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Dear Rita, Thankyou for sharing your exercise experiences with me.You are doing a super job at keeping active and I wish more people had your attitude and energy! I would like to give you some feedback on your swimming training and then address some of the other interesting points you made. I was a competitive swimmer in Germany for 8 years. Now I teach swimming and aerobic dance at Florida State University. You say you have never been able to increase your time in the water. If you are swimming one stroke continuously the muscles you are using will fatigue rapidly. Try alternating lap-to-lap from one stroke to another.You will definately feel less fatigued. Fatigue in swimming is also caused by an inefficient stroke technique. A good book to read about stroke technique can be ordered from your local American Red Cross Chapter.Until then, you may want to try this: Instead of using your legs and your arms in the water, try using arms only and use a floatation device for the legs (this is called a "pull-boy"). Your left leg is causing a lot of drag in the water. This drag will definately slow you down and it also keeps you from being streamlined. Your best alternative is to use a pull-boy when swimming the freestyle or backstroke and to work on making the upper body stroke more efficient. If you always train the same way, you will find it difficult to change your time in the water. The body responds best to things which are new and unusual. Your body has adapted to the stress that you are putting on it and it will not change until you modify your routine. Another way to increase training time is by changing your workout intensity. You can do this by swimming multiple laps and then resting for a short period of time and then swimming multiple laps again. There is much more of this in the American Red Cross Book. The key is to change your training once the body no longer responds favorably to the stimulus. You mention that you tried Nautilus (wonderful machine) but are weak on your right side. If you train your left side only, your right side will also benefit in terms of strength. You can train unilaterally on many Nautilus machines. Your leg muscles need strengthening, and if you can only do one side then this is better than nothing. Swimming will not increase the strength in your leg muscles the way weight training will. I do not know if swimming training can help with balance.I'm also using Nautilus in my dissertation. I hope that you will alllow me to disagree with you concerning the what you said about the therapeutic effects of exercise, its ability to enhance a persons life and to reduce the degree of their disability. I believe that you may be underestimating the benefit of exercise in helping you to overcome your "condition". I believe that exercise can significantly help a person overcome their disability. It makes persons more independent and autonomous and they must rely less on others for help maintaining their quality of life. This is not an opinion, but a statement based on a growing body of scientific and clinical evidence. Here are some ideas which you may allready be familiar with and what we know from the literature: Persons who are fallers and have PD can be trained to reduce the odds of falling, can be trained to improve their reaction time, can be trained to improve their strength and cardiovascular endurance, can be trained to speak like "healthy" adults through speech therapy etc etc. The less disabled a person appears in the eyes of others, the less disabled that person will actually become in their own eyes and also in the eyes of society. Off course this can't happen overnight. There is a great deal of information on the benefits of exercise for PD. We are constantly learning new things. It is an exciting field isn't it? Maybe it is true that exercise cannot STOP a degenerative disease. We won't know that until we have studied the long-term effects of regular exercise in persons from a time of health to disease onset. Exercise can delay the onset and slow the progression of certain diseases.For example, this has been shown in studies conducted with Alzheimers and in my opinion it will also hold true for Parkinson's disease. I believe that a person who exercises on a regular basis could end up requiring less medication as the brain starts to sprout new dendritic connections. This is such a "young" field. But we are allready seeing very positive exercise results for PD. You say that exercise has not stopped your degenerative process. But can you say that, with confidence, it has not slowed the progression? The longer you can hang on to what you have left in the way of strength, endurance, flexibility, and dopamine producing neurons, the less disabled you will be. Keep up the good work. Swimming is a wonderful activity, one that will enhance your quality of life for years to come. -- Sincerely, Mark Hirsch ([log in to unmask]) PS Let me know how the swimming works out for you.