APEX PWR | Dad Duty
Three hundred fifteen pounds on a barbell is three 45 pound plates a side. In most weight rooms it is the number where a bench press stops being a workout and starts being a statement.
Colin Feldtman, CSCS, is chasing it.
He is our Director of Performance, so the coaching part is expected. The part worth paying attention to is everything else on his calendar. He is in his mid-30s. He has two kids at home. He spends most of his working hours making other people stronger, which is a job that quietly eats the energy you were going to spend on yourself.
In other words, his week looks a lot like yours.
See what the work actually looks like on a normal training day. No highlight reel, no soundtrack, just the reps that add up to 315.
Watch the Video Subscribe on YouTubeColin does not need a newsletter to hold him accountable. He would be under that bar either way.
We are publishing it because of the conversation we keep having at the front desk. A guy in his 30s or 40s walks in, usually with a kid in tow, and says some version of the same thing. He used to lift. He was in decent shape before the first baby. Then came the second kid, the promotion, the house, the 6:00 a.m. wake-ups, and somewhere in there the gym stopped being a thing he did. He is not unhealthy. He is just further from the version of himself he remembers than he expected to be, and he does not know where to re-enter.
That guy does not need a lecture about discipline. He needs proof that someone in his exact situation is doing the work, and a starting point that does not require him to already be in shape.
You do not have to be in shape to start. Being out of shape is the reason to start. That is the entire point of a foundations program.
The most common reason dads give for not training is time. It is a real constraint and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Kids do not care about your training block.
But the amount of training required to meaningfully change your health trajectory is smaller than most people assume, and the research on this is strong.
In 2022, Momma and colleagues published a systematic review and meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine pooling 16 prospective cohort studies. For the mortality analysis alone, they tracked 42,133 deaths across 263,058 participants. What they found should reframe how you think about the minimum effective dose.
30 to 60 minutes per week of muscle-strengthening activity was associated with a 15 percent lower risk of death from any cause and a 17 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease. Per week, not per day. (Momma et al., British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2022, PMID 35228201.)
Two more findings from the same paper are worth knowing. Cancer risk was 12 percent lower, with the association strongest around 30 minutes per week. And when muscle-strengthening activity was combined with aerobic activity, the benefits stacked, with substantially larger reductions in all-cause mortality than either produced alone.
That last point is the reason we pair a DEXA body composition scan with a VO2 max test for adults starting out. One measures what your body is made of. The other measures how well your engine moves oxygen. Together they tell you which side of the equation needs the most attention first, so your limited hours go where they will actually do something.
Two sessions a week, done consistently for a year, beats an ambitious six-day program you abandon in March. We would rather build you a plan you will still be running next summer.
There is a version of this decision where you put it off another year and assume you will pick it up when things settle down. Things do not settle down. And the cost of the delay is larger than the mirror suggests.
Mitchell and colleagues published a quantitative review in Frontiers in Physiology examining how muscle size and muscle strength change across the adult lifespan. Buried in that paper is a finding that should change how you think about waiting: in studies that measured both variables in the same subjects, strength was lost two to five times faster than muscle mass.
Practically, that means the decline shows up in what you can do long before it shows up in how you look. You can weigh what you weighed at 28, look reasonably similar in a t-shirt at 38, and be meaningfully weaker. The first evidence usually arrives as something small and annoying. Your back complains after carrying a sleeping kid up the stairs. A weekend of yard work costs you Monday. You hesitate before joining a pickup game.
Strength is the quality that gets quiet first, and it is also the one that responds fastest to training. That is a good deal, and it is available at any age.
There is no single correct entry point, because dads walk in from different places. Some want data before they commit to anything. Some have a shoulder that has been barking since 2019. Some just want a coach to tell them what to do on Tuesday. We run three starting points for exactly that reason.
Start with the numbers. A DEXA scan gives you a precise breakdown of lean mass, fat mass and how each is distributed across your body, which is far more useful than a bathroom scale that cannot tell muscle from anything else. A VO2 max test measures your cardiorespiratory fitness, one of the strongest single predictors of long-term health outcomes we can measure directly. Together they give you a starting line, and something concrete to beat six months from now. This is the path for the dad who wants evidence before he commits, and for the dad who suspects he is fine but wants to actually know.
If something hurts, start here. Our physical therapy team works with adults on the shoulder, low back, knee and hip issues that have been quietly shrinking what you are willing to attempt. This is sports-focused, strength-based physical therapy, which means the goal is not just getting you out of pain. The goal is getting you back to loading the movement that hurt. Plenty of dads spend years training around an injury and wonder why it never resolves. Addressing it first is faster than working around it forever.
A personalized introduction to APEX and to strength training, or a reintroduction if you have been away from it for a while. You get coached from the first session, on a program built around your history, your schedule and what your body can currently handle. No prerequisite fitness level, no assumption that you remember how to squat. This is the most common starting point for dads who know they want to train and would rather not spend six months guessing their way through it on YouTube.
DEXA scan plus VO2 max test. An objective baseline before you change anything.
1-on-1 physical therapy. Fix the limitation before you load it.
Strength Training Foundations Trial. Coached from day one, at whatever level you walk in with.
This is the first entry in Dad Duty, a recurring section in the APEX Field Notes newsletter written for the dads in our community.
Colin is going to keep us updated as he works toward 315. Where the numbers are, what is working, what is not, and how he is fitting the training into a week that already has two kids and a full client schedule in it. The programming details, the setbacks and the practical stuff about training around a family are all coming.
You can follow along in two places. The newsletter goes out weekly and the Dad Duty section will carry the updates. The APEX YouTube channel has the training footage, including the session that started this.
If you have been meaning to start again, use this as the excuse. Watch a guy in the same life stage do the work, then pick one of the three starting points above and put something on the calendar. Nobody has ever regretted getting stronger.
Tell us where you are starting from. We will follow up to schedule your trial and walk you through the path that fits.
Three ways in, whichever one fits where you are today.
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