Selected Podcast
Medical Fitness
Medical Fitness Manager Matthew Wright explores what medical fitness is and when people typically seek out a medical fitness manager.
Featuring:
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS
Matthew Wright, our Medical Fitness Manager, started his journey as a Certified Athletic Trainer at Reid in 2015. He also is a Certified Fall Prevention Specialist and is our Certified Rocksteady Boxing Coach. He graduated from Centerville High School, where he played football for 4 years. He has a bachelor's degree in Athletic Training and a minor in Coaching, which together give him great tools to work with. Transcription:
Prakash Chandran: Welcome to Right Beside You, a Reid Health Podcast. I'm Prakash Chandran. Today, we'll be talking about medical fitness with Matthew Wright. He's the Medical Fitness Manager for Reid health. So Matthew, really great to have you here today. I really appreciate your time. Let's just get started with the basic question. What exactly is the medical fitness?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Well, thank you for your time. Medical fitness is kind of a new department for the hospital. It falls under rehab services. The idea is it's the department where I may have a chronic disease or I may be an athlete that's looking to take my game to the next level. You know, we're developing programs to kind of maximize a person's health and overall quality of life.
Prakash Chandran: Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So just at a very high level, when do people normally come to you? I know you said rehab services, but is that typically proactively before surgery or after surgery? Tell us a little bit about the type of person that comes to you.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So it really depends on what program of ours that they're in. The program that you're talking about proactively before surgery, we do have a surgery fit program. It's for your medically frail or just the type of population that may benefit better, have better results after surgery if they do some fitness before. So really, it just depends on, you know, what they're diagnosed with. Kind of, you know, if it's an athlete, we're looking for your athletes of any age, you know, 10 and up that are now looking at either beginners in working out or they're, you know, seasoned athletes that just want to take it to the next level. So we do that.
We do see people, you know, whether they have Parkinson's disease or they have cancer and currently going through chemotherapy or maybe just recently diagnosed with diabetes. So we kind of see anyone and everyone basically.
Prakash Chandran: Wow. Okay. So there's a wide range there. You know, I've read about the different programs that you offer, which reigns from boxing to yoga to sports performance. Can you share at a high level about each one of those?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah, of course. So, the boxing programs, you know, the whole thing with Reid Health and boxing fitness started with Rock Steady Boxing, which is an affiliated fitness program for Parkinson's disease. So, you know, Reid was approached of bringing this program to the hospital and Reid did their due diligence, you know, became an affiliate of it and actually the first hospital affiliate ever of that program. And now, I mean, it's over 800 worldwide.
So we use that learning from that program and started to create non-contact boxing fitness classes for other diagnoses. You know, we kind of had the subset with the Parkinson's and then we made another one called the Baby Boomers just for the 50 plus population that doesn't need a diagnosis, but it was just looking at it, you know, kind of getting in shape and working with, you know, peers of the same age. And then there's the Reid Team, which is just a public kind of cardio boxing fitness class.
The yoga program's a fairly new program on the medical fitness front. We were approached by a physician to affiliate program called Love Your Brain. And Love Your Brain is a yoga class for your traumatic brain injury, your stroke, your acquired brain injury population. So we did the trainings, brought that here and that kind of started, you know, now we offer public yoga classes for anyone whether, you know, we have a full mat class and we have, you know, chair class, more relaxed class. And then more and more coming as we're growing that yoga.
And then we go to the other subset, which is our sports performance program, like I mentioned, with athletes from 10 and older, and then we have other fitness-based programs like your Cancer Fit, your Diabetes Fit, Surgery Fit. And we usually even do a fall prevention workout class as well.
Prakash Chandran: Wow. It's really amazing to hear about all these different programs and also the fact that you service a lot of different levels, right? If there's true sports performance, you have ways to tune and really make sure an athlete is performing at their best, but you also have programs for people that are looking to just get up from a fall. I think that's wonderful.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Oh, yes. Yeah. The whole idea for us is we want to change the perception of, you know, "I want to come to these programs to get better." You think you're going to the doctor, "Oh, I'm sick, I'm this." We kind of want to bring hope to different diagnoses, different chronic illnesses they may have, and we want to bring the whole aspect of, you know, there's a hope that I'm going to get better. I'm going to get stronger. And for our athletes, we want to be the go-to area in this area, just trying to get athletes to the next level.
