Dancing Through the Golden Years: Lived Experiences of Senior Citizens in Low-Impact Dance Fitness

This study explored the lived experiences of senior citizens participating in low-impact dance fitness, using a qualitative descriptive phenomenological design grounded in the Husserlian tradition. Participants were eight Filipino senior citizens aged 60 years and above, purposively sampled from a community-based dance fitness program. Data were generated through individual, semi-structured, in-depth interviews and analyzed using Colaizzi's descriptive phenomenological method. Analysis yielded five emergent themes describing a coherent developmental arc in participants' experience: Dance as a Pathway Out of Loss, Stress, and Inactivity; Embodied and Emotional Renewal Through Movement; Belonging, Confidence, and Purpose in Later Life; Negotiating Physical Limits and Social Tensions; and Senior-Responsive Dance Fitness as Inclusive Care. The study concludes that senior citizens' lived experience of low-impact dance fitness is best understood as a layered, temporally unfolding process that no single theory of aging can fully explain, but that is best accounted for by reading its functional, dispositional, and embodied dimensions together, drawing on the Theory of Successful Aging, Continuity Theory, and embodiment. From these findings, the study developed the GY-CARE Framework, the Golden Years Connect-Adapt-Reinforce-Equip Framework, a practitioner-facing framework for organizing senior-responsive dance fitness programs. The study recommends that community-based programs institutionalize relational recruitment, ability-matched and non-coercive pacing, trained and safety-conscious instruction, and explicit anti-exclusion group norms, and that future research pilot and evaluate the GY-CARE Framework, examine the embodied renewal-social confidence cycle longitudinally, validate uneven safety risk through mixed-methods designs, replicate this inquiry across other senior exercise modalities, and purposively recruit more male participants to test the transferability of these findings.