The Code: A Guide to Health and Human Performance

How do you keep showing up when every setback gives you another reason to quit?   After nearly walking away from baseball, Jake Bauers became the NLCS MVP, helping lead the Milwaukee Brewers to their first World Series appearance in 44 years. His comeback offers a lesson in patience, resilience, and knowing when to keep going.   In this solo episode of The Code, Dr. Andrew Fix shares what Jake Bau...

The fastest way to lose your love for running might be to turn every workout into a test of your worth.   How do you push yourself to improve without turning something you love into another source of stress? And what happens when injuries or setbacks make you question what you're capable of?   In this episode of The Code, Dr. Andrew Fix sits down with running coach Jen Hickman, founder of Persever...

Dr. Andrew Fix planned to work out in the afternoon. By 7:40 p.m., he was still in his garage, squeezing in whatever exercise he had time for. His point is, a short workout beats skipping one because the day didn't go as planned.   Perfectionism can make simple goals harder than they need to be. When the plan changes or the timing falls apart, it becomes easy to do nothing. Dr. Andrew Fix shares w...

The workout that changes your life is the one you’ll actually come back to.   So what makes someone stick with fitness while someone else keeps starting over? For coach and personal trainer Jeremy Crawford, the answer often comes down to connection, environment, and whether the approach actually fits your life.   Jeremy joins Dr. Andrew Fix to explore why the right coach, gym, or community can mak...

The person you want to become isn’t waiting somewhere in the future. Your choices today decide who shows up.   Dr. Andrew Fix shares a simple mindset shift that can change how you approach your health, work, relationships, and everyday habits: stop treating personal growth like a constant effort to fix yourself. Instead, consider the person you want to be and start making choices from that identit...

Communications coach David "Kiwi" Kiwimagi joins Dr. Andrew Fix to explain why unspoken expectations quietly wreck marriages and workplaces alike, and how a few simple frameworks can turn resentment into agreement before it ever takes root.   Kiwi built his coaching career on a hard truth learned from his own marriage: most conflict has nothing to do with bad intentions and everything to do with e...

You can't expect to get better at anything you've never actually practiced, and Dr. Andrew Fix explains why performance and practice are two completely different skills.   Picture missing shot after shot on a basketball hoop you haven't touched in years. Then getting annoyed at yourself for being rusty. Andrew unpacks the real gap. You have the ability. You skipped the practice. When was the last...

Don Dillon endured roughly four years of unexplained seizures and immune collapse during his Navy years, and decades later he built a supplement bar designed to survive the very manufacturing process that destroys most nutrients before they ever reach your mouth.   Dillon is the founder and CEO of Sound Foods, and he joins Dr. Fix to unpack the real reason most people quit their supplement routine...

Two runners can have identical knee pain and need completely different fixes, and Dr. Andrew Fix explains why chasing generic advice off YouTube usually leaves the real problem untouched.   The same symptom can point to a different injury, and even the same injury can have a different cause. One runner's knee pain might come from a tendon pushed past its capacity by too much training volume too fa...

Amanda Theodore is training for the 2028 Olympic Trials marathon with Pop-Tarts before most runs and a hard lesson about what happens when athletes eat too little instead of too much.   Amanda joins Dr. Andrew Fix for a conversation about marathon training that moves well past splits and mileage logs. She talks openly about the eating disorder she developed at Duke, the femoral neck stress fractur...

From behind the wheel on a travel day fueled by too little sleep and too much airport food, Dr. Andrew Fix breaks down what it takes to protect your training, nutrition, and sanity when travel throws your routine into chaos.   Two flights, two little ones, and a 2 a.m. wake-up call set the stage for a candid look at what happens when the ideal routine falls apart under the weight of travel. Andrew...

Mental performance coach Stacy Ingram reveals why teen athletes with the most talent still hit a wall when they haven't trained the mental side.   Talent gets an athlete to the starting line, but mental toughness is what decides who's still standing at the finish. Dr. Andrew Fix sits down with Stacy, founder of Catalyst Mental Performance, to explore why so many young athletes build their entire m...

