Classes

Every class is carefully designed, planned and conducted to be:

• safe and effective

• accessible to everyone

Safe and effective means that you will learn how to do all the exercises properly so you (1) avoid injury and (2) get maximum benefit. This is especially important as it is much easier to injure an older body and it takes longer to recover from injuries.

Accessible to everyone means that you will exercise at a level that you choose. Every exercise has options so you can go as gently or as hard as you wish.

Class Structure

Classes have 5 sections:

• Warm up (10 min) - a gently accelerating set of exercises which will warm up and gently stretch your muscles, raise your heart rate a little and generally prepare you for the rest of the class.

• Aerobics (10 min) - this 10-minute session (done to Scott Joplin's ragtime music) will get you moving to stretch and strengthen muscles whilst developing agility and balance and having fun doing it.

• Strength and Endurance (15 min) - being stronger and having more stamina just makes life easier. In this session you will do many familiar exercises and a few novel ones designed to help you develop firmer and stronger muscles as well as the capacity to do more for longer. You'll also do some moderate impact exercises to strengthen bones ... important to slow down (and possibly even reverse) the effects of osteoporosis.

Please note that if you have severe osteoporosis, you should check with your doctor the level of impact recommended. This is to avoid stress fractures.

• Balance and Agility (10 min) - these are both important to keep you steady on your feet and help you recover from stumbles and trips. This means that you will be able to enjoy walks in the town and country and feel confident walking in crowds and over uneven pavements etc.

• Flexibility (10 min) - as we get older joints stiffen up and muscles and tendons lose their stretchiness. These exercises will help you stay more supple and remain independent for longer.

Benefits

You'll feel more energised, get a spring in your step and improve your posture as you tighten up your muscles and develop more poise and grace.

You'll also strengthen your entire system as your heart and lungs become more efficient at supplying nourishing blood to your organs.

You'll even find that losing weight is easier (as long as you are careful to eat a healthy diet) as your metabolism speeds up.

There really are no downsides to safe and effective exercise. The only danger is doing unsupervised and unstructured exercise ... or doing no exercise at all.