Challenge Yourself with Exercise after Bariatric Surgery

Just after bariatric surgery in Michigan, fitness will likely be a challenge for you. As you lose weight and begin building your strength, every step can feel like a challenge, and even relatively gentle exercises may leave you sore and sweaty. But once some time has passed after sleeve gastrectomy, gastric band surgery or gastric bypass in Ypsilanti or Saginaw, you’ll notice that the same exercises don’t feel so difficult anymore.

When this happens, it’s time to start adjusting your routine to provide your body with new challenges. If the results of your routine start to level off, this is a sign that you’re progressing, but maintaining the same intensity will only deliver diminishing returns—before long, you’ll likely find yourself at the standstill of a fitness plateau.

Regularly increasing the time you spend on an activity or the number of reps you do can help you keep your exercise routine fresh and rewarding. However, some other simple adjustments can also help you maintain intensity in your workouts, including:

• Instability. Because working to keep your balance on an unstable surface will engage more muscles in your core than doing the same activity on solid ground, tools like wobble boards, BOSU balls and exercise balls can up the intensity of countless different simple exercises. Try these tools out at your gym or consider investing in one for your home gym, and ask a trainer if you need help learning how to use them properly.
• Minimalism. Having the support of a weight machine beneath you can take some of the challenge out of strength training. Much like the tools of instability above, lifting free weights will engage more muscles as you work to keep yourself balanced and upright. You will also get this benefit from doing bodyweight exercises like push-ups, which may become more feasible as you lose weight after bariatric surgery.
• Circuit training. It’s often necessary to take breaks between activities, but stringing different workouts together can help you improve the efficiency and intensity of each one. Circuit training involves transitioning from one exercise into the next, working different muscle groups as you shift between aerobic and resistance exercises. Including a variety of activities in your circuit training sessions can help you get a full body workout, but make sure you aren’t overburdening any one area of your body.

When your routine starts to feel less challenging after sleeve gastrectomy, gastric band or gastric bypass, strategies like these can help you get off a fitness plateau and back on track. What else has helped you keep exercise intense after bariatric surgery? Tell us in the comments below.