How to exercise in order to get results from Parkinson’s Exercise Programs

[Music] hi everyone i am leigh cochenauer the education program manager at the davis spinning foundation and i am here today with parkinson's wellness coach chris meldrum who's going to be sharing with us all the latest about high intensity exercise for parkinson's chris has spent more than 15 years in the fitness industry with a decade in the medical fitness industry before starting genesis health club's neuro wellness program in 2020 she is an ace senior fitness specialist certified group fitness instructor and ace approved parkinson cycle coach a certified mad dog spinning advanced and spin power instructor a certified rock steady boxing parkinson's head coach and instructor a certified parkinson's delay the disease instructor and she has completed the apda parkinson's training for fitness professionals she's also published several articles that she vets through dr j alberts at the cleveland clinic and she often speaks at parkinson's conferences about the science and methodologies of parkinson's exercises so thank you so much for being here chris thank you for having me okay and we are going to jump in first to a presentation about some of your research so if you want to pull your screen up we'll switch over to that we can do that so i'm going to talk about the science methodologies about exercise programs and in particular three exercise programs today probably the three most um popular but i'm going to start with a student of mine whose name is jojo and it's how exercise changed his life and he was diagnosed with parkinson's disease and he lived with it for six years and all of a sudden uh his parkinson's got worse and so he went and he found out that it wasn't parkinson's but he had progressive supernuclear policy uh psp and so this was at year six and he started exercising he had been exercising but he started really exercising rockstar boxing cycling uh delay the disease weightlifting i mean he was really going to put the dot in the progression of his disease and so as he did it was really working for him and the the two diseases though they are different they share similar symptoms they have stiffness muscle rigidity movement difficulties but they have very different scopes and that is that psp people tend to get dependent care within three to four years and people tend to die within six to nine years so joe had already had it for six years and his uh ability to already live past the normal range that a person with psp uh was able to was pretty much mystifying his neurologist and the other thing for him was that as of 2014 he was having pneumonia at least twice a year now that's eight years worth of pneumonias and this year uh this last december he got probably the worst case of pneumonia ever he landed in the hospital and he had such a bad reaction that he ended up coming home to hospice so joe was kind of at a at a precipice in the point in his life in that he was going to either go up or down most people thought down i was sitting on the couch with some friends and his wife and joe and the one thing i thought as we were discussing what was going to happen with him was that joe needed to move and if he didn't move he was going to be in big trouble and i asked his wife what what can we do to help joe start moving and she told me that joe was in hospice so he couldn't have physical therapy he couldn't leave to do anything and no one could come in and so i was pondering that and i thought to myself well if no one's going to help this man i'm going to because if he doesn't move we're going to lose joe and so when i got home that night i got a text from joe and he said to me he said health i'm trapped in this body and i i can't i can't do this without help and i i just it just really got to me i mean i'd already decided i was going to help him but the thought that he was trapped in his body and unable to do it for himself at that point in his life was pretty um jolting to me and so i started working with joe a couple times a week i go i went out we started boxing we started weight training we started moving his body and a couple of months later i got a call from his wife and he and she said guess where we just came from and i said where and she said we just went to church and joe went with us and i was like what and uh and i i was just i was so shocked that you know he had he had the strength to go get up and go all the way down to the church farthest away and uh he went to church and back and ever since then he's been moving his way back to coming back to uh work out so here's joe and uh his wife gail and if if i told you i'm going to tell you how long joe has uh lived with first parkinson's six years and then psp the magic number for joe uh because of exercise he has you guys have been doing a long time yes i'll have the video first sorry yes yes your neurologist also agrees with that yes well he's totally um surprised and impressed with how joe has been doing because he is especially with the diagnosis of psp that has a shorter lifespan expectancy than the regular parkinson's i think he's been pleasantly surprised and amazed at how joe just keeps going does it feel when you're moving and you're working out feels good you like boxing yeah is that your favorite yeah you like what you do you go to the gym on a regular basis three times a week it's motivating you to get back in the gym it is he's uh working that direction he's working that direction and he's been doing this for 16 years and that's probably uh probably one of the biggest records out there and it's all because of exercise and um so he is probably one of the best stories i know of of how exercise has helped keep um one of these diseases at bay uh she heard she already went over all my um accolades here and all my certifications so there they are what does a parkinson's wellness coach do we have a different role we have a different perspective than say the neurologist the physical therapist the occupational uh therapist but we are part of your care team and we are with you a lot some of my people i see not only every day but two times a day and we notice when things are off and we have you let your the rest of your care team know when things are off and that's kind of how um i got into researching articles and uh talking and writing to dr alberts about different subjects mostly cycling and any kind of topic that would affect my students i wanted to let them understand the importance of exercise and how it affects them so that they could um be motivated to ride or work out with an understanding of the science behind it so many people when i when i talk they they don't know about dr alberts jay alberts the vice chair of innovations at the cleveland clinic and yet here he has been uh championing parkinson's exercise for the last 18 years so i'm always happy to tell people all about him he is currently doing a study um and looking at the long-term uh impact of high-intensity aerobic exercise on parkinson's disease and his focus right now is on uh home cycling so how people are cycling in the home in the home and um he's gathering the data for the year i believe and then they are sending it back and they're looking at how that's um how that's working when people are working at their home in the home environment now the the first article i ever wrote um i i asked i sent him a note an email and uh i actually and our first article i wrote and i didn't exactly think he actually sent me anything back um and i was really shocked that he did and um in the email he talked about the fact that he he said that translational research he said it's bringing a treatment from the bench to the bedside and he said what you're doing with all your students and all these people it's it's you're doing it in it for real and he said what i feel like i do is more like bringing it from the bench to the bedside or to the bookshelf from the bench to the bookshelf because he's not it's just nobody ever really gets to i don't get to really work with people so i thought that was kind of a funny comment from him um and so it all starts started back in 2003 with ragbrai which is the big ride across iowa and he was uh riding with a woman named kathy he's got a great story about that and um she and her husband weren't seeing eye to eye on the rise so they switched partners and along the way um he started to notice that her parkinson's was getting better and so um from the corn fields that led to the clinical trials and of course um that was in 2007 the first clinical trials where they were testing on tandem bikes so someone would be writing in the front a person with parkinson's would ride on the back and this was all thanks to the davis finney foundation who funded so much of this research and uh between dr albers and the finnish finney davis finney foundation um there is a great deal of research on parkinson's and exercise that um we wouldn't have otherwise and what they did find on this research is that the brain controls movements how it controls the movements and that cycling can improve motor function for people with parkinson's and this was a big deal and that led to this landmark study from dr alberts on force not voluntary exercise improved improves motor function in parkinson's and it kind of left this whole discussion on forced exercise versus voluntary exercise and it's kind of a this forced exercise became a term uh that's been around since this report came out and the when the report came out it it was interesting because um forced exercise was one study group on the tandem bikes the voluntary exercise group were the people that were biking uh on their own all right so they were voluntarily biking at their own pace so the forced exercise were the people that had someone biking in the front they were going at revolutions per minute of 80 rpm okay that's the rate per minute so what happened is that both groups uh about cardiovascularly both groups improved um what i want to say um their heart was better their they felt better everything things like that were better but when they looked at what happened on the unified parkinson's disease scale it was an interesting dynamic so when i asked people when i do this this conversation i asked them to give me what do you think the fe group uh got on the parkinson's scale versus the ve group and i get all kinds of numbers people give me all kinds of numbers and i tell them well the fe group got 35 they improved 35 and then the they'll say give me all these numbers over the ve group and then they're shocked when i tell them the ve group was zero and they're like what how can it be zero and i say well they they improved aerobically cardiovascularly heart wise they felt good but it did nothing for them for their parkinson's symptoms and that is the key that people have to understand how you exercise determines whether or not you get um results for your parkinson's symptoms and the biggest question that always comes out is what does forest exercise mean i think people were confused by this term forced exercise i mean i think dr alberts just had people on the tandem bike they were forcing the person in the back to uh push the pedals for them so they were forcing them to go at a higher rate so you know you coined the turn forced exercise but it just simply meant high intensity training that's all it is you're you're working at a higher intensity than um you would otherwise but it's different for every individual so someone who's just starting out exercising their intensity level is going to be met much quicker than somebody who's trained who's been working out longer and the other important key is that it changes so as you get more um in shape then it's going to change and you're gonna you're gonna have to also change so i think probably one of the best things about uh dr albert's research is that today in a 2020 study on neuroprotective mechanisms on neurological diseases it completely reinforces that everything that dr albers found back in 2009 so if we look at this research study and it goes across six different uh neurological diseases schizophrenia huntington's disease parkinson's disease um alzheimer's ms and depression physical exercise improves your quality of life we know that but also your cognitive skills and your depression okay they find that it does it is superior to usual treatments all right and then for it's specific for parkinson's it improves your gait balance and it slows down the aggregation of protein in the brain and that's a big deal for people with parkinson's but here's the secret the secret is you have to have an exercise intensity for a certain amount of duration to have the neural endocrine response okay and i'm going to get into this little science section here and this is really great because people hear all the time neuronal survival and neuroplasticity but and rewiring the brain and then but then they're like but what does that really mean so here you've got the neuron all right i'm going to use my little mouse here so they didn't used to think way back when that you could change the brain could continue to grow but now they show that the neuron can in fact grow and the brain change happens here when it takes this and grows the synapsis right here all right so when this synapse in synapses grows and oh by the way what makes it grow exercise exercise makes this grow in your brain all right and when that happens that is when you're rewiring here for a new task okay and then the the key though is and that's the neuroplasticity for the neuroplasticity to work it it's depending it depends upon the exercise parameter so you have to have intensity you have to have uh difficulty specificity and complexity so walking down the street is not going to change uh the neuroplasticity in your brain that's okay it's gonna you're gonna have to do something a little bit harder than that and that's the key to understand it's understanding how what do i have to do how do i have to work out in order to change the brain and make my symptoms better so if we look here i'm going to show you this this is the greatest slide i think out of the whole thing how does my brain rewire for change so say i'm going to neural cycle rocksteady boxing or delay the disease all these classes are designed to help you change your brain okay here we go so you go to class and these classes help you contract your muscles so as these muscles are contracting right here then being irishman is released erythrin is what they call the exercise hormone that exercise hormone is really important because it releases probably the most important thing and that is brain derived neurotrophic factor okay remember this bdnf bdmf it's going to come up later and try to remember it okay when we get there brain-derived neurotrophic factor that is the key protein that maintains these neurons and adds new ones okay so what happens then is the bdnf helps maintain those neurons create new ones and what do you get down here you get life-changing results all right and all of this happens because of exercise that's what happens and what are those positive effects on that are happening improve sleep you've got reduction of stress reduce that insulin resistance okay reduces inflammation which is very important for parkinson's it stimulates and releases the growth factor you have growth of new blood vessels and here we go you get your neuro neuroplasticity all right improvement of memory and learning as well as neuronal survival so you that overall health and abundance and survival and these things aren't just good for people with parkinson's it's good for everybody so i'm gonna just quickly go through the three different programs okay uh neurocycle also peddling for parkinson's same thing my my place uh genesis health clubs our neural program opens our cycle class up to all kinds of uh neural uh people so stroke white matter disease ms we have we have all kinds of people in our cycle class um if you're the methodology behind a cycle class is that you come in you're encouraged to ride at wherever you can ride and then you're coached over a period of time to get to that higher rate of speed that will kick-start the brain then we're always adjusting everything speed time intensity all those things that i just talked about in that brain chart all of those things are are changed so that progressions are made all right we create uh metric assessment rights so we monitor progress and so that we can help you um see where you see where you start see where you're going and see where you want to be then a goal of class is 45 to 60 minutes but trust me no one ever sits and starts a class with that amount of time most people start in a class for 10 minutes 10 minutes that's it and they slowly build their way up the magic number rpm revolutions per minute 80. that's the number we want to get to so that you can get your brain working so that you can get better symptoms and keep them under bay so science behind neuro cycle dr albert's his 2009 study cycling three times a week can reduce motor functions up to 35 that is phenomenal three times a week another study showed that you can take a 74 year old and a 20 year old and you can have the same leg strength in the muscle okay same size and and leg strength and size just from cycling and that's really important because our lower body leg strength is really important for our activities of daily life so the other study that dr edwards did was on brain function and cycling increases the motor cortex up to 20 to 30 percent after cycling and you'll hear in a little bit one of my people talk about how it improves her ability to um read where without cycling she's not able to because she's in such a fog this is a real big one and these are from the cleveland clinic uh improved patients motor functions clinical ratings by 51 and when they did this they tested the people's significance the other thing they found was that it means it means four weeks after stopping and my people left the colavid they found that out really fast that they uh kept their symptoms at bay for four weeks and then it went down fast so the one thing they realized is that they've got to keep going um otherwise the symptoms come fast now this is a really uh new study um the uh this was in um colombia and it was kind of an interesting uh study on tandem writing as well but this was looking at the bdnf levels remember i said remember brain derived neurotrophic factor okay here we are these guys were riding the bikes they did six bike rides for 30 minutes that's it they were trying to see how quickly that um there was the effects that they were getting good effects and the bdnf levels increased more than tenfold in that short of amount of time that's significant they also showed how the increase bdnf correlates to the improvements on the parkinson's rating scale and they also confirmed what all the earlier studies science studies behind neural cycle have shown previously so cycling to me has the biggest science behind it and again we think we can thank dr alberts and the davis vinnie organization for having all that science because originally when people were quoting the science behind parkinson's exercise even um rocksteady boxing and uh delay this disease they were using the science this science of cycling as the main [Music] research to use first experience cycle i did not believe i could do it get on the bike and much to my surprise um chris helped me get on the bike it took a while to figure out how i was gonna get my paralyzed body up there but now i do truly love it it helps my brain work and it helps it find after cycling what was what was it like the kids sat down to read a whole book at the time and then think of a couple months and they could party when you start out a goal the next time that you go 42 the 42 i finished my life and now i like to cycle at least three times a week or more and just give it a try it's very scary to try anything new after you have to give it up give it a try and it's amazing how much you will get back so sandy had a stroke in her 20s and [Music] she for the first time in like 40 years that she had any mental clarity after her first cycle class and she started cycling all the time because she gets four hours four hours of mental clarity after each cycle class the other thing i just i love about this sandy and her story about her whole half of her body is paralyzed and yet in time sandy is able to go 80 to 90 rpm on a bike and so when i meet people and they tell me that have parkinson's and they tell me there's no way i will ever be able to go that fast i tell them trust me you can it takes time but you will be able to do it and if you don't think so i want you to come meet sandy cycling if you ask me what's the hardest for me it's cycling cycling is the hardest but i know it's probably the thing that does the best so i try to keep coming back because it does make a difference for me and i think it makes a difference for a lot of people because we have the same people coming back all the time box steady boxing is phenomenal and the methodology is um [Music] it is it's really interesting because they take non-combat high-intensity functional training for the entire body and they incorporate all kinds of parkinson's specific work into it and rock city boxing was founded by um mayor or i'm sorry former marion county prosecutor scott newman you know and he had early onset parkinson's and um he really really wanted to have rock city boxing apart available to as many people as possible um and the thing that's really great about it is that and and one of the phrases you'll hear if you've ever been to a rock city boxing class is that boxers are to leave their parkinson's at the door and they're treated as athletes and there's something extremely empowering about that and it's it's a it's a that methodology is very unique to rock steady boxing and the athletes really respond to it and they do use the uh training at higher intensity levels that whole methodology of working at that higher intensity level to get the brain where it needs to be 90 minute class but the class is not just boxing the class is like i said made up of power endurance um brain work and dexterity work all kinds of stuff so people tend to hear oh it's boxing but it's not boxing like you think and if you ever have a chance to go and just watch a rocksteady boxing class it will definitely change your mind and they also have great plans of the week that come out from headquarters the plans of the weeks may be this week we're going to work on bradycanisia or this week we're going to work on compound movements so there's a real unity between uh the training planning and they also do parkinson's specific like i said specific training so say we're going to work on how to fall falling training um and then also the current they stay current on exercise science which is really important um and you can read current science um new things like i did the circle kenya article which is um training uh strength training in a different way and one of the ways to avoid cyclopenia is to do what they call power training and it's say you go down if you're gonna do a bicep curl you would go down slow one two three and up fast okay so it's a whole different uh kind of training method but the beauty of rockstar practicing is you can weave that in so that that came out as a new way to combat sarcopenia and so you have that flexibility to weave that into the training they also do their balance assessments you know the time that they go the foliage in advanced balance scale they're very very methodical on how they assess and track progress of their people now rock city boxing currently has some fabulous fabulous science released uh presented at the 2020 international