Fitness Over 50 | Not Done Yet

The Quiet Humiliation of the Senior Fitness Class

The senior fitness industry sells softness and calls it care. Softness is what actually ages you.

Photo by Nelka on Unsplash

If there is a 225-pound barbell on the gym floor, most mornings, I am the one at it. At 62, I tend to be the among the oldest in a 50-foot radius. The young fellow racking his weights beside me was likely put on this earth the year I did my first marathon, but he has no way of knowing that. All he sees is an old man with a grey beard doing deadlifts. He gives me a nod, though, which is the way lifters one another. The proverbial “guy nod.” It is as good as a compliment in here.

I like to think I have put in the work for that kind of nod. It is the first thing on my mind when some well-meaning type tells me I would be better off in the senior fitness class down the hall.

The weight room makes its demands. You load up a bar you are not sure you can budge, plant your feet and brace and see what happens. It is not going to make allowances for me being a Navy vet or a cancer survivor, or for my knees having a mind of their own come bad weather. There is no softening of the floor, no gentle music on the speakers, certainly no foam noodle proffered to you. The room assumes you can handle it and if you can’t, it expects you to get back to where you can. Effort in, strength out. The bar is about as honest as anything in my life short of Gus (the ever-stalwart Bernedoodle), but I will not put it in those terms for fear of offending him.

If you walk by the other room you will see something entirely different. Folding chairs, people my age and older putting in slow motion with two-pound dumbbells, while some instructor half their age (and probably size) speaks baby-talk to them, assuring them that they are doing fine. There is a lot of sitting. The resistance bands are about as strong as the rubber band in your hair. It is a room filled with coaches that have made up their mind that you are fragile and you should step inside.

I have to be careful with my anger over this, because the folks in there do not deserve it. They showed up. In a world content to let you waste away in a recliner, they got dressed in proper shoes and drove here to put in some movement. I have nothing against them. My problem is with the room’s design.

There is a committee somewhere that has made up its mind: pass a certain point and the whole point of being fit is not to build strength but to stay out of harm’s way. They have put a new spin on it. Training is now “low-impact” if you are past 60, and they will tell you so in the kind of hushed voice one uses for bad tidings. I grew up in DeLand during the ‘60s and ‘70s where you were just told once you hit 50 that was the end of it. We ought to be beyond such things by now, yet we have merely applied some better wallpaper to the same old idea. The senior fitness industry would have you believe they are in the care business, when what they are selling is comfort.

I am not so sure about that. In my view it is the softness you allow yourself that adds years to you, not the calendar. You won’t hear the types in the circle of chairs admit as much, not with their membership figures to think of, but your body doesn’t fall apart of its own accord at 60. It is because you have stopped making any demands on it. Muscle does not mind age if you give it something to do. Any study worth its salt will show you that an 80-year-old can still gain strength if you put some genuine resistance in his path, not those asparagus bands, but something with meaning. Make the demand and the body will oblige.

And so you find yourself in a chair with a two-pound weight, they are telling you how well you are doing and all the while you are a 70-year-old in full command of your faculties. It is not so much kindness on their part as it is a way of validating the very fear that brought you here. You came in because you were concerned you were losing your edge and the class has a program to put your mind at ease. There is a certain humiliation to it. The room is full of lovely people, no one is unkind, but then again their kindness is a sort of verdict: they don’t believe you are up to anything more.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying every 65-year-old ought to be heaving 225 from the floor on a Monday. But we have put a ceiling over their heads that is four feet too low and for what? They are just stooping under it.

Fitness after 50, done right, is not gentle. It is patient. Patient is what you are when you start where you are and let the body adjust at its own pace. Gentle is an assumption that you are breakable. I prefer patient and, coming from a Catholic background, I can say I know a phrase that used to carry some weight.

There is a gift in the barbell. It does not consider me fragile. When I load it up, it treats me like someone who can still put in hard work. I did not anticipate this when I left the endurance side of things for the iron, but there is something to being treated as capable; it makes you so. The room wants it of you and you become the sort of person who can oblige.

When you reach a certain birthday they try to spell out the options for you. It is not a matter of safe versus dangerous. It is whether you want to be in a room that expects nothing or one that does. One will make you comfortable. The other will see you upright and useful, getting yourself up from the ground on your own terms for the next couple of decades.

I know which room I am going to be in tomorrow morning. The folding chairs will be there as they always are, but I have no intention of sitting in one just because someone has put it in front of me and said in the nicest tone that it is time.

Sign up here to receive our free weekly newsletter featuring the best of Crow’s Feet.