It’s just so important for us to maintain our physical and mental health, and stay connected with Family, and figure out a way that we can get through this all together. And this is a great time, if you have been active already, to just really get creative about how we can stay active through this, as well as if you have never been active before, there’s definite benefits to even starting just small bouts of five, ten minutes of exercise and movement throughout the day. There is research showing that, in general, when you do moderate-intensity exercise, it can help boost the immune system and so that’s really important that if we want to keep our bodies strong in case we were to be exposed to COVID. In order to prevent it, that we really need our immune system healthy, and that can be done through exercise. In particular, exercise has specific benefits for improving our heart and our lung health, and that’s very important during this time as well.
Staying Fit At Home
There’s definitely ways to stay active at home, and we have some good resources for that. So, that includes doing, for instance, just bodyweight exercises. So all you need for that is some floor space or a chair, and you can do things such as doing jumping jacks, lunges and wall sits. There’s also a lot of opportunities to just think creatively about how we can exercise. It can include doing a jump rope, even just turning on music and dancing with your kids, and finding ways to stay active. You can even just walk around your block if you’re living in a community where you can do that safely, while maintaining social distance. Alternatively, it is possible to build a dedicated Gym or Yoga studio in your garden for you and your family to use. The log cabins on loghouse.ie, and Irish based Log Cabin Company are great examples of how people have created dedicated space at home to stay fit while working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Don’t Do it If You Catch COVID
If you haven’t done high-intensity exercise before, now may not be the time to start doing that because there is some research showing that high-intensity exercise can temporarily decrease your immune-system function if you have not been exercising at that intensity before. So we usually recommend to patients, in general, to do something called a”graded progression,” or just increase it slightly at a time, and don’t go from 0 to 100 all of a sudden. That’s a great way of preventing injuries. Right now, if you are currently having symptoms of COVID or flu-like symptoms, the recommendation is that you should not be exercising at a moderate or vigorous intensity. You should really be seeking guidance from your health-care professional on what to do next.
Simple Tips
I think that ways to exercise together can include just having your children or someone in the family. All you have to do is pick music, and then everybody dances to that music, if you enjoy doing that. Another thing is taking walks together with your family is good way if you’re living in a community where you’re able to do that and maintain social distance. There’s definite ways that you can do it virtually. I could say, even for my own children, they’ve transitioned some of their group classes, like ballet, to a virtual-ballet class. So there’s ways that you can connect with your friends and say, hey, everybody at 5 o’clock today, we’re going to do a session together, doing yoga together virtually. Even taking just a five,10-minute break from sitting has been shown to be beneficial to your health too. So every minute counts, every movement counts. So definitely, we should be dedicating ourselves to doing that because it’s more important than ever that we stay healthy.