The Year Round Athlete: How Ryan Martin Trains When Racing Is Not on the Calendar

At around 8:15 p.m.on a Wednesday night in Texas, Ryan Martin is not winding down, not easing into an off day, not living the kind of quiet evening most people think champions earn.

He is getting called back to set while crews and cars sit in position on a very real stretch of road, the kind of night where the work is not just mechanical, it is mental, and the body still has to perform on command.

Drag Illustrated described that moment while profiling him during the era when he was coming off a championship and already staring at another long season, with the magazine framing the No Prep Kings schedule as grueling and time consuming.

That is the first truth behind the way Ryan Martin stays sharp: the sport does not give him a clean offseason the way fans imagine.

In the same Drag Illustrated profile, the year is portrayed as a loop of racing, travel, and public obligations, where the grind continues after the last win light, including immediate trips for autograph sessions at major industry shows like SEMA and then PRI.

Even the logistics in that piece read like an endurance story, with him driving the rig, the crew chief driving another truck, and the small team surviving on the hours down the road as their only real downtime.

In that context, training stops being a separate thing you do at a gym.

Training becomes a way of living that protects performance when life refuses to slow down.

The fan wants to believe speed is built only in the shop, in the big decisions about power and setup, in the parts that sound expensive when you say them out loud.

But at the level Ryan Martin operates, the body is another part of the program, because the body is what absorbs the travel, the sleep debt, the stress spikes, and the hours of standing in heat while the brain still has to make clean decisions.

Even the simplest evidence of that athletic baseline has surfaced in the most casual way.

A post from the Fireball Camaro Facebook page highlights him ripping through 50 push-ups like it is nothing, a small moment that reveals something bigger: he maintains a kind of everyday strength that is useful in the pits and under pressure.

Strength, for a no prep driver, is not about looking like a bodybuilder.

It is about staying stable when the environment is unstable.

It is about core control so the body does not fatigue while sitting strapped in, focused on staging and the first fraction of a second.

It is about grip and shoulder endurance for the repetitive work that happens around the car.

It is about resilience, because resilience is what keeps a team from spiraling when the weekend turns ugly.

Then there is the part fans rarely think about: reaction time is a physical skill.

And in a world where the margin can be a blink, reaction time is not a talent you either have or do not have.

It is something you maintain through repetition, sleep discipline, and nervous system regulation.

That is where Ryan Martin’s year-round athletic reality becomes more psychological than muscular.

Drag Illustrated’s coverage of his dominance and the way he manages callouts highlights the seriousness of the series and the importance of the team around him, including longtime crew chief Javier Canales and tuner Steve Petty.

The same piece also mentions restrictions that shape preparation, including limits on testing within two weeks or 200 miles of a racetrack, which means many improvements must be made without endless rehearsal runs.

When you cannot simply test your way into confidence, confidence has to be built another way.

So the year-round athlete version of Ryan Martin is not only someone who can do push-ups.

It is someone who can regulate his mind when the environment tries to flood it.

That kind of regulation often looks boring from the outside.

It looks like routines that do not change even when the calendar changes.

It looks like controlled breathing before staging.

It looks like hydration habits that are not glamorous but prevent fatigue headaches on long travel days.

It looks like cutting chaos wherever it can be cut, because the surface already provides enough chaos.

The Drag Illustrated profile from 2022 lays out the scale of the workload in numbers, describing the No Prep Kings season as 15 races and calling it super competitive and time consuming.

It also describes a six-weekend stretch of consecutive races late in the season, which is the kind of travel run that breaks people who have not built an endurance life.

That is the stretch where training becomes recovery management: managing joints, managing sleep, managing mood, managing the subtle cognitive decline that happens when you are always moving.

This is where the discipline becomes invisible to fans but obvious to anyone who has lived inside a touring schedule.

The biggest danger in a long season is not a single bad pass.

It is the slow erosion of decision quality.

The moment you start making small sloppy calls, the weekend turns into a chain of mistakes that look like bad luck on camera but feel like exhaustion in your bones.

Because Ryan Martin is visible, fans can watch behind-the-scenes content and still miss how much labor is hidden between clips.

His official YouTube presence is framed as the official channel where he shows what cameras miss, which means the audience gets extra access to the grind.

But access can create an illusion.

Seeing the work does not always reveal the cost.

The cost often shows up in the simplest place: breathing space.

Drag Illustrated described him going from the end of a season straight into SEMA and then PRI appearances with minimal recovery.

That does not just tax the body.

It taxes identity.

When your brain is constantly switching between racer mode, businessman mode, public figure mode, and husband and father mode, your nervous system never gets a true off switch.

The year-round athlete has to build that off switch on purpose, or the sport eventually builds it for you in the worst way.

That is why the best training story for Ryan Martin is not a list of exercises.

It is the way his program treats fatigue like an opponent.

There is also a practical element.

A small crew means the driver is not only driving.

The driver is also loading, checking, troubleshooting, managing schedule timing, and staying present through long stretches of waiting punctuated by moments that require perfect execution.

Drag Illustrated explicitly described how small his core crew is during the tour and how the travel duties are split, which reinforces how much labor sits on a few shoulders.

In that structure, physical conditioning is not optional.

It is part of the job description.

Then there is the other form of training that matters in no prep: the training to remain calm while everyone wants you rattled.

Drag Illustrated’s callouts piece frames the series as a TV show first and a drag race second, and it highlights how the format and the drama can pull racers into performance for the audience.

The year-round athlete has to resist that pull at the exact moment it is most tempting.

The body reacts to stress with adrenaline, the mind reacts with urgency, and urgency is where mistakes hide.

So the training becomes emotional discipline.

Not suppression.

Not pretending you feel nothing.

Real discipline is feeling the spike and still acting like a professional.

It is looking like the calm person while your heart tries to climb out of your chest.

It is staying polite when the narrative wants you loud.

It is refusing to race the comments section when the only thing that matters is the tree.

This is also why the idea of offseason is misleading for a figure like Ryan Martin.

The so-called downtime is when the foundation is built: sleep restoration, injury prevention, mobility work, and mental recovery, plus business obligations and content obligations that keep the brand alive.

The same Drag Illustrated profile makes clear he did not spend the offseason simply unwinding, and that reality is the point.

The machine keeps demanding output, just in different forms.

If you watch his career through this lens, you see why the fanbase is often shocked that he stays consistent.

Consistency is not just talent.

Consistency is the product of a lifestyle engineered to protect performance.

It is a willingness to do the unsexy things repeatedly: sleep when you can, hydrate, stretch, do the basic strength work, manage travel fatigue, keep the crew morale steady, keep your own emotions from infecting decisions.

It is also why the best description of Ryan Martin as an athlete is not built on a highlight reel.

It is built on the routines that never go viral.

When you hear that he drives the rig and lives inside a schedule with no weekends off, you begin to understand that the body is not just along for the ride.

The body is a tool that must stay sharp, or the whole operation dulls.

When you read that testing is restricted and must be squeezed in around the tour, you understand that composure is not a personality trait, it is a trained response.

When you see the casual evidence of physical capacity, like the push-up moment, you get a small window into a larger reality: he has built a baseline that makes the chaos survivable.

The year-round athlete story, in the end, is not about being invincible.

It is about being available.

Available for the next weekend.

Available for the next long drive.

Available for the next late-night call back to set.

Available for the next moment where everyone else is tired and the surface is lying and the crowd is loud and the only thing that can keep the pass clean is the calm, trained body inside the car.

And that is the real secret fans miss.

The fastest part of Ryan Martin is not only the machine.

It is the discipline that makes the machine usable when everything else is trying to take it away.