SmartBody Empowerment Plan
How you move is
something you can learn.
SmartBody is an online movement-learning program for adults over 50. You learn to change how you do what you already do — at home, and in whatever you do for exercise or enjoyment. Easier now, and still yours later.
Keep reading and you’ll know how the learning works, what a session actually asks of you, and where you’d start.
You can still do everything. It just takes more from you than it did.
Nobody decides to start doing things differently. It happens by degrees, and you adjust as you go — so by the time the adjustment is a habit, you’ve forgotten there was anything to adjust to. Most of us file it under getting older and leave it there.
Nothing on that list is unusual. But whether you can still do something isn’t really the question. What it costs you now is — how much effort, how much care, how long you feel it afterward.
That’s worth knowing even if nothing has changed yet.
Staying active can build physical capacity. Learning how you move helps you use it.
Exercise does what it says — strength, stamina, flexibility. Keep all of it. SmartBody asks something else: what does your body do with what you’ve already built?
Take standing up from a chair. Strong legs help. So does where your feet are, and whether your torso tips forward from the hips — as one piece, before you push up rather than while you push up. Let it travel forward first, and your legs get more of the job they’re built for.
Your hands come into it less. Not at first, if you use them — your legs have to learn to work that way — but that’s the direction.
Whatever you repeat becomes familiar, and familiar is what most of us mean by easy. Right now, what’s getting familiar is the way you already do it. Practice another way a few minutes at a time across the day, and that becomes the familiar one instead.
The action stays the same. What changes is how you go about it — and that part travels, into your workouts, into whatever you do for fun, into the next thing your body has to do.
A diagnosis names a condition. It doesn’t decide how the rest of you shares the work in the day to day.
Arthritis in a knee is still arthritis, and SmartBody doesn’t change that. How your hip, knee, and ankle line up when you stand — and how that relates to how strong you become or your joints feel over time — that isn’t fixed.
You’ll be participating, not following along.
Sharon guides; you do the moving. Stop the video, back it up, take as long as you need. What makes it work is paying attention while you do it. No one’s counting, and nothing has to look right.
01
Check in
Some sessions open with a checkup — how long you can stand on one leg, say. Others just ask you to notice where the effort sits. Either way, you get a starting point you can come back to.
02
Learn
Sharon takes the action apart, points you at one or two things worth noticing, and says why they matter. You try it another way and feel what changes.
03
Apply
Then you take it into something ordinary, and soon. The hour after a session is the easiest time — the difference is still fresh.
Some of it you’ll feel right away. Some shows up later, when you repeat a checkup or notice something got easier and you can’t say exactly when. If something shifts right away, that’s real — it means another way is there. It doesn’t mean you’re finished with it.
Start with what matters most now.
You don’t need to work out the cause first, or pick the right one. You’re picking a door to walk through. You can walk through another one later.
When your back is the main concern right now
Better Backs
If your back keeps having a say in what you do — or what you avoid — start there.
When balance has changed how you move
Better Balance
Not SmartBalance — the names are close, and this is the one that starts further back. Choose it if you’ve gotten more cautious than you used to be.
When you’d rather work on one thing
A Foundation Topic
Stamina, strength, posture, flexibility, agility — or SmartBalance, if your walking is steady and you want to find out how good your balance actually is.
If more than one applies, start with whichever is costing you most right now. If two feel equal, either works — they share more than you’d think.
Not sure which door? Fifteen minutes with Sharon, free, and you’ll leave knowing where to begin.
When one concern involves several connected skills
Better Backs and Better Balance bring those skills together through progressive sessions. Follow each series in numbered order because the earlier learning prepares you for what comes next. You decide how quickly to proceed and can repeat a session before moving on.
8 Progressive SessionsWhen your back has started having a say in what you do right now
Better Backs
You sit, stand, bend, carry, and turn dozens of times a day, and your back takes part in every one of them. That’s more repetitions before lunch than most back programs ask for in a week — which means your back is being taught all day, mostly by habits so familiar you no longer notice them.
Your back is usually where you feel it, not where it starts. How you breathe, sit, stand, and use your legs all shape what your back ends up handling. That’s often why back exercises only take you so far.
So Better Backs starts with breathing — a braced back can’t take in much that’s new — then moves through sitting, standing, and your legs in a deliberate order. Each session makes the next one easier to learn.
The eight sessions
- Breathing
- Sitting
- Standing
- Core strength
- Getting up from a chair
- Standing on one leg
- Chores and your surroundings
- Flexibility
10 Progressive SessionsWhen you’ve gotten more careful than you used to be
Better Balance
A hand on the chair arms to stand up. A hand on the railing going down. Eyes dropping to the ground on an uneven sidewalk. These are smart adjustments — your body made them for good reason, and they work.
