What’s It All For? The Psychology of Moving Your Body as You Age

As a very unsporty Longevity client of many years’ standing, I like learning about the benefits of exercise. But as someone who is ageing (not old, an ‘old’ person being by definition anyone who’s been around longer than I have) I’d like to say something about the psychological factors that influence our attitudes to exercise, and to our bodies, especially as we grow older.

For most of us when we’re young, exercise is just part of being a kid: running around, climbing, falling over, jumping, hopping. Unless you’re a serious athlete and/or get hurt, you don’t think about your body much: you take it for granted because it usually does what you ask of it. But then adolescent self-consciousness strikes, peer pressure becomes intense and the urge to build muscle, or to keep the weight off, might send you treadmilling or lifting weights in an attempt to achieve the perfect body. Viva vanity!

A little later Life gets in the way: you need to deal with your career, parenthood, dealing with children and all the other things involving working and raising a family. You may not have time (as well as being too sleep-deprived) to think about regular exercise. But when things calm down a bit, you may look at yourself in the mirror with dismay or discover you’re out of breath after climbing a dozen stairs. Something, you decide,  Must Be Done. 

Back you go to the gym. This is when you’re likely to find that it’s not just your life that has changed since you last picked up a set of weights. And what happened to the person who could run for hours without stopping? Exercises you could do with ease in your twenties are either much harder or, perhaps, impossible. And this is where it gets interesting – because while your levels of fitness have changed, your attitude to exercise is probably the same as it was when you were younger. 

It’s really common, I know, to be frustrated at this stage if you’re working really hard in the gym and you can’t see obvious results from months of sit to stands or squats. What’s it all for, if you’re not getting better? I’ve seen middle-aged clients, mostly men, being a bit terse with trainers because of this. But when you’re older it takes a while to understand something that seems counter-intuitive: if your levels of fitness and flexibility remain the same, if they don’t deteriorate, you’re ahead of the game. The definition of getting better at exercise, in fact, is not getting any worse.

 You do need to remind yourself what you’re doing all this for, I think. If you have medical problems, even surgery, you’ll recover more quickly if you’re reasonably fit. And in any case you need to pick up your kids or grandkids, carry the shopping, go upstairs quickly, run for a bus — and the last thing you want is to tear a tendon or put your back out. Exercise is good for avoiding such disasters. You may have more flesh than you want or need, but you’re stronger. (Besides, exercise is great as a stress-buster. I can recommend boxing: attacking punching bags instead of people is very therapeutic.)

We all want to stay strong and resilient as long as we can; that’s what exercise is for. It’s even better if you’re able to use the services of exercise physiologists – health professionals with a wide range of knowledge about the body and how it works at different stages. Gyms, after all, are not just for models and meatheads.

Jacqueline Kent is a Sydney-based writer of biography. Her most recent book is Inconvenient Women.