Cliff Richard may have just turned 86, but retirement doesn’t appear to be particularly high on his agenda. Celebrating his birthday this week, the singer credited his fans as ‘the reason why I continue to make music and tour’. Whatever you make of his back catalogue, you can’t deny his staying power.
And while his approach to nutrition might raise a few eyebrows – more on that shortly – his relationship with training has involved plenty of familiar graft.
Cliff Richard’s Workout Routine at 86
Speaking previously, he said: ‘I’m doing weight training in a gym, three days a week for two hours.’
That commitment to lifting carried through into later interviews, when he’d obviously caught the bug and upgraded to a home gym. ‘I’ve got a gym, too. Lifting weights has helped me stay in shape,’ he said. He also described how a regular morning stretching routine had helped with his troublesome lower back.
In the past, training also gave him a structure around which to prepare for the demands of performing. Speaking about getting ready for a tour, he explained: ‘Monday, Wednesday and Friday I will be in the gym, and in between I play tennis.’
A straightforward combination of gym work and a sport he enjoyed, repeated throughout the week. We highly rate that, whatever your age.
As he’s grown older, he’s adjusted that workload. In 2024, he told press in New Zealand: ‘I don’t exercise on tour. Being on stage each night is enough.’ He also explained that he avoided tennis while touring because a fall could put his performances at risk.
But by 2025, biographer Ian Gittins had confirmed Richard was back at it, still going to the gym and playing tennis twice a week.
This all fits the philosophy he’s espoused in the past:
‘I always say to people, you know, just keep moving. If you can run, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. Just keep everything moving and I think that’s helped me a great deal.’
We back Cliff’s sentiment of giving yourself permission to adapt while keeping movement firmly on the agenda. Your training might look different with each passing decade, but it should still have a place in your life.
Cliff Richard’s Diet and Blood-Type Diet Rules
His dietary rules, however… they’re slightly less convincing.
In 2010, Richard revealed he was an advocate of the ‘blood-type diet’. In 2024, he confirmed he was still a staunch follower: ‘My diet is based on my blood type, which is A positive.’ That documents at least 14 years of enthusiasm for the approach.
The premise is that your blood group determines which foods best suit your body, with different menus and restrictions prescribed for types A, B, AB and O. It sounds personalised, but the evidence doesn’t quite justify reorganising your lunch around it.
A systematic review found no evidence validating the diet’s claimed health benefits. Subsequent research found that although some of its eating patterns were associated with better cardiometabolic markers, matching them to someone’s blood group offered no additional advantage.
In other words, a healthy, consistent eating pattern is likely to have benefits, even if the explanation attached to it is incorrect.
His long-standing commitment to keeping active and paying attention to his nutrition is the big takeaway here.
Our advice, as the man himself said in his breakout hit 68 years ago: just ‘Move it’.
With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.
As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.
Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.
You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.