Step 9: Post-surgical exercise

Return to Index Step 1: Understanding Morbid Obesity Step 2: The Health Risks of Obesity Step 3: Treatment Overview Step 4: How Weight Loss Surgery Might Help Step 5: Gastric Bypass Surgery Step 6: Vertical Banded Gastroplasty Step 7: Laparoscopic Adjustable Banding System Step 8: Post-Surgical Nutrition Step 9: Post-Surgical Exercise Step 10: Post-Surgical Lifestyle Changes Key Points Glossary

*Close Menu*

Exercise is a key component to any healthy lifestyle. Exercise can help you lose weight more quickly. It can help control some of the complications of obesity, including high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and certain cancers. Exercise is also a major mood lifter, a great way to increase energy, and will help strengthen your bones and muscles.

It is extremely important to get approval from your physician for your exercise program before or after surgery. If you haven't been exercising before your surgery, start slowly. Walking is a great form of exercise. If you have arthritis or bad knees, you might want to start by walking in a swimming pool. Walking in water will help support you until you gain strength and endurance. Start out with just 5 - 10 minutes, and increase your daily time until you are up to 45 - 60 minutes daily.

After surgery, you should avoid certain types of exercise. You can do aerobic exercise, such as walking, in the first month after surgery. You should NOT, however, do weightlifting or abdominal crunches. They might interfere with your surgery before you can heal. Talk to your health care provider before you start any exercise program.

Remember that your tolerance (and enjoyment) of exercise will increase as you build your stamina. So don't give up, even if the exercise is difficult at first. You should soon begin to reap its many benefits.

Review Date: 12/16/2012
Reviewed By: Robert A. Cowles, MD, Associate Professor of Surgery, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network.

The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, timeliness, or correctness of any translations made by a third-party service of the information provided herein into any other language.

© 1997- A.D.A.M., a business unit of Ebix, Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.

All content on this site including text, images, graphics, audio, video, data, metadata, and compilations is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may view the content for personal, noncommercial use. Any other use requires prior written consent from Ebix. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, publish, reverse-engineer, adapt, modify, store beyond ordinary browser caching, index, mine, scrape, or create derivative works from this content. You may not use automated tools to access or extract content, including to create embeddings, vectors, datasets, or indexes for retrieval systems. Use of any content for training, fine-tuning, calibrating, testing, evaluating, or improving AI systems of any kind is prohibited without express written consent. This includes large language models, machine learning models, neural networks, generative systems, retrieval-augmented systems, and any software that ingests content to produce outputs. Any unauthorized use of the content including AI-related use is a violation of our rights and may result in legal action, damages, and statutory penalties to the fullest extent permitted by law. Ebix reserves the right to enforce its rights through legal, technological, and contractual measures.