The Perfect Exercise Routine for People With Fibromyalgia
- Flourishing With Fibromyalgia
- Aug 26, 2024
- 5 min read
We get stuck wondering things like, “How am I ever going to exercise when I always feel exhausted?” or “My body already hurts all over, how am I going to feel after I go for that walk my doctor recommended?”
Or the phrase I hear so often from my patients “I used to be so fit and now I struggle to even get my basic daily tasks done, will I ever get back to the way I used to be?”
When you’re unsure what to do, it’s hard to move forward.
The good news is, you can easily bring order to the chaos by exercising in a way that makes your body feel good AND improves your pain and energy, rather than flaring your fibro symptoms.
In this post, I’ll outline the perfect exercise routine for fibromyalgia and provide 3 exercises to get you started. I hope that this will give you a roadmap so you can get started with an exercise routine and reduce your pain, exhaustion, and brain fog in the process.
What Is The Perfect Exercise Routine For Fibromyalgia?
The perfect exercise routine for fibromyalgia includes a combination of stretching, mindfulness, gentle strength building and mild cardio training. When structured correctly, exercise for fibromyalgia helps to reduce pain, improve energy, and clear brain fog.
In other words:
Your exercise routine should never flare your fibromyalgia symptoms. If you’re experiencing more pain, exhaustion, and brain fog after exercising, you’re pushing your body beyond it’s current limits. This strategy puts you further behind on your goal of getting your symptoms under control.
Research has shown that people with fibromyalgia experience mitochondrial dysfunction. This means your mitochondria don’t work as efficiently to produce the energy your cells need to function.
When you’re exercising in a way that causes more fibromyalgia pain, exhaustion, and brain fog, it means you’re using up energy faster than your body can produce it. This generates lots of inflammation and leaves you feeling achy, tired, foggy, and maybe even a little grumpy (who can blame you?).
So when adding exercise into your health routine when you have fibromyalgia, the key is to incorporate exercise slowly and strategically, while listening to your body.
The added benefit is that when you incorporate exercise that makes your body feel good, you will make progress in healing the underlying causes of your fibromyalgia symptoms AND experience less pain, exhaustion, and brain fog as a result. Win win!
Component 1: Mindfulness-Based Exercise
Mindfulness-based exercise incorporates full body stretching with meditative practices. Many forms also include strength building exercises. Examples of mindfulness-based exercise include yoga and pilates.
This is a crucial component because fibromyalgia comes with a dysfunctional stress response. When you have fibromyalgia, your stress response gets stuck on and doesn’t shut off when it should. Meditation and mindfulness are a very important part of re-training your body to shut off this stress response and allow healing to occur.
With the dysfunctional stress response comes tense, achy muscles and joints. Mindfulness-based exercise helps to stretch out tense sore muscles, reducing pain, and shift your body into a relaxation state. The more often you can shift into relaxation, the easier it will be to reduce your fibromyalgia symptoms.
Many people who are new to managing their fibromyalgia hear from their health care providers that they should be exercising regularly, but then get stuck because they aren’t taught how to do it properly and when they do exercise they feel awful afterwards.
And then they wind up in a fibro flare, feeling discouraged and frustrated, or worse, they get injured.
The key to adding exercise into your fibromyalgia health routine is to start slowly and gently, while keeping an eye on your pain and energy to prevent flares in your symptoms.
To get started here, start with a full body stretching routine or chair yoga.
Component 2: Gentle Strength Training
Strength training involves exercises that build muscle strength and endurance. Building muscle strength and endurance helps to prevent injuries, improve your physical fitness, and increases the number of mitochondria your body produces.
Translation: Your body will produce more energy, more efficiently, allowing you to do more without feeling exhausted afterwards.
If you think you need to spend hours at the gym to build strength, but you’re nervous about how you’ll even get to the gym with the limited amount of energy you have, I’m here to tell you that a gym membership is not a necessity here.
You can incorporate strength training from the comfort of your own home, even without a full at-home gym set up.
So, how can you build your strength using simple at-home exercises?
When you’re just starting out, yoga and pilates are going to be the easiest and gentlest options to include. Choosing routines that incorporate stretching, mindfulness, and strength building will ensure you’re getting the most from your exercise sessions, even if you need to keep them short in the beginning.
If you’re a bit more advanced or you already have some exercise incorporated into your routine, a very useful routine is the 7 minute workout.
The 7 minute workout is a scientifically designed exercise routine which uses your own body weight to build strength the major muscle groups in your body. As the name suggests, one round of this workout takes 7 minutes to complete. You can combine multiple rounds to step up a workout. You can find the 7 minute workout on Youtube or as an app to download on your phone.
When you’re just starting out, the 7 minute workout may be too fast. You can use the video controls to slow down the routine and complete it at your own pace.
Since there is no equipment needed, it’s easy to incorporate the 7 minute workout after you’ve warmed up your muscles with a yoga or pilates routine, or a full body stretching routine.
Component 3: Cardio Exercise
Cardio exercise includes activities that improve the health of your cardiovascular system, by strengthening your heart and lungs, as well as improving blood flow throughout your body. Cardio exercise can also be called aerobic exercise.
When incorporated correctly, here’s where you’ll really start to notice that you are capable of exercising, even when you have fibromyalgia.
Of course, this can take time to build into your routine and should be used with caution initially. Consider including very short, mild cardio exercises at the start.
The approach you can use to successfully incorporate cardio exercise into your routine without flaring is:
Start with 5 to 10 minutes of gentle walking, swimming, bicycling, or using an elliptical machine every second day.
Pay attention to your symptoms. If you are not experiencing flares in your symptoms after exercising, increase the amount of time you’re performing your cardio exercise by a small amount.
Then, in order to continue improving your physical fitness, you’re going to increase the intensity of your cardio exercise. This means you’re going to put in more effort during the same length of your cardio exercise.
Once you’re done, you’ll be well on your way to using exercise to reduce your pain, improve your energy, and clear your fibrofog.
Putting it All Together for Your Perfect Fibromyalgia Exercise Routine
There you have it! The 3 components of your perfect exercise routine for fibromyalgia.
It may sound like a lot, but like most things practice makes perfect. Just focus on taking a small first step to get started. This will help you to improve your confidence in your ability to exercise and ensure you’re reducing your fibromyalgia symptoms, rather than flaring them.
What’s next? Join the Flourishing With Fibromyalgia Academy
If you need help getting started, my membership The Flourishing With Fibromyalgia Academy, includes a whole course on incorporating exercise to reduce fibromyalgia symptoms. The Flourishing With Fibromyalgia Academy will help you determine which exercises are best for your body, so you can skip over the frustrating accidental symptom flares and jump straight to the exercises that are going to get you pain-free and full of energy.
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