a continuous glucose monitor on the back of my arm, more or less continuously, for nearly three years.

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The Joy Juice.

The alcohol industry has spent decades and billions of dollars convincing you of two things that are not true. First, that moderate alcohol consumption is good for your health — a claim built on deeply flawed observational studies that the industry helped fund and promote. Second, that a fulfilling life — celebration, connection, relaxation, reward — requires their product to be complete.

Neither is true. Both are manipulations.

The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory in January 2025 declaring alcohol the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States. Not a risk factor. The third leading preventable cause. So why would I want to put that into my body? On purpose? The science has been available for years. The wine industry’s Mediterranean diet talking points, the beer commercials that make you believe every meaningful human moment requires a cold one, the social script that frames sobriety as joylessness — all of it is marketing. Great marketing, too. This Bud’s for you! Weekends are made for Michelob! Tastes great, less filling! Stay thirst, my friends! These ad agencies have earned their huge fees. I am as entertained as anyone by the Super Bowl halftime ads. Alas, none of it is medicine. None of it.

But the manipulation goes deeper than the carcinogen. Alcohol is also one of the most effective tools available for avoiding yourself. For numbing the discomfort that is actually information. For suppressing the low-grade anxiety that, if you sat with it, might tell you something important about your life. A drink to take the edge off. Another to get to sleep. A third because the first two didn’t quite do what you needed. The hedonic treadmill running at full speed, tolerance building, the dose escalating to maintain the same effect.

This was a big one for me. Not drinking myself into oblivion. But rather, using a big IPA or two to get my brain to slow down. Guys, there’s a better way. Lots of better ways, actually.

I get it. Learning to be comfortable in your own skin — present, unmedicated, in the actual texture of your life without a chemical buffer — is hard. It is also one of the most important things you can do for yourself. William Porter’s Alcohol Explained is the clearest account I’ve read of why alcohol makes you feel better in the short term and worse in every other dimension. Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind is the best account of how to understand the grip it has and decide for yourself whether to let go of it.

I’ll be four years sober in October. Not because I had a problem by conventional definitions. Because the data was unambiguous — my sleep, my recovery, my HRV, my cortisol, my cognitive clarity all improved materially and measurably. A drink or two on a Friday night was affecting my Tuesday training. The trade was not worth it.

The Slowfit antidote: honesty. Not prohibition — agency. Look at what alcohol is actually doing to your body and your mind, strip away the marketing, and make a real choice. Your own choice. Not one foisted upon you by Madison Avenue. A fulfilling life does not require poisoning yourself with a known carcinogen while bowing to television advertisements. It just doesn’t.

Reflections Upon Three Years of Sobriety

November 5, 2025

Reflections Upon Three Years of Sobriety

“First a man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man.”

—

Chronic cardio.

So far we’ve got Big Food, Big Booze & now, Big Shoe. You’re likely familiar with the hedonic treadmill? On this point here, I’m referring to the treadmill treadmill. Mark Sisson has written compellingly about what he calls “chronic cardio” — the kind of punishing, high-volume endurance training that grinds the body into a cortisol-flooded state of permanent, low-grade stress. Long-distance running done at the wrong intensities, day after day, without adequate recovery, doesn’t make you fitter. It makes you sick, injured, and inflamed.

All aided by the shoe companies who have propagandized us for years with overly-cushioned shoes featuring narrow toe boxes and raised heels. Shoe coffins.

Been there, done that. I remember running my first marathon—don’t get too excited, I only did a few of them. The Boston Marathon in 1995 or maybe 1996. (No, I didn’t qualify for this one—I had a buddy with some graphic design bona fides and morals as bent as mine whip up a counterfeit race bib, but that is another story altogether). I trained in “motion control” shoes through regular bouts of shin splints that left my lower legs painful to the touch. In an incredibly dumb bout of pre-race exuberance, I ran a race-pace 8 miles a couple days before the marathon itself.

I also remember being deep into training for my first Ironman-distance triathlon (again, not a humble brag, I didn’t do many of these), while running a 6-week jury trial as an overly ambitious young litigator, just 2 weeks before getting married. In what world is any of that a good idea?

Thankfully, I know better now (because…science).

The Slowfit antidote? Smart dosing. Zone 2 for your aerobic base. Brief, intense efforts for VO2 max. Strength work twice a week. And recovery treated as part of the training — not what happens when you’re too tired to train. A viable longevity strategy should involve regular walking, rather than running yourself into the ground. Oh, and ditch the shoe coffins. Gradually, like any other big change. But get thee some shoes that reflect what our feet are designed to do—toe-splay, perceive the ground, no high heels.

The Most Underrated Longevity Drug Costs Nothing and You Already Know How to Do It

Jun 8

The Most Underrated Longevity Drug Costs Nothing and You Already Know How to Do It

There is a thing you already know how to do — have known since you were about a year old — that is one of the most evidence-backed longevity interventions available to you, costs absolutely nothing, requires no equipment, no gym membership, no coach, and can be done anywhere on earth.

—

OK, that’s probably enough to digest for today. That’s the Slowfit Method®—well, Part I of it. It’s not a program. Not a protocol. It’s a framework for making the better choice, pillar by pillar, day by day, for as long as you’re here.

