Blake Hunsley
You're listening to within our reach, a podcast by reachAbility association that focuses on accessibility, inclusion and leveling the playing field at work and ignore community. This week, we're discussing fitness and disability with fitness instructor Terri Roberts. Enjoy the episode.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
I'm Shelley. I'm one of the CO hosts, and I'm here

Blake Hunsley
with I'm Blake. It's nice to be here again. Hello. Hello. Hello. So

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
we're here, and today we have a very interesting topic, and I'm going to let Terri introduce herself, but we have, we're going to be talking today about our journey of fitness as it relates to perhaps disability, right, and your wellness journey. So I'm very excited about that, and perhaps it'll allow me to jog. I'm not

Blake Hunsley
gonna lie. I was thinking, here is like, good this may motivate me to get back on my own fitness journey today.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
Around the same we're trying for trying to get there follow up on Monday, what we did on the weekend, but we have someone

Blake Hunsley
who is constantly getting there and helping others get there today. So Terri Roberts, thank you for joining us, and why don't you tell the listeners?

Terri Roberts
Thank you so much for having

Terri Roberts
me. It's always a pleasure to talk to you both, and I love coming into reachAbility and talking about fitness. It's I'm here about once a month now to do this. So my name is Terri Roberts, I am I wear many hats, many, many hats, but fitting well around here. But the thing that I'm that's known for, the thing I identify with most, is being a fitness instructor. And I've been a fitness instructor for getting close to 20 years now. And prior to that, I trained in dance, and then in education, and then fitness kind of evolved out of that, and it became my accidental career. It was going to be my side gig, and then for quite a few years, it became my full time career. I ended up teaching the courses to become a fitness instructor, running the provincial fitness instructors association for 10 years, doing my academic research in fitness as well. So I've kind of had many, many different areas of the fitness industry blend in my into my day to day work nice.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
So you, you, let's start with what you're doing at reachAbility. I think you're in doing some fitness. So let's, let's tell our listeners about

Terri Roberts
that. What I do here is this started, actually, several years ago. I got a call from Amanda here at reachAbility. I was the ed for the Nova Scotia fitness Association. At the time, she asked if there was somebody in this area of the city who could come in and do a talk with this, with the folks who attend courses here. And I said, Well, I actually happen to be literally the closest person to you, so I'll come over. I think you're basically our neighbor, like a stone's throw from from the office here, literally a stone's throw you can, you can pitch a rock into my driveway from here. And I said, Yeah, I'll pop over. And so I did a couple of workshops with her sitting in to kind of get a feel of like what people needed, what was the right level of instruction, what was too much information or not enough, what the questions were going to be like, that kind of thing. So that then from there, I sort of crafted two workshops that I do frequently. Here. I was doing them every two weeks. I was doing one and then the other. But now I've kind of combined them, and I'm here once a month. And so I do a session on safe stretching and what stretching is, and then I do a session, a similar session on strength training. So I do a strength week and a stretch week. Okay, now I'm kind of blending the two together. Okay,

Blake Hunsley
right? So how did I know you talk about this a lot, because then we're gonna, we're going to plug everything you're doing thoroughly at the end of the episode. So stay tuned. Terri is a very busy person with lots of talk about here. So, but you you do public speaking, you talk about your journey of how you got, of how you got into this sort of sector of fitness and wellness. And it started from what i've what little I've read about you with with a traumatic accident. So, so if you're comfortable telling us this, which I know you are, because you talk about this professionally, I think it's going to be a very interesting journey to hear about. So how did this really

Terri Roberts
start? So coming up pretty actually, coming up pretty soon, it will be the 34th anniversary of the car crash that I was injured in. And I had some experience with disability before that. I was born with some vision impairment, so I've been already been through the medicalization of all of that, and the system of all of that, and the being a pediatric patient and all that. So in 1990 I was on my way out to have coffee with a couple of friends, and was struck by an impaired driver. Okay, so we don't actually refer to it as a car accident. We refer to as a car crash in impaired driving parlance,

Blake Hunsley
because there's no accident, no accident,

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
right? Yeah, okay.

Terri Roberts
And at the time, organizations that help victims of impaired driving didn't exist in Canada yet. Okay, so I was injured before mad Canada, okay, came to be the first mad Canada chapter opened. I think it was. Following year and in Toronto. And then it was another three years, I believe, after that, that we finally got a chapter in Nova Scotia. So I my family, we navigated this with no help. So I got, you know, and I was, I was a teenager, so I got to understand from a young age, not just the medicalization of accidents and injuries and disabilities, but also the legal system around it in certain cases,

Blake Hunsley
can you describe what you mean by medicalization? Just for people to share? So

Terri Roberts
there is a whole system behind medical treatment. You don't just walk into a doctor get treated and walk out. There are biases in the medical care about who's it's less so now it's been, it's been handled better in training for medical staff now, but back then, you know, biases about the patient, biases about the circumstance in which you were injured, which happened in my case, things like that. So it's, it's this whole other industry that you have to navigate. Same thing with the legal system. It's a whole other industry you have to navigate that you've just had thrust upon you because of random life circumstances, whether that be a disability or disease you are born with or you acquire later in life, or an injury in life like I acquired. So there's, there's a lot of stuff around there that just does not make any of this straightforward

Blake Hunsley
and with no advocacy back then more tough. Yeah.

Terri Roberts
And, and, full disclosure, I do volunteer with Mad Canada, with the local chapter here in Halifax, because and people ask me all the time, Oh, do you volunteer with mad because they helped you after your injury? I'm like, no, no, they didn't exist yet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I help with Mad Canada so nobody has to go through this alone like I did. Yeah,

Blake Hunsley
I think that would make you twice the passion Absolutely, because

Terri Roberts
it is you don't want to have to deal with all of that on your own. And there's an additional sort of stigma and layer, several layers of problematization when your disability or your injury comes from somebody's criminal activity, okay? And that's one of the things Matt has done really well over the years, and has done, you know, supported a lot of research and stuff in that because my I had a number of injuries. Obviously, I was a pedestrian who survived a car crash, I mean, so I still have a permanent lump on my head. I have a rib that that doesn't sit flat anymore because of the break there. It didn't heal properly. I have had a couple of injuries, or a couple of surgeries to repair the injuries on my left elbow, like, and it makes clicking noises now, like, there's all kinds of things to go along with it. So partially because of my age at the time, I didn't get sufficient post surgical medical treatment. I didn't get physiotherapy, things like that. The belief at the time was, Well, kids bounce back, and you just left your own devices to heal on my own. And I asked, I mean, this was again, it was the early 90s. It was it was early days, it was practically the Dark Ages,

Blake Hunsley
and it wasn't the Oregon Trail, or we weren't that far, yeah, yeah.

Terri Roberts
And I was shocked when I did join mad Canada, which I just had my 15th anniversary of joining mad. And I was shocked when I first sat down with our then Regional Director, and she's now retired, and and I was, we were up here at the at the Starbucks here in Clayton Park, and I and I said, and you know what they said to me about not why they wouldn't give me medical treatment and physio? And she said, they told you, kids bounce back, don't they? And I went, Oh, my God, you knew that. And she said, Oh, you have no idea how many times we've heard that across the country. So it's not just a local phenomenon. It's not just Nova Scotia has a doctor shortage and we have for for 50 years. It's this. Isn't this has been a nationally established thing at the time. And my jaw dropped because she was finishing my sentences in that meeting for the stuff that I was told and, and, I mean, at that point, it had been, you know, almost 20 years since I'd been injured, yeah, and we were still hearing that stuff, and that was a lot of what really motivated, motivated me to volunteer. So, yeah, so it's, there was, there was a lot of that. There was also because the person who injured me was generally a good person. He wasn't a career criminal. He wasn't, you know, the local sociopath in my hometown. Yeah, it was not, you know, it was somebody who made very poor choices on one night of his life, and it impacted me. And he really, unlike some some impaired driving offenders, he really did take it seriously, okay? And he really, he's no longer around, but he for the rest of his life, he he was remorseful, okay? And that's quite unusual, actually,

Blake Hunsley
yeah, it's unusual to hear that acknowledged by the victim of the circumstance, to be honest. That's, yeah, that's quick.

Terri Roberts
So it was, it was, it was my story, in that sense, it's quite different. But the it. I was in a small town, everybody knows everybody kind of town, and there was reluctance among some of the medical professionals at the time to acknowledge that what he did was a crime, really, because they didn't want him to be punished for it. This was somebody they knew. This was their neighbor, their friend, their you know,

Blake Hunsley
but you're a kid, but I was been mowed down by Okay, okay, yeah, I'm not gonna, I said at the start I wasn't gonna get on a soapbox, so I'm not gonna get too

Terri Roberts
Yeah, and this is precisely it is. I was a teenager in junior high. Okay. Why? Yeah, I was in eighth grade. So what? Why was I being held responsible? I wasn't even old enough to drive yet, and why was I being I being held responsible? And it was interesting to me, part of what put me on my eventual path towards academic research, and particularly feminist theory in my academic work, was there was also a gender element to how I was treated. Because what was a young girl her age doing in the evening where she could have been walking across the street at that time to be hit? Well, I'm sorry, but Wrong place, wrong time, is not an excuse.

Blake Hunsley
I just said I didn't want to get impassionately angry, and here we go. There's no need to plan

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
to like this is why.

Terri Roberts
But this was this really fascinated me, because at the time, the public discourse around how women were treated in criminal cases as victims was still, I mean, the Anita Hill case was just breaking loose in the States, so things like sexual harassment, all of this stuff was going on. So there was, there was news and public discourse around this. And then it was, it was also playing out in a slightly different way in my own life. And I'm like, I to this day, I look at people go, did you think because I was a teenage girl, I was under house arrest? Yeah, it was six o'clock in the evening when I was injured. It was not like I was out at 2am and drunk. And even if I had been I still didn't deserve to be hit by an impaired I was just gonna say exactly, because you were walking, because I was walking across the street, yeah. And he can and people say, Well, why did you walk? I'm like, he came around a curve. You can't see around a curve. Yeah, sorry, I don't have X ray vision.

Blake Hunsley
Also, did we all forget the part where this grown, adult driver was drunk behind the wheel? Maybe we should focus on that.

Terri Roberts
And to be fair, part of the problem was, at the time, the laws around impaired driving aren't what they are now, correct, and again, which is why we needed mad campus, a lot of good and mad has done a lot of advocacy and changes around that, and we're still working on that at the national and provincial levels. And what he was actually charged with, what basically amounts to a driving ticket. Oh, my God, it wasn't. It wasn't a crime against a person at the time. Yeah. So there's

Blake Hunsley
absolutely no recognition of the utter damage that was done to you. There was no over the long term

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
manslaughter, no vernacular attempted manslaughter, no time. So you

Blake Hunsley
really got just left fully out on every front here sounds of it. So okay, so after all of this and then, and then start to learn and advocate for yourself at such a young age. How did that start? Well,

Terri Roberts
it didn't start right away, because I, because I was refused. The surgeon who did this, the work on my broken elbow was fantastic everybody else, and he was new to the area, he wasn't the local which I think is very telling everybody else who, who could have had some hand in my medical treatment basically covered the reason, what, la, la, la, I can't hear you. I was fortunate that I had already been involved in dance and that I continued that involvement. It, it was a bit of a struggle after the immediate recovery phase from the crash, but it saved me in the long run, because I was refused physiotherapy, which is mind blowing today, but at the time, well, Physiotherapy is not, you know, not really a thing. You'll bounce back. And of course, there's the idea, you know, girls are just dramatic. Teenage girls are just dramatic, right? And I'm like, I have got several broken things. Are you serious? I

Blake Hunsley
was hit by a car, in case we need to be technical. It wasn't

Terri Roberts
even a car. It was a half ton truck. Oh, dear God, it's a half ton truck. And mostly I was just, sort of, as they say, clipped by it. It was, it was the corner of the headlight that sounds like 20 Yeah, to throw me in the air and me land

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
on the pavement. Let's just talk about, like, yeah, what is how much of that? Like, 8000 pounds, or something like that, yeah? And, you know, 100 pounds? Yeah, there's going to be like, just think about that a second. Like, I like, I've had to say that to people, right? Like it doesn't matter what speed they're going, okay, there's not a contest. No

Blake Hunsley
clips. Clip sounds mild until you follow up with by a truck.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
So you had so you you kept up with dance. So dance

Terri Roberts
basically did, yeah, yeah. And I think if I hadn't already been trained. In that I also I after my arm re knit and healed up, I continued on with music. I was learning a couple of different instruments at the time, and I think if I hadn't been doing both of those things, I would have gone downhill very, very quickly. And I say that because several years later, when I finished high school and I went off to university and I wasn't playing, wasn't playing music and I wasn't doing dance, my condition deteriorated rapidly, okay, all right. And so in early 1997 So seven years or six and a half years after I was injured, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, okay, and at the time, fibromyalgia was not a clear definition, and it wasn't the definition it currently has. If I were to be presenting in a doctor's office with those, those symptoms and things now, fiber wouldn't be the diagnosis, okay? Because now Fibromyalgia is considered an autoimmune disease. At the time, there was no real understanding of the cause, and it was just sort of what that, what doctors call a waste basket diagnosis, yes, right? They just chuck

Blake Hunsley
it in the back. Yeah, I don't know. So it's Fibro, yeah, stick it in

Terri Roberts
there. And so it was that, although the doctors I had, I by then, I had moved here to Halifax, so the doctors I had here were trying to figure it out, but really had no where to look and no guidance on these things at that time. So today, I wouldn't call it fibromyalgia, but that's what we were using for the terminology at the time, and I was fortunate enough to get some some pharmaceutical help to sort of break me out of the cycle of muscle pain and fatigue that I had. I was very fortunate that a neighbor of mine had just trained in massage therapy, and she's quite quite she's now retired unfortunately, like, commit of retirement, please. But she was quite brilliant. I figured out where specific injuries happened that were never found and never diagnosed at the time of the of my recovery from the crash, because I was refused that help. So I was having, like, lots of headaches and jaw pain and things like this. And she's like, that's not your head and your jaw, that's your neck and your shoulder that were injured. And I'm like, well, it makes sense that I have that shoulder injury, based on what I understand of physics in the human body. So it was, it was a long time for me to get worse, and then it was a fairly long time for me to recover from all of that. But again, by the late 90s, I finally had some help,

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
but still

Blake Hunsley
informal help. There's still no systemic help, okay? And

Terri Roberts
then after I finished university in the early 2000s I did a BA and a BD back to back. So I did a long stretch in university. As an undergrad, I was there forever. We used to joke, I was the Van Wilder of the mount. I just never left. And I got back into dance. Shortly after, a friend of mine was teaching dance classes at the Rec Center, I was finally available with time and had, you know, a job, so I had some recreational money to spend, and I went into dance. And I finally started feeling really good, and I could feel a difference in my brain, because one of the things that wasn't diagnosed in 1990 was that I had a serious concussion, very serious concussion, and I was told I wasn't concussed because I didn't lose consciousness. And even in the early 90s, that was not the definition of a concussion, yeah, so I can only chalk it up to, again, the age, the gender discriminator, sex discrimination and local medical people's uncomfortableness around the fact that it was their friend that injured me, right? And had I had some proper neurological care at the time, I think things would have gone very differently for me, but they refused to believe that I was actually concussed, and I can clearly tell that now and again. In that initial conversation with I had with the director for local regional director for mad she said, Oh, you were concussed. You are welcome to tell people you had a concussion, because I'd said, Well, I can't say I had a concussion because I wasn't diagnosed. She said, you can say it. And I'm like, Yeah, you're right. Or like, I can say it. She's like, there's no doubt. My mind, you were concussed at the pavement. Of course, you were concussed. But

Blake Hunsley
yet again, it still blows my mind. Every bit of expert advice, help, anything that you've gotten here has been something you've sought out yourself, has been informal, has been a neighbor, has been there's no there's no one who's professionally responsible in the system as it exists that took any form of responsibility here that I can see so far. Okay, I'm keeping my impassioned nature down, Shelly. I see the work, but I just want to acknowledge, I want to acknowledge the circumstances.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
He's just reiterating. His voice isn't rising, so

Blake Hunsley
I'm keeping my outrage. I would imagine it's shared with some of our listeners. Okay, this really explains to me why you become who you are. Though you're such an advocate and you're giving people all of this information. It makes complete sense to me, because they're but for the grace of a lot of luck, really, absolutely.

Terri Roberts
But it was, it was taking the dance classes. That was the real aha moment for me, because I. Yeah, I didn't realize until I got back into dance, having been out of it for six or so years, at that point, that my brain felt like it was coming back online again. You know, when you have an interruption to your internet connection and you get the swirly thing on the screen and it finally comes back online, you just go. I felt like that was happening in my brain. And a few more years later, when I went back into practicing music again, I felt it even more because there were old parts in my brain that hadn't been activated for several years, that had been there before the crash, that were being reactivated and going, this is normal for you. You're coming back online. Hello, wake up. And it really helped. So the going back to dance, even though it wasn't a dance style I had previously studied, really was the aha moment. And then my friend who was teaching the dance classes was taking some time off to do her master's degree, and because I have an education background and a dance background, she asked if I would cover her classes for a semester. And I thought, yeah, but I didn't have any background in, like, physical activity, teaching it, like in the science and I thought, oh, beyond a first aid certificate, I better go do something. So another friend was working for a local chain of fitness centers, and she was a dance person as well. And, like, how do you get into that? Maybe I should take, like, the theory course that fitness people take. And she said, Oh, yeah, here's what you do. So I ended up back at the Mount again. I keep showing up at that campus

Blake Hunsley
as a fellow alum. I salute you for this.

Terri Roberts
One of the past presidents said to me Terri. Terri,

Terri Roberts
you know graduating means you're supposed to leave, right? No, I don't know that. I'm like a bad penny. I keep turning up and the fitness officer there at the time, Pat McDowell became, I took, I took exercise theory from her. She became a career mentor to me. And I was only going to take the theory course and then go teach dance for my friend for a semester, and that was going to be it. That was it. Famous, last words. Then I took, excuse me, and then I took the group exercise course. I was only going to teach aerobics once or twice to fill in if Pat needed a substitute at the mouth. That was it, oh yes, I hear you. And then my phone started to ring. And it was, it was places from all over the city going, Hey, we just heard you just finish your certification. The ink was not dry yet on my certification. And in fact, I got some calls before I was technically finished, because I still had to do my first aid research, and I hadn't done it yet, and I was already getting calls to teach fitness

Blake Hunsley
because people knew your background, so they knew no people calling

Terri Roberts
and asking. Rep calling the mountain, saying, Hey, do you guys have just there's that much need? Any new graduates? There was a huge need at the time, and and I was one of the people she was highly recommending as brand new fresh out of the training, and I ended up working there. I ended up working for HRM. I ended up working at other universities. I've been all over the city, and it became, I call it my accidental career. I did not mean for it to be a career. At the time, I'm still substituted teaching for the school board and hoping to get a teaching job. And it got to the point where I got so many calls and emails and offers to teach a class here, a class there, or whatever, and I was running around all over the city, but I loved it, and I felt fantastic for the first time in my life that I eventually called the school board and said, Hey guys, I quit. I've gotten better offers from a lot of other people. Don't call me every take my number off the list. I'm not substituting anymore. And that was the real beginning of everything, stepping up and glowing up for me. Okay? Was was that moment in which I really found my I found my place in the world as it were. And because I had the teaching background, because I had the dance background, my ability to lead fitness classes became, you know, quite unique. I was able to bring different things to it. I was able to communicate with people who previously had not felt welcome in fitness. And then in 2011 the opportunity for me to do a TEDx talk came up. Oh, okay, so the TED Talks became hugely popular. And I'd always done public speaking. I've always told I was, been told I was very good at it. Never really thought of it beyond that. But as the TED Talks became massively popular, in the early 2010s the local groups, and coordinators and event planners started doing the TED X events, and had actually applied to one here in Halifax and didn't get selected. Oh well, yeah, them's the breaks, and actually applied for one up in Cape Breton and got selected for it. Found out later that my application to one in Halifax didn't go through the system. They never did get my application. So here I was all heartbroken because Halifax didn't accept me. And I'm like, turns out they never saw it, but I ended up going up to to the convention center at Membertou in Sydney, and doing the TEDx there in 2011 nice and. But by then, I was already, you know, doing workshops, doing like the local fitness instructors, conference stuff like that, and had taken a program, I think was in 2008 I took a training program called belly fit. So because I had been in the dance world and I taught dance a bit for recreation. My friend's class evolved into me having classes. It was belly dance we were teaching. And my friend who got me into fitness in the first place, came into my office at the gym one day, and she said somebody's created a belly dance aerobics hybrid. They're having a course in Dieppe in New Brunswick. Let's go. And we got in the car and we went. And she and I were the first people in Nova Scotia to teach that program, okay? And I'm still teaching it, and it's a wonderful program. It's a women focused program that really solidified some of the gender aspects of where there's gaps in access to physical activity for me. So then a few years later, I bumped into an old friend of mine from university, and he's like, remember when we were undergrads and the mount created that new master's degree in gender studies, and you said, Oh, I'm gonna do that degree someday. Did you ever go back and do that? And I went, No, I didn't. I completely forgot about that degree existing. I better get on the phone to the mount. And so it was the fall of 2013 I started my master's degree. Okay? And I gave them the video of my TEDx talk, and said, Here's my application. Watch this video. This is my thesis proposal. And they went, Yes, it is, you're in. So for over the next several years, I worked part time on that and finally published my thesis a couple of years ago when I graduated, and the thesis is called the pink dumbbell problem, because what I ended up doing was looking at gender specific gaps, mostly around women, but also gender non conforming people, LGBTQ, plus people of where there are gaps in exercise knowledge, where women in particular, have been refused access to learning, and where there's also access gaps in in, like, physical spaces either, because historically, women have, there's plenty of gyms historically just never allowed women in the door. That's pretty rare since the late 90s, early 2000s that's that's almost non existent. But if you're of a certain age and you don't know that those policies have changed, you don't know women are allowed in your the one gym in

Blake Hunsley
your town, to say nothing of the informal attitudinal barriers when you walk in and get the looks from sorry meatheads, but from the meatheads guys in the gym don't make you feel super welcome.

Terri Roberts
And then by that point, I was working in fitness full time. I was working in weight rooms, doing floor supervision and training. I was teaching classes, and I got to meet the meatheads and the gym rats and those kids people, and I got to see I sort of got a sense of where, where there was, there was good and there was bad. And I really came to realize, even though my background isn't strictly speaking in sociology, I got to realize that every gym has its own culture. Every studio, every rec center, has its own fitness culture, and that sometimes those meatheads are are they look intimidating, but they're actually really lovely people who are welcoming. And I've met, I've met people who you would think would run you out of the gym with with scary rhetoric and and and biases and bigotry. And in fact, they're not. They're they're the first person to come up to you and go, Wow, great for you. I'm so proud of you for being here and you know, and let me show you this, and let me help you with this. So there's, there's some biases we've learned, particularly, I think, from popular culture, from from fictional media in particular, that make us think somebody is going to be hateful, when, in fact, they're actually the nicest person there, and then the person who looks like they're going to be nice is the one who's who's got biases and may behave with bigotry and things like that. So you really, you really, actually can't tell by looking at

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
somebody, yeah, okay, unconscious bias. Absolutely, we've talked

Blake Hunsley
about that a time. Yes, we definitely have. So I'm curious to bring it back to your courses here at reach and the sort of the sort of things that you're teaching here. What sort of specific barriers do you find that people with disabilities are facing into the fitness world that are particular to them and that might be holding them back from things that obviously can be really beneficial for their physical health and for their overall recovery and wellness.

Terri Roberts
There's a few. Some of it, again, is the sociological aspect of not being explicitly welcome to come into gyms. You do get the impression in certain gyms, particularly the ones that have, like, big walls of windows where you can see into the gym and you see very fit looking people working out that if your body doesn't match that sort of look, then that's not a place where you're welcome gyms and particularly the people who do marketing, people with marketing degrees that don't work out, tend to market in. In what they call an aspirational sense, right? So when you see advertisements for gyms, for workout videos, for workout clothing, oh, the workout clothing ad copy is dreadful. Stock photography, you see the most perfect looking people, perfect bodies, perfect hair, perfect face and brand new clothing that just had the tags removed because there's not a sweat stain or a scuff or anything anywhere. And I taught I remember talking to a friend who did Mark studied marketing in university, and he was shocked when I said the marketing is keeping people out of the fitness accessing fitness spaces, facility gyms or in classrooms. And he was shocked, he said, but we put all of that on on the advertisements, so that you're at, you feel like, if you come to this gym or you do this class, you'll, you'll look like that person. I'm like, Yeah, but people are more realistic than that. That

Blake Hunsley
may not be somebody's goal to my goal for going to the gym may not be, you know,

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
somebody who looks like me, bingo, yeah, who's wearing a pair of ratty sweatpants, whatever going in, like, who's the size of me? Because I'm like, Okay, I'm going to be welcome. Because I could, we could have a whole podcast on me going to various gyms, yeah, over my life, absolutely and my lack of feeling welcome, right? And my absolutely, and my and still to this day, the ability, when you talk about fitness clothing right, to be able to buy, like, even if I wanted to have that clothing, right? Well, I need to go to that gym for about two years before I could fit into that clothing, right? So, yeah, I think there are all kinds of, like stigmas attached Absolutely. One of the things that you said, which I, I wanted to, I wanted to come back to, was when, when you started back up in dance again, and you said, you know, your, your sort of brain did that rewiring, and I feel like what I was hearing is that it's almost like your physical okay and mental okay came together, okay, and the synapses was now absolutely why now you're firing on all cylinders, right? Because, I like to say, because now it's bringing joy, right, like, and, and don't you think joy, you know, brings more feelings of, I mean, I think there's lots of studies on on that when you're feeling joyful, when you're enjoying what You're doing, oh, it's having some overall wellness. What? How do you feel about that? I

Terri Roberts
agree, and we do know now to just in the last, gosh, not even 20 years, 10 to 15 years, we are starting to understand from the scientific research just how much physical activity affects the brain, how much the brain is involved in learning and performing physical activities and and how much connecting that activity with music is also part of it. There's been some really great work, if you if you have a look at dance Nova Scotia, and I've been a dance Nova Scotia member for quite a while. They've got a program called Dance for health, and have been working with a researcher who has been studying dance in folks who have Parkinson's, and it's something to do with the connection of not just physical activity, but physical activity and to music that seems to be making different synapses fire up in the brain already. And like I said, firing on all cylinders is exactly the metaphor, because fibromyalgia, or whatever was wrong with me at the time, the physical problems I was having from injuries not being treated properly, comes with brain fog. We call it. And for the first time in many, many years, the brain fog was clearing, and my all the synapses in my brain felt like they were coming back online again. And we we now understand that every time you learn a new physical activity, whether that be exercise, based whether it's a sport, a dance move, a piece of choreography, learning to play a piece of music on an instrument, because that's very physical. I mean, your whole body plays music. It's not just your hands or your mouth or whatever. All of that creates new neural pathways in your brain, because your brain has to send a signal to your hands, your feet, your arms, whatever is moving to do the thing. Your brain has to do the thing before your the rest of your body does the thing, and because many of us learn stuff like dance and music from an early enough age, hopefully we are going back to parts of our brains that got developed very early on. So even when you're like me and you've acquired a brain injury years later, those parts. The brain, if they've already been developed, they can actually fire up again. It's like, it's like, it's like digging through an old hard drive and retrieving old files. And I know I could use some computer analogies, but the brain, and it's so it's like, that. It's like retrieving old files off of an old hard drive and opening them up again, and music and dance in particular, but any sort of physical activity really seems to have that sort of almost magical effect on the brain. I know

Blake Hunsley
I read a lot about the effects of dance in particular on depression and the benefits of frequently doing enjoyable dance routines and activities even just in your own kitchen. Compare it against some some pretty intense medications for depression, it's pretty shocking how kind of on par The results are. It kind of blows my mind, just how effective it is. I know, personally I'm we talked about this an hour ago. I'm quite prone to depression, and if I don't get a certain amount of physical activity in my day, boy, does that rear its ugly head much, much faster. It takes very little physical activity to get me out of that rut and get me moving again. The effect is really immediate for me,

Terri Roberts
absolutely and the thinking now, and I feel this makes sense to me from personal experience as well, is that dance in particular is because it makes areas of your brain that are respond. Different areas of your brain light up, as they say, that are responsible for different types of like, organizational thinking, right? Like, am I on the beat of the music? And am I coordinating my limbs? You know, sometimes you might be doing one thing with your your left side of your body and another thing with your right side of the body.

Blake Hunsley
So you've seen me dance

Blake Hunsley
No one's saying I'm good. I just enjoy it.

Terri Roberts
and it's interesting now that I know all of this, because I'll look at brand new people coming to a dance class or a dance event, or they're coming to like an aerobics dance hybrid. I just taught a class last night, had some brand new people in the class. They've never danced before. They've never done aerobics before. So things that become very old hat once you've learned it are mind blowing to somebody doing it the first time, something that we consider very mundane, like a hamstring girl that's in every aerobics class since you know, we started doing aerobics in the early 80s, it's one of those standard moves everybody learns, but if you've never done it before, holy smokes, your brain is on fire for a moment when you're learning this. And the really cool thing for me as I as I watch the people in front of me following my instructions and mirroring my movements is I'm looking at people who have been coming to my Thursday night class every year for like, 12, 13, 14, whatever years it's been now, who, when they first started, couldn't do a hamstring curl. And now I don't even have to finish the phrase hamstring curl out of my mouth, and they're already doing it because they know I'm going to call that out at some point. They know how I cue the class and the neck. The next person over to them is going, I am lost what is happening. They're flailing. That you see the look of concentration on their faces. And in a few more weeks, they're going to be smoothed out, and this will be normal, and they're not even going to have to think about what a hamstring curl is. I'm going to start saying the word, and they'll do it,

Blake Hunsley
which is nice too, because they can recognize from the person next to them. I'm sure, I'm sure you have some kind people in that class, that kind of look. You know what? This was me not that long ago, and now you see how secondhand is for me. But that kind of brings me back to the whole theme of your entire career is that seems to be what you're doing is saying, okay, yes, you can do this. It's not as hard and the benefits are going to be like you're seeing in me and like you hear me talk about, and things that you might not think about, the clearing of the brain fog. That connection between mind and body is always so interesting to me, because I find I've talked to a number of particularly people who are going through severe depression, and they almost think of their body as this meat sack they're attached to, and it's like, no, it has so much your physical health has so much of an impact on your mental health and just on your thought processes. There's no There's no disconnect at all. You have just allowed yourself to become disconnected. So it's lovely that you're getting to you're still that informal support network, because unfortunately, and I'm curious about your thoughts on this, how far the system has come with formal supports, I wonder, do you have, do you see enough of a positive change to make you relieved in any way, or are we still...

Terri Roberts
Not in any tangible way? Tangible? I mean funding. I had to have some nasty words a few years back with when I was the ed for the fitness instructors Association, provincially mental health organizations, be they direct supports to patients or clients with mental health issues, be they government, be they research based what have you how all started about probably close to 10 years ago now saying, oh, exercise is great for mental health, things you should go. Exercise. What they failed to do in doing that was say anything about where to find exercise, what kind of exercise instructors to go to, what how to tell a good one from a bad one, anything like that. Where to get funding for that? Nothing. There was. There was just this blanket statement that became a sound bite in the mental health world that exercise is good for you. And yes, absolutely it is. There's not a fitness instructor on this planet who's going to disagree with that statement. However, we as the fitness industry had no warning of this. Oh no. We had no support from government. We had no training in mental health. It got to the point where myself and I had a board member who went above and beyond the call of duty of any volunteer at the time, she started calling around to all of the little community health boards in Nova Scotia and getting funding. And we eventually put on a special training for members, mostly for personal trainers, in fact, to take mental health first aid because it was getting desperate in our work lives, and see most, most fitness instructors, personal trainers across Canada, but especially here in the East Coast, work in the in the in the job part time. They have a day job or a part time job, or they they are entrepreneurs who work from home or something like that. So we don't have an employer who makes sure that we get professional development. We take responsibility directly, and we pay out of pocket for it in most cases, right? And so it became a financial problem as well as an access problem to get some kind of training. And I remember doing sort of follow up afterwards with a lot of the trainers who took that mental health first aid course and saying, it was great, but it was so generic that as a fitness instructor, it didn't really help me, and there needs to be a reckoning of providing mental health training for fitness instructors. The other thing is, of course, is that there is no legislation anywhere in the world that I've ever found, let alone here in Canada or Nova Scotia, that defines what a fitness instructor is.

Blake Hunsley
Okay? So there's no sort of like licensing or anything of that nature. Okay, so certification

Terri Roberts
is strictly voluntary. People with no certification whatsoever can hang out a shingle and call themselves a personal trainer. They can call themselves a fitness instructor or a yoga teacher, what have you. Fortunately, most people working in the sector do not do that. Most people do get some kind of credential. Thank heavens. Now those credentials vary in quality, in length, in depth, in everything, in expense, but generally speaking, you can have a very good fitness and start to come out of a course that takes a couple of weekends, because we'll crash course you through basic anatomy, basic adult education principles. You can tell a bad trainer if they don't know how to teach anybody can sit down and memorize an anatomy textbook, but if they can't teach it to anybody who, under has any level of understanding, including none, that's not it. That's not a trainer. To me. To me, a trainer or a fitness instructor is an educator. Mind you, that's also my personal bias, because I have an education degree, but I really when I was doing that work of leading that association and teaching those courses, I really leaned heavily into the education side of it, because instructor means teaching, trainer means teaching. It doesn't matter to me, if you can do 40,000 variations of squats, if you can't explain that to the person standing in front of you, it's got no it's got no use. It's got no practical

Blake Hunsley
use. And to say nothing of the real, the honest to god danger that I see of having a system that says, hey, exercise is great for your mental health. If you're in a mental health crisis, go exercise and then showing up to someone who doesn't know how to recognize those signs, let alone offer actual tangible exactly

Terri Roberts
the problem we ended up coming up against several years. A few years this is about, oh gosh, when was this? Was before the just before the pandemic hit. So about five years ago and we got, we ended up getting this, this board member who gave her all to get this funding. I mean, what a rigmarole she went through to get your bureaucracies on bureaucracies here to get this funding for us. And we went to a thing that was, like, announcing who was getting funding and stuff like that. And I, and one of the higher up people in mental health in this province, said, Oh, this, this is so brilliant. How did you decide this? I'm like, I decided we needed to do this because you left us in the lurk. Yeah,

Blake Hunsley
exactly, yeah. You created a gap that needed filled. That's how we decided to fill a gap.

Terri Roberts
And I had to fight to get this my board member, and I had to fight to get this funding. And her face fell, and I'm like, don't you ever throw another group of professionals under the bus like this again? Yeah, yeah. Don't you ever do this. Because not a single person in mental health, stopped to think, what about the fitness instructors? We're throwing people on their doorstep? Do they have training? Do they have supports? Do they have resources? No. The only thing that really saved us is that all of our training, and it has been like this since the late 80s, at least when we started formal training in Canada for this. But. Um, has been the rule that if you don't know what to do, you refer out, yeah, you refer your client to another person to mental we did do some, always did some mental health training around eating disorders and seeing in exercise, um, excessive exercise for people with eating disorders and body dysmorphia and things like that. But we really didn't do it for other mental health issues. And so that became the official rule, is, if you see something that looks like there might be a mental health issue here, you refer immediately out to other services. But of course, that's a referral. That doesn't mean the client takes you up on

Blake Hunsley
it, no, and it doesn't mean that, like you were saying, if somebody's not properly trained, that they'll even or have been through it themselves, that they'll know how to recognize that. And the only silver lining I can see here is that if there's one lesson we've learned today, it's that the most vulnerable people among us, they bounce back, so they're going to be okay. We we have unfortunately, we're reaching. We're the end. So I had to end with some sarcasm there. But of course, I do beyond thanking you for coming in today, I want to thank you for coming in monthly as you do, because I think you you, you've demonstrated that you have this sort of holistic understanding of people and where they're coming from and how you can tangibly help them, and in conjunction with what we're doing here, that's a really necessary component. I think we have a much higher success rate with our clients because we've added in a physical health component. That's not something that is our particular wheelhouse here. We're dealing a lot more with the mental side of things. And you always answer, and you come and you help, and you've been an immense help. Just so thank you very much for that. You get up to a lot of things out there, beyond classes. Once a month you reach so this is your chance. Terri Roberts, please, please show yourself thoroughly. There are so many places people can check out what you're

Terri Roberts
up to. You can search my name Terri with an I, or you can search the pink dumbbell problem and find me on all kinds of social media platforms. I've got a video channel on YouTube that hasn't been active lately, but because I've been doing other administrative work, you can find videos that I've done that are basically chunks of my master's thesis in in short pieces, and you can find me on all the social media platforms doing that work. Um, prior to COVID, I did a lot of public speaking work, which, of course, stopped during COVID and sort of switched to video work. Um, because I have been in that delivery mode for my content for quite a few years. I've given a lot of advice to people, fitness and otherwise, on how to add public speaking work to whatever it is you do, whether it's disability advocacy or training or what have you. So I am now with a few friends, fitness and dance friends, mostly starting and music friends. I've got, I've got a fitness friend, a dance friend and a musician friend, all starting this new project with me. We are starting a new organization called speakers Nova Scotia. The paperwork just went in a couple of days ago. I should hear from the government any minute now that we're official, that's where my career is headed now, but I'll still always be doing a bit of the fitness and health and advocacy work, and right now, a lot of my work is I'm not administrating the association or teaching the courses anymore. I've moved more into consultancy and advocacy work around fitness. So I'm talking to other NGOs. I'm talking to service organizations. I'm talking to occasionally when I can get through them, government departments, political parties, political caucuses, that kind of thing. And doing this exact sort of advocacy work and saying, okay, yes, you're going to agree with me that exercise is good, yes, that that is a given in society. Now, where can we take this? Where are disabled folks falling through the cracks? Where are persons of color not getting access? Where are there barriers to LGBTQ plus folks, which is a whole other area of barrierhood. I could

Blake Hunsley
pick your brain for an hour. Basically, we're gonna have you back in the future.

