You don’t need to give up on your fitness as you get older. On the contrary, a youthful gran is showing that age really is just a number.
Jacqueline Hooton, from Bognor Regis in West Sussex, is living proof that you can stay fit in your 60s. In fact, she’s able to lift double her body weight and plans to live until she’s 100.
The grandmother is on a mission to smash stereotypes and show that age is just a number when it comes to feeling fit. So it’s no surprise that people mistake her for being much younger than the date on her birth certificate.
Despite having osteoarthritis, gran Jacqueline has had a successful personal training career for more than 20 years. She didn’t get into fitness until she was in her late 30s and now hopes to inspire others to do the same.
Speaking about how she motivates herself, Jacqueline said: “I know that all the time I invested in exercise is going to be paying back in years to come because it’s going to help me maintain my strength, my function, my ability to move around and my zest for life and just to be able to enjoy the things I do. I’m exercising now for my current health, but also for my future health.
“Whilst we can’t absolutely minimise every risk, we can certainly go a long way to improving our health and promoting active and healthier ageing. My sole focus around training is about function and about health promotion. I think one of the benefits of exercise is that it can have aesthetic benefits as well, but that’s not my primary goal.
“My primary goal is to be as healthy and well as I can be, especially as I’m 60 years old [and] because I have osteoarthritis. It’d be very easy to sit down and think, ‘I can’t do anything’, but it’s even more important as we get older if we’ve got underlying medical conditions and things to invest that time. For me, it’s definitely about health, it’s definitely about function, and it’s definitely with an eye on the prize – of getting to 100 years old or more and still feeling healthy and well.”
Even though looking years younger than she actually is, the super-fit sixty something emphasised that it’s not just about looks. More importantly, it’s about staying healthy.
She explained: “Growing older and ageing are two different things – so growing older is literally about your chronological age – we’re all growing older every minute, every day, every week that’s from the date you were born but ageing is something different.
”Ageing is where various systems in the body are starting to not function so efficiently, and there is a natural tail off of some of these things, like our bone health and our bone density and our cardiovascular health and various other systems in the body that don’t work as well as we get older. There’s an awful lot we can do to promote that, though, and to sustain a good level of general health for as long as possible.”
To follow in Jacqueline’s footsteps, it’s important to be consistent. She added: “There’s something very empowering about lifting up a weight and feeling strong and capable and able to move that weight, and then seeing yourself getting stronger and picking up a heavier weight than you did last week.
“I don’t think it’s anything to do with motivation. I think it’s primarily about embedding healthy habits. There are days when I really don’t feel like exercising or I’m not quite with it and it’s very easy then to have a day off and then another day. But the thing that keeps me going is that I’ve got a habit. And it’s become part of my lifestyle.
“So, it isn’t difficult for me to do it because it’s just one of those things I do, like brushing my teeth every day. There are days when you don’t really feel like it and there might be times when I need to back off, exercise a bit or modify it, particularly if I’m struggling and I’ve got a bit of knee pain with the osteoarthritis. But I always know that I feel better for doing something. So even if it’s a modified or shorter session, I do try and maintain my exercise and through times like holidays and Christmas and time away and birthdays, it just becomes a lifestyle and a habit.”