Tag: Strength Training

Working Out to Avoid Freaking Out

It’s hard to imagine a cancer diagnosis that doesn’t provoke some level of anxiety.

When I was told that I had breast cancer, it didn’t take long before I got a prescription for Xanax because my anxiety was going through the roof — I clearly couldn’t handle everything I was feeling. It wasn’t until my radiation oncologist suggested that I try meditation that my view of the best way to handle my anxious feelings changed, and eventually I dropped the Xanax altogether.

But one thing that I kept on doing was exercising, at least as much as I could manage on a given day. So after reading a recent study about exercise, I had to wonder how much worse my experience might have been if I hadn’t kept to my workouts.

Henriksson et al. (2022, Journal of Affective Disorders; see link below) found that engaging in moderate or strenuous exercise was very effective in relieving the symptoms of anxiety. What I found so interesting was that half of the study participants had actually lived with anxiety for at least a decade, and they still got relief!

The subjects in the exercise groups did a combination of both strength and cardio training.

The subjects in the experimental groups were assigned to one of two groups: low-to-moderate intensity group exercise or high intensity group exercise. The exercise was timed circuit training that combined both cardiovascular and strength moves and subjects maintained heartrates at levels appropriate for their assigned intensity levels. At the end of the 12-week program, everyone’s anxiety had significantly decreased, as compared to a control group that was not participating in group exercise.

What is striking is that there was a tendency for the improvement to follow the level of intensity; the harder the subjects exercised, the more anxiety relief they experienced. Talk about motivation!

My own experience echoes this, but in a subtractive sense. At times of intense stress, my anxiety skyrockets when I’m prevented from engaging in my regular workouts. This may happen, for example, when I’m dealing with an unreasonable workload that ties me to my desk and preempts my exercise sessions.

I used to wonder why I felt so much worse when I was getting more work done. This study answers that question for me.

Couple these results with what we’ve learned about the beneficial effects of exercise in decreasing the risk of recurrence of breast cancer and it is incredible why physicians don’t write exercise prescriptions for their patients, and why personal trainer sessions are not covered by health insurance.

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There are several things that I feel are important to underscore here if you’re interested in trying this out yourself.

The social aspect of the exercise sessions may have also played a role in alleviating the anxiety that the study participants had initially complained of, and there was the added benefit of a pre-planned, supervised program.

First, this was a group session. That means that there was also social support involved as no one was exercising alone. The subjects were supervised by a physiotherapist; they didn’t have to come up with their own program, as it had been created for them.

Also, the exercise included both cardio and strength exercises and included warm-up, cool-down and stretching, so it covered all the bases, so to speak. And the subjects got fitter as the study progressed, so there was also a sense of self-efficacy at work here.

Does this mean that the exercise didn’t matter? Not at all! The emotional benefits of exercise have been documented in previous studies. If you consider the mind-body as a single system, as your physical fitness improves, your mental health will generally follow.

If you’d like to see the original article, it is available free online:
Malin Henriksson, Alexander Wall, Jenny Nyberg, Martin Adiels, Karin Lundin, Ylva Bergh, Robert Eggertsen, Louise Danielsson, H. Georg Kuhn, Maria Westerlund, N. David Åberg, Margda Waern, Maria Åberg. Effects of exercise on symptoms of anxiety in primary care patients: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Affective Disorders, 2022; 297: 26 DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2021.10.006

For a reader-friendly version, see the write-up in Science Daily:
University of Gothenburg. “Anxiety effectively treated with exercise.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 9 November 2021. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211109095348.htm

“The Gun Show”: Assessing Biceps Muscle Loss Due To Endocrine Therapy [PHOTOS]

In my last post, I whined about the repercussions of taking aromatase inhibitors (in my case, letrozole) as a way to diminish the amount of estrogen in my body, for the purpose of reducing the risk of breast cancer recurrence.

While I also mentioned letrozole’s effects on my exercise habits, in this post I wanted to drill down on one aspect in particular: muscle loss.

Before I go further, I need to add a disclaimer. Since the time the first photo was taken (the morning before my first chemo infusion), three and a half years passed and I went through menopause. Notably, the menopause was pharmaceutically-driven, starting with tamoxifen and then, after my hormone levels were low enough, continuing with letrozole. However, my body now is dealing with the same aging effects as someone who had transitioned naturally.

