Exercise in Adulthood, Who Will Support It?

On Tuesday, Kristina wrote about the importance of exercise. This was timely for me as on Monday, two things happened to me: 1) I received a notification about a seminar with Jana Peterson at OHSU on exercise and adults with intellectual disabilities, 2) I took a walk (i.e. got exercise that was more than trudging to the bus stop) for the first time, I am not joking, since September. Getting regular PE in school is great for kids, but how do we get exercise after we grow up?

Interested in this topic and bitter about the barriers to my own ability to get regular exercise, I read Peterson's paper "Paths to Leisure Physical Activity Among Adults With Intellectual Disabilities: Self-Efficacy and Social Support" (full citation, abstract, and access to paper). The paper describes a study with adults with intellectual disabilities in supported living.

Peterson found that two key factors to how much leisure exercise (i.e. exercise that is more than just trudging to the bus stop) were 1) how much social support a person had in doing exercise, 2) the person's level of self-efficacy.

Social support is a big piece that is lacking for me. The amount of money I've been allocated to hire staff is so minuscule that the idea of having someone to help me with exercise is ridiculous. Exercise, leisure in general, simply isn't a priority next to things like "make sure Dora hasn't blown up the house." My social network of peers is extensive but almost entirely non-local. I have no friends who could take me for a daily jog, for example. I've tried exercise classes before but find them so confusing or even downright dangerous that I don't last more than the first few sessions. Without any social support for leisure exercise, it just falls out of scope of anything I can imagine being able to have.

Which leads right into self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is an interesting concept. It's the belief that you can do something. Not whether you actually can, but whether you believe you can. I have really high self-efficacy for a lot of things. I even have high self-efficacy in my ability to be in shape if I could get regular exercise. At this point though, I've pretty much given up hope of being able to have regular exercise due to the overwhelming barriers. So I just try not to think about it too hard or what it will mean to my health as I get older.

According to Peterson's study, social support for leisure exercise is needed both directly for participation, and indirectly as social support helps to enable greater self-efficacy.

While Peterson's study was done specifically with adults with intellectual disabilities and not with autistic adults, in my opinion it's not unreasonable to imagine a similar situation might be true for autistic adults as well, especially as this same type of correlation has been found in other populations.

How can we make sure adults (like me) continue to get a healthy amount of exercise as we age? What will replace the school PE class? Who will take us on bike rides and runs and make sure we are exercising safely when our parents are no longer around?