Rock Steady boxing classes don’t provide a big part of her income, fitness coach says, but they feed her soul
Vigorous noncontact exercises help to stave off progression of the disorder, experts say
Ed Abbott, center, who is battling symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, prepares for his Rock Steady Boxing workout late last month at Capital Strength & Performance gym in Sacramento. Clint Jurgens, right, was at the gym to support his wife in her training. Lezlie Sterling lsterling@sacbee.com
Fitness
trainer Melissa Tafoya coaches
boxers whose traitorous bodies give them a dozen reasons not to show up for
class. Some lose their balance just trying to cross a room. Others wake up with
an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. A few have muscles so rigid that their
bodies contort.
All
struggle with symptoms of Parkinson’s
disease, and just getting to class takes a certain amount of
intestinal fortitude.
Rock Steady Boxing coach Melissa Tafoya, who also works as a fitness trainer, spars with Roy Lutz last month
Tafoya
runs the Sacramento region’s first Rock Steady
Boxing affiliate, a fitness regime that uses noncontact boxing
drills to help people with Parkinson’s improve their agility, hand-eye and foot
coordination, muscular endurance, speed and overall strength. Although her Rock
Steady classes now take up half of her time, Tafoya said, they provide only a
third of her income.
“As
an affiliate, we get to choose how we want to charge,” Tafoya said. “We are
told from the get go, ‘This is a fixed-income population. Ethically, you should
not increase your rates as inflation happens.’ These folks do not get to work
with inflation, so you should know that this is just for you to basically pay
your rent.”
Tafoya
charges her Rock Steady clients $100 a month, which covers three sessions a
week. Her personal training clients pay $75 per session.
“It
helps to keep me afloat, and it’s filling my heart beyond measure,” Tafoya
said. “It’s something I never want to stop. ... Everybody tells me, ‘This is
growing really fast. Why don’t you start grooming new coaches for Rock Steady?’
Well, I don’t want to stop training the fighters.”
IT HELPS TO KEEP ME AFLOAT, AND IT’S FILLING MY HEART BEYOND
MEASURE. IT’S SOMETHING I NEVER WANT TO STOP.
Melissa Tafoya
Since
Tafoya launched her classes in November at Amadeo Novella’s
Capital Strength & Performance gym, 1809 23rd St., in midtown
Sacramento, another Rock Steady
affiliate opened in Roseville at No Excuses Training, 309 Lincoln St.
What
did Tafoya think of the competition? “We need more,” she said. “We can’t do
this alone.”
Madeleine Kenefick, known in class as the “Tiny Terror,” works with Melissa Tafoya in the Rock Steady Boxing class at Capital Strength & Performance. Rock Steady boxers take no hits, but they deliver plenty to punching bags
Tafoya
and Christine Epperson, who runs the Roseville classes, trained at the Rock
Steady home gym in Indianapolis, where this fitness regimen originated. Rock
Steady “boxers” or “fighters” are swinging back at Parkinson’s, and every one
of Tafoya’s clients who spoke with me emphasized that, while the disease comes
with a life sentence, it is not a death sentence. Indeed, researchers now
believe that regular, vigorous exercise can dramatically slow the disease’s
progression.
Kaiser physical therapist
Erin Vestal explained: “From a neurologic perspective, what they’re
gaining is dopamine. It’s a neurochemical that is deficient for people who have
Parkinson’s, and so when they’re exercising, particularly when they are
exercising at an intense level, we see that they are utilizing dopamine more
efficiently and effectively. From a movement perspective, that’s what allows
them to move more normally.”
Roseville
resident Ed Abbott told me that, although he still gets tired during the
workouts, he has gained more self-confidence and a little bit more stamina
since joining Tafoya’s classes in January.
“I’m
not afraid to tackle the things that I was afraid to do before,” Abbott, 83,
said. “I’m ready to get up in the morning and do whatever I have to do to keep
moving. It’s really easy to say, ‘Today’s not a good day. I’ll just stay in
bed.’ But I don’t. I get out and do.”
Peder Matthews plays dodgeball with a group of people with Parkinson’s in their Rock Steady Boxing class.
Some
people find irony in the idea that people with Parkinson’s are training in a
sport that is commonly believed to have led boxing legend Muhammad Ali to
develop the disease. Neurologists have said that, while multiple traumas to the
head likely may have caused symptoms of Parkinson’s to develop earlier in Ali’s
life, it is unknown whether the battering caused it.
The
Rock Steady boxers take no hits, but they deliver plenty to punching bags.
