Combat hopak as a lifestyle

They walk barefoot on broken glass and hot coals, lie down on nails, lift the bar twice as heavy as their bodies, win medals at prestigious championships and defeat their own weaknesses. As much as 32 children with disabilities attend the combat hopak school Dzhura in the town of Dubrovytsia, Rivne region. They train as much as healthy students and are often bolder and more daring. The school’s manager Petro Velynets has founded the sports club for the disabled at the institution. He has developed his own method of rehabilitation and was his own first test subject.

When he was seven years old, Velynets was injured in a car crash, which left him in a coma, clinically dead for a while, with an open brain injury and many fractures. Doctors saved his life, and for several years the boy lived in a sort of limbo. His brother came to the rescue, forcing Velynets to exercise. “I started to do push-ups on the floor – the only thing I could do because of a spinal injury,” he recalls. “At 15, I broke my high school’s record, having done 100 push-ups.” Later on, he began making sports equipment while continuing his exercises and then going into bodybuilding, yoga, and combat hopak. As soon as he felt his life came back to normal, he decided to help others. In 2005 Velynets began to teach combat hopak to children. He got his first student with cerebral palsy that year. After only six months, the boy went to an unarmed combat tournament and defeated his healthy opponents.

Children with various conditions, from locomotor disorders to impaired hearing and vision are attending the club now. The 14-year-old Vasyl Rozhko is one of them. The boy has been wheelchair-bound since birth, but still, he attends lessons twice a week, coming from his village which is located 40 kilometers from the district center. Weighing just 35 kilograms, Rozhko is now able to lift the 72-kilogram bar. He says he has found the purpose of his life since he began to attend the lessons. “I want to go to the Paralympic Games and win gold in powerlifting,” the boy says, “and to meet the Klitschko brothers and ask them about the secrets of success.” Rozhko is already projected to enter Ukraine’s power lifting Paralympic team. He also plays chess, table tennis and even soccer, the latter as a goalkeeper, while his parents assure us their son has become more relaxed since he started to attend the club.

“My child feels he is needed there,” Oksana Cherniuk, the mother of 11-year-old Nazar Cherniuk says. “He is now stronger, both physically and mentally.” He had troubles with admission to kindergarten once, being seen as too weak to even attend it. The boy is now learning boxing together with healthy peers.

The club’s students are using Velynets-developed exercisers for training. His method of rehabilitation includes not only physical exercises. “Over 100 children attend my combat hopak school today, and the disabled are training together with the rest. Of course, I train the disabled one-on-one, too, but they need to communicate more than anything else. Therefore, such children train together with the healthy ones, and it does some good,” the school manager tells us. “Some techniques, like walking barefoot on broken glass, have more than one purpose. However, toughening up is the most important one. It gives more than just physical toughness. Generally, the disabled children find the courage to do it sooner than their healthy peers. Thus, they overcome their fear and become stronger, most importantly, spiritually stronger.”