40-Year-Old Men's Health is a Lie
A conversation with Dr. Tracy Gapin on why everything you've been told about aging is wrong and what to do about it.
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40-Year-Old Men’s Health is a Lie
You’re tired.
Not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep fixes. The kind that sits in your bones. The kind that makes 2 PM feel like a war you’re losing.
You’ve got brain fog. You can’t focus the way you used to. The fire that built your business? It’s flickering.
And you’ve been told this is normal.
“You’re getting older.”
“This is just what happens in your 40s.”
“Welcome to the club.”
It’s a lie.
A lie that’s costing you your energy, your drive, your relationships, and yes—your business.
I sat down with Dr. Tracy Gapin, a former board-certified urologist who spent 23 years in traditional medicine before walking away to focus on what actually matters: optimizing men’s health, not just treating disease.
What he shared changed how I think about my own health.
…and if you’re a founder, entrepreneur, or high-performer who feels like you’ve lost a step, it might change yours too.
Connect with Dr. Tracy Gapin
Website: gapininstitute.com
Free Resources: gapininstitute.com/launch — Get a free copy of his bestselling book Male 2.0, the High Performance Health Handbook, and the Ultimate Peptide Guide.
The Stat That Should Terrify You
Here’s the number that stopped me cold:
Testosterone levels in men have dropped 45% over the last 20 years.
Read that again.
A 40-year-old man today has roughly half the testosterone of a 40-year-old man in 2004. This isn’t opinion. This is data from multiple longitudinal studies spanning decades.
And it’s getting worse. Every year. By another percent or so.
What does that mean for you?
It means the “normal” range your doctor references is based on a population that is increasingly deficient. You could be in the “normal” range and still be operating at 50% of your potential.
It means the fatigue, the brain fog, the belly fat that won’t budge, the disappearing sex drive—these aren’t inevitable signs of aging. They’re symptoms of a crisis that nobody is talking about.
Dr. Gapin put it bluntly:
“Anyone who wants to take a nap in the middle of the afternoon, there’s something really wrong. You should not want to take a nap unless you’re 90 years old.”
Healthspan = Wealthspan
This is the core concept Dr. Gapin hammers home, and it’s the one that resonates most deeply with me.
As entrepreneurs, we are obsessed with optimizing our businesses. We track every metric. We hire coaches. We read the books. We attend the conferences.
And then we completely neglect the one asset that makes all of it possible: our bodies.
We sacrifice sleep to hit deadlines.
We skip workouts because we’re “too busy.” We eat like garbage because it’s convenient.
We tell ourselves we’ll focus on health “later”—after the next funding round, after the product launch, after we hit the revenue target.
Later never comes.
And then one day, you wake up and realize you’ve built something incredible, but you’re too exhausted, too foggy, too broken to enjoy it.
Dr. Gapin sees this constantly: “Founders, entrepreneurs, small business owners, executives.
We are so focused on building our business, on our career, on taking care of our clients and generating revenue. What do we do? We sacrifice ourselves. We put ourselves behind everyone else.”
The ROI on your health is infinite. There is nothing—no strategy, no hire, no marketing tactic—that will have a bigger impact on your business than showing up every day with energy, focus, and clarity.
Your healthspan is your wealthspan.
The System Is Broken (And Your Doctor Can’t Help You)
I shared my own story in this episode.
Two years ago, I hit a wall. Energy gone. Brain fog constant. Drive disappeared. I went to my GP, and her solution? Adderall and Lipitor.
I didn’t want either.
I pushed back. I asked questions. I advocated for myself. And eventually, I found a hormone optimization specialist who actually listened, tested comprehensively, and helped me rebuild from the inside out.
Dr. Gapin had the same experience—as a doctor himself. He was 40, stressed, overweight, miserable, and his own physician’s only answer was a statin.
The problem isn’t that GPs are bad people. The problem is the system they operate in.
Traditional medicine is designed to treat disease, not optimize performance. It’s based on pharmaceuticals, driven by insurers, and staffed by burned-out doctors who must see 60 patients a day. They don’t have time to dig into your sleep, stress, gut health, or hormone panel.
They have a hammer, and everything looks like a nail.
Dr. Gapin calls what he does “precision performance medicine.”
It’s focused on prevention, optimization, and longevity—finding the hidden blind spots before they become catastrophic problems.
If you go to your GP and ask about optimizing your mitochondrial function, they’re going to look at you like you have three heads.
That’s not a knock on them. It’s just not what they’re trained for.
You have to become your own health advocate. And you have to find practitioners who operate in this space.
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The Cake Analogy (Stop Frosting a Disaster)
One of the best frameworks Dr. Gapin shared is what he calls the “cake analogy.”
Think of your health like baking a cake.
The cake itself—the foundation—is built from the basics: nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress management. These are the non-negotiables. Without a solid cake, nothing else matters.
Supplements, peptides, biohacks, fancy gadgets? That’s the frosting.
Frosting on a well-baked cake? Delicious. Transformative.
Frosting on a pile of garbage? Still garbage.
Too many people skip the fundamentals and jump straight to the hacks. They’re taking expensive supplements while eating like crap and sleeping four hours a night. They’re injecting peptides while their cortisol is through the roof from chronic stress.
It doesn’t work.
Dr. Gapin is a huge believer in peptides—he’s been prescribing them for over eight years. But he’s adamant:
“Peptides are not going to fix a broken foundation. You have to get the basics right first.”
Build the cake. Then add the frosting.
What You Should Do Next
If you take one thing from this conversation, let it be this:
Stop guessing. Start testing.
You can’t optimize what you don’t measure. And you can’t convince yourself to care about something until you see the data staring back at you.
Get a comprehensive panel done. Not the basic CBC your GP orders. A real panel that looks at:
Full hormone profile (testosterone, estrogen, thyroid, cortisol, growth hormone markers)
Inflammation markers
Metabolic health and blood sugar control
Cardiovascular markers (including APO B and LDL particle number, not just total cholesterol)
Micronutrients
Gut health
Let the data tell you where you stand.
…because as Dr. Gapin says, “Data doesn’t lie.”
You might think you feel fine.
You might be a master of adaptation, compensating for deficiencies you don’t even recognize.
But you don’t know how good you could feel until you get optimized.
This is the way.
Hanley
