How to reset your relationship with exercise at any age
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2024
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Exercising can be intimidating. Any New Year’s resolutions you made might feel overly ambitious and hard to keep. But fitness science tells us that exercise is linked to longevity and staying young.
Read more:
How fit you are is not determined by your age, weight or ability to do any one physical activity.
In this bonus episode of Post Reports, we’ll talk about how to stay fit at any age. Health columnist Gretchen Reynolds shares some simple exercises to assess your fitness and explains how overall fitness influences how long and how well we live. This is part of our occasional series about how we can all rethink and reset our daily habits in 2024.
You can find the online fitness age calculator here.
This episode was produced by Taylor White and Bishop Sand. It was mixed by Sean Carter. It was edited by Lucy Perkins.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So we're sitting here in Richard Morgan's carriage in Balenlock and he has a rather unusual activity. |
| 0:08.0 | I started never really played any sport but started drawing badgered a bit by my grandson to do something to exercise more. |
| 0:17.3 | This is Richard Morgan. |
| 0:18.7 | He's a competitive rower in Ireland, but for most of his life he was a baker and battery maker with creaky knees, not |
| 0:26.8 | your typical athlete. Richard started rowing when he was 73, all because of his grandson. Richard talked about this in an interview with the Irish |
| 0:36.2 | examiner. |
| 0:37.2 | So I started on the drawing and... |
| 0:40.2 | And what are you then? |
| 0:41.2 | 73. |
| 0:45.0 | And he persuaded me to enter into the national championships that year and I did and I want to go on Eddle. |
| 0:55.0 | Today Richard is 93. |
| 0:58.0 | He still competes in and wins indoor rowing competitions. |
| 1:02.0 | He's now a four-time world rowing champion. |
| 1:05.6 | These are the sort of things that really impress me. This is Bass Van Horan, |
| 1:10.5 | an exercise scientist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. |
| 1:14.5 | In December, he published a case study on Richard that looked into his training, diet, and |
| 1:20.4 | physiology. |
| 1:21.4 | So, you know, his training over 20 years is 10 times circumnavigating Ireland, the |
| 1:26.7 | coastal road of Ireland. |
| 1:27.8 | I mean, that's phenomenal for anybody even to perceive that they would they would set out on a training |
| 1:33.8 | regimen that would that would do that. |
| 1:37.5 | He concluded that Richard has the fitness of a much younger man. |
... |
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