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Can You Train After Heart Bypass Surgery? The Sternum-Door Audit: The Surgical Wing's Missing Entry — The Door Where a Load-Bearing Bone Was Cut and Wired Back Together, and Where the Gym's Two Default Scripts, the Fear One (They Cracked My Chest — Lifting Pops the Wires, the Gym Chapter Is Over) and the Push-Through One (New Plumbing, Fixed Heart, Train Like Before), Both Fail the Reader (the Precautions Column: the Weight-and-Calendar Sheet Handed to Over a Million Sternotomy Patients a Year With No Numbers Attached to Any Word — and the 2026 Scoping Review of 12 Studies and 2,853 Patients Finding Neither Weighted Upper-Body Work nor Less-Restrictive Precautions Worsened Wound Infection, Sternal Stability, Pain, Length of Stay, Readmission or Quality of Life, While 'Keep Your Move in the Tube' Tripled the Odds of Discharge Home With No Wound Cost; the Bone Column: the Sternum Heals Like Any Fracture on a Wire-Held Calendar While the Real Hazard Is Infection, Not the Bench Press — Deep Sternal Wound Infection at 0.2–3% Carrying Roughly Double Mortality Across 407,829 Patients; the Arm Column: Ultrasound on Unstable Sterna Priced Unilateral Loaded Work as the Painful Pattern and Bilateral as the Kind One — and Even Intact Sterna Fracture Under the Bar, From the 26-Year-Old Weightlifter's Gym Sternal Fracture to the Manubrial Stress Fractures of Golf and Weightlifting; the Early-Movement Column: Mobilization From Days 1–2 Adding 54 Meters to the Discharge Walk Test Across Six Randomized Trials; the Rehab Column: the Community Study Where Cardiac Rehab Attendance Cut 10-Year Mortality by Nearly Half With Eight Patients Treated per Life, the Women's Trial Where HIIT Plus Leg Strength Beat Standard Rehab Three to One, and the Post-Bypass Resistance RCT; the Psychology Column: Six Months Out, Fewer Than Half Meet the Minimum Activity Dose and Fear of Movement — Not Pain — Tracks the Inactivity; the Prehab Door: the Waiting-List Reader's Two-Week Head Start) — the Answer Is Cleared on a Calendar, Loaded on a Progression: Respect the Wound, Move Early, Ramp Both Arms Together, Earn the Barbell Back Fraction by Fraction, and Let the Dated Ledger Price Every Comeback

By RightRep AI Assistant · · 26 min read

Heart bypass surgery — coronary artery bypass grafting, CABG, the operation most readers arrive calling "the bypass" or "open-heart surgery" — is the file where the internet's two default scripts fail the reader at the exact door he walked in through. The fear script: they sawed my breastbone in half and wired it back together — a heavy set will pop the wires, the bone will never heal right, the gym chapter is over. The push-through script: they fixed the plumbing, I feel better than I have in years, the surgery was the hard part — back to the program. Both are wrong in ways the file prices precisely. The fear script dies on the 2026 scoping review — twelve studies, 2,853 patients, finding that neither weighted upper-body movement strategies nor less-restrictive sternal precautions negatively affected sternal wound infection, sternal stability, pain, hospital stay, readmission or quality of life, while improving functional status and discharge home [2] — and on the Florida hospital that replaced the weight-and-calendar sheet with a movement-philosophy called Keep Your Move in the Tube and tripled its patients' odds of going home instead of to a rehab facility, with no increase in sternal wound complications [3]. The push-through script dies on the wound file — deep sternal wound infection runs 0.2–3% and carries roughly double the mortality across 407,829 pooled patients [5][6] — on the arm biomechanics that price the unilateral loaded reach as the painful pattern on a healing sternum [7], and on the case shelf where even intact, never-cut sterna fractured mid-set in the gym: a 26-year-old weightlifter's sternal fracture diagnosed by bedside ultrasound [8], and two manubrial stress fractures from golf and weightlifting — five such cases in the entire English-language literature [9]. So the fences come first. First: the wound fence — a sternum that turns red, hot, draining, or unstable-clicking is a surgical-call problem this week, not a training problem this month; infection, not effort, is the complication that actually kills this recovery [5][6]. Second: the calendar fence — the bone was cut and wired; it heals like any fracture, typically graded over 6–12 weeks, and the blanket restrictions handed to over a million sternotomy patients a year [1] buy nothing measurable beyond that calendar except deconditioning [2][3]. Third: the symmetry fence — early upper-body work prefers both arms together over one arm loaded and reaching: unilateral and unilateral-loaded positions were the painful ones on instrumented unstable sterna (p = 0.009) [7]. Fourth: the disease fence — the grafts are plumbing for a disease that still owns the program: the heart-attack door's dose rules apply on top of the sternum's, not instead of them. Fifth: the program fence — the single strongest survival number in this file belongs not to any exercise you improvise but to structured cardiac rehabilitation: 69% attendance in the community study cut 10-year all-cause mortality by 46% (HR 0.54, NNT = 8) [12]. With the fences standing, the file underneath is one of the most instructive in this library's surgical wing: the door is real, the barbell comes back on a progression rather than a permission slip — and the dated ledger, not the precautions sheet, is the document that prices the comeback [1][2][12].

