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Joan MacDonald’s health was in a shambles at the age of 71. She was on numerous medications for high cholesterol, increased blood pressure and kidney trouble.

Her daughter, a fitness coach, warned that she’d wind up an invalid if she didn’t turn things around.

She did, hitting the gym for the first time and learning to balance her diet with the help of a brand new tool — an iPhone.

Now 75, Ms MacDonald is a hype beast for health, with a bodybuilder’s physique and 1.4 million followers on Instagram.

She’s among a growing number of “grandfluencers” — folks 70 and up who have amassed substantial followings on social media with the help of fans who are decades younger.

Ms MacDonald said she was surprised at the beginning that people cared what she had to say.

“Why would people want to follow an old broad?” she asked.

“My daughter, Michelle, cleared that up. She said it’s what you’re representing, that people can do what they think they’ve not been able to do, or were told that they couldn’t do.”

Turning their digital platforms into gold

Ms MacDonald has sponsorship deals and has just launched her own health and fitness app, not so many years after first learning how to use digital technology herself.

On TikTok, four friends who go by @oldgays have 2.2 million followers who revel in their clueless answers to pop culture questions.

Others focus on beauty and style, setting up Amazon closets with their go-to looks and putting on makeup tutorials live.

Lagetta Wayne, at 78, has teens ask her to be their grandmother as she tends to her vegetables and cooks them up on her TikTok account as @msgrandmasgarden. 

Ms Wayne owes her social media success of 130,500 followers since joining Tiktok in 2020 to her teenage granddaughter.

Her very first video, a garden tour, had 37,600 likes.

“One day my garden was very pretty and I got all excited about that and I asked her if she would take some pictures of me,” Wayne recalled.

Most people aged 50 and up use technology to stay connected to friends and family, according to a 2019 survey by AARP, a US group which advocates for those over 50.

But less than half use social media daily for that purpose, relying on Facebook above other platforms.

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Just 37 per cent of those aged 70 or more used social media daily in 2019, the research showed.

Since the pandemic began, older creators have expanded their horizons beyond Facebook and become more voracious, often driven by the growing number of feeds by people their own age, AARP’s senior vice president Alison Bryant said. 

The second youngest member of the Old Gays, Jessay Martin, aged 68, said social media had changed his life. 

“I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life relaxing pretty much, and I do, but this is picking up more for us,” he said. 

“I had a very structured week, where Monday I worked the food bank at the senior centre, Tuesday and Friday I did yoga for an hour and a half, Wednesday I was on the front desk at the senior centre.

“I was just sort of floating by, not being social, not putting myself out there in the gay community. And boy, has the Old Gays changed that.”

Busting myths about aging 

Ms Bryant said influencers like Ms MacDonald and the the Old Gays were busting myths about what is possible at ages 60, 70 and 80. 

“The authenticity that we’re seeing in some of these older influencers is really refreshing.

“That’s part of the complexity of their narratives. They’re bringing other parts of their lives to it.

“They’re grandparents and great-grandparents and spouses. They’re more comfortable in their own skins.”

Sandra Sallin, a blogger and artist, has slowly built her following to 25,300 on Instagram.

Her reach recently extended to the British Olympic gold-medal diver Tom Daley, who raved about her mother’s cheesecake recipe after his coach spotted it online and made it for her athletes and staff.

Ms Sallin, a lover of lipstick who focuses on cooking and beauty, also shares photos from her past and other adventures, like her turn last year in a vintage Spitfire high above the cliffs of Dover.

“I wanted to expand my world. I felt that I was older, that my world was shrinking. People were moving, people were ill,” she said.

“So I started my blog because I wanted to reach out. After that, I heard about this thing called Instagram.

“I’m shocked because most people who follow me are 30 and 40 years younger. But there are people who are older, who have kind of given up and say, ‘You know, I’m going to start wearing lipstick.'” 

