Despite A Disability...Getting Pumped

By Dara Fukuhara

When you think of a gym or health club, images of people running on treadmills and lifting weights come to mind. But there is another image. You can find it in the back of the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Fitness Center, where people with disabilities are exercising with adaptive exercise equipment.

That’s right. While varsity football and basketball and volleyball players are pumping iron, so are folks in wheelchairs.

Dr. James Little, associate professor of kinesiology and leisure science, is the man responsible for giving people with disabilities the opportunity to exercise with adaptive equipment in a gym with able-bodied people.

Exercise is important for people with disabilities, he says, because “they’re no different than any other person.”

Little has been teaching undergraduate and graduate students adaptive physical education, which deals with a full range of disabilities. He teaches KLS 150, a class where people with disabilities can learn how to exercise with the equipment properly. This class also includes able-bodied students from his other adaptive physical education classes to work together with physically disabled students.

There are eight exercise apparatus designed specifically for people with disabilities: a Bowflex machine modified for wheelchair users; an Uppertone machine, designed by a German quadriplegic; strengthening machines for paraplegics and quadriplegics; wall pulleys; a Scifit bicycling machine; parallel bars for walking; and a wheelchair treadmill.

“I was at the right place and at the right time in terms of the ways thing were going in society,” he says. “Seeing people who were deprived of opportunities to experience life as others were,” he wanted to do something to help.

As a young man growing up in Iowa, he was seldom exposed to African Americans. When he went to Arizona for college, he saw the tremendous discrimination going on there. He saw the impact of the early civil rights movement where people of color were denied opportunities. This influenced him to become an advocate for people with disabilities because he saw there weren’t many opportunities for them.

He says he also saw the parallel between individuals with disabilities and African Americans, who were denied opportunities to have a better quality of life. In the ’60s when he began teaching, there weren’t any opportunities for children with mental or physical disabilities to participate in physical education or sports.

“I grew up with an individual who was mentally retarded and interacted with him, and I didn’t think his mental retardation was a big deal. We would play together and do the things he would like to do,” Little says.

He grew up on a farm where his father raised purebred Jersey cattle. His father’s best friend — another farmer who lived 20 miles away — had a son who had Down’s syndrome and was the same age as Little.

“He was really good at helping his dad take care of animals. It was always bothered me when people would say, ‘mentally retarded people can’t do this or can’t do that,’ because I knew that this person could,” he says. “His parents let him participate in life and in particular, take care of the animals and the farm.”
Little’s brother later had a son who was born with Down’s syndrome. “There was a connection there that if people don’t work with these individuals, they don’t get a chance to do things,” he says.

His interest in physical activity and exercise for people with disabilities was sparked by a conference he attended while he was teaching at the University of Arizona.

In 1966, he attended a conference put on by the Kennedy Foundation that dealt with children with mental retardation and physical activity.
The Kennedy family had a sister who was mentally retarded. When the oldest Kennedy son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., died during World War II, the family set up a foundation in his honor because he enjoyed taking care of his sister.

This foundation focused on assisting people with mental retardation to have sports and recreation. They saw how much their daughter was different from other mentally challenged individuals, and they attributed it to the recreational leisure activities their daughter participated in.

Under agreement with the Kennedy Foundation, college professors that attended the conference had to start an adaptive physical education course at their perspective university or college, funded by the Kennedys. Little started up a course at the University of Arizona. A few months later, Little transferred to UH and took over the adaptive physical education course, which Dr. Henry Tominaga started.

One student who benefits from Little’s program is Sterling Krysler, an independent computer consultant who became disabled on Oct. 31, 1990 while he was body surfing at Makapuu beach. Krysler lived a physically active life before his accident — he swam competitively, was a licensed lifeguard and an avid bicyclist.

“Once I plugged in with Dr. Little, I could go down there and spend an hour, and get a good exercise session in, and be home within an hour and a half,” he says.

Krysler wanted to exercise because he was gaining weight over the years of not exercising, and he wanted to stay healthy for his grandchildren. He looked into swimming as an option for exercise, but it would have been a time-consuming task.

“For me, swimming would have been a three-hour task. I didn’t have the three hours, and I needed someone with me to help me dress and shower,” he says.

