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Why Vanja Moves Says Range Is the New Strength Metric

Women's Journal Staff on May 22, 2026

By: Ethan Rogers

Forget the PRs. Range Is the Metric That Actually Matters.

For most of the last two decades, the fitness industry has been training people to chase a number. How much weight is on the bar? How many reps? How fast does the clock stop?

Personal records became the universal scoreboard of progress, and anything that didn’t add to it got quietly demoted to “accessory work.” Vanja, the movement teacher behind a global coaching company that’s served over 180,000 students across more than 45 countries, argues that this scoreboard is measuring the wrong thing. The metric that actually predicts whether a body still works at 70 isn’t load. Its range.

It’s a position that puts her at odds with most mainstream fitness, where load remains the easiest thing to sell, market, and compare. But in her view, the people quietly getting the best long-term results, the ones still moving freely into their sixties and beyond, have stopped chasing numbers and started chasing territory. They’re not asking how much they lifted. They’re asking how much of their own body they can still access.

Why Load Stopped Being Enough

Load is a useful number. It’s also a narrow one. It tells you what a body can produce inside a single rehearsed pattern, under a single rehearsed demand. It says nothing about what happens when the angle changes, when fatigue arrives mid-rotation, or when the body has to absorb force it didn’t see coming.

That gap, in Vanja’s view, is where most injuries actually happen.

“You can hit a PR every week and still be one wrong step away from a disc injury. The bar has never tested your body the way real life does.”

A person can be objectively strong and functionally fragile at the same time. The deadlift goes up. The hip stops flexing past 90 degrees. The shoulder stops stabilizing overhead. The body becomes very good at one thing and progressively worse at everything else, and no amount of weight on the bar reverses that decline.

Range, by contrast, tells a different story. It tells you whether your hip can flex past parallel with control. Whether your spine can extend without compensating somewhere else. Whether your shoulder can hold overhead without recruiting half your back to do it. These are the qualities, she argues, that determine whether someone can keep training and keep moving as the decades stack up, and they’re the qualities almost no one is tracking.

What Range-Based Training Actually Looks Like

In Vanja’s methodology, training around range doesn’t mean abandoning strength. It means restructuring it. The principle she returns to constantly is simple: every position the body can reach should also be a position from which the body can produce force. The reach without the strength is a stretch. The strength without the reach is a script. Real capability is both.

“A deep squat isn’t a stretch. It’s a place to load. A dead hang isn’t a finisher. It’s a strong position. Most people are using these as recovery work and wondering why nothing’s changing.”

That single reframe changes how a session is structured. The bottom of the squat is trained, not just descended into. The overhead position is loaded, not just reached. Hanging is treated as a fundamental capacity to be progressed across years, not a cool-down at the end of a workout. Lateral loading, rotation under tension, single-limb work in unstable positions, full shoulder articulation, all of it gets pulled into the main lift, not relegated to the warm-up.

Clients trained this way, she says, stop asking different questions. The shift is from “how much did I lift today” to “how much of my body did I use today.”

What Modern Adults Have Actually Lost

Part of why this conversation is landing now, Vanja argues, is that the population she’s training has changed. Sedentary work, screens, decades of fitness culture obsessed with aesthetics over function, the cumulative effect has been a slow stripping away of basic human capacity. Squatting deep. Sitting on the floor without props. Hanging from a bar. Getting up off the ground without using hands. These used to be ambient skills, things a body retained simply by being used.

They’ve now become specialized abilities most adults have to deliberately reclaim.

“These positions weren’t optional. They were baseline. We’ve made them rare on purpose, by sitting more and moving less, and training a tiny corridor and calling it strength.”

The clients who walk into her programs at 40, 45, 50, she says, aren’t training to perform. They’re training to recover something modern life quietly took. The 45-year-old who can finally sit at the bottom of a squat without pain experiences something measurable that no PR ever delivered: a piece of their own physical self comes back online. That, in her view, is what range as a metric actually tracks. And it’s why it motivates people in a way that load never quite manages to. A heavier deadlift makes someone feel accomplished. A reclaimed range makes them feel returned to themselves.

The Scoreboard Is Being Quietly Rewritten

The fitness industry, Vanja acknowledges, will keep selling loads. Load is easy to measure. Easy to market. Easy to compare. Easier to film. It fits neatly inside a 30-second video, a fitness app, and a personal best graph. Range doesn’t compress as cleanly. It takes longer to build, longer to demonstrate, and harder to monetize in a culture trained to want results in eight weeks.