Inspiring the next generation online 

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Grace Maier, 32, is home full-time with her two young kids. She followed Barbara Costello, a 72-year-old Connecticut grandmother, after seeing her life hacks on Instagram under @brunchwithbabs. 

“She does these posts, ‘Did your mom ever tell you?’ and I followed her immediately on Instagram,” she said. 

“Her content brings me joy! She’s got all of these life hacks and tips that remind me of things my grandma shared with me before she passed.

“She also doesn’t take herself too seriously and just seems like the kind of person who would welcome you into her home.

Candace Cima, 74, taught herself to shoot and edit videos for Instagram by watching YouTube tutorials.

Ms Cima joined the platform in February 2019 as a fresh voice on fashion and style while encouraging her audience not to be afraid of aging.

“I’m still in that learning curve, I have to be honest,” she said. 

“I’ve always had a lot of ideas about aging. I don’t understand why aging has such a negative connotation.”

ABC/AP 

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They say crisis creates opportunity.

When COVID hit last year, Nicola Thomas lost access to her one form of exercise, the local swimming pool.

But when her kids’ organised sport was stopped, she suddenly had some time on her hands — and so, for the first time in 20 years, she started to run.

“It’s given me an opportunity to get out and about and do a lot more physical exercise than I normally would,” she said.

And so now, a normal day might begin with a 14-kilometre run.

People look to exercise in lockdown

There’s no question that the COVID lockdowns have focused people’s minds on exercise.

“During lockdown the online search activities for Google and YouTube has completely exploded, so there’s a lot of online interest for exercise,” Melody Ding, an associate professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health, said.

She’s been researching exercise habits during lockdown in Australia and one of her tools has been to look at online searches for exercise options. 

“We saw that after the lockdown, the pattern seemed to change a little, it came down, and then during this lockdown in Sydney it has gone up again.”

People’s motivation for exercise has ebbed and flowed during the various lockdowns over the 18 months.

A SportAus report released this June on the impact of COVID on sport and physical activity found people initially became more physically active last March, before they trailed off.

Come the second Victorian lockdown, women became active again, but not so many men.

That data backs the anecdotal evidence of Victorian gym owner Brad Cunningham.

But it’s not always easily done

Not everyone finds it easy to exercise during lockdowns.

Around 20 per cent of Australians have increased their physical activity during the pandemic, while about 20 per cent did less, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics released this week. The data was used in the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s report on the direct and indirect health effects of COVID-19.

And, not surprisingly, we’re on screens a lot more.

The ABS Household Impacts of COVID-19 Survey found that around 3 in 5 people were spending more time on their phones, computers, TVs, and other devices than before the pandemic.

For some people sitting at home on screens all day can be a real disincentive to moving around.

That’s been the case for Rima Younes, a social worker for a disability support service in Sydney’s south-west suburbs.

She lives in Hurstville, a suburb in one of Sydney’s 12 hotspot LGAs which have faced harsher lockdown restrictions than the rest of the state, including a one-hour time limit for exercise which has only just been lifted.

“I don’t do anything. I probably go for one walk every two, three days, if that,” she said.

She has friends and relatives who have had COVID, including one elderly relative who died from the disease.

“There is that sense of anxiety about leaving the house, wearing the mask — it just seems like such an effort,” she said.

And then there’s the pressure of her job.

“It’s really hard also because of the work that I do; more of my participants are in crisis, I’m constantly tending to their needs.

Postcode can be a deciding factor

Environment is also a factor when it comes to explaining why some people get out of the house to exercise and some don’t.

“We know that exercise facilities and green space and blue space (access to water) — they tend to be socio-economic patterned as well,” Ms Ding said.

“With wealthier suburbs having more places for people to go exercise and enjoy being outside, and quite the opposite for the disadvantaged neighbourhoods.”

Lockdown isn’t so bad if you can swim on the beach or get your kayak out for a paddle on the harbour, as opposed to jogging around hot suburban streets.

