On November 7, 2026, a thousand people will compete in the SuperAge Games, the first world's first longevity fitness competition. They will not race for a finish time. They will be scored on how well they are aging. The event redefines who counts as an athlete, and it hands you a template for care you can use on Monday.
The work that builds a competitive athlete is the same work that protects a sedentary patient from decline. Same assessments, same levers, different starting dose. AI makes it practical to run that protocol across a whole panel instead of only on a handful of motivated clients.
The SuperAge Games Are A Longevity Panel In Action
The SuperAge Games are running eight trials:
The trial | What it predicts |
|---|---|
Cardiovascular capacity | Higher cardiorespiratory fitness is consistently associated with lower mortality risk, better brain health, and healthier aging. |
Grip strength | A practical marker of overall strength, neuromuscular health, frailty risk, and long-term health outcomes. |
Balance and agility | Predicts fall risk, mobility limitations, and the ability to maintain independence with aging. |
Functional strength | Reflects everyday capability, mobility, and the ability to remain independent in daily life. |
Endurance under load | Indicates how well physical function is maintained during sustained effort, fatigue, and real-world demands. |
Working memory | Supports cognitive reserve, helping maintain thinking performance despite age-related brain changes. |
Relational capacity | Strong social connections are associated with greater resilience, cognitive health, and lower risk of frailty and decline. |
This list looks like a healthspan workup. Each trial scores durability across decades instead of peak output on one day.
What Six Pro Athletes Already Know
The New York Times recently profiled six professional athletes who keep competing well into what most would consider retirement age. These athletes treat recovery, sleep, fueling, and tissue maintenance as the actual job. They measure constantly.
Your patients can copy a similar structure. Assess, set a target, train the weak link, recover on purpose, and measure again. The pro athlete is just further along the same road your patient is already on.
Matt Dawson is the proof of concept. The TruDiagnostic founder is a busy chief executive and a father of four who had not trained seriously in over a decade. Rather than out train the real endurance athletes, Dawson used epigenetic and performance data with AI as a coach, often at a treadmill desk. He used data to train smarter and, in 2026, helped set a group world record going up and down Kilimanjaro in under 24 hours, injury free.
The Four Assessments That Anchor The Careflow
You don’t need eight trials to run this at your clinic. These four are measurable, trackable, and tied to hard outcomes:
Assessment | What to measure | Tool | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
Aerobic fitness | VO₂max (or estimated VO₂max), tracked over time | Wearable estimate; confirm with CPET when needed | One of the strongest measurable predictors of lifespan and healthspan. |
Strength | Grip strength, both hands | Hand dynamometer, two minutes | A practical biomarker of resilience, physical capability, and biological aging. |
Mobility | Sit to rise, single leg balance, gait speed | No equipment, under ten minutes | A measure of whether strength and fitness translate into real-world independence. |
Nutrition and body composition | Protein intake, lean mass, fat mass, and weight trend | Diet recall, DEXA or bioimpedance | The foundation that preserves muscle, supports recovery, and protects function over time. |
Want to dive deeper into each assessment? We break it down in our latest blog.
The New Performance Physical
You can take those same functional activities from the SuperAge Games and build them into a standard care loop. Call it the performance physical, the yearly exam for patients who want to stay on the move and push what their body can still do. It’s the same idea as the physical you already run, except the markers measure capacity and trajectory.
The exam has three layers. They are fast, need almost no equipment, and give the patient a score they actually care about.
Layer | What you collect | How |
|---|---|---|
In room battery | Grip strength, sit to rise, single leg balance, gait speed, a working memory screen, endurance under load | Dynamometer and a stopwatch, about 15 minutes with a medical assistant |
Lab and biomarker panel | VO2 max or its estimate, body composition, a metabolic and lipid panel, and an optional biological age test | CPET or a submax test, DEXA or bioimpedance, a standard draw, an epigenetic kit |
Wearable stream | Resting heart rate, heart rate variability, VO2 trend, sleep, readiness or strain | One device the patient wears daily, synced to the chart |
Build it once and use it for every patient. Make an intake template that captures the battery scores, an order set that fires the labs and the imaging together, and a flowsheet that trends each marker visit over visit so you read direction and not a single number. Point the wearable feed at the same flowsheet. Now the performance physical is a repeatable visit type instead of a custom workup you rebuild for every patient. For the biological age piece, we walked through what is real and what is hype in our genomics issue.
Where AI Carries The Load
The performance physical scales because of AI. No one hand builds and monitors a performance physical for several hundred patients. Use a HIPAA-compliant clinical AI tool, or a purpose-built platform like Ultralight, to synthesize each patient's exam findings, wearable trends, and lab results between visits. The model drafts the next progression, flags a VO₂ max or readiness score drifting the wrong way, and writes a plain summary before each visit. You review, correct, and approve. The model carries the volume. The clinical judgment stays yours. We laid out setups you can copy in a previous workflows issue and the wider stack in the five AI tools issue.
