Put the "Dope" in Dopamine. Knock out Parkinson's Disease!

There's a lot of research related to Parkinson's Disease.  The outward signs of this disease begin as a tremor in one or more parts of the body and can extend into another section or part of the body.  While many who look into exercise and fitness look at the musculature and composition, we must remember that the nervous system and the diseases that may affect it are just as important to work on.

One thing about lifting weights is that there is a nervous system component to it.  Most people only focus primarily on the muscle but we forget that the body functions as a system, a sum of its' parts.  Looking at the body in its entirety is a much more effective way than looking at it in parts.  Where the nervous system comes into play is really everywhere.

Without your nervous system, you can't do pretty much everything.  From talking to smelling to picking up heavy objects, your nervous system is involved with everything.  Parkinson's disease is essentially a disruption of your nervous system, primarily dopamine which is a neurotransmitter. With this disrupted, things that you could or were able to do start to fail.
neurotransmitter takes the signal and travels across the nerve's junction(s).

Parkinson's disease is incurable, once you have it you have it.  The goal, especially the sooner you can find out, is to slow the effects of the disease.  Inevitably it will win.  Using boxing, ironically the sport of which Muhammed Ali performed (who recently passed from Parkinson's Disease) we, as therapists and exercise professionals, are helping to turn the tide on the disease.

About 200,000 new diagnoses of Parkinson's Disease are diagnosed each year.  Therefore there are millions of people living with this really slow, brutal disease.  Now an unconventional method of exercise, boxing, is being used to help fight the disease.  Boxing empowers a person.  It allows for an individual to feel strong and in control, even when often they don't have it.  Over time, we can see an increase in functional ability and confidence, which can go hand in hand.

My classes have several components to it.  We have more or less the "mindless" conditioning components, predominantly using heavy bags where an individual either focuses on strength or endurance.  We have the more focused, heavier mental output, of the double-ended bag and speed bags.  And finally, we have the interactive components with include punch mitts, agility ladders, cones, and strength work.

I bring this up because it is something that has now made me who I am.  I love having the opportunity to work with every one of these individuals and hopefully change their lives.  For further information, you can check it out yourself here. 

That looks hard, so I can't do it. Will you help me?

Something that I often see are people watching someone else perform an activity.  In a gym, it's a pretty common thing to see.  Very often these people don't attempt to try it due to fear of its difficulty or perspective difficulty.  And very, very often, they don't ask for help.

If your background isn't in exercise and you go into the gym and mainly focus on machines, then you aren't an expert.  So what is it about asking for help, in a gym, that many people struggle with?  If your car breaks, you don't just drive around for awhile until it completely fails, do you?  If you don't know how to wire an electrical socket in your house without lighting it on fire, do you do it anyway?

Now, I know these are examples of more "acute" things, like your car breaking or needing to wire your house, but nonetheless, they are still good examples of needing to ask a professional in that field.  So why do you, if this applies to you, assume that when you walk into a gym or any fitness related activity that you know what you're doing.

Looking at people who exercise regularly, I'd say only about 10% of them truly know what they are doing, especially if they are not employed in the field.  Even then, many of the ones that do know what they are doing don't go it alone.  Sometimes they have a friend or hire a coach to help them.  Very often, this is for motivation or accountability, but still, they do it.  Even amongst professionals, many train with someone.  I train with another at the facility that I'm primarily employed with, most of the time at least.  Honestly, without it I probably wouldn't push as hard or want to push as hard.

In fitness, it seems that there is a stigma with asking for help.  There's nothing wrong with asking for help be it with a specific exercise, program design, nutrition question, or anything really.  Asking for help allows for you to expand your knowledge and sometimes you can make a friend or two in the process. It's not a sign of weakness or stupidity, as I've alluded to before, you ask for help when you don't know how to do something.  And unlike your car or house which often have step by step instructions for you to follow, which are generally reliable, your body is an adaptive machine which can do amazing things.  Very often you don't see or know what those amazing things are.

Asking for help can sometimes be the smartest decision that you make.  Sometimes it's just the validation that you need, other times it's the entire process that you're looking for.  But if you don't ask, you won't know.

Which muscle does this work?

A question that routinely is asked is "which muscle does this work?"  The question that I have is "what value do you receive knowing the answer?"  What purpose for you, as the exerciser, does knowing which muscle is the one being used?

Part of my undergraduate and graduate studies consisted of anatomy, physiology, and biomechanics.  Each of these allow for me to understand which muscles are being used, which energy systems are dominant, agonist/antagonist movement, and a variety of other fairly important items when it comes to understanding how the body responds to exercise.  So for me to answer that question to myself or better yet, why am I working this muscle, is much more relevant than what muscle is it.

The specific muscle being worked isn't hugely important unless your bodybuilding or in therapy.  For many, it's the bio-energetic system(s), the energy systems the body uses, which is usually more relevant.  The amount of muscle recruited to perform a task is also generally more relevant to me than which muscle I'm working.

Now, don't get me wrong, if I tell you that you're working your "lats" while performing a pull-up I'm not lying, they're being used.  But, what does this tell you?  It honestly doesn't fully help me unless I'm trying to hypertrophy (grow) or recruit (contract) the lats.  And even still, lats isn't really the name, it's shortened for lattissimus dorsi.  It is however, one of the primary movers in a pull-up.  It helps to stabilize the spine and the upper body in general. Generally speaking, it's involved in all large compound movements such as dead-lifts, squats, and bench press.

So knowing which muscle being worked, has it helped you with this knowledge?  Or is it important to ask "why am I working this muscle?"  Think of questions like that as opposed to which muscle, which really doesn't serve a practical matter.  

A curve-ball to the face

Life can send you into many directions, some of which you prepare for and some that you cannot.  In my previous post, I talked about how life will ultimately kill you in the end.  Here I want to talk about how you need to adapt to life and what happens within it.

My life is generally fairly simple.  It's wake up around 5-6 a.m. most days, go to work and train anywhere between 5 & 10 people (excluding any classes), come home around 5-6 (depending on the day), eat dinner, get the kids ready for bed and to sleep, prepare for the following day, and hopefully spend a little time with my wife.  Most days follow that schedule pretty well without any variation in it.

Trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle when you've got that much going on isn't an easy thing to accomplish.  Yet daily my wife and I generally do that.  She tries to go for a walk with her friends each day around lunch, and if you have ever been to the western North Carolina mountains, you know those walks aren't easy.  I try to lift each day or at least most of them, and I also am pretty active in my boxing & kickboxing classes that I teach.

As you can see, it's pretty busy in general.  Sometimes the difficulty lies in what we eat or not eat.  What I alluded to in my previous post regarding the one individual who gave me a little crap about what I was eating has no idea what I do in my life on a daily basis.  What I know about him is that he's single, no kids, doesn't really have to pour himself emotionally and physically into the people he works with, and lastly can likely spend the time to prepare his meals weekly without having to deal with the chaos of life.

Many live the life that is much more similar to mine than his.  When you're dealing with kids the only consistency is that there is no consistency.  For the record, my oldest is 4 years old, just so you get an idea of the chaos that we deal with.  Planning meals is relatively easy for when I'm at work, it's the home ones that become challenging because of when we get off work or any number of other things.  There have been days where I've been off work first, made dinner, the kids and I ate, and my wife was home a couple-several hours late.  The curve-ball to the face.

If your life is this hectic, you're not alone.  The first step is to identify what you want most, exercising or eating better, you can have both but if you're not used to it it's better to pick one and start there.  With some coaching you can receive a profound difference in your life, but if you try to go it alone you will struggle because it's not like you have enough on your plate.

Welcome to life in all of it's glory.  Just keep up with it and you'll be fine.  

You know that will probably kill you?

Do you know what the leading cause of death in the world is?  It's life.  Life will ultimately kill you in the end. Our ultimate goal with "healthy eating" or "exercise" is to prolong the inevitable death that we will all face.

Not to be morbid, but it got your attention right?  At work the other day, I had a...well let's call it an encounter rather than a conversation, with someone who is probably more than knowledgeable about healthy foods and exercise.  He is another employee from our parent organization, however, we don't have the same "chain of command" and we don't have the same purpose, I'll leave it as that so I don't even accidentally let loose who or what he does.  

