Finding Your Baseline: A Series on Pacing- Part 2

In the last post, we talked about why “using pain as your guide” isn’t always the best approach when you live with chronic pain. Instead, pacing is about finding the “sweet spot” between doing too much and doing too little.

So, how do you actually find that “sweet spot”?

A good place to start is finding your baseline.

What is a baseline?

A baseline is an amount of activity you can repeat consistently without causing a significant increase in your symptoms.

It’s not the most you can do. And it’s not about pushing yourself until the pain tells you to stop.

Instead, it’s about finding that starting point that you can gradually build on over time. 

How do you find your baseline?

Start by choosing one activity that you’d like to do more of. It could be something like walking, gardening, housework, or cooking. 

Next, decide what you’ll use to measure the activity. For most activities, time works well, but depending on what you’re doing, you could also use distance (such as how far you walk) or repetitions (such as how many exercises you complete).

Over the next couple of weeks, keep a record of how much of that activity you do and how your symptoms respond afterwards. Try this on both good days and more difficult days, then look for the average. That becomes your baseline.

The next time you do that activity, use your baseline to guide you instead of waiting for pain to tell you when to stop. Since you’ve already decided ahead of time how long you’ll do the activity, it’s much easier to avoid overdoing it on good days or avoiding it altogether on bad days.

For example, let’s say walking is an activity you’d like to do more of. Over the next couple of weeks, you record how long you walk and pay attention to how your symptoms respond afterwards. You do this on days when you’re feeling relatively good and on days when you are not. 

As you look back over your notes, you notice that some days you were able to walk for 15 minutes, while on others 10 minutes felt like enough. You take the average of these times and discover that 12 minutes is an amount you can consistently repeat without causing a significant flare-up. That becomes your baseline.

The next time you go for a walk, you plan to walk for 12 minutes. On good days, you might feel like you could keep going. On bad days, you may look forward to stopping. Either way, you’re letting your plan guide you, not your pain.

What happens next?

Once you’ve found your baseline, you can begin progressing from there.

Now comes the tricky part! It can be tempting to do extra on a good day when you’re feeling better. But pacing works best when you make small, gradual increases rather than big jumps in activity.

A common recommendation is to increase your activity by about 10% each week. This might mean adding one minute to a walk, a few extra repetitions of an exercise, or a little more time spent doing a household task.

If your symptoms flare up, try not to panic. Flare-ups are a normal part of living with chronic pain and don’t mean you’ve failed or that pacing isn’t working. Just return to your previous baseline for a little longer before trying again. If a 10% increase feels like too much, try increasing by 5% instead.

Progress isn’t always a straight line, and that’s completely normal. 

A Final Thought

At first, pacing can feel like you’re doing less than you could.

But remember, the goal isn’t to do as much as possible today. The goal is to find something you can repeat consistently so you can gradually do more over time.

In the next post, we’ll look at what pacing can look like in everyday life, with practical examples you can start using at home, at work, and during exercise.