Most people are surprised to learn that exercising on cancer treatment isn’t just acceptable, but increasingly encouraged. The benefits of exercise that are available to everyone are also applicable to cancer patients and, generally speaking, providing you feel well and have some energy, exercise is absolutely fine.
There are, as always, some exceptions, and someone with specialist training (such as myself!) can run you through the specifics, but here are some other things to remember:
Exercise can take place at home – fitness instructors are better than ever at adapting client programmes for home workouts (there were SOME benefits to the pandemic!), so if you don’t feel up to leaving the house but still want to undertake some physical activity, you can
It doesn’t have to involve sweaty exhaustion – hey, if you WANT to go berserk on the treadmill or in the pool and are deemed healthy enough, that’s cool. But if you’d like something more sedate or restorative, again we can adapt. There’s plenty of benefit to be gained from chair-based exercise or yoga (and these can be particularly good at combating treatment side effects such as reduction of grip strength or weakening of core muscles)
Sessions can be as short as you like – the idea of “movement snacking” has become particularly trendy of late, but for cancer patients and survivors, it’s more than a fad. Guidelines recommend a total amount of minutes to aim for across a week, and we can all take each minute at a time, meaning that sessions can be as brief as 10 minutes if that’s what suits us best
I’d love to know what you think of these ideas – have they surprised you? Encouraged you? Inspired you? Let me know in the comments!