As the strongwoman in Circus Oz show Twenty Sixteen, Spenser Inwood holds up two acrobats with her bare arms and catches performers on the flying trapeze.

But Ms Inwood said she believed simply being a strongwoman was not that remarkable.

"There's always been strong women," she told 774 ABC Melbourne's Rafael Epstein.

What the audience may find remarkable, though, is that Ms Inwood's feats of strength are performed while managing chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

The circus performer was struck by CFS in her early 20s when the disease threatened to take her out of the ring for the first time since childhood.

Circus 'sounded like a pretty good deal'

Ms Inwood started practising her skills 20 years ago with Albury-Wodonga's Flying Fruit Fly Circus.

Rather than running away to join the circus, her parents used the circus to convince her to stay at home.

Spenser Inwood says she never thought she would feel as strong as she does now. ( Supplied: Rob Blackburn )

"My family was living in Canberra and I'd started school," Ms Inwood said.

"When my parents had bought their business in Albury-Wodonga they said, 'we're moving'."

The young Ms Inwood, however, did not want to leave her friends in Canberra.

"I said, as a seven-year-old, 'no, I'm staying, I'm going to tell my best friend that you've died and I have to live with her'," she said.

"My parents said, 'well, if you come with us, you can join a circus', and that sounded like a pretty good deal at seven."

Trapeze training disrupted

Ms Inwood stayed with the Flying Fruit Fly Circus until she finished high school when she was accepted into science at Monash University.

"I deferred that to go and train with a coach here in Melbourne doing swinging trapeze, but then I fell into some health issues," she said.

The health issues were later diagnosed as CFS.

"I think it was coming on long before I noticed it actually being a problem," she said.

"I just started to have shortness of breath during training and then my muscles started fatiguing really fast.

"Then I started sleeping heaps and not being able to do very much when I woke up."

'Strong and capable'

Ms Inwood said CFS left her debilitated for three years.

"I would say that I went down to only being able to do 10 per cent of what I would normally do in a day," she said.

"It took a long time to get to a diagnosis because they have to go through and check everything else before they can diagnose you with chronic fatigue."

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Seven years have passed since she started feeling unwell and Ms Inwood still takes medication for her CFS and sees a specialist regularly.

She said she now had a better understanding of how her body responded to food and sleep and had learnt the difference between the symptoms of CFS and simply being tired.

"I feel like there's a real difference and it took a long time for me to feel comfortable with those two differences," she said.

"For a long time just being tired was scary and I didn't want to push myself.

"What I'm loving at the moment is that I never thought that I was going to be able to get back to feeling this strong and capable."