APEX PWR | Dad Duty
There is a take going around right now, and it is mostly right.
It goes something like this. Being in shape at 22 is not that impressive. Your body forgives almost everything. Being in shape at 35 or 40, while holding down a career and raising kids who wake up at 5:40 in the morning, is a different kind of accomplishment. Somebody online called it the new quiet luxury, alongside reaching 40 without a prescription for blood pressure, cholesterol, or blood sugar.
We agree with the spirit of all of it. We would add one correction and one admission.
The version circulating says your 20s were easy because your metabolism was fast. That part is wrong, and it is worth fixing, because a wrong diagnosis leads to a wrong plan.
In 2021, Pontzer and colleagues published the largest analysis of human energy expenditure ever assembled, in Science. They pooled 6,421 people from 29 countries, ages eight days to 95 years, measured with doubly labeled water rather than an equation on a treadmill screen. They found four distinct phases across a human lifetime.
The phase that matters here is adulthood.
After adjusting for body size and composition, total expenditure, basal expenditure and fat-free mass were all stable from age 20 to age 60. The decline does not begin until around 60, and then it runs about 0.7% per year. (Pontzer et al., Science, 2021, PMID 34385400.)
Your metabolism at 38 is doing roughly what it did at 24.
That should land as good news. If the engine is running at the same rate and you still feel worse, then the change is somewhere in the inputs: what you lift, how you sleep, what you eat, how much muscle you have been defending. Every one of those is something you can put your hands on. A slowing metabolism is a sentence you serve. Changed inputs are a problem you solve.
Where the popular take gets thin is the part that says if you feel old at 35, it comes down to your lifestyle and your choices.
Choices matter. But that framing treats the whole thing as a willpower problem, and the data says a large piece of it is structural.
Johnson and colleagues ran a secondary analysis of NHANES data from 2007 to 2016, covering 2,034 adults aged 22 to 65, published in 2023. They looked at how many children were in the household, and how old those children were, against how much the adults actually moved.
Adults with two or more children aged 0 to 5 reported 80 fewer minutes of vigorous physical activity per week than adults with one child or none. With three or more children aged 6 to 17, it was 50 fewer minutes. Moderate activity showed no significant difference at all. (Johnson et al., IJERPH, 2023, PMID 37297546.)
Read that last sentence again, because it is the useful part. Parents do not stop moving. They keep walking, keep carrying, keep going up and down stairs all day. What disappears is the hard work. The intense end of the spectrum.
Which happens to be the exact end that protects muscle mass, bone density, and cardiorespiratory fitness. The stuff you will want at 70.
So the person telling you it comes down to choices is not wrong that choices matter. They are skipping the part where having two kids under five removes an hour and twenty minutes of your hardest training every week before you have made a single decision. That is not an excuse. It is a design constraint, and a plan built without accounting for it will fail in about four weeks. We have watched it happen enough times to stop being surprised by it.
This is not a thought experiment for us.
All three APEX founders currently have multiple kids under the age of five, including two sets of twins under one year old. Our Director of Performance and our nutritionist are in the same stretch, each with two kids under six.
So when we say we know the 5:15am session is the only one that survives contact with a real family calendar, or that the plan has to work on the day somebody is up at 2am, that comes from our own week and not from a certification manual. We are in it right now, same as you.
It also means we have opinions about what to cut. Most parents coming back to training want to add everything at once. More days, more sets, more cardio, starting Monday. The better move is usually a smaller number of sessions you will genuinely hit, programmed hard enough to count, in a coached environment so no session gets spent deciding what to do.
The line about reaching 40 and beyond without medication for blood pressure, cholesterol, or blood sugar holds up. We looked.
Hypertension affected 52.5% of U.S. adults aged 40 to 59 during August 2021 through August 2023. Among those with it in that age group, 47.1% reported taking medication for it. (National Center for Health Statistics, NHANES.)
More than half. Not at 70. At 40 to 59, which for a lot of readers is this year or next.
Walking into your 50s with normal blood pressure and normal lipids on the strength of your training and your food is a genuinely uncommon outcome. Calling it a luxury is fair. Just remember that this particular luxury is bought in advance, in ten-year installments, starting around now.
We specialize in busy parents and professionals between 35 and 50, and the reason is specific. It is the last long stretch where you are building rather than defending. What you do in this window sets the ceiling for everything after it.
The goals we actually work toward with people in this age range are not summer goals.
Nobody sells a gym membership on being independent at 80. It is still the thing that matters most, and it is decided largely by what you do between now and 50.
Here is where we are different from a gym, and it is the part worth understanding before you start anywhere.
We are not going to hand you a generic program and check in at the end of the year. We test, we build off the results, and then we retest to find out whether the plan is working. If it is not, we change it. That is the whole offer.
A DEXA scan gives you lean mass, fat mass, and how both are distributed across your body, plus bone density. A bathroom scale cannot tell muscle from anything else, which is why plenty of parents "lose weight" and end up weaker. Muscle and bone decline together and respond to the same training, so knowing both numbers tells your program what it needs to defend. The scan takes about seven to ten minutes.
A VO2 max test measures cardiorespiratory fitness directly, and it is one of the stronger single predictors of long-term health outcomes we can measure in a room. It is run one-on-one, and it gives us your actual training zones instead of a percentage-of-220-minus-your-age guess. Given the finding above, that parents lose vigorous activity while keeping moderate activity, this is the test most likely to show you exactly where the gap opened up. It also bundles with the DEXA scan.
Training with a nutrition plan built for someone else is the most common reason a good program stalls. Our nutrition services run from a one-time macro breakdown to a 12-week challenge to 1:1 coaching, so you can start at whatever level of hand-holding you will actually keep up with. For parents, the honest constraint is usually not knowledge. It is that you are eating the last third of your kid's dinner standing at the counter at 7:40pm.
Our adult strength training runs in semi-private groups of up to five, or one-on-one if you would rather. Coached from the first session, programmed off your test results and your real schedule. No prerequisite fitness level and no assumption that you remember how to squat from college. You do not have to be in shape to start. Being out of shape is the reason to start.
DEXA scan plus VO2 max test. An objective baseline before you change anything.
1-on-1 physical therapy. Address the limitation before you load it.
Strength Training Foundations Trial. Coached from day one, at whatever level you walk in with.
Testing and coaching are not things you can do over a video call. You have to be in the room, which means the drive has to be short enough that you keep making it.
We are at 11105 SW Greenburg Rd in Tigard, just off Highway 217, which puts us inside a ten to twenty minute drive for most of the Westside. Our clients come from Tigard, Beaverton, Lake Oswego, Tualatin, West Linn, Hillsboro and Southwest Portland.
If you are a parent in this area between 35 and 50 and you have been meaning to start again for a year and a half, we have run this exact play with a lot of people who look like you. We have the testing to find out where you are, the coaching to move you, and the retesting to prove it worked. What we build from that is yours specifically, because the version of this that works for a dad of twins on a 6am schedule is not the version that works for a mom running a clinic.
Tell us where you are starting from and what your week actually looks like. We will follow up to get you scheduled and walk you through the path that fits.
Measure it, train it, retest it. Whichever door you come in.
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