At 90 years old, Maryvonne surprises everyone. Always in motion, she seems to defy aging. Here’s what makes its energy so unique.
At 90 years old, Maryvonne Simonneaux has energy to spare. No armchair, no afternoon nap… but gym classes that she leads with disconcerting energy. When we discovered her in the program La belle Rencontre on France 3 and the Gazette Center du Morbihan, it was impossible to believe her age. His face lights up, his posture is straight, his body incredibly mobile. How does she manage to stay so lively, so strong, so young in her body? She explains it herself: a simple habit, repeated every day, which changes absolutely everything.
The most surprising thing is that Maryvonne didn’t grow up in sports. “I only started when I was approaching fifty,” she confides in the show. According to her, that’s where everything changed: “I didn’t have this tense leg ten years ago. It was by working that I gained this ease,” she confides. And she rejects the idea that growing old necessarily means losing one’s abilities: “With age, we do not necessarily lose muscles and flexibility.”
His leitmotif? “Build muscle, build muscle, build muscle,” she says with a laugh, pushing through her lessons with a determination that many twenty-year-olds would envy. For her, daily movement is more than exercise: it is her elixir of life. She does not seek to prove that she is still an athlete, but to show that we can age with strength, flexibility and joy.
What she shares with others is not a complicated method but a simple and inspiring message: move every day, don’t let yourself be held back by age-related prejudices, remember that the body still has a lot to give, even at 90 years old. She embodies living proof that sport is one of the best ways to age well.
Maryvonne doesn’t claim to be a perfect role model. But she has chosen not to submit to time: she responds to it by moving, by guiding, by inspiring. And for all of us, this is arguably the most valuable lesson: keeping moving, every day, is the best way to stay alive in your body and in your life.