congress um it was a virtual congress but nonetheless it was big because this survey uh which was done in 2018 and 2019 had over 2 000 rock steady boxing uh people surveyed and 86 percent were previous roxane boxers and 77 were current ones and the one thing a rock city boxing person will tell you they would recommend it to you because 99 and 94 said you should try rocksteady boxing and that's pretty darn good there's also a 2021 a new rocksteady boxing um science study out there and this one's really great because it looked at people over two years and it measured at six month intervals and this one was really great too because it looked at the fab uh the timed up and go your lower body strength 30 second chair stand your gait speed and what was great about it is that you know it found that at your six month your 12 month your 18 month you know there were significant improvements in these kinds of um the tug and the fab and the 30 second chair sick test and but i think probably most important was the significant improvements in the standard measures of your balance functional mobility and your strength so those are some really good science factors now i want to go back to this um this is from that congress um the congress uh virtual uh platform where they talked about rocksteady boxing and they took the big survey and they they wanted to look at the improvement that the boxers previous boxers and current boxers so if you look at the um right here that so the darker color is the current participant rock state boxers and the lighter one is the previous participants so and you've got social fatigue uh let's see fear falling depression anxiety poor sleep dyskinesia freezing tremor cognitive dizzy dizziness lightheadedness and your meds wearing off now any of this is phenomenal okay because if you have this is almost 30 say they improved on their meds wearing off that's great um all of this as this goes up and up and up and up and up all the way to social being 70 percent of an improvement i mean all of this is improvement in all of these categories you know 59 in depression and dyskinesia 40 i found my glasses on but it's like 43 and 48 so that these are phenomenal numbers for rocksteady boxing and everybody said that their quality of life and their self-efficacy was better because of rocksteady boxing compared to those who had never tried it before so i'll just let you hear one of my new boxers he's only been boxing a month you do have good results you've said totally good results really surprisingly good results um like like tonight i know that at six o'clock or we might be watching the news on tv and i'm not spasming at that point in time and i hadn't even taken the medication that i that they've prescribed for me it kind of calms my nervous system down what does it do for your timers it calms them down okay even i could say it'll eliminate them okay that's a pretty bold statement but it does definitely um take it back to ground zero on uh the trimmer billboard i like rocksteady boxing and all the aerobic type exercises that go along with that it isn't that we box all the time i like the camaraderie we have with each other the [Music] discipline that we have with it consistency again and the coach is wonderful that makes a big difference delay the disease is a very popular parkinson's program and it's you know it's all based on helping uh to the participants learn to control their symptoms and i love it uh because it is it's very set up well so that you can teach a chair a chair version a medium version and high version so everybody in class can work at their own level and they can move up and down so say for one exercise i'm not feeling really good about my balance i can sit in a chair for that but maybe the next exercise well i can stand up for that part so you you have the freedom to to move and and not be bound to um one set uh exercise or way of exercising within the delay of the disease class and the program is set you have got to work at 70 to 80 of your maximum intensity and the reason why jackie russell and uh david sid created this program as the founders they created this so that you were you were going back to these they relied on dr albert's research that you've got that high uh functioning brain going work through cardio and then they pull in um the parkinson's specific work okay so if for instance you are having your shuffling and your feet are going smaller okay your movements are getting smaller so we would do a round of cardio get that brain going and then we do these big large amplitude walking okay so that your brain is rewiring to walk big not small all right so you're retraining your brain to do it in a way that is not small but big and so we do uh cognitive multitask training walking balance you name it there's just um there's a ton and delay the disease and um the classes like i said there's level a basic be a little harder see the hardest so you know depending on what stage you're in everybody can work at it at their own level and then they also have um different classes as well so you have that all within one class and then they also offer other classes um as on top of that but um i i really just think delayed the disease is a phenomenal program and um the they also do the assessments track specific measures on your balance your dexterity and how well you're doing interestingly enough uh jackie and david jackie told me that they originally used there was so much science that um on force exercise and everything already done that when they did their um pilot study on uh they did more of the non-motor skills and they wanted to see for who for the delay the disease in specific they looked more at quality of life and functioning short-term function and mobility and more depression things like that and they originally did their 2014 study and then they just finished their 2020 study and again they they've looked pretty much at the same things uh fall risk quality of life depression functional mobility and they do a lot of functional work in the labor disease functional work as well so um and i just want to mention for those of you who may or may not know david and jackie i mean they've been with delay the disease forever they are have been delayed the disease forever but they aren't there anymore and you didn't know that they are now with totalhealthworks.com they're still doing an uh internet version of but they're working with ms and alzheimer's as well so you can find them there but delay the disease is still with www.ohiohealth.com so either way you can find both people in different directions now exercising means that i have a normal life and that i can walk i can talk without you know taking time to think and i if i did not have the exercises i would be probably in a wheelchair sizing means for me to keep on going and keep on having my brain work without being my fault my husband had parkinson's for 20 years and he wasn't the type of person to exercise but he'd get on an air dying bike and use that air dying bike over probably 18 of those 20 years made a huge difference so i figured that if i do more exercise at the age that i got it then it's gonna help me and i'll be able to manage my life and enjoy my life for a longer time than to just give up and say i've got a disease i'm not going to let it beat me and this is the way i can do it this is the only way i can do it there aren't any medicines yet that's going to cure it and i know it's not so let's just exercise seeing the heroes there are really a lot of brave people and the encouragement that you get and just knowing how hard it is to move your body and to see people just keep at it and to keep a sense of humor and to keep enthusiasm even when you know it's hard i've met so many heroes okay i love that so much i wrote down so many notes and things that i love um i mean so like so many takeaways i think that um the the testimonials are amazing um and i love that um so many of them emphasizing you emphasize so well that it's not you don't go to a class or go to um start a program and you're doing 80 rpm right away and i think that we we hear from people who hear the 80 rpm and that's something that resonates with people and and like you said they say i can never do that and just knowing almost no one is going to go in there and run they never do but they get there is the thing right they get there and they get there so much faster than they think they will ever get there and they're so excited by that you know love to what sandy i think it was sandy who said you you can you know when you talk about forced exercise but also coming from within when you say the next time you go set your own goal for doing more right and with you know that's self-motivation and it's building your self-efficacy it's just i love that yeah one question that i had for you this was at the very beginning uh when you talked about what you do as a parkinson's wellness coach and you say that you're able to to notice things um for people who are in your classes that their physicians might not notice that other members of their team might not notice so could you talk a little bit more about how you things that you've noticed and what kind of actions you take when you notice either better or worse that's happening so i i have a great example it just happened not just like a month ago so one of my uh students had um he had had dbs surgery and uh like quite a long time ago but he had to have his battery replaced so he went to have the surgery to replace the battery and everything went fine he came back really pretty quick and um but within a few days i started to notice that something was off and he was not cycling at his normal you know spots and he was his balance was really off which was very unusual for him and so you know i mentioned it to him and he said yeah you know i kind of noticed that too and then he said but you know what i got the vaccine and he told me i could tell this story so um i said he said maybe that's it i said well i'll tell you what let's watch for the next few days and so we waited and he i i another week went by and i said you know what i think something's really off and he said he called the neurologist's office and they said they told him these batteries nothing ever goes wrong with these batteries nothing ever these i mean it's like one and how many that something ever goes wrong so they kind of just said we don't think it's the battery and so you know another week went by and i was like nope i'm sorry it's the battery it's got to be the battery it's the only thing that makes sense so he called and said look i'm something's still really wrong and he went they said okay come in and guess what it was the battery the one and whatever was his battery and they had to get the technician people in and fix it and he had to go in and so there you go we just you know we see people all the time and we just notice when they're walking funny when their balance is different and you just when they're not cycling their normal cycle speeds just just things we just we just notice these things right yeah that's wonderful well could you talk a little bit about um you know we hear all the time especially if someone's been newly diagnosed with parkinson's maybe they haven't felt comfortable disclosing their diagnosis to a lot of people that they've heard about these classes and but they're feeling either anxious about going or they've never done a group exercise class before what would you tell them to kind of calm those feelings and make them feel more motivated to join well i think that um a lot of times people once they get in and even if they go and watch and don't participate like a lot of people come and watch a rock steady boxing class and halfway through they're up and saying oh can i can i join me you know because it's like oh i i'm okay now and this looks fun i want to do it and also they realize how supportive everyone is and um when they feel the how much these people are like someone who walks in the door and everybody is like oh we're your people you know and it really is amazing how quickly people just feel just the support court system and one thing i find is that it's really needed people need support and um these classes and these groups they're i mean they're with they're with each other for years and years and um they really do depend on each other and i would just tell someone to go and watch first and just check it out i hold uh open houses a lot i hold you know i hold these where i do my little talks and people come and they enough i mean the one thing i hear all the time is why don't people tell us this and i'm like well i'm telling you i mean it's it's just so important and i think that i mean i love to and you that you wrapped up with this but how there's research you know there's so much research that's fabulous about the impacts on motor symptoms um but that they're also now the increasing research that's supporting impacts on non-motor symptoms because for so many people that's just as yes and so that's really exciting and to see how it moves forward i have just one one more question and it's so relevant right now too is you know you kicked off by the story of joe and how yeah was one of jane's heroes by the way oh yeah yeah yes so how um so if someone has let's say they have a kind of setback so either they're hospitalized and they get really set back or they are you know their class that they were going to for years was closed or still is closed because of covid what what should they do if they are they've been feeling unmotivated to get back into it what's what's a takeaway that you would give them to get them back in you know it's interesting i left one slide out and that was joe's words joe's gave some words to people and one of his one of his things was that if whatever you do it's the days that you let people help you get there he said it's the days that you don't want to get to the gym or you want to stay home in bed that's the day you really need to go um and i i love that from joe i mean that's that's joe for you and um but so um but if well a lot of people you know did the um you know or do do the you can only do what you can do if things are you know if you can bike i think biking is the best the best thing you can do is if you can bike at home because you're safe on a bike right you're not going to fall biking so biking is probably one of the best things you can do and you can get your you know you can keep your heart um you can keep your level of fitness a little bit higher than other things i think but i mean like jackie and david have their they they do all kinds of brain work and their online zoom the zooming stuff so i mean that's what everybody did during covit right um and if that's but i will tell you my people said it was not enough they did you know in the covet article you know it for four weeks it worked and then it didn't for four weeks because they were living off of their you know right yeah so um it's tough it's really tough you know find find somewhere you know and you know i will tell anyone call me i will help you i will help anyone who needs help um if they're in my area and you know call call find a rock city boxing any any coach from any rock city boxing place you know especially is going to help if anybody calls them yeah and there's plenty of rock state boxing place shoot they could go online to the rock steady boxing headquarters and call there even and they would help them you know any of these places would be happy to help anybody if they were if that kind of situation came up right any any coach is going to help anybody yeah he really will be willing to make the call to you know and that's the thing is make the call make the call don't don't don't sit back that's my thing right i what i hope is that when people see this they go i i i gotta exercise it's not i want to i have to i always tell my people this is your job this is now your job in life exercising is your job and um they love it they love it and they love it because they get results and when you get results it's like wow right i remember someone we were talking to about exercise for parkinson's and they gave the example of especially if someone it was kind of new let's say they've done it for two months and they're feeling good um but something's come up they are gonna go travel or they have you know their kids are in town and so they take a couple days off and then they realize how they feel when they've taken the last couple days off and it's like that all for some people that's all you have to know is how different you feel um the days that you don't so yeah my people crawled back after the quote they were like oh my god they felt so bad they felt so horrible they were just they were really and it was a really it was a big climb back i wasn't kidding in that article the the long climb back it was really tough and but the thing is is that even still they made it mm-hmm exactly that's right it's good time and it was hard but they made it back you know and we look back now we go oh that was really hard but we did it and they did it together and that's the other thing too when you have that camaraderie when you have that group and you're doing it together so that's that's so important and they need that you know i love that well thank you chris so much this has been you explained everything in a way that just made so much sense and is so motivating and we're so appreciative of you giving your time to us oh thank you thank you thank you oh no i love i just love i just i love it so thanks for having me [Music] you

Channel: Davis Phinney Foundation for Parkinson's

Views: 15,136

Keywords: Davis Phinney Foundation, Parkinson's Disease, Living Well with Parkinson's, Kristine Meldrum

Id: sfVKFwIl4ck

Length: 58min 42sec (3522 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021