But the people who care about being capable in their sixties, seventies, and beyond are tracking different things. How deep can they sit? How long can they hang? How cleanly they can move into a position they couldn’t access a year ago. Whether they can crawl, rotate, twist under load, and get up off the floor in any direction without thinking about it.

“The numbers on the bar are optional. The territory you can move through is not. That’s the body that still works when life gets unpredictable.”

The reframe she keeps returning to is that strength and range aren’t separate qualities, and never were. They’re the same quality, expressed across different positions. A body that can produce force in the corridor it’s used to is partially strong. A body that can produce force everywhere, overhead, deep, off-axis, under rotation, in shapes the gym usually skips, is actually strong.

Most people are training the first kind and assuming it’s the second.

The Longer Game

What Vanja teaches isn’t a rejection of strength training. It’s a redefinition of what strength training is supposed to do. The goal isn’t a number that’s heavier than last week. The goal is a body that has more access to itself than it had last year, and the year before that, and the decade before that.

The body someone will have at 70, in her framing, is being decided by the ranges they’re training and the ones they’re letting disappear. There is no neutral session. Every workout either reclaims territory or surrenders it.

Most people, she says, don’t realize the scoreboard has changed. They’re still adding weight to a bar that’s measuring something narrower than their lives are about to demand. The lifters quietly winning the longer game have already moved on. They’re training the territory the bar can’t measure, and they’re keeping it, year after year, long after the PRs have stopped mattering.

Drug-Free Approaches to Fibromyalgia Care in South Florida

Women's Journal Staff on May 22, 2026

By Dr. Bruce Mark, DC | Hollywood Laser Pain Center | Hollywood, Florida

Fibromyalgia affects an estimated 4 million adults in the United States, with women comprising approximately 75 percent of those diagnosed according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For women in Hollywood, Hallandale Beach, Pembroke Pines, Fort Lauderdale, and across Broward County living with widespread pain, fatigue, cognitive fog, and sleep disruption, the standard medical response, a combination of antidepressants, anticonvulsants, and lifestyle advice, often provides incomplete relief while introducing significant side effects. Many women in this population are looking for drug-free options to consider alongside conventional pharmaceutical care.

Central sensitization and peripheral musculoskeletal contributors both play a role in fibromyalgia. Clinical reasoning supports considering both components when evaluating care approaches for patients who have not found sufficient relief through pharmaceutical treatment alone.

At Hollywood Laser Pain Center, I provide chiropractic care for fibromyalgia patients using a multimodal approach that includes photobiomodulation (laser therapy), Graston Technique, and acupuncture. The approach reflects an understanding of fibromyalgia as a condition involving both peripheral musculoskeletal factors and central neurological sensitization.

What Is Central Sensitization and Why Does It Drive Fibromyalgia?

Fibromyalgia is widely understood as a disorder of central sensitization, in which the central nervous system amplifies pain signals throughout the body. Research published in Arthritis & Rheumatism documented measurable neurological changes in fibromyalgia patients. The study found elevated substance P levels in cerebrospinal fluid, approximately three times higher than in controls. Functional brain imaging changes have also been reported in the literature, consistent with amplified pain processing.

The journal Pain has published research examining the relationship between peripheral nociceptive input and central sensitization. The findings suggest that peripheral pain sources can contribute to maintaining the sensitization cycle. This is part of the broader clinical reasoning for approaches that consider tissue-level factors as one component of fibromyalgia care.

How Photobiomodulation Therapy Is Studied in Fibromyalgia Care

Photobiomodulation, often referred to as laser therapy, has been studied for its effects on pro-inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-alpha, interleukin-1, and interleukin-6 in the tissues it reaches. Researchers have examined whether reducing peripheral inflammatory signaling may have downstream effects relevant to central pain processing.

In 2021, a systematic review published in Frontiers in Neurology examined photobiomodulation therapy in fibromyalgia and reported observed associations across the included studies. A 2019 randomized controlled trial in Pain Research and Management also examined fibromyalgia impact questionnaire scores in the context of photobiomodulation treatment. The research literature on photobiomodulation for fibromyalgia is still developing, and clinical findings vary across studies and patient populations.

