Age is just a number, right?!

I’ve been waiting my whole life to be old. When I was a child, adults kept telling me: “You’ll understand when you’re older.” “You’re not old enough yet.” “When you’re older, I’ll explain.” I imagined adulthood as an arrival place, one where age unlocked a vast storehouse of knowledge. As I’ve gotten older, and worked with hundreds of older bodies as a personal trainer and yoga teacher, I’ve had to question my own beliefs about what chronological age tells us. Chronological age matters. A body that has lived for 70 years is not the same as a body that has lived for 20. But the number alone cannot tell me how strong someone is, how well they balance, how quickly they recover, what they fear, what they practice, or what they are still capable of learning. The word “old” describes time lived. I don’t use it as a diagnosis, an insult, or a prediction of what someone’s body can still do. If you’re new here, welcome to Soma Moon Wellness. My name is Jeanetta Bodie and I’ve been teaching women’s health, strength training, and yoga for a decade. Soma Moon Wellness is women’s health education publication written be multiple yoga teachers to help you train for the life you want to live today. Our work on Substack is offered freely. Our subscription is a patron-based model. We would be extremely grateful for your financial support to keep this going. What happened when I put “older” on the flyer I live in Oro Valley, Arizona, a town of about 48,000 people with a median age of roughly 55—more than 16 years above the national median. Aging is not an abstract subject here. It is a daily conversation in the grocery store. Occasionally, I like to stir the old’s pot and last week I made two flyers for the same yoga offering. The images and most of the information were alike, but the language differed. One named “older bodies.” The other emphasized “recovery.” Some people disliked or felt offended by the age-based wording. Some stepped in to defend it or explain what they thought I meant. Others contacted me because they had not noticed a meaningful difference between the two flyers at all. “Recovery” describes a process. “Older” describes a person. For many, that word carries assumptions that were never printed on the page: fragile, limited, slow, dependent, no longer athletic, or in decline. Two definitions of Age Part of the confusion is that we use age to describe different things. Chronological age is the simple one: the amount of time since a person was born. Biological age is an estimate of how old the body appears based on how well its cells, tissues, and organ systems are functioning. I started thinking more carefully about this after reading an article by physician Elroy Vojdani about a recent Nature Medicine study. Researchers analyzed data from 154,169 UK Biobank participants younger than 55. They estimated biological age using a model based on chronological age and nine routine blood measurements, including markers related to inflammation, blood sugar, kidney and liver function, immune cells, and red blood cells. The researchers found that people born in more recent decades tended to have a larger gap between their estimated biological and chronological ages. They also found that a greater biological-age gap was associated with a higher risk of several early-onset solid cancers. Here is the plain-language version: Researchers found that people whose blood markers suggested they were biologically older than their actual age were more likely to develop certain cancers before age 55. Even simpler: Our bodies can age faster than the numbers on our cake each year. This study does not show that accelerated biological aging caused the cancers (let’s all take a breath here). It also does not mean that a biological-age calculation can predict one person’s future with certainty. Beliefs can alter the boundaries we accept My mom and I often talk about what she is capable of doing and what I believe she can do. Those are not always the same things. I push my mom pretty hard sometimes because we have talked about the lives we want to live. I want to be healthy enough to live on a sailboat. She wants to be healthy enough to come visit me. For her, that means being able to squat, get up and down from the floor, walk across uneven or moving surfaces, carry her luggage, and climb stairs. That may sound like a list of exercises, but it isn’t. It’s a list of physical requirements for the life she wants. If she loses those abilities, I am not going to love her any less. But parts of the life she wants may become unavailable to her because her physical capacity has become more limited. So I’m going to give you the same hard coaching talk I gave my mom. What you want matters because it gives your training direction. But wanting something does not prepare your body to do it. You may want to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon before you die. But if you are not training your body to control your descent, carry water and equipment, tolerate uneven terrain, and sustain hours of hiking, your desire alone will not get you safely down and back. A desire is not a training plan. Aging matters. Your body changes. Your health history matters. Injuries matter. Recovery matters. But your chronological age does not tell me everything I need to know about what your body can do or what it could learn to do. When I work with someone, I want to know: * What do you want to be able to do in your life? * What can your body do today? * What is currently limiting you? * What capacities will that life require? * What can we begin training now? Because the goal isn’t to become better at working out. The goal is to build a body capable of participating in the life you want to live. Want help building your training plan? I offer one-on-one coaching sessions specifically for this. This isn’t a session where I hand you a workout plan. We’ll start with your life and getting crystal clear on those questions above. Then we’ll work backward and identify the strength, mobility, balance, endurance, skills, and physical capacity that life requires. You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of what you’re actually training for and a practical plan for how to begin preparing your body for it. Would you come to this workshop? I’m also considering teaching an online workshop (free for paid subscriber) called What Does It Mean to Train for Life Instead of Training for the Gym? I’ll teach you how to look at the life you want to live, identify the physical capacities it requires, and begin thinking about training around those requirements—especially as your body changes with age. If you would attend, leave a comment or reply “interested.” Your body is changing. That does not mean your world has to get smaller. Yoga with Jeanetta I’m still offering twice a week yoga (with sneaky strength) on Tuesday and Thursdays at 8:30 am through November 19th. $15 cash or Venmo. No preregistration required. Location: Hydra BJJ at 10861 N Mavinee Dr Ste 155, Oro Valley, AZ 85737. I’m considering a Zoom yoga class and would love to know if anyone is interested. Leave me a comment if you’d like to see it happen. Reporting notes and sources * Tian, Z. et al. “Accelerated biological aging and rising early-onset cancer incidence across generations.” Nature Medicine (2026): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04448-w * Allen, J. O. et al. “Experiences of Everyday Ageism and the Health of Older US Adults.” JAMA Network Open(2022): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7742998/ * Chang, E.-S. et al. “Global reach of ageism on older persons’ health: A systematic review.” PLOS ONE (2020): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33317402/ * American College of Sports Medicine. Resistance training guidance and position stand (2026): https://acsm.org/resistance-training-guidelines-update-2026/ * Oro Valley demographic profile, U.S. Census Bureau data via Census Reporter: https://censusreporter.org/p… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit somamoonwellness.substack.com/subscribe