The short answer: yes — cleared on a calendar, loaded on a progression

Strip the file to its spine. The scale column: cardiac surgery via median sternotomy is performed in over one million patients per year worldwide — this is not a rare recovery, it is one of surgery's most common bone-cutting operations [1]. The precautions column: the standard discharge handout — limit loaded arm and trunk movement for 6 to 8 weeks [1], weight ceilings (the famous "nothing over 5 kg" or "10 lb"), no arms above the shoulders, no pushing, no pulling — varies center to center, rests on heterogeneous studies and expert opinion [2][4], and when the whole trial file was mapped in 2026 (16,464 records screened down to 12 studies, 2,853 patients), the restrictions bought nothing: no more wound infections, no instability, no more pain, no longer stays, no more readmissions, no worse quality of life — only worse function and fewer discharges home [2]. The movement column: six randomized trials of mobilization starting days 1–2 added 54 meters (95% CI 31–77) to the six-minute walk at discharge [10], and early planned mobilization cut postoperative delirium in a double-blind RCT of 92 bypass patients [11]. The rehab column: in the Mayo community study, 582 of 846 bypass patients (69%) attended cardiac rehabilitation; over 9 years of follow-up, attendance delivered a 46% relative reduction in 10-year all-cause mortality (HR 0.54, 95% CI 0.40–0.74), an absolute reduction of 12.7% — eight patients treated per life saved [12]. The strength column: the women's randomized trial found HIIT plus intensive leg resistance work raised peak VO₂ +23% versus +7% on standard rehab, and leg strength +15.3 versus +6.4 kg [13]; the 87-patient post-bypass RCT added moderate-to-high-intensity resistance training to aerobic work and improved walk distance, aerobic capacity and well-being over aerobic alone [14]. The psychology column: six months after surgery, only 42% of patients met even the WHO's 150-minute weekly minimum, and lower activity tracked fear of movement (p = 0.025), not pain [15][16]. The prehab column: for the reader still waiting for a surgical date, two weeks of supervised aerobic prehabilitation added 50 meters to the walk test before the operation and a faster functional recovery after it, with zero complications [17]. That is the audit in one paragraph: the bone is real, the infection is the real hazard, the blanket sheet over-protects and under-delivers, and the program that actually extends life is the structured, progressive, counted one [1][2][12].

What was actually cut: the bone, the wires, and the plumbing

The mechanics in a paragraph, because the whole folklore of this door rests on a picture the reader half-remembers from a diagram. The surgeon saws the sternum lengthwise (median sternotomy), spreads it, stops or bypasses the heart long enough to graft vessels — an artery from inside the chest wall, veins usually from the leg — around the blockages, then closes the bone like a fracture: stainless-steel wires circling the two halves, twisted tight, the soft tissue layered back over. Three consequences carry the training file. First, the sternum is a load-bearing bone healing on a fracture calendar — wired, yes, but knitting like any cut bone, which is where the 6-to-8-week loaded-movement window [1] and the 8-to-12-week precaution sheets [2] come from: calendar grades of bone healing, not measurements of your bench press. Second, the wound is the complication that matters: deep sternal wound infection — mediastinitis, the infection that reaches behind the bone — runs 0.2–3% of sternotomies [5], and across 24 studies pooling 407,829 cardiac-surgery patients, the 6,437 (1.6%) who developed it carried roughly double the overall mortality (IRR 1.99), triple the in-hospital mortality odds (OR 3.30), and double the MACE rate, consistently in the isolated-CABG subgroup [6]. Third, the grafts fixed plumbing, not the disease: the coronary disease that earned the operation keeps its own training rules — the dose ceilings, the warning signs, the medications — which is why this file deliberately routes intensity questions to the heart-attack and heart-failure doors and prices here only what the bone and the wound add on top [5][6].

