I lived as a happy-go-lucky Parkie for the first six years. My symptoms were mostly mild and easy to joke about. (Poop joke: What do New Yorkers call a bird that craps on you when it flies overhead? A stool pigeon. Drooling as I sleep: My husband says that sleeping with me is drool and unusual punishment.) I was active at the gym, at the town pool, and in open-water, long distance swim races.
But life intervened. I tore my Achilles tendon and had surgery, which forced me to stop working out for a few months. Then the Covid-19 pandemic took over everyone’s life, and the gym and pool closed. My physical and mental health nosedived, and Parkinson’s disease played a new hand: I developed severe festinating gait every morning until my first round of meds kicked in.
What is festinating gait? It’s when your feet shuffle in tiny steps and you have no control over it.
Here’s a video of a man with Parkinson’s. It shows his gait before he took his Parkie drugs, and after:
Note how long it takes him to navigate turning around. For me, this was scary! It felt like someone had tied my shoelaces together and I could only shuffle in baby steps to get anywhere. And it was hard to maintain my balance. Though I never fell to the floor, there were plenty of times when I slammed up against the wall or dive bombed onto my bed, because I was losing control. (Note: to see how severe a festinating gait can get, combined with arm tremors, click here.)
What to do?
I cured myself.
I remembered what I had read and seen of the work of Davis Phinney and his colleagues, especially a video which talked about how forced exercise on a bicycle reduced a variety of lower- and upper-body symptoms, including microscopic handwriting. (“Forced exercise” = having the Parkie pedal faster on a bike than he/she would normally do.) With the money I was no longer spending on my gym membership and personal training sessions, I bought a spin bike and started working out relentlessly.
I recalled from the Davis Phinney Foundation’s video that Parkies (and probably a lot of other people) pedal on a bike at a cadence of about 50 rpm (revolutions per minute). For their research, the Phinney folks forced the Parkies to pedal at 85 rpm or above. I went even higher: I typically pedal over 100 rpm, and I go for an hour of this. Occasionally, I push myself into a speed zone of over 120 rpm.
A friend can’t believe I really pedal that fast, but here’s a record of my spin bike workouts from November:
- Nov 10: 30 min. – 103 av. rpm – 111 max rpm
- Nov 14: 60 min. – 103 av. rpm – 162 max rpm
- Nov 16: 60 min. – 105 av. rpm – 163 max rpm
- Nov 21: 30 min. – 101 av. rpm – 115 max rpm
- Nov 22: 30 min. – 106 av. rpm – 142 max rpm
- Nov 23: 60 min. – 105 av. rpm – 128 max rpm
- Nov 25: 30 min. – 101 av. rpm – 114 max rpm
- Nov 28: 30 min. – 96 av. rpm – 107 max rpm
- Nov 29: 60 min. – 103 av. rpm – 147 max rpm
- Dec 01: 30 min. – 104 av. rpm – 132 max rpm
- Dec 03: 30 min. – 94 av. rpm – 131 max rpm
- Dec 06: 60 min. – 94 av. rpm – 160 max rpm
The video above shows me watching the cadence monitor and calling out how fast I’m pedaling.
Note: this would get boring if I didn’t also play music. As a former disco bunny from the 1980s, I opt for hour-long dj sessions on YouTube. Here’s one of my favorites, by Frankie Knuckle:
But back to the story. As long as I do 3 – 4 spin bike sessions each week, I’m not bothered by a festinating gait. If I slack off (what I call “back pedalling”), it starts to return.
What else to do? Ping-pong! I take private ping-pong lessons at an enormous ping-pong hall with about 30 tables. Before the pandemic, a group of Parkies met there Wednesday nights and were coached in how to play the game. I added two private lessons a week, and find I get the same results that I do from my spin bike: The following mornings I walk free as a jaybird (I know the actual idiom is “naked as a jaybird,” but I’ll let you supply the picture!). My legs have never felt stronger or more secure.
What is it about ping-pong that drives my festinating gait away? I don’t really know. A lot of ping-pong is counterintuitive. I find I have to focus my attention simultaneously on different parts of my body: My eyes need to watch the ball right when it hits my paddle, even though I want to look over the net at where my opponent is. And my feet, which I can’t really see, need to move in an unnatural way. If I need to step to the left to intercept a ball, my inclination is to move my left foot first. But no, my teacher says, “Move the right foot first, then the left.”
I video taped my lesson last week and learned a lot about what I’m not doing correctly. Here are some snippets:
The two things to watch here are how I’m still not holding the paddle correctly, and my feet don’t always operate the way they should.
But the next morning when I got out of bed, I walked with a strong normal stride, and it felt so freeing. As a jaybird!
Hi Bruce –
Very impressive spinning and ping pong!!! I can see that I need to up my game. 🙂 My community provides exercise classes, but nothing as strenuous as what you are doing.
Congratulations on getting rid of the festinating gait!
Continue to stay well!
Good going! We also have recently purchased a pandemic induced spin bike for my husband. I knew one has to push one’s limit but wasn’t aware of the David Phinney research! I shall be cracking the whip even harder now!