Reply to Are your parents fit and active in their 70s?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well, we are the parents in our 70s.  We use the gym. Avoid takeout food. Live in a city and walk 10,000 steps a day.

Do we tire more? Sure. Three ours in a museum can do us in and we need business class on long flights. Also my husband prefers uber to metro and I’d use metro more.

Now we have a close relative in her late 70s who is overweight, refuses needed knee surgery, [b]takes no stairs, [/b]cannot walk more than a block, cannot roll her own suitcase, and drives across the street literally. This is ideally what I’d like to avoid.[/quote]

I was really struck by what a difference this made for my mom. She lived with my dad in a house that had a flight of stairs to get into the house and a couple stairs to navigate throughout the main level and then up to her bedroom. Her mobility was OK, at least the stairs never seemed to be an issue. Then dad died and she moved in with my sister with a main-level bedroom. Never needed to take a step up. Her mobility seemed to deteriorate very quickly. A bout of pneumonia that put her into the hospital didn't help and she never seemed to get back to the earlier baseline since she could go through her day never doing more than walking from bedroom to sofa.[/quote]
Chicken-egg. At some point, steps are a bad bad idea for a senior. I’m not convinced keeping steps is a net positive, and neither are most physicians to patients in that age. [/quote]
We bought a house 5 years ago (after retiring) with everything on the main level. We can mostly avoid the basement and the 2 bedrooms upstairs, but for some reason, the builder made the family room 6" lower than the kitchen/hallway/master bedroom. That step up and down is going to be the death of me. The previous owner tripped once coming out of the bedroom and hit her head on the fireplace stone hearth. It is much better to have no steps at home, and if you feel they are good exercise, go to a gym or outside place with stairs. But no aging person is better off with steps in their house that they have to navigate at night or 20 times a day.[/quote]

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