Prakash Chandran: So one of the things that you brought up was the affiliated programs like Rock Steady Boxing and Love Your Brain. But I'm curious as to how does medical fitness fit within Reid and coordinate with other medical departments?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So we mentioned before we're a fairly new department. So we are working with different physicians and physician groups to try to get the name out there for our programs. But we're basically a complementary service to everything that they offer. You know, looking at a program that's kind of on the horizon, but looking at our OB-GYN, you know, physicians looking at a pregnancy fitness program. So, you know, we've been working with them to develop a program for, you know, pregnant mothers to know that it's safe to work out while they're pregnant and hopefully have better outcomes throughout the entire pregnancy. So we're kind of that complementary service that, you know, a physician notices that this patient would do so much better with a fitness class. And then we develop fitness classes around the different diagnoses.
Prakash Chandran: Yeah, I really love how integrated everything is with your plan of care. The fact that fitness is such an important piece of it. So maybe let's talk about what's on the horizon for medical fitness and what are the broader plans do you have in place.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So a lot of growth is on the horizon. Currently, you know, our boxing programs alone, we're in Richmond, Indiana and Connersville, Indiana, and Eaton, Ohio. We're actually looking to grow into the Oxford, Ohio area to offer the Rock Steady Boxing for the Parkinson population there.
Like I mentioned, with the pregnancy fitness class, we're looking to get that up and running. Some more different style yoga classes to help more population and just kind of sports performance in itself is looking to get a big growth opportunity to offer our athletes a more elite level of training than you can get in the area with your high quality equipment. And a lot of growth and a lot of great things coming.
Prakash Chandran: Yeah. That's fantastic. So if someone is listening to this and they're hearing about, you know, the medical fitness program for the first time, is there anything else that you'd like them to know about it?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Basically, I just want them to know that, you know, medical fitness, we're here to help. You know, we want to, you know, help you live a better quality of life. And, you know, yes, you may have a certain diagnosis, but we're here to help. You know, with Parkinson's disease, we can show you proper ways to have that better quality of life or get your life back. You know, going through cancer treatment, how to keep your energy levels up and strength up through chemotherapy. You know, how to try to have a better outcome with pregnancy and maybe avoid any supplemental oxygen during labor, to be in that better, you know, overall fitness. We're here to give hope to a lot of areas that there may not be.
Prakash Chandran: Yeah, I love that. One thing I forgot to ask you about was facility. Do you have a facility there? Do you work out of a facility? Can you talk at a high level about that?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So we actually have two facilities we run out of. We have the athletic training clinic, which is a newer clinic out of the Reid Orthopedic Center at 1400 Highland Road in Richmond. That location is for our sports performance, our more weight-based exercise classes. So Cancer Fitness, Surgery Fitness, those run out of that location.
And then we're at the outpatient rehab center in Richmond at 2021 Chester Boulevard. That's where our boxing programs are and more of our group fitness programs. But we also service Connersville out of the HealthWorks Building in the Connersville, Indiana. And we're also at the Reid Specialty Care Building in Ohio and that's where we offer boxing at.
Prakash Chandran: And speaking of boxing, this is something that I personally have always been interested in. And you said that from the Rock Steady Boxing Program, there have been many others that have sprouted from it. What makes boxing so unique?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So boxing is one of the hardest sports that an athlete can do. You know, it's where you have to use every facet of fitness to be a good boxer. You know, you have to be agile, you have to have core strength and, you know, your working on upper body strength, you know, working on improving your bone density by hitting the bags, getting that sheer force on the bone that you typically don't get when you weightlift. So you know, you're working your entire body doing these different exercises because, you know, lifting a weight, you may do a bench press, you're activating, you know, a lot of muscles through your chest. You're doing one motion while your legs may not get a lot of benefit from it. You know, they work on upper or lower boxing. Every movement, the entire body's engaged. And so your heart rates up, you're bouncing around and what's great is who doesn't want to work out and also relieve stress at the same time. You hit the bag, it doesn't matter what happened before class, you leave there feeling better just because you were able to beat up on something that's not hitting you back.
So, you know, it's just a great overall full body workout and, you know, it's so adaptable. You know, you can do, you know, weightlifting as well in that class. I mean, we do boxing, but we also do like say cardio, we do core, we do, you know, agility works up and down steps, jump rope, all that kind of stuff. So it's a full body workout. It's a lot of fun.
Prakash Chandran: I love it. Well, I can't wait to get into it. So for people that are interested in getting into one of the medical fitness programs that you're talking about, what does coverage look like? Is it something that is paid for or covered by insurance or is that something they pay out-of-pocket? Talk a little bit about that.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Of course. So, all of our programs are out-of-pocket services. Two of the programs, the Love Your Brain Yoga and Cancer Fitness are both supported fully by the Reid Health Foundation. So none of the members have to pay a dime to be part of those programs. The Rock Steady Boxing program Is out-of-pocket, but we do have scholarship opportunities through our wonderful partnership with Pro's Players Fore Parkinson's. It's a local golf outing that they have every year at the Elks where, you know, the proceeds go to University of Kentucky and to our Rock Steady Boxing Program to help offer scholarships for our programs.
So, we try to keep the other programs as cheap as possible, where, you know, it's enough to pay for the instructors teaching the class, but isn't going to break the bank for those that are wanting to look for programs like that.
Prakash Chandran: Okay. Wonderful. Well, I really appreciate your time today, Matthew. Just before we close here, is there anything else that you'd like to share?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: No, I think that's it. Just feel free to reach out if there's more information. We're here to help. We're excited to help anyone start their journey for fitness.
Prakash Chandran: I love it. I love it. Well, Matthew, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time today.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. You're very welcome. Happy to be here.
Prakash Chandran: That was Matthew Wright, Medical Fitness Manager for Reid Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of Right Beside You. For more information, please visit reidhealth.org to get connected with one of our providers. And that concludes this episode of Right Beside You, a Reid Health podcast. My name is Prakash Chandran. Thank you so much, and we'll talk next time.
Prakash Chandran: Welcome to Right Beside You, a Reid Health Podcast. I'm Prakash Chandran. Today, we'll be talking about medical fitness with Matthew Wright. He's the Medical Fitness Manager for Reid health. So Matthew, really great to have you here today. I really appreciate your time. Let's just get started with the basic question. What exactly is the medical fitness?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Well, thank you for your time. Medical fitness is kind of a new department for the hospital. It falls under rehab services. The idea is it's the department where I may have a chronic disease or I may be an athlete that's looking to take my game to the next level. You know, we're developing programs to kind of maximize a person's health and overall quality of life.
Prakash Chandran: Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So just at a very high level, when do people normally come to you? I know you said rehab services, but is that typically proactively before surgery or after surgery? Tell us a little bit about the type of person that comes to you.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So it really depends on what program of ours that they're in. The program that you're talking about proactively before surgery, we do have a surgery fit program. It's for your medically frail or just the type of population that may benefit better, have better results after surgery if they do some fitness before. So really, it just depends on, you know, what they're diagnosed with. Kind of, you know, if it's an athlete, we're looking for your athletes of any age, you know, 10 and up that are now looking at either beginners in working out or they're, you know, seasoned athletes that just want to take it to the next level. So we do that.
We do see people, you know, whether they have Parkinson's disease or they have cancer and currently going through chemotherapy or maybe just recently diagnosed with diabetes. So we kind of see anyone and everyone basically.
Prakash Chandran: Wow. Okay. So there's a wide range there. You know, I've read about the different programs that you offer, which reigns from boxing to yoga to sports performance. Can you share at a high level about each one of those?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah, of course. So, the boxing programs, you know, the whole thing with Reid Health and boxing fitness started with Rock Steady Boxing, which is an affiliated fitness program for Parkinson's disease. So, you know, Reid was approached of bringing this program to the hospital and Reid did their due diligence, you know, became an affiliate of it and actually the first hospital affiliate ever of that program. And now, I mean, it's over 800 worldwide.
