The Exercises That Help Keep Breast Cancer At Bay

For women, our lifetime risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer is about 1 in 7, before we take into account any added risk or protective factors.

For men, it’s more like 1 in 556, which again, is before taking into account any added risk or protective factors.

Here’s a good place to start on improving those odds: How To Triple Your Breast Cancer Survival Chances

And for that matter, check out: 8 Signs On Your Breast You Shouldn’t Ignore

And for those concerned (or even just curious) about the pros and cons of menopausal HRT when it comes to breast cancer:

The Hormone Therapy That Reduces Breast Cancer Risk & More ← this is actually very important to understand, as otherwise it’s easy to accidentally self-sabotage and increase one’s overall mortality risk

So, what’s this about exercise and breast cancer?

There are two things to focus on

No, not those.

Well, yes, those, but also: aerobic exercise and resistance training.

A research team (Dr. Alice Avancini et al.) analysed data from 22 randomized controlled trials (total n=968 participants) that investigated the effects of exercise on various pro-inflammatory biomarkers (mostly interleukin variants, but also c-reactive proteins) that are known to increase breast cancer reoccurrence risk.

What they found was:

❝Exercise induced small to large significant reductions in IL-6 (SMD = -0.85; 95% CI = -1.68 to -0.02; p = .05) and TNF-α (SMD = -0.40; 95% CI = -0.81 to 0.01; p = .05) and a trend for a decrease in CRP.

When stratifying by exercise mode, trends toward reduction in IL-6 and TNF-α were observed for combined exercise, whilst changes were not generally affected by exercise program duration❞

Source: Effects of exercise on inflammation in female survivors of nonmetastatic breast cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

The “combined exercise” mentioned?

Aerobic exercise and resistance training.

This is important, because as regular 10almonds readers may remember…

What Your Metabolism Says About How Aggressive Breast Cancer Is Likely To Be For You ← this makes a huge difference to survival chances

So, this study’s findings are very consistent with that, because:

• Aerobic training increases cardiovascular fitness, improving metabolism
• Resistance training increases muscle mass, improving metabolism*

*because muscle “costs” calories to maintain, prompting an increase in metabolism, whereas fat prompts our metabolism to slow, to conserve energy to face the obvious food shortage that must be coming

See also: Stop Cancer 20 Years Ago

Want to learn more?

Here’s the best book we’ve read on breast cancer survival:

The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer – by Dr. Jenn Simmons

Take care!