Exercising with Parkinson's: The good, the bad and the need for support to keep exercising. A qualitative study

Objectives: To explore the experiences of people with Parkinson's disease exercising and to determine if the location (home versus centre) or exercising in a group impacted on their experience. Design: A qualitative study. Participants: Community-dwelling people with mild to moderate Parkinson's disease who had undertaken a 10-week exercise intervention. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 participants; nine participants had completed 10-weeks of predominately home-based exercise and eight participants had predominately centre-based excercise. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Four key themes emerged. Two themes: ‘targeted exercise is important when you have Parkinson's disease’ and ‘support helps me to gain the most from the exercise’, were related to exercising with Parkinson's disease and were not specific to location. Two themes encompassed the perceptions when exercising at a centre in a group compared to exercising at home: ‘the good and the bad of exercising in a group’ and ‘exercising at home, can I do it?’ Conclusion: Experiences of people with Parkinson's disease when exercising were primarily influenced by the prescription of specific exercise and the support provided. There was no clear preference for the location of exercise but maintaining the motivation to exercise at home was challenging.