Before recording, I hid Rudy Rubio’s Zoom face behind a script on my monitor. Why? Because I couldn’t read his intro without a good old LOL.
Rudy is a dear friend. One of the things I adore about him most is his ability to make you comfortable enough to be slightly ridiculous. Knowing this, I propped my script between us like a shield and read straight off my Google doc. “Thank God for editing,” I said.
Thirty seconds later I asked him to define strength - on a podcast about strength, no less - and he said, “I am unprepared for this question.” We laughed again.
While the laughter is inevitable, the insights he shares as an asthmatic-kid-turned-fitness-lover are applicable no matter where you are in your own fitness journey.
On this episode, we get into:
Rudy’s definition of strength which has nothing to do with the gym
That time he dropped a heavy barbell on his knee and what he learned
How to make yourself feel like a loser
Why CrossFit stopped being healthy for him
The one thing he does first in every hotel he stays at
Strength Isn’t What You Think It Is
In Rudy’s career, the startups, nonprofits, and early stage companies call when they need to build something from nothing, he is the operator that navigates chaos and creates clarity for everyone else. Since his work is ambiguous, I expected him to tell me the gym was a place where he gets structure, a way to assert control. The place where the numbers go up and the reps are the reps, it’s cut and dry. But, that’s not what he told me.
“I’m not the same person at the gym every day,” he said. Some days he’s tired. Some days his head’s somewhere else. Some days his body won’t cooperate. “But, it’s where I practice showing up inside of chaos.”
Training to show up in chaos is his practice. Keeping it dynamic and challenging in the gym keeps him flexible for what work has in store.
Rudy grew up in Texas, with asthma. As a kid he’d rather read than run. And if you’ve ever been to Texas and felt that level of heat and humidity, you know why. Thus, Rudy is the last person you’d expect to bring fitness into his life, let alone the person who builds four rotating [workout] splits. Yet, in his twenties, in the middle of what he calls “hard resets” - breakups, job changes, cities where he left everything behind - the thing that remained constant was showing up to move his body.
“It gave me a place to be honest with himself when nothing felt real,” he said.
Honesty is Rudy’s definition of strength. “The strongest moments [of my life] are tied directly to the emotional parts of my life,” he said. He’s talking about the vulnerable moments where he’s felt most himself. The gym - the place where he trains for chaos - is also where he learned how to access his truth and decide what he wants.
Quitting CrossFit
Going for the trifecta, the gym is also where Rudy learned what doesn’t work for him.
It took real nerve to quit something he loved. Rudy spent years deep in CrossFit, the community-driven, PR-chasing, leaderboard-checking culture that thrives on comparison. He loved it. (So do I. For the right workout.) And then he left because he noticed that standing next to someone stronger and feeling the need to keep up was quietly stealing something the joy of the workout from him.
He walked away from the community he’d built a big chunk of his identity around and picked up rock climbing instead.
CrossFit wasn’t a wrong choice, but eventually he outgrew it and it just stopped being right for him.
The Comparison Trap
To this day, Rudy isn’t immune to the comparison trap. He’s honest about that, too.
A few days before we recorded, he did a workout he hadn’t touched in over a year, Fran.
It’s a ballistic workout. Oh so very taxing on the system in a short amount of time.
He texted me feeling genuinely proud of himself. Then he quickly made the mistake of looking up what the “average times” for this workout are. His time fell in the “beginner” range and just like that the joy was gone. I’m the only one he told about the workout that day, no one said a word. The joy thievery was his own; by comparing himself to an imaginary standard he ruined his own joy. He did it to himself.
“I fucking showed up,” he told me, working his way back to feeling good about it.
Ninety percent of Americans don’t get baseline movement in at all and here Rudy was mad at himself for doing what he could that day. He didn’t talk himself out of the disappointment. He let time pass, reminded himself the results aren’t permanent, and went back to training.
“It’s not that we’ll never feel the comparison, it’s a deep refusal to let the comparison be the final word we hear,” Rudy shared.
The Hotel Room Habit
The very first thing Rudy does after he checks into a hotel is find the gym.
This doesn’t even give him a chance to not know where it is or what’s available. Getting the information is programmed into his hotel check-in process. If he doesn’t, he won’t even bother to go. So, he removes the excuse before it has a chance to exist. “The more information you have,” he said, “the easier it is to get excited about something, instead of just showing up and figuring it out. Or not doing it at all.”
It’s a small, unglamorous habit. (Being fit is very unglamorous.) It’s also evidence of how he makes fitness a non-negotiable: one less decision standing between him and moving his body.
A Barbell to the Knee
Rudy’s muscle moment left a mark, literally. He was doing a workout with power cleans, loaded up more weight than he should have, and the bar slipped and landed hard on his knee. He lost skin. There was blood. And, there was more to train so there were no complaints.
His lesson was accountability. He didn’t blame the bar, didn’t blame the coach. He knew exactly what he did to end up in this position. He made an ego decision to lift more than was programmed, couldn’t lock in his form or trust the process. It ended up not being his best.
“You still have to try,” he said. “Just because I did well yesterday doesn’t mean I’m going to do well today. The gym doesn’t hand out guarantees. It hands you the same choice, every single time you walk in,” he said.
That choice is to push yourself and risk discomfort, or do what feels safe for the day.
No Cheat Meals, Just Favorite Foods
Even nutrition gets the same honesty because… (drumroll, please)...Rudy doesn’t do cheat meals.
He says the concept doesn’t exist for him [anymore]. Instead Rudy has favorite foods that he eats guilt free inside a life that also includes a quarterly dry month and a husband who’s a great cook. “I’m not restricting myself a lot,” he said. “I want to be able to enjoy the days that I have.”
No guilt math for Rudy, just a life he built and wants to be inside of.
Take It With a Grain of Salt
Before we wrapped, I asked Rudy what advice he’d leave for you. His answer was to take everything he says with a grain of salt. What works for him might not work for anyone else. His advice is to keep trying different modalities until one of them sticks. So if what you needed was permission to keep looking until you find the type of movement, the type of fitness, that’s yours, this is it.
Your Turn: What’s one thing that you gave up before you found what works for you?
