New exercise panel consists of leaders including local provider Sarah Palmer
By Elizabeth Grover
In early June, the Parkinson’s Foundation (in partnership with the American College of Sports Medicine) announced recommendations for exercising for people living with Parkinson’s disease. Included are the frequency (for example, strength training 2-3 days a week), duration (for example, aerobic activity for 30 minutes per session), variety (for example, yoga, dance and boxing are all recommended) and cautions. Four fields of exercise are discussed – aerobic activity; strength training; balance, agility, and multi-tasking (BAM – often done together); and stretching. The panel whose work resulted in these recommendations consisted of many top names in the field, and included among them was Cincinnati’s own Sarah Palmer. Here are some reflections on Sarah’s experience so far (the panel’s second task is developing evaluative tools to use with exercise instruction courses.)
The Parkinson's Foundation (PF) asked me to be on a committee to help establish the exercise competencies for organizations that provide courses in PD exercise. (Examples would be PWR!, Rock Steady Boxing, Delay the Disease, Brian Grant Foundation, etc. The goal was to establish a very high quality checklist of what a course would have in it: information on Parkinson's disease, fitness, PD-specific considerations, safety, etc. to meet the standards for the PF’s approval. We met in Miami in March of 2020 , then continued with several very long meetings via Zoom to complete the project.. We looked at it from 2 perspectives: the organization providing the course; and an exercise professional taking the course. The process to reach the final draft was very intensive.
There were many top experts in the field as a part of this project: Jay Alberts, Becky Farley (PWR), Terry Ellis, Rock Steady Boxing's Kristy Folmar, Ben Rossi, David Zid and Jackie Russell (Delay the Disease), heads of ACE and ACSM, and more. The exciting part of all of this is that this will set apart what courses have the quality content that exercise professionals are looking for to really help people with PD. It also will help people with PD to know if they are going to an exercise professional who has taken a qualified course. And it may spur some organizations to revisit their course content and make needed changes to improve that content. Being a part of this fascinating committee, I got to see a very interesting process, and it made me very aware of the benefit of so many experts coming together, each contributing a nugget of wisdom and together making the Parkinson’s world better.
It was an honor to be a part of this project, but there is certainly still work to be done. The next step in this process is to determine an application process for the organizations that provide PD exercise courses. And the next step after that is to form a committee and develop a procedure to evaluate such applications. I look forward to working with the PF in the future for the betterment of Parkinson’s exercise.