Finding senior fitness programs

April 18, 2013

I wanted to find a yoga class, but it had to be for seniors. I'm not about to twist this old carcass into pretzels. So how do I find one?

I started out looking in Parks, Forestry and Recreation's Fun Guide. The online version has a link for Older Adults, so I clicked that, then slogged through the listings for Toronto / East York and found a couple of classes. But I live near Scarborough, so I backtracked and looked in their listings too, and found a few more. Nothing near home, though. That covered the community centres. But wait: what about senior centres? Some of them must run yoga programs too. What do you know, most of them are not in the Fun Guide, because they're not run by Parks, Forestry and Recreation. So where are they listed? Well, there's an Older Adult Centres Association of Ontario that makes me run separate searches for East York, Toronto, Scarborough, North York, and Etobicoke. Even then there's no information about each centre's programs, not even a link to their websites. And some perfectly good senior centres don't belong to this association.

It's ridiculous to have to jump through all these hoops just to find a seniors' fitness program. So when I built Senior Toronto, I listed both community centres and senior centres. I also put in brief program descriptions, so they would be keyword searchable. For the senior centres, I include brief listings of all their programs. For the community centres, I include listings of their seniors' programs only. So if you want to find seniors' yoga, all you have to do is type "yoga" in the search box just above the Topics list. This is the tool I wish I had had when I was first looking for programs. And yes, I did find a yoga class in a senior centre close to home, and it's great!