Lymphedema Awareness Month Tips: Movement is essential

Move your body by walking, stretching, doing yoga, resistance training: any kind of movement is beneficial (in fact, essential) to assist the movement of lymphatic fluid around your body. Here’s how it works:

When we move our body, we are essentially moving our skeleton and we need the muscles in the body to contract and relax (or concentric
and eccentric contractions). As the muscles contract and relax they create a pumping action. In the world of MLD we call this ‘muscle pump’.

This is another type of pumping action required by your lymphatic system to keep fluid moving (we looked at the pumping action of the
diaphragm last week). And this is why any visit to an MLD therapist should include guidance in exercises that you can perform yourself at home on a daily basis.

Where there is damage to, or removal of, part of the lymphatic system you’ll need additional techniques alongside this muscle pumping action. This will be discussed in another post, so stay tuned.

If you’d like to move more, I offer yoga classes 3 times per week, resistance training classes twice per week and Personal Training too, all
online via Zoom. I also offer online private tutorials to teach you all the techniques you need to create a daily routine to help manage your Lymphedema at home.

Get in touch, you can contact me here.