[Esofia]

I am one of those people who just focuses on dieting for weight loss, as I have severe ME/CFS and can't exercise anywhere near enough for it to influence my weight. Indeed, some days the most exercise I manage is just getting to the toilet and back, and having a shower is too exhausting. Overall, I'm not as bad as I was a few years ago, but I've been having a bit of a flare since the autumn, which is a pity. Right now I'm bedbound, hmm, 20-22 hours a day? This time last year, I was managing regular slow, gentle walks with my partner and the cat, and we all miss those. Which Her Ladyship shows by getting bitey in the evenings, so I do spend some time throwing catnip mice, trotting around the flat yelling "Pounce!" and playing with her with the big wrestling toy. It can actually be quite hard work playing with the cat, I keep an eye on my Fitbit and if my heart rate goes into the 110s, I have to stop, but thankfully it's only short bursts.

The situation for me with regard to exercise is:

1. Aerobic exercise is bad (dysautonomia). My heart rate should go up as little as possible, and I should never get breathless. (If I ever heal enough to get to the point of more serious exercise, apparently weight training is the way to go as it's anaerobic, but I'm a long way away from that.) Pushing through the pain is also the last thing I should do. A little gentle discomfort may be OK, the sort of sensation you get from a stretch, but that's something I have to judge myself.

2. My muscles are weak, fatigue from pretty much anything (I can come home shattered from a wheelchair trip to the park if I was too tired to go out that day), and don't recover well from exercise.

3. My balance is poor, and I'm bad at standing still (dysautonomia again). So I do some exercises lying down, which is easier to build into my day if it's in bed than on the floor, as getting up again is a problem. I can do some standing-based exercises, it depends really.

4. Gentle stretches work out quite well, and seem to be a bit helpful with pain, especially pelvic pain. I'm already doing some of those, and the WEED challenge is helping me get back on track with doing them regularly.

5. I have fibromyalgia, so I get a lot of pain. When I'm up to going for a walk, I notice that the pain isn't as bad when I'm walking, and I think is a bit milder for a while afterwards. But if I overdo it, and despite having a Fitbit and eighteen years of experience with ME this is still hard to judge, then the pain may flare up, so it's a delicate balancing act. Oh, and it flares if I get a massage. Even if the massage is to a different area, I get pain in the hotspots I'll describe next, weirdly enough.

6. My pain is all worse on the left, and the primary hotspot is a nest of trigger points around the left hip/gluteal area. The next hotspot is my left shoulder, and they both refer all over the place. I also have pelvic pain, so I'm thinking that working on that general area is a good idea. Especially if it improves my sex life! Seriously, sex and chasing the cat are currently my main forms of exercise. Not concurrently, of course.

7. Apparently it's useful to work on your leg muscles when it comes to dysautonomia. Erm, vascular something-or-others.

8. Purely in terms of vanity, I would like to build up the muscles in my bum if that's at all possible, because that's where I've lost a lot of weight, and it would be nice to have some curves back in that area. We're all apple shapes in my family. Apparently I had a lovely hourglass figure when I was twenty. Ah well. It may be that I am not able to do remotely enough exercise to see results of that nature, but hey, it's worth a try.

Now, another problem is that my teeth are not in a good state! I have invested in a spanking new electric toothbrush, which is much better than the old one, quite apart from the fact that it actually works properly and doesn't need to be held together with the other hand while you're using it. In order to keep going for the whole two minutes, I have started doing exercises while I brush my teeth. This is turning out really well. It's a manageable amount, my teeth are already doing better, and I can end up doing it two or three times a day.

So can you help me find a nice range of exercises which I can do while brushing my teeth? Some days I will be not up to anything, some days I will only be up to the gentler ones, so it's worth having a range, not to mention staving off boredom. A set of four things to do works well, as the toothbrush buzzes every thirty seconds. I'm not familiar with much exercise talk, so it'd be great if you could explain the exercises fully or link to a full explanation. Diagrams work fine for me, videos are less my thing. So far I've been doing:

1. Pliés. Are you meant to have your heels in the air while you do these? I have a Callanetics book around somewhere, my mother was into it so I did those exercises in my teens, and I'm drawing on a few memories from those.

2. An exercise from the Callanetics book where you stand in the plié position, lower yourself a bit, tilt your pelvis forward and then back again, lower yourself a bit more, tilt and back, lower yourself a bit more, tilt and back, then do the same on the way up.

3. Standing with my feet a bit apart and doing circles with my hips.

4. Lunge stretches, with my toes of the back leg on the floor rather than having my shin lying along the floor. These are nice to do last.

I'm holding onto the wall a lot for balance, though I think that is improving a bit! I've just heard about doing pliés in second position, with my feet wider than hip width apart, so I'm going to try that.

Any ideas? Ideas for general stretches I can do the rest of the time are welcome too. Mostly I do the ones from the Heal Pelvic Pain book (seriously, if you're disabled and can't exercise much, these are brilliant), a yoga stretch which I think is the Seated Twist Pose, and swinging my arms in big circles, plus I've started doing a couple of little stretches just for my hands, like the Prayer Pose and its inverse. As well as general pain, I also tend to get RSI in my hands and forearms, from computer use or quilting, so loosening up my shoulders, arms and hands is useful as well.