Understanding Exercise


Your Prescribed Exercise

Why Have I Been Prescribed Exercise?

Exercise is often used to help you improve your symptoms by increasing your muscular strength. We all need to improve our muscle mass (the amount of muscle we have) before being able to increase our strength, power and endurance.

Strengthening is a process that requires us to challenge our bodies with activity to be able to drive a change. These changes are not immediate and strengthening will take at least 6-8 weeks before we notice big changes.

Resistance exercise is great at helping manage many conditions including:

Arthritis

Dementia

Frailty

Low Back Pain

Obesity

Pulmonary Disorders

Cancers

Diabetes

Mental Health

High Blood Pressure

Osteoarthrits

Peripheral Vascular Disease

Falls Risk

Insomnia

Osteoporosis

Cardiovascular Disease

Stroke

Movement Disorders

How Many Repetitions of an Exercise Should I Do?

Below are some ideas of how to choose what repetitions you should be using. Remember that you need muscle mass and strength before you can improve your power and/or endurance:

DIAGRAM HERE

How Do I Know When to Make Things Harder (Progress) or Easier (Regress)?

DIAGRAM HERE