Thanks to Little, Krysler, 52, has been able to exercise for the past two years.

“It (exercising) makes me feel good. It’s not like I can do wind-sprints,” he says, jokingly, “but I got my routine and I am able to move through it, for the most part, without too much assistance.”

He has quadriplegia — paralyzed from the chest down to his legs and has no triceps. He suffers from a painful burning sensation in his arms and hands. He has partial feelings in his thumbs and upper arms, but has no sensations in both of his pinkie fingers and from his waist down.

He deals with the pain by taking medication and by exercising. “It (exercising) definitely takes my mind off the pain,” he says.

Since Krysler doesn’t have the capability to grip the hand crank, Little binds each of Krysler’s hands to the hand cranks with an Ace bandage.

Little adapts each exercise equipment to the needs of his students, whether it’s attaching S-hooks onto a student’s wrist cuffs so they can pull down on a bar or buying sheepskin to line the inside of a plastic boot to protect the student’s skin.

Exercising has also helped him regain his strength in his arms. When Krysler first started exercising on the bicycling machine, he struggled turning the hand cranks at level 2 and could only do it for two minutes. Now, he is at level 3.5 and can do it for over 30 minutes.

“It (exercising) also requires a commitment. You have to be ready to say, ‘I’m really going to put some effort into this.’ Getting started is really the hardest,” says Krysler. As it is for most people.

In order to exercise at UH, individuals must enroll as UH students and register in KLS 150.

UH’s Fitness Center is the only gym on the islands that has these types of equipment. Little chose these machines by visiting other facilities on the Mainland.

“Dr. Little’s program is a very innovative program but it really isn’t happening in the Islands right now,” says Melissa Applegate, certified therapeutic recreational specialist at the Rehabilitation Hospital of the Pacific.

“People should really be educated on the adaptive exercise equipment he has there because it should be in every gym, but it’s not,” she says.

For people, who are able to walk and go to gyms, they don’t think about accessibility unless they have encountered it with a family member or themselves, says Applegate.

Health clubs, such as 24 Hour Fitness or Gold’s Gym, don’t carry exercise equipment specifically designed for people with disabilities, says Chris Pivonka, assistant manager at the Waikiki 24 Hour Fitness.

So, why is UH the only place where there’s exercise equipment designed specifically for people with disabilities and there aren’t any in public gyms or health clubs, like 24 Hour Fitness?

“I am a firm believer, as Dr. Little is, in the idea of existing places incorporating people with disabilities, as opposed to just having a gym for ‘crippled’ people — keep them out of sight, out of mind,” Krysler says. “By law, if they are offering it to the public, they have to make it accessible. But you just don’t find anyone willing to take that on.”

Little adds, “No one was willing to push the issue of the violation of civil rights, and I did.”

Born in Pennsylvania, Little grew up in an isolated valley which residents rarely left. His father left for college, but later returned to teach.

“My parents were willing to uproot from their families and their tradition to provide for my brothers and sisters, and I was exposed to a whole different kind of life,” he says.

They moved to Iowa when he was in the third grade because his father didn’t want his children to grow up in that valley. He wanted them to grow up near a university, so they would all go to college, and all four did.

Little graduated from Arizona State University in the spring of 1958. In the fall, he started teaching biology at Sunnyslope High School in North Phoenix and taught there for one year.

After teaching at the high school level, he wanted to get his master’s degree in kinesiology. He worked as an instructor and coached the wrestling team while he was a graduate student at the University of Missouri, and then he became a graduate assistant at the University of Iowa.

“I started teaching out of the influence teachers had on my life” he says. “I was not always a good little boy and my teachers kind of straightened me out. Teachers and coaches provided me with guidance. I tended to listen to my teachers and coaches, more than I did my parents. So, I just thought ‘I would like to be like that.’ And then when I began teaching, I enjoyed it and never thought of doing anything else.”

For 35 years, Little has given the disabled community an opportunity to do something that one would never think would be imaginable — the freedom to exercise as an able-bodied person would.

At 66, Little will be ending his teaching career to retire at the end of this year. He wants to do everything he didn’t have a chance to do, Little says, but will always be an advocate for individuals with disabilities.

“I don’t see myself as an out-in-the-front advocate,” he says. “The people who need to be advocates are those with disabilities.”