First - a set back. Last week Mike had a follow up appointment with the Electrophysiologist who performed his ablation. Mike was worried that he was still having several runs of atrial fibrillation (AF). His consultant confirmed from Mike's AliveCor readings (a nifty little gadget you can use at home to measure your heart rate) that he was having several runs of AF every week.
Read more about Mike's journey up until now - Week 1, Week 2.
The good news - this is normal in the weeks after an ablation. Often the heart takes several weeks to settle down and may in fact never stay in sinus rhythm completely. The difficulty with AF is the unpredictability of it - some patients have no symptoms at all, some feel rubbish.
Mike doesn't feel rubbish for our exercise sessions - he's motivated to just 'get on with it'. We start this week with a longer warm up - when you are in AF exercise can feel more difficult and thus a long warm up can help the heart to prepare for exercise much better. Keeping an eye on Mike's breathing, we were able to complete 9 different exercises - a combination of lower body and upper body. By alternating between an arm and a leg exercise, it means we don't need to rest as much as legs rest whilst the arms are working and vice versa.
This week Mike completed over 40 minutes of exercise without stopping and without feeling breathless. Add this to his homework that he's been sticking to - walking every day and a couple of games of golf last month and he is getting on track to improving his fitness.
Next week we will aim to increase the amount of cardio that Mike completes in one go - our end target is 30 minutes so each week we will add a few minutes until he is able to sustain 30 minutes of continuous cardio work.
Mike thought he couldn't exercise again - he's proven himself wrong week after week. Although it seems like a long road, after 4 weeks he is already doing 40 minutes of exercise in one go - way more than he thought possible!
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Yours in health,
Angela Hartley
Team Leader of the Healthy Hearties!
Read more about our programmes here.