I’m 78 and I’m a gym bunny
Exercise keeps the Grim Reaper at bay, says John Sutherland from the comfort of his cross-trainer
Last October, I went for my daily workout at Fitness First. Behind the counter, the outrageously fit staff burst into a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ and brought out a cupcake with a candle on it.
My birthdate flashes up, radioactively, on their monitor. Enough years to cover a dustbin lid with candles. Seventy-eight candles, to be precise. ‘Am I your oldest member?’ I asked. ‘You don’t want to know, John,’ answered the saucy thing across the counter. Let’s hope I exercise enough to get plenty more cupcakes in the future. I note that the gym has recently installed a prominently displayed defibrillator.
Exercise is good for you at whatever age, particularly in later years. If it were up to me, I’d give every pensioner the choice of: (1) a freedom pass; (2) local gym membership; (3) a house-trained dog.
Dogs are for the solitary types. Fido demands walks two or three times a day,
rain or shine. Bending to pick up their droppings is good for the back. They’re companionable, but dogs don’t require you to talk. Would that more humans were like that. There is a downside: watching them piddle so promiscuously can, as a sort of empathy exercise, do things to one’s own continence. Gyms are for the more socially inclined who want to join in with no follow-up outside the gym.
The changing rooms – given their intimate, physical closeness – foster conversation. I’ve had to become a Spurs fan to get along in my gym, where football rules. Devotion to Arsenal, Chelsea or Spurs is tribal. Nakedness brings out the savage in a man.
For me, the Fitness First changing room has the same effect as basic training in National Service did many years ago. You meet a different type of person.
Gyms also provide public washrooms. Camden, where I live, doesn’t do that any more. The public baths and lavatories went long before the public libraries. The council gym I pass on the way to Waitrose has recently been sold off for ‘luxury apartments’. A sign of the times. Of course, Camden needs more luxury apartments. How else will the council solve the desperate local housing shortage?
Gym members – many of them crammed into overcrowded worker accommodation – use my gym to shower, shave, shampoo and the other thing.
Regularly used gyms are good value. You can haggle down the payment for full, all-hours membership to less than £10 a week. In some gyms (not mine), they’ll throw in a towel for free.
Oldie gym members should not go to the gym to train – leave that to the grunting hunks and willowy girls. It is retention you want: fighting off that annual loss of muscle and bone mass. Exercise forestalls bad, elderly things. Cancer, of course, won’t be impressed by the fact you can press forty kilos. But workouts generally give you longer odds.