PHOTO: THE PERFECT STEP
One aim is to enable people to regain function below the level of their injury
were doing and the culture it created. Our member attrition had always been 21 to 24 per cent, but we saw this drop to 15 per cent once we started running these programmes. When we questioned our customers on what they liked about the club, they all mentioned the sense of shared values and the work we were engaged with – helping people who were in dire need. How did the Spinal Cord and Paralysis programme come about? In 2007, my daughter’s 17-year-old friend, Hal Hargrave, suffered a spinal cord injury which left him paralysed from the neck down. When we visited him in the acute rehabilitation hospital he was being treated at, I told his parents that when he finished his transitional living care we would get him back to the club that he had grown up in and begin working with him there: taking him out of a sick care environment and back into an electric and wellcare environment. After making that promise to his family, I was not really sure what I could do with him, but I was committed to trying. I went back to the club and told the board of directors that I needed a second pilates studio, which would give me 800sq ft to work with Hal.
When we questioned our customers on what they liked about The Claremont Club, they all mentioned that we were helping people who were in dire need Then I sent my wellness director and two of my PTs to train at Project Walk in Carlsbad to learn cutting edge, non-traditional methods for treating SCIs: using load-bearing exercises and Patterned Neural Activity Recruitment which reorganises the nervous system and/ or rebuilds pathways in the brain to get more tangible outcomes than traditional therapy. Hal’s physiatrist at Casa Colina Rehabilitation Hospital began referring his patients to train at the facility and in December 2013, The Be Perfect Foundation [set up by Hargrave and his family to support people with disabilities] and The Claremont Club made the joint decision to expand the operation by taking on the first ever Project Walk franchise and expanding into a 3,000sq ft space on the club’s campus. As it was part of a franchise, this became our first fee-based programme and we worked ©Cybertrek 2021 Issue 5 2021
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