Working out - How to adjust for Multiple Sclerosis

FITNESS - Malady Monday

Fitness and Multiple Sclerosis

Finding a personal trainer or physical therapist that you can trust and work with long term is a critical first step.

The nerve sheaths lose some of the myelin protecting the nerve.Then plaque forms like small scars.This stops or interferes with messages passing from brain to muscle. So the brain sends out a control message to a muscle but the message does not arrive or arrives garbled. Result no movement or the wrong movement.


What next ?

• Do not work out to the point of fatigue, It is a bad idea with MS to push to exhaustion. Before MS this might have been the way you worked out but pushing too hard brings up body temperature and high body temperature makes the symptoms worse.
• Stay cool. So find a cool or even cold place to work out. Preventing body temperature going up to far too fast means that you'll be able to workout effectively for longer.
• Use cold packs or even cold vests to keep muscle temperatures down.
• Do not overload a joint as the potential for injury is obviously always present.
• However joints need to be worked through a complete (almost complete) range of motion.
• At the end of range of motion in an exercise, hold the position for a second or two before coming back to the start position.
• Try to use rotational motions as much as possible (over straight in and out movements).
• Try to include exercises which directly relate to everyday tasks like getting in and out of a shower.

Leg muscles can get tight and spastic but you need to find a way to get around these issues:

• Sometimes stroking the muscle opposite the tight muscle (the tight muscle is often called the agonist muscle and the opposite muscle is the antagonist) helps loosen the tight muscle. So if the Quad muscles at the front of the thigh are very tight and unresponsive then stroking gently the muscles at the back of the thigh (the Hamstring muscles) can free up the Quad muscles.
• Gently stretch each leg joint in all directions. This means the ankles up, down and around; knee forward and back; hip forward, back and around. This is to stop a joint gradually losing range of motion and a week at a time getting tighter.
• Use leg kicking motions (as if kicking a ball but not actually using a ball) but curve the leg movements from outside to inside. Make sure you are safely holding on before trying a kick.

Lastly, MS is not the same all the time. It gets better and gets worse.
Use the up time to best advantage.