Exercise After Cancer: Ep 3 Exercise During Treatment

Welcome back to The Recovery Room’s ABC’s of exercise after cancer series. This is episode number 3 on exercise during treatment.

For persons currently undergoing surgery chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and/ or radiation, the ideal time to start exercising is ideally before you start treatment. Yet, it is never too late to start an exercise prescription and get the positive benefits.

Though oncology doctors know exercise is both safe and beneficial for people in the middle of cancer treatment, they often don't bring it up. This does not mean that it is not critically important; because it is.

Please bring up exercise with someone on your cancer team to see if you may have any specific limitations. And certainly, ask to be referred to a physical therapist to help you build an exercise plan.

There are many benefits to exercise during treatment. One of the biggest is minimizing the amount of cancer-related fatigue you get. As a matter of fact, the only evidence-based treatment for cancer-related fatigue is exercise!

People who exercise during chemotherapy and radiation have less fatigue and less weakness, less sickness, and less depression compared to those people who don’t exercise during treatment. Exercise helps protect your heart from some chemo drugs and may even help protect your brain a bit. And even if you don’t fly through treatment, if a bit of exercise can help make the difference between being miserable or less miserable. As a matter of fact the sicker you get, the more you need an exercise prescription. If this is you, please have one of your doctors or nurses get you to a PT.

People who exercise during treatment also recover much more quickly when treatment is over. You may not finish treatment without feeling somewhat weak and beat up, but with exercise, you can minimize what you lose. So when you’re done with treatment, you don’t have to work to regain what you haven’t lost.

As you know, some cancer treatments can impact your blood counts; which includes your white cell count, your red cell count, and your platelet count. Research studies show that no matter how low your blood counts go, the exercise itself has been shown to be safe. Here’s what’s important though if you do have low counts… if your white cell count is low enough you may be at risk of getting an infection, which of course is not good. This doesn’t mean you can’t exercise though, it just means you need to exercise in an environment that protects you from other people’s germs. If your platelets are low, we want to protect you from any potential bleeding. So in this case we want to protect you from falling or overstraining with strenuous exercise. But this certainly doesn’t preclude you from taking simple walks until your platelets come back up again. And if you are anemic, yes you can still exercise. You may need to break your sessions into several shorter bouts doing less intense things. Remember moderate exercise is anything that feels moderate to you on that particular day. Somedays that may be sitting at the edge of the bed for 3 minutes and some days it may be jogging 3 miles.

Please check out the other videos in this ABC’s of exercise after cancer series playlist, and in our cancer and exercise playlist to learn more!