FITNESS AUTHOR
Jacqueline Knox
YOU’RE NEVER TOO OLD TO TAKE A FITNESS CLASS n Director of the Butler Center for Dance & Fitness and Pilates Center, Vicki Parsons, is on a mission to keep health an ageless priority.
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hen Vicki Parsons was in her early 20s, she noticed that she was not leading a very healthy lifestyle and started looking for a change. She thought to herself, “I need to do something. I think I am getting older.” So, she started to be more active throughout her day to put off this ever encroaching “oldness” she felt. After college, in the mid 1970s, she began working as a recreation therapist — a type of therapist that engages patients in therapeutic, recreation-based activities. In that job, she worked specifically with the elderly population and fell so in love with working with the elderly that she’s been doing it ever since. While working that first job as a recreation therapist, she noticed that a lot of her patients were
AUGUST 2021
really not well, and she wanted to change that. “I remember thinking that if I could be able to stimulate some sort of joy in everybody’s life every day, [then] that joy might get them up out of their chair, get them moving more, get them more active and get them more social,” Parsons recalls. Parsons, who calls herself a lifelong mentor at heart, made encouraging people, especially older people, her lifelong passion. After taking a break from her work to start a family, Parsons began a career with Ballet Austin. At that time, Ballet Austin did not have a lot of programs for adults and instead focused more on children’s ballet. “When we moved downtown in 2007 and built our new facility,” Parsons explains, “we said, ‘What if we could become a center where all people could be active and be well?’”
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So, Parsons decided to bring back some of the things that she used to teach and incorporate them into the new Ballet Austin’s Active Aging Programs. Eleven years ago, Ballet Austin’s first program aimed at an older population began — the Better Balance & Movement Workshop. “People ask why Ballet Austin is involved in programming for the aging, and I think it goes back to
