Jane Fonda recently touted exercise as “the best way to fight depression,” but that’s not the only thing it’s good for in her book. The actor, 85, says it’s also the secret to having great sex past 50.
Flexibility, for her, is crucial to a spicy love life as you get older, she told The Telegraph. “You’ve got to be able to put your legs over your head, right? I can still do that,” Fonda said.
Staying limber is the third of Fonda’s three pillars for overall fitness, she told the UK-based outlet. “Firstly, you have to stay strong, which means you have to do resistance work [and] keep your muscles strong, and that protects your bones,” she explained. “The second thing is aerobic fitness—you have to keep your heart strong, so that you can walk upstairs without getting all out of breath.”
Fonda, who recently entered remission for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, didn’t start to consistently work out until her 40s, she told The Telegraph, but she certainly made up for lost time with her best-selling 1982 aerobics VHS tape, Jane Fonda’s Workout, which sold more than 17 million copies.
Now, the Grace and Frankie star may not be doing the high kicks of her unitard days, but she told Elle UK in January that she still relies on her videos’ exercises for daily movement. “I do the same moves only slower and with less weight, every day,” she said.
Injury prevention is all about taking it slow, “so you don’t get hurt,” she told The Telegraph. “When I use weights, they’re lighter weights. But I still lift. I have dumbbells of different colors—beautiful pink, orange, yellow, and turquoise, which makes them more pleasant to pick up.”
Even for Fonda, working out can feel like a chore sometimes, but she pushes herself to keep going. “It makes a difference not just in my body, but in my brain,” she said. “If you don’t work out when you’re young, your body will forgive you. When you’re older, if you don’t keep moving, stay flexible, and keep your muscles strong, it really makes a difference.”
As for her love life, Fonda is single—she’s been married three times, and most recently split from her longtime partner Richard Perry in 2017, per People. But that’s not to say she isn’t taking her own advice. In fact, she told Andy Cohen in a July 2022 interview on his SiriusXM radio show, Andy Cohen Live, that sex, for her, got better with age.
“Women, I think, tend to get better because they lose their fear of saying what they need,” she explained. “We waste way too much time not wanting to say, ‘Wait a minute, hold it, hold it, no, no, no. Slow down, and a little to the left.’ We don’t want to do that…. But when we get older it’s like, ‘No, I know what I want. Give me what I want.’”