They also have a price. Each one takes a job away from your legs, feet, or eyes — and the less those parts are asked, the less ready they become.
Most balance practice asks you to balance. That tells you where you stand, and it helps. But it doesn’t always reach what’s underneath — ankles that have stiffened, legs slower to respond, eyes taking on more than their share.
So Better Balance starts with breathing — holding your breath is the stiffening, and stiffness is the opposite of balancing — then builds skill by skill, easier to harder, at just enough challenge to learn from. That’s the kind of learning that stays with you outside the practice.
The ten sessions
- Breathing
- Standing
- Standing on one leg
- Leg power
- Core strength
- Eye habits and eye use
- Lower legs
- Feet and ankles
- Turning and looking, head to feet
- Balancing with your eyes closed
You’ll spot the same few things in both lists — breathing, core strength, standing on one leg. Same skills, different jobs. Breathing for a back that’s bracing isn’t breathing for balance, and sitting taught for a back with a history isn’t sitting taught for posture. One membership includes both, so you’re never choosing between them.
When you’d rather sharpen one ability than work through a series
Six topics, two to four sessions each. Each one takes a piece of how your body works and gives it real attention — how you climb steps, how freely you actually move, how you breathe under effort. No required order. Start with whichever matters most now.
2 Focused SessionsWhen pushing harder has stopped paying off
SmartStamina
More steps, longer walks, a little faster. That’s the usual answer when stamina drops, and it works for a while.
What gets missed is breathing — not breathing hard, breathing well. Plenty of people find out in the first session that their breathing at rest has less to it than they assumed. From there you’ll learn to use it under effort, and to recognize the effort level you can actually hold. It applies to whatever you already do.
You’ll also sort out how hard is hard enough and how long is long enough — including why ten minutes in the morning plus twenty after dinner adds up the same as thirty.
4 Focused SessionsWhen carrying groceries have gotten to be a chore
SmartStrength
Between the chair, the car seat, and the couch, you’re up and down more times a day than you’d guess. Half of those are sit-downs — where your legs work hardest, and the half most of us skip, dropping the last few inches instead of lowering.
So SmartStrength starts with the actions themselves: rising, lowering, and stairs. Then two you wouldn’t expect from a strength program.
Your core, holding steady while your arms do the lifting, so a full bag of groceries doesn’t end up in your back. That same strength supports your bladder — rarely mentioned, more common than most people admit.
And your lower legs and feet, where walking gets its push. That’s the pep in your step, and it starts dropping off in your forties — there’s no day you’d catch it happening.
Four sessions to find out what your legs can do now, and how to ask more of them.
3 Focused SessionsWhen your walking is steady and you want to know where you actually stand
SmartBalance
Start here if you walk without thinking about it, your legs still have real push, and you’d like to find out how good your balance actually is.
The three sessions take on your eyes and head, the strength your balance runs on, and walking itself — where balance either holds up or it doesn’t. You’ll finish knowing what’s working and what wants attention.
If you’re reaching for the railing on the way down, or your eyes drop to the sidewalk on uneven ground, start with Better Balance instead. It begins further back, and takes ten sessions to get there.
2 Focused SessionsWhen you shift in your chair more than you used to
SmartPosture
Sit up straight. Shoulders back. Most of us got that advice young, and it works for about four minutes — because it’s a position you’re holding, and holding takes effort.
Posture isn’t a place you park. It’s your pelvis, spine, and ribs adjusting all day, and it should cost you almost nothing.
Two sessions on sitting and standing: what your pelvis is doing underneath you, how your ribs and back join in, and how to find the small shifts that let you stay somewhere longer without stiffening. If your balance is already sound, freer movement through your torso shows up in your walking too.
2 Focused SessionsWhen stretching hasn’t changed how you move
SmartFlexibility
You can touch your toes and still not turn far enough to back the car out. Range on the floor and range you can use are two different things.
Some of what limits you isn’t tightness at all — it’s effort. Tensing somewhere that doesn’t need to tighten, or asking one part to do a job three parts could share. Reaching gets shorter. Turning gets stiffer.
The first session works with your whole body: less effort, more parts joining in, more than one way to do a familiar action. The second goes to your feet and ankles, which have to adapt to every surface you walk on and rarely get asked to.
2 Focused SessionsWhen the floor feels far away, or one shoulder is doing too much
SmartAgility
Two sessions, two separate skills. This isn’t a full agility program, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
The first is getting down to the floor and back up. A grandchild, a dropped pill, a suitcase pushed too far under the bed. If it’s been a while, it’s rarely one weak thing stopping you — it’s useful strength, flexibility, balance, and timing having to cooperate in one continuous action. So you practice it whole.
