Exercise Protects Against Breast Cancer
October 2008
Regular exercise can reduce your risk of getting breast cancer, as was shown in a study of 120,000 nurses. Burning 2,000 calories a week will do it. This may be because regular exercise reduces estrogen levels in your blood, and estrogen can stimulate cancer growth.
You can burn up to 2,000 calories by:
- Walking briskly for 3 to 5 hours
- Doing housework for 10 hours
- Bowling for 8 hours
- Raking leaves for 7 hours
- Leisurely biking for 5 hours
In women who have breast cancer, regular exercise can reduce the risk that cancer will come back. Exercise can also extend life.
Exercise can improve your strength. That’s important because inactivity and cancer medicines can weaken muscles. Sometimes, cancer surgery will involve cutting or moving muscles. Special strength-training programs can help you get back your ability to close the trunk of your car, lift heavy groceries, and play sports.
Exercise can also improve your energy. How it does this is a mystery, but it does. Cancer and its treatments—chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation—can cause fatigue. That’s because treatments injure some tissues as they kill the cancer and your body needs a lot of extra energy to heal an injury.
Chemotherapy can make your bones thin—regular exercise builds the bone back up. Chemotherapy can also cause weight gain—regular exercise can help take those pounds off.
Some breast cancer surgery can cause uncomfortable swelling (lymphedema, pronounced “lim-fed-EE-ma”) of the arms. Gently exercising the muscles of the arm can reduce that swelling. Doctors recommend a gradual, slowly increasing strength-training program for the arms. Going too fast can cause setbacks.
Pain and tightness after surgery or radiation treatments can also make it hard to have good posture. Special stretching programs can improve your posture.
To learn more about breast cancer, see the “Breast Cancer” brochure.