Avocardio

Where Emma rants about exercise - again

Hello lovelies x Second letter of the week…yes, you are spoilt or damned. Anyway do enjoy!

Right. I’m going to level with you. Brace yourselves—swearing incoming.

I am losing my bastarding mind over the relentlessly cheerful, hyper-motivated, colour-coded exercise crew that seems to pop up every time I blink. You know the ones: They’ve got branded water bottles, matching Lycra, and a suspicious amount of energy for people supposedly living with a degenerative neurological condition.

Now, before you lob a resistance band at me—let me clarify.

I am not coming for you warriors who are grabbing Parkinson’s by the parkies and kicking its arse up and down a Pilates mat. I love you. You are incredible. Exercise is, genuinely, the only halfway decent thing we’ve got in the toolbox. It’s not a cure, but it’s as close to a helpful middle finger at Parkinson’s as we’ve got. So yes—go you. Gold stars all round.

This rant isn’t about you.

This is about the bombardment. The avalanche of perky leaflets, chirpy videos, and professionals shouting “Exercise is medicine!” as if they’ve just invented it. It’s not the message I have an issue with—it’s the assumption behind it. The assumption that we just haven’t heard it yet. That we’re all sat on our sofas with our thumbs up our arses thinking, Oh gosh, if only someone had told me moving my limbs might help...

Spoiler: we know. I’d bet my non-shaky left hand that every person with Parkinson’s who’s engaged in any sort of community, group, or charity network has already been told this. Probably twice. Possibly in song.

So, Emma, I hear you ask, why the frothing rage?

Well. I used to be one of the active ones. I hillwalked. I wild camped. I once voluntarily went jogging. I was the kind of annoying person who got a buzz off ticking things off a to-do list and had a spreadsheet for fun. Motivation? I had it coming out of my ears.

And then Parkinson’s arrived and robbed me of my bounce. Not dramatically. Not with some cinematic, violin-backed moment. Just—one day it was gone. No spark. No get-up-and-go. Just an eerie flatness where ambition used to live.

And this isn’t just laziness, by the way. This is a non-motor symptom. This is dopamine deficiency. This is clinical, brain-based, medically-acknowledged lack of motivation. You can’t yoga your way out of it. You can’t gratitude-journal it away. It’s like someone unplugged me, mid-sentence.

Every now and then, I get a flicker. A tiny, random jolt of old-Emma energy. It’s like finding a crumpled tenner in the pocket of your jeans. Briefly thrilling—and then gone again.

So when I get bombarded with exercise initiatives, challenges, and that constant tone of, If you just try a bit harder you’ll be fine!, I don’t feel inspired. I feel like I’m being told off. Like I’m not doing Parkinson’s properly. Like the only reason I’m struggling is because I haven’t “helped myself.”

And I can’t lie—some of these campaigns? They’re either aggressively chirpy (just SMILE through the tremors, Sandra) or so bleak I feel like I need a nap and a biscuit afterwards. Where’s the middle ground? Where’s the honesty? The nuance? The acknowledgement that Parkinson’s is weird and annoying and sometimes trying to exercise with it feels like wrestling a greased octopus in a hoodie?

I wish some of these messages were written by people actually living this. Or at the very least, properly consulted. Because let me tell you something: no one, absolutely no one, with a chronic illness wants to be greeted with a chirpy “Hope you’re well!” in their inbox. It’s the chronic illness equivalent of stepping on an upturned plug.

So yes. Encourage us. Share the science. Be kind, be warm, be realistic.

But for the love of cockwombles, stop pretending we’re all just one vision board away from being motivational speakers in Lycra.

With love and mild fury,
E xx