Slow. Deliberate. Yours.

I’ll publish Part II in a few days, so please stay tuned for that.

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BOOK HERE

—

Stick around.

Best,

Keir

EAT REAL FOOD. THE REST IS DETAILS.

July 24, 2026Healthai coaching, diet, Food, Health, human performance, nutrition, personal-training, wellnesskjbeadling Leave a comment

I wore a continuous glucose monitor on the back of my arm, more or less continuously, for nearly three years.

Thirty-three months. 262,000 glucose readings. Every meal, every workout, every stressful Zoom call, every late night, every coffee — all of it tracked in real time by a sensor the size of a quarter reading my blood chemistry every few minutes. I ranked 187 foods by their glucose spike impact on my own metabolism. I found that summer on Cape Cod did measurably better things to my metabolic health than winter in San Francisco (96 mg/dL average vs. 101). I learned which supplements spiked my glucose, which ones didn’t, and which breakfast sent my blood sugar into a slow grind that didn’t resolve until noon.

I am telling you this not to brag about my commitment to data, but because the single most important thing my CGM taught me has nothing to do with data.

It is four words.

Eat real f*cking food.

That’s the Nutrition pillar of the Slowfit Method®. Four words. Everything else — the macros, the timing, the supplements, the fasting windows, the protein targets — is built on top of that foundation. If you get the foundation wrong, none of the optimization matters.

Foghorn Fitness is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber on Substack.

—

The book you need to read right now

Dr. Chris van Tulleken is a British physician, BBC journalist, and infectious disease researcher at University College London. For his book Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can’t Stop Eating Food That Isn’t Food, he spent a month eating 80 percent ultra-processed food while scientists monitored everything that happened to his body and brain.

He gained weight. His appetite regulation broke down. His gut microbiome degraded. His mood deteriorated. His desire for the UPF foods increased even as they made him feel worse — a textbook addiction response.

Then he stopped. And everything reversed.

Van Tulleken’s argument is not that ultra-processed food is unhealthy in the way that, say, too much salt is unhealthy. His argument is that UPF is not food. It is an industrially manufactured substance, engineered from cheap commodity inputs, designed in laboratories to override the satiety signals that evolution built into us over millions of years. The goal is not to nourish you. The goal is to make you eat more of it.

What is UPF? The working definition — the NOVA classification system — is not about calories or fat or sugar per se. It is about degree of industrial processing. If it contains ingredients you would not find in a home kitchen, if it has been assembled from components extracted from other foods, if its texture and flavor were designed to maximize palatability and minimize fullness — it is ultra-processed. This covers roughly 60 percent of the American diet. It covers most of what is in the middle aisles of your grocery store. It covers a lot of what you think of as “healthy” options.

Ultra-Processed People is the most important food book I have read since Robert Lustig’s Metabolical. It belongs at the top of your list. And the news is not all grim: Van Tulleken is not asking you to be perfect. He is asking you to understand what you are eating. Because once you understand it, the choices get easier.

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The Lustig framework: it’s not the calories

Dr. Robert Lustig is a neuroendocrinologist at UCSF who has spent decades studying the metabolic effects of sugar and ultra-processed food. His book Metabolical makes the case that the chronic disease epidemic — obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s — is not the result of personal failure or lack of willpower. It is the predictable result of an industrialized food supply that has been systematically engineered to maximize profit at the expense of metabolic health.

The core Lustig insight, summarized: sugar, and specifically fructose, drives insulin resistance and liver dysfunction in ways that do not show up in simple calorie counts. A calorie of fructose is not a calorie of glucose is not a calorie of fat. The “a calorie is a calorie” framework that dominated dietary science for fifty years was wrong, and it was convenient for the food industry for it to be wrong.

What to do about it: reduce added sugar, read ingredient labels, and default to foods that were not manufactured in a facility. The rule I use with every athlete I coach: if your great-grandparents would recognize it as food, it probably is.

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You lose weight in the kitchen, not the gym

Herman Pontzer is a Duke evolutionary anthropologist who has spent his career studying human metabolism across cultures and activity levels. His research produced a finding that shocked the fitness world: the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, who walk eight to ten miles a day hunting and foraging, burn roughly the same number of total calories as sedentary Western office workers.

The body adapts. Exercise is not primarily a weight management tool. It is a metabolic health tool, a cardiovascular tool, a bone density tool, a mental health tool, a longevity tool — but it is not the way to outrun a bad diet. You cannot out-train poor nutrition. The research is definitive on this.

The implication is not that exercise doesn’t matter. It matters enormously, for all the reasons above. The implication is that if your goal includes body composition, food is the primary lever. Exercise is the multiplier.

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The protein argument you need to hear

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon’s Forever Strong makes the case that the medical establishment has been asking the wrong question. The focus has been on fighting fat. The real lever is building muscle.

Muscle is not just the thing that makes you look good at the beach. It is the body’s largest endocrine organ, the primary site of glucose disposal, the tissue most responsible for metabolic health and aging trajectory. Sarcopenia — the loss of muscle mass with age — is a more powerful predictor of mortality than obesity. And the solution is resistance training plus adequate protein.