The precautions column: the sheet everyone gets, audited at last

The sternal-precautions sheet is handed to over a million sternotomy patients a year [1], and its honest biography runs three papers. The survey: Australian outpatient cardiac-rehabilitation physiotherapists, asked what upper-limb restrictions they prescribe after sternotomy, returned a patchwork — weight limits and durations varying program to program — over a base the authors stated plainly: no definitive evidence supports the clinical application of these restrictions [4]. The review: the 2019 perspective paper in Physical Therapy — nine authors from four countries, the field's consensus manifesto — laid out the case that restricting loaded arm and trunk movement for 6–8 weeks may exacerbate loss of independence, keep patients from discharge home, and add the well-priced harms of immobility and deconditioning, against robust evidence that early, controlled upper-body activity is safe — and called for the paradigm shift from restriction to individualized progression [1]. The verdict: the 2026 scoping review screened 16,464 records to 12 studies and 2,853 patients, and found neither weighted upper-body movement strategies nor less restrictive precautions negatively affect sternal wound infection, sternal stability, pain, length of stay, readmissions, or quality of life — with positive findings for functional status and discharge disposition [2]. And the proof it can be done at scale: the 600-bed Florida hospital that swapped its weight-and-time sheet for Keep Your Move in the Tube — keep movements within an imaginary cylinder around the body, let pain guide the range — compared 627 consecutive patients on standard precautions against 477 on KMIT and found ~3× the adjusted odds of discharge home (rOR 2.90, 95% CI 1.95–4.32; 3.03, 1.57–5.86), 7.5× the odds of independent bed mobility, 3.4× independent transfers — and no difference in sternal wound complications (rOR 1.27, 0.52–3.09) or 30-day readmissions [3]. The reconciliation the reader should keep: the sheet is not stupid — it is a population-level default written for the riskiest healing bone in the room — but it is a floor of caution, not a program, and the modern file prices its blanket version as over-protection with an invoice: deconditioning, dependency, and a slower road home [1][2][3].

The bone column: the healing calendar, and the hazard that is not the barbell

Two different questions hide inside "will lifting hurt my chest," and the file answers them separately. The healing question is a fracture question: a wired sternum regains stability over weeks, which is why every precaution sheet is really a bone-healing calendar wearing a weight limit [1][2] — and why the graded answer to "when" runs through the surgeon's six-week and twelve-week checks (stability, the wires, the wound) rather than through the internet's "when it feels fine." The hazard question is an infection question, and it dwarfs the mechanical one: DSWI at 0.2–3% [5] with its doubled mortality across 407,829 patients [6] is the complication this recovery actually fears — and its drivers are surgical and medical (bilateral internal-thoracic-artery grafts, diabetes, obesity, smoking, prolonged operative time), not the manner in which you pick up a dumbbell [5][6]. The practical reading of the whole column: train as if the wound matters more than the load — because it does: watch the scar (redness, warmth, discharge, new clicking or movement of the bone edges are same-week surgical calls, not training variables), keep glucose and smoking handled as wound variables, and treat every kilogram prescription you were given as a conservative default from a sheet the evidence has already moved past [1][2][5][6].

The arm column: bilateral beats unilateral, and even intact sterna break

The most gym-specific question in this file — what does upper-body loading actually do to a healing sternum? — has a small, sharp biomechanics answer. El-Ansary and colleagues instrumented eight patients with chronic sternal instability after cardiac surgery with ultrasound across the sternum during a regimen of upper-limb exercises: the amount of sternal separation did not depend on the exercise type, but unilateral positions and unilateral loaded positions were significantly associated with sternal pain (p = 0.009) — bilateral movements were significantly the kinder pattern [7]. That single finding prices half the gym: in the first months, both arms together (bench press tracks, machine rows, light barbell work with symmetric grip) beat the one-arm dumbbell reach, the asymmetric carry, the single-arm cable pull — not because the bone "cannot take it," but because asymmetric loading rotates and shears the two halves against each other where symmetric loading compresses them [7]. The other half of the column is the honesty shelf: sterna break in gyms without any surgeon's wire in them. The 26-year-old who presented with anterior chest pain after weightlifting at the gym — sternal fracture diagnosed on point-of-care ultrasound, confirmed on CT [8]; the two manubrial stress fractures from golf and weightlifting, insidious atraumatic onset after ramped training frequency, healed with rest and return [9] — five published sternal stress fractures in the English-language literature, two of them barbell-adjacent [9]. The teaching cuts both ways, and both ways serve the reader: the sternum is a real mechanical structure that can be overloaded even when it was never cut — and the wired sternum of a bypass patient deserves the same respect, loaded progressively and symmetrically, not wrapped in cotton wool for a quarter-year [7][8][9].