So we use that learning from that program and started to create non-contact boxing fitness classes for other diagnoses. You know, we kind of had the subset with the Parkinson's and then we made another one called the Baby Boomers just for the 50 plus population that doesn't need a diagnosis, but it was just looking at it, you know, kind of getting in shape and working with, you know, peers of the same age. And then there's the Reid Team, which is just a public kind of cardio boxing fitness class.
The yoga program's a fairly new program on the medical fitness front. We were approached by a physician to affiliate program called Love Your Brain. And Love Your Brain is a yoga class for your traumatic brain injury, your stroke, your acquired brain injury population. So we did the trainings, brought that here and that kind of started, you know, now we offer public yoga classes for anyone whether, you know, we have a full mat class and we have, you know, chair class, more relaxed class. And then more and more coming as we're growing that yoga.
And then we go to the other subset, which is our sports performance program, like I mentioned, with athletes from 10 and older, and then we have other fitness-based programs like your Cancer Fit, your Diabetes Fit, Surgery Fit. And we usually even do a fall prevention workout class as well.
Prakash Chandran: Wow. It's really amazing to hear about all these different programs and also the fact that you service a lot of different levels, right? If there's true sports performance, you have ways to tune and really make sure an athlete is performing at their best, but you also have programs for people that are looking to just get up from a fall. I think that's wonderful.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Oh, yes. Yeah. The whole idea for us is we want to change the perception of, you know, "I want to come to these programs to get better." You think you're going to the doctor, "Oh, I'm sick, I'm this." We kind of want to bring hope to different diagnoses, different chronic illnesses they may have, and we want to bring the whole aspect of, you know, there's a hope that I'm going to get better. I'm going to get stronger. And for our athletes, we want to be the go-to area in this area, just trying to get athletes to the next level.
Prakash Chandran: So one of the things that you brought up was the affiliated programs like Rock Steady Boxing and Love Your Brain. But I'm curious as to how does medical fitness fit within Reid and coordinate with other medical departments?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So we mentioned before we're a fairly new department. So we are working with different physicians and physician groups to try to get the name out there for our programs. But we're basically a complementary service to everything that they offer. You know, looking at a program that's kind of on the horizon, but looking at our OB-GYN, you know, physicians looking at a pregnancy fitness program. So, you know, we've been working with them to develop a program for, you know, pregnant mothers to know that it's safe to work out while they're pregnant and hopefully have better outcomes throughout the entire pregnancy. So we're kind of that complementary service that, you know, a physician notices that this patient would do so much better with a fitness class. And then we develop fitness classes around the different diagnoses.
Prakash Chandran: Yeah, I really love how integrated everything is with your plan of care. The fact that fitness is such an important piece of it. So maybe let's talk about what's on the horizon for medical fitness and what are the broader plans do you have in place.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So a lot of growth is on the horizon. Currently, you know, our boxing programs alone, we're in Richmond, Indiana and Connersville, Indiana, and Eaton, Ohio. We're actually looking to grow into the Oxford, Ohio area to offer the Rock Steady Boxing for the Parkinson population there.
Like I mentioned, with the pregnancy fitness class, we're looking to get that up and running. Some more different style yoga classes to help more population and just kind of sports performance in itself is looking to get a big growth opportunity to offer our athletes a more elite level of training than you can get in the area with your high quality equipment. And a lot of growth and a lot of great things coming.
Prakash Chandran: Yeah. That's fantastic. So if someone is listening to this and they're hearing about, you know, the medical fitness program for the first time, is there anything else that you'd like them to know about it?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Basically, I just want them to know that, you know, medical fitness, we're here to help. You know, we want to, you know, help you live a better quality of life. And, you know, yes, you may have a certain diagnosis, but we're here to help. You know, with Parkinson's disease, we can show you proper ways to have that better quality of life or get your life back. You know, going through cancer treatment, how to keep your energy levels up and strength up through chemotherapy. You know, how to try to have a better outcome with pregnancy and maybe avoid any supplemental oxygen during labor, to be in that better, you know, overall fitness. We're here to give hope to a lot of areas that there may not be.
