Fitness and Exercise For Disabled People

Exercise for the Disabled

At Optimal Fitness, a part of Good Shepherd, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, three times a week, John Miller is lifted from his wheelchair onto a stationary bicycle. Electrodes are attached to three of his muscle groups, coaxing his paralyzed legs to pedal. It's the highlight of his workout.

Besides the stationary bike, he also likes using upper body weights, which come equipped with a seat that swivels away so he can move his wheelchair into position and lift.

Miller is one of the fortunate ones. He belongs to a gym specifically designed to accommodate people with disabilities.

Very few other disabled people have that option. The usual basics of good health, diet and exercise, often present challenges for people with disabilities, a situation which made more difficult by a common assumption that disability and poor health go hand in hand.

The result, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is that people with disabilities , about 19 percent of all Americans, are far less healthy than the average American. Since those people with disabilities are the biggest users of medical services, that disparity could be costing hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year.

Those costs are likely to increase as the baby boomer generation grows older and are more susceptible to disabilities.

There's an enormous number of barriers that people with disabilities face when they try to become healthy.

Those barriers range from health clubs that view people with disabilities as potential liabilities to public health campaigns that bypass them entirely.

There's a mind-set that people with disabilities are also ill and they shouldn't be exercising says the head of the National Disability Sports Alliance. The group promotes athletic competition and physical activity among people with cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, stroke and other physically disabilities.

But people with disabilities are increasingly very hard to overlook. In a first-of-its-kind study released last fall, the CDC found that those with disabilities were more than four times more likely to be in fair or poor health than those who are not disabled. Those with disabilities were also more likely to smoke and to be obese and physically inactive. In West Virginia, the numbers were even worse.

The head of the computer science department at Bluefield State College in West Virginia, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1997 and sometimes uses a wheelchair. She lives in a state where its reported that one in four adults is disabled, the highest rate in the country.

She says she's lucky that a gym in Bluefield, near the Virginia border, has one or two pieces of equipment she can use to get an upper body workout.

Part of the problem, according to the experts, is the common assumption that people with disabilities are simply unable to take on physical tasks.

People with disabilities can be healthy, and people without disabilities can be unhealthy says a lead scientist for the CDC's Disability and Health Team. But the perception persists, even in public health, that just the opposite is true.

Public health has a kind of uncomfortable relationship with disability. People with disabilities tend to be viewed by people in public health as a failure of primary prevention.

Exercise for the Disabled

That's starting to change. In January 2007, a group of doctors and advocates launched the Inclusive Fitness Coalition to urge private health clubs and gyms to make universal accessibility part of their basic service.

At places such as Optimal Fitness that's already happening. Optimal Fitness is part of Good Shepherd, an acute care rehabilitation hospital. The fitness center is open to hospital patients and its employees, but also to anyone with a qualifying disability.

Rehabilitation and regular fitness and exercise for disabled people has helped many stay trim and muscular.