How Graston Technique Is Used in Multimodal Care

Many fibromyalgia patients present with significant myofascial trigger points in the trapezius, levator scapulae, suboccipitals, and paraspinal musculature. These are discrete areas of muscle tension that may relate to local pain and referred pain patterns. Graston Technique is an instrument-assisted soft tissue mobilization method used to address soft tissue restrictions. In a multimodal care setting, it is applied as one component alongside other approaches.

How Acupuncture Fits Into Fibromyalgia Care

Acupuncture has a substantial research literature, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses that have examined its effects on descending pain inhibitory pathways. My acupuncture certification allows me to incorporate this modality as part of a multimodal care plan for patients in the Broward County community, where fibromyalgia is a condition that has historically been under-recognized.

To learn more about chiropractic care offered at Hollywood Laser Pain Center, visit the practice website. Patient education content is available on the ReliefNow Nation YouTube channel. The practice is located at 2607 Polk Street, Hollywood FL 33020. Phone: 954-925-7333.

About the Author

Dr. Bruce Mark, DC | Hollywood Laser Pain Center | 2607 Polk Street, Hollywood FL 33020 | 954-925-7333

Dr. Mark earned his Doctor of Chiropractic from Logan College of Chiropractic with honors and has practiced for more than 27 years in Hollywood, Florida. He holds certifications in Graston Technique and acupuncture, is a former collegiate football player at Wake Forest University, and practices at Broward Medical and Rehab. He is a provider in the national ReliefNow® network.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for general informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice. The effectiveness of treatments may vary depending on individual circumstances. Consult a qualified healthcare professional to discuss your specific medical needs and treatment options.

Two Worlds at a Dinner Table: How a Manhattan Perfume Lab and ‘Gone with the Wind’ Taught Me to Be American

Women's Journal Staff on May 22, 2026

The Abyss of Silence

When Gretel Timan first stepped onto American soil, she carried with her more than just a suitcase; she carried the heavy, suffocating silence of a life lived under a dictatorship. In East Germany, words were dangerous. In West Germany, she was often labeled simply as “that refugee.” But in America, she encountered something she hadn’t expected: a seat at the table.

The transition was not overnight. It was a grueling, daily battle fought with a heavy dictionary and a stubborn will. Gretel recalls one of her first major decisions, to learn English not just to survive, but to master it. She chose a formidable teacher: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Having seen the movie dubbed in German, she was determined to read the original text.

The process was agonizing. “Except for articles, pronouns, and prepositions, I had to look up every word,” she recalls. “By the time I looked up the last word of the sentence, I had forgotten the first word.” Most would have quit. But Gretel found a magic formula that would define her American life: make a reasonable choice and keep going. Mistakes would happen, but momentum was the only way out of the abyss.

The Sweet Smell of Success

Soon, the dictionary was accompanied by a job. Gretel found work at a perfume company in midtown Manhattan. To her, it was a “dream job”, sweet-smelling, clean, and accessible by the pulse of the city, the subway. However, the language barrier remained a wall. The telephone was a particular source of dread. When her boss, Art, would step out, the ringing phone felt like an alarm she wasn’t equipped to handle.

Her initial solution was simple: “Art is not in.” It was a phrase that backfired when Art returned to find his clients believed he had skipped work entirely. With patience, Art taught her a new phrase: “Art has stepped out of the room.” It was a small linguistic shift, but it represented a larger growth. Eventually, Art took her dictionary away entirely. “Try without it,” he told her. “You can do it.” And she did.

The Power of the Lunchroom

The most profound lesson in Americanization, however, didn’t come from a book or a boss. It came from the office girls in the lunchroom. In the beginning, the speed of their conversation was overwhelming. “They talked with machine speed,” Gretel says. “I could not understand one word. I felt dumb, absolutely stupid to the point where it became painful.”

Feeling defeated, Gretel began retreating to her lab to eat her sandwich alone in the dark. She chose isolation over the pain of not belonging. But the American spirit of her colleagues wouldn’t allow it. On the third day, eight women marched into her lab. They refused to leave until she joined them. They didn’t just share their lunch; they shared their lives. They took her to parties and showed her New York City on the weekends. They moved her from the status of “refugee” to the status of “friend.” They showed her that in this new world, she belonged.