Exercising with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome | Do’s and Don’ts

Exercising with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome | Do's and Don'ts



Welcome to another episode of the CFS Health Recovery Podcast! 🌟 In this video, we dive deep into the essentials of exercising with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Whether you're dealing with CFS, fibromyalgia, post-viral fatigue, or any chronic health condition, understanding the dos and don'ts of exercise is crucial for your recovery journey.

In this video, we cover:

– The importance of movement for those with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
– Why traditional exercise methods might not work for you.
– The difference between exercise and restorative movement.
– Key strategies to safely recondition your body.
– Tips for maintaining consistency without overexerting yourself.
– How to balance your energy levels and avoid the boom-and-bust cycle.

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Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more helpful content on managing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and improving your health and well-being! 👍🔔

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2. Watch the newly released past members “Guest Panel” Workshop where they share their top 5 recovery secrets – https://www.cfshealth.com/guestpanelreplay

3. Get our free most popular recovery trainings:
– Find your baseline – Stop pushing and crashing – https://www.cfshealth.com/baseline
– The 3 stages of recovery and what to do in each one – https://www.cfshealth.com/the3stages
– The “9 do's and don’ts” PDF – to decrease symptoms and improve energy – https://www.Cfshealth.com/pdf

4. Want help professionally with a step-by-step recovery plan specific to you? Fill out the application form and the team will send you the details – https://www.cfshealth.com/form

#ChronicFatigueSyndrome #CFSRecovery #ExerciseWithCFS #RestorativeMovement #CFSHealth #Fibromyalgia #postviralfatigue

