Introduction - 66Y/O w/ Parkinsons

I am 66 years old and cca 20 years in ‘lifting weights for healthy life’ (from Europe, I seldom use english). I’ve been reading this site for a very long time and find it very inspiritive and useful.

This week I visited neurologist for persistent tremor in non-dominant hand and he diagnosed beginning of Parkinsons desease. I admit I was shattered , then I pulled myself together and made a plan to slow down the disease. (of course prescribed drugs have a priority- for a start I got ropinirole).

  • not slowing down in weight game; in general healthy life

  • I consider taking the following supplements Omega 3, resveratrol, curcumin, CoQ10,creatine, vit C,D,E

Does anyone have some experience in fighting this ‘enemy and have some advice’? Thanks.

Thomas

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I have no personal experience, but a good friend of mine ( she’s 89) kept her Parkinson’s in remission for over 20 years with proper meds. Research has made remarkable progress.

Be careful with the supplements and do your research. Some supplements interact with the meds.

Start a training log here and keep getting after it.

Hi, Thomas! Your English is good, by the way.

My father had Parkinsons. We started very late, he was pretty bad so this may or may not be useful. Basically, the weight training improved some specific gross motor skills but it was hit and miss.

Some things didn’t seem to improve at all like pressing was basically as we started (but maybe that was a huge win). Others had huge improvements, his db row went from being unable to bring his elbow to the level of his chest to adding 20% more weight and almost touching the db to his ribcage.

I would focus on keeping safe, slowly progressing the weight, quality of movement and keeping reps under control. More sets, less reps (prefer 10x3 to 3x10). I’d probably try get as much extended ROM movements in as possible to help with rigidity/stiffness - particularly for lats/back

Training seemed to really exhaust my dad so we kept well away from failure - unless on TRT there’s probably not much point to training close to failure anyway.

Anyway, best of luck. Its good to see you are taking action - I hope you kick that fucked square in the nuts.

To this day, I continue to touch each of my fingers to my thumb, three times per day. Wife thinks I have OCD lol