No time to exercise? Then make more time for illness and injury.

If you do not make time for exercise now, eventually your time will be spent on illness and injury. Inactivity has the potential to lead to a long list of life-compromising health complications. Much of this could be avoided with a small amount of strength training each week.

Most people get a gym membership, tell themselves they will workout two or three times a week and “Get In Shape!”  In the end, they accrue monthly credit card charges and long periods of discouraging inactivity.

A better approach, find an exercise program that does not consume lots of your time – one you can stick to.  At our Austin Strength Trainers facility our workouts address all aspects of fitness and are specifically designed for the highest marginal return for minimal time in the gym. It takes 30 minutes once a week.

Each weekly session your trainer will have you do a little bit more than you are used to handling.  Then rest, recover, improve, and repeat the next week. It comes out to about 25 hours of exercise a year.  Add to that an activity you enjoy, and you will have a plan you can stick to.  

Years from now you will be stronger, healthier, and still exercising. Then again, you could do nothing and your body will deteriorate to the point where exercise is no longer an option. 

A method to reduce lymphedema

Exercise for recovering breast cancer patients can often produce painful lymphedema symptoms. As a consequence many patients avoid exercise; this leads to weakness, frailty, more pain, swelling, lower energy levels, weaker bones, increased likelihood of injury, and a shorter lifespan. Fortunately with a protocol of slow, progressive weight lifting one can increase strength and reduce painful lymphedema symptoms.  

 From a previous blog post, Exercise for Women Living with Lymphedema:

 “In the last decade, Linda Miller, the director of the Breast Cancer Physical Therapy Center in Philadelphia, has found that patients who strengthen their arms controlled their lymphedema symptoms better than those who didn't lift weights.  "For years, I was spitting in the wind," said Ms. Miller, a physical therapist. "This study is going to rock the lymphedema world."

 Evidence from a more recent study, Study: Weight Lifting Helps Breast Cancer Survivors Stay Healthy:

“The physical function study involved 295 survivors of breast cancer that had not spread (metastasized). Half the women took part in slowly progressive weight lifting twice a week. After 1 year, half as many women in the weight lifting group lost physical function as did women in the control group… More specifically, 12 out of 148 women in the weight lifting group, or 8.1%, lost physical function, compared with 24 out of 147 women in the control group, or 16.3%.

According to the study’s authors, the findings are significant because each 10-point decrease in physical function among breast cancer survivors increases their risk of premature death by an estimated 6%.”  

At our Austin Strength Training facility we have had success working with recovering cancer patients. The recovery systems of these patients have already been strained. They cannot stand long bouts of exercise. Our personal training sessions are short and designed to efficiently stimulate a change; we then give them plenty of time to recover.

 The equipment we use is MedX medical rehab equipment which is more easily tolerated by the joints. We can restrict the range of motion to a pain-free range of motion, and we use controlled movements, i.e. slower, to minimize forces that could aggravate pre-existing conditions.

Lance Armstrong once said. “Before I just lived now I live strong”. The catch 22 is doing this without aggravating pre-existing conditions. As the studies listed above have demostrated, it can be done.