Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show . I’m Robin Daly, host of the show and founder of Yes to Life, the UK charity that’s been supporting people with cancer in discovering the benefits of integrative medicine for almost 20 years. I’m pleased to say that in recent years it has become easier and easier to find specialist exercise coaches for cancer, and this very recently developed strand of integrative medicine is fast becoming central to many people. One such specialist is Sarah Newman, who heads up a team of practitioners under the banner of Get Me Back.

Sarah Newman
Thanks for having me.

Robin Daly
So, the first line of the homepage on your website states that exercise is an essential part of cancer recovery.

Sarah Newman
Yeah, I genuinely believe that it is a medical tool that we should be using and should be recommended by physicians as well. It’s something that I used in my own recovery from cancer. I was diagnosed in 2016 and was always a bit of a fitness fanatic and when it came to exercising after my first round of chemotherapy I wasn’t sure what to do and what would be safe and what felt comfortable. So I decided to just listen to my body and go with a little bit of walk running but I wasn’t sure whether it was the right thing to do. As treatment progressed I didn’t feel well enough to exercise but when I was coming out the other side in my recovery I wanted to start doing stuff to get stronger to rebuild my body and my trust in my body as well and I couldn’t find anyone who could help really who was a specialist in cancer rehabilitation and so that’s when I looked at creating something to support people like me who were in 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s who were active people who didn’t want to just be recommended or walk to the shops who wanted to do more than that and so I retrained and became a cancer and exercise specialist and started to build a client base from there. People started working with me and I was working with them from a stage before their treatment even started to prehabilitate them to get them ready for their treatment and then work with them during their treatment chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy and to keep them fit and strong and actually to help them manage their side effects in some cases and then also to help them out the other side to help with their recovery not just from a physical fitness point of view but also mobility, their strength and their cardiovascular fitness as well but this in turn would help with their mental health at the same time because a lot of the work that I did at the beginning was outside and that felt like it was a really positive experience for them to be outside in the fresh air rain or shine away from the walls of hospital appointments and hospital rooms that feel quite clinical so that was the idea of creating this safe space where people could come and feel like they’d escaped cancer and that they were a little bit more in control of what they were doing which is what exercise helped me do.

Robin Daly
Fantastic, so that’s why I’m talking to you today to find out more about all this And so, you know when I found the years life almost 20 years ago That statement on your website might have been just as true as it is today, but of course no one knew it Absolutely. No one knew that it was all about well rest and you know, take it easy for a long time and So it’s not really over egging you to call this a revolution in cancer care You know because the the difference that an exercise program can make to your well-being and to your longevity is So significant is that’s why it’s revolutionary. So and Your team is called get me back you and your team and and there you are Specialized in working with cancer. So not just an exercise coach but a specialist cancer exercise coach So you’ve got very personal reasons obviously that have taken you into this area and it’s Pretty shocking though, isn’t it that it’s really not that unusual for young people like you to be diagnosed with cancer That’s the place we got to in so many different ways on this planet. It’s pretty scary stuff All right. So yeah back to exercise It’s a revolution as I said and the evidence said to demonstrate how effective it can be as a strategy for recovery But how much do we know about exactly why it’s so effective?

Sarah Newman
And so, well, there’s a lot of science behind it and there are lots of different ways that it can work. So in preparation for treatment, cardiovascular exercise is really important in creating as much fitness and the most optimum cardiovascular health as you can before you are given things like anaesthetics to help with your recovery, to get you out of hospital quicker, to get you up and moving faster. The fitter you are, the faster you’re going to come back to where you were before. During treatments like chemotherapy, a combination of cardiovascular, so that’s things like jogging and cycling and swimming, something that gets your heart rate up and gets your lungs and heart working together, and strength training or resistance training, where you’re building muscle around your joints and to support your bones. The combination of the two have been shown to be really effective in reducing side effects like cancer-related fatigue, joint pain, nausea, lots of different side effects, and actually have also shown that people are able to tolerate chemotherapy for longer. So many people.

Robin Daly
Do you know what’s actually going on there? How is it helping with all those things? What’s the physiological effect, the exercise having that’s lessening side effects, for example?

Sarah Newman
I think it’s to do with the changing of the cells and the metabolic rate of different cells. Right. And the specifics behind the science go beyond my scientific knowledge. Fair enough. But there is a change in the cells when people are exercising. So when they’re looking at mouse models in some of the studies that are starting to come out now, they are actually seeing a change in the cell composition of those mice who are exercising whilst being treated with chemotherapy and those that aren’t. So they’re able to tolerate the treatment for longer because they’re metabolizing it faster. Right. And therefore they have better outcomes because they are able to receive more treatment, which is ultimately reducing their cancer or curing their cancer.

