I Love Success Stories

We have all read and heard countless reports about the benefits of exercise: how exercise promotes brain health, prevents disease, helps you achieve better sleep, reduces stress, etc.

Somehow, however, it never seems like it relates to us personally.  Yes, our lifestyle may need some small improvements.  But we don’t need to make major changes.  After all, we feel we eat fairly well, we think we are working on our sleep, we believe we are learning how to reduce our stress, etc.,  etc., etc.

I want to share a success story that demonstrates why we need to exercise.

I was contacted about 10 months ago by a woman who wanted me to work with her then 90-year-old husband.  He was overweight and had Parkinson’s disease.  He had always liked to work out.  In the last few years, though, his workouts had been getting frustrating and therefore less frequent.  Could I help?

We started working together in January 2021.  I see him weekly for 45 minutes.  He is motivated and will sometimes exercise in between our sessions.

My goal was to keep JJ functioning.  I wanted his legs to be strong enough to help him stand when he was getting up from the couch or the toilet.  I wanted him to be able to rotate his body so he could reach things that weren’t in front of him.  Overall, I wanted to build and maintain muscle in his upper and lower body.

A number of months ago he said he wanted some sort of total gym weight machine that would help him use heavier weights and maybe give him the opportunity to work out on his own.  I worked with his wife to find the right piece of equipment.

A few weeks ago he had a thorough health evaluation.  During it, the doctor asked him to stand up unassisted, thoroughly expecting JJ to be unable to do so.  Here is what his wife wrote to me afterwards:

“And I'm so glad I was there in the meeting with the doctors. :)  They truly were blown away.  In fact, they prefaced the next "task assignment" [to stand up unassisted] with "we don't expect that you will be able to do this so don't worry about it" and then he proceeded to pop up and down like a champ!!  It was awesome!

Exercise can bring great outcomes.  I know there are no guarantees.   But great success stories like this one prove that it is worth a try. 

Contact me and I can get you started.