In weight lifting, the lower back does not always receive much attention, unless it is injured. Experienced athletes know enough to include deadlifts, stiff legs, good mornings, glute-hamstring raises, and pull throughs into their routine, but maybe that’s not always enough. The posterior chain is used in many pulling and lifting movements, so making it [...]
Werewolf Muscle Training with Dumbbells Werewolf Muscle Training After many requests I’ve gone ahead and rewrote Werewolf Muscle Training without barbells. More specifically, this is a Werewolf Muscle Training style dumbbell routine to gain strength. Don’t get me wrong, you will still need at least an adjustable bench, and some exercises call for bands and [...]
First, check out his cameo in Gabriella Rogers’ Living With Parkinson’s. Neil is featured prominently as evidence of the power of heavy and consistent weight training as part of a Parkinson’s treatment plan. Yay Neil!!
april 2011
A missive from Neil, April 11.
My occasional pieces in Stumptuous are commentaries on my exercise habits. They are not recommendations but accounts of what I’ve found possible while living with Parkinson’s. No-one should commence a vigorous exercise routine without having been assured by a medical practitioner that it’s safe to do so.
[Krista's editorial comment: In this case, I recommend healthy skepticism about "doctors' advice", given that until recently, much of said advice has involved "Lie down in God's waiting room, read some old copies of Readers' Digest and await your termination; there's a good boy." Go kicking and screaming all the way, in my opinion.]
Mandy has left a question on part 1 of my blog. Calls me a dude, and says it’s about time for an update. (Is being a “dude” complimentary or a putdown?) Mandy, you’re an impatient woman. I most recently reported in December 2010. But thanks heaps. It made my day to learn that someone’s interested in my situation.
Parkinson’s disease intrudes in nearly all I do.
The timing of daily chores is dictated by timing of my medication. Minor activities of daily life such as doing up the button at my collar and knotting a tie are reserved for when medication is likely to be functioning. Clients are seen when medication is most likely to be “on.” Sleep is fragmented; I’m usually awake between 3 am and 6 am before lying down for a final hour.
Respite is found in vigorous exercise during four sessions of around 55 minutes each week.
Monday night this week was bliss. The day had been dreadful. An unusually heavy workload in my daytime occupation plus concern regarding deadlines led to severe shaking. Arriving at the gym around 9 pm, a fellow member asked if I was O.K.
After 10 minutes cycling, 15 minutes rowing increasing pace to flat out, and 25 minutes lifting weights my body had become “normal.” What a feeling!
The impediments of PD drift away as I pick up pace. Dr Parkinson becomes briefly anonymous.
In indoor rowing, indoor cycling, and pushups/situps/unweighted squats competitions at the gym there’s no “PD” alongside my name on the printed results. My biggest handicap in the “55 years and over” events is being 65.
This Wednesday, I rowed for eight minutes, starting slowly then increasing pace to a 1 minute 44 seconds/500 metres rate in the final 30 seconds. On the decline bench, I started with 6 x 80 kgs and finished with 1 x 110 kgs (242 lbs).
Horizontal bench is being avoided until slight soreness in my right shoulder goes away. I’m told that my speeds on the bike and in the rower along with the weights I lift are unusual for a man of 65 years.
I was diagnosed with PD in 1998 and commenced gym activity in 2000, at age 54. Apart from possessing a set of 120 lbs weights and a weightlifting bar in my final year at school and occasionally attending the uni gym in my late teens and early twenties, I’d had no lifting experience.
My training regime differs from exercise undertaken by many with Parkinson’s in that it
was commenced, and continues, for overall health and physical fitness rather than as therapy for Parkinson’s;
is conducted in the company of the general public, not a specifically Parkinson’s group;
follows targets and programs set by myself;
demands close to maximum exertion;
assumes that exercise = flexibility + aerobic “stressing” (pushing heart and lungs) + strength and “strength” means to maximum capability.
In January 2000 I was overweight and unfit and decided to do something about it.
I was met at my first gym session by a cheery but tough lady who pushed me hard in my first months. Sweat is my main recollection of 2000. By 2004 I’d realised that sweaty training sessions bring me temporary relief from tremor and rigidity.
“Bradykinesia,” slowness of movement, is one of three major symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Weakness is included by some as one of numerous other symptoms. (See link below to article by Falvo, Schilling and Earhart.)
What’s going on in my case? Can intense physical training from soon after diagnosis overwrite symptoms? To what degree do shortcomings in speed and strength of many living with PD simply reflect lack of fitness resulting from a lifestyle cocooned from physical activity?
My training follows six separate programs, one per session. There’s nothing magic about the number six. It simply ensures specific exercises aren’t repeated too soon.
I lift lower repetitions and “heavier” weights rather than higher reps and lower weights. Higher reps cause me soreness. I’ve not been injured unless a painfully stiff neck for a week around seven years ago could be rated an injury.
In February 2004 I read an article online in a gym equipment journal describing a training program for a gentleman with a terminal neurological condition. The author was Dr Krista Scott-Dixon.
I emailed Krista, complimenting her for what she was doing and recounting my own situation. Krista kindly suggested some exercises. Exchanges continued for several years before Krista asked whether I’d agree to my accumulated commentaries being transferred to her Stumptuous website. That’s how I come to be here.
What does a Google scan of the literature tell us? It tells us that professionals’ opinions have moved a long way since first coming to my attention around 2003. Mainstream advice told me then that, having Parkinson’s disease, I should not exert myself and not lift heavy weights. I was classified as a “patient.”
