Exercise during and after reconstruction?

I am almost six weeks post surgery, bilateral mastectomy and immediate reconstruction with implants. I have been doing some Pilates classes (without any planks or weights) for the last week, and have been going for daily walks since a few days after surgery. My plastic surgeon gave me the ok today to get back to everything I was doing before, but to listen to my body and don’t go too heavy with the weights. I will start slowly, but am really excited to get back to my usual exercise routine!

I was told I was ok to run 5 weeks after BMX with immediate implant recon, and normal activity after 6 weeks. I waited until 7 weeks. If you go too hard too fast you'll risk failure of your reconstruction. I had to work my way back up to where I was before; you'll lose muscle strength really fast but your cardio conditioning will not suffer nearly as much. Keep this in mind; you'll feel like you can go harder/faster because your heart is fine but you might wind up injuring yourself because your muscles aren't. So work your way back into shape by starting out easy and increasing weight/distance/difficulty a little bit each week.

I didn't do any weight lifting before my dx but had to add some in to avoid bone loss on the AIs. It was long after my surgery, and after radiation too. I feel like the weight lifting made a HUGE difference in how my pec muscle felt - one weight training session did more than months of PT exercises. It took a few days for the soreness and tightness to wear off, but after that my pec felt MUCH more loose than before. I never would have guessed that.

Thank you for sharing this. It makes me feel hopeful that I’ll feel a little *normal* sooner rather than later following my bi-lateral with (hopefully) straight to implants coming up in a little over a week. I’ve never had major surgery and have 3 boys under 5. While I know I won’t be tumbling around with them anytime soon, I’m happy to hear I’ll potentially be able to be a tiny bit active not too horribly long post surgery.