At 80, Larry Woodruff Is Still Moving—and He Has No Plans to Stop

After 64 years of regular exercise, this AMAC member and longtime fitness professional has learned an important lesson about healthy aging: staying active doesn’t mean doing what you did at 30. It means finding ways to keep moving for life.

At 80 years old, Larry Woodruff still exercises six or seven days a week.

He cycles. He hikes. He strength trains. On cardio days, you might find him riding a bike or walking 2.8 miles per hour on a treadmill set to a challenging 15-percent incline. On strength-training days, he works his chest, shoulders, arms and back, while carefully modifying exercises around the orthopedic issues he has accumulated over the years.

For Larry, who lives in Cornville, Arizona, exercise isn’t simply something on his daily to-do list.

It has been part of who he is for more than six decades.

“I made it part of my identity starting in grade 10, and cannot imagine life without regular exercise,” Larry says.

That relationship with fitness began when he was a teenager and was influenced, in part, by a sobering family history.

Larry says no direct male ancestor in his family had lived beyond the age of 38. His father died at just 34 after experiencing several heart problems, and his grandfather died at 38.

Faced with that history, Larry made health and physical fitness a priority at an unusually young age. He went on to build a career around that passion, working for approximately 50 years as an exercise physiologist and health and fitness educator. His career culminated in 15 years as a Senior Lecturer in the Exercise and Wellness Department at Arizona State University.

Today, having reached 80, Larry believes his lifelong commitment to regular exercise and good nutrition has played an important role in his longevity.

But his story also comes with an important lesson.

When More Isn’t Always Better

In his 20s and early 30s, Larry wasn’t merely active. He pursued athletic performance with tremendous intensity.

He performed thousands of maximum vertical jumps while working toward a 36-inch vertical leap. He ran wind sprints, charged up steep hills and stadium stairs, completed high-intensity intervals on the track, squatted 425 pounds for repetitions and deadlifted even more.

He also spent thousands of hours playing highly competitive volleyball.

At the time, Larry thought his body could handle almost anything.

“I was young,” he says, and he believed he was “invincible and would completely heal from anything.”

Decades later, his perspective has changed.

Larry has osteoarthritis in both knees and hips and has undergone several surgeries over the years. He also deals with chronic minor injuries that require him to modify how he trains. Looking back, he believes some of the extreme training he pursued when he was younger contributed to the physical limitations he manages today.

It’s why his advice to younger people today isn’t simply to exercise more.

It’s to exercise with the future in mind.

Larry encourages people to be thoughtful about excessive high-impact exercise and very heavy weightlifting, particularly if their goal is to remain active well into their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond.

His own experience has changed the way he defines fitness.

The goal is no longer to see how high he can jump or how much weight he can put on a barbell.

The goal is to keep moving.

Training at 80 Looks Different

Larry has not allowed osteoarthritis, surgeries, or old injuries to become reasons to stop exercising. Instead, he has adapted.

He no longer runs or performs other high-impact cardio. About three days a week, he completes approximately 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise, usually cycling or incline treadmill walking. He follows that with lower-body strengthening exercises such as leg extensions, leg curls, calf raises, carefully performed bodyweight squats, and back extensions.

On upper-body days, he trains his chest, shoulders, biceps, triceps, and back. He also includes abdominal exercises daily.

The routine is still challenging. It just looks different from the workouts he did at 25.

That distinction may be one of the most valuable parts of Larry’s story for anyone navigating the changes that come with getting older.

Healthy aging doesn’t require pretending your body hasn’t changed.

It may require changing how you move so you can continue moving.

Larry has lost some muscle in his legs in recent years, but he remains remarkably active. At 5 feet 11 inches tall, he weighs around 159 to 160 pounds and says his waist remains approximately the same size it was in his 20s.

More importantly, at 80, he is still doing what he loves.

“Movement Is Life”

Throughout his career, Larry taught, counseled, and coached others about health and fitness. He also believed strongly that health professionals should model the behaviors they encourage in others.

“I believe that all health, fitness, and medical professionals should lead by example,” he says. “If they don’t walk the talk, why should anyone take their advice seriously?”

Retirement hasn’t ended his interest in the field, either.

Larry continues to read books and scholarly research and listen to experts in wellness, fitness, longevity, and stress management. After a lifetime in the profession, he remains a student of health.

And one idea has stayed with him.

Larry points to a statement from legendary bodybuilder and former Mr. America Bill Pearl: “Movement is life...without movement there is no life.”

It is a philosophy Larry has lived for 64 years.

“If we stop moving,” he says, “we accelerate the downhill slide.”

For AMAC members, however, Larry’s story is a reminder that movement can remain part of life at every age.

Your workout at 70 may not look like your workout at 40. At 80, you may need to trade running for walking, heavy lifting for more manageable resistance, or certain exercises for movements that work better for your joints.

And perhaps one of the most important lessons Larry has learned after a lifetime devoted to fitness is that the goal isn’t to prove what your body can withstand today.

It’s to take care of it well enough that you can keep using it tomorrow.

At 80 years old, Larry Woodruff is still doing exactly that.