What 10+ Years in the Fitness Industry Taught Me About What Actually Works for Women Over 60

I’ve been in the fitness industry long enough to see trends rise, peak, and quietly disappear. High-intensity boot camps. CrossFit. Workouts designed for a younger audience but marketed to women of all ages. I’ve watched each one arrive with enormous promise and leave behind a trail of sore joints, discouragement, and women who quietly concluded that maybe exercise just wasn’t for them.

That conclusion, more than any workout, is what I’ve spent my career working against.

What the Industry Kept Getting Wrong

For years, the narrative in fitness was simple: work harder, burn more, push through. Workouts were built around calorie output and intensity metrics, with little attention paid to how a body actually moves – or to the long-term cost of moving it badly.

What this approach missed was joint health, movement quality, and the reality that chronic stress on an aging body doesn’t build it up – it wears it down. The ‘no pain, no gain’ mentality, poor alignment, repetitive strain – women feel these consequences every day, in their knees, their hips, their lower backs. They’re the reasons so many women hit their 50s and 60s feeling like exercise is something their bodies can’t cope with.

The fitness industry wasn’t designing programs for these women. It was designing programs for younger bodies and hoping the marketing would do the rest.

What I Actually Saw Work

Over time, a different pattern emerged – and it had nothing to do with intensity.

The women who stayed strong, mobile, and pain-free into their 60s and 70s weren’t the ones who pushed hardest. They were the ones who stopped trying to. They found movement they could sustain, showed up consistently, and built strength slowly enough that it actually held.

I’ll be honest: this challenged some of my own assumptions. Early in my career (like most women) I believed effort was the variable that mattered most. What I kept observing was that quality of movement was the difference that mattered most. Alignment. Control. Awareness of how the body was actually working, rather than just how hard it was working. This is Pilates.

What Pilates Actually Is (Because It’s Not What Most People Think)

Let me address the misconception directly, because I hear it often: Pilates is NOT stretching. It’s not just ‘a core workout’. It is not gentle in the sense of being easy. And it is absolutely not just for dancers or the young and flexible.

Pilates done well is strength training – it just happens to be joint-friendly and precise enough to retrain how your body actually moves. It builds the deep stabilizing muscles that protect the spine and hips. It corrects the compensation patterns that develop over decades of desk work, stress, and movement habits we never questioned. It is retraining our muscles as much as it is fitness.

What makes it uniquely suited to women over 60 is that it meets the body where it actually is, rather than demanding it perform or “push through” just to keep up.

If you’ve never tried Pilates, this short practice is a good place to start – no equipment and beginner friendly.

The Women Who Changed My Mind Completely

Nothing has shaped my thinking more than watching the women in my own online studio.

Some of my most consistent, most capable members are women in their late 50s and 60s who would tell you, without hesitation, that they were never “exercisers.” They didn’t have a fitness background. They hadn’t done sport or gym routines for most of their adult lives. They found Pilates – sometimes by accident, sometimes out of desperation after an injury – and something shifted.

Several of these women have now been practising Pilates two to three times a week for more than five years. Not because anyone pushed them. Not because they set aggressive goals. But because for the first time, movement felt like something their bodies could do rather than something being done to them.

That, I’ve come to believe, is the only metric that actually predicts long-term success: does this feel sustainable? Does it feel like something you look forward to doing?

What I’d Tell Any Woman Starting Now

Stop chasing the workout that promises the most. Start looking for the one you’ll still be doing in five years.

Consistency outlasts intensity every time. A practice you return to twice a week for years will do more for your strength, your balance, your bone density, and your confidence than any program you burn out on in six weeks.

You don’t need to earn the right to move well. You don’t need to have been athletic your whole life. And you don’t need to suffer through exercise that doesn’t suit your body to prove that you’re taking your health seriously.

The women I’ve watched thrive aren’t the ones who worked hardest. They’re the ones who finally found movement that felt good – and kept showing up.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What do you imagine when you hear the word Pilates? Have you tried it? What other practices have you tried and did any of the stick?