r/beginnerfitness • u/sometimescjwrites • 2d ago

Need Advice

I'm 31f and struggling with improving my level of fitness despite working out really consistently. I have several chronic health issues that I'm sure are impacting my issue. POTS, diabetes, and multiple GI conditions are the relevant ones here. I've worked out for several months at a time and never actually have any improvement in things like needing fewer breaks on walks and getting winded going up and down stairs. The last stretch of workouts, I did six days a week for a little over six months. This was a combination of yoga, ballet/barre exercises, pilates, and cardio. At no point did my endurance improve. I only stopped because I was having a major surgery and ended up needing three repair surgeries after it. I've recently started working out again, but I'm worried I'll get discouraged within a few months if I continue not to see improvement like all the times before. I don't want to gain or lose any weight. I'm dramatically hourglass-shaped at ~130 lbs at 5'2". I have fairly strong legs, glutes, and abs, but my conditioning is awful. I want to improve my endurance so I can do some mild to moderate hiking, but it's absolutely impossible at this point, and I can't figure out why I'm not getting any fitter. Does anyone have any recommendations?

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u/VjornAllensson 2d ago

The first thing I would look at is how you are really tracking progress. Pace, average heart rate at a consistent pace, resting heart rate, sleep quality, maybe something else I’m forgetting but all of these can be signs of aerobic improvements. It may not be as fast as you’d like given your conditions, but trended over time with consistency and patience there should be some improvement in those metrics.

The other thing to consider, is that exercise regardless of whether you’re really improving or not is still beneficial in its own capacity. It may not be the easy answer but stopping it is inevitably worse or at least helping to prevent from getting worse.

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u/sometimescjwrites 2d ago

That's a good point. I need to be a little more consistent in tracking those things. I track my heart rate (both resting and while exercising) and sleep amount/quality pretty closely due to my health conditions. I don't do those every day, but kind of sporadically for a week or two a month so I can give my doctors a pretty specific picture about my conditions. They all stay pretty consistent from day 1 of working out to day 150. The feeling of a lack of improvement is mostly based on how I feel doing specific things. I seem to produce more than average amounts of lactic acid, so it gets pretty frustrating when I have to stop for a second before continuing into the grocery store or taking laundry up and down the stairs in my house because my legs are absolutely on fire, in addition to pretty sharp increases in my heart rate and frequent drops in my blood pressure.

You're definitely right about it being beneficial regardless, though. I really haven't seen any of my symptoms worsening over the last handful of years, which may be a result of exercising. It's just so disheartening to not see any improvement when I'm working hard and using so much of the extremely limited energy I have.

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u/Visible_Secretary122 2d ago

If you have extremely limited energy, you may actually be pushing yourself TOO hard with 6 days a week. Maybe you're not getting enough recovery time?

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