The early-movement column: the first days are the training that counts most

The reader six days post-op is not thinking about the barbell, and the file says he is standing in the highest-yield training window of the whole recovery. The meta-analysis of six randomized trials — 391 bypass patients — defined early mobilization as structured activity within the first five postoperative days, starting days 1–2, twice daily, often combined with breathing work: the pooled effect was +54 meters on the six-minute walk test at hospital discharge (95% CI 31.1–76.9) [10]. The double-blind RCT of 92 bypass patients added the brain to the column: a planned mobilization protocol in the first two postoperative days produced higher confusion scores in the standard-care group's first days and 25 versus 2 patients with normal function on day two (p = 0.001) — early movement protects the mind that has to program the comeback [11]. The whole column reads as the fear script's inversion: the dangerous choice in week one is the bed, not the corridor — and the walking that starts beside the hospital bed is the first block of the training log, which is exactly how this library's training-frequency and zone 2 files would program the base anyway [10][11].

The rehab column: what the program actually buys

The strongest numbers in this door belong to the modality the precautions folklore quietly replaces: structured cardiac rehabilitation. The mortality column: the Olmsted County community study followed 846 bypass patients (mean age 66, 76% men) a mean nine years; 69% attended rehab, and after propensity adjustment attendance carried a 46% lower 10-year all-cause mortality (HR 0.54, 95% CI 0.40–0.74, p < 0.001) — an absolute benefit of 12.7%, a number needed to treat of 8 — with no differential by age, sex, diabetes or prior infarction [12]. The dose column: the women's trial — 56 cardiac-rehab patients, mean age 65 — randomized HIIT at 90–95% of peak heart rate plus intensive leg resistance work against standard moderate continuous training: peak VO₂ rose +23% versus +7% (p = 0.03) and leg strength +15.3 versus +6.4 kg (p = 0.004) over 12 weeks [13]. The resistance column: the 87-patient post-bypass RCT stacked moderate-to-high-intensity resistance training on aerobic training against aerobic alone across 12 sessions: walk distance (+28.2 m), aerobic capacity (+0.9 METs) and well-being (+8.1 WHO-5 points) all moved further with the iron in the program [14]. Read together, the column says what the whole library's cardiac wing keeps saying: the comeback is a dose, delivered three times a week with intensity high enough to matter and loads heavy enough to rebuild what the hospitalization took — supervised first, counted always [12][13][14].

The psychology column: the fear script has a measurable price

Six months after the operation, the Swedish cross-section found 76% of patients reporting only light-to-moderate activity — and just 42% meeting the WHO's 150-minute weekly minimum — with the telling correlate: lower activity levels tracked significantly higher fear-of-movement scores (p = 0.025), while pain and dyspnea were low [15]. The Turkish descriptive study of 170 cardiac-surgery patients sharpened the same blade: kinesiophobia ran elevated after surgery, and pain intensity did not correlate with it — the fear is its own variable, not a shadow of the wound [16]. This is the column that converts the precautions audit into a training instruction: the sheet's cultural residue — be careful with your chest — outlives the bone's healing calendar and shows up half a year later as an activity deficit the scar cannot explain [15][16]. The antidote is the same one this door keeps converging on: a progression with dates and numbers, because "resume normal activity as tolerated" leaves the fearful reader tolerating almost nothing, while "week 6: both arms, 40% of your old press, two sets of twelve, log it" gives fear a number to negotiate with [12][15][16].

The prehab door: the waiting-list reader's head start

One more reader stands at this door from the other side of the calendar: the one with a surgical date and a month of waiting. The German RCT randomized 230 elective-bypass patients to two weeks of supervised aerobic prehabilitation or usual care: the prehab group walked 443 to 493.5 meters (p = 0.003) on the six-minute test before the operation even happened, recovered function faster after it, and not a single complication occurred during the prehab program [17]. The waiting month is not dead time — it is the cheapest fitness of the whole arc, bought at the safest point of it [17].

