Actually I've been meaning to print this out for AGES!
Here's my pedometer steps/day measured for coming up to 2 years.
You can see, day by day, it's anything but linear. But what's fascinating for me is that the trend line in the middle has actually been incredibly consistant. (Starting off just above 1 additional step/day, and slowly going up to 1.5. If fact the rate of recovery has been more like 1.3, consistently, with a jump half-way through due to Glutamine and BCAAs.)
And what really surprised me is that the upper and lower limits on my typical days seem to have followed this trend pretty accurately too. (So it's really NOT representative of fitness, it's representative of something happening at the cell level.)
You can see at the beginning, I made the rookie mistake of wearing a pedometer and semi-consciously trying to further my steps/day, like a typical Type A personality... I got to almost 2,000, and then spiraled back down over the next few weeks. (A classic example of poor pacing - even though this was a LONG way from actually being fatigued from exercise. I wouldn't have even noticed the over-exertion and fall had I not been measuring steps.)
Then I felt better around day 95-100, and did the same thing again - I think after that I learned that I had a boundary I had to stay within to make consistent improvements.
But interestingly, even though there have been viruses, periods of stress, periods where I've been fatigued, where I've exercised, where I've done too much, etc. the longer-term trend, of 1.3-1.4 additional steps/day, hasn't really changed much.
An interesting point is around day 380, where I added (from my own research into sports science and nutrition) 15g L-Glutamine, 10g BCAAs and 1-2g Malic Acid.
A problem up until then was that going towards my upper limit of daily activity - especially a few days in a row - would often bring on muscle soreness/fatigue in the thighs/knees. And this in itself is a sign of pushing - it's giving the body more to deal with in repairing tissue and adding to the free radicals and waste products the body needs to get rid of.
(In fact, by now, as I wasn't getting much central fatigue, I'd use muscle soreness as a barometer of whether I'm pushing too much.)
So what do athletes use to combat this? L-Glutamine and Branch Chain Amino Acids seemed popular with bodybuilders for avoiding these same symptoms. (I since learned they're almost always low in CFS. In fact, when you need to use/repair muscle tissue, the body's stores of L-Glutamine are used up quickly, and Glutamine's not only a semi-essential amino acid used by muscles, it's also important for the immune system...! So low Glutamine in itself could explain both over-training in athletes and why we get weakened immunity when we push ourselves physically with CFS. I think there's a strong overlap.)
So yeah, I got a sudden jump in my trends almost as soon as I added those supplements.
You can also notice now I can have days where I push to almost 3,000 steps, and unlike the earlier days, that doesn't result in me going downhill for the following days/weeks. So there's obviously a much greater capacity for work now.
(Worth noting, steps are only a part of the picture. I'm also driving and going out much more frequently and for much longer stretches now. I'm doing some basic conditioning exercise now too, and obviously using my chart to ensure I don't push.)
VERY helpful! It's taught me about not only pacing, but pacing very specifically to my own condition and the nature of my recovery. So I'm sure other people will find their trends are completely different.
PS - Should also mention, BEFORE I started with the pedometer, I'd been taking all the supplements Myhill recommended and had my activity down to a bare minimum for about 3 or 4 months at least. Probably averaging about 700-800 steps/day. I started with the pedometer as soon as my symptoms had eased up a bit and I felt like increasing activity a bit... I think the stabilisation phase before was very important though.
