Training with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Medical Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hi,

My wife has been diagnosed with CFS. I’m wondering if you recommend anything different for training or exercise recommendations. In the past she’s experienced extreme fatigue from high intensity exercise. For instance, doing kettlebells 3x a week caused a period of extreme fatigue.

She’s using an APAP and it seems to be helping. She’s also taking Amitriptyline 10mg/day for headaches (prescribed before the CFS diagnosis). She recently started taking methylated B12 OTC and it seems to be helping, but that’s only been a week.

2

Hi,

Sorry to hear about this. I would probably use a similar approach to what was described in the recent article on pain on our website – the key being to find a tolerable “entry point”. It is common for patients in this situation to be poorly tolerant / intolerant of very high intensity exercise, so you may need to start significantly lower and monitor / adjust based on symptoms over time. This is a great situation for RPE-based autoregulation strategy as well.

3

Thanks for the quick reply!