Prehabilitation

Prehabilitation: Preparing Your Body for Cancer Treatment

The weeks between diagnosis and treatment can feel like a holding pattern — appointments, scans, decisions, waiting. But this window is also one of the most valuable opportunities in your entire cancer journey. It's when prehabilitation does its work.

Prehabilitation — or "prehab" — is the structured use of exercise, nutrition, and psychological support in the period before cancer treatment begins. It's an established field of clinical practice, backed by a growing body of evidence from organisations including Macmillan Cancer Support, the Royal College of Anaesthetists, and the Prehab4Cancer programme pioneered in Greater Manchester.

Why prehabilitation matters

The research is consistent and increasingly compelling. Patients who undertake structured exercise before treatment tend to experience:

• Improved cardiorespiratory fitness, which is one of the strongest predictors of how well you'll tolerate surgery and recover afterwards

• Reduced post-operative complications, including pulmonary issues and longer hospital stays

• Better preservation of lean muscle mass during treatment

• Faster return to baseline function after surgery or chemotherapy

• Lower levels of treatment-related fatigue

• Measurable improvements in mood, anxiety, and psychological readiness

In short: the fitter you go in, the better you tend to come out. Your body has reserves to draw on, and those reserves matter.

What the programme involves

This is not a generic fitness package adapted for cancer patients. It's a clinically informed prehabilitation programme, built around the principles set out in the Macmillan Prehabilitation Guidance for People with Cancer and aligned with current exercise oncology research (ACSM Roundtable on Exercise and Cancer).

Your programme is built around four core components:

• Cardiovascular conditioning to improve VO2 capacity and treatment tolerance

• Resistance training to preserve and build lean muscle ahead of the catabolic demands of treatment

• Functional strength and mobility work targeting the movement patterns most affected by your specific surgery or treatment plan

• Breathing and core integration to support post-operative recovery, particularly for thoracic and abdominal procedures

Programme length typically ranges from 2 to 8 weeks, depending on your treatment timeline. Sessions can be delivered in person or remotely, and every plan is built around your current capacity, your medical context, and the time you actually have.

Working alongside your medical team

Prehabilitation works best as part of an integrated care pathway. We require medical clearance from your consultant or GP before beginning, and we'll communicate with your clinical team where appropriate. Your coach is a Level 4 Cancer Rehabilitation Specialist with over 20 years of clinical experience — qualified to work safely with people undergoing cancer treatment, and trained to adapt programming around side effects, scans, and surgical schedules.

What's included:

• 6 or 10 one-hour coaching sessions with your trainer over an agreed timeframe

• A tailored weekly home programme to build consistency and momentum

• Adherence tracking to support habit formation under stress

• Mid-point review to reassess and adjust based on your response

• Ongoing email support throughout your programme

Getting started

If you've recently been diagnosed and are preparing for surgery, chemotherapy, or radiotherapy, the time to start is now — ideally as soon as your treatment plan is confirmed. Even two weeks of structured prehab has been shown to produce measurable benefit.

Get in touch to arrange an initial assessment.