Lyon’s prescription: one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass per day, minimum. This is higher than conventional recommendations and significantly higher than most people are actually consuming. She also makes the case for protein timing — prioritizing protein at breakfast rather than backloading it at dinner, and hitting a post-training protein window within 45 minutes of finishing a session.

The Momentous protein I use with athletes (code: FOGHORN) is NSF Certified for Sport and among the most rigorously tested on the market. If you are not hitting your protein targets from whole food sources, a quality protein supplement is not a crutch — it is a tool.

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What 33 months of CGM data actually showed me

After 33 months of continuous glucose monitoring, here is what my own data showed me.

The foods with the highest and most consistent glucose spikes were exactly what you would expect: refined carbohydrates, sugary drinks, white rice, most bread, processed snacks. The foods with the lowest impact: vegetables, proteins, healthy fats, legumes.

What surprised me: how much stress spiked my glucose independent of food. A difficult conversation. A contentious Zoom call. A piece of bad news. These produced glucose responses nearly indistinguishable from a modest meal — without a single bite of food. The connection between the stress response and metabolic health is real and measurable.

What the data confirmed: 97.6 percent of my readings were in the healthy range (70-140 mg/dL). My mean glucose across the entire dataset was 99.7 mg/dL. I attribute this primarily to three things: real food as the foundation, consistent exercise, and — after taking a hard look at my relationship with it — no alcohol.

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The alcohol honest conversation

Alcohol is part of the Nutrition pillar in the Slowfit Method®, and I am not going to soft-pedal it.

I stopped drinking nearly four years ago. Not because I had a problem by conventional definitions. Because the data was unambiguous — alcohol suppressed my REM sleep, elevated my resting heart rate, degraded my recovery scores, and spiked my cortisol in ways that took 48 hours to fully resolve. A drink or two on a Friday night was affecting my Tuesday training.

The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory in January 2025 declaring alcohol the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, calling for updated warning labels. This came after decades of research suggesting a “safe” level of consumption. The current scientific consensus is that there is no safe level when it comes to cancer risk specifically.

I am not here to tell you how to live your life. I am here to be honest with you about what the research shows, and what I have experienced firsthand. If you are working on performance, recovery, sleep, or body composition, alcohol is working against all of them. That is just the truth.

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Practical takeaways

Start with real food. If it grew somewhere or had a mother, it is probably food. If it was designed by a bunch of scientists and assembled in a factory from industrial inputs, it is probably not. This is not a complete nutrition system. It is a foundation. Build on it from there.

Read the ingredient list. Not the nutrition facts label — the ingredient list. If it contains more than five ingredients, or ingredients you cannot pronounce, think twice. Van Tulleken’s rule: if your great-great-grandmother would not recognize it as food, it probably is not.

Hit your protein target. Bodyweight in grams, minimum. Prioritize it at breakfast. Do not skip the post-training window.

Consider a CGM. Even a month of continuous glucose monitoring will tell you more about how your body responds to specific foods than any diet book. Levels Health is the platform I used for nearly three years. The data is genuinely eye-opening and I’d recommend it to any athlete serious about metabolic health.

Reduce added sugar. Specifically fructose in processed form — not fruit, not whole food sources. The ingredient list will tell you where it is hiding. High-fructose corn syrup, cane sugar, dextrose, maltose — there are 60-plus names for added sugar on labels.

Get honest about alcohol. You do not have to quit. But look at your Whoop data on nights you drink versus nights you do not and decide for yourself what the data is telling you. Or maybe read the alcohol post I shared awhile back; here ‘tis.

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The Slowfit Method® app puts Coach Keir AI in your pocket — trained on all ten pillars including this one. Ask it anything about your nutrition, what to eat before training, how to manage glucose, what ultra-processed food is doing to your body, or how to hit your protein targets. One hundred people have already downloaded this app, and I’ve got nine 5-star reviews on the App Store. Check it out!

I’ve added an easy way to book a free 30-minute introductory call with me to learn more about the Slowfit Method® and/or my AI Coach app, to discuss your training goals, or to explore what a private coaching relationship might look like. No pressure, no pitch — just a conversation.

BOOK HERE

—

Stick around.

Best,

Keir

THE COACH IS ON THE ROAD. THE APP IS IN THE GYM, OR THE OFFICE, OR THE STADIUM, OR….

July 22, 2026Healthai coaching, exercise, fitness, Health, human performance, personal-training, strength-training, wellness, workoutkjbeadling Leave a comment

I am somewhere between Salt Lake City and Omaha, with my Golden Retriever pup Ellie in her crate in the back with approximately 2,000 miles still ahead of us.

I’m behind the wheel for 7-10 hours a day. So the real Coach Keir is unavailable this week. He is driving, hydrating, eating cans of tuna and soup (yep, this is a thing with me), and listening to audiobooks about ultra-processed food (also a thing with me) while Ellie sleeps soundly in between pit stops (thankfully, this is a thing with her).

The AI Coach Keir, however, has not taken a single day off.

When I have a moment to check in on the app’s backend, this week I’ve been watching athletes I normally train with in person open The Slowfit Method® app, describe whatever equipment they have in front of them, and get complete, detailed, coaching-cued workouts back in seconds. No appointment. No Zoom link. No waiting for me to get off the highway.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Foghorn Fitness is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

—

Bob was at a track in San Francisco with stadium steps and a jump rope.

He asked for a 30-minute circuit with some push-ups or burpees. This is what Coach Keir AI gave him:

Warm-up (5 minutes): 2 minutes easy jump rope, World’s Greatest Stretch x5 per side, Hip 90/90 for 60 seconds, thoracic rotation x5 per side, leg swings front/back and side to side x10 each.

The circuit (20 minutes, 4 rounds, 60-90 seconds rest between rounds): Jump rope 60 seconds at moderate pace, stadium steps — run or power-walk up, walk down (one full trip), push-ups 10-15 reps full range chest to ground, burpees 5 reps quality over speed with full extension at the top, stadium steps — second trip up, walk down.

A legitimate Foghorn workout. Stadium steps, bodyweight, jump rope. No gym required.

—

Chris had a jump rope and a 30lb sandbell.

He asked for a HIIT workout. Coach Keir AI named it the Foghorn HIIT — Rope and Sandbell and built him this:

4 rounds, approximately 30 minutes, 60 seconds rest between rounds.

Jump rope for 60 seconds, sandbell slam for 10 reps, jump rope for 45 seconds, sandbell clean and press for 8 reps, jump rope for 30 seconds, sandbell rotational lunge for 6 reps each side.

The coaching cues were specific: for the sandbell slam, drive it down from overhead with the whole body — hinge, load the hips, reach to the sky, then throw it at the ground. For the clean and press, it is one fluid movement, not three separate ones. For the rotational lunge, step into it, rotate the sandbell across the lead knee at the bottom — Weck Method rotational power, head over foot, spiral through the spine.

The science note at the end cited Dr. Martin Gibala’s research at McMaster showing that short interval sessions match or exceed hours of moderate cardio for VO2 max and metabolic function. Then it linked his book.

—

Chris came back and asked for more.

This time: TRX, sandbell, and jump rope together. Coach Keir AI called it the Foghorn Full-Body Athlete and built a 40-minute, 4-round session.

Warm-up: jump rope 2 minutes easy rhythm, TRX hip hinge x10, TRX chest stretch 30 seconds each side, sandbell halo x8 each direction.

The circuit: jump rope double time for 60 seconds, TRX atomic push-up for 8 reps (full push-up, then drive both knees to chest simultaneously at the top — hips level, no piking), sandbell rotational slam for 10 reps (load the hip on one side, rotate through the torso, slam at a diagonal, alternate sides — pure rotational power), TRX suspended lunge for 8 each leg (rear foot in the cradle, front foot planted, sink straight down — these will humble you fast at any fitness level), sandbell clean and press for 8 reps, TRX row for 12 reps (body at 45 degrees or lower, pull elbows past ribs, squeeze scapulae at the top, slow the eccentric on the way down — that’s where the gains live), jump rope single leg alternating for 30 seconds each leg (balance and coordination challenge as much as cardio — if you lose it, reset and go again, no ego), sandbell lateral lunge and reach for 6 each side (step wide, sit into that hip, reach the sandbell toward the outside of the foot at the bottom — loaded hip mobility pattern, perfect for longevity goals).

Finisher after round 4: sandbell farmer carry 2×40 steps, jump rope 90 seconds your choice of tempo, TRX plank hold 60 seconds.

Recovery note from Coach Keir AI: after a session like this, the lymphatic system needs to move that metabolic waste out. Don’t just collapse on the couch — take a 10-minute walk, get some elevation in the legs, and hydrate. That’s where the adaptation happens.

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Brought a Smile to My Face.

This is the app doing exactly what it was built to do. Bob and Chris train with me regularly in San Francisco. This week, while I’m in a car somewhere in the Mountain West, they are getting complete Foghorn-style sessions with full coaching cues, exercise science citations, and recovery protocols — built specifically for the equipment they have in front of them, in real time.

The free tier gives you ten exchanges with Coach Keir AI. Start there. Ask it what to do with the equipment you have. See what comes back. There are also a handful of written and video-on-demand workouts already loaded up in the app; you can run those if you’re feeling lucky. But remember, this is not just something for heavy-sweating gym rats (and no, I’m not suggesting that Bob and Chris are heavy-sweating gym rats). If you want to learn how to breathe better, eat better, sleep better, manage stress better, etc.—The app and I are here for you. Even if one of us is gripping a steering wheel non-stop for the next week.

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One more thing: want to talk to the real Coach Keir?

This is new. I’ve added an easy way to book a free 30-minute introductory call with me to learn more about the Slowfit Method® and/or my AI Coach app, to discuss your training goals, or to explore what a private coaching relationship might look like. No pressure, no pitch — just a conversation.

BOOK HERE

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One more pitch for the app! The Slowfit Method® app puts Coach Keir AI in your pocket — trained on all ten pillars including Movement and Strength. One hundred people have already downloaded this app, and I’ve got nine 5-star reviews on the App Store. Check it out! Slowfit Paid is $29.99 a month — a dollar a day — and gives you unlimited coaching chat conversations, full Vault access, and a growing library of on-demand workout videos.

Foghorn Fitness is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid Substack subscriber.

Stick around.

Best,

Keir

YOU TAKE 20,000 BREATHS A DAY. HERE’S WHY MOST OF THEM ARE WORKING AGAINST YOU.

