By Joe Blundo The Columbus Dispatch March 10, 2019
Gym owner Melissa Carlson’s hardest-working exercise class isn’t the one for fitness buffs at 5:45 a.m.
It’s the one a few hours later for people with Parkinson’s disease.
“It’s the motivation,” she explained. Exercise is believed to slow the progression of Parkinson’s, a neurological disorder that’s not fatal but can severely affect movement.
Anyone walking into her MC Fitness and Training gym, 4140 Tuller Road in Dublin, at 9 a.m. on a given day is likely to see a dozen or so people pushing, pulling, lifting, balancing, bending and hopping.
The program is called pDNextSteps.
Andy Bell, 73, drives 55 miles from Springfield several times a week to participate. He could find classes closer to home, but he likes the combination of Carlson’s enthusiasm and his classmates’ camaraderie. The opportunity to gather with people who face the same health challenge lifts his spirits and invigorates his workout.
“You push yourself harder in a class like this than you do on your own,” said Bell, a retired insurance agency owner.
Carlson, a personal trainer, became certified three years ago as an instructor of Delay the Disease, an OhioHealth exercise program aimed at Parkinson’s patients. She offered the program, on which pDNextSteps is based, at various gyms until she was able to open her own late last year.
Instructing people who have so much riding on exercise fulfills a desire.
“I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself,” she said. “To just make a difference.”
Parkinson’s can cause such movement issues as tremors, rigid limbs, loss of balance and gait problems. It can also cause depression, sleep disorders and cognitive impairments. The onset can be subtle.
Jeff Smith, 70, said he consulted a neurologist after his wife noticed that he was shuffling his feet last summer. The neurologist diagnosed Parkinson’s and told Smith the best thing he could do for it was to exercise.
Smith, a retired guidance counselor and baseball and tennis coach at Centennial High School, has always been active, and he likes that Carlson doesn’t coddle her students during the 60-minute classes.
“She’ll get on me: ‘Jeff, get your head up. Jeff pick up a heavier weight.’ ”
Carlson has more than 50 students, many of them referred to her by David Hinkle, a neurologist and movement disorder physician at OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital.
Hinkle said he has seen dramatic improvements in patients enrolled in Carlson’s program and others like it under the Delay the Disease umbrella. People who exercise multiple times a week at a level intense enough to keep their heart rates up do best, he said.
Carlson is particularly good at coaxing effort, said student Sher Harvey, 56, of Lewis Center. People pick up on her enthusiasm, said Harvey, who has dystonia, a movement disorder with some similarities to Parkinson’s.
“She has so much passion for what she does,” Harvey said.
Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.
https://www.dispatch.com/entertainmentlife/20190310/joe-blundo--their-parkinsons-disease-prescription-60-minutes-of-sweat
No comments:
Post a Comment