Physical Friday – Exercising with a Chronic Illness

(c) Megan S, December 2013
(c) Megan S, December 2013

Last week I shared a video of my daily yoga practice to show what exercise I do to reduce my pain levels. Today I want to share the other part of my daily routine, the “real exercise” as my GP likes to call it.

To maintain muscle condition, or at least reduce the levels of deconditioning that can and will occur from lower activity levels, I aim to do at least 3 sessions of cardio based exercise that uses my biggest muscles (my legs). At the moment this exercise is either walking or riding my bike (inside or outside depending on the weather).

My bike set up for me to ride inside.
My bike set up for me to ride inside.

Obviously I don’t want to push myself too hard, so these 3 sessions of exercise don’t last very long. I have built up from as low as 1 minute of riding, or 2 minutes walking, to 3 minutes riding or 6 minutes walking per session. Between sessions I take at least an hours rest.

Because of the extreme heat here at the moment this has only been inside riding (so I can stay in the air-conditioned house). Usually I aim for 2 sessions in the morning and one session in the afternoon, but today I had my mum visit this morning so I only did one morning ride and now have to aim for 2 rides this afternoon. This will be a struggle for my because afternoons are my worst time of day for any activity, but I’m going to do my best as I promised my GP on Wednesday that I would do 3 sessions a day.

As I’ve mentioned on Twitter and Facebook, I have now got a confirmed diagnosis of ME/CFS and Fibromyalgia. I will do a separate post soon to update you on what this means for me in the near future, but returning to work does not look to be happening anytime soon. My GP has said I need to build up to being able to be on my feet and active for at least 4 hours at a time (with no rest breaks) before we consider returning to work, at the moment I’m at about 1 to 2 hours between my rest breaks, so it’s still a bigger job than I’m capable at the moment.

What physical activity do you do daily?

Are you working to slowly build up your capabilities?