His World Is His Gym
My dad never had a gym membership. He never owned a stationary bike, never sat through a spin class, and never had a cup holder built into anything to hold his electrolyte drink of the month. None of that existed in his world, and he never needed it. The world is his gym, and his actual life is the program.
When I was a kid, he rode a 10-speed to work and back every single day — five miles (about 8 kilometers) each way, all year, unless it was an honest-to-god blizzard. That was just how he got to work. On weekends, we headed up into the hills around our place and cut down trees by hand, because we couldn’t afford a chainsaw yet. My grandparents had a ranch about 70 miles (roughly 110 kilometers) away, and when we weren’t cutting wood near our own house, we were out there clearing dead cottonwoods off the ranch — not just for firewood, but because a dead cottonwood is what loggers call a “widow maker.” You take those down before they take you down. My grandfather was always out there working alongside us, and as his old injuries caught up with him over the years, he slowed — but he never stopped showing up.
Then came the actual work. We’d saw the logs on a sawbuck, one of us on each end of a two-man saw, old-school lumberjack style. Splitting was done by hand too — splitting mauls, double jacks, and wedges. Axes were for the small stuff. We’re talking rounds 16 inches (about 40 centimeters) long and up to 4 feet (about 1.2 meters) across. Once it was split, it got loaded onto a garden cart and hauled from the back forty up to the house, where it got stacked neatly against the wall under cover. Then we’d do it again. This wasn’t a project — it was a year-round process that never really ended, for my entire childhood.
And that was just the wood. We also had vegetable gardens that needed weeding and hand-watering — nobody had sprinkler systems back then. Lawns to mow, trees to trim, horses to feed, corrals to build and constantly repair, snow to shovel, and wood to move under cover before storms came through. Nobody in my family needed a gym, an exercise bike, or a screen telling them which fake hill to climb next. The hills were right there.
When my parents were about 60, I figured they’d earned a break. I was grown and out of the house, and I thought, great — maybe now they’ll slow down and enjoy life a little. Instead, they bought a bigger place on a lot that was technically “vacant” but really just covered in sagebrush and Russian olive trees, and started the entire process over. New horse stalls, a new barn, new fences, more lawn and trees to plant and maintain, sprinkler and drip systems to install from scratch, and — of course — more wood to split.
My dad is 83 now. He had a hip replacement about six years ago, and he still doesn’t stop moving. Up at the crack of dawn, every day. He never did a single rep of formal strength training or a minute of cardio in a gym in his life — his world is his gym, and it continues to train him since he was a child.
The eating side of it matters too, and it’s easy to overlook. He learned how to eat growing up on a ranch, and that habit never left. Real food — fresh fruits and vegetables when they’re available, sensible alternatives when they’re not, milk with dinner, a real breakfast, and nothing out of a box. If there’s dessert, it’s an occasional bowl of ice cream after dinner, and it’s earned. These days he and my mom do supplement their diet a little more than they used to, and that actually lines up with something the research backs up: as we get older, our muscles get less responsive to the protein we eat — sometimes called anabolic resistance — so it takes a bit more protein, and a bit more attention, to get the same muscle-building signal a younger body gets automatically. My dad couldn’t tell you what anabolic resistance means, but he’s been managing it the right way for years without ever calling it that.
When I wrote about sarcopenia — the muscle loss that creeps up on people as they age — I was thinking about how it sneaks up on people who stop moving. My dad is the other side of that coin. He never had a “fitness routine” because his life never gave him a reason to need one. The wood pile, the garden, the fences, the horses — that is the routine, every single day. And it shows.
You don’t need a gym membership to stay strong into your 80s. You need a reason to move every day, and you need to eat like an adult. My dad never had this figured out as a “philosophy” — it was just life. But it worked, and it’s still working.