Robin Daly
So, you know, yes, lots of science behind it these days is great, isn’t it? And this really emerged very quickly in terms of the medical history. This is just sort of like landed in one go virtually over the course of a very few years. So over and above the science, what’s your kind of sense, this is both from your personal experience and from helping many others at this point, how and why it works. What are the key things you’re finding that are really supporting people?

Sarah Newman
So, I think there is a huge fear when people come to exercise after their treatment particularly, knowing exactly what they can do safely. And actually, we are capable of doing a lot and pretty much most of the things that we could have done before treatment, but the point is there needs to be a little bit more guidance and there needs to be a bit of a gentler approach in some cases where things are progressed at a steady rate. So exercise, as I said at the beginning, is a bit like a medicine. So, it is dose dependent and sometimes in some cases, and this might differ from day to day and does differ from person to person, the dose might be too high. You might do too much and that then kind of doesn’t help you with the side effects that you want. Interesting. So, you have to reduce your dose slightly so that you get the most benefits out of your treatment and that needs to build up gradually because the dose you’ll be able to increase it with a gradual increase of exercise and intensity. But sometimes you’re going to have to take a little few steps back when you’re not feeling quite so well. So for example, during treatment, I always tell people that progress here is not linear. Your aim is to maintain as much muscle mass as you possibly can during your treatment. It’s muscle that’s driving that metabolic change in the cells, so we want to try and keep as much muscle as possible. You’re not looking to run a marathon or lift your personal best deadlift in this phase, but you want to try and keep that going. And so, people see different benefits at different points and they also need to be wary of how their treatment is affecting their fatigue, their energy levels and they do need to listen to their body. So, what I do recommend to people is if they exercise on one day, particularly quite hard, so they do a strength training session, they wait the next day and check that their body is responding okay to that treatment before they then move forward or progress further. So it’s a real kind of having to tune into your body and how it feels, which you become quite used to during cancer treatment and then dosing the exercise according to your response.

Robin Daly
Very interesting, very personalized, in fact, if you want to get good results.

Sarah Newman
Exactly

Robin Daly
Yeah, okay. So I wonder if you’ve got your fingertips. I mean, for people who are not up to speed with the exercise revolution, have you got a few headlines from the science? You could tell us about the things that have been shown to be the case.

Sarah Newman
I think the biggest headline is around reduction of recurrence, so lots of studies coming out showing that exercise is a huge driver to reducing the recurrence of cancer and in some cancers up to 50%. So because breast cancer is quite a prevalent cancer, there are more studies in that specific cancer and it’s shown in some of those that it can reduce the cancer coming back by up to 50%. So that for me and for a lot of other people is a huge driver as to why we exercise and we don’t.

Robin Daly
It should be.

Sarah Newman
Exactly, and then for women and also for men, particularly with hormone-driven cancers, we start to go through medical menopause or you may have already been through menopause and so with that becomes a reduction in oestrogen which can lead to more brittle bones and osteoporosis. So making sure that we have strong bones and strong joints through strength and resistance training is really important and has been shown to improve outcomes for people who have had hormone-driven cancers and be committed to that medical menopause.

Robin Daly
Maybe for some people who haven’t heard of medical menopause, you could explain what that means.

Sarah Newman
So it is for men and women who have their hormones suppressed, and this tends to be before they were due to go into menopause. So for example, if I had cancer at 34, I was given a drug called Xolodex, and that suppressed all of my hormones and shut down my ovaries, which meant I went into a medically induced menopause. And as a result of that, the body responds by trying to take calcium from the bones, which makes them more brittle. And so we need to be aware of that in particularly younger women, and some men as well who have prostate cancer or testicular cancer, for example, who are also given hormone suppressing treatments.

Sarah Newman
Well, I was just going to say on one of the other benefits that has a huge amount of data behind it is cancer-related fatigue, so people are experiencing this kind of tiredness that just won’t go away no matter how much sleep you have, and it’s a result of cancer treatment, particularly radiotherapy as well that can cause cancer-related fatigue. Exercise has been shown to be one of the biggest and most beneficial treatments for cancer-related fatigue. Again, it’s a slow, steady dose increase, but if you get the dose right, you actually feel quite energised after exercising, and that’s what I see a lot with men and women, is they come out of their workout and they’re like, wow, I feel so much better. I didn’t want to do it at the start of this workout. I felt terrible, and it feels really counterintuitive, but it feels so rugged. Absolutely, absolutely. They say, hey, can you go and just go for a little run on the right, please? But actually, it can make you feel so much better.

