From Strength to Strength

March 15th, 2026. It’s 23:26 in the evening.So I woke up very shortly after falling asleep, maybe a bit less than two hours ago. Upon waking, I noticed that I had a bit of night sweat, especially around the loin and groin area.And upon waking, I also felt this tingling, warm sensation around parts of my body—especially the upper body, the torso, the arms, but also the feet, interestingly.For the first second or two, I had this cautious suspicion: is this tumor activity already coming back this early in the cycle?But then my body and mind reminded me that these were not the same kinds of sensations I was feeling before starting treatment.Those earlier sensations were more of the type where, every now and then, I felt these intense, heavy pins-and-needles sensations accumulating in the hands and feet. I strongly suspect that had something to do with oversensitized nervous system activity, coupled with cytokine activity throughout the body because of tumor activity and inflammation—as seemed to be the case with the blood panel I took close to the latest scan, the one I did before restarting treatment now.That was the first time ever that I got positive inflammation markers.So throughout these eighteen months—from when I first got the diagnosis, or even before that, when I first suspected something was wrong and had this protruding lymph node on my neck that I wanted the hospital system to look at, and then weeks passed without them taking me seriously—throughout all that time, until around the last scan two months ago or so, I hadn’t had any inflammation markers in my blood.So seemingly it could be that this increased inflammation activity with the tumor is causing cytokine storms, and that these can manifest as this weird heaviness in the hands and feet.For some time, when those symptoms started this autumn, around September or October, I first suspected I had Lyme disease because I had been bitten by numerous ticks throughout the summer. That heavy, almost paralyzing feeling in my hands and feet—but especially in my hands—coupled with sudden stiffness and pain in my right knee, gave me the suspicion that I had contracted Lyme disease.And upon drawing a blood panel for Lyme disease—the standard one—I did test positive for having had Lyme disease. But the marker that would indicate active antibodies from an ongoing active infection in the blood, I did not test positive for.I was considering doing a lumbar puncture to check whether Lyme might still be active in the nervous system rather than in the blood in significant amounts, which I never ended up doing, for better or worse. It might still be Lyme layered over all this. Who knows.And then, because it didn’t go away, I tried to fast and see if the symptom would disappear.First I did a four-day water fast, I think, and the symptoms clearly dissipated over those four days. But once I started eating again, the symptoms came back sooner or later, more or less.A month or so later, I did an even longer five-day fast, which I coupled with a number of HBOT treatments. I think it was six HBOT treatments over the course of three days, so two treatments per day.Same result.The symptoms dissipated, but once I came back out of the fast, they returned somewhat.Then I kept doing the arborist courses. I had the climbing course, where I did feel some of those symptoms, but because they were most intense at night and dissipated somewhat during the daytime, I was still able to do all the rope-based climbing required for the course without huge issues. But I remember now that there were some climbing days when my hands were really affected by this.Then additional weeks passed, into the turn of the year, when we had more theoretical classes. I don’t remember exactly how these symptoms felt back then in detail.Then January came, after I returned from a lovely vacation with Jana in Sicily, and the next course after the turn of the year was my first internship.And there too I was able not only to bear with those symptoms and still go climbing, but also to do it in the worst weather conditions Stockholm could offer for outdoor tree care work—climbing ropes, wading through deep snow just to get to the trunks and branches I needed to reach to do the work.But also, at the end of that period, when I was getting the results of the latest scan and only weeks remained before I had decided it was time to restart treatment, I did feel those heavy, kind of paralyzing pins-and-needles sensations in my hands and feet begin to come back somewhat.But this sensation now, upon waking, wasn’t that.However, these symptoms I’m feeling in my body can sometimes be layered, so who knows what this is.What I do know is that it does correlate with me yesterday finally managing to do my first strength-training session for this cycle.Returning to Strength TrainingSo, to recap, for those who don’t know about my strength training:I didn’t used to do strength training in the sense of going to the gym and following a strict training program. It’s basically not something I’ve ever really done.I tried in high school a while back, but seemingly my programming back then wasn’t good enough. I also think my body was too young to get the right signals out of going to the gym, so it didn’t really add up to much.Then after high school, during the first year I lived in China, I also went to the gym. Back then I got a bit more out of it when I went to the local gym outside the school together with one of my best mates, Miguel, the crazy Mexican guy who is still around in China.But since then, I didn’t pursue the gym again until just now.And the reason I started was that after initiating treatment I was getting weaker and weaker and weaker, because treatments were ongoing every two weeks and I was fasting for almost a week with each treatment round.That meant I only had a little more than a week after breaking the fast to recover, refeed, regain body mass, rebalance, and recalibrate my different body systems.And that was obviously not enough.What I saw, and what I realized, was that in order for my body to bounce back and recover, it wasn’t enough to just start eating again.After that onslaught of aggressive chemotherapy and immunotherapy and the whole water-fasting process, my body needed something stronger than just food in order to understand: now you need to rebuild, now you need to strengthen yourself, now you really need to reboot your system.Through reading and research, and just common-sense reasoning, I realized that strength training might be the one thing I truly needed in order to do more of a full reset of my metabolism and hormonal systems and everything else.So I tried doing resistance training during those first four cycles, but I realized I didn’t have a clear, disciplined, rigorous strategy.Luckily, a few weeks before starting treatment, I had come across an advert in my Instagram feed from a guy promoting his online coaching for strength training.And that face was very familiar to me.It turned out to be my old naprapath, whom I had seen years earlier for two different issues at two different locations: my neck, which I had long-running issues with due to severe injuries during wrestling practice, and also my right knee, which I injured because an idiot on the mat willfully twisted it during practice. That gave me a medium-sized tear—MCL, or maybe LCL, the one on the inside of the knee—and that took a long time to heal. It probably still reverberates now and then, which would explain why I keep getting weakness on the inside of that knee.So I contacted him a few weeks after seeing that ad, because it seemed like exactly what I needed: a structured approach that would guarantee I got as much benefit as possible from resistance training in the few days of each treatment cycle that I might actually have available for strength training at all.We had a good call where I had to give him a lot of context about my life situation and how it was at a desperate crossroads.At that point I was somewhere around the third or fourth cycle, and I had lost a lot of body weight. Before treatment I had been walking around at maybe 87 kilos. By then I was down to 78. So I had lost 9 to 10 kilos.And if I was going to gain that back—not just in terms of body weight, but more importantly in terms of the capacity to withstand treatment and sustain myself through the long course of treatments that remained—I would need to give my body the right signals.And I would need to give those signals in enough volume and with enough efficiency for it to be sustainable.So I gave him the rundown of how my life was being lived by then, in those treatment cycles.By then I had also decided to extend my fourth cycle so that I was no longer starting treatment every two weeks, but rather every three weeks. So my new reality became a 21-day cycle.That was also key, because otherwise I simply wouldn’t have time to get the breathing window where I felt recovered enough to start doing resistance training.So we programmed things with a split between upper-body-focused sessions and lower-body-focused sessions, and we had two variants of each.So I was going:upper body variant one,lower body variant one,upper body variant two,lower body variant two.And then I just kept cycling those at the start, gradually increasing the weights.And that was a miracle, because I was able to gradually increase weights even though these aggressive treatments were slotted in between the gym sessions.Some rounds, some cycles, I was only able to fit in two or three gym sessions maximum. But still, coming back out of treatment, I was able to increase the weights gradually.And I was also able to increase my own body weight, bouncing back from that all-time low of 78 kilos.Already with cycle four, I was back close to my median weight from before treatment.Then I would go down again.And then I think in cycle five I came back to where, before starting fasting for cycle six, I was just as high—or even higher—than I had been before starting treatment.And around cycle eight, I was up weighing more than I had ever weighed before, due to my body’s ability now to gain weight and regain bodily balance through the strength training.I think during cycle six I was able to very aggressively slot in seven gym sessions within the course of two weeks, which was crazy.So strength training did so much here.And I’m very happy that I’m now re-engaged with Simon for him to fine-tune my strength-training programming for this period as well.Because what I’ve done now, up until we had a talk yesterday, is that I’ve been reusing and refactoring the old initial sessions we did, and I’ve taken it quite carefully at the start.With each new session variant that I introduced now—which were the same as the ones I initially had—I used more or less the same weights, even though they feel light for me now, in order not to overload my nervous system and to let my whole body ease into it.Then the plan is to gradually increase the weights with each new session.So yesterday was the first time I did the second round of the same main session type. I did upper body variant one for the second time now—the first time I redid it during this first retreatment cycle.And it feels good.It feels good to do rigorous strength training again.It feels like the one thing my body needs in terms of physical movement more than any other kind of activity, because of its potent effect on rebooting some of my body systems so that their imbalances can gradually decrease over time, even though there is this shock effect.So the symptoms I’m having now, waking up just two hours after falling asleep, are probably attributable to the effects of me doing strength training yesterday—a session I completed sometime between 10 a.m. and noon today, in the morning.So my initial knee-jerk suspicion that this was cancer, or tumor activity already being this active this early in the cycle, I don’t think there is strong evidence for yet.It is more likely my body’s systems reacting in aggregate to the strength-training session I did.Combining Strength Training With Arborist SchoolAnd I want to do these