How FES Cycling Can Help Your Mental Health

If you are one of the millions of Americans who suffer from paralysis, you know that the condition affects more than just your physical body. Paralysis also leads to many secondary conditions and invisible consequences, such as mental health issues, lowered self-esteem, and decreased quality of life. Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is a powerful therapeutic tool that allows you to exercise in spite of paralyzed or weakened muscles. In addition to its many physical benefits, FES cycling in particular can also have a profoundly positive effect on mental health and well-being. Read on to learn more about how FES cycling can help your mental health.

Understanding FES Cycling

For those with any degree of paralysis or who are non-ambulatory, physical activity becomes challenging, often putting you at risk of developing issues such as hypertension or diabetes. FES therapy helps you overcome these movement limitations and facilitates exercise through a stationary bicycle and electrical impulses that stimulate the muscles to move.

FES Cycling and Diagnoses

Various diagnoses can use FES cycling therapy to improve their physical and mental health, including if you suffer from SCI (both complete and incomplete depending on the injury level), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Cerebral Palsy (CP), Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and Transverse Myelitis (TM).

FES’s Benefits and FDA-Cleared Uses

1. Decreased muscle atrophy
2. Improved circulation
3. Improved range of motion
4. Decreased Muscle spasms
5. Muscle re-education

With regular use, FES cycling can also strengthen your muscles, increase flexibility, reduce spasticity, decrease pain, decrease the risk of heart disease, lead to a healthier weight, and improve blood sugar and cholesterol.

FES Cycling and Mental Health

Beyond these physical benefits, FES cycling also helps improve sleep, energy levels and mood, motivation to participate in activities, and a more positive self-image and quality of life.

Released Beneficial Neurotransmitters

People with paralysis, especially when the result of a spinal cord injury (SCI), are at higher risk of experiencing depression due to its disruption of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which lowers neuroendocrine stress hormone production (including endorphins), and can lead to depression. Regular FES exercise can help increase endorphin production and improve depression scores.

Enhanced Self-Confidence

The physical changes of paralysis can visibly affect appearance through many outcomes including loss of abdominal muscle tone, sometimes referred to as “quad belly.” While all exercise, in general, can help people gain muscle tone and lose weight, for people with paralysis, FES cycling helps improve their self-image by resulting in bigger muscles and less fat, helping to prevent depression.

Improved Quality of Life

Many factors contribute to your quality of life. For people with paralysis, the aspects of life that contribute most are physical health, functional ability, and self-image. Research has shown that regular use of an FES bike can improve all 3 areas. FES cycling benefits such as improved function, stronger bones and muscles, and enhanced respiratory and cardiac function all contribute to a higher quality of life. Even better, if FES cycling is done in a social setting, the interaction of FES cycling in a group can have noticeable positive effects on quality of life.

Patients with MS who participated in a clinical study even found that FES cycling improved how they perceived their diagnosis and they reported a decreased effect of MS on their day-to-day life. Following FES cycling sessions, that benefit extended to their caregivers as well, who experienced a lessened perception of burden in caring for them.

The MyoCycle Helps You Move and Improve Your Mental Health

There is no doubt that FES cycling offers countless benefits, and emerging research continually proves how valuable this form of therapy can be for your physical and mental health. Learning to live with paralysis may be difficult in many ways, but FES cycling and the MyoCycle offer ways to engage in exercise, improving not just your appearance and function, but your mental health and well-being too.

Reach out to your trusted, knowledgeable team at MYOLYN when you are ready to learn more about how FES cycling can help your mental health. You can also learn more about the MyoCycle and living with paralysis.