hello and welcome to another episode of the CFS Health recovery podcast this is for anyone who is going through chronic fatigue syndrome fibromyalgia you might be experiencing post viral fatigue anything fatigue related and chronic health related where you do a million blood tests and the doctor says there's nothing wrong with you or we there's nothing we can do for you this is the place to be we're going to give you some practical help in every single episode and definitely today this is a really practical one we're going to be talking about the conversation around movement when it comes to recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome and other Associated illnesses so one of the biggest problems with chronic fatigue syndrome and chronic illnesses is the deconditioning of the body because you don't have the energy to do what you used to be able to do and therefore you lose muscle mass usually gain fat or you just lose weight and condition alog together and it can be really quite concerning and quite alarming so in today's conversation we're going to cover why reconditioning your body is really important and I'm going to touch on some key Basics on what you can do to make sure you do this appropriately for you depending on where you're at let's get into today's topic about movement you know movement is a real key component of recovery part of getting better and recovering is having strength to live having strength to push your body out of bed having strength to sit up having strength to go for your walk having strength to go to the toilet having strength to open a car door there's so many things on a micro level that a lot of people would never think about but then on a macro level obviously the more muscle mass you have as in you know you don't have to be a bodybuilder but the more muscle mass you have versus fat in your body the more energy is stored in your body and so provided that you are not pushing yourself and going beyond your means and this is the hardest part about chronic fatigue syndrome chronic illness and recovery and movement is that most people around the world look at movement as going to the gym and pushing yourself which is like not what we want to do when you're going through recovery in fact we want to do the total opposite we don't want to P ourselves at all and you know I think exercise is just the wrong word to use when it comes to reconditioning your body through recovery and this is why we don't even use the word exercise anymore we use the word movement because it has a much more gentle feeling towards it which is actually what we want so here's the thing greated exercise therapy I believe isn't the right way to go about it and I know there's a lot of people out there who agree with me on that and they say you know gr exercise therapy it's terrible it doesn't work it makes people worse and I would tend to agree with that because the problem with gr exercise therapy is it's fixated there's no flexibility with graded exercise therapy and it's usually wrongly prescribed we at it's out we believe that you as the person knows your body best and you should have the power to know what to do when to do and the problem with going to someone who doesn't understand chronic illness or what you're going through they see you as a body they don't factor in how you're sleeping they don't factor in your stress levels they don't factor in your nutrition they don't factor in your mindset they don't factor in what stage you're at in your recovery and simply just throwing you a bunch of exercises or saying you know you've got to walk for 10 minutes every day regardless of how you feel is a sure way to set yourself up for faure and so we don't believe in gred exercise therapy because it has a very inflexible approach instead we believe in restorative movement and reconditioning your body appropriately when it is the right time for you so for example if you're I'm going to cover all the stages there's three stages in recovery the first stage is the acute phase and this is where you're kind of really struggling with symptoms you're feeling totally exhausted it's usually at the initial stages when you might have a virus or you might be going through a heavy infection or you might have just come out of a prolonged period of stress physical and mental and emotional and you're just depleted now in this time I would not recommend movement at all if you're in stage one we don't do any movement program especially at the start because you don't need to expend any more energy than you currently have we need to put energy in so we do restorative breathing at this point and we can do a bit of restorative movement but as long as it's energy in not energy out yeah energy in is it's making us feel more energized or it's giving us energy versus if we do something and it's depleting our energy stores well you can feel its energy out stage one we want to restore we don't want to push we don't want to expand too much and i' see this happen a lot people kind of just they want to get ahead yeah they seek of being where they are and so they just want to push beyond their means and they keep going around in circles and they feel horrible for it and so we want to avoid that in stage one the accute phase what you really want to be doing is building your daily function yeah when I say daily function I mean around the house I mean sitting up just using your daily activities as movement is actually part of the process and you'll find that over time as your capacity expands so too will your functional movement around the house you know simply going outside watering the plants going to the bathroom sitting up for breakfast lunch and dinner going from the bed to the couch all these things they add up if you do them consistently over time then you'll be more ready to do a more structured restorative movement process but it makes me kind of angry when I hear people being told you just need to go for a 10-minute walk every day and it's like they struggle to get out of bed they struggle to even just think about exercise and so it's just the wrong prescription so again movement is good and bad there's no right or wrong it's got to be prescribed at the right time this is the actual problem movement isn't the problem it's the prescription of movement that's the problem in the world that I see and this is where CFS help is extremely different we have a very flexible approach we have to factor in fear we have to factor in mindset we have to factor in how you're feeling you know because ultimately imagine if someone said all right