Doug Pickard tells Dave Graham, co-host of the PULSE Podcast – about a man named Scott Newman finishing a boxing workout, looking down at his own hand, and realizing it had stopped shaking. “My hand,” Scott said, “it’s rock steady.” That is the whole story of how the Rock Steady Boxing Program got its name.
Doug never set out to specialize in Parkinson’s disease. He was a personal trainer when a client named Donna Kimpton asked him to work with her. She had Parkinson’s. He admitted he barely knew what that meant beyond a general sense that Michael J. Fox had it. He said yes anyway, and that single yes turned into Taming the Dragon, his first Parkinson’s exercise group, then a Rock Steady Boxing affiliate, and eventually a drumming program he calls Dopa Beats, built around a conga drum he kept in the corner of his gym.
The rhythm itself is a kind of treatment. Parkinson’s, he explained, is partly caused by a drop in dopamine, the chemical behind the small rewards our brains give us for getting things right. Drumming helps produce some of that reward on its own, and so does boxing, with its big, purposeful movements and shouted counts.
He has taken that work to Las Vegas, where he gave a keynote at the Movement Fair to about 170 people, and to a Davis Phinney Foundation conference in Minneapolis, where he turned a room of strangers into a drum circle using nothing but egg shakers and tabletops. Through Zoom, his Pedaling for Parkinson’s cycling sessions now reach people in Texas, Virginia, and even Paraguay.
What comes through most in listening to the conversation with Doug is the hope. “If I give up,” he told me, “they’re gonna give up.” After 13 years, he still shows up. That tells you everything about why his programs work.
You can hear the full conversation, including the origin of Dopa Beats, on The PULSE Community Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S2EP41PulsePodcast.
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/