Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about another pillar out of the sense method. The sense method stands for subconscious empowerment, sleep, stress management and exercise. And today I'm going to be talking about exercise.

Now, if you've listened to previous episodes or you are one of my clients, then you may well know that I have chronic fatigue or ME. I also have hypermobility. So I get quite a lot of joint pain and specifically I have a bad back which I have had since I was age 13. Very annoyingly being a physio saying it a bad back.

I obviously I do as much as I can to treat myself and it's been worse since the dreaded COVID because my work changed quite a lot from being active treating people to sitting at a desk, talking and doing assessments over the phone. I then left that job and then I did a couple of years doing online triage, which I hated with a passion, but again, sitting down at a desk.

I went back and did my classes. So I opened up my clinic about three years ago now and I do a lot of Pilates classes now started off with one group with one lady and now I think I do about 11 sessions a week. And I've got lots of people in all of those classes, which is great. But it does mean that I'm doing a lot of Pilates teaching.

I do the warm up with everybody and I do the cool down and then I just demonstrate the odd exercise in between. So I'm not I'm doing some exercise. I am doing all of the chair exercises, but my back has still been really bad.

So then I think a couple of years ago, I then pulled it and then it was really bad. And I could barely like stand up properly. And then from then it's just been really problematic getting out of bed. If I was laying on my back, I couldn't stand up properly. And for several years, it was always painful, always a problem despite me doing exercise every morning.

But I was trying to avoid doing Pilates because I teach that many classes in the day that I'm like, oh, I don't want to then do exercise. There's Pilates that I've been doing all week. So I was doing like dancing, I was doing HIIT exercise, I was doing weights, all different things. And my back was still causing me problems.

The company that I worked with that I did the couple of years of virtual triage at the same time as me doing my clinic had its own private health insurance. So then I went to see an osteopath. I didn't want to see a physio because I'm like, what's point? I always already know what a physio would do. So I thought, oh, I'll go and try an osteopath and see if it was any better.

He said that basically he couldn't help me, which is really helpful. Because I'm hypermobile and he felt that he couldn't do anything to address that. I was like, okay, great. So that's great. I'm sure other osteopaths or chiropractors that they may well be okay. But this particular one did a bit of like soft tissue release, but didn't really give me anything in terms of other things to do. Maybe he thought that I knew exercises myself to do, which is fine.

I got really fed up of being in pain all the time. So I was like, okay, fine, I give in. I will then do Pilates every morning. So then I could only manage about 20 minutes because then I'm just too tired because I do it first thing in the morning, get up early, I can just about do that because, that's my only time I've got any kind of energy and then I walk the dog afterwards.

But after maybe four weeks of doing it, I was like, actually, my back is starting to get better. Now I preach all the time about the benefits of Pilates and how amazing it is because it is and particularly things like back pain and joint pain and any issues really, it is really good because it gives you that core strength and is a great basis for everything.

But you know, when you give advice out, you don't always take it yourself. You don't always practice what you preach. So I thought, okay, great, I will do it. And my back has been much better. I still get days where I've done too much or done the wrong things. Like the last few days has been pretty bad, but nowhere near to what it was. That was like a constant every day I was struggling to move.

After now doing it for many months, I feel so much better. Not only the pain is better, but when I'm demonstrating exercises in the class, there's one that we do, which is like a quad stretch where you stand on one leg and then you bring up the leg and you hold onto the foot. Now, before I had to really brace everything and I was a bit unstable. I'm like, now I can just do it really easily. So obviously my core has got stronger.

But also, keeping to that consistent exercise, which I was doing before, but I was a bit hit and miss about what I was doing. I found that my chronic fatigue is better now. It's always better when I exercise and it's fatigue is one of those things that is really difficult to manage because you don't feel like doing anything and you struggle with everything. You struggle to get out of bed in the morning. You struggle to work. You struggle to do everything.

Now this is no matter what causes your fatigue. Now, mine is I've had chronic fatigue, ME for the last 20 years. But the same goes with fatigue that you'd get from perimenopause or any kind of other conditions. like fibro or they're very interlinked, anything that would cause fatigue because you still struggle to do all of these things.

And you get things like brain fog and just struggling to remember things. There's many different factors to it. But I know that I am always better if I do some exercise, a small amount and something that's often strengthening based. I always feel better if I then have some time off. It's only got to stop like one or two days and I'm like, I have not exercised, although think for the last year, at least I've been very consistent and I keep with it, which is great because I know that if I stop, I stop and then I don't bother.

But doing consistent excites and but within my limits, I know that I've tried doing 30 minutes, which doesn't seem much more. But because then I'm teaching many classes in the day as well. That's just a little bit too much. And it just pushes me over the edge. So it is knowing your limits for what you can do.

And then I go for a walk with the dog afterwards. Now that's just probably a shorter walk. Then in the weekends we go for longer walks. And again, I know my limits, what I can do. If I go for one that's too long, I know that's me out for the rest of the day.

