Move Your Mind: The Link Between Movement and Brain Health

The panelists all agreed that one of the best ways to make movement part of your regular routine is to take it out of a medical setting. That is at the core of Sarah Robichaud’s success with Dancing With Parkinson’s, which offers in-person and online classes every single day of the year for free to people living with Parkinson’s disease and seniors. Robichaud started the project 15 years ago after her career as a professional dancer.

“I wanted to bring people with Parkinson’s disease into an artistic environment, not a clinical environment,” she explains. “One where they could move to music, be with other people who understood what they were going through, and honestly, explore the potential of their own movement with music, with being part of a very inclusive, welcoming community.”

Rethinking location is also a big part of what motivated Sarah Lambert to create Ora Medical. She realized that clients coming to physiotherapy sessions only once a week didn’t have the consistency required to reach the full potential of their progress. So she developed a hands-free gait training device called the Levity, which patients are able to use from home whenever they want.

“We’re improving their daily activity – and I think that’s really the key,” says Lambert. “I got a video from a mom showing me her child is actually playing tennis. And the testimonial from the child is like, ‘Now I feel normal.’ And that’s the best feeling that we can ever have.”

Some of the seniors that Angela Roberts is studying through the Center for Activity and Aging have a truly impressive level of daily activity. Roberts’ work explores the continuum of aging from dementia to exceptional cognitive aging.

“Because we’re interested in understanding some of the things that go wrong in conditions like dementia and Parkinson’s disease, we felt like we need to understand a group of people for whom things were going exceptionally well,” Roberts said. “We call them our super-agers – people 80 and older who have memory abilities as good as or better than people in their 50s and 60s. We have 100-year-olds who are camping on their own. We have 95-year-olds who are out riding 20 miles a day on their bikes.”

The people who come to Dancing With Parkinson’s might unfortunately no longer be able to go on long bike rides or camping trips, but imagining they are on adventures – and moving accordingly – is a big part of what makes the program so effective.

Sarah Robichaud explains:

“If I were to say to someone with Parkinson’s disease, ‘Lift your right hand’, that may or may not happen easily. But if I said ‘I want you to catch a butterfly with your right hand,’ that’s the kind of stuff we’re talking about. So, we put imagery to almost every single thing that we do. We have dancers who come into a class in a wheelchair or a walker and halfway through class they’re waltzing around the room without a device. It’s the music. It’s being transported to another place. And the storytelling.”

At the other end of the age spectrum, this approach is also how Sarah Lambert motivates the children she is working with.

“We’re trying to make a story around the fact that now they have their hands free so they need to take an object and put it in another place,” she says. “Like maybe they need to put the treasure in another place. We’re trying to make it as a game, so it’s more fun. So now the patient is more engaged in the action of making the movement.”