Terri Roberts
That's another podcast to come. You know, folks with disabilities, any my big thing is intersectionality, of course, because I do have formal training in academically in feminist philosophy, and that's a big cornerstone of what we do. So where are there people falling through the cracks? Because I am somebody who, going back to that story of the car crash, fell through several cracks. Yeah, I got ignored because of biases, but I also got, I got dismissed and unserved or underserved, because I fell through several cracks in the system at the time, and some of those gaps have been closed, but not enough, and not all of them, and they don't the closures haven't intersected when people have multiple areas of vulnerability or intersecting oppressions. So there's a lot of work yet to be done on this, and what I'm finding is there's people out there in the world who are. Doing this work, but they don't really have a platform for it. They don't really feel like doing podcasts or making YouTube videos. But I know I have filled some gaps with my video series, but it's still not enough. So now I'm at the point where I've been in this work for for 20 ish years now, coming up close on 20 years, and I'm at a point with my education level, my experience level, my age. What have you that some of the bigger players in this province are ready to listen. I'm older than some of the bigger players in this province now, and they're like, Yes, ma'am, whereas a few years ago, they were like, Hey, you're just a kid. I'm older than you. I know better. I'm not listening, so I'm really leveraging the fact that I hit a different demographic now, yeah, and get I'm trying to get more top, top level, so this can come top down, and I don't have to have to sort of talk to to people who are are struggling at at the beginning of their journey, I can start, hopefully setting some precedents and getting people to understand things at the policy level. I just had a big policy discussion with somebody in a medical field yesterday,

Blake Hunsley
because they still need the help. So that makes me happy. Here's a gap

Terri Roberts
in your you think you have a policy that doesn't even exist. You need to actually write this down, make it an official policy, and then educate your staff on it. And we had a really great chat about that, because there are there are norms, and then there are policies. And a lot of people think there are policies within the fact they've just got norms, yeah, and we need to put some some hard things in policies that they really happen and that there's consequences if they don't happen. So if your policy is to be LGBTQ plus inclusive, and somebody who's not part of that community does something that's not inclusive, you need to have a policy to follow to to either train them on that inclusion, or maybe relocate them to another another department, if it's or or maybe get them into a new career and out of this one if they're not going to follow policy, but if you don't have a policy, you got nothing to stand on. No, so, yeah, so I become a policy wonk, is what I'm doing.

Blake Hunsley
Well, I'm glad you're doing the work. Thank you for that. Frankly, I think you're doing more than enough of besides the policy work. Sounds like a horrifying thing to take on but I'm glad somebody's doing it. I'm glad it's you. I'm I'm just gonna be picking your brain for an hour after we turn off the microphone. I feel bad for our listeners now, but

Terri Roberts
You need to have an after hours version of the podcast so you can

Blake Hunsley
Within reach after dark. That's what we need to stay here until after sunset.

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
I do. I want to. I think a great way to wrap this up is one of the things you talked about was, you know, we still need to have, you know, access is still not you know, we need to have more access. But I did want to thank you, because I am a big believer that access, you know, does happen. You know, sometimes one person at a time, and you're providing or trying to create access in many areas of the things that you just described to us, my head's like very busy thinking about all the things that you're involved in. But just here at reachAbility, you're providing access, okay, to the clients of reachAbility that maybe had no idea that they could have access, right? Or giving them maybe that opportunity to realize, oh, this is bringing that, you know, kind of, that joy back to my life if I do this, and then finding, where can I go, how can I access? Because I think that is a real, that is a real, that is a real thing. You know, when people hit a certain you get at a certain rut, if you will, in your life. And, you know, one side of your brain probably knows what you should do, but somebody needs to be there to kind of give you the little pull. You know, that's very important work. One

Terri Roberts
of the things that we haven't really touched on yet is is how disability and poverty intersect, right? And unfortunately, access to trained, certified fitness instructors and personal trainers is a is a poverty problem because, quite frankly, it's expensive and there's not, in most cases, there's not a way to access that if you are, you know, living paycheck to paycheck, or if you are under paid or on disability benefits or things like that. So there are some if you're in HRM, for example, there are some ways to access recreation facilities for low or even sometimes no cost. A lot of even the expensive gyms will allow you to, say, volunteer your time in exchange for a gym membership for however many hours or what have you. That's not super well known, and we've really got a picture in our minds that accessing gyms and personal trainers in particular is a luxury service. Well,

Shelley Alward-MacLeod
you you you already described like you know when the when you know. When the Mental Health Association came out and said, fitness, okay, will help with your mental wellness. Well, wellness, wellness, please cut that part that that. So now I'm in this, you know, as a client, I'm in this conundrum. Okay, great. You're telling me I need this from wellness, but I don't have any leftover money. How do I assess it? Right? So I agree. I think there's a we could go on. I think there's another session

Terri Roberts
on just on the financial Exactly. The flip side of that is that there's a lot of great fitness things that are free again on YouTube and online. But how do you know who's a good instructor, right? And there's

Blake Hunsley
some bad YouTube and videos are all great, but you coming in here gives people not only the fact that you've been you're someone that we trust you or we trust your background, we trust your knowledge base, we trust your level of empathy with the clients, which is huge for our clients from their backgrounds, but also they get the chance to ask you questions, which is so much fun. Oh, my God. And also, just the one major failing of learning things from YouTube is you don't get to actually ask about these things. And sometimes it's not something that might have been important for the instructor to mention, because it isn't relevant to absolutely every person, but it is the one thing that is preventing this person from even beginning their journey. So to have you here as just a knowledge base and a resource in someone people feel comfortable asking questions too is a massive asset our client base intersectional. Just, oh my, the intersecting barriers faced by our clients and by our staff here in a lot of cases, yeah, that's a long laundry list. So to have you here, helping people who are facing multiple barriers is a massive, massive asset. Thank you for that. We're going to put all of your links in the show notes so that people can find you. They can also find you here at reachAbility. So if you, if you somehow can't find Terri through her many, many videos, links and public activities, you can always call us here at reachAbility, 902-429-5878. You can write to us at withinourreach@reachAbility.org, we will connect you as well. And yeah, I'm sorry. I'm just gonna say it right now. I'll be shocked if this is your sole appearance on this podcast. I have many questions,

Terri Roberts
many things to talk about. Yes, absolutely perfect.

Blake Hunsley
Thanks for listening to within our reach. We'll be back in two weeks with our next episode. If you have an idea for an episode, topic you'd like us to cover, or if you'd like to join us as a guest on the podcast, reach out to us at withinourreach@reachAbility.org.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai