Eight minutes and a chair

Where the name came from

I am Ren, and this is not my phrase. A member of over-60 described her entire programme in circle one evening as eight minutes and a chair, slightly apologetically, as though she were confessing to something.

Eight minutes and a chair, done twice a week for two years, beats a perfect programme abandoned in March. That is not a consolation prize, it is the actual finding: the thing that protects strength is turning up repeatedly at a level you can sustain when you feel terrible, not the quality of the sessions you do when you feel wonderful. Everybody is good at those.

So this page exists for the bad fortnight. For the weeks when you are nauseated, wrung out, and reading a fitness article would make you feel worse rather than better. It is deliberately small. You can do it in a chair. You can do it in a dressing gown. You can do half of it and stop.

And before anything else: you are not obliged to do this. Not by me, not by the community, not by anything. There is no streak to protect and nobody is checking. If the honest answer this week is that you need to lie down, lie down. This page will still be here.

Why bother at all when you feel like that

The short version. When intake drops quickly, the body draws on muscle as well as fat, and the two mitigations with actual evidence behind them are eating enough protein and continuing to load your muscles. Neither is glamorous. Both work.

What makes the bad weeks matter disproportionately is that they are exactly when loading lapses, and a lapse in the weeks when intake is lowest is the worst possible timing. Muscle responds to a surprisingly small stimulus when the alternative is nothing at all. A handful of hard-ish sit-to-stands is not the same as a training session, and it is enormously more than zero.

The second reason is less measurable and members mention it more. Getting up and moving something for a few minutes changes the shape of a bad day. Several people in protein-and-strength describe it as the difference between a day that happened to them and a day they were in.

Keeping your strength through a loss phase has the evidence in full, including the parts that are less certain than people claim.

Before you start

Use a solid dining chair against a wall, not an office chair with wheels and not a soft armchair you sink into. Have something to hold: the chair back, a worktop, a windowsill.

Two safety points that matter more than usual on these medicines. First, if you have been eating and drinking very little, standing up quickly can make you dizzy or faint, so move between positions slowly and hold something. Second, do not hold your breath. Breathe out on the effort. Holding your breath and then gasping is what makes people light-headed, and it is the single most common thing I have to correct.

Do not do this on a day when you are vomiting, cannot keep fluids down, have chest pain, are unusually short of breath, or feel genuinely unwell in a way that is new. That is a clinician’s day, not a movement day — when a symptom needs a clinician. If you have a heart, lung, joint or balance condition, or you have recently had surgery, run this past whoever looks after that before starting.

Muscle cramp is common on these medicines and often relates to fluid and electrolytes rather than to training. Muscle cramps and electrolytes covers it.

How to make it smaller

This is the section people need most and it is usually missing, so it goes before the routine rather than after it.

Every movement below has a smaller version and the smaller version counts completely.

• Fewer repetitions. Two of something is a legitimate set on a bad day. I mean that literally.
• Stay seated. Anything standing has a seated equivalent. Do the seated one.
• Use your hands. Pushing off the chair arms is not cheating. It is how you keep loading your legs when your legs are not cooperating.
• Shorten the range. Half a movement done today beats a full one skipped.
• Do one movement, not eight. If you only ever do sit-to-stands, you are doing the most valuable one. Everything else is a bonus.
• Split it. Two minutes now, two later, two before bed. The body does not know they were separate.

The only rule I would defend is this: on a bad week, aim to touch it twice rather than to do it well once. Frequency is what preserves the habit, and the habit is what carries you back to real training when the fortnight ends.

Making it bigger, later

When the bad stretch passes — and for most people it does pass — this routine has somewhere to go, which is why it is worth starting here rather than waiting to feel able to do something proper.

Progress in this order. First, more repetitions. Then a slower lowering phase, three or four seconds down, which is where a lot of the stimulus lives and costs you nothing. Then less assistance: fingertips on the chair instead of a grip, then no hands. Then range: lower chair, deeper hinge. Only after all of that, load — a bag of shopping, a rucksack with books in it, a resistance band, and eventually actual weights if you want them.

You do not need a gym for any of that, and you do not need to buy anything. I coach people who have never been in a gym and never intend to, and their strength is fine.

When you are ready to rebuild properly, returning to exercise after a bad fortnight is the next page, and protein-and-strength is where people talk about how it is actually going.

What this will not do

Honesty, because a page that promises too much is a page you will stop trusting.

Eight minutes twice a week is a holding pattern. It is not a strength programme and it will not build much of anything. What the evidence supports is that continuing to load muscle during a period of rapid loss protects more of it than not doing so — the trials that combined exercise with these medicines saw better preservation of lean tissue than the medicine alone. This routine is the smallest honest version of that principle, designed for the weeks when the real version is not happening.

It also will not fix fatigue, and it will not make nausea better. Some members find gentle movement settles them; others feel worse and should stop. Both are normal.

And it will not do anything at all without food. Loading muscle while eating very little protein gives you the stress without the raw material. If eating is the harder problem this fortnight, that is the more important page: eating enough when nothing appeals and protein and strength, the basics.