29 Dec 2025 · 1 min
Episode 'Life After Sports #5' (Healthy Mindset App Podcast) features host Mike Hartman and the Healthy Mindset App Coach AI offering practical guidance for athletes transitioning out of organized sport. The Coach AI emphasizes five tactics to rebuild structure when a competitive schedule disappears: establish one morning anchor habit, break days into small time-blocks with one goal per block, set a single daily 'win', keep the body moving with light activity, and practice recovery/mindfulness (reset, breathing, end-of-day intention). The episode also includes outreach details (healthymindsetapp.com) and a note about program pricing (~$100) and accessibility.
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Welcome to the Healthy Mindset App podcast where host Mike Hartman, a performance coach and former professional athlete, brings his passion to help athletes and workplace athletes achieve their dreams and goals while being mindful of everything else in life. Mike also uses this platform to share his targeted assessment applications. Healthy Mindset course meditation and goal setting technique for the athlete and workplace athlete. We're glad you're here. Now let's dive headfirst into this episode of the Healthy Mindset App Podcast podcast. Here's your host, Mike Hartman.
Welcome back to another episode and we're still going to talk about life after sports and without going over the entire system again. Please listen to the introductions, please listen to the first other four podcasts that were before this. And just to get an idea of what we're doing, I'm offering this system to all athletes. Whether you're a high school athlete, whether you were a college athlete, professional Olympian, it doesn't matter to me. You're still an athlete, you're a person. And the whole purpose is to add value to you and help you. So go back and listen and also leave your information@healthymindsetapp.com and if you go there to the website healthymindsetapp.com list your information. And I said this before, if you truly can't afford this, it's literally just a little over a hundred doll. I'm here to help you. And this is not about having a community and having you spend thousands of dollars to be with us. We're going to provide you with tools that could help you in your everyday life so you can maximize your potential. So today I'm just going to talk about five tips to build structure when the schedule disappears. We're so used to this schedule. As an athlete, I was used to it. Show up here, they would hand out what time you had to be there. Ever since we were young kids, okay, you have to be at the baseball field at this time. Make you're here 45 minutes before a game. If you know you got Little League or when you're playing, even in the big leagues, you're on a schedule, you have that routine. But what happens is after sports it's like, okay, what am I going to do now? So I always believe in starting your day with one anchor habit. Something that's simple that you can repeat every morning. For me, I have my own system that I've developed since I retired as an athlete. I'm up very early in the morning, I'm up at 4:30 in the morning. I do my training, then enjoy My breakfast and I'm on with my day. So that's something I developed over the years. And I do have some of my friends tell me that they don't like to do anything when sports was over. They don't really like to exercise or be as, you know, be as competitive. Of course, you don't have to be as competitive, but you still have to take care of yourself. You still properly fuel your body and you still like have that one anchor habit like I just mentioned, you know, break your day into small blocks and it's tough. Like, you know, one thing for, for the people that played a professional sport, I'll speak on hockey, we would practice in the morning. Let's say it was a 10am practice, if we're not playing a game or we don't have a game that night or we're not traveling. So we have. You have all day. So when you're done, let's say you're done, you're at the stadium three to four hours after lunch. By 2 o', clock, it's like, what do I do? And that's a lot of time on your hands. And so now in the real world, now that those days are long, so it's important that you need a strict schedule like you had in your sport. Just divide the day into these little blocks. You could do into three blocks if you want. Morning, afternoon and evening. Give each block one small goal like we did as an athlete. That's something that we could do daily. The other one is we set daily wins. And a lot of athletes are hard on themselves. I've worked with athletes for over 20 years and I could tell you they're very hard on themselves as well as the workplace, professional. We could be very hard on ourselves. So choose that one thing that if it's completed, is going to make the day feel like you're successful. You don't have to be so hard on yourself. It's tough that life after sports, I've lived it. We're always like, you know, there's nothing like maybe playing a big game or you're fired up or could be you're playing, you're a club, you're playing. You know, like club hockey is really big nowadays and they're competing against each other and that's exciting. You have that excitement going on or you're, or you play soccer or whatever it is, or jv, it doesn't matter. And we're so used to those excitements in the game and the energy. But when it's over, it seems like, we lose that. So set up a daily win. And one thing we can't forget about here is keep your body moving. It doesn't need to be training. We don't need to do some high intensity training. In fact, I talk to some athletes and they still love it. I have a couple friends that are just, they were world class athletes and now they're training just as hard as they did. Eventually your body's like a machine and it will break down. I don't think you could do that. But that's not what this is about. But just keep your body moving, even if it's light activity, keep your energy up, stabilize. What it does is, even if you're going for a walk or a nature walk, what it does is it keeps you connected to the part of yourself. It just makes you feel strong. At least it did for me. And again, we provide these tools for you and our whole purpose and objective is to help you. At the end of the day, I always call it a reset. And to me it's all about recovery. In fact, years ago, one of my first, I got an offer to work with a company many years ago and they had a group that came in without saying their name, and they had an. They wrote an amazing book as well, but it was all about recovery, the ability to recover. I worked with this group and it was more of a. My gosh, just over when, when Wachovia was Wachovia, now they're Wells Fargo. They brought me in to speak and be a part of it. It was probably the best experience I ever had. I've learned from amazing people. The reason I don't want to say their name is they're very. They keep things on the QT of who they work with and the companies that they work with. And I'm sure they sign NDAs, even. Even though it was that many years ago. I don't want to mention it, but they taught me one thing, and some of you might even know who this group is. They told me, they asked me, mike, you know what the definition of being an athlete is? And I said what? They said, the ability to recover. What about fitness? Same thing. The ability to recover. What about life? The ability to recover. Or you could look at it at the end of the day, the ability to reset five minutes, even reflect, work on some breathing exercises. Ending the day with intention reduces stress. It really reduces your stress. I've done a lot of this over the years, practicing mindfulness, and it sets you up for a better tomorrow. If I could help anybody, this Life after sports, again, is for anybody, for you that has played a sport. And even if, you know, we're today, we, like I said earlier on, and I didn't want to confuse anybody, I play pickleball. But playing pickleball is fun. It's not like that competitive sport that, you know, it is competitive. I shouldn't even say that. There's people that, you know, want to throw, smash the ball down my mouth sometimes. But I don't mean it like that. I mean, when we played your college sport or your high school sport. Now we don't have that anymore. The thing I like about pickleball is it's like a community and it's really good for me. I love it because it doesn't bring me, it will never bring me back to what I did. But it's pretty close. When you're around good people. Or even the fun part about it is if you meet good people and you're playing pickleball and you build that relationship with them. So any help, if I could help you in any way, please reach out. Go to healthymindsetapp.com Leave your information. I'm here to help you. And again, there's no questions asked. If you simply say, mike, I can't afford this. Again, everything we do is about values and shame on you. If, if you could afford just over $100, we reduced this so people can afford it. But again, it's not about, it's not about the money on this. It's about actually us breaking even. So we don't, you know, get too much out there. I mean, I've worked, I've done over over 40,000 different assessments over the years now close to 40,000 and counting. And we use this assessment as a tool and we use the rest of the system to help you. And please listen to the intro and looking forward to helping you in any way.
We're so glad you joined us for this episode of the Healthy Mindset App Podcast with your host, Mike Hartman. If you're enjoying the show, please feel free to rate, subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. That helps others find the show and we greatly appreciate it. To dive deeper and learn more about the Healthy Mindset program or to get in touch with Mike, please visit our website, healthymindsetapp. Com. Thanks again for listening and we hope you'll join us again in the next episode of the Healthy Mindset App Podcast. Until then, be well.

