My opinion is that everyone should have a Personal Trainer at their disposal. I have one and everyone in our gym has at least one (Barb).
But the majority of gym members in the U.S. do not utilize a Personal Trainer or seek professional help when they join a gym. An estimated 85% of gym members go it alone (Gemini).
We’re a nation of DIYers and from my perspective as long as everyone 1) is being safe, 2) has effective workouts, 3) avoids fad diets, and 4) is sticking with the program, it’s all good.
Here’s what we want for our members:
Everyone should know exactly what they’re doing in a gym – and not just our gym. Members should be able to walk into ANY gym and feel comfortable working out.
They should know what makes up a solid fitness plan, which includes diet, exercise, stress management, and sleep.
They should know how to design and modify their workouts to keep them effective and motivating. Members should have enough knowledge to keep variety in their workouts as to not be bored with doing the same thing over and over.
They should also know what makes up healthy nutrition and how to put together a plan they can stick to.
Barb and I are putting a new focus on all of the above. We want to make sure everyone in our gym has the tools to meet their goals in a safe, effective and motivating manner.
I have a gym in my backyard that I’ve barely used for the past year.
Not one for excuses, but 2024 and 2025 were crazy busy for me. Lots of projects.
Here’s what’s wrong:
My projects kept me active the last few years, but my diet sucked. Somewhere in my mind I still think I can outwork a bad diet.
“You can’t exercise your way out of a bad diet.”
Mark Hyman
My biggest diet pitfalls were 1) my snack before dinner, often carbs and beer totalling 800-1000 calories, and 2) my snack before bedtime, which typically contained a lot of sugar.
The worse thing was that I started feeding my addiction to sugar again. I needed sweets, mostly cookies and candy bars.
Retirement can be scary, particularly if you haven’t planned for it financially.
As the last of us Boomers approach retirement age, our focus has shifted from raising a family to ensuring we have enough nuts put away to last us for the winter of our lives.
Those that aren’t prepared have to work longer hoping their health will allow it.
For them, it’s not about money. It’s about staying capable.
The less money you have, the longer you need to work.
It’s ironic that many people wait for retirement to get serious about their health. The logic is that they’ll have more time to focus on eating right and exercising. The irony is in that eating right and exercise will make it so you can work longer. It will make it so you can be useful into old age.
Know What’s Scarier Than Not Having Enough Money?
Losing muscle and capability.
Confidence in Ability
I helped a friend with a home project a few months back. He’s an older guy in his 70’s – about a decade older than me. He had bought all the materials he needed and had a good idea what he wanted done. I showed up essentially to help with final assembly.
It occurred to me that he could have done the whole project by himself, but he lacked the confidence to do it.
My friend golfs a lot and has toothpicks for arms. He clearly hasn’t touched a weight in decades. With this project, there was some lifting involved and I am certain his wife encouraged him to hire some help rather than try it himself.
And this is what happens as we age. We start to lose confidence in our abilities. As such, we do less. As we do less, we lose more confidence.
It’s a spiral.
And then there’s the fear of falling.
Couple years back I attempted to jump off the tailgate of my truck – backwards – as I was pulling something large out of the bed.
My feet caught on the tailgate and I fell flat on my back off of my lifted truck.
Ouch. But I was OK.
Actually, I was better than OK. I was thrilled.
Falling can be devastating. Fortunately it wasn’t. But my jumping off the back of the pick-up days is over.
As we do less and less, eventually, the main concern becomes just staying upright. Falls are devastating, particularly if we can’t get up.
Long-Livity
(Grandpa George coined that term back when I was a teenager in the 70’s.)
My grandparents worked hard all their lives at a mill so they could have a comfortable retirement in Florida.
In it’s in our culture to focus on both living a long life and being financially set in retirement.
But our real focus should not just to live a long life in retirement, but rather a long, useful life.
Think Healthspan
In 1987, Gerontologists John Rowe and Robert Kahn coined the term “healthspan”, defining it as “the period of life where individuals maintain full function, aiming for healthy years rather than just more years of life.”
Essentially, we should be focusing on the quality of life in later years vs. just extending the quantity of years.
In fact, society has it backwards as far as its priorities. Being healthy and fit is the ultimate protection during our retirement years. Staying capable means you have the ability to work longer to make a living.
Living in Luxury
Retirement is a hoax we have been sold.
No one should live a life of doing nothing. According to the data, having purpose and meaningful work is important to happiness. Just because you can do nothing doesn’t mean you should.
A much better designed retirement is one where you spend it doing more of what you love than what you have to do.
I know several Contractors who have worked until they were crippled. Bad health habits combined with repetitive motion activities forced a sedentary retirement. A much better plan would have been to take care of themselves and hire younger people to do the heavy lifting. Do more thinking than lifting.
