Inspired by California facility, Push to Walk in New Jersey offers clients with SCI a chance for recovery on the East Coast.

By Anya Starykh

Jim Laughlin (right) gets some assistance on the Power Plate from trainer Eric Prol.

At 21, Darren Templeton of Kinnelon, New Jersey, has many accomplishments to boast of. A student at Ramapo College, he’s an avid athlete and a passionate rugby player. He recently went skydiving for the first time and is thinking of going again in the spring. He is also organizing a ski trip to Windham Mountain Ski Resort in Upstate New York with some friends this winter.

The most notable thing about Darren given his athletic prowess, however, is that on July 23, 2004, he had an accident while diving into shallow water of the bay at Long Beach Island, New Jersey, bay and sustained a C-5 spinal cord injury (SCI).

Not one to let the injury get the better of him, Darren tried everything to set himself on a path to full recovery. After all, at the time he still hadn’t realized his long-time dream of skydiving. “It was something he really wanted to do and he decided he was still going to do it,” said his mother, Cynthia Templeton.

Eventually, however, Darren felt that his therapy workouts had reached a plateau, “I felt I needed to take my workouts to the next level, and I was able to do so by spending a week in Carlsbad, California, at ProjectWalk,” he said.

Closer to Home

ProjectWalk is an SCI recovery center providing an improved quality of life for people with SCI through intense exercise-based recovery programs, education, support, and encouragement. Darren’s first trip to ProjectWalk took place in September of 2005, and after returning four more times, he and his parents, Cynthia and John Templeton, decided to look for something closer to home.

After searching extensively, however, they had an unpleasant revelation-there wasn’t anything even remotely similar on the East Coast. “It’s important to have a support group, go to school and work and have your other activities, so you don’t want to uproot to a place like California just because of the kinds of therapy they offer,” said Cynthia.

Fortunately for those in a position similar to Darren’s, he served as an inspiration for his parents to open Push to Walk, an organization based in Bloomingdale, New Jersey. “My friend had an idea that we start a similar place in New Jersey, and it just seemed so overwhelming at the time. But the more we thought about it, the more we figured well, maybe we can make it work,” said Cynthia.

Push to Walk opened in mid-January of 2007, with exercise recovery specialist Eric Prol and three clients, one of them Darren Templeton himself. Only a little under nine months later, the organization has grown to include 15 regular clients and three exercise specialists.

“I’m so happy that other centers are starting up around the country, in Portland, Boston, and San Francisco. It means that people can stay close to home and get these types of workouts and exercise training, because then they’re staying in their own environment. It was a huge plus to be able to set that up for Darren and in doing so help other people,” said Cynthia. “We want to keep growing and helping more people and give people who are coming as much as we possibly can to make it worth their while,” she added.

Rebirthing the Nervous System

As the name implies, Push to Walk is a center for SCI recovery concentrated around improving neuromuscular function, with the ultimate goal of helping clients walk again. It follows ProjectWalk’s Dardzinski method of developmental patterning. The method is based on the developmental movement patterns of an infant whose nervous system is just starting to develop.

As Lindsay Huisman, one of the center’s exercise recovery specialists, explained, “It’s the body’s natural way of developing the nervous system. We follow that for someone who has a damaged nervous system, trying to re-establish connections and get the body to work the way it was intended to.”

Attention is paid to teaching the body proper form and posture, so that when the client sits up or walks, they do it correctly. Apart from bringing clients closer to their ultimate goal of walking, the organization’s aim is to “get people out of their wheelchairs and into different positions, using parts of their body that are not getting used because they’re sitting in their wheelchair for so many hours in the day. It’s important for overall circulation and will help prevent osteoporosis and skin breakdowns,” said Cynthia.

Each workout is tailored to a particular client’s needs, goals, strengths, and weaknesses. It begins with a free two-hour evaluation of the person’s situation, injury, medical history, and complications. After a prolonged discussion, an exercise specialist outlines an approximate plan of exercise. While there are some core exercises, they are adjusted to a client’s specific needs and tweaked during every session.

“It’s really fun,” said Lindsay. “You get different people who come in with different abilities and it’s like a puzzle trying to figure out what we need to do to maximize a person’s chance to recover more movement or to help this person be stronger so that in their daily life they’re not struggling as much. It can be very rewarding.”

A Laid-Back Environment

The Push to Walk center is very small. The exercise gym occupies approximately 1,000 square feet of space. Regardless, it is neat and clean and, according to Mark Sprague, an exercise specialist, “is a very laid-back environment. It’s not a stressful place to be because everyone here wants to be here, they’re not here because they have to be.”

The center has enough equipment necessary for a good workout targeting the whole body. “We’ve been trying to make this as much like ProjectWalk as we can, as far as the best equipment that we can have, and the best training,” said Darren. The center has a standing bar for various standing, squatting and balance exercises, a spin bike for balance exercises and leg work, a total gym adjusted for people with SCI for weight bearing exercises, a standing frame, a specially designed Kaiser machine with weight increments of one- tenth of a pound, a brand new Power Plate machine and a new Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) bike for muscle stimulation. “Here, there are certain things they do that they wouldn’t do in other therapy places. One day I may tell Eric I don’t feel good in an area, so he’ll develop another plan of action and we’ll try to work on something else. Some days we work on the Power Plate, which is good, other days we’ll try squats. There’re so many different things it’s hard to mention them all. To me, it’s made a noticeable difference,” said Jim Laughlin, who’s been a client of Push to Walk since early April of 2007.

They just started, but they’re growing, and the short-term goal is to move the center to a bigger space and get more equipment. “We are looking at a bigger space and hopefully being able to expand in the next year or maybe less. I would like to stay in this area of Northern New Jersey that’s easy to find on the highways, because people generally are traveling to us. Being in an accessible location for driving is important,” said Cynthia. They were recently recognized as a 501c3 by the IRS, meaning all contributions to the organization are tax deductible and they can accept donations to try and keep the fees as low as possible.

They’re also trying their best to be not only an exercise center, but also a community for people with SCI, “offering the best services even outside of here, different information we could provide about SCI events or recreational things to do outside of the gym,” said Darren.

The motivation is there. The attitude is there. All they need now is more time and resources to accomplish their long-term goal of providing the best exercise and services they can for the people who need them and provide hope in a better chance for recovery for people with SCI.

For more information, see www.pushtowalknj.org and www.darrentempleton.com.

Anya Starykh is a freelance writer from Astoria, New York.