Physical activity is only part of the story: Prototyping supports for women’s transition to retirement

Women’s transition to retirement (TtR) is shaped by gendered inequalities, shifting identities, and changing social relations, yet supports for this life stage are often generic, with physical activity related offerings framed by discourses of active ageing. This study examined the generative potential of co-designed intervention prototypes for women’s TtR through the performativity of stories. Using story completion, fifteen women (M age = 60.4 years; range = 54–72 years) generated 29 stories in response to three co-designed support prototypes: a retirement café, a buddy scheme, and a women’s exercise class. Stories were analysed using dialogical narrative analysis. Analysis identified six resonance orientations: embracing, tentative, ambivalent, resistant, redirecting, and disconnected, which portrayed how women imagined engaging with the prototypes and negotiating retirement futures. Across stories, engagement was shaped not simply by intervention type, but through the interplay of personal histories, personal and social expectations, material environments, and culturally available narratives of ageing and physical activity. While some stories reproduced dominant discourses of successful ageing and healthism, others revealed subtle resistances that held future-forming possibilities for later life. Findings demonstrate the value of story completion for exploring intervention performativity prior to implementation. More broadly, the study argues that performativity offers an alternative organising principle for physical activity intervention and co-design by foregrounding relationality, resonance, and world-making over behaviour change alone. Designing supports for women’s TtR requires approaches that favour variation over reinforcing normative expectations of ageing and expand narrative possibilities that incorporate physical activity rather than targeting it as a behaviour.