Robin Daly
Interesting. No, as you say, completely counterintuitive, but it works. Yeah. Yeah, it does. But also, I mean, the CRF, the fatigue is so common, and it’s such a blight on people’s lives, you know, it can be the worst aspect of treatment for many people, aren’t it?

Sarah Newman
Yeah, I see a lot of posts through social media and groups that I’m on around people just feeling so tired and not being able to get to work, to get out of bed some days and I think that’s why trying to keep up some kind of really basic exercise like a 20-minute walk outside every day during or after your treatment, whatever stage you’re at will really help boost and just maintain your energy levels a little bit higher and hopefully above that really terrible fatigue that you can start to feel. I think if you rest too much, you can start to get yourself into a lower level and into that kind of cancer-related fatigue, real almost drowning in that kind of level of heaviness that you feel when you’re so tired.

Robin Daly
completely takes the shine off every aspect of life. Yeah. So, I mean, these kind of results are so startlingly good that actually every oncologist should be placing exercise front and centre for practically everyone that comes their way. But tragically, this is far from the case in Britain anyway. But do you think things are moving that way?

Sarah Newman
They definitely are changing. There are oncologists coming through who get in touch with me and talk to me about what we’re doing and how they can refer their patients to me. I think the thing is I obviously work as a private enterprise and within the NHS, in some of the hospitals, there are facilities for physiotherapists and exercise specialists to support patients to a certain stage, but it tends to be when they’re let go from their everyday hospital care where their active treatment ends, that they become a little bit lost in the system. And I think that is true from an emotional point of support as well, but also from a physical support that they need to then continue that exercise into their everyday routine and make sure that they’re supported that way. But at the moment, there are not enough oncologists talking about exercise. However, it is improving. And tomorrow I get to speak to the Royal College of Radiographers and a team of clinical oncologists who are all meeting to discuss consensus in my cancer. And so I get the opportunity to tell them about exercise and the benefits of exercise. Because for women who have breast cancer, for example, if they go on to have radiotherapy as part of their treatment, if they’ve had surgery that’s limited their mobility through their arm, they need to be able to achieve a hold behind their head, with their arms behind their head for 20 minutes whilst they’re having their radiotherapy. And many women don’t know that. And that’s where a physiotherapist, where an exercise specialist could be helping them to supporting them to regain the mobility in their shoulders and make them feel a little bit stronger to be able to come into that position. So from a physical point of view, they need to be doing it. From a time-saving point of view, they could be doing it. Getting people out of hospitals quicker, making sure they’re pre-having them before surgery, making sure that they are tolerating their treatments for longer and recovering faster from their treatments, just advising them very simply to keep moving and that rest is definitely not best anymore.

Robin Daly
is not best. Absolutely. Yeah, so I think certainly for probably a majority of the patients who an oncologist sees, there’s something on offer from exercise, whether it’s in the area of fatigue or actually extending their life considerably. You mentioned the fact that some of the best evidence is prevention of a recurrence. This is massive, of course, because if you have stage one or two cancer that’s successfully treated and the person’s given the all clear and off they go, that you could say, if that was the sum of it, that would be job done and it would have been expensive and something they would have never wished for, but at least it’s done. But when they’re back nine months later with a stage three or four recurrence, the nightmare is multiplied by a hundred, isn’t it? There’s very expensive results. You know, everything about it is terrible. So anything that can reduce that by 50% has surely got to be, it should be of such interest to the NHS. It isn’t true. They should be thinking, all right, this is exactly what we need.

Sarah Newman
I think, unfortunately, as with most things, it comes down to funding, and so this is something that could be raised in the community. It’s something that Maggie Centres, Macmillan Centres do offer as free services with people who are either volunteered or sometimes paid. There are other charities who are offering exercise sessions for free to people that want to take part, and I think there is a lot more available since COVID and things have been gone online, and so people are available to access those types of services in a much easier way. But in terms of the NHS, I think, unfortunately, the funding is quite low, and you’re lucky to get a physiotherapist. In some cases, a leaflet with some exercises, it seems to be the case in most people who are recovering from surgery and where there might be an effect to their mobility or their core strength or something like that. And what we need is support for those people when they then leave hospital. They leave the kind of everyday contact with a chemotherapy nurse or the radiotherapy team where they can access safe advice to get moving and to keep moving and be recommended, reiterated through their treatment, please go out, make sure you’re walking, make sure you’re moving, go to this place to find some more information. And that’s all they need to do is signpost. There are things out there.