How to Prepare for Your Retirement Years
I wrote a book on it. It’s called Young, Longer. (You can get a free pdf from my Google Drive here.)
The short version to what retirees need to do is laid out in the first Chapter, but here is an even shorter version:
Get your finances in order
Eat right
Exercise. Needs to include mobility, strength, and cardiovascular (aerobic) training.
Cardio for Lifespan, Strength for Healthspan
Think back to my golf buddy. He can walk 9 holes no problem. Lifting lumber? Not so much.
Walking is good exercise and should be a part of everyone’s program, but the best cardio has interval components where you raise your heartrate to near maximum.
And Strength Training is an absolute necessity for a good quality of life in your 50’s on up. It builds muscle, mobility and strong bones.
Personal Fitness Coaching: A Life Hack for Retirement
Working out is hard. Even harder for folks over 50 that haven’t done it in a while.
You likely don’t know what to do. You may feel subconscious. Your muscles fight you the whole way. You can’t do what you think you can do or what you used to be able to do so the whole experience attacks your ego.
And then there’s the inevitable soreness.
You know that over time, if you can stick with it, it it will become easier and even maybe even enjoyable. But it’s just so hard.
But there’s one thing you can do to GUARANTEE your success starting back into Fitness: Hire a Personal Fitness Coach or Personal Trainer.
The job of a Coach or a PT is to get you to a point where you feel comfortable working out by yourself or in a group. They give you the knowledge you need and make sure you’re doing things right. They’ll encourage you and hold you accountable until you don’t need them any longer.
But Personal Trainers are Expensive!
They are quite literally the best investment you can make if you don’t exercise. Find the best one money can buy and get started the right way!
Ten years ago I got my first hankering to expand the gym. Back then, I just wasn’t satisfied with what we had.
But 2016 was not the right time to reinvest in the gym. I was looking toward retiring from my job in a few years, so instead of expanding, we spruced the gym up. New flooring and paint. It would have to do. New programming started with adding HIIT classes, new yoga classes in a dedicated upstairs zen space with an awesome instructor. This brought in new clients and membership grew. Late in 2019 I started joking about needing a bigger gym and our members enthusiastically agreed.
Enter Covid March 2020: we were shut down for 6 months. Honestly, my wife and I didn’t know if/when we would open back up. We started offering outdoor exercise classes in the summer at our local town pavillion for free to give our clients a safe space to continue to exercise together. We did re-open in September 2020 with a new scheduled format of a max of 4 members in the gym for safety.
Then, in 2022, a few years into retiring from my job, I got the urge again to expand the gym. Actually, the desire never left, but now I had the resources and time to do it. I realized our current space would not allow for the growth of more membership.
The gym had evolved to what it was in 2022 through trial and error. You can read our (abbreviated) story here, but over the years several factors landed us to where the gym was.
The result of our evolution was a gym that we were very comfortable with and liked very much. At roughly 1100 square feet, it essentially had everything needed for our members. It was right-sized for our customers and efficient.
Our Vision for our Clients and our Business is Two-fold:
Business: To be a welcoming sanctuary of strength and support that fosters a supportive community for fitness.
Training: To empower, train and inspire every member to achieve their goals through a positive environment and personalized training.
Our Mission is:
To provide our members with a convenient, friendly, and supportive environment that empowers them to reach their fitness goals.
To create an excellent, sustainable facility for exercise, locally.
To provide our members with training and education that in addition to helping them meet their goals will motivate and empower them to set new goals.
Our Purpose:
To offer our community an excellent, sustainable, supportive, local, facility for exercise.
To offer our community resources and guidance to help each member within it achieve their fitness goals.
To help our clients identify and achieve their health and fitness goals through empowering personalized fitness in a welcoming, supportive environment.
Before 153 BCE, the Roman Calendar had October as the 8th month of the year (octo means 8 in Latin), November as the 9th (novem means 9) and December the 10th (decem means 10).
The old Roman calendar made sense, as the seasons are a cycle. If you were inventing a cycle, where would you start it?
In the winter?
It makes more sense to us humans to start the cycle at the beginning as we know it – birth or Spring.
Spring 2010 – Tioga County Fitness Challenge
So why would anyone resolve to change exercise and eating habits at the end of a cycle – in the dead of winter?
Well, maybe because they think “It’s a New Year and that mean new things. A new you maybe.
But it really doesn’t make sense from a practical standpoint. Up here in the Northeast, winter means shorter days, less sun, and colder weather. Most people slow down – maybe put on a protective layer of fat. Snuggling in a blanket with a good book is much more appealing than trekking out in the snow and cold to get to an exercise class.
