There are many misconceptions centered around exercise and fitness. The media has played a big role in this, both men’s and women’s fitness publications seem to focus on losing weight and building big muscles. There are always new workout programs and in-home exercise machines promising quick solutions to get fit. Trendy diets and fasting solutions seem to pop up from year to year. So, it is to no surprise that many people do not understand the real reasons why exercise is so important. It has been marketed to Americans as vanity. People need to understand that as living organism, human beings have not evolved to be sedentary. Our bodies require that we move and our modern way of life does not require us to do so.
This lack of required physical activity is even more pronounced for people with special needs. And across the autism spectrum, individuals who present with more profound disabilities often engage in even less physical activity. In the United States of America every child, no matter their ability level is entitled to having a free and appropriate education. This same line of thinking needs to be placed on physical education and fitness.
Adaptive Exercise offers a number of autism exercise services, aimed at improving the physical health of people with autism and other special needs through exercise. When David Crowley first began offering this specialized service, he was astonished by some of the responses from families and programs. Some parents said that “my child doesn’t need to lose weight” and others “he has gym twice a week at school”. Part of the problem was that people did not understand why we need to exercise. Exercise is one of the most beneficial skill sets a person can learn. It can improve your physical health, mental health and make day to day tasks easier. For people with autism, exercise offers additional benefits. Exercise has been shown to reduce rates of maladaptive behavior, self-stimulatory behavior, aggressive behaviors and self-injurious behaviors. It has also been shown to increase time on task, improve self-confidence, improve fine/gross motor skills and benefits social skills. Many of the same benefits other therapeutic fields aim to achieve. This information is what David was thinking about, but he had to let it be known how beneficial autism exercise really was.
David began his journey working in special education when he was in high school and continued to work in the field through college. During this time, he committed his time to learning about fitness, and improving his own health. Post college he worked in several Applied Behavior Analysis programs, schools, and in-home service programs. Throughout all of these programs there were some common themes. There was almost no focus on physical health and fitness. Children were mostly sedentary at school, many of them were engaging in sedentary leisure activities both at home and at school. Nutrition was not considered when making food choices. Knowing from personal experience, David knew that these decisions were not only negatively affecting these children’s physical health, but it was likely contributing to some of their behaviors as well. This led to the creation of Adaptive Exercise.
Everyone should have the choice to better themselves through exercise. Big box fitness centers, gyms and even personal trainers are not always an appropriate means for people with special needs. Adaptive Exercise was created to offer an appropriate autism exercise service. We hope to not only offer this appropriate solution, but to raise awareness of the benefits and necessity for autism exercise. Adaptive Exercise offers a variety of autism exercise services. Our group exercise classes focus on introducing people with special needs to exercise in a fun, social atmosphere. This is one of our most affordable and popular options available. Our one on one adaptive personal training is typically offered in-home and focuses on functional movement training. Our trainers develop an individualized program to teach your child how to exercise. This process is tracked by data to ensure your child’s progression through their exercise program. Adaptive Exercise Videos use a variety of supportive strategies, like kinesthetic cuing and visuals to make following the exercise routine easier for people with special needs. These videos are available for purchase and can be downloaded from Vimeo. This is another affordable option for families looking to get started on increasing their child’s physical activity levels. The newest service that we are now offering to autism families is our virtual personal training. Using web-cam technology our trainers host an exercise session that clients can participate in from home. This is more affordable than our in-home one to one sessions and offer many of the same benefits. A great option for families with children that can follow visual and verbal instruction.
All of these services are specifically designed to support people with special needs. We use a number of different teaching strategies from traditional autism therapies to support individuals in learning exercises. So whether your child is more of a visual learner or they learn better following verbal instruction or maybe they learn from trying, we work to support them. This may look very different from one client to the next. For some athletes their sessions may look more like what you would see in a traditional personal training session and for others we may be focusing on holding a weight safely. Regardless of what that individual’s ability level is, we work to provide an appropriate exercise solution.
Over the past few years, there has been more attention targeted towards physical fitness and activity for people with special needs. This is a small step in the right direction, but we need to continue to educate the public on why exercise is so important and how beneficial it can be. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have minimum guidelines for exercise for both children and adults. Only a small percentage of the general population is meeting these MINIUM guidelines and these percentages plummet within the autism population.