Teri Sibai Fitness Director, Carillon Miami Wellness Resort
Photo courtesy of Teri Sibai
An 80-year-old man had a meeting with Teri Sibai, who runs the gym at the Carillon Miami Wellness Resort in Miami Beach. He had a modest goal: stand up from a chair without it feeling like it was killing him. Also, he told Sibai, his wife liked to walk, and he thought it would be nice if he could join her, but thanks to injuries and surgeries and whatever else life had brought him over eight decades, walking across the room was all he could manage.
The first thing he had to work on, Sibai told him, was his mindset. “He was at a point of saying, ‘I’m incapable. I’m 80 years old, and I just can’t do these things anymore,’” she recalls. “I had to reprogram his thinking.”
They started small: Water work. Two-pound weights. Hands pushing down on armrests. Then a little more load. Soon, he was standing up without using his hands. He increased the weights. His grandkids asked him how he’d turned things around. He happily went for walks around the block with his wife.
We’re all getting older, but none of us wants to get to the point where we’re incapable of getting out of a chair. Preventing that from happening starts early — decades before we think we’ll need it — and there’s a simple, one-step solution. It’s not just about staying active; as much as I love pickleball and biking, they aren’t enough. It’s about weights.
Strength training matters for a simple reason: It’s the most direct way to keep muscle on your body, keep your frame stable and ensure basic life tasks — standing, carrying, balancing — remain within your control.
A few years ago, I ran into an old friend who’s a personal trainer. I told him proudly that I worked out five to seven days a week — pickleball, cycling and even some high-intensity interval training. He nodded, gave a diplomatic pause and asked, “OK, but do you lift weights?”
I did not. I had cardio. I had movement. I had sore calves and the self-esteem of a middle-aged man obsessed with his daily step count. What I didn’t have was the slow, tedious maintenance work of keeping muscle on as the years began to peel it off. My friend explained that adults lose muscle and strength as they age, and that cardio doesn’t stop that process. Like a lot of older adults, I had confused “active” with “strong.”
So, I went home and researched it. The consensus is blunt: After age 30, adults lose roughly 3–8% of muscle mass per decade. It accelerates after 50, at about 1–2% a year. The fix is not mysterious: weight training done progressively, at least two days a week.
Lifting weights also pays off in ways people don’t necessarily brag about: better posture, stronger bones, more stability, fewer falls and more confidence doing ordinary things. Strength is what turns “I hope I don’t get hurt” into “I’ve trained for this” — even if “this” is just a flight of stairs.
Busy Bodies, Soft Frames
At the Carillon, Sibai says folks often have the same misconception. “People will get a little confused,” she says. She’ll ask if they’re lifting weights, and they reply, “No, but I’m working out.”
That’s when she explains that while Pilates, yoga and long tennis matches are great — those activities all count toward staying healthy — they don’t automatically build strength. Sibai calls the ideal strength-training regimen a “strategic rebuilding.” It’s about recreating the movements that show up in daily life at the gym. Sitting and standing from a chair is a squat. Picking something up is a hinge. Carrying grocery bags while stepping off a curb — duplicated with hand weights or kettlebells — is balance, grip and the kind of functional strength nobody notices until it’s gone.
This approach mirrors what Boca Raton–based certified personal trainer Dana Clarfield, 59, talks about every day with her clients. She has become an expert in maintaining muscle as we age, and her philosophy is straightforward: “Being active is not the same as building muscle.”
Some of Clarfield’s clients arrive looking healthy, eating well and working out regularly — and yet everything hurts. Her explanation is that adult bodies spend most of the day sitting, then are asked to be athletic with too little preparation.
People stretch quickly, hop onto a court and act surprised when a hip or knee objects. “Your muscles are what’s going to prep you and keep you from getting injured,” she says.
Dana Clarfield
Photo by Hannah Eden
Before she became a personal trainer, Clarfield built a law firm with her husband. She suffered from debilitating back pain that wouldn’t resolve no matter what the medical professionals told her to do. She started studying, passed her personal training certification and took workshops with the goal of fixing her back, not changing professions.
