OgiFit

This is functional training.

Functional training isn’t about what you look like. It doesn’t care how big your muscles are or how good your six-pack looks.

We talk a lot about training for longevity - maintaining muscle, strength and independence as we age. But until you see what the alternative can look like, it’s easy to underestimate just how important that is.

I visited a friend in hospital the other day. In the same ward were three elderly women who had all suffered falls. One had broken her hip. She was understandably very upset and kept asking the nurses to let her go home.

But the reality was that she was very unlikely to ever return home.

There’s no guarantee that being strong and fit will prevent a fall, a fracture or illness. But maintaining muscle, strength, balance, coordination and power can help stack the odds in your favour.

We naturally lose muscle mass and strength as we age, but regular resistance training can help slow that decline. It can help us stay capable of doing the things we often take for granted - carrying our own bags, getting up from the floor, climbing stairs, reacting quickly and managing everyday life independently.

And if we do fall, having greater physical capacity can make a real difference to how well we cope with the consequences and our ability to recover.

That’s functional training.

Not just training for how you look.

Training for what you want to be able to do for as long as possible.

And if you do drop the broom… make sure you’re good at burpees! 😅

Every fall starts long before the fall itself. It starts when your body becomes just a fraction of a second slower. At 86 years old, Olga isn’t simply exercising. She’s training one of the most overlooked abilities in healthy aging: Reaction time. As we age, we naturally lose Type II muscle fibers the fast muscle fibers responsible for reacting instantly when we trip, slip, or suddenly lose our balance. The slower your reaction… The harder it becomes to recover before hitting the ground. This is one of the biggest reasons falls become more common after 60. The good news? Reaction time is trainable. At The Lab Vitality Club Hallandale Beach, we safely combine strength training, balance exercises, coordination drills, cognitive challenges, and reactive movement to help adults over 50 maintain the ability to respond quickly when life becomes unpredictable. Because preventing a fall doesn’t start after you lose your balance. It starts years before. Every session is designed to help our members: ✅ React faster. ✅ Move with confidence. ✅ Stay independent. ✅ Keep traveling. ✅ Play with grandchildren. ✅ Continue enjoying the life they’ve built. This isn’t about becoming an athlete. It’s about making everyday life safer. If you’re looking for a place specializing in healthy aging, strength training for older adults, fall prevention, balance improvement, mobility, longevity, and personalized fitness after 50, that’s exactly what we do every day at The Lab Vitality Club Hallandale Beach. 👉Tap the link in our bio. Calculate your Vitality Age and book your comprehensive Vitality Assessment. Your future independence depends on what you train today.

"I Do CrossFit:" Jewell's Story of Survival and Strength In 2009, Todd Widman was asked to be the CrossFit Kids program mana...

We hear a lot about the negative effects of screen use and blue light on our sleep. So how does it actually affect us, and why should we avoid it close to bedtime?

Your eye retina contains special cells whose job is to detect light, their main role being to tell your brain when it’s daytime. When these cells detect light, they send a signal to the pineal gland in the brain, which reduces production of melatonin, the hormone that helps send you to sleep and keeps you there.

Unfortunately, screens emit blue light, which tricks your brain into thinking it’s still daytime, suppressing melatonin and making it harder to feel sleepy. To give the pineal gland time to resume normal melatonin production, it’s best to switch off screens at least 1 hour before bedtime.

Conversely, during winter, many people struggle to wake up. Morning light normally helps suppress melatonin and signal “wakey wakey” to your body clock. Without it, melatonin can stay elevated for longer after you’ve woken, contributing to that groggy, sluggish feeling known as sleep inertia.

“But I take melatonin, so it doesn’t matter.”

Not quite. Blue light doesn’t just suppress melatonin production - it also directly stimulates alertness through your circadian clock (your body has it’s own 24-hour timer that regulates when you feel sleepy or alert), independent of melatonin levels. So even with supplemental melatonin in your blood, blue light can still keep your brain signalling “daytime,” delaying the sleep signal and fighting against the melatonin you’ve taken.

Research shows the devastating effect phones are having on our sleep Want a good night's kip? Stop looking at your phone

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It’s this simple. If you aren’t strength training your bones are getting weaker as you age.

