OgiFit

Fun morning in Aberdeen at the Gauntlet. I didn’t get a lot of sleep in a pretty uncomfortable, stuffy hotel room so felt a bit ropey in the morning. I was pretty conservative with the pacing early on, and had plenty left in the tank towards the end, so it’s possible I could have gone a bit faster, but overall I’m really happy with how it went.

To my mind this proves once again that the CrossFit methodology does what it says on the tin! Other than my usual daily hour of CrossFit wods plus some mobility in the evening I did very little actual training specific for this, no extra running, and only tried the sled pushes and pulls once.

I see this a lot, mainly from people who don’t lift, telling others that lifting is “bad for you” or causes injury.

But the data doesn’t support that. Yes, you might get niggles, feel some soreness or discomfort from time to time - that’s part of training and probably means you’re getting stronger.

But let’s not forget that lifting is a sport. Injuries are a possibility in any sport. Comparatively there are considerably more injuries in running and football, but we still let our kids to do them.

And if you do have niggles, don’t just ignore them. Go and see a physio. Physios aren’t just there for rehab or to fix injuries - they work with athletes to prevent injuries, manage niggles and keep them performing. Why do you think every serious athlete and sports team has physios?

The answer isn’t to avoid lifting - it’s to learn how to do it properly. Good coaching, sensible progression and appropriate loading.

So ignore the haters. They’ll end up weak and having someone else lift their bags. 😂

Deadlifts are bad for your back. You have probably heard that from a physio, a coach, or a guy at your gym. The research says otherwise. Powerlifters deadlift heavy, every week, for years. Their injury rate is lower than contact sports. Nobody is telling you to quit weekend basketball for the sake of your spine. Then it gets more interesting. Researchers took seventy people who already had back pain that kept coming back. Half of them were put on a deadlift program. Eight weeks later, they were in less pain and were stronger. I will be straight with you. The other group did slightly better on a few measures. Deadlifts were not the magic fix. But people with bad backs picked a barbell up off the floor for eight weeks and got better. That should change how you think about your body. There is no such thing as a bad exercise. There is load, and there is capacity. Load is what you ask your body to do. Capacity is what your body is ready for. Running stresses your knees. Lifting stresses your back. Stress is not damage. Your body gets stronger from load it is ready for. Can you get hurt deadlifting? Of course. You can also get hurt running, skiing, or picking up your kid after a bad week of sleep. But that was never about the movement. It was about the gap between what you asked your body to do and what you built it to handle. So the real question was never whether deadlifts are safe. It is whether you built the body that can earn it. Where else are you asking for output you never built the capacity for?

While I’m not an advocate of training simply to look good, her message can equally be applied to general weight loss and more importantly to the discipline and dedication required to make lasting changes to your life.

Regardless of the promises made by ill-informed PTs, fitness groups, dance classes and the list that goes on, it is a fallacy to believe that training on its own will significantly help with weight loss. Misleading claims mean people wonder why they are not loosing weight even though they are being more active leading to demotivation, quitting and a return to sedentary ways.

Consider that a 30-minute swim might burn around 250-500 calories. A 30-minute run might burn somewhere in the region of 250-500 calories. Even a demanding one-hour high intensity CrossFit session might burn 500–800 calories. But a single meal can easily contain 600-1,000 calories or more!

The truth is that meaningful, sustainable weight loss requires fundamental lifestyle changes, particularly what goes in your mouth. Exercise is important, but you cannot simply out-train a poor diet.

Ask yourself: are you genuinely willing to make sacrifices and do what it takes?

This is what it takes:

Cut out alcohol. Cut out added sugar - fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, biscuits, sweets and anything else where added sugar is an ingredient (Check the back of the package and read the ingredients and nutritional information. You’ll be surprised where sugar turns up - even in things you might assume are perfectly harmless, such as some packaged ham). Cut out or drastically reduce highly processed foods. Go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time every day. Get eight hours of sleep.

Your life is now fundamentally water, meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, seeds, training, stretching and sleep.

But that’s not the hard part.

The hard part is everything that happens around you.

When your best friend gives you a jar of her homemade strawberry jam - forget it. When your kids want you to try their homemade chocolate brownies - forget it. When your Nan gives you a slice of Christmas cake - forget it. When your work colleagues celebrate 50 years with a glass of champagne - forget it. When an old mate pops round with a few beers for the game - forget it.

And given our culture in the UK, you’ll probably alienate friends, family and work colleagues. You’ll be known as Mr Boring. “He’s changed,” they’ll say. “She used to be such fun,” they’ll say.

That is the price of making fundamental changes.

Life doesn’t come with any guarantees, but assuming all of this might tip the scales in your favour, ultimately, will it all be worth it when you are lean, healthy, strong, fit and independent into your old age, while those around you are in care homes being looked after?

Well, that is up to you.

Everyone wants the physique but very few want the lifestyle that built it There is no hack to getting extremely lean , its years of structure, sacrifice, hunger, training and saying NO when it would’ve been easier to say yes You can absolutely have balance But sometimes balance is earned AFTER discipline not before it

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.