How Aussies Over 60 Are Staying Active

6 min read

The mornings are sorted. It is the evenings that get you.

Ask anyone over 60 how they stay active and they will tell you about their mornings. The walking group. The golf. The grandkid duties that involve lifting prams up two flights of stairs. Mornings are not the problem.

The evenings are the problem. The big day catches up around seven o'clock, and what you do in that hour decides whether tomorrow's walk happens. I have tried a fair few things over the years, so here is my honest ranking of what is actually worth your money, best to last, or rather third to first.

#3: The home treadmill

The obvious one. You walk while the weather does whatever it wants outside. There is a reason so many of us own one.

The honest pros: it works, it is sturdy, and you can watch the news while you do it. A decent one will outlive you.

The honest cons: it eats a room. It costs serious money for the kind that will not rattle, and a cheap one will rattle. And it solves a problem you do not really have. Most of us can walk fine. Walking was never the hard part. The hard part is that after a properly big day your knee files a formal complaint the moment you sit down. A treadmill does nothing about that.

#2: The vibration plate

The one with a cult following. Small unit, stand on it, it hums, you watch telly. A neighbour swears by hers and I tried it for a fair stretch.

The honest pros: tiny footprint, quiet, and there is something to it. Ten minutes on one does wake the legs up a bit and it is genuinely pleasant.

The honest cons: it asks standing, which is fine until it is not. It does very little for the specific spot that complains after golf. And I could never shake the feeling that the machine was doing the moving while I supervised. Pleasant, but I could not make a ritual of it. Something had to fill the hour after a big day, and the plate was not it.

#1: The cold-therapy machine, for the evenings after a big day

This is the one I had never heard of, and the one that changed how my evenings go.

A mate from the walking group brought his to cards night, because that is what our social life has become. It is a compact cooler with a small pump in the lid. You fill it with water and a couple of frozen silicone trays, clip a hose into a cloth cuff, wrap the cuff where you want it, and cold water gently circulates for as long as you sit. No ice packs. No balancing acts with peas. You sit where you already sit, and the cold does the work.

The mornings were never the problem. It was always the hour after you finally sit down.

It is called the Cryo Therapy Machine and it is $499.95, cooler, pump, hose and one cuff in the box. Sounds like a chunk, but that is half what the treadmill in my garage cost and it is the one I use every single evening.

Here is my routine now. Walk in the morning, do the day, strap in for the evening. The cuff on while the six o'clock bulletin runs, the cooler humming along quietly like the world's politest esky. That is the whole routine. Nothing dramatic.

What staying active actually costs

The walking group is full of people my age doing exactly this. Not running marathons or buying home gyms, just finding the small evening habit that makes the next morning possible. That is the whole trick, if you can call it a trick at all.

If a machine that keeps your evenings sorted sounds like your kind of thing, have a look at it.

Paid content from Cryo Remedy.