The three things that pried me off the couch...

There were three things that finally pried me off the couch.  The first was Amberly during our "Phat Club" days (oh my...) who pointed something out to me after dropping my first 20 or so pounds while eating low fat whole wheat muffins and yogurt (it's the official food of women... watch the video, I'll wait)



Back to Amberly, she asked me how much weight I could have lost if I'd actually, you know, got off the couch. So I did. With Fit to Strip. Yeah....

The next was Kat Carney, who runs the SoulCysters site posting a link to a few research papers on the benefit of resistance exercise on improving insulin resistance in women with PCOS (the couch/pizza ordering existence did me no favours - my body was like a car on blocks parked in someone's front lawn...). That got me dusting off my old copy of Bill Phillips' Body for Life book and doing bicep curls and leg extensions in my half storey.

The third, and most profound, was Mistress Krista's posts about the shaky man in the gym on her Stumptuous website. Neil has Parkinson's and has been doing intense physical exercise and heavy weight training since sometime in 2005. He's caught the interest of Parkinson's researchers with the positive outcomes he's experienced. Parkinson's and Dystonia have a lot in common. Same area of the brain, same neurotransmitter and a lot of the drugs developed for Parkinson's are used to treat people with Dystonias. The drug I had been on, trihexphenidyl, was an anti-Parkinson's agent. Reading his email exchanges (here, here and here) got me wondering if there was a better way to exercise and wondering if intense physical activity could also help me with my Dystonia. Sure enough, it did! His emails also made me realize that doing supersets with a 12lb dumbbell was maybe selling myself short a little.

Krista just posted another update about Neil. According to her post, he's featured in a video created for Professor Bastiaan (Bas) Bloem, who is a world-leading neurologist in the field of movement disorders. Oh, the link to the professor includes a great TED presentation and a really fun presentation of a guy with Parkinson's who can barely walk but can ride his bike just fine... yay for the adaptive power of grey matter!  Hmm, this could be why I can clean 135lbs for 2 reps when I'm so symptomatic I can barely stand and putting my own plates on the bar is impossible (thanks for loading my bar, Ang!).

Check it out! Dude's achieved a level of fitness that most people never will. And did I mention he's in his 60's? Yeah, pretty cool.



I know I've been yammering on about Dystonia a lot lately. But I think it's important to try and get the word out there that there ARE people out there with neurological disorders who are seeing benefits from intense physical activity. I know what it's done for me and I also know that, being without a neuro right now, no one in the medical community even knows it. I think it's worth studying and I'm so pleased that Neil's experiences are getting some attention.

I thanked Neil a few months ago for getting me off the couch. I don't know. Maybe someone with a movement disorder will stumble across my blog some day and this will encourage them to give their local CrossFit gym a call.