In 1993, we coined our mission statement as “Helping Women Succeed with Fitness”. We wanted to be the place where women could come to exercise to get fitter and relieve stress so they could be better to themselves and for those around them.
Our gym has evolved. Now, we’re not just about women. We are co-ed and nearly 70% of our members are over 60 years old!
Our gym is now about serving people in their Best Third of life. It’s about helping people make this time the best part of their lives.
We want this third to be your best. It absolutely is for me and others in the gym. No more financial struggles. No more working for idiots. More time for family and friends.
We all know it’s not the age number that counts. The only thing that really matters is how we feel and how we perform physically and mentally as we age.
Chris Crowley in his book Younger Next Year writes how good life can be for those 55 and older in their “Next Third”. (Its actually the Last Third, but no sense in being morbid about it.)
Chris explains how the science shows that it is a choice for many to allow themselves to decay like the typical older person does. You can choose to feel and act just as good in your 60’s and 70’s as you do in your 50’s.
But it does takes work.
The science is clear that if we change away from our unhealthy habits and start doing the right things with exercise and diet, we can get biologically younger. We can have better physical and brain health as well as be more energized and optimistic.
Building Community within a gym is good for members and for business. Strong communities within gyms encourage member retention by keeping the atmosphere friendly, supportive, and energized.
Most people don’t go to the gym just for a workout. They go for motivation, accountability, inspiration and social connection. There is pride in being part of a healthy, strong, happy community. Members feel valued and accomplished when they are working out side-by-side, learning new movements, celebrating victories and overcoming challenges together.
Crossfit’s meteoric rise in the fitness industry was built on a community platform. Barb and I attended Wodamania in Riviera Beach, Florida in December. The energy and support for the athletes was unreal!
Our friend, the late Val Gundrum, focused her business model of Aerobics Central/Four Seasons Fitness Studio a decade ago on community. She was way ahead of her time in understanding that social interaction is important in the gym.
Community is important!
Now more than ever!
Society is heading in the wrong direction regarding social connection. There is more cellphone and social media use, particularly among younger generations, and less volunteering and face-to-face interaction. This is linked to the increase in loneliness and depression.
Data shows that exercise can help treat depression. Adding positive social interactions within the exercise environment is only going to help more.
The mechanisms underlying the antidepressant effects of exercise remain in debate; however, the efficacy of exercise in decreasing symptoms of depression has been well established. Data regarding the positive mood effects of exercise involvement, independent of fitness gains, suggest that the focus should be on frequency of exercise rather than duration or intensity until the behavior has been well established.
We need to look for opportunities to connect face-to-face with others as well as virtually.
The gym is the perfect place!
Building on to Our Community Gym
In 2024, we will be entering “Fays II” of our Building Project, which will add another 500 sq. ft of floor space to the gym.
This additional space will allow for more people and more classes.
I’d like to borrow from Charles Dickens and start with, “It was the best of times…,” but it wasn’t. On St. Patrick’s Day, I slipped on my front porch, slid to the ground, and was very badly bruised and hurt. A trip to the ER revealed nothing broken, but I was quite shook up. In fact, the swelling and numbness have still not completely gone away after more than two and a half months. Today, June 10th, I fell again…this time headlong. Two tumbles. The first resulted in significant injury; the second, I got up, dusted off my hands, and continued on my way.
Ron and Steve in the Wee Hours – Post Workout
What was the difference, aside from the first was backward and the second forward? The difference is Fay’s Fitness, Inc. on the corner of Simcoe Road and 96B in Candor. After I was cleared by my doctor the first week of April, I started to go see Ron Fay twice a week for personal strength training, and my wife started with Barb Fay. The first thing I saw when I came into the gym is the quote on the wall: “You cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet.” Yikes! That struck a nerve…Both Ron and Barb have been able to make accommodations in our exercise programs for injury and fitness levels. Both are highly encouraging, engaging, and super knowledgeable. Since then, I have continued a twice weekly strength training program that is fun, doable, and produces results. About three weeks ago, Ron identified that I had a certain lack of strength in my legs, so we added a “leg day” that takes about 30 minutes.
When I started, I had difficulty balancing on one leg for more than a few seconds. Now I can routinely hold my balance for 30 seconds or more. I am convinced that I was able to get right back up after today’s tumble because my reflexes, ankles, legs, arms, and shoulders are measurably stronger than they were two months ago. I am now doing strength training three days a week and walking between 45 and 60 minutes a day for three days a week. Even the Lord took a day off!
I am so glad that I started at Fay’s Fitness…greater strength, balance, reflexes after two months…and, as a side note, I’ve lost a bit over twenty pounds. Give them a try…you won’t be sorry!
