The Art 2 Aging

As world populations age, there are numerous challenges around how to take care of older adults who need help.

Most often, they surround healthcare systems.

However, one aspect of aging populations may not get the same amount of attention: caregiving.

More and more of us unwittingly become caregivers for a loved one, most often an aging parent.

In December, The Art 2 Aging featured an interview with Debbie Howard, a former caregiver who is working hard to create support in her community in Texas for other caregivers.

All too often, caregivers don’t have community resources that they can access to lessen their burden.

If you are a caregiver, then you know what we’re talking about.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, there is an organization whose mission is to support caregivers. It’s called the Ontario Caregiver Organization (OCO).

OCO recently completed a year end review for 2025 that paints a disturbing picture of caregiving in the province; the strain that caregiving produces is showing up dramatically in the numbers.

This week, A2A speaks with Amy Coupal, the CEO of Ontario Caregiver Organization.

And if you’re a caregiver looking after an older person, perhaps a parent, then you need to hear this.

The world is a frightening place right now. Frankly, there are few times in history when it hasn’t been.

Fear of the future has been ratcheting higher and higher since You-Know-Who entered office for the second time.

But fear lives in the minds of each of us regardless of geopolitics; it’s an emotion that we experience almost more than its opposite, love.

How do we deal with it? Especially if we are older adults with less time in front of us than behind us?

There are many ways and strategies that we can employ to continue to get joy out of our lives, no matter what is going on within or without.

Wayne Lehrer has been a frequent guest on The Art 2 Aging. His books, The Prodigy Within and The Art of Conscious Aging, describe our human experience in ways that open up new possibilities for all of us.

Wayne has become a good friend, so, who better to turn to, I thought, when I wanted to discuss how all of us can live lives free of fear.

We all know that physical activity goes directly to lifespan and, indeed, healthspan - how healthily we are living our lives.

That message has been embraced by those of us who are older adults; we get the connection between being strong and flexible and living a fit life.

That’s why many older adults will happily join a local gym, determined to regain strength or increase it.

Unfortunately, what do many find? Ageism. Not in the workplace this time. But in the fitness class, perhaps the last place they would suspect ageism to lurk.

Erin Eleu is a functional aging specialist and falls resiliency coach who leads and teaches physical activity programs for older adults and who is vehemently opposed to ageism in the gym.

She is also the host of the podcast series, AGEnts of Movement, and is our guest this week on Point of View.

Scott Fulton is an extremely talented individual. He’s a mechanical engineer by training who shifted into home design with older adults in mind, forming a company called Home Ideations. In fact, he custom built his own home in Virginia using the principles from Home Ideations.

He dug deep – and still does – into how to live better as we age.

Scott is well into his 60s, is very active and excels at physical fitness, competing in ironman triathlons and long distance running.

His abiding interest in healthspan and longevity impelled him to dive into a vast trove of health data to answer one simple question: what’s the most important thing people can do for their bodies and brains that can help them live longer?

By crunching many millions of bytes of data from 700 thousand adults, spanning 10 million person years, Scott has answered the question he posed and written a book called Function that lays out his findings.

The answer to the question he posed to himself will surprise you..

Settle in for a fascinating conversation.

There are nearly 60 MILLION Americans who are unpaid caregivers today.

Now think about that; these are people who likely have full time jobs working 40 hours a week and who are working another 26 hours a week on average looking after an aging loved one.

It’s a tough picture and it’s made worse by the lack of any kind of support available in the United States.

Certainly this long term healthcare crisis (and it is a crisis by any definition of that word) is not exclusive to America alone.

There are aging populations all over the world and countless millions more caregivers but many other countries have been proactive in implementing policies designed to mitigate the pressure that unpaid caregivers experience.

Debbie Howard, a professional market researcher, knows what it’s like to be a caregiver after spending some years caring for her cancer-stricken mother.

As a result, Debbie has devoted nearly 20 years to agitating for caregivers in the U.S., forming Aging Matters International and thecaregivingjourney.com along the way.

She is our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging.

Dave McCaughan has made frequent appearances on The Art 2 Aging; he is an experienced marketer with decades of real, “in the trenches” marketing expertise and he has made the issue of marketing to an aging population a kind of mission for the past three decades.

Today, he provides another thought-provoking Point of View in which he talks about how demographers have known for decades that the world’s population is aging (some countries faster and sooner than others, like Japan for example) and that an aging population will bring unique challenges and demands before it starts shrinking.

So, if demographers have known this for more than 40 years, Dave asks, why is it now only just dawning on policy makers? Further, is encouraging women to have more babies really a viable tactic to reverse aging in any country? Or just a silly idea with no merit whatsoever (hint: it’s the latter…)?

I can’t remember how we first heard about Fred Woolman but I knew it was imperative to have him as a guest on The Art 2 Aging.

That was more than a year ago; at the time, Fred was a full time fitness instructor at a nearby facility in his hometown of Rochester, Minnesota, 125 LIVE, where he was conducting fitness classes and personal training three times a week.

At the age of 83.

He’s still at it and the fact is, he is older than anyone in his classes – and they’re all what you could call “seniors”.

They will tell you that they love his classes and they are his biggest fans.

Well, bit by bit, Fred’s fame spread beyond Rochester and recently reached the offices of the Guiness World Records headquarters in London, England.

They were intrigued that this now-84 year old guy was a fitness instructor and possibly older than any other living trainer. So they began their background checks to determine the veracity of Fred Woolman: was he who his bosses at 125 LIVE said he was? Could he be doing what he was purported to be doing at 84? Was it even possible?

Yes, it was possible, they discovered. Fred came as advertised. He was the real deal – an 84 year old fitness instructor and personal trainer.

So, Fred became a Guiness World Record Holder in September, 2025.

But not just once. Twice. He’s in the Book of Records as the oldest living fitness instructor and the oldest personal trainer in the world.

Now, what do you think that says about aging?

I reached Fred at his home in Rochester, Minnesota to get the Guiness story from the horse’s mouth and learned that he’s just plunged headlong into a new physical activity: mountain biking!

There’s no stopping this guy!

Last May, The Art 2 Aging had the pleasure of talking with Mike Drak about his commitment to regain his health.

Mike is a 70 year old man who lives just north of Toronto. His sedentary lifestyle had resulted in large weight gains and he was determined to lose as much of it as he could before August 3.

That’s when he would enter a triathlon competition in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. Here’s the link to that episode. If you are one of the millions who have decided to lose weight through injections of Ozempic, you might want to listen to it.

We got in touch several weeks ago to interview Mike again after the triathlon and learn how he fared during the event which turned out to be filled with unexpected surprises.

Every week, thousands of readers enjoy the musings about aging that can be found on Crow’s Feet. The best way to describe Crow’s Feet is to think of it as a gathering place or compendium of content about growing older that flows from the minds of hundreds of different writers every month.

Nancy Peckenham oversees the content, editing and publishing the works of her writers and leaning on her former broadcast journalism career at CNN to keep the content polished.

Nancy talks about that career, her new one with Crow’s Feet and what she, herself, thinks about growing older in this week’s episode of The Art 2 Aging.

Wayne Lehrer is a guy who thinks deeply. About life. About his role in the world. About what he can bring to others that is inspiring and supportive.

In this week’s POV, Wayne talks about “oxygen” – the thing that inspires each of us to make a contribution – and why it’s important that we locate it within ourselves each day.