you've got to go and do 20 push-ups on your toes right now it's like oh my God why I haven't done that since I was like 10 that's the fastest way to get an injury and the fastest way to feel horrible afterwards one of our biggest sayings is consistency over intensity and that is one thing that you must have when it comes to making progress physically you know you can't just go from nothing to everything and most people who are going through this They're All or Nothing people they're type a personal ities they're pushers they're Achievers they're not lazy and so this is really hard for people to hold themselves back and contain their energy as they expand stage two is a tight and wide stage so it's kind of this stage where you come out of the acute stage of suffering and you're moving into this window or energy coming back to the body but it's like your brain doesn't know what to do with the energy so it's all new to you it's like apparently you might be feeling a little bit more anxious you know your cortisol levels will be rising High in the mornings your Cadian rhythm is starting to get in sync and by the way movement can be a fantastic helper with your calian Rhythm and your sleep and everything your mood but again you have to do the right amount when people used to come and see me in my clinic this is over a decade ago you know we've been doing this work this program has been running for way over a decade now and when people used to come and see me back then in the clinic before he went online and created the online mentorship program I would make sure that people would just do the right amount so for instance I remember I had this girl she was amazing kind of sports athlete and she'd been pushing and crashing like up and down up and down up and down tried everything tried every quick fix under the sun nothing worked and she came to me and we got out of our office and we went onto the floor the mat area where we do our restorative movement stuff and we did about 5 minutes and I thought okay I think this is the perfect amount for her because I watch for cues I look at facial expression I look at color ation in the skin I watch breathing I watch posture I watch your nervous system you know is it shaking or is it feeling stabilized there's lots of things that you can pick up on when you're doing this work and so I felt like 5 minutes was perfect and I said okay let's just say her name's Joe stop there and Joe looked at me and she goes what and I said yeah that's we're done she goes but I'm not even tired like I'm not even in pain I'm not even exhausted I'm not even like tired yet and I said said that's the point that's why you're paying me so I can help you stop feeling like crap all the time it was like a really and I was like yes so seeing what we did there we want to do that every single day we want to do micro sessions so we can build up faster whereas what you're doing is you're doing a macro session you're pushing yourself and expending way too much energy and you can't back it up the next day in fact you can't back it up every week you're like one week good and then two weeks bad I said we want consistency every single day and it was an absolute Game Changer within six months she was training for 30 to 40 minutes with me on the gym floor now obviously her training was catered to her goals now I know not everyone's an athlete not everyone wants to be a freaking Olympic swimmer or a ballet dancer or an ice skater I know we have a few members who you know jokingly said they're their goals and some of them are serious you know we've got some high level athletes too but we have a lot of moms we have a lot of dads we have a lot of business people who aren't interested in sport but nonetheless building restorative strength and condition in your body is just so helpful for your overall health and well-being and I think what we need to do is again just do what's appropriate and build up but don't take advice from someone in the gym who doesn't understand what you're going through I just see so many wrongly prescribed programs for people who aren't ready who aren't at the stage to receive that kind of capacity and adaptation put on their body and what you got to remember is because you're going through this right now and your body is more sensitive it just means that it can't adapt to higher loads of stress now stress isn't a bad thing stress can be a good thing provided it's the right amount of the right time when I'm talking about stress I'm talking about physiological stress if we were in the gym and I was doing a bicep Cur and I can feel the tension and the physiological stress I'm placing upon my bicep as I'm lifting the weight up and down and what's Happening Here is we're creating microt tears and micro tears is a good thing right because what happens when we stop doing the exercise and we created micro tears when we rest sleep and recover we're actually repairing the tissue the muscle tissue which actually breaks down and then grows so most people think that when they're training is when they're actually getting the adaptation no they're getting the adaptation 24 to 48 hours after their session when their muscles have broken down they're getting repaired and replenished from food rest and sleep and hydration and then what happens is the muscle kind of grows more and so that's how you build more condition and more muscle mass but really if we break it down to Simplicity consistency is everything like you need to be aiming for micro sessions every single day or every second day versus two or one big session a week and you can't even do anything on the days if what you're doing is compromising your entire week or even compromising your entire day it's too much for where you're at right now now obviously we have step-by-step trainings in our program called the movement Mastery Program we've got a mindset Mastery Program too but movement Mastery Program we take you through the process of how to progress appropriately depending on what stage you're at we have programs from pre- beginner all the way up to Advanced so if you're someone who wants to really go into that high level strength and you want to just feel incredibly strong we have programs for that if you're someone who just wants to kind of get back into life and living we have programs for that too because again we need to factor in your personal goals you might want more flexibility you know we have a lot of people who love hiking in our program for instance so a part of their focus was working on building the strength and stamina to be able to go hiking