After Everybody Else Gave Up

"After Everybody Else Gave Up" provides an operational description of a supervised exercise training program in service since 1994 at a university in Texas. The trainers are undergraduate kinesiology students who have volunteered to provide special physical activities for individuals who have various degrees of weakness or paralysis from injury or disease. Having successfully completed studies in anatomy, exercise physiology, motor learning, adaptive and corrective exercise, therapeutic exercise and rehabilitation, and others, these students choose to volunteer for an Applied Learning Experience in the Laboratory for Wellness and Motor Behavior. During the three-hundred-hour experience, the team develops and supervises adaptive movement activities. New trainers arrive each semester to continue the activities and the progress in wellness and motor behavior. The subjects in training include spinal cord injuries, stroke survivors, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, spina bifida, and other neuro-muscular disabilities. They represent students, faculty, staff, or members of the community who have typically been released from conventional health care following injury or disease. With little help and hope, the team approach at the university is significant to both the trainers and the subjects. The book provides perspectives from the developer, the trainers, the subjects, faculty, a hospital administrator, and a participating physician. Trainers describe a valuable hands-on, culminating experience and participants report improved wellness, decreased use of prescription drugs, and increased energy for daily living. This so-called Team KinesiologySM is replicable with millions of individuals standing to benefit from this extended health care.