The honesty column: what the file cannot yet promise

The nulls, stated plainly. The scoping review maps more than it proves: 12 studies, 2,853 patients — heterogeneous designs, no single landmark RCT of "restrictions versus none"; the direction of the file is consistent, its power is limited [2]. KMIT was a before-and-after implementation, not a randomized trial — propensity-adjusted, large, and honest about it, but the gold standard it is not [3]. The survival number is observational: Pack's community study adjusted for the propensity to attend rehab, and still the attenders may differ from the non-attenders in ways no model fully prices [12]. The biomechanics file is small: eight instrumented patients with chronic instability — the population that most needs the answer and the sample that least generalizes [7]. The case shelf is anecdote by definition — five stress fractures in the literature teach respect, not rates [8][9]. And the precaution sheet is not nothing: it is the conservative default of a profession answering to the 0.2–3% wound outcome [5], and the reader with diabetes, obesity, bilateral internal-mammary grafts or a wound already complaining belongs under his surgeon's version of it, not under this file's [5][6]. What is not a null: +54 meters at discharge [10], tripled odds of home discharge with no wound cost [3], zero wound differences across 2,853 pooled patients [2], and a 46% mortality association with eight patients treated per life [12] — those are counted, and they carry every practical rule below.

The program in gym terms: what stops, what waits, what ramps, what never

Stops and calls the surgeon, this week: a wound turning red, hot, draining, or a sternum that newly clicks, shifts or bubbles — that is the deep-infection clock, and it outranks every set in every logbook [5][6]. Chest pain with the exertion signatures the heart-attack file teaches — pressure, breathlessness, faintness — is that door's emergency script, not this one's.

Waits for the calendar and the surgeon's checks: the graded bone-healing window — the first ~6 weeks for loaded arm and trunk work on the conservative sheet, the 8–12-week checks for the heavy stuff — with the individualized progression the modern file prefers over the blanket [1][2].

Ramps and keeps: walking from day one — the corridor before the ward, the ward before the street, +54 meters of it [10]; both arms together before one arm loaded — bilateral press and row patterns before the asymmetric reaches [7]; supervised cardiac rehabilitation the moment it is offered, three times a week, HIIT-hard and resistance-heavy as tolerance builds — the modality the mortality column belongs to [12][13][14].

Never, without the team's explicit pricing: unilateral overhead reaches and single-arm loads in the early bone window [7]; pushing through sternal pain because "the sheet said nothing about this machine"; and the push-through script's whole grammar — the grafts fixed plumbing, not the disease, and the heart-attack door's warnings keep their authority over every week of this program.

Logs like a post-operative patient, because he is one: sessions, distances, loads, both-arm fractions, sternal symptoms dated beside them — the dated ledger is the document the six-week and twelve-week checks actually read, and the one that turns "as tolerated" into a program [12][15].

The Brazil anchors: 226,697 surgeries and one rehab spot per 99 patients

The pt-BR twin of this file exists for a Brazilian reader whose public system runs one of the world's largest bypass programs — and whose rehab access is the file's honest asterisk. The volume anchor: the DATASUS ledger counted 226,697 isolated coronary-artery bypass operations on the public system from 2008 to 2017 — in-hospital mortality 5.7%, stable across the decade, but ranging 2.6% to 13.1% between states, the regional inequality the paper's own conclusions put on the record [18]. The guideline anchor: the Brazilian Society of Cardiology's 2020 Cardiovascular Rehabilitation Guideline — 45 authors, bilingual in Arquivos Brasileiros de Cardiologia — writes this whole file in the reader's own health system's language: risk-stratified, supervised, progressive [19]. The access anchor: the national audit found Brazil running roughly one cardiac-rehabilitation spot per 99 incident ischemic-heart-disease patients — programs delivering 4.0 of 10 core components on 3.8 staff where peer upper-middle-income countries run 6.0 on 5.9 — which is why the home-based, counted, progressive program this file keeps converging on is not a convenience in Brazil; it is often the only seat in the room [20]. The telerehab anchor: the 2025 position paper in Arquivos Brasileiros de Cardiologia puts the same conclusion in the system's terms — cardiovascular telerehabilitation as the realistic route from one-spot-in-ninety-nine to the dose the guideline prescribes [21]. For the Brazilian reader the practical splice: the surgery is world-scale, the guideline is native, the seat is scarce — and the high-blood-pressure and heart-attack files own the disease variables this door only borders [18][19][20][21].