The second is your shoulders and arms in the work you repeat: the serve, the swing, the second hour of painting trim. One pattern over and over wears in. You’ll find other ways to organize the same action, and the shoulder strength to back them up.
Everything you need to begin.
One membership opens all of it: 33 Master Sessions, both Target series, all six Foundation topics. Nothing is released in stages.
Thirty-three isn’t a big number, and that’s on purpose. Teaching this in person narrowed it to about twenty core skills — the ones that turned up again and again, in nearly everyone, whatever else was going on. The sessions build on those. You don’t sort through a hundred videos deciding what you think works. Sharon already did that, over forty years.
Each Master Session includes:
The full session
Sharon explains the movement, demonstrates it, and guides you through it. Pause it, repeat it, come back to it a month later.
A shorter practice video
The movements without the teaching, for when you already know what you’re doing.
Written guidance
The steps, what the session is for, and what to keep in mind while you practice. It sits with the session inside the course.
Sessions run 35 to 60 minutes. That’s the learning, and you do it once. The practice afterward is short — what you learned goes into the chair, the stairs, the walk you were taking anyway.
Each session opens by telling you what you’ll need — usually a sturdy chair and a corner of a room, sometimes a band or a low step. It all fits in a small space. One session works on the floor, and it walks you through what that takes before you try it, with a version on the bed if you’re not there yet. Suggestions for props are on the Resources page.
You set the pace. Follow each series in numbered order — the earlier sessions prepare you for what comes next. Revisit any of them whenever it helps.
Monthly and annual memberships both include everything. Starting with one route doesn’t close the others. Individual sessions with Sharon aren’t included.
Sharon taught this in person for decades before it became a website.
Outpatient clinics. People’s homes. Rehab units, community classes, one-on-one work. Different rooms, different bodies — and the teaching got clearer every time it had to work for someone new.
Two trainings shaped it. In orthopedic physical therapy she learned to spot what’s actually limiting someone, and what needs direct attention. In Feldenkrais she learned to see differently — not the sore part alone, but how the whole body takes part in an action, and how to break any action into pieces a person can learn. A tennis serve as readily as a flight of stairs. The two didn’t stay separate.
People tell her they’d never had it put quite that way. She’d found the thing they hadn’t noticed themselves doing, and named it plainly enough to be worth trying. Someone with hip discomfort on longer walks learns the holding doesn’t stop at the hip — it runs down through the leg, into the foot and ankle. He tries it a different way, feels the difference, and that’s what he practices. Now he catches it early himself.
SmartBody turns that same lens on the ordinary actions, the ones so familiar you stopped noticing how you do them. Broken down further, in order, paced for learning on your own. The aim isn’t to walk you through a movement. It’s to leave you with something you keep using.
Sharon Duffey, PT, FCP — licensed physical therapist, advanced orthopedic background, certified Feldenkrais practitioner.
“When I was debilitated, I got more physical benefit from SmartBody sessions than from 8 weeks at an Inpatient Rehab.”
Nancy A.
Trusted by professionals
“I have known Sharon professionally for over 30 years and regularly receive positive feedback from patients. She has expertise in her field of movement science. I strongly recommend SmartBody.”
Dr. Bill Emper, Orthopedist
“I was dealing with some injuries at the time, and what surprised me was how much changed from such small adjustments. She sees patterns that are easy to miss. Even my own physical therapist noticed the difference in my posture and how I was moving.”
Vicki Bersch, Physical Therapist
Choose what fits you now.
Three ways in. Any of them is a reasonable place to start.
Begin with SmartBody
Join monthly or annually. Everything opens right away — start where you decided to start. Pause or cancel anytime.
Keep learning
SmartBody Insights, two emails a month. One thing to notice in how you carry a bag or stand at the sink — small enough to try the same day.
Ask Sharon first
Fifteen minutes with Sharon, free. Useful if you’ve got more than one thing going on, a condition that flares up, or you’re unsure about working on your own. You’ll get a short questionnaire beforehand to think over. It’s a conversation, not an evaluation or a treatment session.
No obligation, just a conversation.
When in-person care makes more sense
SmartBody is movement learning, not rehab. It assumes you’re getting around on your own — if you use a walker, or you’d want someone nearby while you practice, working with someone in person is the better place to start.
Same for new pain, a flare-up, a recent injury, or a sudden change in what you can do: start with your doctor or physical therapist. This works best when things are steady. Once they are, it’s here.