July 21, 2026Healthai coaching, human performance, personal-training, wellnesskjbeadling Leave a comment

At the end of the last post in this series — the Mindset pillar — I teased what was coming next.

Breathing. Specifically, why the way you breathe right now — most likely through your mouth, shallowly, chaotically — is undermining your performance, your sleep, and your stress response.

That was not hyperbole.

You take roughly 20,000 breaths a day. It is the only autonomic function you can also consciously control — the hinge point between your voluntary and involuntary nervous systems. And for most people reading this, the vast majority of those 20,000 breaths are making things worse. Not by a little. By a lot.

Let’s talk about why, and what to do about it.

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James Nestor changed how I think about this

I referenced James Nestor in the walking post — noting that what he did for breathing, Conley and McDowell did for walking. Let me back up and actually give him his due here, because his book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is the text that cracked this topic open for me and for a lot of people.

Nestor spent years reporting on breathing, including blocking one nostril and spending ten days breathing exclusively through his mouth while scientists monitored everything that happened. Blood pressure went up. Snoring started. Sleep deteriorated. Cognitive function declined. Athletic performance dropped.

Then he switched to nasal-only breathing for ten days. Everything reversed.

His core finding: humans a long time ago breathed correctly. We have systematically unlearned how. The fossil record shows it — ancient skulls have wide jaws, spacious airways, straight teeth. Modern skulls, starting roughly with the industrial revolution and accelerating sharply with the rise of processed food and sedentary indoor life, show narrowed jaws, crowded teeth, reduced airway diameter, and the structural consequences of a species that has stopped chewing hard food and started breathing through its mouth.

This is not a minor lifestyle quibble. Nestor’s argument is that dysfunctional breathing is at the root of conditions ranging from anxiety and poor sleep to cardiovascular disease and immune dysfunction. And the fix — at its most fundamental — is embarrassingly simple: close your mouth.

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Patrick McKeown on The Ready State

If Nestor is the journalist who broke the story, Patrick McKeown is the scientist who built the clinical framework around it.

McKeown is the founder of the Buteyko Clinic, author of The Oxygen Advantage, and one of the world’s most rigorous researchers on functional breathing. He recently appeared on The Ready State podcast with Kelly and Juliet Starrett — and given that Kelly Starrett is the person I credit for transforming how I think about mobility, movement, and physical preparation, this was a conversation I paid close attention to.

The key ideas from that episode:

Most people are chronically over-breathing. This sounds counterintuitive — we tend to think more breath equals more oxygen. But breathing too much actually depletes CO2, which is not just a waste gas. CO2 is the signal that tells your red blood cells to release oxygen to your tissues. When you over-breathe and drive down CO2, your body actually delivers less oxygen to where it needs to go, despite you breathing more. Paradox. A real one.

The BOLT score is your breathing baseline. BOLT stands for Body Oxygen Level Test. Take a normal breath in through your nose, exhale normally, then pinch your nose and time how long it takes before you feel the first urge to breathe. Not the maximum you can hold — just the first urge. A score under 20 seconds indicates dysfunctional breathing. Elite endurance athletes typically score 40 seconds or more. Most sedentary adults score 10 to 15 seconds. This one number tells you a lot about your CO2 tolerance, your anxiety baseline, and your recovery capacity.

McKeown also covers why women experience breathing and sleep differently than men — particularly around menopause — and why many sleep disorders in women may be going undiagnosed because sleep studies were historically designed around male breathing patterns. Example number 5,345 of how women are not just small men.

Mouth breathing in kids is a hidden developmental crisis. Mouth breathing in children has been proven to cause poor academic performance, craniofacial deformities, dental problems, and behavioral issues. If you have kids, this episode is worth paying very close attention to.

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How to Measure Your CO2 Tolerance: The CO2 Exhale Test

Jesse Coomer’s The Language of Breath offers a complementary test to the BOLT score — one I’ve found particularly useful because it measures a different dimension of CO2 tolerance. This protocol was originally developed by elite fitness trainer Brian Mackenzie. It’s the one with which Foghorn athletes are the most familiar.

Where the BOLT score measures how long you can go before the urge to breathe strikes, the CO2 Exhale Test measures how long and slowly you can exhale — which reflects your nervous system’s relationship with CO2 and your actual breathing control.

Wanna give it a shot right now? Before taking the test, breathe normally. Don’t practice or mimic the test first; just breathe naturally. You will need a stopwatch.

Step 1: Take a deep breath through your nose and relax it out to neutral lungs.

Step 2: Wait until you feel the urge to breathe, then take another deep breath and relax it out to neutral lungs.

Step 3: Wait until you feel the urge to breathe again, then take a deep and full breath through your nose.

Step 4: Begin the timer as you exhale through your nose for as long and as slowly as you can.

Stop the stopwatch when any of the following occur: you completely run out of air; you swallow; or there is any interruption in the airflow as you exhale.

Your time is your score.

Scores and their meaning:

0 to 20 seconds: Very poor CO2 tolerance. Retest the following day to confirm — many people score low when under significant stress or illness. Before working on CO2 tolerance techniques, get this score to at least 21. Cardiovascular exercise is one of the best ways to improve it naturally. Do not jump into advanced CO2 tolerance training at this stage; it will add stress rather than improve tolerance.

