Social Workout

Feats

Wild Ab Workouts

See John Maulkin, aged 71 and living in Northern Cyprus, do 15 "standing reps" with his ab wheel. Ab wheel? Yes, dare you to find one in the corner of your gym and try just one of these. (Via Conditioning Research.)

Newslinks

Yoga, Playgrounds, and Kegels Push Fitness Boundaries

• First there was yoga for dogs; now there's yoga for horses.  
• It used to be that playgrounds were for kids only, but London just opened its first playground designed for senior citizens.
• And maybe you thought Kegels were just for women. Nope, turns out they work wonders for men, too.  

Fountain of Youth

Old People Should Pump Iron

The most recent edition of the Archives of Internal Medicine features a roundup of studies regarding the effects of exercise on aging successfully — a specialty otherwise known as "preventive gerontology." (Love that.) No big surprise: All the researchers agree violently that physical activity keeps you healthy and feeling younger. But there are some unexpected findings....

Workout

feel good aerobics class

back to aerobics

we danced, got to know each other a bit, and worked really hard.

Every Little Movement

A Gentleman's Workout in Paris

[R.Barr, dearest of old family friends, lives in Paris in a meandering set of linked chambres de bonnes on the Rue St. Honore. He is of a certain age, over 80, and long since retired from the American Foreign Service -- and mostly, too, from a late in life acting career. On hearing of Social Workout, he sent in the following description of his own exercise routine, which we run, mostly untouched, with thanks and glee. ~The Eds.]

Touches of Alexander, Yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, squats, stretches, mid-section bends and twists, etc., all go into the try toward 45 minute daily exercise mix. Lately, "backwards walking," (which came somewhere out of the Internet), has become part of a later-in-the-day promenade. Advantage, so they say, is that the backward motion uses different leg muscles, and that one step backward is worth ten forward, a bonus when the cardio limits walking time.

What began with a few backwards steps across the living room has become about 1,000 during the daily promenade. Luck for me is the ground floor tunnel leading from our building to another -- a Greek Parthenon-shaped glass building, with its own ground floor -- located across the street.

This morning, about half-way through the 150 meter Parthenon walk-through, I noticed a young couple near my starting point. As I went along, she took a few backsteps, then forward for a longer stretch with our exchange of waves. Then came a few more of her backsteps, with his showing, at least from my distant point, a tone of skepticism. Then back to their mostly forward walking. I waited for them at the end for a quick exchange of smiles and words....