How Exercising At Home Can Help To Fight Infection
Top advice on how and why you should stay active while self-isolating.
As we all try to avoid infection, staying physically active is more important than ever as regular physical activity reduces our risk of contracting communicable diseases. However, the spread of coronavirus has made many of our usual workout methods exceptionally difficult. Many of us are unable to get to gyms now due to a number of reasons such as self-isolation, closure or just being sensible as gyms are seen as ‘high-risk’ locations. I’ve decided to try and be socially responsible, and I’ve opted to avoid the gym and perform my workouts at home or outdoors and away from others. Below are my exercise tips and plan for those who are self-isolating in these unfamiliar times.
Should I be exercising still?
If you are still feeling fit, healthy, and symptom-free, I would recommend continuing to try and exercise as its benefits are now more important than ever. Firstly, exercise strengthens our immune system, which can help fight infections and viruses. It does this by enhancing our immune systems' ability to regulate itself. So apart from government measures like social distancing, good hygiene and washing your hands; continuing to train may be one of our most useful tools to help fight the coronavirus. Additionally, regular exercise can delay the aging process of our immune system. This is important as the coronavirus is shown to be more deadly for the elderly as our immune systems lose the ability to fight infections as effectively.
Without a doubt, everyone is suffering mentally from the stress caused by the spread of this disease. It’s impossible not to be with the constant stream of notifications and updates we get fed through the media. Anxiety is fear of the future and the unknown, and with an unprecedented pandemic like the coronavirus, its only natural that our worry is increased. Luckily though, exercise can be one of our best outlets for relieving stress and anxiety. Regardless of whether it’s through endorphin release or just being a simple distraction, it is fantastic for our mental health. If you don’t feel up to a home workout or a run, a short walk can be just as helpful. The world health organization has recently released some great advice about looking after our mental health as well.
How much should I exercise?
The World Health Organization recommends 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise with at least two resistance sessions, so this should still be the goal to keep us as strong and healthy as possible. I plan to run twice a week outdoors, for around 5km, as well as doing two or three resistance workouts at home. One thing to note here is to avoid extreme exercise as this can cause a temporary dip in our immune system, most likely due to fatigue of our system. However, this is only likely to come into play if I was planning on running a marathon over the next few days. I wasn’t planning on running a marathon, but why not use an excuse and pretend that coronavirus is the only thing stopping me.
Resistance Workouts
It’s incredible how much you can do with little or no equipment. However, set a perfect home gym up with as little as a pull-up bar and a pair of dumbells or a kettlebell. If you have these, I would recommend what I like to call a minimalist workout, twice a week, that hits all areas of the body. It consists of 3x5 pull-ups, 3x8 goblet squats, 3 x16 push-ups, 3x8 lunge, 3x8 straight leg deadlifts. It’s as simple as that. Five exercises which hit every body part done in super quick time.
I’m aware that this could get a bit boring, depending on how long you are stuck by ourselves, and not everyone has a pull-up bar or dumbells. Alternatively, if you don’t have access to home gym equipment, all you need is your body weight to stay strong and keep our workouts interesting
My current favorite home workout is something a patient told me about called ‘Deck of cards’, which is beautifully simple. You take your regular deck of 52 cards, and you allocate a different exercise for each suit. You then pull cards out at random (I’d recommend shuffling first), and perform that specific exercise by however many reps it says on the card. Generally, the King, Queen, Jack, and Ace should represent ten reps. To save you going to the shop and buying a deck of cards, you can download an App called Sweat deck, which takes care of everything for you. My advice here would be to choose four exercises from these below: push-ups (on knees if needs be), crunches, burpees, squats, lunges, leg raises, straight leg deadlifts. It’s a simple but engaging workout that can be done in 15–30 minutes which guarantees a good infection-fighting sweat.
So there it is. My straight forward plan, which, in combination with continuing a good quality varied diet and sleeping well, will go along way to keeping me fit and healthy while self-isolating.