Episode 16 – Post-Exertional Malaise

Shownotes

Post-exertional malaise is probably one of the biggest bugbears when it comes to fatigue recovery. Anna shares a general framework for tackling post-exertional malaise as well as her own experience and things that made the biggest difference for her personally.

Useful links:

Website: https://annamarsh.co.uk/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anna_marsh_nutrition/

Fatigue Recovery Quiz: https://app.annamarsh.co.uk/quiz

Post-Exertional Malaise

Welcome back to the chronic fatigue and burnout recovery Podcast. Today I’m going to be talking about post-exertional malaise. If you are anything like me or anything like I posted, exertional malaise was one of the biggest bugbears in my fatigue recovery.

It was probably one of the first symptoms to creep in, although I didn’t realize that’s what was happening initially. It was one of those last things I needed to deal with to move forward and gain momentum in my fatigue recovery. I know the frustrations of post-exertional malaise very well, and I’m going to share today some things that you may want to be thinking about if you are as frustrated as I was.

And things that work for me, things that work for clients, and things to play around with my work in general. But before I share all of that with you, I guess the first thing to say is, what is post-exertional malaise? Post-exertional malaise is an increase in symptoms that occurs after exertion, which could sometimes be mental exertion.

For the most part, it is physical exertion or exercise. Usually, it happens between straight off to exercise to 24, even 48 hours after some demand on the body system. I found in my own fatigue recovery that there was definitely a pattern that I would notice.

So if I was going to get any post-exertional malaise after exercise, I might have an hour after I exercise where I would feel on top of the world running on all the fantastic endorphins and then by about almost four hours on the dot after I finished exercising, that’s when it would hit, and I would tend to feel the symptoms increase. For me, a lot of it was experiencing a lot of brain fog, fatigue and maybe some aches and pains. Although it can be different for each person, there will be a bigger cycle.

That was the small four-hour cycle, but the bigger cycle might be like a build-up cycle. If I had been doing a lot of things over, like maybe several days, I knew I could wake up one morning and just need a rest day. That, to a certain extent, was easier to manage because it was a bigger, less intense cycle.

But if I were going to get the sort of crash for hours after exercise, that would probably be the more intense cycle. I tried so many different things and many different approaches to exercise. I was constantly trying and crashing, trying and crashing, trying and crashing.

I wouldn’t recommend it. But eventually, I did get to where I needed to go. Hopefully, what I can share today in this episode can shortcut that process for you so you don’t have to go through those repeated cycles of trying and crashing, trying and crashing.

Exercise was such a bi...