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Created in 2008, Phoenix Rising is the largest and oldest forum dedicated to furthering the understanding of, and finding treatments for, complex chronic illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, long COVID, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and allied diseases.
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ahmo, from what I've read that's too much HIT, even the "cardio" kind (that is, more for pulmonary fitness not building muscle). Even that kind of HIT should only be done a couple times per week or maybe 3x/week for very healthy people. For people trying to recover probably 1x/week is enough. So maybe you overdid and that accounts for your setback...? That's kind of what's happening to me right now.I was doing consistently 3-4/week, but even though I'm better now, am not managing this.
In case anyone is wondering, exercise is not doing a thing for my ME symptoms. I don't see this as an ME treatment in any way, shape, or form.
Ooooh, I'm not ready to do the sweating and HR-raising bit yet. I don't have the aerobic capacity for that. I need all the aerobic capacity I have to do my ADLs. I definitely working with the low-level anaerobic metabolism.Me neither! It would just be nice to have a little bit more strength, and to get a bit of the benefits people get from exercise (OTHER people, I guess I might say!) For example, I always feel like my body is running a bit better after I've sweat a bit and increased my HR (a little). I did feel good after the arm and belly exercises.
Over the course of the next four or five days, my thighs were noticeably cold to the touch, and felt weak and almost burning. (Lactic acid, I suppose, but that's a surprisingly long shelf-life, if so.) It took awhile for me to accept that this had not been a good idea for me - days, in fact - because I kept thinking that the damage to the muscles would let up. Instead, over the next two or three days, the ache, weakness, and cold / lack of blood flow grew more noticeable. The longer I went from the exercise, the less it felt like typical post-exercise muscle soreness, and the more it felt like my legs were dull tree-trunks pinned at each hip that I could scarcely drag along.
IIRC, the exercise physiologists studying ME/CFS (Snell, Stevens, Sol) say it's the cardio that is problematic for us, but limited strength training is possible. The trick is to exercise using the ATP-CP phosphogen system (low-level anaerobic), not the aerobic or anaerobic glycolysis (high-level anaerobic). Theoretically, by training with the ATP-CP phosphogen system we should be able to utilize it better and therefore have more capability before our aerobic metabolism fails us and we PEM.Some distinction like this might account for the fact that many people don't get PEM from walking or short bouts of cardio, but a very short bout with weights or HIT will floor the same people. Weight training or HIT all is about building new muscle fibers (mitochondria).