You feed it | It drafts | You decide |
|---|---|---|
The performance physical, wearable export, recent labs, your notes | The next progression, a flag on drifting VO2 max or readiness, a plain visit summary | Read it, correct it, approve or change the plan |
Wearable VO₂ estimates have been validated against lab testing at scale, but watch out for errors. A 2025 validation study of the Apple Watch found a mean error of 6.25 mL/kg per minute compared to CPET, with a 13.2 percent mean absolute percentage error. A 2025 systematic review found accuracy varies significantly by brand and context. What wearables do well is track the same person over time. Use the trend to see who is climbing and who is sliding, then order a formal test when the result will change what you do. That turns athlete-style fitness monitoring from a concierge service into something you can run for every patient, as long as the trend, not the number, is driving the decision.
How To Start This Quarter
Four moves stand up the performance physical in your practice.
Build the intake template and order set for the exam.
Buy a grip dynamometer and standardize on one wearable.
Pick the visit type and price it, cash or covered.
Run your next ten active patients through it.
Then watch how the same exam serves the marathoner and the deconditioned 58 year old. Only the numbers move.
Be a modern clinician with the help of Ultralight, the AI-native EHR built specifically for functional, integrative, and longevity medicine.
In the news
Midjourney just announced it is building a whole-body scanner you step into like a spa. The Midjourney Medical announcement describes a 60-second full-body ultrasonic CT scan with no radiation, or MRI tube. It just needs sound waves and a shallow pool of water. The first Midjourney Spa opens in San Francisco in 2027, with hot tubs and cold plunges alongside the scanner so the scan is almost incidental. The clinical implication is the same one driving this whole issue: when patients can get detailed body composition maps on their own, your job shifts from collecting data to interpreting it and acting on it.
A 21-year-old just raised $11.6M to put a hormone lab on your patients' wrists. Clair Health, founded by two Stanford graduates, closed an $11.6M seed round led by Khosla Ventures to build a continuous, noninvasive hormone monitor for women. The wearable tracks estrogen, progesterone, LH, FSH, and PdG in real time with no blood draw or finger stick. Launch is set for November 2026 at $369 plus a $9.99 monthly subscription. Women's hormone data is finally becoming continuous and wearable.
Harvard just put a number on the strength training sweet spot. A 30-year study of 147,000 adults published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that 90 to 119 minutes of weekly strength training reduces all-cause mortality by 13 percent, cardiovascular death by 19 percent, and neurological death by 27 percent. Above 120 minutes, the benefit plateaued. The clinical move is straightforward: if a patient asks how much lifting is enough, 90 minutes a week is your evidence-based floor, and the dynamometer tells you whether it is working.
Upcoming Conferences & Events
Oct 8–10, A4M Women's Health Summit · San Antonio, TX · The best clinical education on hormone, metabolic, and midlife women's health you will see this year. The room to be in if you are growing the perimenopause and menopause side of your practice.
Oct 21–24, NAMS Annual Meeting · San Diego, CA · The single most practice-changing meeting of the year for midlife women's health. Your protocols will look different after this one.
Nov 5–8, Eudēmonia Summit · West Palm Beach, FL · One of the most talked-about longevity gatherings in the U.S. Experientials, hands-on demos, and the best place to try the emerging frameworks your patients will ask you about next year. Ovation and Ultralight team will be there!
Nov 5-7 — Private Physicians Alliance Annual Meeting · St. Petersburg, FL The gathering for independent, cash-pay, and concierge physicians navigating practice independence. Practical and peer-driven. Ultralight will be there!
Nov 8-11 — American College of Lifestyle Medicine Conference · Orlando, FL Lifestyle medicine's main annual event — evidence-based approaches to behavior change, chronic disease, and healthspan. Growing overlap with the longevity medicine community.
Dec 11–13, A4M Longevity Fest · Las Vegas, NV · The biggest longevity event in the U.S. The room spans clinicians, industry, founders, and the people building next year's platforms, and the connections from this one tend to compound through the rest of your year. Ultralight will be there!
Know of an event we should add? Reply and tell us.
Until next week
The performance physical tracks more per patient than a yearly exam ever did. VO2 trend, strength, body composition, recovery, all moving at once. Tracking that volume of data manually across a full panel is impossible. AI automatically connects the dots between these metrics, giving you a clear, readable snapshot for every active patient you treat.
Pick one patient this week who wants to stay on the move. Run the performance physical, trend it against the four markers, and find one thing worth acting on. Reply and tell us what you found. The best ideas in this newsletter come from clinicians doing the work, just like you.
— Sunita and Dr. G