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Patients fight Parkinson’s disease with boxing lessons

Intense, frustrated anger is one of the most debilitating symptoms for people with Parkinson’s disease, a Victoria patient and advocate says.
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Jillian Carson, left, spars with boxing instructor Jason Heit at Victoria Mixed Martial Arts.

Intense, frustrated anger is one of the most debilitating symptoms for people with Parkinson’s disease, a Victoria patient and advocate says.

So Jillian Carson, founder and chairwoman of ParkinGo Wellness Society, is looking forward to working out her anger, and getting some intense exercise, with boxing lessons.

“You just get mad,” said the 56-year-old woman who has diagnosed in 2009. “Boxing, we are hoping — I’m hoping — will relieve that.”

Carson, along with seven other people with Parkinson’s disease, are part of a pilot project beginning Thursday to put them through boxing-oriented workout sessions. They won’t actually hit each other, but the non-contact exercises and drills are all derived from what real boxers use.

The classes are at the Island MMA Training Centre, 831 Fisgard St., led by longtime amateur and professional boxer Jason Heit.

Heit, now retired and coaching, won the 1995 Canadian Light-Heavyweight Championship and followed that with a nine-year professional career in boxing and other martial arts. He understood instantly the desire of people such as Carson and other Parkinson’s patients to vent some anger while boxing.

“Some people see a heavy bag and some people see a therapist,” said a smiling Heit. “The heavy bag has helped me through many troubled times of my life.”

According to the Parkinson Society of British Columbia, Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative disease affecting the central nervous system. It has no cure.

People with Parkinson’s experience a variety of symptoms: Tremors, slowness, stiffness, impaired balance and rigidity. Typically the first diagnosis occurs around 60 years of age, and about 12 per cent of people older than 80 show symptoms.

An estimated 100,000 people in Canada have Parkinson’s and 13,000 of them live in B.C. In Victoria, an estimated 1,575 people are living with the disease, a number Carson said is expected to rise as the demographic grows older.

The year Carson was diagnosed was also the year she walked away from a 26-year career as a physiotherapist. Like most in her field, she had always been physically active, running, cycling, skiing even downhill ski racing as a teen and young woman.

But she said people with Parkinson’s experience difficulties in doing more than one physical action at once. Walking and talking at the same time can be difficult. Dancing can be hard.

“Sometimes we have trouble to just pull it all together to know what to do,” Carson said.

So she is hoping an intense and varied workout such as boxing will help stimulate those muscles and nerves responsible for movement and function.

Carson also hopes the intense exercise can also stave off the depression that affects so many people with Parkinson’s.

“It’s all about how you can feel today, the quality of life right now,” she said.

Heit said the program is just getting off the ground now. He and others in Island MMA will not only be teaching and training, they will also be listening to hear what the people with Parkinson’s want and are capable of doing.

“Safety is our No. 1 concern,” he said. “I’m not an expert on Parkinson’s and I’m not a doctor, I’m a boxer.”

But Heit hopes to take the class through exercises to connect footwork to hand movements and bodily posture and balance, the “choreography” of boxing.

“We’ll eventually go through the drills a real boxer would use, the bag work, the speed bag, the heavy bag, the exercises and the shadow boxing,” Heit said.

To learn more about ParkinGo Wellness Society and some of their programs, go online to parkingo.org.

rwatts@timescolonist.com