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Getting Physically Ready For Your Mastectomy



You’ve made the decision to get rid of the girls, bravo! This is a huge, life-altering decision. Now that you’re on your way to taking back control of your life, it’s time to prepare your body for surgery. Whether you’re an avid athlete or just starting out, I’ll be going over how getting those muscles primed and prepped, will help make recovery from major surgery that much easier.

When I met with both my Plastic Surgeon and Surgical Oncologist, my first question to them was “What can I do to prepare physically for surgery?”, but I didn’t like their answer of “nothing”. How can there be nothing I can do to help make this surgery go easier for me? That seems like such a bland, roll over and surrender answer; and I’m not the type of girl to not put up a fight. I mean hello, I just came out of my battle against chemo and won!

I took matters into my own hands and started to do some research on physical therapy after a mastectomy and applied it to my fitness routine before surgery. Once you have your mastectomy your arm and chest strength will be at their weakest point that you will probably ever experience. In order to help minimize muscle atrophy (the loss of muscle tissue), you can prepare these parts of your body before going under the knife.

Cardio – Abs – Upper Body; these three areas are the main focus of all my pre-op workouts. Cardio to help keep my heart strong; Abs to help aid in lifting myself up when I can’t use my arms to pull or push myself up; Upper Body to help keep muscle atrophy as minimal as possible. Now, this is not to say that you should be skipping leg day. You should still be doing a full-body style approach, I just spend a little extra time on these specific areas to give them a little more TLC.

I’m an avid athlete and fitness “enthusiast”, but by no means do I have any formal education in personal training or physical therapy. I’ve been working out and playing sports all my life, so I usually just “wing it” when I’m in gym mode. So what exercises can one do that can help these focus areas?

I default to the experts over at the Sweat Factor when I need some extra help in coming up with a new routine, or even when I need help on making modifications to exercises I already know of. You can choose different styles of workouts led by the world’s top trainers, and boy will it make you work up a sweat. Having just come out of 5 months of dense dose chemo treatments, my body was in total shock with each workout I completed. I missed that feeling of my arms burning so bad I thought they’d fall off or not being able to sit down because my legs were so sore.

Some of my favorite workouts I use when I’m just “winging it” can be found on my Pinterest boards if you don’t want to sign up for a membership. Always remember that whatever style of workout you choose, make sure you stay hydrated and stretch!

~Rori Zura

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