COVID Helped Open Door Exercise Classes Grow

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — The wellness program at Open Door Family Medical Center has discovered a positive consequence of the coronavirus pandemic: a wider reach and a strong new community.

For years, free, it offered daily exercise classes in its Ossining and Port Chester studios to patients, many of whom were enrolled or had previously taken the center’s year-long certified National Diabetes Prevention Program.

But when in-person classes were no longer considered safe because of COVID-19 and the attention of its wellness team primarily focused on an emergency food distribution program designed to meet the needs of the hundreds of homebound Open Door families suffering from food insecurity, the exercise studios went dark.

The program, paid for by donations from the Open Door Foundation, reemerged 16 months later in July 2021 in the only way it could —with virtual classes.

The new program — which, like the in-person classes, is offered in English and Spanish – started slowly. Soon, however, according to Leanna D’Agostino, wellness program coordinator and a certified fitness instructor, the virtual classes started filling up.

Many were familiar faces who had taken the in-person classes for years.

But pretty soon friends told friends, increasing the number of participants. Furthermore, Open Door realized that while it had attracted only residents of Ossining and Port Chester to the nearby studios, it could now cast a wider net by reaching its patients across the region, including Brewster, where there is also an Open Door site.

Then there are remote participants like Orange County resident Diana Zaldivar de Solares. She believes that the virtual classes – she takes circuit training on Mondays, kickboxing on Tuesdays and Pilates on Wednesdays – actually offer other benefits over the in-person classes she had taken for five years (beginning with her enrollment in NDPP, which educates participants to reduce their risk of developing diabetes).

While Open Door does offer pre-recorded online exercise videos on its website, Zaldivar de Solares said she prefers having an instructor she can interact with in real time.

“It was a little weird for me at first with my kids at home,” she said. "But it’s been a benefit for them too. They can also exercise." She said it's good for her children to see her exercising and practicing a healthy lifestyle.

She also likes the continuity of working out with familiar instructors, which having moved her family to Orange County from Ossining in September, would not have been practical.

The Open Door staff faced a number of early challenges. Some of their clients who expressed interest in taking the classes were not computer savvy. Others lacked the bandwidth to connect. Still others shared a single Internet connection with their children, who needed it for school. Some struggled to exercise in tiny apartments, with little available space and the distraction of young kids running around.

Wherever possible, the staff worked to ease the transition.

“Our patients were living through a pandemic, and getting them to refocus on making healthy lifestyle changes was hard,” D’Agostino said. “We wanted them to know that they could still exercise to relieve stress instead of turning to unhealthy alternatives to cope.”

Even the instructors found they needed to make changes. Some, like D’Agostino, continued to teach her classes from the Ossining exercise studio, while others preferred to lead the Zoom exercises from home.

“In the beginning, I found it challenging to position myself and the computer to appropriately demonstrate the movements, while still trying to observe what the participants were doing,” said D’Agostino. “I remember saying, ‘Point your feet out,’ and those watching on Zoom would all stop what they were doing and say ‘what?’ ‘who?’ … There was a learning curve.”

Now patients have started to connect not as part of a health center, but as part of a community, said Claudio Villarroel, Open Door’s Associate Director of Wellness Programs.

Added D’Agostino, “People really encourage each other and have formed bonds. They look for each other on Zoom during the class and if they don’t see someone, they text them. It’s been very positive.”