It’s the first week in January and I am delighted that the gym in my over-55 community is not crowded.
I’m not a big fitness buff, mind you. Fitness, yes; buff, hardly. I began hitting the gym regularly when the Navy required me to pass an annual physical fitness test and kept the habit after I retired (minus the military sit-ups and push-ups). These days my last defense against age and gravity is to stagger into the gym and horse around with the exercise machines while reading a novel on my Kindle.
For many years one of my pet peeves was the New Year’s resolution crowd at the gym. My local fitness center in the Chicago suburbs was part of the Bally’s Total Fitness chain, which had a heavily advertised holiday sale on memberships every year. Lots of people got gym memberships for Christmas and many of them showed up the day after New Year’s.
This ruined my entire day. By the time I got to the gym after work the parking lot and locker room were full. All the exercise machines were in use by people who did not know how to use them and were unaware of gym etiquette. The aerobics class was a demolition derby of random flailing limbs. I quickly learned to just stay away from the gym the first week in January.
Fortunately, the fitness frenzy did not last long. The cheerfully sadistic young woman who taught the aerobics class refused to slow things down for the uninitiated and the class cleared out after a few days. By mid-February most of the newcomers had returned to their couches and the gym was back to normal. This validated the fitness chain’s business model of selling memberships to people who did not use them.
My senior community somehow is immune from the New Year’s resolution exercise mania. The gym gets regular use but is never crowded. Usually there are fewer people in the gym than on the pickleball court or in the yoga class. The only change I see during the holidays is when a few folks are dragged into the gym by their visiting kids.
Not that my neighbors are a bunch of couch-bound geriatrics. The community has a hiking group and I see lots of people walking or bicycling around the neighborhood. I suspect senior citizens who are attracted to an active-adult community already have figured out how to keep themselves healthy. The neighbors I have encountered are laid-back and mellow folks who may feel less urgency to change their lives than younger generations.
My only New Year’s resolution is to stick to the fitness program I’ve been following for years. And maybe clean the garage.