again and you know it's just been awesome to see people posting videos of their first hike again and photos of mountains and in Norway and USA and everywhere in fact we have a past client Christy who put up an amazing success story on YouTube actually and she climbs some I can't remember exactly what it was but it was ridiculous like prle kind of mountaineering that sounded absolutely incredible and amazing for someone who had to get fed food and was in a wheelchair to then building up the strength and capacity over time to be enable her to hike again and so here's the key consistency is the key consistency over intensity consistency over intensity consistency over intensity you need to repeat that you need to put it on your forehead you need to write it down that's so key and what we want to do in terms of flexibility with movement you know this is why I think it's so important to have it is because we do need to factor in your day-to-day life so how did you sleep yesterday what did you eat how's your bowel movement how is your stress levels how is your energy levels from a 1 to a 10 and how do you feel generally overall now based off that should be then based off what you're going to do that day movement wise so it varies and one of the great things we've got a movement specialist in our program called Steph Ryan hey Steph you're a legend one thing that she's brought to the program is a rating tracker and a movement tracker and we call this the RP tracker which is the rate of perceived exertion 10 being maximal effort and then one being minimal effort and so what you want to do if you're in stage one and you're doing a restorative movement you wouldn't want to go over a three out of 10 you want it to feel that easy it's doable it feels good we never wanted to feel like oh my God this is so hard and I can't do this not in stage one not in stage two stage three integration stage when you start to integrate back into life and you've got capacity You're Building stamina and strength your immune system is good your health is good you're living life again that's when you can push that RPA up to a 7 8 n and even 10 depending again on all the levels that we spoke about before your sleep levels your stress levels how good your nutrition and hydration is all these factors yeah and so we have flexibility there but here's the thing as you integrate back into life your strength and capacity is better your immune system is better it means you can handle more load physiologically and so your body can adapt to that load then it's fine but we don't want to go to macro sessions until we're in stage three integration stage and that's where it would look like a more typical general population gym session you know where you go to the gym and you train for 30 to 40 minutes and you do your thing but there's no point even talking about that until you get your consistency there's just no point so again what you want to do movement wise you want to make sure you're doing all the compound movements so we're targeting all our multi-joint movement session so think about hips knees arms and back so multi- joint is where we're using multiple joints in the movement single joint exercises they're good that would be more like a bicep curl and a tricep push down kind of thing but they're not targeting multiple muscles in one movement and so we want to build functional strength first how we do that is by multi-joint movements I'm not going to go into movements today though because again literally there's like 30 hours to dissect here just for movement if you want to take it seriously so I don't want to get you too complicated right now I actually just want you to focus on if you're in stage one build functionality around the house if you're in stage two you can start restorative moving but keep the rpe low so it's easy it's doable and it feels good and then in stage three obviously you can get a bit more excited and you know you can push yourself more because you can cuz your body can handle it and you want to so there're my recommendations of a very very basic di to movement but the people who are ignoring movement completely you're missing a big part of health and if you think about it when you're in stage two of recovery we actually want you to get good tired and good tired is important because by the end of the day we want you good tide so you're going to sleep at night now if you haven't utilized the energy appropriately for you you might be still too wide and have too much energy in your system therefore you're not sleeping so it's a really fine balance and all ties back back into your Baseline and this is the starting point of your foundation to recovery so you know it sounds a little bit complicated it's really not that complicated once you know where you're at on the road map of recovery stage one 2 or three based on that that's what you've got to focus on what you got to do you stick at it you build you get to the next level you change you build you get to the next level you change you build and it changes you know what got you here won't get you there and so we help our members literally pinpoint okay okay this has been good your consistency your less is more has been fantastic well now it's actually not less is more you're in stage two now more is better doing less all the time is deconditioning you and making you worse when you're in stage 2 and three when you're in stage two and three there's energy to be utilized we just need to utilize it in the most appropriate way for you and this is what we help our members with again it's not overnight nothing is nothing great is so stop doing that if you're here going what's the quick fix tell me the secret I just told you the secret you've just got to do it now hey I hope this was really helpful take it with the grain of Soul again if you need professional help and support reach out to our team at infot cfsh help.com book in a call we can help you and really tell you what a program would look like for you and we can work with you every step of the way to make sure that you're doing the right things you know of course you can do this on your own it's just a lot of guess work as you can tell my advice is use the word appropriate when you're doing this kind of stuff and again of course seek professional help before you start any kind of program that you think is going to be useful for you sending you a ton of love hope you're doing really really well and we'll speak to you soon bye for now

#Exercising #Chronic #Fatigue #Syndrome #Dos #Donts

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