Robin Daly
I mean exercise can be free, let’s face it, it doesn’t even have to cost any money. But if people aren’t told that they won’t do it, well of course if they’re fatigued they’ll think I need to lie down on the sofa, so yeah, it’s a tragedy. It’s interesting you talk about resources but of course it’s a mindset which is like well so far we don’t invest in health, we spend our money on picking up the pieces from people who are in a terrible state. If you invested in a fitness program for somebody who’d had breast cancer and you’ve prevented a recurrence, the amount of money you’d save would be absolutely massive. We throw money at somebody who’s got stage four cancer and then they die, and horrible death and it’s a very horrible end to come to. It’s misplaced money more than lack of it in my book, it’s actually where we are failing to invest in health. But I’m glad to say that concept is at least on the table these days.

Sarah Newman
I hope so. I think there are organisations out there that are trying to push for it. I think there’s a lot going on behind the scenes around recommendations of exercise and making sure that there is a case, a business case, to support more people to exercise before, during and after their treatment. It’s just taking a long time to get through. It’s only really been the last 10 years where that data has started to come out and be significant enough to be able to support and back up what we’re doing.

Robin Daly
Hmm, that’s true. Okay, so exercise is a broad church. It spans from disciplines such as Qi Gong, in which you might be barely moving at all, right through to running or weightlifting or whatever. So I imagine they’ve all got benefits, but different ones. And that some are more applicable to one situation, some to another. Would you give us a little tour of some of the main choices and how you might direct people towards them?

Sarah Newman
So yes, something that I really started with when I first started exercising after treatment was yoga and that was an amazing way to get my body moving gently and slowly but also to help my mind. So I suffered from quite serious anxiety around my treatment and in my recovery and that was just a way of grounding me and I think Qigong is a similar concept, it’s slow movement and using the breath a lot and I know Sophie True who’s going to be speaking at your conference, she’s actually doing a session for us next week. She is a fantastic coach in breath work and making sure that people are using their breath to help. For me from a movement point of view it’s expanding muscles and stretching muscles that perhaps become quite tight. So it’s a useful tool from a stretching point of view but also from a mind calming, making sure your heart rate slows down, reducing mental health and side effects from treatment or just general situation. And so yoga is a fantastic place to start. If you’ve had surgery to shoulders and you want to avoid things like downward dogs and any kind of plank holds you can go to some fantastic instructors Marcia Mercier who does yoga for breast cancer. She does specific moves designed for people who have had treatment to their shoulders and Vicky Fox who runs yoga for cancer and they are specialist teachers. So they’re really great people who do run free classes for people affected by cancer. Some people prefer to do something a bit more energetic so as you mentioned exercise is free, things like running, you can use park benches to do a little bit of strength training if you want to sitting down standing up and using it for arm exercises. So using the facilities that you’ve got around you lots of the parks now have free gyms that you can use or gyms. We’ve had a few that have just been installed around us so that is all free. But if you want to seek a bit more guidance around something like strength training when you feel ready and you want to start building up muscle and your bone strength that’s where I think there needs to be a little bit more guidance and so that’s where I focus our efforts. Through the classes that we run most of them are based around strength and resistance training. So building up muscles that help support good posture that help support your your bones and your joints that can start to ache with ongoing treatment and just making you feel generally stronger so that you can do you can run faster you can cycle faster you can walk faster and everyday functional movement becomes easier for longer and that is ultimately what the goal is to live the best life that you can for as long as you can and so you want to be able to do all of these things and play with your children play with your grandchildren walking up the stairs and down the stairs that can become quite difficult for some who are on ongoing treatments like tamoxifen or hormone treatment where you get real aches into the bone.

Sarah Newman
So my work focuses mainly around strength training. I’m supported by a yoga instructor who does a yoga for breast cancer and cancer class but we also work with a physiotherapist so we make sure that people have mobility through areas that have been affected by treatment be it their hips or their shoulders or anywhere else in their body that’s been affected and making sure that they can move everything freely so that they can exercise and build up muscle again.

