Hey there,

I'm looking for some advice on following the buffalo protocol on exercise from those who have used it. I did a test run on a cross trainer a couple of months ago and kept upping the pace until I felt rather fatigued. The symptoms didn't return as I was using the cross trainer, but came a bit afterwards. I felt weak in my legs and somewhat foggy in my head.

So I used the heart rate at which I stopped as my symptom triggering heart rate and placed my goal at 80% of this heart rate - the goal ended up being ~137 bpm. Before university started again a month and a half ago, I did 7-10 minutes of training at between 120 and 137 bpm before I stopped. This made my legs feel wiggly and weak but my head was pretty clear even though I had some fogginess that I think was due to anxiety/expecting symptoms after exercising.

When university started, I had my plate full with reading which surprisingly went by more than allright (I stopped with the exercise and instead walked for a bit each day). It seems that I managed to get by my first course without excarbating any of my symptoms and I actually seem to be more resilient towards fatigue now, a month and a half later. However, as I'm slowly progressing (at least I think I am - conversations are less challenging than they were a couple of months ago but symptoms are hard to measure as I'm not pushing myself to the limit as often anymore), I feel like I could be doing more to improve my situation. I'm eating okay, sleeping okay and walking for a bit each day.

So I went back to using the cross trainer, but I'm left a bit confused over (what I believe is) anxiety-induced symptoms after the training. Am I below the symptom triggering threshold if I experience anxiety-induced symptoms after training? I have no way of knowing for sure that these symptoms are induced by anxiety, but the fogginess-symptom feels completely different from the fogginess I experience when I know that I've pushed myself too far cognitively. That fogginess is thick and impenetrable, this one feels more like a thin layer laid upon a pretty clear conciousness.

TL;DR - how do you feel after exercising and how do I know I'm not doing too much?


PS. I might just be impatient and restless because I feel like I'm not doing enough to get better. How do you approach being patient about recovery when you feel like things aren't moving forward?