Did you know only 17.2% of older Australians meet physical activity guidelines, and 1 in 5 Australians aged 65 and over experience disability that limits their ability to engage in physical activity?
COTA Victoria understands the importance of getting active or staying active for the health and wellbeing of older people, especially those with a disability, and have been working on a project to break down some of the barriers that can limit older people from fully engaging with exercise activities.
Thanks to funding received from Sport and Recreation Victoria, COTA recently completed a project aimed at improving the experience of older Victorians from deaf and blind communities through Living Longer Living Stronger: Access All Abilities.
Through a series of co-design workshops, we worked with older people from the deaf and blind communities to create resources for exercise trainers to help them improve their practice when providing exercise activities for these communities. In these workshops, we identified four main areas to focus our resource development on, namely:
- Exercise and equipment
- Access and equity
- Exercise correction
- Outside the gym
These resource sheets were then disseminated to some of our previous LLLS trainers and other interested exercise professionals and the learnings from this project have been used in a successful funding bid to support older people to engage in physical activity at the John Pierce Centre, a not-for-profit organisation specialising in services for the deaf community.
For more information about this program or a copy of the resource sheets please email LLLS@cotavic.org.au or call our COTA WISE Helpline on 1300 135 090.
