Graded Exercise Therapy

Graded Exercise Therapy (GET) was also the first CFS strategy I tried after my first really bad period of my illness where I’d been hospitalised for a while but hadn't yet been diagnosed.  I found out about it on the internet, read the manuals and tried it out on myself.

The basic theory of GET is pretty straightforward - you work out how much activity you can do in a day without making your health worse, then add 10-20% to that each week or two so that you gradually do more and more.  So if you can walk 10 minutes a day, every day, you do that for a week or two; then you walk 12 minutes a day, every day - the next week.  And so on, as far as you need.

It’s supposed to avoid the major ‘ups and downs’ of CFS - where you wake up feeling a bit better than usual, go for a walk and then spend the next few days in painful misery in bed.  That used to really confuse me when I first got ill. I’d always be thinking “but I felt better yesterday! I thought I was finally recovering, but now I’m worse than ever!!’.  GET was useful in understanding that I was worse the next days BECAUSE of the extra I’d done on that better day.

For me personally, it did help me to get some stability back and gave a bit of a sense of control over my health which all helped my sanity.  However, it definitely didn't magically transform me into a fully-functioning health bomb either!!

For me personally, GET helped me to:

• Understand why I got awful days after good days.
• Even out days to more of an 'average' level rather than (relative) peaks and massive troughs.
• Gradually build up my confidence in doing a bit more activity.
• Build up how much I could do so I could walk more and do more.

Bad things about GET for me personally:

• It certainly didn't 'cure me' - I had a ton of brain fog from pushing myself walking everyday.
• It worked quite well in my first period of recovery, then seemed to work less and less well after each relapse and became harder and harder to do.
• My days varied in how good and bad they were despite keeping physical activity the same.

I think those are the main things! So in a nutshell I think for me, GET helped me to understand better how my activity levels influenced my symptoms, but there was a lot else going on with my health that it didn't resolve, it made the brain fog worse (from physical exhaustion I think) and didn't resolve the relapses.  

Nowadays, I don't believe that a single approach can resolve this illness, I think a much more holistic approach is needed, but there are things I learned from doing GET that I carry forward - I do need to challenge myself a little at a time to progress and running around doing tons on 'good' days is a recipe for creating a 'trough'.  A more balanced approach to activity levels across my days is helpful to me.

Wishing you all lots of health and happiness, Rose 🌹xx