That’s one of the divides in Sydney’s current lockdown. Burwood in the inner west, for example, is one of the 12 areas of concern and also has the most people per hectare of parkland in greater Sydney.

While Rima Younes says her suburb does have beautiful bushland within it, she has to drive or walk a long way to get there. When she does, it’s very crowded.

Nicola Thomas, on the other hand, lives in Melbourne’s Eltham, where there are plenty of green spaces.

“I’m very lucky that it’s a leafy green area with lots of trees and I can go down to the river and run along there and it’s a really great environment that’s really good for my mental wellbeing,” she said.

Brad Cunningham has seen that socio-economic divide because of the two gyms he owns — one in Melbourne’s bayside suburb of Cheltenham, and the other in the regional Victorian town of Echuca.

“The culture in this area, it’s getting down to the beach, it’s getting out, being active, it’s going for a walk with your friends,” he said.

“And then if I look at our regional facility, the culture there isn’t anywhere near as active.”

Mr Cunningham, who has three young kids, says trying to eke out time to exercise can be incredibly difficult.

“If you’ve got kids home schooling, you’re trying to work from home, you’ve got kids who are day care age and they’re not at day care, there’s a lot going on in the household,” he said.

He also said that when people worked from home they tended to move less, simply by missing out on incidental movement — walking to the train, or going out for a coffee.

“At the moment people are sitting in their kitchen doing their work and they’re walking from the kitchen to the lounge room or toilet or something, they’re not really moving anywhere near as much, so the overall activity level is a lot lower,” he said.

But there might be a silver lining to the pandemic in terms of how people are exercising.

“You can’t go to the gym, so I’ve noticed people are getting out on their bikes more or they’re trying yoga, or pilates, or doing these online programs.

Being stuck in lockdown can force some people to make the most of what time they have for exercise.

But for those of us who are finding it difficult, it’s worth remembering that all movement helps — and it’s never too late to start.

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Ruckman Stefan Martin hasn’t played since round 12 and was described as an “emergency break glass” option only two weeks ago, but he’s a risk the Western Bulldogs are willing to take to overcome Port Adelaide in Saturday night’s AFL preliminary final.

“By no means will he be at the peak of his performance powers, so our expectations are to really stabilise that stoppage area and help our group to play them on our terms, which we haven’t been able to against Port Adelaide in particular,” coach Luke Beveridge said.

“He will need to manage his game time based on how he’s progressing. He’ll do his bit for the team-on-team defence and whether he gets caught up in any possession chains it’ll just be circumstantial.”

Martin formed a formidable ruck combination with Tim English early in the season, but has been plagued by shoulder, groin and Achilles injuries since.

“I just didn’t think he was going to be able to get though the work to come back,” Beveridge said.

“When I was talking about emergency break glass I was talking about, can we get him to stoppages only and just minimise his game time and hopefully get him through the game?

“In the last couple of weeks he’s been able to put back-to-back sessions in, he trained again yesterday and trained strongly, and what you want from your players is just that desire to play in big occasions, and he’s expressed that.”

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After holding his own in previous weeks, Lewis Young struggled against Brisbane ruckman Oscar McInerney last weekend, prompting the Dogs to return to the Martin-English ruck combination.

The Bulldogs coach also played down any concern about captain Marcus Bontempelli, who hurt his knee late in the victory over Brisbane.

“He’s OK, there’s no risk, he might have a little bit of an ache or a dull pain in there going into the game, but he’ll be fine, he moved extremely well yesterday so there’s no real risk,” he said.

When questioned if Port Adelaide may target the injury, Beveridge warned against it.

“Marcus comes from really strong Irish-Italian heritage. It’s a pretty formidable combination of Mum and Dad, so if anything happens like that there could be some retribution,” he said.

After Saturday night’s win in Brisbane the Bulldogs spent the week in Perth and will fly to Adelaide on Friday afternoon.

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