This article describes the cross-cultural adaptation of the Exercise Benefits/Barriers Scale (EBBS) to the Portuguese language and its application in elderly Brazilians. The EBBS was originally developed in the United States to identify perceptions concerning the barriers to (and benefits of) physical exercise, and thus to determine factors affecting this practice. Cross-cultural adaptation involved the following phases: initial translation, summary of the translation, retranslation into the original language (back-translation), review by an expert panel to evaluate semantic, idiomatic, experimental, and conceptual equivalence, and pre-test of the final version with 30 elderly subjects. The EBBS cross-cultural adaptation allowed proposing a preliminary Portuguese-language version. However, to ensure that the cross-cultural equivalence between the original version and the translation has been fully achieved, it is necessary to compare the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version and the original instrument, a crucial task that is now being performed and will soon be published.