I was fortunate enough to gain insight and experience on the disorder, what its symptoms are, and how it affects each patient differently. As part of the Rock Steady Boxing team, our curriculum focuses on improving balance, speed, hand-eye coordination, agility, and dexterity through many personally designed exercises and workouts. As part of my curriculum in graduate school, program design had become one of my favorite modalities of my college career, so after I became certified as an RSB coach I was extremely excited to use my skills to design exercise programs for a specific population of the community. Every week my class has a fun and fresh new workout implementing exercises to improve strength, mobility, cognitive abilities. Since I have become a coach for Rock Steady, I have seen such an improvement in my boxers involving their abilities to successfully get up and down from the ground safely, improve power in their punching techniques, and expanding their movements from small to large and their speech from soft to loud. Also, with consistent training and practice, their tremors have improved as well as being able to recover from postural freezing. Every week, I look forward to coaching because it allows me to give back to the community promoting exercise as medicine. I love seeing the smiles and hearing the laughter from my boxers when I give them a hard workout. They complain that its tough but I know they are capable of overcoming what they think is impossible because they are fighters.
For those who suffer from Parkinson’s Disease or know someone who does, I hope this information is helpful to you and I hope that you share it so that someone who is diagnosed with Parkinson’s knows they are not alone in the fight against this relentless disease. There is hope for recovery through the intervention of exercise. As long as you keep moving and never give up, Parkinson’s Disease cannot win. For more information about Parkinson’s and Rock Steady Boxing, visit their website. If you are in the Central Jersey area, you can inquire about our Rock Steady Boxing affiliate located at Hackensack Meridian Health at JFK Medical Center in Edison, NJ.. To learn more about Scott C.Newman’s story and others like him, check out the video The Fight Game: Rock Steady Boxing (HBO Boxing) on Youtube. Also to hear more about the success of Rock Steady boxing and its follower’s testimonials, you can order the book “I Am Rock Steady” which tells the stories of 11 boxers as narrated by Julie Young.
By Nikki Scornavacca