21 to 40 seconds: Average modern human. You can begin CO2 tolerance training. You have significant room for improvement. This is where most of my athletes start out.

41 to 60 seconds: Advanced. A healthy range. You generally have a relaxed and smooth breathing pattern and can slow your breathing down relatively easily after exertion.

61 to 80 seconds: Elite. Your natural breathing pattern is slow and smooth, you rarely breathe more than you need to, and you experience increased resilience against stressors.

80 seconds and above: Master. You have become very comfortable with CO2 and are highly resilient against stress. I have athletes who’ve been training with me for a few years—which means they’ve been training their breath with me for that long—who are bumping along towards two and a half minutes. Yep.

Take both tests — the BOLT and the CO2 Exhale Test — and you have a meaningful baseline picture of your breathing health. Most people are surprised by how low they score. That’s not a reason for discouragement. It’s a reason to train.

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The Language of Breath: where conscious meets unconscious

I recently read Coomer’s The Language of Breath — endorsed by McKeown himself , by the way — and it has a framing I really like.

Coomer’s core argument is that breathing is the one function where the conscious and unconscious self meet. Your heart beats without you. Your digestion runs without you. Your immune system operates without you. But your breath does all of this automatically — and also responds instantly to your conscious direction. It’s the bridge.

He cites the research: 95 percent of brain activity is unconscious. Your senses are reporting approximately eleven million pieces of information at any given moment. You consciously process about forty. The rest — your heart rate, your posture, your emotional state, your stress response — is being handled by your unconscious self, constantly, relentlessly, using everything it knows about your history and your environment.

Your breath is continuously informing that system. When you mouth-breathe, shallowly, rapidly, your unconscious self interprets this as a threat signal. It doesn’t know you’re just sitting at a desk answering email. It knows your breathing looks like the pattern of someone in danger. And it responds accordingly.

Coomer’s framing: “Most of our troubles in the modern age come from a lack of awareness of these foundational relationships.” We have become, in his words, mind-body machine operators rather than whole beings. Breathing, done correctly, is how you start to close that gap.

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Jaws: the structural problem underneath everything

No conversation about dysfunctional breathing is complete without talking about the jaw.

Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich open the relevant chapter of Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic with a line that I love: “Our jaws are built for a Stone Age diet, but we’re living in a Big Mac environment.”

Sheee-it. Nailed it.

That single sentence explains a remarkable amount. Our jaws are built for a Stone Age diet — tough meats, fibrous tubers, nuts, fruits that required real chewing effort, hours of it daily. What we get instead is soft bread, yogurt, applesauce, processed food bolted down in minutes. Kahn and Ehrlich identify three core areas of cultural shift that have driven the modern jaw crisis: what we eat and how we eat it, slack jaw and prevailing oral posture, and indoor living and how we breathe. All three are interconnected. All three are getting worse.

The structural consequences are measurable and serious. The human jaw has been shrinking for roughly 300 years. The result is narrow palates, crowded teeth, reduced airway diameter, and a structural predisposition to mouth breathing, snoring, and sleep-disordered breathing. Children of parents who cut food into tiny pieces — out of fear of choking — miss out on the learning experience of how the tongue and muscles coordinate to maximize extraction of nutrients from a meal, and don’t get the muscle exercise needed for healthy jaw development.

Orthodontia fixes the cosmetic symptoms. It doesn’t fix the airway.

If you struggle to breathe through your nose, there may be a structural reason. Addressing it — through myofunctional therapy, palate expansion, or airway-focused dental work — may matter more than any breathing protocol. And chewing more — harder foods, longer duration, starting in childhood — is the lowest-cost, highest-impact intervention available.

In the meantime, work on proper oral posture—mouth closed, teeth lightly touching, tongue pressed up against the soft palate. Simple, right? Kids, too.

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What the research is showing

The science on breathwork has matured significantly in recent years.

A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials showed that breathwork interventions significantly reduced self-reported stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. Slow-paced breathing was particularly effective in promoting parasympathetic activity and increasing heart rate variability.

Even single sessions of as little as two minutes of slow breathing have been shown to increase HRV, suggesting breathwork is accessible, cost-effective, and immediately impactful.

A 2024 randomized controlled trial published in JAMA Open Network found that physicians who regularly practiced structured breathwork over two months experienced significant decreases in insomnia, stress, and anxiety.

For athletes, the data on nasal breathing during training is accumulating. McKeown’s Oxygen Advantage framework — training with nasal-only breathing during moderate-intensity work — has been shown to improve CO2 tolerance, increase VO2 efficiency, and reduce the ventilatory threshold. Kipchoge ran his sub-two-hour marathon with his mouth closed for most of it! Worth noting.

If you are using Whoop and your HRV is suppressed, your breathing habits during the day and during sleep may be a primary driver.

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Practical takeaways

The good news: the interventions are free, require no equipment, and can begin immediately.

Take both tests. Do the BOLT score and the CO2 Exhale Test today. Write both numbers down. These are your baselines. Return to them in four weeks of nasal breathing practice and see what changes.

Tape your mouth at night. McKeown and Nestor both do it. Micropore medical tape across the lips encourages nasal breathing during sleep, reduces snoring, and improves sleep quality for many people within a few nights. Works for me.