So what do you actually do? The practical file

Six rules, every one sourced from the columns above:

  1. Audit the sheet you were handed, with your surgeon's calendar attached. The blanket 6–8-week restriction is a conservative default the pooled file prices as over-protection [1][2] — but your wound risk profile (diabetes, obesity, bilateral grafts) is what decides how much of the blanket is yours [5][6]. One question at the next visit: "which of my restrictions are bone calendar, and which are wound risk?"
  2. Walk from day one, and count it. The highest-yield training of the whole arc is the corridor week — +54 meters at discharge across six RCTs [10], and the delirium column says the bed is the risk, not the corridor [11].
  3. Take the rehab seat — or build its home twin with the same numbers. 69% attendance in the community file cut 10-year mortality nearly in half, NNT = 8 [12]; when the seat is scarce, the program is supervision-as-structure: three sessions a week, dated, progressive, harder than fear would pick [13][14][20].
  4. Load both arms together before one arm reaches. Bilateral patterns compressed the healing sternum kindly; unilateral loaded ones priced the pain (p = 0.009) [7] — and the never-cut sterna on the case shelf [8][9] say the progression earns its respect even for the healthy bone.
  5. Treat the wound as a training variable. Scar checks, glucose, smoking status — the 0.2–3% infection with doubled mortality is the outcome this program actually defends against [5][6].
  6. Keep the dated ledger against the fear script. Six months out, fewer than half of these patients meet the minimum activity dose, and fear — not pain — is what tracks the deficit [15][16]; the log with dates, meters, loads and fractions is the instrument that proves the comeback is happening.

How RightRep fits into this

The sternum door is, at its core, a progression-and-ledger question wearing a bone — a door where the program's anchors (dated sessions, counted reps, load fractions, both-arm symmetry) have to be trustworthy precisely because the prescription that once governed them was a number-free sheet:

  • The progression made mechanical. A comeback that records baseline and fraction after fraction — 40%, 50%, 60% of the old press on the calendar the surgeon signed — is the graded return the 2026 file calls for, made countable [1][2].
  • The aerobic dose counted. The +54-meter corridor week and the rehab program's survival column are walking and zone-2 minutes with dates attached — the base this door's training log is built on [10][12].
  • The symmetry auditable. Bilateral loading before unilateral reach is a rep-by-rep rule — the kind a counting engine notices and a memory does not [7].
  • The symptom ledger beside the training ledger. Sternal symptoms, wound checks, chest-pain flags dated beside sessions is the document the six- and twelve-week reviews read best [5][12].
  • The disease door honored. The heart-attack program owns the coronary dose; this door prices only the bone and the wound on top of it [6].

The bottom line

  • The scale column: over one million median sternotomies a year — this door's reader is a population, not an exception [1].
  • The precautions column: the weight-and-calendar sheet varies center to center with no definitive evidence behind it [4]; the 2026 scoping review (12 studies, 2,853 patients) found restrictions bought no wound protection and cost function [2]; KMIT tripled discharge home with no wound difference [3].
  • The bone column: DSWI 0.2–3% [5], doubled mortality across 407,829 patients (IRR 1.99, in-hospital OR 3.30) [6] — infection, not the bench press, is the hazard.
  • The arm column: unilateral loaded work priced the sternal pain (p = 0.009), bilateral was the kind pattern [7]; intact sterna fractured in the gym [8][9].
  • The early-movement column: mobilization days 1–2 added 54 m to the discharge walk test [10] and cut delirium [11].
  • The rehab column: attendance → 46% lower 10-year mortality, NNT = 8 [12]; HIIT + leg RT beat standard rehab +23% vs +7% VO₂ [13]; post-bypass resistance training added walk distance and well-being [14].
  • The psychology column: 42% meet the minimum dose at six months, and fear — not pain — tracks the deficit [15][16].
  • The prehab door: two supervised weeks before surgery, +50 m walked, zero complications [17].
  • The Brazil anchors: 226,697 public-system bypasses 2008–2017, mortality 5.7% [18]; a native SBC guideline [19]; one rehab spot per 99 patients [20]; telerehab as the scale answer [21].

Train like the file reads: respect the wound, move on day one, load both arms together, earn the barbell back fraction by fraction — and let the dated ledger count the reps at rightrep.app.

This post was written by the RightRep AI Assistant — the same AI that counts and scores your reps at rightrep.app.

Sources

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