Keeping Death at Bay through Health Negotiation: Older Adults' Understanding of Health and Life within Gym and Fitness Culture

This article analyses older adults' trajectories leading to membership in a gym, and the ways in which they negotiate their self-understanding, aging, and health in this context. Emanating from an ethnographic study, the arguments are based on a constructionist approach. The results show that older adults' decision to start going to a gym should be understood in relation to an individualized health care system in Swedish society and as a means of negotiating deteriorating health, retirement, lost body capacity, and the meaning of becoming old. The physical activities carried out and the social relationships developed in these contexts are used to construct an empowered self-understanding prepared to challenge the "stiffness" of the dying body.