Train nasal. During easy and moderate-intensity training — your Zone 2 work, your warm-up, your cool-down — breathe exclusively through your nose. If you can’t maintain nasal breathing at a given pace, slow down. Your pace will catch up to your breathing capacity over weeks of training.

Use the downregulation protocol before bed. Nasal breathing only, belly-led inhales, exhale twice as long as the inhale, 4-count in and 8-count out, three to five minutes minimum, thirty minutes before bed. This is your direct dial into the parasympathetic nervous system. Use it every night.

Practice box breathing for stress. Four counts in through the nose, four counts hold, four counts out through the nose, four counts hold. Four rounds. This is what military units use for acute stress regulation.

Chew. Hard foods, more often. Sugar-free xylitol gum. Tougher proteins. Raw vegetables. Your jaw is a use-it-or-lose-it structure — and relatively little chewing early in life can alter the development of your entire face, jaws, and airways.

Learn the Wim Hof Method for upregulation. And here’s one more big one, as every Foghorn athlete knows: Wim Hof Method upregulation breathing. Every training session I run – bootcamp, 1:1, Zoom – begins with a round of Wim Hof Method breathing. This is the other side of the breathwork coin. Where the downregulation protocol dials you down, WHM dials you up. It is a deliberate, controlled form of hyperventilation that primes your nervous system, floods your body with adrenaline, alkalizes your blood, and generates a state of heightened focus and physical readiness before you start moving. I’ve been using it as a warmup tool for years, and the science has been catching up fast. A 2024 systematic review in PLOS ONE found promising evidence for WHM’s effects on inflammatory response and exercise performance. A randomized controlled trial published in 2024 showed WHM practice reduced depressive symptoms and stress – with high-arousal WHM-style breathing specifically outperforming calming protocols for some individuals, challenging the assumption that breathwork should always be downregulatory. A 2023 study in Scientific Reports found that 15 days of WHM practice improved blood pressure, HRV, and subjective vitality.

The protocol: sit or lie down comfortably. Take 20 to 30 deep, powerful breaths – inhale fully through the nose or mouth, then let go without forcing the exhale. Keep a steady, rhythmic pace. After the final exhale, hold your breath with empty lungs for as long as comfortable – most people start at 60 seconds and build to two or three minutes over time. Then take one deep recovery breath, hold it for 10 to 15 seconds, and release. That’s one round. Do three to four rounds. You will feel tingling, lightheadedness, and a warmth spreading through your body – all normal, all physiological. Do not do this in water, while driving, or anywhere a loss of consciousness would be dangerous. When you finish, you are primed. Now go train. For the full method, Wim Hof’s book is the place to start: The Wim Hof Method.

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Next up in this series: Nutrition. Specifically, why the most important dietary intervention most people could make costs nothing, requires no supplements, and is not a diet at all.

All ten pillars of the Slowfit Method® live here on Substack and at foghornfitness.com. Paid subscribers get deeper dives, workout programming, and the full resource library.

The Slowfit Method® app puts Coach Keir AI in your pocket — trained on all ten pillars including this one. Ask it anything about your breathing, your CO2 tolerance, your sleep, or your stress. One hundred people have already downloaded this app, and I’ve got nine 5-star views on the App Store. Check it out!

Get the app

And if you’re interested in a 1:1 private coaching relationship, you can book sessions at foghornfitness.com . You can even book a free intro discussion with me to learn more about how the Slowfit Method® could amp up your performance, health and happiness.

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Stick around.

Best,

Keir

THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW ME BEST SHOWED UP FIRST.

July 9, 2026Health, human performanceai, ai coaching, artificial intelligence, fitness, Health, human performance, technologykjbeadling Leave a comment

When I launched the Slowfit Method® app, I wasn’t sure who would show up first in the reviews. What I didn’t expect — and what means more to me than I’ll probably admit — is that the first people to leave public reviews in the App Store are people who actually know me. A couple former clients. A current client. Good friends.

These aren’t strangers being generous to a product they stumbled across. These are people who have trained with me, withstood my harangues about mobility and sleep, and have a very high bar for what good coaching looks like. No BS. When they put their name on something publicly, they mean it.

We’re nearly 100 downloads in. Every review so far is five stars. Here’s what they said.

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“Great app, great coach” — Lhitchcock

“Just used the Slowfit Coach to design a custom workout with my specific fitness issues and goals. I also work with Coach Keir in person and this app is a great extension of his expertise. Perfect complement…”

A current training client. Someone who knows exactly what my in-person coaching looks like — and is telling you this holds up against it.

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“Yes!!!!” — Govivo

“Love this app!”

Short, enthusiastic, unambiguous. From a good friend who has watched this project develop for a long time and knows what went into it.

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“Impactful App” — dgathlete

“Coach Keir has nailed it w this app. Super engaging w insights honed over decades training athletes (and non athletes!) alike. Highly recommend!”

A buddy and former athlete of mine. Someone who trained with me and has been in the trenches of the Slowfit Method® framework firsthand. “Insights honed over decades” — that’s someone who has experienced what that actually means.

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“Get this app!” — Past Foghorn athlete

Another former athlete. Four words. No ambiguity.

