Staying active while staying at home

At the time of writing this blog post, the country finds itself practicing self-quarantine and social distancing in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Health experts are recommending several things to improve and protect your health during this crisis. These recommendations include washing your hands, avoid touching your face and avoiding contact with people who have been infected or exposed to the virus.

There also is another recommendation that is important in the fight to stay healthy, and that is exercise. People who are physically fit stand a better chance to recover from all illnesses and injuries.

I encourage you to maintain your physical fitness routine during this unique and challenging time. The good news relating to maintaining your fitness is that it doesn’t take much to accomplish this goal, so let’s cover a few different ideas you can incorporate into your fitness program to maintain your health during the quarantine.

First and foremost, you should walk more. This can be accomplished in several ways. Numerous short walks throughout the day are a fairly easy way to increase activity. You can also just walk around the house to increase your activity level. If you have stairs in your house, you can walk up and down the stairs for exercise.

The next category of physical activity involves basic exercise movements that you can perform at home without exercise equipment. Instead of reviewing every exercise possible to do at home, I will cover basic movement patterns that you can perform in any way that you desire.

The first movement involves squats. Squats are a basic human movement pattern. These can be done with or without resistance. You can use everyday household items like a container of laundry detergent or a gallon jug of water for weight.

The next exercise involves horizontal push movement. This would be your classic pushup. These can be done in traditional fashion on the floor, but you also can perform them against a wall or chair depending on your level of fitness. You can modify your repetitions by adding reps as needed and adding sets as well.

Another exercise involves a form of back rowing movement. These will be a little challenging to do without some form of equipment, but one idea is to find common items found in the home such as two large soup cans. Bend over at the hips and let your arms hang down while holding a can in each hand. Now pull your hands to your hips.

The final exercise is a hip hinge movement. The hip hinge is basically a deadlift movement. Find two items of similar weight and stand with an item in each hand. Hold the items in front of you and bend forward at the hips until your back is parallel to the floor, come back up and that is one repetition. Experiment with sets and reps according to your level of fitness.

These are just some of the exercises you can do around the house to help maintain a level of fitness, which will help maintain your health during this pandemic. Be sure to watch my video on this topic that will cover exercises listed here and a few others as well.

Be safe, and be healthy!