The most recent article from Marlene Rosa, Raúl Antunes and Roberta Frontini about the practise of physical exercise in elder people and edited by Springer Nature aims to explore the cultural influences on barriers or facilitators for the practise of physical activity in this population.

Applied a narrative methodology, this study compared two groups of 6 individuals each one, older than 60 years old, in which one of them was enrolled in a community exercise program and the other was not enrolled in any regular exercise program.

The study concluded that the high number of barriers felt by the less active older people makes it more complicated for them to adopt and maintain an exercise program. Also, the enrolled group highlighted benefits, facilitators and strategies to overcome some barrires, while the non-enrolled group focused on the barriers and shared more excuses to justify their non-practice of physical exercise.

So, narratives-based methodologies are interesting to collect patient-centred perspectives about exercise practise and therefore design suitable exercise programs.

The full article is now available in: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35465024/