Effect of different types of exercise in adult subjects with fibromyalgia: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials.

People with fibromyalgia are often told exercise can help, but it has been unclear which type actually makes a difference to pain, mood and daily quality of life. This review pooled results from 18 randomised trials, covering 1184 adults with fibromyalgia, comparing aerobic exercise, resistance exercise and stretching exercise. Overall, all three exercise types were associated with reduced pain perception and better quality of life. Aerobic exercise was also linked to reduced depression and better mental and physical health-related quality of life, while resistance and stretching exercise showed non-significant effects on depression.

The pattern is encouraging but comes from a modest, mixed set of trials using different protocols, comparators and measures, so confidence in the size of any single effect remains limited, and how exercise type should be matched to individual patients is not settled by this analysis.

If you have fibromyalgia, you may have heard that exercise is recommended, but it's reasonable to wonder which kind actually helps and with what. This review looked at 18 earlier studies, with over a thousand adults in total, comparing three types of exercise: aerobic (like walking or cycling), resistance (strength) training, and stretching. Putting the studies together, all three types of exercise were linked to less pain and better quality of life.

Aerobic exercise was also linked to lower depression scores, while the evidence for resistance and stretching exercise easing depression was not strong enough to call a clear effect. These are pooled results across many different studies with different exercise programs, so they describe a general pattern rather than a guarantee for any one person, and the review does not tell us which single exercise type works best for an individual.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

This review addresses which exercise modality, aerobic, resistance, or stretching, has evidence behind it for pain, depression, and quality of life in fibromyalgia. Pooling 18 randomised controlled trials (n=1184), all three modalities showed associations with reduced pain perception and improved quality of life; aerobic exercise was additionally linked to reduced depression and gains in mental and physical health-related quality of life domains, whereas resistance exercise showed a non-significant effect on depression and the mental quality-of-life dimension, and stretching showed a non-significant effect on depression. For practice, this synthesis informs the general rationale for including exercise in fibromyalgia management but does not establish that one modality outperforms another, since the abstract does not report head-to-head statistical comparisons between exercise types.

The main limitation is that effect sizes come from a modest and likely heterogeneous set of trials with differing protocols and comparators, so subgroup findings by exercise type, particularly the non-significant depression and mental health results for resistance and stretching, should be read as less certain than the pooled pain and quality-of-life signal, and the abstract does not report adverse events.