Challenged athletes challenge Exercise Science students to grow and care

Four dozen athletes push their backpacks and water bottles against the wall. Brightly colored cones and bean bags are spread around the wooden gym floor. The goal of the day’s activities are not immediately apparent to an outside observer, but one woman is clearly in charge.

Cathy Simbeck, professor of Exercise Science, paces the gym with several stopwatches around her neck.

“Pair up with partners,” Simbeck calls out. “We are going to run, so you might want to take off your jackets!”

The athletes, approximately thirty Fort Lewis College students and nearly twenty visiting athletes, amble around the basketball court as fast as they can. Some holler back and forth. The good-natured competitiveness spurs a handful of mini-races. Simbeck cranks a boom box and offers encouragement. “Way to go fast! Halfway there! Four more minutes!”

This session might sound like a fairly typical gym class. And it is. But it is also something much more unique.

Simbeck teaches “Adapted Exercise,” a course in which her students are the teachers. The students are studying to be personal trainers, physical therapists, K-12 physical education teachers, and coaches. Here, in the course's weekly experiential lab session, they work with clients with various disabilities in order to apply the concepts explored in the classroom.

“My students are constantly practicing different ways of working with somebody in a fitness or physical activity setting,” Simbeck explains. “They’re learning about differences in mental abilities as well as physical abilities, and they are challenging themselves.”

In Simbeck's “Adapted Exercise” course, FLC students learn about exceptional conditions and disabilities affecting individuals in exercise programs. They also study various assessment tests and diagnostic strategies, as well as legislation impacting adapted exercise programs. Then, one day a week, students apply these principles in real-world settings.

“It reinforces the knowledge that we went over in the class,” Simbeck says, “so they’re getting the practical application of it in the lab. They get the practice of teaching, assessing, and interacting with people.”

This particular week, Simbeck’s class is completing a physical and motor fitness assessment. The students are measuring clients’ balance, agility, speed, coordination, and reaction times, as well as flexibility, muscular endurance and strength, and cardiorespiratory endurance. The bean bags, cones, music, and energetic atmosphere are all examples of how “Adapted Exercise” addresses both the physical and mental side of adaptation.

“We talk about physical fitness,” Simbeck says, “and we also talk about behavior management techniques, how to motivate people. We have clients who would do whatever you ask of them, but they’re not necessarily able to. Or clients who are very able, but they don’t want to do it. We have to adapt it for them.”

Clients come from the Holly House in Durango, which offers a day program for adults with disabilities, as well as from the Durango 9-R School District and home-schooling programs. Working with these clients’ physical or cognitive challenges can also challenge Simbeck's students.

Simbeck recalls one of her best academic students confessing her struggles during a lab. The student could not figure out how to motivate a willful client to stay focused and safe in the shallow swimming pool. “She said, ‘I just cannot do this. It’s stretching my comfort zone,’” Simbeck says. “So I made a suggestion: Take her into the deep end.”

The tip worked. The client could not stand up and run anymore, so the student was able to teach her. “The experience challenged one of our brightest students, who hadn’t been challenged in other things,” Simbeck says, “whereas some of our weaker academic students might have come up with that idea, might have had more experience or a better demeanor for working with that client.”

It's because of such challenges that the “Adapted Exercise” course offers such immense rewards to students and clients alike, says Simbeck.

“It’s pretty neat to see my students improve, and to see the participants from the Holly House have fun and learn things,” she says. “They know each other better after being in one of my classes, because they’ve worked together as partners, or they go to Special Olympics together.”

After teaching the course at FLC for thirty two years and the weekly lab for nearly twenty years, Simbeck feels rewarded herself, too.

“I have the best experience because I get to see my students in ways that other teachers never get to see them,” she says. “I get to know that we have caring, encouraging, sensitive students.”