Staying Travel Fit After Sixty

If you have been following my South African adventures, you would have learnt that my first game drive into Kruger National Park began at 4.45am, in an open-sided vehicle. It was so cold that I shivered for the first hour and I was more than grateful for the rug. The day before I hiked along the Blyde River Canyon lookouts until my legs burned, and they honestly earned a long rest. 

But, it was on the long run back to Johannesburg, past pine forests and macadamia plantations, I found myself thinking that uncomfortable thought. “How many more trips like this do I have in me”? This is why staying travel fit after sixty is paramount to keeping on with more travel adventures.

An Honest Question For Women My Age

I’m in my late sixties and most days I don’t feel it at all. However, I have had to ease back a notch, because my body isn’t as strong or as flexible as it used to be. After menopause our bodies do shift. Bone mass decreases, muscles weaken and joints get stiff.

Whilst none of this will surprise any woman over sixty, it matters when you love to travel as much as I do. Wildlife safari mornings, canyon lookout hikes and cobblestoned old towns are all wonderful. But they assume your body can still climb, balance and lug a daypack. I usually have a trip on the horizon, so I want to be fit and strong when the departure date rolls around.

The Research Was Never Really About Us

What makes me cross? So much of the medical advice we get was built on studies of men. The finding behind it is that women live up to a third of their lives after menopause. However, they are largely ignored in medical research trials. I have written before about how sexagenarian women are fighting back, and about how often issues that we raise at GP visits are dismissed as age-related.

I’m not the only one that is unhappy about this fact. One analysis of more than 20,000 American clinical trials concluded that sex bias in research still persists, with women under-represented in several major fields of medicine. For decades, menopause was shoved into the research footnotes, even though many of us suffer from serious symptoms. ¹

A long-running American study that followed women through the menopause transition found that lean muscle starts declining right at the start of it, with losses continuing until about two years after their final period. ²

When Women Do Get Researched

When we finally do get to take part in medical research at our age, the results point the same way. Muscular and skeletal strength can be reversed.

So, starting with bone health. Researchers who pooled 43 trials concluded that exercise has the potential to be a safe and effective way to avert bone loss in post-menopausal women. In one Australian trial, post-menopausal women with low bone density undertook two supervised half-hour sessions of heavy lifting a week for eight months. The group finished with measurably improved bone density in their spines and better results on every measure of physical function tested. This study came out of the Australian team in a Brisbane bone clinic, which I watched a documentary on a few months back. 

Balance is no different. A review of falls prevention exercises covered more than 23,000 older people, 77 percent of them women. It found that exercise cut the rate of falls by 23 percent. If you’ve ever encountered an uneven or slippery lookout track or you’ve been on a rocking boat deck, that number is significant.

Think you’ve left it too late? Well you haven’t. In one study from 1990, frail people in their nineties took up high-intensity strength training and increased their strength by an average of 174 percent in eight weeks. Ninety! Our sixties feel like a warm-up lap.

My Plan to Stay Strong For the Next Trip

I’m not about to train like an elite athlete, and I don’t need to. So this is what keeps me ticking over, plus a couple of extras that the research reminds me to include:

• Reformer pilates. It alleviated my sore hips and lower back and gave me back strength and flexibility. Although the bone density researchers’ recommended two half-hour weight lifting sessions a week, I have added weights and heavier resistance work to my pilates exercises.
• The floor test. I make sure I can still get up off the floor without grabbing a chair or coffee table. Seems daft, until you’re clambering out of a safari vehicle or trying to pick up a grandchild off the floor.
• Walking with purpose. Additionally, brisk walking is another weight bearing exercise, and every hill or flight of steps helps towards climbing up to the next lookout.
• Protein stays front and centre on my plate. An international expert group that reviewed protein requirements in older adults recommends at least 1.0 to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight a day, with a little more for those of us who exercise.
• Increase your intensity of exercise over time. Our bodies adapt when we ask more of them, so the load needs to slowly increase. There are online options too, like the strength coaching from huuman, which shapes strength sessions around your week, at home or away.

For me, these days, a couple of sessions a week is a fair trade for a body that can still haul me up an escarpment.

The Next Adventure

There is always another journey pencilled into my diary. Next year it may be walking the steep cobbletoned laneways of the Greek Islands. Or,it could well be another African adventure in Tanzania. Planning is half the fun. But the fitness training has quietly muscled onto my list, right beside renewing my passport and booking the window seat. 

The research gap for women my age is real, and it is worth making noise about. But if people in their nineties can rebuild their strength in eight weeks, women in their sixties have plenty of leeway left.

So tell me, which trip do you want to be strong for? And what are you doing to make sure your body is ready for the ride?

1. Sex bias across 20,020 US clinical trials: Steinberg et al. 2021, JAMA Network Open. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34143192/ ↩︎
2. Muscle loss through the menopause transition (SWAN): Greendale et al. 2019. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30843880/ ↩︎