They Aren’t Taking Illnesses Lying Down : Clients of AIDS Services Foundation say exercise workout sessions give them “a sense of accomplishment.”

Like any good personal trainer, Cort Corson offers his clients at the ASF office plenty of encouragement when they’re working out. But he stops short of urging them to push their bodies beyond the limit with just a little more weight or a few more repetitions. He knows they’re already pushing themselves as hard as they can.

For some, that may mean traditional bodybuilding, increasing muscle mass by lifting progressively heavier weights. But for others, weights are out of the question. Instead, they lift their arms and follow along empty-handed, sitting in a chair or even lying on the floor.

ASF stands for AIDS Services Foundation, and these clients all have some manifestation of infection with HIV. Some have no symptoms and have merely tested positive for the virus. Others have AIDS-related complex (ARC) or AIDS itself.

Corson has worked with more than 75 clients in the two years he’s been volunteering at ASF. Usually they come in about four or five at a time to his three-day-a-week lunchtime sessions. Attendance is sporadic; Corson understands when a client just doesn’t feel up to coming in. But still he encourages them to move around as much as they can, even if they have to do exercises in bed.

“I tell them they have to get up off their duffs and do something,” he says. “Doctors are finally learning that when you’re sick, the worst thing in the world for you to do is to lie down.”

Jim, 34, of Laguna Beach, knows that firsthand. He was an athlete in college, then he continued lifting weights and working out until about a year and a half ago when his symptoms of AIDS-related complex began to worsen.

“I started getting weaker as the virus progressed,” he says. “I felt like I should just quit. So I just about quit everything: I quit my job, I quit working out, I just rested in bed, like the doctors told me to do. I just got worse. I lost all my muscle tone, I had no energy at all, and then depression set in. That lasted for about nine months, and finally enough people sparked me to get back into moving and exercising.”

By then, he had progressed to AIDS.

Corson still remembers Jim’s gray complexion when he walked slowly and stiffly into his first workout session at ASF. Just to get enough energy to make it there, Jim had spent more than two months exercising at home, progressing from stretches to pushups and sit-ups.

“I felt better right away,” Jim says. “If I missed a day, I didn’t feel as good. I had less muscle soreness, but also a feeling of accomplishment, like, ‘I did something today.’ ”

Now, in addition to going to Corson’s sessions as often as possible, Jim walks three days a week for 20 minutes or longer. Some days, he says, “Just going to the store is an aerobic workout.

“You have to set your sights a lot lower. You can’t expect to go work out for two hours and sweat. You can only do what your body tells you to do.”

In addition to the problems from the virus and its accompanying opportunistic infections, Jim is also battling the side effects of the medicines he takes to combat those problems. He makes a point of moving his feet, even in bed, to ward off the nerve problems related to DDC, the medicine he now takes to inhibit the HIV virus.

Jim lost more than 45 pounds in the early part of his illness. “I couldn’t take a bath without putting towels in the bathtub to sit on. I was just too bony,” he says. Now he’s still about 15 pounds under his pre-AIDS weight, but he has built back not only muscle tone, but bulk as well.

“I really didn’t think I could,” Jim says. “I thought I’d be skinny the rest of my life.”

Jim says he tried going to a gym to work out a couple of times, but “it just didn’t work out. I left there just beat, and I didn’t really do that much. It’s so hard to do with all those other people there. They’re in a hurry, and you just can’t rush.”

Because of various AIDS-related problems, including blood clots in his chest, Jim says, “I have to really watch my strenuous exercise. When I get tired, I have to sit down. I don’t worry where I’m at, or who I’m with, or what I’m doing. I just sit down. That’s what’s so nice about working out with Cort. He really understands that.”

Corson came up with the idea for the class while studying exercise physiology at UC Irvine. “I just kept thinking there had to be something these people could do,” he says. With donated equipment and cabinets and weight racks built by one of the clients, he turned a conference room at the ASF offices into a part-time gym.

The city of Costa Mesa recently endorsed Corson’s classes with a $2,000 grant for additional equipment.

Each client determines the amount of weight he or she feels is appropriate, as well as the number of repetitions, with guidance from Corson. “Form and breathing is more important than the amount of weight. That’s true for anyone, but especially for these people,” Corson says.

Some clients have gone against their doctors’ advice to participate in the exercise program. But Sherman Williamson, a family physician in Orange who has treated people with HIV infection since the early days of the epidemic, says emphatically that exercise is helpful to those with HIV infections, just as it is for those with other illnesses.

“I recommend it for anybody,” he says. “I don’t single people with AIDS out as anything different. Anybody with any kind of chronic illness needs to maintain their physical strength.

“Life goes on, and we must maintain the temple in which our life occurs, which is our body,” Williamson says. “Exercise helps in maintaining endurance and strength, improving resistance, diminishing recovery time, and it gives you a greater sense of well-being.

“A person with full-blown AIDS could be more physically fit than (Arnold) Schwarzenegger, or so ill they don’t have the energy to brush their teeth,” he says. “Whatever level they’re at, I push all my patients to the max at all times. We have to make life happen for us. Otherwise, it’s going to happen to us.”

Williamson says the psychological benefits of exercise for people with AIDS or other chronic diseases are even more important than the physical, although “they’re so enmeshed you really can’t separate them.”

Jim’s workout partner for a recent session was Dave, 28, of Santa Ana, who tested positive for HIV a year ago. “The day after Christmas, I just hit the bed,” he says. He was hospitalized shortly after that, and the doctors found he had hepatitis B and syphilis along with the HIV virus. Both problems cleared up after a couple of months, and so far Dave has no AIDS-related symptoms, “other than the psychological effects.”

He takes AZT to halt the reproduction of the virus.

“I was going to the gym before I got the diagnosis, off and on for a few years,” Dave says. “But Cort has taught me the right way to work out. Now I exercise, try to eat well, take vitamins and try to stay as healthy as I can.”

Exercise, Dave says, helps him deal with the stress of knowing he carries the HIV virus. “With the workouts and the AZT, I feel like I’m doing something against the virus. . . . And that’s a good feeling.”

“No one has any idea how strong the brain is in controlling the body,” Corson says. “But we do know that getting oxygen into the body is a tremendous plus in fighting any kind of disease.”