One Secret to Health as a Wheelchair User

NEW MOBILITY HEALTH & WELLNESS July 2026 - View in browser IN PARTNERSHIP WITH KALOGON — SEATING THAT WORKS AS HARD AS YOU DO —

THIS MONTH: EMBRACING DISCOMFORT On the first of what I’d planned to be 10 laps on a steep hill in my everyday chair, my arms started burning midway up the block. Three-quarters of the way to the top, I wasn’t sure I had enough power to finish. When I got to the top, arms screaming and head woozy, I took a few deep breaths and then turned around. On the way back down, I thought of something my father-in-law had said to me years before. My wife and I were out to dinner with him. We were recounting a touring trip we’d just finished, me on a handcycle, Kelly on a bicycle. I was detailing how difficult it had been physically — trying to pull myself over mountains day after day with two quad arms; Kelly carrying more than 100 pounds of gear over the same terrain. “If it’s so hard, why do you do it?” he asked. “Because it feels so good when you get where you’re going,” I said. “Yeah, well I could hit myself in the head with a hammer and it’d feel pretty damn good when I stopped,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I want to hit myself in the head with a hammer.” I shrugged. I didn’t have a great response. SPONSORED CONTENT Read One User’s Experience With Bondar New Mobility put Kalogon’s Bondar backrest to the test. Read how its customizable support, single-tool adjustability, and field-modifiable design helped deliver the balance of positioning, freedom, and function the reviewer needed -- earning praise for thoughtful hardware and adaptability. COASTING Before I started in on those laps, I’d been sanding cabinet faces in the house Kelly and I had just bought. We’d bought a fixer-upper with heavy emphasis on the fixer because it was the only thing we could afford. The renovation was taking forever because we had two young children, two full-time jobs and were doing the work ourselves. Kelly had been putting in days at a time at the house, and now it was my turn. She'd taken the kids to visit family, and I'd stayed back to power through a week of work with no distractions. Back hurting, hands twitching from pressing an orbital sander into 73 years of paint, I looked at my phone and realized it was 9 p.m., and I hadn’t taken my dog on a walk. I grabbed her leash and rolled out the door into our new neighborhood. I was only planning on a quick loop, but it felt damn good to be outside and moving. For the past five years I’d been living in a rural area, where I had to drive everywhere. I was 43 and still in good shape, but felt like I’d been coasting on the fitness I’d built over 10-plus years as a full-time athlete. I knew that being strong and fit felt good, but if I didn’t start pushing myself again, I was going to lose it. So, when I saw a particularly steep, one-block stretch, I wondered if I could do 10 laps on it. “It’s going to hurt. You’re going to want to stop,” my subconscious replied. GOOD PAIN Lap one brought the pain, but lap two hurt the same. I took that as good news. Lap three hurt more than lap two, and as I barely made it over a sidewalk crack near the top, I started to wonder whether I’d make it to 10. The reason I kept going isn’t that I’m a big, tough guy. It’s that I understand the difference between good pain and bad pain. Bad pain is your shoulder twinging, warning you that a tendon is about to do something you really don’t want it to. Good pain is a burning in that same shoulder, telling you that a few days from now, it’s going to be stronger. I learned that in college, when I couldn’t make it from class to class in time, so I started pushing laps on the hills outside my dorm a couple of times a week. Within a few weeks, I could stay for all of Writing 101 and still make it to Animal Behavior in time. I began going to wheelchair rugby practice. I could barely move the heavy chairs, so I added weights at the campus gym. Lifting and rugby both hurt more than pushing outside my dorm. But after a few months of my new routine, rugby started to get more fun. And for the first time since my accident, I had the strength to transfer back into my wheelchair after I hit a crack in the sidewalk and tumbled out of it. The more I pushed myself, the more I found that there was a direct relationship between how hard I was willing to push myself and the gains I’d collect on the other side. WONDER DRUG Laps four through nine were a grind. On the ascents I focused on my mechanics. On the descents, I was done having to reason my way to the next lap and settled into the kind of calm focus I only experience during extended physicality. I felt strong, and for the first time since I started pushing these laps, I was glad I’d committed myself to the task. Strength can be optional for nondisabled people. It isn't when you don't have many muscles to work with. I still get out of breath pushing across a gravel parking lot. I have to gather myself to lift a pot of water onto the stove. Stabilizing myself with one arm and pressing an orbital sander into seven layers of paint is an extended isometric workout. Maximizing my own strength hasn’t just helped my health and fitness; it has been the surest way to increase the amount of stuff I can do in my everyday life. Building strength and fitness is also the closest thing humans have to a wonder drug. In eight years of writing and editing health and wellness articles for New Mobility, I've seen one recommendation pop up in almost every topic. Would you like to sleep better? Be active early in the day. Lower your blood pressure, improve your heart health? Get consistent physical activity. Improve your mood? Live longer? I bet you can guess the answers.   The author found handcycle touring an especially helpful way to learn how to embrace discomfort. When you have a disability, it’s easy to get lost in the comparison game. Brook McCall wrote a fantastic article, “How to Compare (and NOT Compare) Your SCI to Others,” in 2019. Looking at other wheelchair users to find ideas for new ways to do things can be incredibly helpful. But if you’re looking at others who have the same injury level as you and wondering why you’re not able to do what they are or as an excuse to not push your own limits, those are holes you don’t want to dig. Rick Hayden, a T8 incomplete para injured in 1976, put it this way: “You can line up 10 people right now who have a T8 injury, and you would have 10 distinct situations, life scenarios, abilities and attitudes. So, a long time ago, I just stopped worrying about that, but I compare my body how it is now to the body I had in the past.” Both parts of his quote are important. First, injury labels can give you a rough idea of what muscles might work or not. But with varying levels of completeness, strength before injury, access to rehabilitation and a thousand other factors, those labels can mean next to nothing in the real world. Therefore, the only person you should be comparing yourself to is you. Push yourself to move your baseline forward. It’s entirely possible you struggle and fight and never reach your original goal. But failure moves the needle a lot more than never trying. THE OTHER SIDE On lap 10, my arms didn’t want to go anymore, but the pain didn’t feel any worse than lap one. I made it to the top of the hill. I rolled back toward the house, exhausted but with my head still buzzing. It was now 10 o’clock and I still had work to do, but I felt a whole lot better than when I’d rolled out the front door. Sports taught me what lies on the other side of discomfort, but the skill is transferable. The right kind of discomfort plus effort produces results. Once you’ve internalized that, it’s a lot easier to take on whatever challenge presents itself: learning a new skill at work, making your diet healthier, remodeling a house that no one else wanted to buy. You know it's going to be uncomfortable. You know you'll want to stop. You commit anyway. More than a decade after that dinner, I finally have a response to my father-in-law. Spend eight hours riding your bike. Spend a night sanding cabinets and doing hill repeats. Spend a lifetime pushing past your comfort zone. You’ll wind up in a better place than you started. The same cannot be said of hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.