“…we…..question the rationale behind current exercise prescriptions. The absence of reports contraindicating resistive exercise, the potential for positive adaptation, and the noted benefits of resistance training in other populations may provide support for its inclusion into a treatment approach to PD.”
“Conclusions: Moderate volume, high-load weight training is effective for increasing lower-body strength in persons with PD.”
Researchers seem reluctant to investigate the benefits of upper body strength. Don’t people who topple over grab for something? Wouldn’t their chances be improved if their arms are strong enough to support them?
Rodrigues-de-Paula and Oliveira Lima, in summing up where physical therapy currently stands in relation to Parkinson’s disease, say this:
“Thus, it is possible that high-intensity exercises are most desirable to minimize the progressive dysfunction of PD. However, since individuals with PD have a lower physical fitness and are often unmotivated to practice physical activity, it is necessary to raise awareness about the use of high-intensity exercise in their treatment, since such exercise will require more physical effort which could lead to individuals’ fatigue.”
Having grown up in the 70s (BTW guys, there’s no apostrophe), the concept of “70s Big” always cracks me up. For those of you born after Magnum PI, you have to understand that the 70s was a very earthy, hairy, body-positive kind of time where the human physique was frequently revealed in all its resplendently awkward glory.
And it was a time when people trained in gyms with cinder block walls with free weights and — if things were fancy — a few leg curl machines that smelled of old leather. When people wore knee socks unashamedly and most lifters were big because they ate steak and drank milk.
As the 70s Big site explains:
“It’s currently in vogue to have a spindly, thin appearance which is typically accompanied by a low body fat percentage. Regardless of why this has come to be, those who have such an appearance are not very useful. Imagine asking someone of this ’stature’ to help you move your car out of the road, haul some lumber, or even fend off a potential zombie attack. It simply wouldn’t be feasible.”
Lately, I’ve been growing some serious gluteyliciousness.
I don’t know whether it was the KB swings, or the 100-rep deadlifts, all my sitting and BJJ yanking my pelvis into hyperlordosis, or just a little extra squeeze in my ass cheeks as I walk to practice recruiting the lazy medius and minimus, but my ass has definitely gotten larger and more in charge lately.
I turn around and it’s like BAM! There it is! Two cannonballs defying gravity back there! You could put a tray of drinks on that bad boy! I feel totally J Lo and I love it.
“You have to show your ass,” says my fashion consultant sister, who shortens my sweaters, snuggifies my shirts, and takes away my baggy pants, making me wear leggings and Sir Edmund Hillary boots, a combo that makes me look like Leela from Futurama (purple hair included, BTW).
As a girl with a WASP brain in an Eastern European body, I am initially stumped by this “show your ass” concept.
I spent my first two decades strategically tying sweaters over my pear-shaped frame, envying the bony boy asses of models, then the subsequent two decades more or less not thinking much about the posterior at all. I knew my ass-to-grass squats were taking care of hip extension so I didn’t really concern myself with what the booty was doing.
Like a lightbulb boy working on his beach muscles (i.e. pecs and biceps), I spent way too much time focusing on the stuff I could actually see — although unlike a lightbulb boy, I actually trained my legs. I rocked the quads so hard I sometimes forgot that there was something that prevented my pelvis from driving two stabby points into my chair.
Enter BJJ in 2007 (hip bridging), judo in 2008 (trying to make people trip over my ass), and Bret Contreras with his glute analysis in 2009 (violating a barbell in public). Recovering enough from my back injury in the early 2000s to start deadlifting again, sumo-style this time, using high-rep sets to rebuild the endurance of my spinal erectors. My crazy ideas about shit like 50-rep sets of 1 full Olympic clean every 30 seconds… and then every 20 seconds… and now working on 1 per 10 seconds…
And finally, acquiring my own adorable little set of vinyl-covered kettlebells to swing. (Yes, although I stand against the concept of adult women lifting pink 1-lb dumbbells like it has some kind of point, I still like pink-coloured heavy weights. I wish my Olympic bumper plate set came in shades of pink. Fucking deal with it.) I swung and swung, repeating Dan John’s mantras in my head: If it’s important, do it every day. And pull your thumb to your zipper!!
Little did I know that all this humping, bumping, and trying to kick people behind me would amount to something. Two somethings, technically. Possibly with their own sentience.
This is especially interesting at a time when asslessness seems to be en vogue.
I like a good caboose on people, so it’s visually painful to walk around the streets of Toronto and observe urban hipsters whose droopy pants hang sadly, plumbline-straight — or worse, concave — from their lumbar spine to their knees. (On the other hand, Lululemon actually makes guys’ pants for “hockey butt”, so if you have a hind end that earns the envy of all the other crimson-cheeked baboons in your posse, get thee to Lulu and stuff the spheres into their accommodating wares.)
No matter what your size, if you don’t get regular activity you are doomed to have a spine like a question mark and the body language that goes with it. As Will Brink used to say, You need a big hammer to drive a big nail. A strong ass means a happy spine. A strong ass is a great foundation for a fit and healthy physique.
Be ass proud, people! Squat, deadlift, run and jump. Make your bum do its job, as Geoff Girvitz of Bang likes to say. It’s the biggest muscle group in your body, so put it to work.
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Update: Here’s an old post I put together right quick for someone who just needs a quick workout at home. Originally posted on May 3, 2007. At times you will find yourself unable to get to the gym or dojo. Things in life just happen. So we do we do in a time like this? [...]