Research shows that bone is one of the most metabolically active tissues in the human body, undergoing continuous remodeling through a balance between osteoclasts (cells that break bone down) and osteoblasts (cells that build new bone). This balance is governed by mechanical load, a principle known as Wolff’s law. When the skeleton is loaded heavily, the bone-building response is upregulated and density increases. When mechanical load drops below threshold for extended periods, osteoblast activity falls while osteoclast activity continues, producing a slow net loss of trabecular bone mineral density. The outer cortical bone remains visually intact, while the internal lattice structure quietly degrades — the same process that produces age-related osteoporosis and disuse osteopenia in immobilized or sedentary adults. Not all exercise stimulates bone the same way. Walking, cycling, and most cardiovascular training produce ground reaction forces well below the threshold required to trigger an osteogenic adaptation. Resistance training — particularly heavy compound lifts like squats and deadlifts — produces axial compressive load on the spine, hips, and femurs that consistently drives measurable increases in bone mineral density across all age groups in trained subjects, including in adults already diagnosed with osteopenia or osteoporosis. The same loading pattern that builds muscle directly reinforces the bone that supports it. Without it, the body has no reason to maintain skeletal density, and the slow loss compounds across decades until a fall reveals what was no longer there. References: Anat Rec A. DOI: 10.1002/ar.a.10119 Calcif Tissue Int. DOI: 10.1007/s00223-021-00836-1 J Bone Miner Res. DOI: 10.1002/jbmr.3284 Follow @gaingoat to learn more about muscle growth, fitness, and nutrition. #gains #muscle #fitness #nutrition #bonehealth

So why has Usain Bolt never done a 5K run?

Because he’s not training for endurance - he’s training for power, speed, and explosive force. Alongside sprinting, he’s doing weight training, jumps, and other explosive work. And his body reflects exactly that.

Sprinters and distance runners don’t just look different - they are different. Their training builds fundamentally different adaptations in the body, through different muscle fibre types. Jogging develops endurance and the ability to sustain low levels of effort for long periods, using slow-twitch muscle fibres. Sprinting develops power, speed, and the ability to produce maximum force in a very short time, relying on fast-twitch muscle fibres.

Endurance training improves cardiovascular efficiency and fatigue resistance, but high volumes of it don’t maximise strength or muscle mass, and when it isn’t balanced with strength work, it will limit power development.

Now ask yourself what actually matters more as you get older. Being able to jog for another 30 minutes, or being able to catch yourself when you trip? Having the strength to lift something heavy, climb stairs with ease, or get up off the floor without assistance?

Fast-twitch muscle fibres are responsible for speed, power, strength, and reaction time. They’re what allow you to react quickly, regain balance, jump, climb, push, and pull effectively. They play a major role in maintaining muscle mass and physical independence as you age - and they are among the first qualities to decline if they are not trained.

You don’t usually fall because your endurance failed. You fall because you couldn’t produce force quickly enough to correct it.

Now, if you love jogging, keep going - there’s nothing wrong with a bit of cardio. But remember that the goal isn’t just fitness. It’s independence, longevity, strength, and the ability to respond when life doesn’t go to plan.

You might have heard your high school track coach talk about how sprinters need to run miles to build an “aerobic base”, but as Dan Pfaff says: “Building a base of what?” The fact is athletes at the highest level don’t do it. Long slow endurance training won’t make you faster and is counterproductive to explosive training. Not only is running/jogging a different gait pattern altogether from actual sprinting (just look at the force-time curves), but it is also accumulates fatigue that interferes with explosive performance and can lead to overuse injuries. This is also evident in many team sport athletes who have high sport volumes all year round (and thus high weekly mileages) and struggle to get faster and more athletic in the off season. To get fast, you have to run fast. You have to manage fatigue and weekly training volumes well in order to perform at a high level and accumulate quality sprinting reps. And when it comes to sprinting specifically, there are also much more effective means (speed endurance, special endurance, tempo etc) that can be used to develop the energy system demands needed and improve sprint mechanics / coordination in the presence of fatigue or over distances longer than the race itself.