Robin Daly
Interesting, I was going to ask you about that, because this combination of some form of body work with exercise, when it comes to rehabilitation, which is really what people are engaged in here, mainly people have at least been through treatment, they’re trying to get back to a good level of fitness for their life, the combination of these two seems to be really good to me, because it’s like one’s very supportive and loosening and all the rest of it now that you can build your strength around that. Do you want to say a bit more about that?

Sarah Newman
So the recommendation from the World Health Organization is around a combination of multiple things. So cardiovascular exercise to help with your hearts and lungs, walking, running, if you, if you feel up to it, cycling, swimming, and all of those types of exercises where you feel a bit breathy, lots of chemotherapy treatments can impact your heart. So that’s a really advantageous type of exercise to keep going. And the recommendation is, is above 150 minutes a week. And that works out about half an hour a day, 20 minutes to half an hour a day. And so you can fit that into your routine, walking the dog, taking the kids to school, walk into the shop, whatever it is that you’re doing, trying to add that into your routine and the strength or resistance training where you’re helping with your joints and your bones, that’s recommended a couple of times a week, and that can be a very short 20 minute session. You can fit it in five minute bursts around tea breaks, but you’re working around your joint and bone strength. So around your knees, your hips, building all the muscles so that you feel stronger, you can get out of a chair faster, you can climb the stairs better. But then combined with that, the stretching that comes and the flexibility that comes through things like yoga, through Pilates is a little bit strengthening as well, or just general stretching is really good for your flexibility, it helps you avoid injury, but it can be useful in the morning, for example, before you go to bed to make sure that you feel a bit more supple when you get up and you can move more effectively when you first come out of bed, because some people find it quite difficult in the morning, particularly with the stiffness in their joints. And so keeping up a stretching routine is really helpful to get everything moving. But also to regain mobility in areas where you might have lost your range of movement, so practising those stretches that physiotherapists might give you and really religiously building them into your routine so that you regain full movement in areas that have been surgically impacted.

Robin Daly
Okay, so those are all sort of recommended as a package of those things, yeah.

Sarah Newman
Yeah. And it, and it feels like a lot, but if you start to build it into your routine, and if you start to look at how you’re moving through the day, you’re likely to be hitting that cardiovascular target quite quickly when you feel well enough, the stretching and the strengthening, you need to make the effort to add it into your routine somehow. Um, and this is the benefit of online workouts now is you can really do them anywhere, anytime and fit them around your day in a lunch break or in the evening, um, or in the morning when you first get up, whenever you feel at your strongest and that will differ from person to person, you might be a morning person or an evening person, that’s the best time to do your exercise.

Robin Daly
Okay, so it’s come up a few times, you’ve mentioned about the mental aspect of the whole thing, the effect that exercise has on your state of mind. Now, the mental challenges of cancer are some of the worst really, they’re some of the most difficult, so anything that can help in that area has got to be good. I think you rank it pretty highly in helping in that area, do you want to say why and how?

Sarah Newman
Yeah, I mean, it’s always been the tool of my, of mine, even before my diagnosis, exercising was kind of an opportunity for me to clear my mind, for me to concentrate on nothing. You know, when you’re running or walking, you can hear your breath. And that’s almost, you know, quite a nice way just to calm down everything and just to take yourself away from it from the world. And I think for lots of people, it helps with their mood, it can reduce anxiety, and release those kind of really nice hormones that give you that nice burst of feeling a little bit happier. And as a result of that, it can calm your mental health. So continuing having like a routine where you’re exercising regularly, lots of people feel massive mental health benefits. And for me getting outside as part of that has an even greater impact. The great outdoors can have some incredible things to look at and ways of calming the soul. But it is something that I definitely used through my own recovery. And it made me feel a bit more in control of what was going on. And I think when you have a cancer diagnosis and you’re going through treatment, it’s almost like a full time job. You can’t keep up with all of the appointments and the information that you’re being bombarded with. And actually having one thing where you can just escape that and take your mind off all of that is really good for your mental health. And then you’re more focused as well.

Robin Daly
Well, it’s interesting you refer there. I mean, of course, exercise, you could be on a treadmill in a fluorescent lit basement somewhere, you know, for exercise. But as you point out, you could be out in nature. And of course, the benefits of nature on their own without the exercise are actually now well documented. And the maximum hit of sort of going out exercising with friends in nature, if you like, is yeah, it’s very good from that point of view, isn’t it? You have the social thing, which, of course, is again, you know, cancer can be very isolating. So you’re hitting the social problem there. And you’re getting all these benefits, both the exercise and the nature all at once. Yeah. So that’s a great thing to do.

