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Laura has spent the last two years working exclusively within the invisible illness population, in a caseload where symptoms rarely held still from one week to the next. These conditions rarely arrive alone, and the interplay between them shapes what a body will tolerate on any given day. That work taught her to meet people where they are — adapting to fluctuating capacity rather than assuming it, treating a moving baseline as information rather than inconsistency, and prioritising safety over progress.
Exercise physiology in this space is less about prescribing exercise than about working out what a body can tolerate and maintain. Laura assesses baseline capacity, what activity costs afterwards, and where the two stop matching, then builds a program that sits inside that window of tolerance rather than aiming at a goal. Much of the work is understanding the patterns that trigger a crash before adding anything that builds.
Laura prioritises building trust within her sessions to help individuals better understand the relationship between their body, interrelationship with the nervous system and building strategies to support stability of the peaks and troughs.
Post-exertional malaise makes effort itself the risk, and the crash arrives late enough that people rarely connect it to the cause. Laura treats pacing as the intervention rather than the preparation for one—mapping activity against delayed symptom onset, working out the threshold that can be repeated without payback, and staying within it until symptoms are stable and safe. Capacity is then built gradually and deliberately, with the priority being a return to the activities that matter to the person rather than progression for its own sake.
When the autonomic nervous system fails to regulate blood pressure and heart rate—against gravity, and for other reasons besides—blood pools in the lower body and upright exercise stops being neutral. Laura adjusts position, sequencing and recovery before she adjusts load, using recumbent and supported movement first and building standing tolerance in increments the body can hold. She watches the signals people learn to talk themselves out of: heart rate climbing before anything feels hard, visual disturbance or dizziness, weakness and swaying, shakiness ahead of fatigue.
Hypermobile bodies often get stronger and feel worse. Laura starts with control—joint position sense, end-of-range awareness, muscles working at lengths they can safely manage—and with interoception, learning to tune in to what the body is signalling, which is rarely the default in people who have spent years overriding it. She draws on Pilates principles where supported, low-load work is what a body needs, and adapts around the fatigue and autonomic symptoms that travel with connective tissue variation rather than treating them as a separate problem.