New London — It happens every Tuesday and Thursday, this enclave of inspiration, that so very fittingly sustains Morgan Freeman’s timeless line from Shawshank Redemption:

You either get busy living, or get busy dying.

And there is no place in the city more alive than the Whaling City Athletic Club, home to Adaptive Boxing, a program helping people afflicted with Parkinson’s manage the neurodegenerative disease in the ring — of each other, for each other and by each other — swinging away at their ailments one punch at a time.

This is the brainchild of retired Lawrence + Memorial Hospital nurse Catherine Gualtieri, diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2015. She saw a feature on “Rock Steady,” a national boxing program for people with Parkinson’s, and wanted to localize it. Turns out Gualtieri’s verve in fighting Parkinson’s is nothing compared to her persistence.

“I knew of Kent Ward, who was a generous man and who had programs for kids (at Whaling City),” Gualtieri said earlier this week. “To my knowledge, he wasn’t charging them. He just wanted them there. I knew he was a man with a soul. I asked him to look up this video on boxing and Parkinson’s. Time passed and I contacted him again. More time passed and I contacted him again.”

Primer on Kent Ward: There aren’t many others in the city who have done more for kids. His gym, in addition to teaching skills that go well beyond boxing, has been a beacon.

“I thought, ‘this woman isn’t going anywhere,’ so I looked into it,” Ward said. “I talked it over with my daughter, Jen, who was in med school at the time. I’d been working with kids over the years but I thought we could do some good using this sport that’s been criticized for years as a danger. Now it kind of comes full circle to use it for something really good.”

And so for the last two years, more than a dozen Parkinson’s patients, some with hand tremors, some in wheelchairs, get in the ring with teachers and mentors to use boxing as a means to quell the disease’s progress. Some of them may walk gingerly, but they punch declaratively.

Ward, ever with the sense of humor, punctuates the proceedings with what he calls “Irish War Music,” as his students do “the gauntlet,” a series of stations where they are required to punch low and high, get their feet organized and use leg kicks.

“Before I started boxing, I could not balance on a BOSU (a dome shaped balance training ball), I couldn’t jump. I lost the ability to skip. I couldn’t balance on one leg,” Gualtieri said. “It might seem like, ‘who cares, why does a 67-year-old need to do that?’ But to dress yourself, you need to be able to lift up a leg. Balancing keeps you from falling.

“Today, I can jump rope, hop, skip, balance and stand on one leg. That’s from being here for two years. I talk to everyone that has Parkinson’s — women I think are a little more skittish about trying it — but I’ve gotten quite a few men interested in it. I wish more women would get involved.”

Richard Throwe, 77, of Griswold, also a two-year veteran of the program, has hand tremors associated with the disease. He’s had Parkinson’s for 10 years. And in many ways, he’s never, ever been better.

“Today I look out and see 14 people doing this and I want to cry,” Throwe said. “Kent always tells us ‘give it more than you want to give it. You have to control your brain. You can’t let it control you.’ You’re not going to beat this disease, but you’ve got to bust your butt to manage it.

“It’s the mental aspect. Not to get down on yourself. You have to get positive. If I see someone who’s too serious, I tell them, ‘I had to quit my job. I was a carpenter. No one would hold the nail.”

Then Throwe, who is tremor predominant, cracked, “I’d make a good bartender.”

Ward, yelling encouragement to his disciples the other day, told them “tell your brain what you want done. It’s a partnership. You and your brain. You need to fight like hell to regain what you lost.”

Later, Ward said, “I said this to them at the beginning: The guy at the control panel you were born with lost his job for some reason to the Parkinson’s guy. We’re training a new guy now. He’s in the doorway and he’s waiting. Pretty rugged dude. He learning. And when he’s ready, he’s taking the control panel over. That’s where we’re headed with this thing.”

It’s working.

“When people hear of a Parkinson’s diagnosis, they know part of the brain is dying off due to the disease process,” Gualtieri said. “The neurons that transmit the movement of dopamine, which is your hormone, are dying. What they found is that with enough exercise to make your heart rate high — in a 30-minute time frame per day or 150 minutes a week — that there are new neuropathways taking over, getting the benefit of almost like a runner’s high, where your brain is submitting other hormones. You get better movement.

“Sometimes, there is a certain component of apathy that comes with Parkinson’s. It gives you the feeling that you are not hopeless. You know you are fighting back. This is going to be for the rest of my life. But if I sit in that chair and vegetate, your body is going to deteriorate very quickly.”

You get busy living, or get busy dying.

“I’m steadier on my feet than I used to be and I have more endurance than I had when I was first diagnosed,” Tod Schaefer of Mystic, diagnosed a year and a half ago, said. “It gives me some inspiration seeing some other folks and how they’re coping.”

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro