Sweat equality

“Most of them have never exercised in their lives,’’ said Hardesty, referring to women 50 and up. “As far as they’re concerned, going to the mailbox is exercise.’’

Newton trainer Joan Hayes tells the same story. They don’t want to work hard. They’re not committed to an exercise routine and use any excuse to weasel out of it. She’s heard it all: The flat tire. The dead dog. Swine flu (they don’t want to get it). One client who couldn’t keep her appointment sent her sister instead.

But worried about their sagging bodies, or desperate to lose weight, they’ve found their way to the gym where they have their first-ever encounters with stability balls, leg presses, and cable crossover machines. They hire a trainer to decode it all for them. And they’re clueless.

“They want me to get my magic wand and wave it,’’ said Hardesty.

“They all say the same thing,’’ said Hayes: ’’ ‘Am I doing this right?’ ’’

(The other thing they all say is “Don’t let me bulk up,’’ both trainers told me. Like they’re in any danger.)

At first I found this pretty funny, but then I realized this was me they were talking about, or at least my fellow boomers, and I got defensive. Is their cluelessness really surprising?

If these women are anything like me, they’ve had an uneasy relationship with athletics. We grew up in the days before Title IX, the 1972 ruling that forced public schools to offer girls and boys equal athletic programs. The takeaway message back then was not only that we didn’t deserve an equal place in sports, but we couldn’t do them right if we tried.

When I was in high school there was something a little suspect, a little cheeky, a little, well, butch about girls who wanted to play sports. Real girls were wimps. We did a different kind of push-ups (the easy kind, leaning on our knees). We played a different kind of basketball (we could only take three dribbles before we had to pass the ball). What did they think would happen to a girl if she did a push-up from her feet? Or took, say, six dribbles before she passed? She’d get sweaty? Winded? Pass out?

Yet even this was progress compared to my mother’s day. She’s 86, never learned to swim or ride a bike, and to this day has no aptitude - or vocabulary - for anything related to sports.

“I don’t know anyone who was a sport,’’ says my mother, who didn’t own a pair of sneakers until after she was married. Back then the only time you ran was when the bus was coming; if any mother on my street had laced up sneakers and gone for a jog, the rotary phones would have been ringing up and down the block.

“They’d be saying, ‘She’s gone crazy!’ ’’ said Michael E. Rogers, research director of the Center for Physical Activity and Aging at Wichita State University in Kansas. For today’s older women, “that level of education and awareness hasn’t been there their entire lives as it has been for women 40 and younger.’’ In terms of what he calls “self-efficacy’’ in athletics - the belief that you’re capable of playing a sport or being physically fit if you put your mind to it - boomer women, he said, are a “transitional’’ generation. No wonder they ask, “Am I doing this right?’’

I think about the next generation of girls, the ones who are getting the message that they are doing it right, and it’s being screamed at them from the sidelines, the bleachers, the finish lines. They’re hearing it with such force and vigor that just last week I read a story in The New York Times about the economic impact of girls’ sports tournaments: They’ve become so lucrative because so many relatives show up that they generate more tourism revenue than those for boys.

Then I think about my own generation, the ones who are giving up before they start because of the voice that’s still in their heads, saying, “Don’t go so fast! You’ll hurt yourself!’’ And then those older women in the gym don’t seem so wimpy to me anymore.

Linda Matchan can be reached at l_matchan@globe.com.