Exercise

[Guest guest]

Not sure if any of ya'll are interested in this, but I found it kinda

interesting and kinda bumming to me....I can barely stay awake between

breakfast and noon let alone get up go to the local " Y " and do an hour long

class of exercising and lord knows that if I did do that I would come home

and pass out til 8:30 that night from being overly exhausted....

Any the rest of ya'll feel me?

But a new study in the July 27 issue of the British Medical Journal found

that regular aerobic exercise can produce substantial improvements in how

fibromyalgia patients feel.

Although previous studies have also found benefits from exercise for

fibromyalgia patients, researchers say those findings are hard to apply to

general practice because the exercise sessions were conducted in hospitals

under the supervision of trained health professionals. Those studies also

lacked long-term follow up.

But in this study, the authors compared the effects of a simple-to-follow, co

mmunity-based exercise program on a group of 132 people with fibromyalgia who

were attending a rheumatology clinic in London.

The patients were randomly divided into two groups that met in hour-long

classes twice a week for 12 weeks. One group received exercise therapy from a

personal trainer with no special training in working with fibromyalgia

patients. And the other group received relaxation and muscle flexibility

training.

After three months of following a individualized exercise program, which

consisted primarily of walking on a treadmill or riding a stationary bicycle,

researchers found 35% of the patients said they felt much or very much

better. In comparison, only about half as many patients in the relaxation

group reported similar improvements.

And those beneficial effects were long lasting. One year later, fewer

patients in the fibromyalgia exercise group still met the clinical criteria

for having the condition (31 in the exercise group compared with 44 in the in

the relaxation group). People in the exercise group also had bigger

reductions in muscle and joint tenderness and said fibromyalgia was having

less of a negative impact on their daily life.

Study author Selwyn C. M. s of Poole Hospital in Dorset, England, and

colleagues say their findings show that " prescribed aerobic activity is a

simple, cheap, and potentially widely available treatment for fibromyalgia. "