Healthy People - Longer Lives

He's a man on a mission. Meindert Hinlopen hopes to level the playing field when it comes to personal training. His company's focus is to help people with developmental disabilities get in shape and find their passion. Say hello to Spectrum Health in this Encouraging Abilities podcast!

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Healthy People – Longer Lives

 

00:05

Welcome back to DDA's Encouraging Abilities podcast where we talk about anything and everything related to the disability community, primarily the developmental disability community. I am your host, DDA Communications Manager, Evan Kelly. Today is actually part three of our Accessible Sports series. We've done podcasts with BC SportAbility and Sirota's Martial Arts Academy. Today we're talking with Meindert Hinlopen. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Who is...

 

00:33

getting people with developmental disabilities involved in working out and working with him, a personal trainer. Now, Mindert is a graduate of SFU, he's a registered kinesiologist and NCCP certified coach with Special Olympics here in BC, specifically with basketball, hockey and track and field. Now, he spent the last few years on the care support team of Ben who has now joined us.

 

00:58

Ben was Mindert's first client. They started doing workouts to help improve his strength for Special Olympics floor hockey because Ben loves hockey. Who doesn't? He also collects hockey cards. We can talk about that in a bit. Now they progressed from doing the workouts in his house to going to the rec center. Now Ben is 26 years old. Mindert and the team are currently working with him to get stronger and faster for his Special Olympics.

 

01:27

hockey season. So, Mindert and Ben, thank you for joining me today. Hi, Evan. Thank you so much for having us on. I'm excited to get to talking and talk a little bit more about myself and what I do and Ben will say hi as well. Hey, Ben, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. So Mindert, what got you interested to be involved so much in the developmental disability community?

 

01:53

I really owe it actually initially to my older sister. She was volunteering for Special Olympics when I moved out to Burnaby and she convinced me to come and volunteer for Special Olympics Burnaby as well and from there I kind of just

 

02:13

grew a lot more in the community, volunteered for a number of years at Special Olympics, and then about three, four, five years ago. So I kind of wanted a bit of a change in my current career and decided I wanted to try a unique opportunity where I'll have the chance to work with someone that I haven't worked with before. And that was an awesome chance for me to kind of dip into.

 

02:34

the developmental disability community where I get to work with someone that, you know, I haven't had a lot of life experience with, and I've absolutely loved it, and I will continue to do it probably for the rest of my life. So how long have you been working with the developmental disability community now? So I've been volunteering with Social Olympics since 2015, and then I've been working with Ben for three years, or how long? About three years, yeah.

 

03:04

So what's the feedback you get from working with this particular group?

 

03:14

Ooh, the feedback. Well, I think the feedback I get is... I mean, I'll say my feedback. My feedback is I absolutely love it. Like, I love working with this group and I find it so...

 

03:29

One of my passions I'll say is being able to work with people from the developmental disability community and share my knowledge with them or helping them any way I can with what I've learned in my experiences. In terms of feedback they give me, I hope the feedback is, what do you mean, do you