Empower member HeeHee doing a deadlift in the gym

The Best Investment You'll Ever Make

August 14, 2026•6 min read

Weekly Wisdom #56

August 14, 2026

Thanks to Coach Titan, HeeHee and I recently had the opportunity to participate in a UBC study on active aging.

Over the course of a week, we tracked our diets, wore accelerometers to measure our activity levels, provided blood, stool and urine samples for analysis, completed a battery of cognitive and physical tests, and went through DEXA and InBody scans to measure body composition.

The results were gratifying.

Neither HeeHee nor I particularly loves working out. In fact, she was sedentary for the first 40-plus years of her life and didn't begin exercising seriously until she started CrossFit fifteen years ago, in 2009. Her transformation since then has been incredible.

I've been active all my life and began dabbling in CrossFit in 2005, though I didn't really commit until 2008. It profoundly changed both my body and my fitness.

At the time of this writing, HeeHee is 58, turning 59 in October, and I turned 54 in May. After all these years of training, the study gave us an interesting opportunity to answer a question:

Has the investment we've made in our health actually paid off?

Now we have some data.

What We Actually Do

It's worth putting the results in context because neither of us lives an especially extreme lifestyle.

We generally do CrossFit about three times per week. We attend judo and BJJ once per week and sprint once per week. That's roughly five days of structured exercise.

Outside the gym, we're fairly active. We both walk a lot. I do rope flow daily. Sunghee practices leopard crawls. I usually throw in one or two Original Strength sessions each week. Yes, we both spend hours every day sitting in front of laptops, but we also get up and move around a lot.

Our diets are similarly moderate.

We don't subscribe to a particular diet or count calories. We mostly eat home-cooked meals made from fresh ingredients and prioritize protein. We don't keep much junk food in the house, but if one of us really wants something, we'll walk to the store and get it. No guilt. When our son brings home ice cream or other snacks, some usually ends up on our plates too.

So while we're probably more active than most people and eat better than average, we don't live to train and we don't follow restrictive diets.

What the Scans Showed

As expected, our lean muscle mass was high. That's good news because greater muscle mass has been associated with lower all-cause mortality.

My body fat measured 10.8%, on the low end for men. HeeHee came in at 14%, which is very low for women. That puts both of us in an "excellent" range for people our age.

But the result we were happiest about was our bone density.

My measurement was literally at the ceiling of the chart. HeeHee's was also excellent, landing in the high-average range for her age group.

This result was particularly meaningful because her younger sister was recently diagnosed with osteoporosis. Her sister's DEXA scan placed her at the bottom of the graph.

The comparison isn't a controlled experiment, of course. But the two are genetically related and shared a similar upbringing for roughly the first 30 years of their lives. Despite her sister's protein-focused diet and years of Zumba, their bone-density results are dramatically different.

For us, it was a powerful reminder of something we've emphasized for years: bones need to be loaded.

Jump. Sprint. Lift heavy.

Under the circumstances, this was probably the result that meant the most to both of us.

Another Measure of Aging

The lab also had a higher-end InBody scanner capable of measuring Phase Angle.

Phase Angle is a measurement derived from bioelectrical impedance analysis and is used as an indicator of cellular health and integrity. Higher scores are generally associated with better cellular vitality, while scores tend to decline with age.

For adults between 50 and 60, scores of roughly 5.0° to 6.5° for men and 4.5° to 5.5° for women are generally considered good.

HeeHee scored 6.0.

I scored 6.4.

Once again, the results suggested that the investment we've made in our health is paying dividends.

Then Came the Physical Tests

We also completed cognitive testing, although we weren't given our results. The tests seemed straightforward enough that I suspect we performed about as expected for our ages.

The physical testing was more entertaining.

Mine began with grip strength. I've never considered grip one of my particular strengths, but the researchers seemed impressed by my scores. I wasn't present for HeeHee's test, so I can't tell you how she performed.

Next came the sit-to-stand test.

We had 30 seconds to stand up from a chair and sit back down as many times as possible.

I went first and scored 24.

HeeHee followed and scored over 30.

Then came my favourite: the six-minute walk test.

They took us to the track and measured how far we could walk in six minutes. Running wasn't allowed.

The researcher had to follow us.

Unfortunately for her, both of us walked fast enough that she had to run to keep up.

By the end of the six minutes, HeeHee and I were barely breathing hard. The researcher, meanwhile, was gasping for air while trying to measure our heart rates. Ours had returned to normal before she had recovered from chasing us around the track.

The Best Investment We Ever Made

We're grateful for the health and fitness CrossFit has given us.

And here's the part I think matters most.

Neither of us was especially fit when we started CrossFit. Neither of us was particularly good at it. And neither of us loves working out simply for the sake of working out.

But we've kept showing up.

That's the strange power of doing something consistently for a very long time. You don't have to be extraordinary. Stick with it long enough and you can't help but develop some competency. More importantly, all those ordinary workouts begin accumulating into something much bigger.

We're especially grateful to the younger versions of ourselves who had the foresight to make that investment.

When we first committed to CrossFit, we were both unemployed. Money was tight enough that we worried we might eventually have to quit. So we bought a one-year couples' membership and paid for the entire year in advance.

Our reasoning was simple: if we ran out of money later, we wouldn't have an excuse to stop exercising.

At the time, CrossFit felt expensive.

Fifteen years later, looking at our muscle mass, body fat, bone density, cellular health and physical capacity, it looks remarkably cheap.

Three hours of CrossFit per week, repeated year after year.

That's what investing in your health looks like.

Best investment we ever made.