By 2019, however, she had started a personal training business. During COVID-19, she turned her garage into a gym, and neighbors started joining her for workouts. Most were over 40, and she discovered many of them also dealt with pain. Clarfield came to the realization that muscle is like an insurance policy. As we age, maintaining muscle can prevent injuries and keep us all more active.
Nofar Hagag in the studio
Photo courtesy of Nofar Method
Foundation, Not Bulk
In the Pilates community, Nofar Hagag, 39, is a familiar name. She moved to the United States on an athletic scholarship to play water polo after competing on Israel’s national team. Now, she has her own Pilates studios, the Nofar Method.
Drawing from her athletic background, Hagag took the tenets of Pilates and added strength training. She has worked with all kinds of clients, from tech executives to NFL athletes, and she tells them all, no matter their age, the same thing. “After 30,” she says, “if [you’re] coming back from injury or overdoing something, you won’t be able to perform the same way you could when you were 20.”
As we age, joints get more sensitive. The margin for sloppy movement shrinks. “It’s really about foundation,” Hagag adds. “What foundation do you give to your body in your 20s and 30s, and what are you looking to do from there?” Foundation requires maintenance, and maintenance requires admitting you’re not 20 anymore.
That’s even more true as the decades increase. An injury that took weeks to come back from in early adulthood can require months of rehabilitation for a 50- or 60-year-old. Strength training can not only help prevent injuries, it will also lessen recovery time.
Nofar Hagag in the studio
Photo courtesy of Nofar Method
“It’s not about bulking up,” Hagag explains. “It’s about preserving function and protecting joints.”
Nofar Method Pilates studio
Photo courtesy of Nofar Method
That word — function — is the entire point of strength training. The older you get, the less your workouts need to look impressive. They need to work. Strength training is not a vanity project; it’s infrastructure.
Hagag describes strength as the thing that keeps people comfortable in their bodies longer, enabling them to sit cross-legged and stand up without pain, hold posture without bracing and carry their own body weight without it feeling like a burden. She also doesn’t pitch Pilates as a substitute for strength training. Instead, she sees the two working together. She wants Pilates sessions to be part of the foundation, providing body awareness, alignment and control, and she advises people to load the body through strength work in between. The Nofar Method combines the benefits of Pilates with progressive strength training in a single workout.
To make the concept less abstract, Hagag offers a small benchmark: a one-minute plank. Start with 10 seconds and work up. The point isn’t the plank; rather, it’s learning to progress from doing something manageable today to doing slightly more next week.
Strategic Rebuilding, In Real Life
“Progressive overload” is a fancy term for a simple idea: Muscles adapt when you ask them to do slightly more over time. Not chaos. Not punishment. A plan.
Sibai starts beginners with stability and form. Early work might be box squats — literally sitting in a chair and standing up without using your hands. Then she introduces load, like a goblet squat, a farmer’s carry or shifting weight from one hand to the other, increasing gradually.
Many clients, she says, arrive thinking strength training means overdoing it. Her approach is closer to physical therapy than to ego placation: movement patterns first, then small amounts of resistance that build over time. If someone is new, Sibai recommends working with a trainer, because form and confidence matter, and it’s hard to build either while guessing.
Clarfield adds that muscle-building requires progression over weeks, not random workouts, and focusing on major muscle groups while slowly increasing challenges.
Beyond muscle, Sibai emphasizes the mental aspect. Think back to her 80-year-old client: Once he saw progress, it accelerated. Once his wife and grandkids saw it, it became real. The outcome wasn’t just that he got stronger — his life got bigger again. He could walk with his wife, pick things up and feel less afraid of falling. He didn’t start lifting weights to impress anyone; he did so because he wanted his life to improve. And most of us, whether we admit it or not, are trying to avoid the day a chair becomes a trap, to stay a person who can stand up and keep moving forward.