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01/18/2017 07:00 AMJab to the chin! Cross to the body! It’s a boxer’s old, reliable one-two combination. A knockout? Maybe, but as Britt Nystrom points out, at the Squared Circle gym in Deep River, sometimes the opponent is Parkinson’s disease.
Britt, who lives in Ivoryton, went out to Indianapolis last summer to become trained in the method that Rock Steady Boxing uses to bring the sweet science to an unexpected population: Parkinson’s sufferers.
“Boxing works well for people with Parkinson’s,” she says. “Boxers train for balance and agility, issues that people with Parkinson’s have.”
But there is one major difference: In boxing for Parkinson’s, participants are not throwing punches at one another. They are working with gym equipment and with instructors. At a recent session, Britt says, athletes, as all the Parkinson participants are known in the gym, worked on coordination by using long plastic tubes, familiar in pools as swim noodles, to swing at Squared Circle’s heavy bags.
Classes last for 60 minutes and focus on posture, gait, and even voice control.
“People with Parkinson’s tend to shuffle,” Britt says. “And their voices often diminish. Sometimes we have them yell to work on voice.”
She adds that the program can be modified in many ways to accommodate the Parkinson’s athletes’ conditions. Participants need doctors’ approval to take part in the program.
According to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, Parkinson’s affects some one million Americans, causing weakness, tremors, rigidity, and posture problems among others. The cause for Parkinson’s is unknown and there is no cure for the progressive disease. Advocates claim boxing is one of the ways to halt the rapidity of the progression.
Britt first learned about boxing as a way of working with people who have Parkinson’s from a childhood friend who grew up with her in Niantic. The friend, who now lives in California and has a husband with Parkinson’s, called Britt to tell her about a television report by CBS newswoman Lesley Stahl about using boxing to combat the effects of the disease. Stahl’s husband Aaron Latham suffers from Parkinson’s and had been regularly attending a Rock Steady Boxing program at Gleason’s Gym, a pugilistic landmark in Brooklyn where greats like Muhammad Ali once trained.
Britt’s friend had decided to go to a two-day Rock Steady training program and her enthusiasm convinced Britt to do the same. And since her own training, several people from Squared Circle, including Britt’s longtime partner Bob Fitzgerald and one of the gym’s owners, Cindy Lignar, have also been through the Rock Steady program. The other owner of Squared Circle, Stacy Meisner, is scheduled to go to Rock Steady training this coming March.
Squared Circle is the first Rock Steady affiliate in Middlesex County. The Valley Shore YMCA in Westbrook is also conducting a different type of exercise program for Parkinson’s sufferers.
Britt explained that Rock Steady grew from the experience of one man, Scott Newman, an Indiana attorney, who had begun to box before his early onset Parkinson’s was diagnosed. He kept boxing even after learning he had Parkinson’s and found that through the training, he made progress in battling the effects of the condition. From his own experience, he founded Rock Steady Boxing in 2006.
According to Stahl’s report, Stephanie Combs-Miller, a professor at the University of Indianapolis’ College of Health Sciences, who conducted the first major study on the effects of boxing therapy on Parkinson’s, noted that over two years, people who participated in the boxing program showed no signs of progression of Parkinson’s disease.
Still, Britt wants to be cautious about making blanket statements about the effects of the boxing training on the Parkinson’s athletes at Squared Circle.
“I want to hold back about saying anything. We just started in November. We will go back to do assessments in four to six months,” she says.
Britt, who works in the IT department of Aetna in Middletown, says she was not a fitness buff until she discovered Squared Circle—and she was not the one who discovered it.
“My boyfriend wanted to do something different; he saw the boxing gym. I was scared to death, but I went and I loved it. I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all.”
The training, she says, has boosted both her energy level and her confidence.
Since she started at Squared Circle, Britt not only trains at the gym, she also does obstacle races with other gym members where participants climb walls, crawl under barbed wire, climb rope, and slog through mud. The courses are usually 5 or 6 kilometers and it takes Britt from an hour and a half to two hours to complete.
“My times are not competitive, but I enjoy it,” she says. “I don’t like to run, but with an obstacle course, you stop and do something else and then run again.
What about thrashing through the mud?
“It washes off,” she says.
Working with the Parkinson’s athletes has been an eye-opening experience for Britt. She admires their resolve, and the effort they put into battling their condition.
“These folks are so inspiring. I meet and talk with them and they are so determined to fight the disease. I am lucky to be doing this,” she says.
As she looks back on her own commitment to training in the Rock Steady program, she sometimes is also amazed at her own determination.
“I have spent 25 years working in corporate America. This was really outside my comfort zone,” she says.
Recently she talked to her childhood friend in California who encouraged her to do the training. That friend has also opened a Rock Steady affiliate on the West Coast.
“Who would have thought when we were children that someday we would both be doing this?” Britt reflects.