Sarah Newman
Yeah, and I think it’s different for everybody, the environment where you exercise, but the advice is you choose the environment that you feel is most beneficial, and it sounds like you’re not quite outdoorsy, Robin, but there might be some people that do like the neon lights in the gym, and they prefer that environment, but I prefer to be outside. So I think meeting up with friends you mentioned as well, so making it part of that’s fun. So meet up with friends, take a family member, or go to a class with some friends, have a coffee afterwards or a cup of tea, whatever you prefer, and getting people to do it with you. People met me when I was recovering, and that’s what we did. We went for a walk and we had a cup of tea, and then I’d been outside, I’d done my exercise, and I did on those days feel better, definitely.

Robin Daly
OK. All right, so you’ve already mentioned you’ve got a physiotherapist on the team. I see you have a nutritionist on the team as well, a nutritional therapist. Tell me about the why and how you work with this therapist.

Sarah Newman
So Joan is our nutritional therapist, she has cancer herself and she’s somebody that I’ve worked with as a client previously actually and she shared a wealth of knowledge with us when we were working together. And there’s only so much that your training gives you as a cancer and exercise specialist and generally the rules as a personal trainer is that you don’t give out specific nutritional guidance. You can advise people on ways to eat healthily, but you don’t design meal plans and things like that because it’s not specific to a person, we just don’t have enough training. So I wanted to be able to offer nutritional advice from somebody who was trained and qualified to do so. And because I had built such a great relationship with Joan, it was a no-brainer that she would be our nutritional therapist and so she provides fantastic advice. We concentrate on a new theme each month and she answers questions from our members that are put forward in advance of her monthly Q&A session. And she alongside that puts together some amazing recipes that people can try and things that help with inflammation, cruciferous vegetables, food for good bone health and so lots of different guidance around specifically foods that support women who are recovering from cancer. And I think knowing what they are going through to some extent is also very helpful from both of our perspectives and because we can relate on some levels to how they’re feeling and what they’re going through.

Robin Daly
Okay, so you said memberships there. Tell me about memberships.

Sarah Newman
So, the community that we’ve built is all online and it’s based around an app and the website. So, members get access to weekday live classes. So, we have six classes a week, I believe, across the week and they’re all recorded and they’re saved in this brilliant library of workouts. So, you can either attend the classes or you can watch them back, depending on what your schedule is. And then alongside that there’s a great community that talks to each other, they talk about everything from sports bras after cancer to sleep and menopause and foods and lots of different topics. But I think what people feel from being part of this community is that they don’t have to explain themselves. Everybody there is in the same boat. When you turn up to a gym class and the instructor says, has anyone got anything they need to tell me? And you’re like, well, there’s… How much time we got? But we know that because I know that. So, it’s a much easier environment just to join and know that you’re in safe hands. Marcia runs yoga classes for us every other week and Hannah, our physiotherapist, does a clinic every month and blogs for us as well. So, it’s kind of a big package of getting access to exercise, getting access to nutrition and knowing that you’ve got someone to support any ongoing issues that you might have from a mobility point of view or muscular skeletal. So, we’ve got the kind of full spectrum of support. And then behind that wall, there’s a community of people that you can talk to who we know what you’ve been through. So, there’s a lady who’s doing some challenges and she’s trying to get people involved. So, there’s lots of things going on behind the scenes. But people pay a monthly membership and they get access to as much or as little as they wanted that. And they join and they can contribute as much or as little as they want to. But it is a great group of women. It is just women that are part of this. And they are all just wanting to do something to help with some of those statistics that we talked about, particularly around recurrence. They’re in control of their bodies in this situation that they’re doing as much as they can to stop their cancer coming back or to keep themselves strong and healthy.

Robin Daly
I mean, sounds great. Any of these all over Britain?

Sarah Newman
It’s all in the world, actually, Robin. and Dubai and Spain and the States and Australia so there are people who as long as their time zones match or if they’re happy to motivate themselves to do workouts from the library it is available to everyone across the world.

Robin Daly
Okay, and everything involved with the membership is virtual there. You do do any real-world events at all?

Sarah Newman
Yes we do, we have some meetups occasionally. We had afternoon tea on the Thames in January and I’m currently planning the next meetup at the moment and potentially some day retreats next year as well so we can all get together and finally meet.

Robin Daly
Brilliant. And do you have any plans for men?