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Four written reviews. Nine five-star ratings. All from people with direct experience of what this coaching framework looks and feels like in practice. That’s the kind of signal that matters.

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Then something shifted.

This past week, a number of new downloads came in from people I don’t recognize. Not clients. Not friends. Not bootcamp group exercise regulars. Strangers. People I have never met, who found the app on their own and decided to download it.

I’ll be honest — I have no idea how they’re finding it. My marketing budget is zero dollars. There are no ads. No paid placements. No influencer partnerships. Just this Substack, word of mouth, and apparently the universe doing its thing.

People are finding the app.

That is an extremely rewarding thing to sit with. It means the work is traveling on its own. It means someone told someone, or a Substack post landed in front of the right eyes, or someone searched for something and the app showed up. Whatever the path, they found it. They downloaded it. And presumably they’re using it.

That’s the whole experiment. And it’s working.

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What people are actually doing with it

Folks are using the app exactly as I intended. As a tool, not as an infinite scroll machine.

My niece Mackenzie and her new husband Jimmy were on a family vacation — 2,500 miles from their human coach uncle — when she opened the app and typed one sentence to Coach Keir AI: “I want a 20 min body weight strength workout to do on vacation today.” What came back was a complete structured session with warm-up, a three-round circuit, coaching cues, and a cool-down. They did it outside in the grass by a lake together. She texted me a sweaty selfie afterward. That’s the whole point of everything I’m trying to build.

Chili is a Tuesday morning bootcamp regular at the Presidio YMCA. He showed up to class, trained hard, and then — that evening — used the app to ask Coach Keir AI how to optimize his sleep after a tough workout. He got a specific, science-backed protocol tailored to the physiological demands of what his body had just been through. Not a generic sleep tip. A coaching answer to a coaching question.

Then there’s the trio I wrote about in the Ten-Question Rule post a few weeks ago. Kari asked for a 10-minute mobility flow she could do anywhere and got Kelly Starrett’s Ready State protocol with the science behind it. Alicia asked about the Nutrition pillar of the Slowfit Method® and one action she could take today, got three words — “eat real food” — and a full framework, and went to read ingredient labels. Andy asked what the most important thing he could do tonight to improve his sleep was, got a complete downregulation breathing protocol, and went to bed. None of them needed a follow-up. None of them stayed on the app longer than they needed to.

Ten free exchanges with Coach Keir AI. Used wisely. Like wishes from a genie, not chips at a casino.

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The real Coach Keir is going on vacation. The AI one isn’t.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about as I pack for a month away (and prep for a cross-country solo drive with our new puppy).

I built The Slowfit Method® app specifically for moments like this one. Clients, group exercise athletes, and others are already telling me they’re planning to use it while I’m gone — to help them sleep, eat well, train smart, and recover properly, all while their human coach is physically unavailable. That is exactly the use case I built this for.

The real Coach Keir needs to unplug. He needs to recharge. A month away on a beach, away from the bootcamp, away from the Zoom calls. Quality family time. That’s not a bug in the coaching model — it’s a feature of being a sustainable human being.

The AI Coach Keir doesn’t need a vacation. He’s available at 11pm when you can’t sleep. At 6am when you’re deciding whether to train. On a Tuesday afternoon when you’re trying to figure out what to eat before a long run. When you’re freaked after a tough work conversation and need a quick downregulation breathing protocol. He’s there. He doesn’t get tired. He doesn’t need to recharge. And he’s drawing on the same decade of methodology that I bring to every in-person session and every Zoom call.

I built the app for exactly this purpose. I’m about to prove it works.

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What this is and isn’t

The Slowfit Method® app is not a generic AI fitness tool that aggregates whatever is trending on the internet this week. It is not a chatbot trained on Wikipedia and Reddit threads about protein shakes. It is a decade of training and coaching methodology, pillar by pillar, encoded into an AI system that responds the way I would respond — because it was built on the framework I use with real clients in real sessions.

That’s what dgathlete means by “insights honed over decades training athletes (and non athletes!) alike.” That’s what Lhitchcock means by “a great extension of his expertise.” The app doesn’t replace the human coach. It extends him into places and hours the human coach can’t be. 2,500 miles away. 11pm on a Tuesday. A month away on vacation.

The Vault inside the app contains 300+ personally curated books, podcasts, gear, and supplement recommendations organized by Slowfit pillar. Coach Keir AI draws on all ten pillars — Purpose, Mindset, Breathing, Sleep, Nutrition, Movement, Recovery, Hydration, Community, and Strength — in every conversation.

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The free tier is real. So is the upgrade.

The free tier gives you ten exchanges with Coach Keir AI. Use them wisely and you will get genuine value. Treat them like chips at a slot machine and you’ll burn through them on questions you could have Googled.

Slowfit Pro is $29.99 a month — a dollar a day — and gives you unlimited coaching conversations, full Vault access, and a growing library of on-demand workout videos.

Plus, I’m gonna keep this t-shirt thing going, since I love seeing Foghorn schwag out in the wild. So I’m offering a Foghorn Fitness t-shirt to the next two people who upgrade to a paid subscription. I’ll mail it to you personally. To upgrade, open the app, go to Settings, and tap Change Plan. Thirty seconds.

Download the Slowfit Method® app here: