in Asian martial arts from the International Council of Higher Arts Education and Applied Science. But Erez wasn’t going to stop at swimming, martial arts and pumping iron. A meeting with a spinal injury support group in 2008 brought him to his next physical challenge: wheelchair basketball. When Miki arrived at his first Miami Heat Wheels practice with his crutches, he began to see wheelchairs in a new light. “Everybody was playing basketball, running here and running there with the wheelchair,” Erez said. “I was sitting there like an idiot. I couldn’t participate in anything.” The team managed to scrounge up an extra wheelchair with some dings and cracks. Miki jumped right in. And he never stopped. Using a wheelchair, Miki didn’t need to sit every few minutes to relieve his joints. Lisette didn’t have to slow her walking to match his pace. Nothing was “too far” anymore. The constraints of his pride began to loosen with each practice. “This is really when my brain switched from walking to sitting,” Miki said. “I saw the capabilities.” Miki has spent the last 12 years on the team. In 2015, he and his teammates won the National Wheelchair Basketball Association championship in Louisville, Kentucky. Lissette, who never misses a practice or game, thinks of the players as bionic people. “You see part man, part machine being one,” Lissette said. “It’s very strange. But these guys are amazing when you see them moving. It’s even beautiful.” Ever since he’d crawled on the floors of gyms years ago, Miki knew the disabled community needed a safe and independent way to stay fit. He decided to do something about it on the way home from a Tony Robbins motivational convention in 2000. As inspirational quotes from the day lingered in his mind, memories of his first days living with a disability overcame him. For Miki, taking control of his fitness had been the most important aspect of mental and physical rehabilitation. It meant he was strong enough to be completely independent and selfreliant. But over his years of physical training Miki found that gyms were never built for
disabled people, no matter what “accessible” labels they flaunted. Wheelchair users had to be able to safely take control of their own bodies without depending on rehab centers and physical therapists who had never been disabled. For this community, fitness is about more than physique—it’s a matter of life and death. According to Miki, it’s very easy to gain weight when you spend your life sitting. This, he said, can lead to other medical problems on top of one’s condition. “When a person has been sitting in a chair for many years, a lot of people think ‘oh poor thing, he wants to walk.’” Lissette said. “But it’s no longer a desire to walk. It’s a desire to be as strong and fit as you can while sitting.” When Miki and Lissette arrived at their Palmetto Bay home that night, Lissette retreated to their bedroom. But Miki silently slipped away to his office. Loose sketches and cryptic notes piled up across his desk. By sunrise, he’d rendered the first blueprints of what would turn into a 20-year project: the first-ever exercise machine system built especially for wheelchair users. He began to bring those drawings to life by piecing together a crude prototype in his own garage. The entire machine design was a compilation of Miki’s own training experiences. He crafted a harness inspired by those inside Air Force helicopters to secure the wheelchair user in place. He engineered a weighted pulley system for upper body resistance training. He incorporated a punching bag, familiar from his karate training. He added a handcycle (like a bike for your hands) to keep up his endurance for swimming. He hung a climbing rope to practice self-lifting out of the wheelchair. He spent years in trial and error, tweaking weights here, moving cables there. His basketball teammates, neurologist friends and even his own wife were the first to test the machine. After several more years of paperwork, planning, patenting and FDA approval, Miki finally set out to find a manufacturer. But not one in the United States would take on the challenge. “They told me it’s not that difficult to build it, but it has a lot of parts and is very complex. And I said, ‘So? When you build the washing machine, you do what? You build all the parts!’”
“I had a lot of time to think, a lot of time to feel sorry for myself and a lot of time to understand that if I’m not going to do it, no one else will do it for me,” said Erez.
After a three-year domestic search proved fruitless, he decided to look south of the border. Months later, Miki and Lissette voyaged to Mexico to see the first built machine in-person. Miki looked over every nut, bolt and screw of his now real-life masterpiece. He quickly pointed out flaws while Lissette, a native Miamian, translated his critiques in Spanish. With a lengthy list of adjustments and a deadline to make them, Miki vowed he’d be back. A year later, they returned and finally gave the green light to manufacture the machine. They call it: Wheelchair Fitness Solution. As of 2018, one machine now lives in clubX, a gym in Coral Gables, Florida. It’s the first of its kind to exist, let alone be available for public use. Miki and Lissette plan to start a non-profit organization dedicated to donating more machines to rehabilitation centers and organizations across the country. “You cannot say ‘I’m disabled, I can’t move, I’m too heavy, I’m too weak,’” said Miki. “This doesn’t help you. You have to turn your frustration into motivation.”
There are about 2.7 million wheelchair users in the U.S.
December 3rd marks International Day of Disabled Persons.
Instead of Handicappped say Disabled instead
Source: National Center for Biotechnology Information
Source: United Nations
Source: National Disability Authority
About 15% of our global population is afflicted with disabilities.
Source: United Nations
Winter 2020 DISTRACTION 53
