Tim Tebow Is Still Lifting Because the Fire Never Retired

Tim Tebow has been told he was finished more than once. At Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Florida, coaches and critics said a homeschooled kid with a missionary childhood in the Philippines could not play quarterback at the level that mattered. At the 2010 NFL Scouting Combine, the verdict was blunter. The motion would not work on Sundays. The Denver Broncos drafted him anyway, 25th overall, in the first round. A year later he started a playoff game in the cold and won it. Then the league decided it was done with him. He tried baseball with the New York Mets. In 2021 he tried tight end for Urban Meyer’s Jacksonville Jaguars and was cut before the preseason ended. None of those endings put the fire out. They moved it out of the stadium and into a life that still has a bar on it. Tebow has never stopped lifting.

The résumé underneath that fire is specific, and it is worth stating plainly, because the nickname traveled farther than the facts. At Florida, from 2006 to 2009, he was the most famous college football player in the country. The Gators won BCS national championships in the 2006 and 2008 seasons. In 2007, as a sophomore, he became the first underclassman to win the Heisman Trophy, after a season in which he accounted for 55 touchdowns. The 2008 team went 13-1 and beat Oklahoma in the national title game. His senior year, 2009, Florida ran the regular season unbeaten before Alabama ended it in the SEC Championship Game. Urban Meyer has said Tebow might have loved the game as much as anybody he coached, twelve or more hours a day on training, the body, the film, and a practice he actually liked. The love did not expire when the number did. It got redirected. The lifting stayed.

The NFL chapter is shorter, and it is the one people still argue about. In 2011, after a 1-4 start, Denver turned to Tebow. The Broncos won seven of their next eight. In the wild-card round at Sports Authority Field at Mile High, they beat the Pittsburgh Steelers 29-23 in overtime. The game was ugly for long stretches and then it was not. Tebow threw for 316 yards. On the first play of overtime he found Demaryius Thomas for an 80-yard touchdown, and the building came apart. A week later New England ended the run. The next offseason, Denver acquired Peyton Manning, and Tebow was traded to the Jets. Stops with the Patriots and the Eagles followed. No team kept him as a quarterback. The fire treated the release as another obstacle, which is the only way a former athlete stays useful after the league has moved on. The NFL was never his only story. It was a chapter.

The Tim Tebow Foundation is where a lot of that fire went. It works with children who have special needs, and with kids a hospital or an orphanage was not built to celebrate. He speaks. He writes. He sits on the SEC set and still studies the game like a man who has not handed in his film. He has said he loves the idea of coaching and has not taken a job, because a head-coaching life would swallow the foundation work. Only time will tell what he does with the platform. Faith, family, and the bar are the parts he has not put up for debate.

Where the Fire Was Built

He arrived in Gainesville in 2006 as a five-star quarterback who nearly went to Alabama. Meyer has told the story of sitting on a plane already sketching a future without him, and a defensive coach putting a hand up to say that losing Tebow would set the program back ten years. Meyer was angry because he knew it was true. What followed was one of the great runs in modern college football. The nights that built it were not on television. On Fridays and Saturdays, when the rest of campus was headed to a bar or a house party, Gators were in the weight room from midnight until about 2:30. Teammates have described those sessions as grind work, sometimes one-on-one, because Meyer wanted to see who got better and did not much care how the drill was dressed. Everything in you says stop. The room was there to find out whether you would.

The day after his last college game, Tebow flew to Nashville and started combine prep with about twenty other players under Kurt Hester, the late director of training at what became D1. That relationship has now run more than fifteen years. At the combine he was plain about the critics. “I’m rarin’ to go so I’m going to work on what I need to work on now. I’m not scared of what people are going to say, obviously. I’m not scared of anything else. I’m going to go out there and do it and whatever happens, happens.” He also said the obstacle was not new. “In high school they said I couldn’t be a quarterback. I’ve come a long way since then.” He did everything in Indianapolis except throw. The throwing, he said, could wait for his pro day. The work could not.

A Father Who Still Loads the Bar

Tebow married Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters, Miss Universe 2017, in 2020. They train together. He has said she kicks his butt in the gym. She has said they like finding healthier versions of holiday food, and that he is a good breakfast cook even if he claims his real job in the kitchen is the dishes. They have a daughter now. The baby did not become an excuse to go soft. Time got shorter. The bar did not.

In March 2021, already out of football and in the middle of the baseball experiment, he filmed a chest-and-back session in his home gym and posted it. Men’s Health wrote it up because the work was specific enough to copy. Three supersets. No rest between the pair. Rest, then go again. Fatherhood was still ahead of him. The habit was already the point, and it has not stopped. He has kept loading the bar since the high chair arrived.

On the hard seasons he has written that there is risk and there is pain, that training is not easy but it builds strength, and that life works the same way. He has also written that God does not allow trials to break us. He allows them to build us. More faith. More endurance. You can set the theology aside and still use the structure. The trial is not permission to skip the room.

The Session He Actually Posted

This is the chest-and-back push-pull from that Instagram, as Men’s Health logged it. Three compound supersets. Do the pair back to back. Rest after the pair, not between the two lifts.

First pair, four sets of five to seven. Bench press, then a bent-over barbell row. Pause two seconds at the top of each row.

Second pair, four sets of four to six. Decline barbell bench, the one-and-a-quarter version: lower, come a quarter of the way up, lower again, then press. Then weighted pull-ups. He appeared to be using a 50-pound plate.

Third pair, four sets of five to seven. Elevated band push-ups, the chaos kind, the band as still as you can keep it while it tries to shake. Then banded face pulls.

That is the lifting snapshot. Heavy enough to respect, short enough to finish, paired so the push never outruns the pull. If the decline bothers a shoulder, flatten the bench. If a weighted pull-up is not yours yet, use a band. Keep the pairs. Do not turn it into a wander.

The longer day is the one he walked through at a D1 in Jacksonville. Fifty-four minutes, five parts, in his order.

A dynamic warm-up that activates, not a lazy jog. A performance piece next, low reps, as hard and fast as you can, before you are tired. Strength after that: a push press, then kettlebell swings, which he was careful to call a lower-body and posterior-chain lift, not an arm exercise. Conditioning only once the heavy work is done, a rower supersetted with planks, volume added at the end, not the beginning. A cool-down with a purpose, mobility you lost in the session, not a sit-down.

Performance and strength before you ever do conditioning. That was his line, and it is the right order for anyone who used to get their conditioning from a sport and now has to schedule it.

A week built off those two sessions, for a former athlete with a job and a family:

Monday. The Men’s Health push-pull. Three pairs. Leave when the fourth round of face pulls is done.

Wednesday. The D1 shape, compressed if you must. Warm up. Something explosive. Push press and swings, or a squat and a hinge if that is the equipment you have. A short conditioner. Cool down.

Friday. The push-pull again, or the lower half he keeps pointing at with the swings. Goblet squat, four seconds down, five reps. A lunge. A carry. Fatherhood is not a reason to skip legs. It is a reason to keep the legs you will need at forty.

Two other days. Twenty to forty minutes that raises your heart rate. A walk around the neighborhood counts.

Saturday. Breakfast with your people. He cooks the eggs and does the dishes.

Five Lines He Actually Said

“I’m rarin’ to go so I’m going to work on what I need to work on now. I’m not scared of what people are going to say.” — at the 2010 combine.

“In high school they said I couldn’t be a quarterback. I’ve come a long way since then.” — combine, on obstacles.

“I’ll do whatever it takes.” — on whatever a team wanted him to become.

“There’s risk. There’s pain. Training isn’t easy — but it builds strength. Life’s the same way.” — on a D1 session, years after the league.

“God doesn’t allow trials to break us. He allows them to build us — more faith, more endurance.”

Your Playbook

Treat the ending as fuel, not a eulogy. High school said no. The league said no, after a playoff win that is still on film. He loaded the bar anyway.

Steal the pairs. Bench and row. Decline and pull-up. Band push-up and face pull. No rest inside the pair. Rest when the pair is done.

Put the explosive work before the conditioner. He was explicit. Performance and strength first. The tired work comes last, or it steals from the heavy work.

Stay heavy enough to respect the weight, light enough to come back Thursday. A new father who still benches and rows has not quit on his health. Neither should you.

Train with someone. A spouse who kicks your butt counts. Lone-wolf excellence gets lonely.

Tebow’s fire was never dependent on a roster spot. The bar is still loaded. The foundation is still open. The fire did not go out.

Your game. Never ends.