But the benefits not only reduce pain and help with my fatigue, also helps mental health. So when we exercise, it produces our feel-good hormones and that helps with low mood. It also helps with sleep. If we are working our muscles, if we are wearing ourself out or calming ourself down, depending on what kind of exercise we're doing, it does help with the quality of our sleep.

Because it can burn off extra energy if you are quite an awake person. If you're stressed, then we can do something that's a bit more calming. And then that can help to reduce our cortisol and our stress hormones, which again, helps us to sleep.

If it helps our mood, then it also helps our sleep. So there's so many benefits to doing exercise. Now it doesn't have to be Pilates. I mentioned about walking.

Getting out in nature now often on our longer walks, we will go up in the woods. So I'd often go with my husband, obviously take the dog as well. Going out in nature is again really great for mental health and reducing our stress hormones. And again, this just helps with everything. So exercise overlaps very much with the stress management and the sleep elements of the sense method.

But there are so many key things to exercise. So yeah, Pilates is great because it's low impact and will really work on the core. We need to have different kinds of exercise. So that's more strengthening and flexibility, but also balance. We also need to have some cardio. So it might be walking, that might be doing an aerobics class or going to the gym and all the machines where you get a bit of strengthening and a bit of cardio. It could be dancing around your kitchen.

So it's getting in little bits of exercise here and there, knowing that it has many health benefits. Now, often we think of exercises just if you want to lose weight. But yes, is benefit of it is to burn calories. But also we need to build our muscles because that helps with our metabolism.

Also, it helps with our testosterone production. Exercise, particularly weightlifting or resistance exercise is shown to be really good for hot flushes and reducing those. It is also key to have some weight bearing exercise or resistance exercise for our bone health. So I did talk about bone health in this previous episode, so go back and listen to that if you want to know more.

But there are so many benefits, not just if you want to lose weight, if we want to keep ourselves healthy and smoothing out some of the bumps that we get along our journey.

If we want to improve the perimenopausal or postmenopause journey and keep yourself fit and able, then we need to incorporate exercise into our lives. It could be five minutes here and there. It could be an hour or two down the gym every day. It really needs to fit in to your daily lives.

And if you're like me, and you've got other symptoms going on, whether that's perimenopausal, whether you've got any other underlying chronic health conditions, or maybe you've just got a bad back or a bad knee that you've had for a few weeks, and that can then make it difficult to keep going with the exercise. it's about being kind to yourself, knowing what you can and can't do.

And if you have flare ups of certain things, knowing that you can still do something, you just might need to adapt it. And knowing that that is a normal part of life to be up and down with what you're able to do. But it's trying to be consistent. So even if you're not feeling great, okay, maybe I couldn't do 20 minutes if I was feeling really poorly. Maybe I think, right, I just do five minute little stretch, just because that's going to help release some of those nice hormones that might feel a bit better.

And I know the other day when I was having period pains and I thought, the worst thing you want to do is when you've got stomach ache, particularly with perimenopause when you're getting really inconsistent cycles, and it might be that you feel like you're on your period all the time or that you don't have one for a few months and it's really heavy and you're getting pain. Actually, exercise can be really helpful. And I found just doing some gentle stretches, I still did the Pilates, some of it was really hard because your stomach's already kind of hurting and then you're really using your stomach muscles. But it felt better afterwards for just having a stretch and getting moving.

So there's ways and means to adjust it to your life and making sure that you are still getting the benefits. It is a tool, it should not be a punishment. And so you should do something that you enjoy doing.

Don't force yourself to do exercise that you hate. Maybe you need the accountability and go to a class. Great, I have many women that come to my Pilates class. I've got a few men as well. But they come and it is their time, the time to look after themselves, time to have a bit of fun because my classes aren't really serious. We do have a bit of a laugh and it is more like a community and meeting up with friends as well.

But it is their time to spend and invest on themselves, not just finances, but also invest the time into improving their wellbeing. So I just want you to think this week, if you already do exercise, fantastic. Do you cover all the bases and the type of exercises? So do you do cardio? Are you doing some kind of strengthening flexibility? Is there something that you could add in that would help cover all those bases?

If you don't do any exercise at all, what one thing could you add in as an extra or one place to start? So could you do five squats while the kettle is boiling? Could you dance around the kitchen while you're waiting for the dinner to be done? Could you go for a walk if you need to go to a shop? Could you walk there instead of driving?

Could you go and walk around your garden a few times. There's many ways that you can incorporate exercise, maybe looking on YouTube and doing a five, 10 minute workout from there. Choose something that you enjoy doing, make it achievable.

Often if you set yourself a small goal, so I'm going to do five or 10 minutes, think, actually, I might as do another five or 10 minutes. So just starting with one step, one thing that you can do and then build on it. Don't think you have to spend hours at the gym or going for a run if you don't enjoy it.

So hopefully you're going to put something into action this week. It's all good listening to the podcast, but if you don't do anything about it, you're not going to make those. So until next time, take care and get exercising in one way or another. Bye bye.