Sarah Newman
And at the moment I do work with men on a one-to-one basis, but my focus has been mainly on women with gynecological and breast cancers since I started. Those are the most amount of experience that I’ve got in my work over the last four years, and I know that there are lots of other trainers out there who are supporting both men and women, but that’s the area that I felt I had the most specialism in, so chose to focus on.

Robin Daly
Okay, well look, great, do you want to give listeners your website address so they can find out more?

Sarah Newman
Yes it is www.getmeback.uk and on Instagram and Facebook I am at getmebackuk. So yes, please do get in touch if you’ve got any questions. I’m very open to speaking to people.

Robin Daly
Well, wonderful. So thanks very much for coming on the show today. Tell us all about Get Me Back. And, yeah, I mean, it’s always great when somebody takes their own difficult experience and then turns it around and uses that experience as a reason to be the one who supports other people who are facing similar difficulties. Great story. Love to hear that. And of course, you’re uniquely well qualified to do the chart, as it sounds like many of your other team members are. So, brilliant. Thank you very much, Sarah.

Sarah Newman
Thank you. Bye bye. Take care.

Robin Daly
Before finishing today, I thought it’d be great to hear from someone Sarah’s worked with and Cathy Ricketts kindly agreed to come on the show.

Cathy Ricketts
Happy to. it’s an important topic. Yeah, I need to be more aware of this about it, so I’m very happy to be part of the conversation.

Robin Daly
Good. So, you’re someone who’s been unfortunate enough to receive a diagnosis of cancer. How did you first become aware that exercise could be a useful strategy for you?

Cathy Ricketts
I don’t think I became aware until I started keeping the therapy, so my diagnosis was lobular breast cancer, which was in March 2021, so I’m kind of two and a half years since my diagnosis and I’ve always always always always exercised have been an important part of my life and actually because I got diagnosed during lockdown, the benefits of working from home for me was that I was able to up my kind of exercise, so I think I was probably running every day doing yoga to keep me kind of supple and obviously receiving a cancer diagnosis. My treatment regime, everybody’s treatment is different, so the order of my treatment was surgery, so a single mistake to me and then I had and then it turned out that my cancer had spread to my nymph node, so it meant that I then had to go into clean therapy, which wasn’t what we thought the treatment would be. So during having a mistake to me, I had six weeks where I could do anything other than the exercises you get given by a breast cancer nurse. So for me, I just found that really difficult, having been very active suddenly being not active at all and mentally I found that quite difficult as well and then I knew that there would be a ketone asking my surgeon every single time I say, when can I start exercising? When can I start exercising? She said that, you know, and I think this is an important lesson for anyone who is diagnosed with a serious illness, so I never learned to listen to my body, I never learned to stop, I’d never learned to kind of give in to illness, you know, for me that was always a sign of weakness and one of the big journeys that I’ve gone through, you know, having been diagnosed with cancer is learning to connect with that side of me that is a patient. So she said, you know, six weeks, just wait six weeks and then I was like, well, what am I going to be able to even do? So I just started kind of, I asked a couple of my yoga teachers, do you know anybody that specialises in yoga for people who can’t stand there and I’m like, no. And then I think I’d literally just googled yoga breast cancer and up came Marcia Mercer, who actually is now one of the teachers, specialist teachers, that’s part of Sarah Newman’s Get Me Back programme. And so initially I started, once I had clearance from my said just do exercise, I went and had a face-to-face session with Marcia because at that point COVID restrictions had lifted and she saw that I had enough of a base of yoga and understanding for her to feel comfortable teaching me remotely. So I started with her classes and that just gave me a little bit, a sense of control back when everything’s out of control and you’re losing your sense of yourself and you’re having to give into medical process and the illness. Those were just a little bit of me was still there in those sessions and so I felt very safe and cared and looked after and also, you know, it was great to be able to do exercise that went just beyond the physiotherapy exercises.

Robin Daly
So I imagine it was, yeah, the accompanying thing was to be working with somebody who actually knew about cancer and knew what was good and what wasn’t. So you know, you were confident you were not going to make a mistake.

