Find Your Bliss with Live-Zoom Exercise
Your Time
By Sandra Guy
Sept 28, 2025, 1:34am PDT
Vera Adams, a 77-year-old retired nurse, can now lift a 42-pound bag of kitty litter into a shopping cart and out of the cart into her car after 11 months of taking twice-weekly strength-building classes on Zoom.
“For me, who has really skinny, puny arms, that’s quite an accomplishment,” said Adams, of the West Ridge neighborhood on Chicago’s far North Side. She urges others to try free trial classes at Vivo (teamvivo.com), a Zoom-based real-time exercise program that helps older adults stay active, strong, and independent.
“I’ve noticed a lot of improvements in my strength and my balance,” said Adams, who found a middle-aged teacher on Vivo who makes the classes feel comfortable and “lots of fun.”
“I can do pushups now,” added Adams, who had hurt her knee while jogging and doing yoga and Pilates by herself. “If I stand for a long time, my legs don’t get tired like they used to. I can walk a little faster.”
“That’s good too because you don’t want a 20-something instructor who makes it look easy and you feel terrible,” she said. “I am competitive so I would try to do backbends with a 20-something [instructor].”
Adams, who declined to be photographed, joins her 8 a.m. Tuesday and Thursday workout classes via her home office desktop computer camera.
Vivo’s Zoom classes, capped at 8 to 12 participants depending on the course, are grouped by ability level, feature the instructor’s live feedback, and ask exercisers to answer the teacher’s questions about their workout drills. Monthly memberships cost $99 for one class each week, $159 for twice-weekly classes, and $199 for three classes a week. That’s a fraction of the typical cost of a personal trainer.
The setup is designed to give people a personalized, affordable, and healthy outlet, but the goal is deeper. Vivo care teams often start phone calls with potential members by talking about fear, shame, and embarrassment that people may feel about exercising.
Some members overcome hesitancy by involving their children or younger family members.
“We have people in their 40s and 50s who exercise on Vivo with their parents. It becomes a wonderful connection through a shared experience,” said Eric Levitan, Vivo’s CEO, who founded the company after serving as a remote caregiver to his parents. He learned that his mother’s catastrophic falls and his father’s deteriorating condition stemmed from sarcopenia, a loss of strength, function, and muscle mass that many assume is an inevitable part of aging.
He was surprised to learn that strength training can prevent these declines.
“Why wasn’t there more information and someone providing an entry point to start to strength train?” Levitan said. “It’s pretty intimidating, so how do you make it easy for someone to start? There wasn’t a really good option. I wanted to not only help my parents, but to create awareness and a path that’s safe, trusted, and welcoming to help older adults everywhere build strength as they age.”
For more about Vivo, visit teamvivo.com.