Deans' stroke musings: The People Who Stay Active Into Their 70s and 80s Have One Thing in Common by SIM60(Still in Motion)

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Sunday, May 31, 2026

The People Who Stay Active Into Their 70s and 80s Have One Thing in Common by SIM60(Still in Motion)

I'll never stop, it is part of my identity. My goal in life is to have fun and I'm successful at that. A woman friend said the goal in life is love. Since this was a text conversation I couldn't easily explain that love takes too long

The People Who Stay Active Into Their 70s and 80s Have One Thing in Common.

THIS WEEK'S STORY

I’ve been lucky enough to know a handful of people in their seventies and eighties who move the way most people in their fifties wish they could. One of them is a 79-year-old I met at a gym about four years ago. He was doing single-leg Romanian deadlifts with a kettlebell when I walked in. Barefoot.

I asked him, as respectfully as I could manage, what his secret was.

He thought about it for a few seconds. Not a humble pause — he was genuinely thinking.

“I never decided to stop,” he said. “Most people at some point decide. They don’t say it out loud, but they decide. I just never did.”

That stuck with me. Because he wasn’t describing a workout philosophy or a nutrition protocol or a particularly well-designed program. He was describing an identity.

He was a person who moves. Not a person who used to move. Not a person trying to get back to moving. A person who moves, in the present tense, as an expression of who he is. The training wasn’t something he scheduled around his life. It was woven into how he understood himself.

That difference — between training as behavior and training as identity — is the single biggest predictor of long-term adherence I’ve ever observed. And it’s trainable.

THE MAIN MESSAGE

Motivation is unreliable. Identity is durable. When “I work out” becomes “I am someone who moves,” the decision calculus changes. You’re not asking whether you feel like training today. You’re asking whether you want to act inconsistently with who you are. That’s a harder question to answer with a no.

Four things that shift training from behavior to identity:

--  Consistency over intensity. Showing up for a thirty-minute session when you’re tired does more for long-term identity reinforcement than a perfect two-hour session once a week. Every time you show up, you cast a vote for who you are.

--  Environment and social cues. People who train with others, even occasionally, maintain activity significantly longer than those who train alone. If the people around you move, moving becomes normal.

--  Reframing setbacks. Someone who misses a week due to illness and gets back on day eight is living the identity. The setback is the exception. The return is the confirmation.

--  Connecting training to values, not outcomes. “I train because I want to be capable and independent at 80” is more durable than “I train to lose fifteen pounds.” Capability and independence don’t have a finish line. (I bought a 4 level condo so I can do steps til the day I die and can travel in Europe where restaurant bathrooms are in the basement. So I am also outcome based)

You have already done the hard part. You’re reading a newsletter about movement at an age when most people have stopped asking these questions. The identity is already forming. The job now is to protect it, feed it, and treat every session — however imperfect — as a confirmation of who you are.