Notes on training as integration.
Something shifted in my training over the last few months, though I didn’t quite see it at first.
I’d signed up for HYROX; a fitness race that combines running with functional movements like sled pushes, rowing, wall balls. It meant my training had to integrate everything: running, strength, conditioning. But somewhere along the way, the goals changed me.
I started noticing things I’d never paid attention to before. How I felt hungry differently after different kinds of runsL some days wanting protein immediately, other days nothing for hours. How my heart rate variability told me things about readiness I’d been ignoring for years. How the quality of my sleep changed my power output in ways I couldn’t will my way through.
I’d spent decades training for marathons, for Olympic lifting, for strength. Each phase had one primary dial: pace, load, progressive overload. You knew what “better” meant. You hit the numbers or you didn’t. This was different. I wasn’t just integrating different training modalities but learning to read my whole system—physical, nervous, metabolic. This is also the first time my training mirrors the repatterning I’ve been doing in other parts of my life, learning to feel signals I used to override. Training stopped being about targets and became about coherence.
And then I realised what had changed wasn’t just my training. It was my relationship to my body, to effort, to what excellence even means.
This weekend I saw a thread about Shohei Ohtani, the baseball player, and something called the Harada Method. When Ohtani was in high school, he created a 64-cell grid with his goal in the centre: become the #1 draft pick. Surrounding it, eight pillars broken into specific daily practices.
The pillars weren’t just technical: body, control, speed, pitch variance. There was also: personality, karma, mental toughness. Under “karma”, his daily practices included: pick up trash. Show respect to umpires. Be positive. Be someone people want to support.
This high school kid trying to become a professional baseball player had built “pick up trash” into his training framework. Not as some motivational add-on. As an actual pillar of excellence, equally important to throwing speed.
I texted a friend: “Not identical, but feels very much in the same PIN code. True excellence is always ecological. Even in pursuing individual mastery, we can choose frameworks that embed us in relationship rather than extract us from it.”
Their response was immediate and sharp: “I cannot imagine having crystal clarity on what I want in 10–20 years, wanting it so much that I’d follow a method this regimented, and closing myself off to all the other wonderful things that might come along the way. It feels deterministic—an external, objective definition of success versus a fluid, subjective, internal one.”
They were right to push back. The Harada Method does look deterministic. Goal in the centre, 64 cells radiating out, daily checklists, measurable tasks. It looks like everything I thought I’d moved beyond. The kind of rigid goal-orientation that treats life as an engineering problem and looks like the opposite of emergence, of responsiveness and of the listening I’d been learning through my training.
But I kept coming back to those cells: “Pick up trash. Be someone people want to support.”
“Okay,” I said, “but look at what’s actually in the grid. Ohtani didn’t put ‘throwing velocity’ in the centre and surround it with biomechanics and training protocols. That would be pure optimisation. He put ‘be the #1 draft pick’ in the centre and surrounded it with karma and personality alongside physical skills. The grid is refusing to separate technical capacity from who you are as a person. It’s saying you cannot optimise one variable while treating everything else as peripheral.”
“But that’s still predetermined,” my friend said. “He decided at 15 what he wanted and locked himself into that path.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But when you include ‘be someone people want to support’ as a daily practice, you can’t fake that instrumentally. You can’t pick up trash as a strategy to get drafted and have it work. It has to be real, which means it changes who you are. The structure isn’t closing down possibility but creating enough coherence that something real can emerge.”
We kept talking, and something clarified for me. The distinction isn’t between having goals versus being open. It’s not between structure and flow. It’s between three different relationships to structure itself.
Determinism is when the structure decides for you. Discipline is when the structure keeps you honest. Listening is when the structure keeps you open.
The Harada Method and my training live in the third category, not the first. They’re not prescribing outcomes but creating conditions where you have to pay attention to what’s unfolding.
My training metrics, HRV, heart rate zones, recovery patterns, aren’t targets to hit. They’re feedback loops that help me read my system. Without them, I’d miss signals. With them as rigid targets, I’d override signals. Perhaps the Harada Method’s 64 cells work the same way. They’re not as much a predetermined path as much as they are a scaffold for integration. Concrete enough that you can’t bullshit yourself (“karma” has to translate into actual daily actions). Ecological enough that you can’t optimise your way through (“being someone people want to support” can’t be gamed).
It struck me that this is exactly what I’ve been learning everywhere else in my life: systems don’t change when you push harder; they change when you learn to read what’s really going on and respond with honesty.
“I think I see what you mean,” my friend said. “It’s not about the goal. It’s about what pursuing it makes you become.”
Yes. When Ohtani includes “picking up trash” in his path to getting drafted, he’s recognising something fundamental: the person who picks up trash becomes someone different. Someone who notices what needs doing. Someone who serves without needing recognition. Someone teammates want to support. You can’t separate who you are from what you can do.
This is the first time in my life I’ve trained like this. Not for a single outcome, but to learn how all the pieces work together—physical capacity and mental state and relational patterns as parts of one ecology. It feels less like sport and more like a devotional practice that transforms the practitioner. A devotional practice isn’t about the outcome. It’s about who you become by showing up with attention.
What I’m taking from both my training and the Harada Method is this: even when pursuing individual mastery, we can choose frameworks that make relationship, service, and character integral to excellence, not peripheral to it. The 64 cells work because they refuse to let you optimise just one thing. Technical skill has to develop alongside karma. Physical capacity has to develop alongside being someone people want to support.
You can’t game the system because the system is asking you to become a different person, not just execute better. And that’s exactly what I’m learning from my training: you can’t optimise your way to coherence. You have to develop the capacity to read your whole system and respond to what’s actually there. It’s the same lesson I’ve been circling in my work: complexity rewards responsiveness, not rigidity.
Integration requires structure, but structure must serve listening. You need metrics and frameworks to hear subtle signals, but the moment they become rigid targets, they break the very coherence you’re trying to build. Excellence doesn’t have to be extractive or individualistic. You can build frameworks that make relationship and service essential to mastery, not add-ons.
The goal isn’t the goal. The person who pursues it is.
Originally published on Substack on 16 November 2025. Read on Substack →
Gautam John 
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