20 Years of Medical Fitness in Rochester

Rochester School of Fitness opened in November 2006. It started with a conversation between a client and her trainer.

The front desk in our first year, 2006.

How it began

I'm Mido Zelenjakovic. Before I was a trainer, I was a professional volleyball player and coach in Europe. I hold a bachelor's degree from SUNY Brockport and am MedFit-certified as a Medical Fitness Specialist, Adaptive Fitness Specialist, Geriatric Fitness and Lifestyle Specialist and Parkinson's Fitness Specialist, and I am a Certified Nutritional Coach. Dr. Cathy Hahn, a pediatrician and a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, first came to me as a client at Oak Hill Country Club. Over time we became very good friends.

As a pediatrician, Cathy was seeing more and more children who were overweight or severely obese, and some were already showing signs of chronic diseases usually seen in adults. We began talking about a gym built to work with chronic disease, starting with those children and their families.

It turned out to be a gym for everyone: people of all ages living with chronic conditions.

Dr. Cathy Hahn with a young client, 2006.

What Rochester looked like then

In 2006 we did not know of anything like it in Rochester. If you had Parkinson's, a cancer history or a new diabetes diagnosis and had been told to exercise, there was not much place to turn for supervised, condition-aware training. We were the new program.

What has changed

Twenty years ago, "exercise is medicine" was a slogan. Today it appears in mainstream clinical guidance. The American Diabetes Association's Standards of Care in Diabetes—2026 treat physical activity as a core part of diabetes care. A 2019 consensus statement from an international roundtable led by the American College of Sports Medicine concluded that exercise is generally safe for cancer survivors and can improve outcomes such as fatigue, physical function and quality of life. And a 2019 Cochrane review of 108 trials found that exercise reduces falls in older adults living in the community. A physician who tells a patient to exercise is following that guidance.

What is still missing is somewhere to send the patient, where the person supervising understands the diagnosis. That gap is why we exist.

What we have learned

1. Consistency matters more than the perfect plan. The best program, skipped, is worse than a decent one someone keeps doing. Most of our work is designing around what a person will actually do.
2. Nutrition is half of it, and it is the half people are often left alone with. Knowing what to eat is different from being able to cook it on a tired Tuesday evening. Nutrition classes and a food log are part of what we do.
3. The family is part of the program. Spouses, care partners and adult children are usually the ones who help a change stick.
4. Honesty about evidence earns trust. This year we published a piece saying the research does not show that boxing improves balance in Parkinson's, while we run a boxing program ourselves. People living with chronic illness have been oversold to for years. They notice when someone tells them the plain version.

A class in our first year, 2006.

An assessment in our first year, 2006.

The Fitness Initiative

Out of that experience came The Fitness Initiative (TFI), our nonprofit. It aims to do the same work for people who cannot afford a program like ours, because who can afford a healthier lifestyle should not decide who gets one.

What is next

We want to be a leading facility that works closely with the medical field on chronic disease, and we want TFI to grow so that everyone who needs support, regardless of income, can get it.

If you have been told to exercise and want it supervised by people who work with your condition every day, call 585-210-9542 or book a free assessment at rochesterschooloffitness.com. We are at 445 W. Commercial St., Suite #4, East Rochester.