Fitness thinking for a more deliberate life.
Chasing Excellence treats health as a daily practice, not a single workout plan or motivational mood. Its conversations move from fitness and food into emotional regulation, family language, sleep routines, discomfort, and the habits that keep people from drifting.
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Chasing Excellence is a health, fitness, and mindset show with a strong bias toward usable practice. It sounds like a conversation between people who care about performance but are more interested in what performance is for. Training matters here. So do sleep, nutrition, emotional regulation, family language, social connection, and the quiet habits that shape a day before anyone notices. Patrick and Ben often take a broad idea and give it a memorable handle. Drift becomes the name for a life that gets carried by comfort and defaults. Equanimity becomes the skill of feeling fully without reacting automatically. A reverse bucket list becomes a way to stop chasing what is already present. The show is practical without being shallow. A discussion about kids before bed becomes a discussion about language, self-talk, and helping children notice the stories forming in their heads. A nutrition segment about calorie trackers becomes a reminder that generalized equations can fail at the individual level. A motivation conversation with Jordan Metzl turns perceived effort into something that can be shaped through gamification, environment, and enjoyment. Guest episodes bring in authors and practitioners, but the format usually pulls them back toward a simple question: what can actually change tomorrow? The show also likes frameworks. The 5-3-1 listener guide, with big ideas, reflection questions, and a takeaway, captures its style neatly. It wants the idea to survive after the episode ends. The tone is warm, brisk, and slightly coachlike, with enough banter to keep the pace human. It can be earnest about peace of mind without sounding precious. It can talk about hard things without glamorizing suffering for its own sake. The central promise is not a perfect body or a perfect routine. It is a more deliberate life, built through repeated choices.
Made for: Best for fitness-minded listeners who want training, food, sleep, and mindset treated as connected habits. It especially suits people drawn to practical frameworks, reflection questions, and behavior change over hype.
What sets it apart: Chasing Excellence stands apart by turning abstract performance language into small repeatable tools. It links gym principles to family language, motivation, emotional steadiness, nutrition skepticism, and everyday resistance.
Looking to build more than just physical fitness? Join Ben Bergeron and Patrick Cummings as they explore how daily practices create the foundation for lasting peace of mind. Through practical frameworks and honest conversations, discover how deep health unlocks the freedom to chase what truly matters. Learn the five essential factors - training, eating, thinking, sleeping, and connecting - that transform fleeting moments of clarity into a life of sustained fulfillment. If you're ready to move beyond quick fixes and build peace of mind, this is your guide.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Chasing Excellence connects physical training with the habits, language and emotional skills that help people follow through.
Chasing Excellence treats fitness as a practice of attention as much as physical effort. Patrick and Ben move between their own framework-led conversations and guest interviews, connecting training consistency with emotional regulation, sleep, relationships and deliberate…
A balloon over a reverse plank turns your next excuse into a surprisingly solvable engineering problem.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A farmer's changing luck becomes a useful reminder not to judge life before the story has moved on.
Jim Murphy's case for non-judgmental awareness starts with a familiar story that keeps changing shape: a farmer loses a horse, gains another, sees his son injured, and then sees that injury spare him from war.
A practical parenting episode on how words, stories, and self-respect shape family culture.
This bonus episode frames parenting as a daily practice of noticing how language shapes the stories a family lives by. The host links children thinking about their thinking to the words they hear and repeat, moving from Alan Watts to a simple fridge exercise: choose certain…
A plainspoken look at how comfort can pull daily life into drift.
Chasing Excellence frames drift as a quiet everyday slide toward comfort, the kind that can leave a person less prepared when life gets hard. Patrick and Ben keep the idea concrete, moving from a couch-and-iPad image to the case for small, chosen bouts of resistance, even…
A clear case for treating calorie-tracker numbers as estimates, not personal facts.
Calorie trackers sell the comfort of precision, but this Chasing Excellence episode is more interested in where that comfort breaks down. E.C.
A practical, playful look at making exercise easier to repeat.
Consistency comes across as a practical problem here, not a moral one. Jordan Metzl links exercise motivation to how people read effort and the friction of getting started, then grounds the idea in a reverse-plank challenge where balloons and a gaudy King hat make a hard hold…
A year-end health reset that puts mind fitness and connection beside training, food, and sleep.
Chasing Excellence revisits two January 2025 conversations the host presents as among the year's most important, using them as ideas to carry into January.
The episode turns guilt after a suicide into a clear boundary: stay present, offer help, and accept what cannot be controlled.
Longtime friendship, suicide, and the limits of rescue give this episode its weight. It treats Cannon's question by drawing a firm line between presence and intervention: someone can stay available to a struggling friend without taking on the impossible work of changing his…
Practical coaching for leaner, stronger living.
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Veteran health with teeth.
Real estate drive meets peptide Q&A.
Trevor Reagan discusses the difference between a learner identity and a knower identity, and how embracing learning can unlock potential.
Hosts Ben Bergeron and Patrick Cummings address a listener named Cannon's question about a childhood friend who died by suicide after falling into negative behaviors.
Host Patrick Cummings curates two foundational episodes from 2025 to guide listeners into 2026.
Chasing Excellence interviews Jim Murphy, author of Inner Excellence and The Best Possible Life, around his line, 'be selfless so that we can be fearless.' Patrick and Ben say they highlighted almost every page of Inner Excellence, then describe Murphy's new book as the kind of read that feels like 15 minutes of intro before chapter one.
Chasing Excellence revisits Mark England’s discussion of a telephobia, described as fear of not being good enough, and its effects on exercise and parenting.
Patrick and Ben define drift as the slow, unnoticed slide away from health, attention, and discipline, not a single bad day.
Patrick interviews Margaret Cullen about her book on equanimity, defining it as feeling emotions without reacting.
Ben and Patrick interview Marcus Wilson about the concept of a reverse bucket list, focusing on appreciating what you already have rather than always chasing more.
Chasing Excellence host Patrick brings over a Consistency Project conversation with nutrition coach E.C.
Sports medicine physician Dr.
Ben and I review our year in mindset, sleep, and connection practices as part of our five factors series.
Ben and Patrick review their training and nutrition approaches over the past year, discussing changes, tweaks, and lessons learned.
Patrick and Ben interview Robert Glazer about his book 'The Compass Within' and discuss the importance of defining and living by core values.
Patrick and Ben discuss three distractions that prevent living with passion, starting with a humorous anecdote about a recording interruption due to a cat stuck in a tree.