PROFESSOR Sean Tweedy used to be a classifier for international paralympic sport.
It was his job to determine how an athlete’s disability affected their ability to perform their sport.
“I’d ask them to do certain activities and they’d say ‘look, I’ll do as well as I can for you but you’ve got to know my disability is more severe than this’, Prof Tweedy told AAP.
“I should be in a class with more severe disabilities, it’s only because I’ve worked so hard that I can do these things.”
And so began a scientific quest to determine whether performance-driven sport could arrest the motor function decline of disabled athletes.
With the support of The University of Queensland, the paraSTART program was created.
Prof Tweedy said people with severe disabilities were an under-studied population.
So his team selected three people with severe cerebral palsy who had never swum before to participate in a training regime that replicated that of an elite para-athlete.
Nate Woolgar was one of those who joined in 2017.
“I was very keen to learn to swim because I was actually kind of tired of being anxious around swimming pools,” he told AAP.
The program included two-to-three weekly swimming sessions, along with strength and conditioning work as well as a diet regime and sleep training.
“We were mostly managing drowning risks in the first few weeks – they were genuinely learning to swim,” Prof Tweedy said.
“It was about six-to-12 months before they would start to do sessions that weren’t just about staying afloat – they were able to physically exert themselves.”
The athletes were asked to stick around for a year, but seven years later they are all still going – with 24 more people joining the training program.
“There have been some very challenging times, but there’s been no times where I felt that I wanted to stop”, Woolgar said.
Despite not being able to stand or walk independently, they can all now swim a kilometre.
While medium-to-mild cerebral palsy is generally not degenerative, people with severe CP often experience a decline from the age of nine through to adolescence.
But all three athletes in the program defied that typical decline by improving their motor function.
Prof Tweedy described the results as “phenomenal”.
He said he would have been prepared to make the argument that if there wasn’t any motor improvement the participants still got a whole lot out of it.
“They made friends, they felt good about themselves, they’re swimming faster, and they’re into a sport that gave them a sense of purpose.”
Woolgar is one of the cohort’s strongest swimmers with a promising future, alongside his swimming mate Jamie Booth who is a national record holder.
“My goal for the program right now is to reach the Queensland state times for people in my swimming class, and I’m two seconds off,” Woolgar said.
Prof Tweedy hopes more funding could see the program expand to help people with severe disabilities who are “not even getting in pool, or to the start line”.
“The creation of opportunities would start to reduce the likelihood they have never swum before and make champions out of them,” he said.
It’s not about creating elite athletes, but rather giving those often overlooked in the sporting arena a chance to experience the benefits.
“My mental state has definitely improved because of all the exercise I’m doing,” Woolgar said.
“And in terms of the body, I definitely feel fitter and stronger. So that’s just been, overall for my everyday life, it’s been really, really good.”