Cathy Ricketts
Exactly, exactly. Because and this is, I was very lucky. So my, my, my husband’s private health care, for some reason, he had decided to elect for the most expensive one, which meant we got private health care throughout my cancer treatment, which made a huge difference. So actually, I had a very good breast cancer nurse, as part of my surgeons team, who actually did talk me through lymphoedema and the dangers of lymphoedema. So for anyone who doesn’t realize, when you have your, any, any kind of surgery to remove cancer from your breast, whether it’s a mastectomy like mine or, or lung cancer, they also take a biopsy of your auxiliary lymph nodes, just double check if the cancer spread or not, even though everyone will have an MRI, as I did, to check if the cancer spread. And for me, that MRI came back clear, you know, that auxiliary lymph nodes showed that actually there were cancer cells in my lymph nodes. And so therefore, I had to go for chemotherapy. Now, as soon as you have any kind of treatment to your lymph nodes, your whole body has to completely reroute the lymphatic drainage system and takes a while to get used to its new kind of, you know, you know, highway, if you will. And actually, it’s very dangerous for anybody who’s had any lymph node kind of surgery to do to put too much pressure on that area of their body, because otherwise you won’t have lymphoedema. I was very lucky to have that explained to me by my breast cancer nurse. Before I did any exercise, I have heard, you know, I’m in a lot of Facebook groups before when nobody has that explained to them. And actually, people either are too scared to do any exercise because the risk of lymphoedema or do too much exercise too quickly and then end up with lymphoedema. So, you know, having that knowledge of the risk of lymphoedema, then practicing with someone who also understood how they needed to adapt the yoga classes to make sure that the exercise wasn’t putting your risk in the same was just invaluable.

Robin Daly
Very good, a bit of expertise goes a long way. Can you just briefly tell me how your experience with Get Me Back and particularly as a member how you think that supported you overall and maybe what you’d say to someone who’s listening hasn’t even ventured into an exercise programme and might be very early stages after diagnosis.

Cathy Ricketts
Yeah, well, so get me back and Sarah Newman’s program kind of came into my cancer rehabilitation recovery. So there was a point in my treatment at which I felt like I was stronger, and could probably cope with a little bit more exercise than the yoga. And then at that point, I had been put in touch with the charity Future Dreams, which is where Sarah once a week was doing online classes for people with breast cancer, which were more strength and hip based training, but still, very much, you know, taking into account the needs of breast cancer patients. So that’s why I first found Sarah. And then after I’d had my radiotherapy, I felt like I was ready to take my, you know, I was kind of through active treatment, I was like, right, I really wanted to start, you know, ironically, the name of her business, her program Get Me Back. And it just so happened that she was launching an eight week program for people who had been fit before cancer and wanted to get fit again. And that literally coincided with my radiotherapy treatment. So I signed up for her eight week program. And oh my gosh, it was just like, couldn’t have been more perfect for what I needed then. Right. First of all, you know, she’s incredible. She knows her stuff, right? She’s supportive, caring, she’s had cancer herself. So immediately she just gets you, you know, I think the difficult thing with exercise, you know, the thought of going back into a public class, and having to explain to everybody that you’ve had breast cancer diagnosis, you don’t necessarily want to turn everybody about, because they have to adapt the exercise to account for your needs. Being able to do that with somebody like Sarah, in a safe environment, where everybody else participating in the class has also been through the same thing. You just feel so held. And it’s so important, you know, to find your tribe when you go through breast cancer. I’ve got an incredible network of friends and family. And I had an incredibly supportive employer, but nobody gets it. You know, nobody really gets what you’re going through, rather than other people that have had cancer. So to be able to kind of rebuild yourself physically, and also mentally through through support of a program like Sarah’s Get Me Back program was just invaluable for me at that time.

Robin Daly
Sounds fantastic, well that was a great testimony as you say, you’ve got to find a tribe, find the people who really get your situation and then you are completely comfortable. Yeah. So yeah, what do you do at the end of your eight-week program?

Cathy Ricketts
So at the end of the eight-week program, I’d also started going back to work. So I thought you know what I’m I’ve done The eight-week rehab program. I’m kind of back to being able to do exercise on my own and so didn’t continue with Sarah’s program, but then After about three or four weeks. I really realized that as you start to reintegrate back into the real world I actually really missed that community that I had with the get me back program So I actually rejoined the program the get me back program and And still here we are two years later, and I’m still part of the program Exactly power community and you know the ability to access Sarah’s program whenever I want through her on-demand Programs fit that into my life now. I’m back to work. He’s just invaluable. So yeah, I am I’m still a member It’s still still feeling the benefits of being part of Sarah’s get me back community

Robin Daly
Fantastic. great message for people. Thanks very much for coming on. All we had time for Kathy, but it’s been really great to hear from you. Thank you.

Cathy Ricketts
Alright, thank you.

Robin Daly
That’s all for today, check out Sarah’s website at GetMeBack.uk and please make a point to listen again next week when I’ll be back with another Yes To Life show.