By: Ethan Rogers
Most people who think they’re strong have never actually tested it. That’s the position Vanja, founder of Moves Method, opens with, and she means it as a provocation, not a tag line. In her view, the fitness industry has failed people by spending decades training them inside a corridor so narrow that everything outside it has quietly atrophied. The numbers go up. The body breaks down. And the bill, she says, comes due around 40.
It’s a position that sets her apart in a space increasingly crowded with mobility content. Where most coaches frame mobility as a complement to strength training, a warm-up, a cooldown, or a stretch session, Vanja rejects this idea entirely. Strength and flexibility aren’t separate qualities. They’re the same quality, expressed at different ranges of motion. And most people, she argues, have only ever trained one slice of it.
A Narrow Definition of Strength
Walk into any conversation Vanja is having with a new client and you’ll hear the same diagnosis. They arrive strong on paper. Big deadlifts, respectable squats, impressive bench numbers. They also arrive with locked-up hips, shoulders that pinch overhead, and backs that seize up doing something as ordinary as loading a dishwasher.
“You can be strong in the gym and stiff everywhere else. That’s not strength. That’s fragility wearing a heavy belt.“
The disconnect, in her view, is structural. Most lifters operate inside a comfortable middle range of motion, the range their tightest joints already allow, and the body adapts specifically to that range. Everything outside it stays untrained, unloaded, and progressively weaker. By the time life demands something off-script, an awkward pickup, a deep reach, a sudden slip on the curb, the system has no answer for it.
That’s where the injuries happen. Not under the barbell, not while in the gym, but in the gap between what the body has rehearsed and what life is actually asking it to do.
Why End-Range Is the Metric That Matters
The reframe Vanja teaches is that real strength lives at the end range, the very edges of a joint’s available motion, not in the middle, where most training is done. And the practical consequence of that is significant. End-range strength is what tells the nervous system that deep positions are safe. Without that signal, the brain locks the joint down to protect the body, and no amount of stretching overrides it.
“Stretching doesn’t make you flexible. If it did, every gym goer would be a mobile god and every yoga teacher would have bulletproof joints. Flexibility comes from being unshakable and strong in the position, not from holding the position.“
This is why, in her methodology, mobility work is loaded. The bottom of a squat is trained, not just descended into. The overhead position is strengthened, not just reached for. Hanging is treated as a fundamental human capacity, not an accessory exercise. Every range becomes territory to be claimed and held under load because, in her framing, anything else is rented.
The Positions Modern Adults Have Lost
Vanja talks often about what she calls “lost positions”, the deep squat, the dead hang, the cross-legged floor sit, postures that should belong to every adult body and that most adults can no longer access. Trained out, sat out, lifted around. And in her view, every range a person abandons is a range the body quietly decides it no longer needs.
“The body takes inventory. Whatever you stop asking it to do, it retires. The hip that hasn’t gone past 90 degrees in a decade isn’t waiting for you. It’s gone.“
That sentence, she says, is the whole argument. The squat someone can’t sit in, the hang they can’t hold, the overhead position they can’t reach, none of it disappeared because they got older. It disappeared because they stopped using it, and no one told them they were supposed to fight to keep it.
Strength as Territory, Not Total
This is where her methodology departs most sharply from mainstream fitness. Strength, in her definition, isn’t a number; it’s the territory across which a body can produce force. A 200kg deadlift, she argues, means very little if the lifter can’t pick up a suitcase from an awkward angle without something tweaking. A heavy press means nothing if the shoulder collapses the moment the arm passes the ear.
Real-world demands rarely arrive in the perfectly aligned plane that the gym rewards. They come off-axis, under fatigue, in unrehearsed shapes. Building a body that holds up in those moments, that’s what she means by strength.
“The numbers will matter less. The territory those numbers cover will matter more.“
It’s a quiet but radical reframe in an industry built around personal records. And it’s a deliberately uncomfortable one for lifters whose identity is wrapped up in their best lifts.
The Cost of Training the Same Way for Thirty Years
The longer-term argument she makes is harder to dismiss. Most people, she says, don’t connect their current training to their future body. They assume the surgeries, the chronic pain, the lost mobility in their fifties and sixties is what happens to everyone, an inevitability of aging. Her position is that most of it isn’t aging at all. It’s disuse and neglect. The bill for thirty years of training is a narrow corridor, and abandoning the rest.
“You were not designed to break down at 45. Most of what people call aging is disuse.“
It’s a sharp claim, but one she backs up with the work itself. Her programming integrates loaded end-range strength, non-linear training, flexion, extension, rotation, hanging, deep squat work, and movement patterns that almost every gym ignores. In her view, this is what training is supposed to build, a body capable across its full range rather than inside a narrow corridor.
The Longer Game
Get strong everywhere you can move, she tells her clients. Then go find the places you can’t move yet, and get strong there too.
That, in her view, is what training is supposed to do. The body someone will have at 70 is being decided by the ranges they’re choosing to train and the ones they’re choosing to abandon, right now. Every session is a vote for which positions stay, and which ones quietly disappear.
Most people, she says, don’t realise they’re voting at all.
