Jacob’s Ladder fitness group helps special needs community climb to better health: Stretching Out – cleveland.com

STRONGSVILLE, Ohio – Every person deserves a shot at health and fitness. Not just the able bodied and minded.

Enter Tony D’Orazio, a concerned dad with a passion for exercise.

Three times weekly for the last eight weeks, under the banner of Jacob’s Ladder Fitness, he’s been rounding up young adults with Down Syndrome and putting them through a body-weight workout at Bonnie Park in Strongsville. Soon, he’ll move them indoors and onto bikes, treadmills, and weight machines.

His effort is both personal and charitable. Witnessing the benefits of regular exercise on his son Jacob opened his eyes to an enormous vacuum in the special needs realm. He saw a population disproportionately overweight and diabetic, and yet largely without access to exercise, and set out to improve the situation manually (jacobsladderfitness.com).

Let me tell you: he’s doing noble work. I took part in the group’s last outdoor meet-up of the season, and I can’t say what affected me more deeply, the fast-paced exercise or the genius and wondrous humanity of the project. In all my years of covering fitness, rarely have I encountered anything so moving.

The exercises, of course, I was quite familiar with. This wasn’t some specialized or modified routine. This was a bona fide, broadly effective calisthenics regimen, crafted by D’Orazio with exercise scientists at Cleveland State University in coordination with the Special Olympics.

Using nothing more than a yoga mat and an on-site picnic bench, the young men and women – and me, that day – got a workout equivalent to anything offered by a gym or private fitness studio. I’m not going to say it was the toughest thing I’ve ever done, but it certainly wasn’t the lightest, either.

The Jacob’s Ladder motto, a quote by famed coach John Wooden, applied perfectly: “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”

I expected a little jogging. A few laps around the park, perhaps. Instead, after warming up with jumping jacks, toe touches and twists, we elevated and kept up our heart-rates with rounds of leg-lifts, push-ups, planks, crunches, and dips, followed by some basic yoga.

I broke a decent sweat, and could tell by their many groans of protestation that my class-mates were laboring, too. Some required assistance or extra motivation, while others, like Jacob, got right down to business and stayed put.

The benefits of this can’t be judged by one visit. Just as any lifestyle change takes time, so does D’Orazio hesitate to promise parents anything over the short term. Real, permanent improvements, he says, will take years. Jacob is as toned as he is only because D’Orazio got and kept him moving at an early age.

Not that progress has been undetectable. Far from it. Already, after just eight weeks, D’Orazio says one of his most unwilling participants has clearly warmed to the workout, and even has been spied performing some of the exercises on his own.

That’s a result of which many a mainstream trainer could be jealous. Jealousy, though, is not the goal. No, what D’Orazio and friends are shooting for and bringing about with Jacob’s Ladder is simple good health.

from myhealtyze http://www.myhealtyze.tk/jacobs-ladder-fitness-group-helps-special-needs-community-climb-to-better-health-stretching-out-cleveland-com/