Prakash Chandran: Yeah, I love that. One thing I forgot to ask you about was facility. Do you have a facility there? Do you work out of a facility? Can you talk at a high level about that?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So we actually have two facilities we run out of. We have the athletic training clinic, which is a newer clinic out of the Reid Orthopedic Center at 1400 Highland Road in Richmond. That location is for our sports performance, our more weight-based exercise classes. So Cancer Fitness, Surgery Fitness, those run out of that location.
And then we're at the outpatient rehab center in Richmond at 2021 Chester Boulevard. That's where our boxing programs are and more of our group fitness programs. But we also service Connersville out of the HealthWorks Building in the Connersville, Indiana. And we're also at the Reid Specialty Care Building in Ohio and that's where we offer boxing at.
Prakash Chandran: And speaking of boxing, this is something that I personally have always been interested in. And you said that from the Rock Steady Boxing Program, there have been many others that have sprouted from it. What makes boxing so unique?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. So boxing is one of the hardest sports that an athlete can do. You know, it's where you have to use every facet of fitness to be a good boxer. You know, you have to be agile, you have to have core strength and, you know, your working on upper body strength, you know, working on improving your bone density by hitting the bags, getting that sheer force on the bone that you typically don't get when you weightlift. So you know, you're working your entire body doing these different exercises because, you know, lifting a weight, you may do a bench press, you're activating, you know, a lot of muscles through your chest. You're doing one motion while your legs may not get a lot of benefit from it. You know, they work on upper or lower boxing. Every movement, the entire body's engaged. And so your heart rates up, you're bouncing around and what's great is who doesn't want to work out and also relieve stress at the same time. You hit the bag, it doesn't matter what happened before class, you leave there feeling better just because you were able to beat up on something that's not hitting you back.
So, you know, it's just a great overall full body workout and, you know, it's so adaptable. You know, you can do, you know, weightlifting as well in that class. I mean, we do boxing, but we also do like say cardio, we do core, we do, you know, agility works up and down steps, jump rope, all that kind of stuff. So it's a full body workout. It's a lot of fun.
Prakash Chandran: I love it. Well, I can't wait to get into it. So for people that are interested in getting into one of the medical fitness programs that you're talking about, what does coverage look like? Is it something that is paid for or covered by insurance or is that something they pay out-of-pocket? Talk a little bit about that.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Of course. So, all of our programs are out-of-pocket services. Two of the programs, the Love Your Brain Yoga and Cancer Fitness are both supported fully by the Reid Health Foundation. So none of the members have to pay a dime to be part of those programs. The Rock Steady Boxing program Is out-of-pocket, but we do have scholarship opportunities through our wonderful partnership with Pro's Players Fore Parkinson's. It's a local golf outing that they have every year at the Elks where, you know, the proceeds go to University of Kentucky and to our Rock Steady Boxing Program to help offer scholarships for our programs.
So, we try to keep the other programs as cheap as possible, where, you know, it's enough to pay for the instructors teaching the class, but isn't going to break the bank for those that are wanting to look for programs like that.
Prakash Chandran: Okay. Wonderful. Well, I really appreciate your time today, Matthew. Just before we close here, is there anything else that you'd like to share?
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: No, I think that's it. Just feel free to reach out if there's more information. We're here to help. We're excited to help anyone start their journey for fitness.
Prakash Chandran: I love it. I love it. Well, Matthew, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time today.
Matthew Wright, ATC, CFPS: Yeah. You're very welcome. Happy to be here.
Prakash Chandran: That was Matthew Wright, Medical Fitness Manager for Reid Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of Right Beside You. For more information, please visit reidhealth.org to get connected with one of our providers. And that concludes this episode of Right Beside You, a Reid Health podcast. My name is Prakash Chandran. Thank you so much, and we'll talk next time.