Except that my transition came before its time.

The below photo is from April 27, 2017, before I headed to the infusion center for my first dose of chemo. I had been training as normally as I could, under the conditions of lumpectomy and port placement that I wrote about here, and finding work-arounds for exercises that I’d been told not to do.

This is my 51-year-old biceps muscle, before I started the pharmaceutical portion of my breast cancer treatment.

While I lost some size and strength throughout my chemo infusions (here are all the photos), I was able to bounce back and had a particularly strong 2018 (sorry, don’t have good photos of that). But as the endocrine therapy with tamoxifen continued in 2019, to be replaced by letrozole in 2020, I could feel the effects of low estrogen.

On December 11, 2020, I struck the same pose again for sake of comparison.

Is something missing? This is my 54-year-old biceps muscle, struggling to keep up. Note: I am still working out as hard as I can!

As far as muscle appearance is concerned, I have experienced a slow downhill slide. My shoulder is not as peak-y, the biceps itself has decreased in size and I even find it more difficult to hold this muscular contraction. In addition, there’s more looseness in my skin, particularly at the back of my arm, which in part may be due to loss of collagen, also affected by estrogen levels (nice dermatological review by Shah & Maibach, 2001, Am J Clin Dermatol).

I’m busting my butt trying to increase the amount that I’m lifting, but I’m not making progress. Not surprisingly, the decrease in estrogen plays a role in this. As stated by Chidi-Ogbolu & Baar (2019, Front Physiol), “estrogen improves muscle mass and strength, and increases the collagen content of connective tissues”.

It makes sense then that lack of estrogen is going to be detrimental to maintaining muscle. To that point, Kitajima & Ono (2016, J Endocrinol), working with animal models, have found that “estrogen insufficiency leads to muscle atrophy and decreased muscle strength of female mice.”

Not just mice, obviously.

This information comes as no surprise to any woman who’s gone through menopause, I’m sure. But the experience of being slammed through menopause instead of having the opportunity to transition more gradually is yet another frustrating way that having cancer pulls the rug out from under you and reminds you that you are not in control of your life.

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Slowly, yoga is becoming more important in my life and my view of fitness is changing. Good thing too, since I can’t keep beating myself up like this.

Lifting My Spirits

I received an unexpected but incredibly satisfying compliment today. It was from a worker at Trader Joe’s who made a flattering comment about my arms. A little background here: I like to work out, and even obtained a personal trainer certification when I was a stay-at-home-mom. While I’ve never trained people as a profession, I have maintained my certification over the years — in addition to a vigorous training schedule. I’ve been told that this is unusual for “a woman of my age”.

When I received my cancer diagnosis, I was shocked largely because in my mind my lifestyle didn’t seem to fit the profile of someone at high risk. One of my greatest fears as far as cancer was concerned was that it would affect my ability to train regularly. While so many people engage in eye-rolling when it comes to exercise — it’s popular to equate exercise with misery — having to take time off from working out was one of the most horrible outcomes I could imagine. My version of hell involves a sedentary existence. I train hard to enjoy my life, to be able to move and lift and not feel pain. I work out to live and that energizes me like nothing else. And anything that jeopardizes that is a death sentence to me.

Okay, maybe a little dramatic? But you get my point. I.Love.Exercise.

Today’s compliment was particularly poignant. During my 2017 doctor’s appointment to check out that suspicious lump in my breast, the doctor’s assistant commented that she wished she had my arms. I remembered that as I went through diagnostic tests and oncology visits and surgery. I followed my surgeon’s orders regarding not lifting heavy things (well, mostly, because “heavy” is negotiable), but as soon as that time limit passed, I was off and running. Exercise meant normality, and I craved feeling normal, as in “not sickly and dying from cancer”. There was mention of this nasty impediment to my life called lymphedema. I didn’t really think about it much until I was discussing lifting weights with my oncologist, who said, “Exactly HOW MUCH weight are we talking about here?” and sent me to the lymphedema specialists so that I wouldn’t go full-Schwartzenegger without knowing whether I was risking having my arm blow up. (It hasn’t so far.)

But my point: the compliment I received today made me feel like I’d come full circle. While, yeah, fear of death from cancer is a biggie, drastic changes to one’s lifestyle are also anxiety-provoking.

Today, I felt, I’m back.