Helping Parkinson’s Patients with Boxing

From the St Paul Pioneer Press, another great example of using non-traditional therapies to great effect.

It’s Tuesday morning at the Element Gym in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood, regulars trickle in for the 10 a.m. boxing class. Men and women are ready to duke it out for an hour and get in their early-morning workout. But this gym crowd is a little different from what you might expect, they are all over 60 years old and have Parkinson’s disease.

The boxing class, Rock Steady Boxing, is an Indianapolis-based nonprofit gym started in 2006 to help those with Parkinson’s and is one of the programs, as well as Element Gym, that make up CoMotion Center for Movement. CoMotion is focused on providing fitness programs for underserved, low-income neighborhoods in St. Paul.

Very few people would think of “boxing” when creating a therapy regimen for Parkinson’s patients, but both clinical studies and anecdotes like this one seem to show it has great promise; as a therapy, an exercise regime & a social passtime.

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