If you’ve watched one of my chair exercise videos, you may have wondered who is actually behind them — and why I started making them in the first place.
So, here’s the story.
My name is Joe. For most of my professional life, I worked in digital marketing. I’m a senior digital marketing consultant and, more recently, a retiree.
Retirement has given me something I didn’t have enough of before: time.
Time to focus on the things I genuinely enjoy — making videos, 3D animation, storytelling, digital strategy and entrepreneurship. As you can imagine, all of that makes YouTube a pretty natural playground for me.
But there’s another part of my life that eventually led to this channel.
I’ve always wanted to stay active
I enjoy walking, cycling and exercising. I’m not someone who wants to spend retirement sitting on the sofa.
There is one problem, though.
My back has been in pretty bad shape for many years.
That has gradually limited the sports and exercises I can comfortably do. And, like many people discover as they get older, things don’t necessarily become easier with time.
I still wanted to exercise. I simply needed to find ways of doing it that worked for me.
And that’s where YouTube came in.
How I discovered chair exercises
A few years ago, I started discovering chair exercise videos on YouTube.
At first, you might think exercising from a chair means doing almost nothing.
I quickly discovered that this wasn’t true at all.
There are very gentle chair exercises, of course, but there are also routines that can really get your body moving. And, most importantly for me, I could adapt them to what my body was capable of doing.
I started practising them regularly.
And I loved them.
Over time, these exercises became part of the way I try to stay active. They help me work on my flexibility, keep my weight under control and maintain my balance.
But there’s also a bigger objective behind all of this.
I want to stay independent for as many years as possible.
For me, that’s ultimately what staying active after 50 or 60 is about. It isn’t about becoming an athlete. It’s about continuing to move, walk, travel and enjoy everyday life.
So I decided to make my own chair exercise videos
Eventually, two parts of my life came together.
On one side, I had discovered chair exercises that I genuinely enjoyed doing.
On the other, I had years of experience with video, digital media and storytelling — and a fascination with creating things.
So I thought: why not make my own?
There is something important I want to make clear, though.
I’m not claiming to have invented chair exercise.
I take inspiration from workouts and movements that already exist, particularly exercises I have personally found useful, and recreate them in my own way.
I build the routines, work on the pacing and presentation, and add my own experience and perspective.
And then there’s Ricardo.
Meet Ricardo, my 3D exercise buddy
If you’ve watched the videos, you already know him.
Ricardo is the 3D character who demonstrates the exercises.
No, the animations aren’t Pixar or Disney quality — and I’m perfectly aware of that!
But they do what I need them to do: show the movement clearly and make the workouts easy to follow.
And I actually enjoy making them.
These videos are very much homemade productions. I create the routines and visuals myself and put everything together video by video.
Despite what you might assume when you see a 3D character on YouTube, the exercise animations are not AI-generated.
Creating a consistent 15- or 20-minute exercise routine, with the right movements at the right time, still requires a considerable amount of manual work.
If artificial intelligence could reliably produce thousands of these videos for me at the push of a button, believe me — there would probably be thousands of them on the channel already!
There aren't.
The one thing I don't do myself: the English voice
English isn’t my first language.
Although I can write and communicate in English, I don’t feel my spoken English is good enough for professional voice-over work.
So for the English videos, I use a professional American voice to bring my scripts to life.
The words, routines, ideas, animation and production are mine. The voice simply allows me to present them properly to an English-speaking audience.
This channel is also part of my own journey
Perhaps that's the most important thing to understand about this channel.
I’m not standing on the other side of the screen pretending that ageing doesn’t affect me.
I’m doing this too.
I'm looking for ways to keep moving despite the limitations that come with getting older. I'm trying exercises, keeping the ones I find useful and turning some of them into routines that other people can follow.
Some sessions are deliberately gentle.
Others are a little more challenging.
Because being over 50 doesn't automatically mean we need everything to be easy.
What matters is finding the right level for you.
And if one of my videos helps you move a little more, feel a little better or simply gives you a reason to exercise today, then all the work that goes into creating it was worth it.
I hope you enjoy doing these exercises as much as I enjoy creating them.
See you in the next workout.
