Twyla Tharp is renowned for her innovative choreography, which blends classical ballet and modern dance with dancehall favorites. Since 1965, the Tony and Emmy Award winner has established more than 160 works: dances for television specials, full-length ballets, Broadway shows, figure-skating routines, and the films Hair and White Nights.

She can also be known for her vigorous exercise program, which propels her on- and offstage. “The older we obtain, the more we should commit to physical activity,” Tharp, 79, notes. “Getting physical and improving is how we can continue to thrive among the living.”

This approach often leads people (even those people who are much younger) to ask her, “How can you keep working?” To answer that question, Tharp has outlined what she’s learned from investing in a life of dance in her newest offering, Ensure that it stays Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your lifetime.

Filled with inspiring anecdotes from her own life and those of other luminaries, for example artist Claude Monet and Olympian Jim Thorpe, each chapter provides an approach to moving designed to help readers maintain their prime.

“I wish to reprogram how you think about aging through getting rid of two corrosive ideas,” she writes. “First, that you need to emulate youth, resolving to live in a corner of the denial closet marked ‘restricted to aged.’ Second, that your life must contract with time.” — Heidi Wachter

Here are some of our favorite takeaways for keeping your groove at all ages from Tharp’s latest book.

Shut Up and Dance

With time you’ve got, choose to help make your life bigger. Opt for expression over observation, action rather than passivity, risk over safety, the unknown over the familiar. Be deliberate, act with intention. Chase the sublime and also the absurd. Make each day one in which you emerge, unlock, excite, and find out. Find new, reconsider old, become limber, stretch, lean, move. . . . I only say this with love: Shut up and dance. That was the advice I gave myself in my 65th birthday. You might want to start now.

Keep Expanding

Practice growth. This really is one habit I encourage you to definitely cultivate. What you do today is definitely an investment in tomorrow. With that in mind, towards the list of desirable states of emotional equilibrium that result in “-ness” — for example, wellness, mindfulness, forgiveness, friendliness, decisiveness, hopefulness, and the really big one, happiness — allow me to add a personal favorite: expansiveness. Moving out is moving on, time and space working in tandem.

Take Up Space

When your muscles stretch rather than constrict, you expand your share from the planet. You take up extra space, not less. Dancers know this intuitively. They're taught to move so that every gesture is not only more precise and elegant, but bigger. It is called amplitude. It is not enough to convey an arabesque; it must be opened in each and every direction to its full expanse. In order to be seen, the dancer must occupy maximum volume. You are able to think the same way in your everyday movements.

• When you walk, consider yourself as striding, not just taking mingy steps.
• Greeting a friend, reach your arm out, whether or not to shake a hand or give a hug, with amplitude and full fellow feeling. Be robust.
• During a conference, spread your belongings out over the table instead of gathering them tidily inside your lap. Speak out. Occupy mental space as well.

There is logic within our movement. Remember, when we walk, we move forward. We can move backward, but we are not designed for this. Forward is our natural way.

Think of the all as your personal Occupy Extra space protest.

Walk Away

The older I get, the more I say no. I turn down jobs, invitations, interviews, you name it. We usually have a list of good reasons when we accept a new challenge. But we only need one reason — some component that makes success impossible — to decline.

I didn’t appreciate this way back when. I’d dive into a new situation, ignoring the killer flaw that doomed the enterprise, believing I possibly could overcome it, or that things would change for that better, or I’d get lucky. I had been seduced by the glamour of difficulty — and what’s more glamorous than the “impossible” or never done before?

With the time you’ve got, choose to make your life bigger.” — Twyla Tharp

It was like climbing Mount Everest and praying for a life-threatening storm to make the ascent more meaningful or dramatic. It rarely ended up well. Afterward I’d reproach myself, Why didn’t I trust the voice that said I’m wasting time? Do this enough times and also you learn to walk away instead of diving in.

Start With a Squirm

Down and out, visit our common evolutionary beginning and squirm. A wriggling moment — squirming appears like what it sounds like — a worm moving. It's formless physical effort, the vaguest of movement inside your skin.

Picture this in your mind now and relocate your chair. Then, before you decide to have to look in the mirror tomorrow morning, you will try it in your bed for real. Lying on your back, move your torso right, then the left, then back to the right.

Next, bend the legs slightly. Now bend the legs again while flexing those feet — have the stretch in the back of your heels. Don’t forget to breathe.

Now arch the rear. Arch again and roll top of the shoulders back. Release. In bed, with repetitions, you will travel very slightly, but that is not the point. Starting is the point.

Now roll onto your stomach. This next is the inverse from the arch you just completed: Contract the abs so they are pulling you in and curve the back out. As you release, push in to the bed with your toes.

Again on the back, raise your hands — shake them. Jaw — move it laterally. Scowl. Release. Forearms wave back and forth. If you can, try flowing with what you might imagine as a Hawaiian greeting from the shoulders.

Still on the bed, breathe deeply, now add shoulder rolls back. Roll to the right side and stretch the left leg across. Reverse that. Now start getting up from the bed. Double in the direction of your feet and fully stand up.

Feeling better but not quite all set to go? Focus on the breath — in for a count of four, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. Ten of these deep breaths should make a difference. Now you should be ready to start your day. Your whole day will be stronger for having taken the time to awaken your body before you demand that it get to work.

None of this may seem that challenging, but think of it as your better-than-nothing workout.

From Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life, by Twyla Tharp. Copyright © 2021 by Twyla Tharp. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.