Dana-farber Cancer Institute

If you’re 69 and diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, what do you do? For John Barrett, the answer was easy: become a certified physical trainer. But as Barrett and Nancy Campbell, exercise physiologist at Dana-Farber, both point out, you don’t need to be an exercise zealot to incorporate exercise into your life. “Exercise needs to be a lifestyle, not an event,” Barrett says. For cancer patients in particular, it’s about working exercise into the fabric of your everyday life. That’s not always easy. A cancer diagnosis can be challenging for lifelong exercisers who need to recalibrate their expectations and goals; and it can be hard for patients who have never exercised to get started while fighting fatigue and other symptoms of treatment.