Exercise oncology
Targeted exercise at every stage of cancer care, from before treatment to palliative care.
Exercise is now written into the cancer guidelines. The American Society of Clinical Oncology tells cancer doctors to recommend aerobic and strength exercise during treatment, to ease the side effects. Australia’s Clinical Oncology Society calls exercise an adjunct therapy that helps counteract the adverse effects of cancer and its treatment, and says it belongs in standard cancer care. We prescribe it the way it was studied: measured, progressive, supervised, and planned around your treatment.
Exercise works alongside your medical treatment, not instead of it. Please check with your care team before you start.
How targeted exercise works with your cancer treatment
- Before surgery: we help you go into it as strong as you can.
- During chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy or hormone therapy: we help you keep your strength and fitness while treatment takes its toll.
- After treatment ends: we help you rebuild what treatment took, with a clear plan, when you’ve been told to “stay active” and nobody has said how.
- Living with cancer long term, including cancer in the bones: we help you train carefully, with a plan agreed with your oncology team.
- In palliative care: we offer gentle exercise to improve your quality of life, planned with your palliative care team around what matters to you.
Why we measure before we prescribe
“Exercise” covers everything from a gentle walk to heavy strength training, and cancer treatment affects each person differently. One person is losing muscle, another has lost heart and lung fitness, and another is losing bone or balance, and each of them needs a different prescription. So we measure before we prescribe, write the programme around what we find, and re-test at sessions 10 and 20 to check that the change actually happened.
Strength and fitness fade when you stop, so we build a programme you can keep up, not a short course.
See the evidenceHow it starts
We speak with you before anything else. If you are in treatment, have cancer in the bones, a port, a stoma or a catheter, have had surgery in the last six months, or have had radiotherapy to the pelvis, we review your situation before anyone tests you, and with your permission we check in with your care team. Then comes your assessment: tests of strength, power, balance and movement, plus a body composition scan, adjusted to what suits you.
Our exercise oncology programmes are led by an exercise physiologist with a Master of Exercise Medicine focused on exercise oncology: exercise for people with cancer, at every stage from before treatment to palliative care.
The questions everyone asks us
For families
It is natural to want to protect someone you love, but please try not to wrap them in cotton wool. Where you can, walk with them, even for a few minutes a day, and short, slow walks are perfectly fine. During treatment, let them set the pace, add a little each week, and make sure someone always knows where they are.
Please stop and call the care team if they get chest pain, feel dizzy, have a racing heart or trouble breathing, notice new or unusual bone pain, or new swelling in an arm or leg. During chemotherapy, a temperature of 38°C or higher is an emergency, so please call the care team straight away. In an emergency, call 995.
← BackTalk to us before you start
Send us a WhatsApp message, or book a time for us to call you back. If you are in treatment, we will speak with you before anything is booked.