Healthy New Year to you!
Brain Food eat your way to a sharper mind Michelle Bridges’ workout for every age Summer Slimming great recipes & tips
When a 14-year-old Michelle Bridges kick-started what would become a global fitness empire by teaching aerobics to adults at a local squash court, her mum, Maureen Partridge, was sceptical, but unsurprised. “I thought, I’ll let her run with it and see where it goes,” Maureen, 72, recalls of watching her determined daughter head out the door with cassette player in hand. “She’ll probably get it knocked on the head. But she didn’t and it shocked me. She was a little entrepreneur – she always had jobs going everywhere.”
That hardworking ethic, according to Michelle, 48, was born from the example Maureen set as a single mother raising two daughters in 1970s Australia. Maureen toiled six days a week in a dry-cleaning business, and spent the seventh cleaning the house, mowing lawns and gardening, while still making time to ferry Michelle to her various sporting commitments and attend weekly yoga and aerobics classes herself. Not only that but she’d rise at 6am each morning for a jog before switching on the slow cooker as she left for work so that a healthy meal would be ready when the family converged each evening around the dinner table.
“There was no fancy food like there is now. It was very simple home cooking,” Maureen says of the fare she served up when Michelle and her older sister, Tracey, were young. “I would make chicken one night, spaghetti bolognese one night – always with plenty of vegetables in that – beef another. In winter when we walked in at night the house was freezing but at least we could smell dinner cooking.”
“But do you know, Mum, that’s how I’ve always eaten? And since Steve [Willis, Michelle’s partner and father of her three-year-old son, Axel] and I have been together, that’s how we cook too,” Michelle interjects. “Last night we did poké bowls, the night before we did salmon off the barbecue with salad and brown rice, and we use our slow cooker in wintertime at least once or twice a week. Three veg and a protein – we eat very simply. It’s actually quite refreshing to think that some things don’t have to change. We don’t need to buy into this particular way of eating or this particular diet or fad. I find real solace in the fact that, the way my mum fed me, Axel’s now eating the same.”
Maureen’s early teachings in health and wellbeing have led Michelle to enlist her mum’s help in various projects over the years. Maureen has long been a firm favourite with Michelle’s 12-Week Body Transformation fans, sharing her favourite recipes and tips and taking part in several videos alongside her daughter. And now the pair has collaborated once more, creating Exercise for Seniors: A Guide to Help Seniors Move, Mobilise and Maintain Fitness.
It’s a topic that both women are passionate about. Maureen has continued to lead an active life, going to the gym several times a week, taking regular Pilates classes and performing on stage with her local Lions Club in New South Wales (at Christmas, she played Frieda in an ABBA tribute concert).
“I go to the YMCA and they have a programme for people over a certain age,” Maureen says. “Because we love 70s aerobics, they give us a bit of that. They also give us a circuit and then
I do a pump [weights] class. I drop two tracks – I don’t do the full class – but otherwise it’s just like the 30-yearolds do.”
Maureen staved off a hip replacement for six years by kicking her exercise routine up a notch. “At 53 they told me I had to have it ,” she says, “but it didn’t happen until I was 59.” She believes eating well and moving are the key to her continued good health.
“I’m not on blood pressure or cholesterol medication – I’m on no drugs. I take a little bit of help for my arthritis when I need it and I have an injection twice a year for my osteoporosis but that’s it.”
“Let’s face it, seniors are the jewels in our crown,” says Michelle of why it was important for her to create and film an exercise guide – starring Maureen of course – in association with Australia’s HomeInstead Senior Care service.
“If you look at our ageing population, and I’m talking about
[those in their] 80s and 90s, whether they ate bacon and eggs every morning and smoked a cigarette while they were cooking it, the overall theme is that they kept moving. They’ve usually been someone who is active, mobile and engaged in their family or community.
“They are the ones that we can learn from, that we can glean the most information from. They have been there, they have done it, earned their stripes and their scars. Sure, it might have been a different era but the foundational lessons are all there – the foundations of family, loyalty, responsibility, accountability. When to step up, when to step back. How to win, how to lose, how to play a fair game. All those lessons are ageless, timeless and invaluable,” says Michelle.