The worst impact the pandemic has on us is the impact on our physical fitness. Being locked up in the house during quarantine and working from home during the pandemic seriously affected our health.
Physical fitness was important before the pandemic started. Now, it’s more important than ever. If you think about it, even if you’ve never worked out, you were pretty physically active compared to the pandemic period. That’s why it’s important to discuss regaining physical fitness after the pandemic.
Why Are Physical Fitness Attitudes Important?
Absolutely! A positive attitude towards physical fitness provides a great basis for regaining your fitness after the pandemic. However, most attitudes are set during our childhood, and we have a negative attitude towards something if it was negative when we were young.
If you don’t have positive attitudes towards physical fitness, don’t worry. You can change your attitude by changing your mindset. Try to evaluate your fitness routine benefits. There are a few things that you need to focus on:
● Stress-relief: Our body releases endorphins, hormones that have a relaxing effect on us because they relieve pain. That’s why you can count on being relieved of some of the stress you encounter every day.
● Surplus energy expulsion: Sometimes, we feel like we have a lot of energy, and then we eat to spend it, but this has an adverse effect on us. Once we exercise, we consume that surplus of energy, which makes us feel amazing.
● Being energized: Exercising every day to maintain physical fitness increases our energy levels. Exercise makes us feel tired at the beginning when we start the routine, but after some time, we feel much more energized.
● Much better health: There’s a lot of studies and research that speaks to how you can benefit from regular exercise in terms of health. You can regulate blood pressure, reduce chances for depression, cancer, arthritis, etc.
Prepare to Regain Physical Fitness
Many issues can occur after long periods of physical inactivity. It’s only logical that you’ll be less physically active when you’re under a lockdown. That’s why there are a few things to do to prepare:
● Don’t start with a gym: Wait until you reach that point where you are determined to put in the extra effort and exercise. However, the post-pandemic gym might be a different type of gym, and you might start.
● Always stretch: It’s important to stretch before you do any exercise, and it’s even more important to do it after a long period of inactivity.
● Remember to start slow: Don’t start with high-intensity exercises. Take your time to adjust and build up to more strenuous exercises.
If you experience some issues because of inactivity, there might be a need to get help from someone like Revive Physiotherapy.
How to Regain Physical Fitness?
We’re sure that most of you know how to regain physical fitness after the pandemic, but some tips will help you stay the course and maintain your routine. It’s important to look at the possibilities for collective and individual sports.
Collective Sports
With the “new normal” and the current situation, we need to be careful when playing collective sports. You can form a group with your friends and organize matches whenever you’d like. It’s better to have a group that always pushes you to play sports.
Another thing you can do is subscribe to volleyball or basketball, or any other sport every week. This reduces the chance that you’ll stop practising sports because you’re paying for it, so it’s less likely that you’ll back out.
Individual Sports
There are no dangers in practising individual sports, but it’s much more difficult to maintain a routine because you don’t have other people pushing you to do it. So, the best thing to try might be to practice individual sports with another individual.
If you enjoy running or used to do it before the pandemic, maybe you can find a friend to run with you afterwards, and you can push each other out of quitting. Another great motivator is a pedometer, or any other tracker, depending on the sport to help you feel fulfilled once you’re done.
Physically Fit at Home
When you don’t like people watching you exercise, and you feel more comfortable doing it when nobody’s around, you could try exercising at home. Many programs don’t require any equipment, and they can be equally intensive as any other activity.
Keep in mind that you can do this kind of workout during the pandemic as well. To be in isolation doesn’t mean to sit and do nothing. You still need to maintain a healthy diet and be physically active, even if it means walking around the apartment for a certain period.
Home workouts
There are a plethora of workout videos on YouTube, ranging from beginner to expert levels, and the best thing is that these are home workouts. You just need to search for a specific workout that suits you the most.
Another thing you can try is downloading a workout app. There’s a ton of those on app stores, and they even have their tracking systems that motivate you to continue and endure the beginning phase of regaining your physical fitness.
Healthy diet
You can exercise all you want and get no results if you continue eating unhealthy. If there’s one thing we could’ve done during the pandemic, it’s eating healthier. We had the time, but we didn’t go anywhere, and there’s a ton of delivery services out there.
So, why not eat a pizza every other evening? We feel good when we do, but your body is in terrible shape if you eat fast food every other day. Don’t worry, there’s a way to reduce terrible foods.
Think about the result. You’ll feel incredible when you stop eating unhealthy food, and you just need to push through the first few weeks. Remember this, you’ll have much more energy, feel much less tired, and be able to do much more.
Fitness products
The pandemic certainly brought about a revolution in-home workouts. Fitness products aren’t necessary, but they sure help, especially after the pandemic. You never know what might happen, and it’s good to have things like:
● Resistance bands: These are a great product. You need nothing else and you can engage your whole body by doing various exercises. Even a simple stretch of the resistance band is an exercise.
● Jump rope: Jumping rope improves your footwork, increases your speed, boosts your power, and improves your agility. It’s considered a full-body exercise. It builds muscles and stamina.
● A balance ball: If you use a balance ball while you’re working from home, then you have it all figured out because it improves your core strength, tones your core muscles, burns calories and improves your posture. Another significant benefit is better breathing.
● Dumbbells: The good old dumbbells, the most common piece of equipment for exercises, and are not very expensive. They are effective for strength training and toning your arms.
Mental Fitness
We need to be mentally fit to endure tough times such as pandemics. Physical fitness helps achieve mental fitness. There’s a healthy mind in a healthy body. That’s an important point to remember.
It’s difficult to adjust to the post-pandemic situation because we have adjusted to the pandemic and being isolated. That’s why we need to regain physical fitness and lead healthy lifestyles so that we can overcome anything that comes our way.