Dr. Andrew Fix pushed his body through a full HYROX simulation in the Colorado heat and walked away with a hard lesson about pacing that every first-timer needs to hear before race day.   What happens when a plan built on paper meets an actual clock, real heat, and eight stations back-to-back? Andrew found out firsthand at a HYROX simulation held with the team from CrossFit Falcon View. He went ou...

Dr. Andrew Fix once called HYROX dumb, so why did he sign up for the hardest fitness competition of his life anyway?   Dr. Andrew Fix records this episode from the parking lot of REI's Denver flagship, prepping for a Run Denver Day event, and uses the moment to talk through his decision to race HYROX this November. He breaks down what the competition actually involves: eight one-kilometer runs spl...

Running won't outrun your trauma, and therapist Don Harris explains why the fastest people at the finish line are often the ones still carrying the most weight.   Don Harris has built a practice and a run club around the same idea: movement helps, but connection does the deeper work. As a therapist who works with both teenagers and adults, he's learned that the question "What's wrong with you?" ra...

What happens to your identity the day you can no longer do the thing you built it on?   Dr. Andrew Fix reflects on a recent 5K to explore a question most people avoid. Are you measuring your worth against a version of yourself that no longer exists? He breaks down why running a race and comparing the result to an old personal record ignores everything that has changed along the way, from injuries...

Ben Braverman dropped from 240 pounds and a couple of prescriptions to a sub-3:40 marathon, and he says the real transformation happened somewhere between his ears.   Ben joins Dr. Andrew Fix to talk about what actually changes when someone moves from the far end of the wellness spectrum toward something closer to optimization. His story starts with running for beginners in its truest form: a guy...

The real test of motivation begins in the morning when life gives you another reason to quit.   Motivation, drive, and aging all meet in one honest question. What keeps you moving when your body feels different, the news is hard, or the next step feels heavier than usual? In this episode of The Code, Dr. Andrew Fix reflects on a conversation with a client who felt discouraged after receiving diffi...

Red and near-infrared light may be the most underestimated recovery tool in your environment, and the science behind what it actually does inside your cells is far more compelling than the wellness industry gives it credit for.   Scott Chaverri didn't set out to build one of the leading red light therapy companies in the country. He was a burnt-out caregiver looking for anything that would help hi...

That tight hamstring you've been stretching might be your nervous system asking for something else entirely.   When pain shows up in one place, the source is often somewhere else. Dr. Andrew Fix walks through a real patient case from Physio Room where a woman who was experiencing persistent pain in her hamstring had been doing what most people do: stretching it out and hoping mobility work would e...

The secret to staying consistent might be hiding in your backyard.   Most people quit their fitness routines not because they lack discipline, but because progress is invisible in the short term. We live in a world wired for instant gratification, and when weeks of hard work in the gym produce no visible results, that invisibility is defeating. Yard work offers a useful contrast. Pull a weed, see...

When the question every injured runner is afraid to ask, "Do I have to stop?",  finally gets a straight answer, it turns out the real story has less to do with the pain itself and more to do with everything the runner wasn't tracking.   Dr. Andrew Fix sits down with Dr. Vikash Sharma, DPT, founder of Perfect Stride Physical Therapy in New York, to talk through managing running injuries, avoiding s...

Most runners are one bad training week away from an injury they never saw coming, and the way they think about shoes, strength, and recovery is probably making that worse.   Dr. Drew Short specializes in working with runners at PhysioRoom, and his approach to running injury recovery starts somewhere most people wouldn't expect: months back in an athlete's training log. The culprit behind most inju...

Sleep isn't a luxury you negotiate with; it's the biological foundation every other health habit is built on, and most people are getting far less of it than they think.   Dr. Andrew Fix revisits one of the show's most foundational episodes for Better Sleep Month, and the timing feels personal. A new baby at home has a way of clarifying just how much everything falls apart when sleep does. Drawing...

Aging gets blamed for a lot of things that may have more to do with disuse, fear, and incomplete advice than the number of candles on your birthday cake.   Dr. Andrew Fix talks with physical therapist Eileen Kopsaftis about pain, aging, and strength through a lens that challenges the usual story of decline. Eileen questions the idea that weakness, balance issues, loss of independence, and chronic...