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A hundred-year-old woman goes to the YMCA twice a week. She walks laps. She does yoga, sometimes from a chair. She is not making a point about anything. She is simply doing what she has always done on Thursdays, because she always has, because it is what she does. When her friends and family turned an ordinary Thursday in December 2025 into a surprise party celebrating her hundredth birthday, Ann Marie Caruso told TODAY.com she was “thrilled” and that “it was a complete surprise.” The party was touching. But the woman at the center of it was more interesting than the party.
Caruso lives in Penfield, New York, and has been attending the Eastside Family YMCA long enough that everyone on staff knows her name. Her daughter, Sheila Marie Caruso-Rothfuss, serves as her caregiver and has noted as much. Caruso participates in crafting classes, joins the group for lunches, and keeps a social calendar that would exhaust people decades younger. She is also, apparently, willing to tell you exactly why she thinks she has made it this far.
She offered three reasons: gratitude, community, and movement. These turn out to be among the most consistently identified longevity tips for seniors across decades of research, articulated here not by a researcher or a public health official, but by the person who has actually lived them for a century. Simple to describe. Genuinely hard to sustain for a hundred years.
1. Gratitude: Waking Up and Meaning It
Caruso is Catholic, and her gratitude is rooted in faith. “I thank God that I can get up in the morning and do what I want to do,” she has said. She is not grateful in the way a self-help book tells you to be grateful, logging three bullet points in a journal before bed. She is grateful in the way a person is grateful when they have outlived most of the people they started with and still find themselves capable of getting dressed and going somewhere.
Caruso’s version is embedded in her daily routine: she wakes up, she notices that she can do what she wants, and she acknowledges that as a gift rather than a given. At a hundred, there is nothing theoretical about that. Research on centenarians consistently finds that a sense of meaning and purpose, whether derived from religious faith, creative work, or relationships, appears in the profiles of people who make it to very old age far more often than it does in populations who don’t.
Caruso’s gratitude has a practical companion as well: a refusal to stop. “Don’t ever stop, just keep going,” she said of the advice she would give her younger self. “Hard and simple.” The habits are not complicated. Sustaining them across decades, across loss, across everything life does to a person between twenty and a hundred, is the part that takes something.
2. Community: Knowing People Who Know Your Name
Caruso goes to the YMCA twice a week. She participates in crafting classes. She joins the group for lunches and other events. Her daughter has noted that everyone at the Y knows her mother by name. “I like the people there, they’re very, very nice,” Caruso has said about her YMCA community.
The research on social connection and longevity is some of the most consistent in all of gerontology (the study of aging). A 2024 study published in BMC Geriatrics, drawing on data from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, found that social isolation among adults aged 80 and older was significantly associated with reduced odds of surviving to very old age. Being socially isolated in advanced age appears to be one of the cleaner predictors of earlier death available. It is not a personality preference. It is a health variable.
What Caruso has at the YMCA is exactly what researchers mean when they talk about protective social connection: consistent, reciprocal, in-person contact with people who see you regularly and whose names you know. She is not scrolling through a feed. She is eating lunch with people. The seniors who appear in research on centenarian health habits tend to be embedded in real communities (families, religious groups, neighborhood institutions) in ways that create daily reasons to leave the house and daily proof that someone will notice if they don’t.
3. Movement: Walking and Yoga at 100
Twice a week, Caruso either walks four laps around the YMCA track or makes her way around the mall. She also participates in Active Older Adults yoga classes at the YMCA, both standing and chair-assisted versions. “I like walking,” she has said. “It’s very, very good exercise.” She is not wrong, and she is in excellent company saying so.
A 2025 global consensus on exercise for healthy aging, published in the Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging and indexed through a 2025 PMC study, found that higher physical activity levels in older adults are associated with meaningful gains in healthy life expectancy, with the relationship holding even at moderate activity levels. The key word in Caruso’s routine is not intensity; it is consistency. She does not sprint. She does not lift heavy. She walks laps and does chair yoga, twice a week, every week. Decades of committed, low-impact movement accumulate into something substantial: preserved muscle function, better balance, reduced fall risk, and a cardiovascular system that keeps doing its job.
The yoga component deserves separate attention. A 2025 systematic review published in the American Journal of Health Promotion found that regular movement interventions (including walking) had positive effects on multiple cognitive domains in older adults, including memory, executive function (the brain’s ability to plan and make decisions), and processing speed. Yoga, with its combination of breath, balance, and body awareness, contributes to many of the same domains, and the chair-assisted version makes it accessible to people who might otherwise have been told that yoga is no longer for them. Caruso is proof that the chair yoga room is not the consolation prize. It is, for many older adults, exactly where the work happens.
One more thing about Caruso’s movement is worth naming: it does not happen in isolation. She drives to the YMCA (or is driven), takes her spot in class, and moves alongside other people. The social and physical dimensions of her routine are not separate longevity tips. They reinforce each other. The community makes the movement more likely to happen, and the movement gives the community a reason to gather.
Read More: David Attenborough’s Longevity Secrets at Age 100
“Get Up and Go”
When local Rochester news outlet WROC covered Caruso’s birthday party at the Eastside Family YMCA, they captured her longevity philosophy in four words: “Get up and go.” It is not a program. It is not a subscription. It is not a carefully optimized morning protocol. It is a decision, made repeatedly, across a hundred years of whatever life delivered, to be the kind of person who gets up and goes.
The longevity tips for seniors that researchers keep identifying (regular movement, strong social connection, a sense of meaning and purpose, a refusal to give up on daily life) are not hidden information. They are the same things Caruso would tell you over lunch at the Y. The harder part, the part she gestures at when she says “hard and simple,” is that none of it works as a one-time intervention. It works as a life. You don’t do it once and store the benefit. You do it on Thursdays, and then again on the next Thursday, until the Thursdays themselves become the thing you’re grateful for.
There is something clarifying about hearing longevity advice from someone who is actually a hundred. It removes the theoretical quality that these conversations usually have. Caruso is not speculating about what might work. She is the outcome. And her outcome, apparently, looks like four laps around the track and lunch with people who know your name.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here. AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
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