“Okay, but what are you actually doing for fitness?”
As a disabled person who is not a fitness instructor, it’s hard for me to actually blog about tips on exercising - a lot of it just isn’t designed for me. Another thing is that unless the person describing the routine to me has also dealt with CFS, I need to take their advice with a grain of salt and also wildly dial down the intensity - intense workouts are not safe for people with CFS/ME/SEID, and this means for people with Long COVID or Long Lyme or anything like that too. Exertion of that kind can cause crashes that last several days, weeks, or months at worst. If you have any form of chronic illness, I heavily recommend that you take whatever workout you’re doing and dial down the intensity a lot - only doing a couple of reps at a time, etc. Your workout should feel like it’s too easy. I’m serious.
There is, as far as I can tell, only really one person in the topmost Youtube search results potentially worth listening to in regards to CFS/ME and fitness - a lot of the rest of it seemed like it was overly spiritualistic or based on unclear science. (There were even claims that psychology or retraining your brain could somehow fix CFS... Youtube, do better! It’s a physical post-viral condition!!!)
Raelan Agle is self-described as someone who has recovered from CFS and is the primary person I could find making any videos in regards to exercise with CFS/ME/SEID. She also just talks about CFS and her personal journey with recovering from/minimizing symptoms from it in general. I’m personally going to be looking into her videos more in the future and seeing what I can take from them for my own life. However, a word of caution - she seems to have bought into things like juice cleansing/clean eating, and while if that helps her, that’s wonderful, I worry about the safety of recommending practices like that to others. That type of “wellness” industry thing contributes to a lot of bad, like eating disorders and even cults. So be careful.
I’m a wheelchair user, so wheelchair exercise or seated exercise (I do have control of my legs, I can technically ambulate on my tip toes) is critical to me. Luckily that’s not too hard to find. Much easier than good tangible advice for people with postviral illness, anyway. A little bit of searching on Youtube before I started this blog, and I found Paul Eugene’s channel.
He does a number of videos designed for seated exercise, low impact exercise, and other forms of exercise for older or disabled people in a variety of settings for a variety of purposes. He’s not a wheelchair user himself, and he does advertise some of the exercise as ‘fat burning’, but the commitment to accessible workout information is appreciated and very helpful. Some of the videos are set to gospel music but most aren’t.
Another channel is Adapt To Perform, which is actually run by a wheelchair user! He does a number of live streams, reels, and other things like that. Not really my preferred format, but it seems incredibly helpful to anyone in a wheelchair. In any case, if you have a disability, an injury, or a postviral illness like I do, be sure to be very careful and know your own limits before attempting any kind of workout or exercise!