Boxing to battle Parkinson’s

Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a group of boxers meets at Juarez Boxing on Montevallo Road. They go through a warmup, practice agility and work on cardio. And while they will enter the ring for a few workouts, these are not ordinary boxers.

These classes are part of Rock Steady Boxing, a nationwide program to help fight the effects of Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s is a movement disorder that affects nearly 1 million people in the United States, according to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation. It leads to the death of nerve cells in the brain and eventually leads to tremors, rigidity and other balance and coordination problems.

Rock Steady Boxing, which originated in Indianapolis, uses concentrated exercises to hopefully slow some of those effects.

“Studies have shown through intense, vigorous exercise, it helps slow down the progression of the disease,” said Martin Juarez, owner of Juarez Boxing and the main coach in Rock Steady Boxing.

Juarez attended a four-day training course for Rock Steady Boxing in March 2016 before bringing it back to his gym. During the course, he learned about how Parkinson’s affects individuals and how boxing exercises can help.

“The boxing wasn’t an element that I had to do any homework on,” he said. “I already know about most of that.”

When he returned to Birmingham, it was around the time of Partners in Parkinson’s Birmingham. Juarez’s gym was the first in Alabama to be Rock Steady Boxing certified, and he spoke to the Partners in Parkinson’s symposium. What started with around six people has now grown to more than 30 “boxers.”

“When a person walks into my gym and they have Parkinson’s, I don’t call them a Parkinson’s patient … I call them a boxer because I am training them like a boxer,” Juarez said.

A typical class started with a flexibility warmup and verbal cue exercises — where Juarez or another coach will call out a motion and the athletes do it, working on muscle control — and then continues to work with heavy punching bags, agility exercises or hand-eye coordination practice. People will leave a class exhausted, Juarez said, but that is a good thing.

“A person that has Parkinson’s, they’ll start hiding the hand with the tremors,” he said. “What this does is a lot of the times, the muscle fatigue is what helps slow down those tremors. The boxers will tell me that when they leave the gym, they’re so tired their gait has improved and the tremors have slowed down.”

The exercise stations also have real-world application. A peg board in the gym helps with hand dexterity that is necessary to button a shirt, and speech-centric exercises help work against the negative affects Parkinson’s canhave on speech.

In the year since he started teaching Rock Steady Boxing, Juarez said he has seen it positively impact lives. One woman attended her first workout walking with a cane, but she soon did not need it.

“When she walked out [of a class], she left her cane in the back of the gym,” Juarez said, noting that this individual hadn’t noticed she left the cane. “She doesn’t use hercane anymore.”

An impressive quality Juarez said he sees in all of the boxers is that they will not complain. Most of them know Parkinson’s will slowly take away their abilities, and they are just ready to do whatever they can to delay those negative effects.

“These people don’t complain because they’ve got nothing to lose,” he said. “They are losing their life every single day.”

In addition to helping boxers with their physical fitness, Juarez said it serves as a support group forthe boxers. 

“All of us are in it together, in the same ring, fighting Parkinson’s,” he said, adding that no matter how large his classes get, he cannot imagine breaking them up into small groups. The camaraderie that forms between participants means these individuals have people who understand what they are going through and are also actively fighting in the same way.

“How do you take that away from somebody? I can’t do that, there’s no way,” Juarez said.

And as the bond between boxers has grown, Juarez said his bond with his classes has also grown. While he did not have a personal connection to Parkinson’s before learning about Rock Steady Boxing, he said he knows this experience has changed his life forthe better.

“To help a person walk in my gym that has Parkinson’s and I can help give them a better quality of life and a better way to help them in their life, where they can come up and tell me, ‘Martin, thank you so much for helping me do this,’ that has been the most fulfilling thing I have ever done in my entire life,” Juarez said.

For more information, go to facebook.com/rocksteadyboxingbirmingham.