VERO BEACH — Dean Martin’s voice drifts from a poolside boom box as about 40 people – mostly women – bob like corks in the Leisure Square swimming pool. Most wear sunglasses. Many wear hats, both straw and ball-cap styles.
They have one thing in common despite their differences in size and weight: They watch and listen as fitness trainer John Sammartano calls out from his perch at the side of the pool. He barks out orders, telling them to twist, turn and reach.
Sammartano, a bundle of sinewy energy, projects his voice over Dean Martin’s.
“Remember, if you have pain, please stop,” he says, during the stretching portion of the water aerobics class one morning.
“The senior population is what I really enjoy working with,” says Sammartano, of JAS Fitness, which specializes in exercise programs for older people and operates at Leisure Square. “Sometimes, the physical gains are small although the gains are substantial in the quality of their lives.”
For example, he says those gains can be as simple as people being able to garden without back pain or for a grandmother to walk around Disney World with her grandchildren without having to stop every 10 minutes to catch her breath.
Overall, Sammartano says his goal in either the pool or with his CORE and weight-lifting programs is to increase the leg strength and balance of seniors.
Besides those two goals, participants in Leisure Square’s programs often see other benefits from their fitness programs.
Sammartano’s water aerobics participants are quick to tout the value of the program as they wrap up an hour-long session.
Tom Hicks, 69, had both knees and a hip replaced. He’s had heart trouble and diabetes. He also has problems with his rotator cuff. He’s been taking the water aerobics class for nearly a year and he likes the results.
“My heart rate is slower, my cholesterol level is down,” he says. “I’ve lost 30 pounds and my diabetes is under control to the point that my doctor wants to take me off my medication.”
Hicks says his heart doctor is very pleased too. “He said it’s wonderful.”
“Many seniors move here and watch TV in their Lazy Boys,” says Hicks. “If you do that, one day you’ll be found dead in your Lazy Boy. I had two friends who were found dead in theirs.”
Blunt, but a problem in Vero Beach with its large population of seniors and elders.
Age shouldn’t be a roadblock to people getting out of those chairs, says Sammartano.
Asked what it takes to get someone out of his or her chair and into a fitness program, Sammartano points to the individual.
“Self-motivation is all that will get them out,” he says. “There also has to be a fear factor,” he says. “Do you want to be in a nursing home sitting in your own urine?”
Laura Craft, 64, understands that message.
A cancer survivor, she lost bone density for years before she started her fitness program eight years ago.
“It got worse and worse,” she says, “and then I got better. My doctors wanted to know what I did. My blood count started getting better. My oncologist said, ‘Don’t stop or you’ll die.’”
Of the options, Craft puts it in simple terms: “I think I’ll go with exercise. I don’t like to exercise. I do like to be healthy. Exercise carries over to eating. You eat healthier.”
She says it’s not too late for anyone to get involved in an exercise program.
“Olga Barberi is 90 and she is going to Sicily in September,” says Craft, who spent three weeks this spring backpacking in France.
Sammartano says he doesn’t place people in fitness programs based on their ages, but on their abilities after assessing their mobility and endurance.
He said a 70-year-old person might just have more mobility and endurance than someone much younger.
In fact, Sammartano says in his kickboxing class he pushes one 70-year-old student harder than he’d push a 40 year-old because the woman can handle it.
He says people have to get out of their chairs, but shouldn’t push too fast, too soon.
“You have to take baby steps. You have to ease into the program.”
For example, he says, the doctor of one of his 80-year-old clients wanted the man to walk more. He says the patient immediately went out and walked a mile but was in agony the next day.
“The doctor says go walk and he walks for an hour,” Sammartano says. “He needed to walk for 10 minutes, then 12 minutes, then 15 minutes and gradually increase.”
Prior to enrolling anyone in his classes, Sammartano evaluates the person using the Senior Fitness Test developed by the California State University, Fullerton.
That evaluation assesses strength, endurance, flexibility and agility.
Sammartano assessed a handful of patients last fall and re-tested this spring and notes that all of the individuals improved their physical fitness and ability to perform.
That, he says, now gives him a baseline from which to work with people.
Mareen Graham, 65, also appreciates the workouts and believes they saved her life when her heart stopped beating while she was in the pool two years ago.
“Thank God, John was there to pull me out,” she says, adding she was rushed to Indian River Medical Center, put into a drug-induced coma for six days and eventually got a pacemaker.
“It wasn’t exercise induced,” she says. “I was in good shape.”
Graham says she was in such good shape that after her pacemaker was installed, she was allowed to skip some post-surgical rehabilitation.
In fact, she says she went from having her heart stop to returning to her fitness regimen in just five months.
Elaine Morse, 75, has been in Sammartano’s water aerobics class for four years. She also participates in his CORE program.
She says she includes some form of fitness training five days a week, a number she claims her husband thinks is too much.
Morse, who spends her summers in Maine and Massachusetts, disagrees and is obviously fond of Sammartano.
“He watches every move,” she says of Sammartano, noting her knee – that she had surgery on – is fine now and credits Sammartano’s programs for that.
Morse isn’t alone in her affection for Sammartano and what he does.
As the song, “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” winds down, Sammartano clicks off the boom box and the pool empties although many for his class linger to talk with their instructor or talk about him and what they can do now that they could not do before fitness training.
“John makes it so interesting, you want to come back,” says Hicks. “Just look at me.”