In any case, I was just finishing up a fairly intense workout when I went into the break room for something quick to eat prior to my going to the university for a class that I teach.  He walks in and sees that I'm pulling out food.  He came into microwave a sweet potato and I am at this point eating oatmeal for lunch. That day I packed the oatmeal, some peppers & carrots, a Greek yogurt, peanut butter, and some summer sausage that I've had since Christmas (just opened it though).  He gives me a little shit about the summer sausage having sodium nitrates, which is true, but honestly I didn't care.  

In truth, if I weren't active for the majority of my day I'd probably care about sodium nitrates.  They might kill me in the end, but they might not.  The reality is that I have probably a hundred other things ranging from accidents to genetics that will take me in the end and I really didn't care if there were sodium nitrates in my lunch.  He may have been benign and just telling me or somewhat of a douche and telling me.  Not sure, didn't feel like asking nor did I really take anything he said into great value.  

What I'm driving at here is that ultimately life will kill you, so enjoy it while you have it.  I maintain a healthy lifestyle overall, with 2-3 boxing classes per day of which I'm moving around and coaching and taking hits.  I lift 4-5 days per week, depending on which plan I'm working on.  I eat vegetables and generally lean proteins nearly every meal, though in truth I probably don't eat enough (yes, I said that; more on that concept later).  

My main concern is keeping my stress level low.  I feel like I do that, most of the time.  You can eat the cleanest diet on the planet but if you're stressed no amount of clean eating or exercise can fix that.  Anyway, I would like for you to think about the face that in the end, life will kill you, so you might as well live. 

The thrill of the fight!

As I pointed out in my previous post with a boxing class for people living with strokes, I have been running a boxing class for people living with Parkinson's Disease for the last year.  We've modeled the program loosely off of a national non-profit program, but we've kept it in line for our needs and our facility.

I have about 16-20 people spread out in 2 sections of our Parkinson's Boxing Class per week. I'm almost to the point to where I have to add another section to fill our demand.  We spend most of the time boxing, rather than other type of work such as medicine balls or anything like that.  However, we do include agility & mobility and a recent addition has been basic strength training.

Even within the boxing itself, we focus on various elements of fitness such as strength, endurance, reaction time, coordination, and cardiorespiratory endurance.  Some of what we have set up is fairly "mindless," but some of what we do requires a tremendous amount of mental awareness and thought.  These areas more than offset our "mindless" options which serve mostly as conditioning (to include all of those elements I discussed before).

I love having the opportunity to get to know each of my boxers.  They truly are wonderful people with wonderful stories.  Many of them have shown a resurgence in life and have taken their lives back over from the disease.  It's this triumph that has been inspiring above all.  I'm happy to serve them all in any capacity that I'm able to.

If you or someone you love is dealing with Parkinson's Disease or any neurological disorder, please don't hesitate to get them assistance.  It may be scary at first, but it'll allow for you to take back your life or theirs.  Remember "Courage is being scared but saddling up anyway."  -John Wayne

A punch stroke

One of the things that I love about working with neurological conditions is the puzzle factor.  Each person has a uniqueness that is not as evident in healthy people.  Each person poses a unique challenge that must be overcome to be effective as a trainer.  This challenge is thrilling and satisfying in ways that are unmatched.

On 2/28 I began leading a boxing class for individuals who have been affected by strokes.  Each participant has been hand-selected to help for us to "pilot" this program and is excited for us to get it off of the ground.  The purpose behind the boxing class is for us to hone in on strength, endurance, cardiorespiratory endurance, weight transfer, balance, and with any luck, neuroplasticity.

Much of what we are trying to accomplish is to take the "medical" perception out of therapy.  Our program is supervised by a Physical Therapist specializing in neurological conditions, of which I refer to her as the "strategy."  I'm next in line and the lead on the "tactical" front, of which once we're in the room and engaged in the program, what I say goes.  From there we have several physical therapy interns and other trainers to assist in safety.

I'm excited about the program and it is our intention to spawn other programs.  We have been running a Parkinson's Disease boxing program for the last year with a high degree of success and participation.  In the same capacity, I'm the lead once in the room and the class beginning.  We have our own "proprietary" program which allows for us to be different when related to other programs that are in existence.

I'm excited for what the future holds in terms of helping these people heal.  In all honesty, I never would've imagined that this is what my life had in store for me and for that I'm appreciative.