Their boxing drills largely focus on developing coordination, strength and
endurance. Vestal said the medical community is trying to get the message out
that this type of vigorous exercise is as close to a cure as they have. People
aren’t experiencing disability or changes in their cognition or depression as
quickly as they might have if they weren’t exercising, she said.
Tafoya,
36, said she’s always been interested in fighting sports and went to mixed
martial artist Urijah Faber’s gym, Ultimate Fitness,
to study a variety of them, just to see which one spoke to her most. She
thought it was going to be kickboxing, but she developed a love of boxing after
studying with veteran coach, Joseph de la
Guevara.
“He
had this following, and all these folks ... rearranged their work schedules to
work with him. I loved it,” she said. “It was so hard. I thought, ‘How come I
can pick up kickboxing but boxing is so difficult?”
The
sport resonated emotionally with Tafoya, she said, and she got a personal
trainer to explore it more deeply.
“It
rewired my brain,” she said. “I’ve had learning disabilities that were never
specifically diagnosed, but I always figured out how to cope with it. ... Three
years later, I start realizing that it was helping me problem solve. It was
helping me break down components, bits of information. It didn’t matter what
the subject was, but it helped me renavigate in my brain how I approached
things and it was calming me down.”
Long
before she worked with people with Parkinson’s, Tafoya had begun training
clients with physical disabilities – multiple sclerosis, aging bodies,
competitive athletes with debilitating injuries. She has a degree in fine art
design from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, but she left behind a career in graphic
design after a fitness gym manager saw her training her mother for surgery and
complimented her technique. He told her he would give her a job if she got the
certifications, she said, and her mom encouraged her to do it. She now has
credentials in personal training, corrective exercise, Rock Steady and more.
She
chose to rent time at Novella’s gym because he referred to her clients with
Parkinson’s as boxers and their time in the gym as boxing training. In the
past, Tafoya said, she’s worked in places where young people or competitive
athletes treated her clients as though they were in the way. Growing up, she
said, she was often the smallest kid and her abilities and strengths were
questioned. Some people wouldn’t give her the chance to prove what she could
do, she said, so she felt like the misfit or the underdog.
“I
understand it’s not about what you look like or what is on the outside,” said
Tafoya, a Woodland native. “I can’t be successful in my job unless I peel the
layers off somebody. I have to really get into why they came to see me.
Usually, it’s not about the bikini body. It’s about something a lot deeper. If
I can’t get to that, I can’t really help them. They won’t commit to what they
need to do, and I can’t find the program that will help them. Once we do find
it, everything comes together – their self-worth and value.”
I CAN’T BE SUCCESSFUL IN MY JOB UNLESS I PEEL THE LAYERS OFF
SOMEBODY. I HAVE TO REALLY GET INTO WHY THEY CAME TO SEE ME.
Melissa Tafoya
Tafoya’s
involvement with her Rock Steady clients began at the gym door, but it hasn’t
ended there. She goes to potlucks and movie nights at their homes. They carpool
together to conferences on aging and Parkinson’s disease. They meet up at River
Cats games.
Many
of Tafoya’s clients link their discovery of the Rock Steady method to “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley
Stahl’s segment on how the training helped her husband, Aaron
Latham, but their coach heard about it from an NPR report. Tafoya had clients
whose Parkinson’s hadn’t been diagnosed fully and she thought it would be a
great service to add to her business, but she had a lot on her plate and didn’t
immediately explore it.
Then,
she said, she went to a continuing education class where the woman in front of
her had a shirt on that read: “Rock Steady San Francisco.” Tafoya saw it as
kismet, and she introduced herself to the woman during a break and ended up
volunteering for several months at her gym to see the impact of the training.
She was content, she said, with the volunteering, but the trainers at the gym
kept pushing her to go to Indianapolis for training and open an affiliate in
Sacramento. She registered for a training in October 2015, so she could
celebrate her birthday while she was there.
Neurologists
from the University of Indiana and trainers from the Rock Steady home gym immersed Tafoya and
other fitness coaches in classes. Then they dropped them into a training
session with boxers who had the most severe symptoms of Parkinson’s disease,
she said, and they began learning how to adjust their routines and drills to
fit different patient levels.
“I
thought, ‘Aren’t these boxers going to be a little ticked off that they’re
working with strangers?’” Tafoya said. “‘Don’t they want to stay within their
comfort zone and work with their (Rock Steady) family?’ What I didn’t realize
was how proud they were, how safe they felt, how strong they felt and how far
they had come. They wanted to teach us. ... I was one of the only ones from the
West Coast, and they were so enamored with that. They said, ‘You take it to
Sacramento. You grow this up. We need more of you guys.’”
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