While I attended grad school, I worked full-time, had 0-3 children living at home (depending on the year), and carried 6 graduate credits. That meant I had 6 hours of class plus a 30-minute drive back and forth to the campus every week after my workday, and my study time at home was at least 20 hours per week. The result: I pretty much gave up exercising because I didn’t have time for it. I achieved three post-graduate degrees–two master’s degrees and a doctorate–and graduated for the last time in December 2005. I love to exercise and I missed doing it, so my New Year’s resolution for 2006 was to get back to regular exercising.

One of the employee benefits at the community college where I worked was free use of the Fitness Center and free classes. It was winter, so I started by going to the Fitness Center at the end of my workday and doing “the circuit”–a series of equipment arranged to work out at one piece of equipment, then move to the next one through the circuit, gradually warming up and working every part of your body. One day, while I was doing the circuit, a Fitness Center employee invited me to do Pilates with her, so I did and I loved it. Eventually, Theo (the employee) had a group of 5 people informally doing Pilates with her. She decided to become a certified Pilates teacher so she could be paid to teach Pilates classes and after that, we were able to exercise in a dedicated exercise classroom, complete with mirrors to monitor our form, rather than in an open corner of the Fitness Center.

Ted and I were getting older by then (shocking!) and we were beginning to feel a little stiff when we got out of bed in the morning. I’d been doing some stretches at home to loosen up, but Pilates was even better, so I invited Ted to join the class too. He and I are now in our 21st year of attending twice-weekly Pilates classes taught by Theo. In fact, we’re her longest-term students. The result: we are no longer stiff when we get out of bed in the morning, and we’re both far more flexible than friends and neighbors our age. A few days ago, Ted sent me this screenshot.

The woman on the T-shirt is doing Pilates with a machine called a reformer. Ted and I do classical Pilates, where our body does the work. Our only equipment is a stretch strap, a ring, and some free weights. Regardless of the version of Pilates, the slogan on the T-shirt is so true, that I asked Ted to video me doing some of of the Pilates moves we regularly do. At every class, we stretch for about 15 minutes to warm up and then we do the “hundreds.” We hold this position and repeat the arm motion 100 times in unison as a class.

We don’t do traditional sit-ups; we do three different styles of roll-ups, one right after another, with 5 reps of each style, totaling 15 roll-ups. This is one of them. If you want to try it, keep your hands on your forehead and touch your head to your knees, then slowly roll back and lie down. Slow and controlled is the Pilates motto. We don’t use upward thrust to overcome gravity, nor do we do quick drops to take advantage of gravity. It’s all about our very own core strength.

This is a rollover. We do a variety of rollover styles. Theo saves this until the new students in the class are strong enough to do it without injuring their backs, and then she has us do 3 different styles with 3 reps of each style for a total of 9 rollups. Again, slow and controlled.

When we finish our hour-long sessions, we stretch. I don’t know if this stretch has a name, but we put our hands behind our ankles and pull our foreheads to our knees to loosen our backs and the muscles we’ve worked in our legs.

Yessireebob! The best of us still do Pilates in our 70s–and we love how strong and flexible we are.