strength-training sessions every other day.But obviously, since I’m now trying to combine my aggressive treatment-and-recovery-cycle lifestyle with my ongoing school activities—studying to become a professional arborist—I also have mandatory class activities.I have them Monday and Tuesday this week.And Tuesday will be a full day with a long excursion about two hours away from Stockholm.So my next strength-training session will have to be on Wednesday.So I lose one day there.But apart from that, I’m trying to do strength training every two days from the point in each recovery phase when I feel able to return to it.So wish me luck going forward with going to the gym.It’s definitely not an environment—the actual gym—that I appreciate.I’ve looked at other options, such as wellness centers where maybe the energy would be a bit different, but I haven’t found any good enough overall options yet.I also don’t want it to be too far away from my home, because when I’m feeling at my weakest, I don’t want long commutes in order to go to the gym.So for now, this gym of mine is what it is.I’m a member of SATS, one of the gym monopolists in Stockholm—or in Scandinavia, for that matter—and I go to the one at Odenplan, which is relatively decent in terms of atmosphere for being a SATS gym, or for being a public gym in general.But I really don’t like the atmosphere of those places.And their choice of music—I mean, everyone is listening to their own music anyway, so why don’t they just turn off the music in the loudspeakers? No one is listening to it, I think.I, for one, abhor their choice of music.So I need to go there with my in-ear headphones and just pump music into those.The Right SoundtrackInterestingly, before this session I asked Jana what kind of music I should play while doing my gym session.Normally I go for a genre that is quite energetic. It could be soundtrack music from war films, or Viking music, or Afrobeat-type active dance music.But Jana said maybe I should do something more relaxed, more like soul.So I did have soul pumping in my ears, and it kind of worked.It gave me a more laid-back, relaxed feeling while doing the strength training, which I very much needed because my nervous system has been so high-wired throughout this cycle.I haven’t really been able to return to a parasympathetic state, which is why I keep waking up in the middle of the night having these ranting reflections, because my body and brain are in such a sympathetic state in the middle of the night.So it was nice to have those cooler, more laid-back soul vibes while doing the strength training.I’ll definitely keep exploring that.It’s good to have music that is a bit more laid-back, and soul is also something you can dance to.So in between sets, in between exercises, when having a breather and letting the muscles relax a bit, I do tend to loosen up and move around.So it is definitely an advantage if the music is a bit dancey, which soul very much is as well.Even the slower, bluesier kind of soul—you can groove to that.The Gain TrainBut yes, strength training is on again.The choo-choo train. The gain train.It will keep running.We just have to throw in the coal.We have to eat a lot, eat good nutritious meals, preferably not too late in the evening, and just keep at it.Be wary of any signs of potential injury or overexertion in any of my body systems, but apart from that, just keep grinding in the gym.And then complement that with other smoother, more movement-based physical activities such as dancing, yoga, spinal waves, and so on, in order for the body to stay limber and to keep some of those other bodily systems fluid—to help the lymphatic system along, for example.That’s something I discussed with Simon as well.So in order for the other part of the cycle—when I’m not able to do strength training—not to go to waste, and in order not to let my body become too pacified, we want to introduce some more structured, programmed daily sessions of low-intensity but high-fluidity movement, such as spinal waves or other movement-based activities that can help maintain blood and lymph circulation and help calm nervous system activity.So we’ll add that as well.That will hopefully prime my overall system better to return to the gym, but may also help overall by decreasing some of the imbalances my body experiences.So wish me luck for the remainder of the cycle with my strength training.I need all the margins I can get in order to fit in as much strength training as possible within each cycle.I’ve now had a very good catch-up call with Simon to set out our initial strategy here.We have a vision of me being able to complete at least four full, rigorous strength-training sessions within each cycle, and preferably more if I feel there is enough buffer for that.This vision still needs to include the ability for me to ease into strength training, but also to ease into initiating the water fast and going back into the treatment trenches.So yes—wish me luck in the gym.And if you have any suggestions for what I should put in my playlist during these strength sessions, I’d be very glad to hear them: what genre, what artist, what songs give you motivation, what gets your step tapping, what helps you squeeze that extra juice out of your muscles, or that extra ounce of willpower out of yourself.Is it more aggressive, angry energy—the warrior, wartime-mindset kind of music you prefer? Or is it something more mellow that still activates you but keeps you a bit more balanced?Any music tips for the gym are highly appreciated.Even though my Afrobeats playlist is constantly being curated and I’m adding songs to it week by week, it’s always nice to get more variety.So holler at me if you have recommendations.And I also wish all of you that the coming days be successful in terms of whatever habits you want to strengthen and fortify and consolidate and develop within your life.And I’m hoping that those habits are health-promoting rather than the opposite.So be mindful of your life force.Love you all.Namaste. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com