Monday night, a 38-year-old third-string quarterback who hadn’t started an NFL game in 1,009 days strolled into Soldier Field to face a 2-0 Philadelphia team that half the sporting press had already sized for Super Bowl rings and a parade route.

Case Keenum. QB3.

The guy you keep on the roster so your rookie franchise savior has a warm body to watch film with. Not the guy you expect jogging out for the coin toss on Monday Night Football with the whole country watching.

But Caleb Williams was out with a hamstring. Tyson Bagent spent most of the week marinating in concussion protocol. So the job free-fell down the depth chart, past the starter, past the backup, and landed in the lap of the third name on the list.

A man who, two years ago, was retired and sitting at home.

You know what he did with it?

He completed 24 of 34 for 247 yards, threw two touchdowns, and then dove headfirst across the goal line himself on a fourth-quarter sneak for his first rushing score since 2019.

In short he crushed it!

Final: Bears 27, Eagles 7. The unbeaten NFC darlings, handed their first loss of the year by a guy who could have been home mowing his lawn.

And the part that’ll wreck you a little: his kids watched him play in an NFL game for the very first time in their lives.

Afterward his five-year-old, Cadence, ended up on the SportsCenter set next to Scott Van Pelt. Somebody asked whether she’d rather watch cartoons or her dad’s game the next morning. She didn’t blink. “The game.”

Amazing!

Even if you are not a football fan, I promise there is a huge lesson here.

A Little Backstory

Keenum is a 15-year journeyman.

Seven teams. Sixty-plus starts.

He once dragged my 2017 Vikings to within a single game of the Super Bowl. Side note - the team that ended that Vikings run was Philadelphia. Revenge is a dish best served the better part of a decade cold.)

He’s also been cut, benched, and eulogized by the football commentariat more times than he can count.

By 2024 he was on injured reserve in Houston, wondering if he’d ever take another NFL snap. Then he retired. Actually, fully, done-with-it retired.

Then Ben Johnson called him in the spring of 2025 and brought him to Chicago. Not to play, mind you, but to mentor Williams and Bagent. In Keenum’s own words: “I had prepared to be ready, but there weren’t a lot of phone calls coming.”

Now the detail that makes this whole thing sing.

As the third-string QB, Keenum almost never gets physical first-team reps. The starter hogs those. The backup gets the leftovers.

Number three gets mental reps: film, meetings, walking through the playbook in his skull like a man rehearsing a speech he may never give.

So how does a dude who hasn’t taken a meaningful practice snap in months, or a real game snap in nearly three years, waltz in cold against a Vic Fangio defense, one of the nastiest schematic minds in the league, and carve it up like a Thanksgiving turkey?

He answered that himself years ago, with the seven words he’s built an entire career on:

“You don’t have to get ready if you stay ready.”

He said it in seven words better than I’ll manage in a thousand.

He Never Got Out of Striking Distance

That’s the point. Everything else is footnotes and jokes.

Keenum did not cram the week of the Eagles game.

He couldn’t.

You cannot conjure three years of readiness out of three days of practice, no matter how many pre-workouts you sacrifice to the gods.

What he could do, and what he’d quietly been doing the whole time nobody was watching, was stay close.

Film every week. Know the offense down to the footwork. Keep the playbook warm even when the phone sat dead silent on the counter.

Then, the one week the universe kicked the door in, he was the only quarterback on Chicago’s 53-man roster to practice all three days.

When the two names ahead of him crumpled, he didn’t have to go hunting for his game like a guy patting his pockets for lost keys. It was right there. He reached out and grabbed it.

Now point that lesson straight at your own training.

You can, and absolutely should, periodize.

Phases are good.

You cannot chase everything hard at once, and pretending you can is how people spin their wheels for years and stay simultaneously mediocre at all of it.

Push a hypertrophy block.

Chase a strength peak.

Build an aerobic base.

All correct answers Brosefus,

But there is a canyon , Grand Canyon, mule ride, the whole postcard, between backing off a quality and abandoning it in the desert.

Let a modality drop all the way to zero and the road back is long an immensely sucky.

It gets longer every birthday.

Whoever kept one measly toe in aerobic work can wake that capacity back up in a couple of weeks.

The lifter who hasn’t touched a hard interval since the Obama administration is starting from the parking lot, in the rain, with a flat tire.

And notice: Keenum stayed ready on a maintenance dose.

He wasn’t running a full starter’s workload for three years straight.

He kept the thing alive on the bare minimum that worked, which was mental reps, film, and reps in his head.

Same move for you. You don’t have to train every quality at full tilt to keep it. You just cannot let it flatline.

Stay within striking distance of everything you care about being able to do.

That Age Thing

Thirty-eight is old for a quarterback. Nobody’s arguing. He became the oldest player in Bears history to score a rushing touchdown that night, which tells you exactly where he sits on the actuarial table.

But “he’s too old” is the lazy excuse people reach for when they don’t feel like examining the real variables. Keenum didn’t forget how to read a Cover 2 on his 38th birthday.

Arm strength doesn’t detonate at a specific candle count.

Your body is not a carton of milk with a stamped expiration date.

What genuinely declines with age is real. I’m not going to hand you a woo-woo “age is just a number” bumper sticker..

... But it’s slower, and far more trainable, than the number on your license wants you to believe.

Do This This Week

Whatever phase you’re in, keep a maintenance touch on the qualities you’re not featuring.

Maintenance, not progress. You’re propping the door open, not chasing a PR.

Grinding a hypertrophy or strength block with cardio shoved on the back burner? One to two aerobic sessions a week keeps your engine from seizing up.

Chasing an aerobic goal instead — a race, a HYROX, a VO2 push — and your lifting quietly fell off a cliff? Two hard-ish strength sets, twice a week, on the big patterns: a squat or hinge, a press, a pull.

Not a program. Two sets that remind your body what heavy feels like so it’s still home when you come knocking later.

The point is not the exact numbers. It’s that zero is the only dose that actually mugs you on the way back.

Much love, and stay ready,

Dr Mike

PS - If that concurrent-training tightrope — pushing your conditioning hard without letting your lifting flatline — is the exact thing you keep faceplanting on, know that I’m building the fix.
Working title: Done-For-You Aerobic Training for Meatheads. A phased program that lets you prioritize aerobic work while keeping strength within striking distance.

Still hammering out the details. Stay tuned.

________

Mike T Nelson CISSN, CSCS, MSME, PhD
Associate Professor, Carrick Institute
Owner, Extreme Human Performance, LLC
Editorial Board Member, STRONG Fitness Mag

Mike T Nelson is a PhD and not a physician or registered dietitian. The contents of this email should not be taken as medical advice. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any health problem - nor is it intended to replace the advice of a physician. Always consult your physician or qualified health professional on any matters regarding your health.

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