Video: Anderson County’s Easy Exercise To Overcome Program Is Always About Mind and Body
The OverEasy Exercise To Overcome program in Anderson County focuses on keeping seniors active with a “use it or lose it” mindset.
Improve your health, improve your mind, improve your life: three things in a slogan that was coined in 2019 and that still go together for Kelly Jo Barnwell as director of the Anderson County Senior Citizens Program. The OverEasy Exercise to Overcome focuses on staying fit and using a series of exercises to overcome a variety of challenges seniors face.
OverEasy Exercise is a personal business developed by Barnwell that is offered throughout Anderson County.
“The program is really working on the Alzheimer’s prevention research to be able to name exercises,” Barnwell said. “Use those named exercises in different sequences on the right and left side of the body so that our minds are always engaged with our bodies.”
According to the online library schedule, Tami Zaphiris, a librarian at the Belton Library, teaches an OverEasy Exercise To Overcome class every other Thursday from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
Zaphiris is trained to lead a class, and on any given Thursday she leads a group of nine through a series of movements and exercises. The class at the library is free and open to anyone. “We’ve had 18 at a time,” she said.
The Anderson County Library System has implemented many things to attract people to the building. “We have crafts, we have cards, two different types of book clubs, and now we offer the Over Easy classes,” she said. “We also have a children’s program and a story hour every Monday morning. People are coming all the time; our numbers have gone up quite a bit since January.”
A mile away, on Blue Ridge Avenue at the Belton Recreation Center, another class is practicing another OverEasy Exercise To Overcome class in the gym. Several seniors are swaying to upbeat music and instruction from Kelly Jo Barnwell, director of the Anderson County Jo Brown Senior Citizen Center.
“At my age, I have to keep my joints moving or I get frozen joints,” said Bill Eaves, 80, of Anderson County.
“It helps tremendously with my ability, especially with the neck stretches, to ride and see what’s coming. I started this class when it opened in 2018, and I was just recovering from breast cancer treatments, and it has literally helped me get my life back,” said Gloria Eaves.
“We have fun, laugh a lot and get rid of the pain,” said Lisa Fisher.
The class gets its name from her late mother, Jo Brown, who was the director of the Anderson County Senior Citizens Program. “In the early ’80s, they just decided to give their practice a name. They called it OverEasy. We took it to the next level,” Barnwell said.
Barnwell explained the program: “So our exercises are called in a different order depending on what side of the body we’re working on, and we try to keep them in the right order so that we can recall with our memory what we just did. It can be as simple as our hamstring-kneecap stretch; it’s called filled. And we do filled on our right side. And then we ask them what do we need to do to do our stretch on our left side. They say, ‘Fulfilled! ‘”
“Our aches and pains and groans and moans, or the mess and stress and fuss and curses, or the setbacks and bumps that always end in triumph,” she said. “As our victors say, ‘If you don’t use it, you lose it.’”