Elderly people in Taiwan are hitting the gyms to stay mentally and physically healthy as Taiwan has become a "super-aged society," with over 20% of its population aged 65 or older.

The misleading step count hype!

You come home from walking the dog. Your wrist buzzes: “Congratulations! Goal achieved!” because you hit your daily steps. And people genuinely think that means they’re fit.

Walking is good for you, of course it is. Humans are meant to move. But it’s a basic daily activity, not a measure of fitness. The problem is the marketing. Step counts have been turned into a gamified health score and people are being led to believe that hitting a number means they’ve done their exercise for the day.

You can hit 10,000 steps every single day and still have poor strength, poor fitness, poor conditioning, and low resilience. You’ve just walked, it’s not training.

Fitness watches make it worse by constantly rewarding you for it: badges, streaks, little celebrations. It feels like achievement, so people assume it is achievement. It’s clever marketing. That’s all it is.

Personally, I take my watch off when I train. If I leave it on, it tells me my heart rate suggests I’m about to die. 😂

Real fitness doesn’t come from chasing numbers on a screen. It comes from building strength, stamina, mobility, and capacity in the real world.

Walking is good, but don’t confuse step counts with being fit.

Founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman spent years exposing the connections between fizzy drinks companies and parts of the exercise science world.

Glassman argued that corporate money was influencing public health messaging through links with major sporting and health authorities, shifting the focus away from the damage caused by excessive sugar consumption.

At the same time, CrossFit was accused of being dangerous because of a study claiming extremely high injury rates. Those claims collapsed in court when the injury data used against CrossFit was shown to have been made up.

You do not have to love CrossFit to see the hypocrisy. A training methodology that helps millions of people get fitter and take responsibility for their health attacked, while corporations profiting from unhealthy products continue to presents themselves as partners in “health” and “wellness.”

Even today, it feels like CrossFit is attacked from every direction. Every other post on Instagram seems to be someone critiquing it. Why are people so threatened by us? Simple. Because CrossFit educates people about nutrition, lifestyle, and training. People are becoming healthier, stronger, fitter, and perhaps most worrying of all for some industries - more knowledgeable. And this all means that a lot of companies and individuals, including many within the sports and fitness industry, stand to lose money. Some will go out of their way to discourage people from doing CrossFit, even to the extent of spreading misleading information.

In 2013, the National Strength and Conditioning Association (@nscaofficial) published a study claiming CrossFit had a 16% injury rate — one of the highest of any fitness activity ever recorded. There was one problem. The data was made up. The gym owner whose facility was used in the study, Mitch Potterf, testified under oath: “Nobody told me they were injured.” CrossFit filed a federal lawsuit in 2014. What followed was six years of the NSCA lying to the public, lying to the court, and destroying evidence. When a judge ordered a forensic audit of the NSCA’s servers, the NSCA claimed they had withheld 70 documents by accident. The actual number was 279,000. On December 4, 2019, U.S. District Judge Janis L. Sammartino issued her ruling. She found that the NSCA’s misconduct was “willful and malicious” and ordered terminating sanctions — the most severe penalty a federal court can impose. Her exact words on the fake study: “The evidence could reasonably support the inference that the injury data were false and — worse — that the NSCA knew they were false and published them anyway in an attempt to protect its position in the market.” The NSCA was ordered to pay CrossFit $3,997,868.66 in sanctions. Separate damages hadn’t even been determined yet. And who was funding the NSCA while all of this was happening? PepsiCo. The same soda industry that CrossFit’s methodology directly threatened — because we tell people to cut sugar. This wasn’t just an attack on a fitness company. It was an attempt to use fake science to protect soda money and discredit a training methodology that was actually making people healthier. A federal court stopped them. Swipe through the full story. Every fact in this post comes directly from court documents and federal rulings. 📍 CrossFit Port Clinton | crossfitportclinton.com #CrossFitPortClinton #CFPC #CrossFit #NSCAlawsuit #FakeScience CorruptedScience CrossFitIsForEveryone NorthwestOhio TheRecord FitnessTruth BigSoda PortClintonOhio​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​