My 94-year-old grandmother died last week. She and I had a long and complicated relationship but mostly I’ve been reflecting on how grateful I am to have had so much history with the elders in my family. Many of my great-grandparents lived until I was a middle schooler and a couple of them made it into my early adulthood. How amazing is it that I’m old enough to have been an AARP member for years before losing my last grandparent?

It fascinated me as a child watching how my family approached aging. They had a lot of beliefs about what aging meant. Many of them saw a slow decline of health and function with the final years spent entirely dependent as inevitable. I wondered if that was really true.

We all approach aging with many myths and stereotypes. We don’t really know how old age will play out for us before we get there but those myths can often keep us from taking action on our own behalf, thinking that our creaky joints and faulty memories and aching back are just par for the course. Even when we see someone older doing something amazing, it doesn’t always register or change our beliefs or actions.

I saw an example of this on the news this week: an 81-year-old woman doing amazing fitness feats like one-armed planks on TikTok. (Just Google “fitness grandma” and you’ll come up with her plus others!) I love seeing stuff like that but I also recognize that it doesn’t always change people’s habits. I was watching the responses of the news anchors and, while all of them were wowed, none of them seemed inclined to follow her lead.

It got me thinking.

I love planks and I do them a lot. I do lots of variations on them, and I love getting stronger and working out. Geeking out on movement and fitness is fun for me and I love spending time on it. For me, this woman is a great role model! I hope I’m doing those one-armed planks in my 80s on whatever social media platform is up and running 30 years from now!

But I think for many people who aren’t even doing plain old garden variety planks, what this woman is doing is from a different reality. It simply doesn’t have much meaning to them because they can’t imagine doing anything like that ever. It might be interesting and entertaining to watch her but it’s not motivating; it’s irrelevant.

For other folks, they may look at that and think, “I don’t even WANT to do that! That looks like a terrible way to spend my time!” Again, it’s not motivating because it doesn’t connect with the goals they have for themselves.

We all need to think about our own lives, our own goals, our own motivations. If we imagine we’re in training for the geriatric olympics, what sport are we training for? Rosebush pruning? Mountain hiking forever? Carrying our own groceries? Playing on the floor with the grandkids? Open water swimming? Don’t worry about what someone else is training for; train for your own life.

My grandmother never did a plank in her life as far as I’m aware and she wouldn’t have cared about Fitness Grandma. But she had some good tools for aging better and maybe those tools from her tool box will be more motivating for everyday folks, because they’re just everyday stuff. And her everyday habits can help us all age into whatever our goals are, planks or no planks.

With that in mind, here are some life lessons on aging from my grandmother:

  1. Walk. I grew up in Texas. People in Texas don’t walk much as a rule; they prefer to use their cars to get them as close as possible to where they’re going. But one of my early memories from my grandmother was taking walks around the neighborhood with her and my grandfather, swinging between them. In a culture where walking was not the norm, we took walks together and it was a regular thing for her. Walking is hands down one of the best all around fitness programs there is, plus it gets you out in nature which has its own restorative powers.
  2. Don’t put stuff off; just get up and get it done. If something needed doing, my grandmother was up and doing it. Just being active doing regular everyday tasks goes a long way towards keeping you healthy.
  3. Prepare your own food. Home cooking was the rule at my grandmother’s house and she was constantly cooking and baking. Doing your own cooking keeps you moving and active and allows you to control exactly what goes into your meals.
  4. Serve others and build community. Plenty of research shows a link between aging well and having a strong community and a feeling of purpose and my grandmother had both. She worked as a nurse until she retired and she was constantly cooking casseroles and delivering them to housebound folks. She had a strong social network until the day she died and loved playing games with her friends.
  5. Learn something new. After my grandmother retired, she got her GED (she had never graduated from high school) and she took a computer class to learn all that newfangled stuff about how to use “that rat thing” as she called the mouse. Again, plenty of research shows that we can continue to learn and grow as we get older, but just like with everything else it’s use it or lose it.

This isn’t rocket science, but there is good science showing that all of these are good ways to approach aging no matter what our goals in life are.

But maybe you want more on exercise specifically and how to incorporate what we know about how exercise affects the aging process (the myths and the reality) in our everyday lives.

Well, my grandmother wouldn’t have been interested but I’ve got you covered. :) I’ll be teaching a free workshop called Aging Stronger on Monday March 8th from 10-11:30 AM PST. ***WHOOPS! This is over. Did you miss it? That’s okay. Sign up for my mailing list and I’ll keep you posted on upcoming opportunities!

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