Lifehacks for Staying Fit During Coronavirus Quarantine
The gym is closed and it may not re-open soon, welcome to the new normal.
But a global pandemic is no excuse to not look good naked. You’ve worked out when you were dead tired and exhausted, you’ve trudged through snow and miserable weather to get a workout in, a little virus is no excuse to not work out.
You may be thinking…
The Coronavirus crisis will blow over in a few weeks or months. I’ll just go back to the gym when they re-open…
Depending upon where you live it might be a while before the gyms re-open, how much will your fitness decline if you take 6 months off working out? Also, even if your gym re-opens soon, I’d urge you not to go, especially if you interact regularly with older folks because gyms are fantastic vectors of contagion. Gyms are rife with all manner of microscopic nastiness — treadmills have 74 times more bacteria than a typical public bathroom faucet (yikes!), according to research done by FitRated.com — checkout this infographic, gyms are nasty!
If you’re a younger, otherwise healthy person you probably don’t need to worry much about Coronavirus killing you or landing you in the hospital, but do you see your parents or grandparents often? What about the old lady who lives down the hall from you? You don’t want to be the one that unwittingly communicates a virus to them that they can’t survive via a short conversation or merely by touching the same door handle.
Sick people often go to the gym because they think a workout will clear the virus from their system, fitness gurus debate whether this actually works, what’s not debatable is that sick people hacking and coughing in the gym are super-spreaders of whatever they’ve got. You can expect people with more benign cases of COVID-19 to be huffing, puffing, and sweating at your gym — do you really want to hop on a sweaty exercise bike after they’ve just used it?
I too am wishing that I had invested in some home gym workout equipment but there’s plenty of ways to stay active and fit while you #StayHome. Here we’ll break down nine lifehacks for staying fit and healthy during the Coronavirus Quarantine…
Designate a Fitness Zone
Reorganize or clear a designated space in your home or apartment for doing regular exercise. Even if you don’t have a lot of snazzy home workout equipment making physical space in your life for exercise makes it a lot harder to procrastinate.
Go Jogging
If you live near a park with a running trail, take advantage of it! Unless the park is crowded with other people doing the same thing, there’s little risk of contracting the virus while jogging in a park. What I wouldn’t do is go workout at one of those public outdoor gyms that you often find in parks. For the same reason, I also wouldn’t do push-ups in a public park.
High-Intensity Interval Training
If you’ve got access to a park or public space, try some HIIT, which has become wildly popular because of how powerful a workout it delivers in not much time, as little as 7-minutes.
The biohacker’s manifesto, Head Strong, explains…
HIIT subjects your muscles and cardiovascular system to extreme stress and then allows them to recover during the “active rest” period. This active rest period keeps your heart rate elevated so that you can still reap the rewards of aerobic exercise. It’s the happy marriage of two schools of fitness thought, and it might be more effective than either resistance or aerobic exercise alone. In fact, studies have shown that HIIT is up to ten times more effective at increasing growth hormone than resistance training or endurance training. (pp. 194–195)
Luckily, you don’t need to carefully watch the clock and count off 30-second exercise blocks or hire a fitness coach, there are several HIIT training apps, that make it super easy to habituate.
Push-ups
Push-ups are no joke, they exercise seven different muscle groups. Why not hop off the computer or couch every few hours and do 15 or 20 pushups? It will get your blood flowing and make you feel better. Importantly, wash your hands after doing push-ups, even if you don’t have Coronavirus hanging around on your floor, floors are dirty. Don’t rub the sweat from your brow until you wash your hands!
Doorway-Mounted Pull-Up Bar
Pull-ups are my favorite exercise, I find them exhausting in a good way! If Amazon is still delivering to your area, get a pull-up bar, and set it up in a doorway where you’ll use it often.
Running Stairs?
On Instagram or Twitter, you can find a lot of inspirational videos of fit people running the stairs of their apartment buildings. That might not be a great idea, you really don’t want to sprain an ankle or trip and break an arm while running stairs, this is no time to do anything risky that might land you in the hospital.
Finally, a few mindset tips…
Meditation
A global pandemic is stressful, the media is blaring fear-mongering speculation 24/7, everybody is a bit more on edge. The stress takes a toll on your immunity, mood, and general health. 10–20 minutes of meditation is one of the best things that you can do daily to healthily manage stress. Especially if you’re self-quarantined and off work, you can’t now use the excuse that you don’t have time to meditate. Probably the easiest way to learn is to start with an app like Headspace.
No Fap
Especially, if you’re a dude living alone, it’s awfully tempting to while away time daily wanking to porn — apparently pornhub is even giving away free premium memberships in some places.
Ejaculating too often actually hurts your immune system as semen contains a lot of Zinc and other biologically costly constituents. While Coronavirus probably won’t kill you, you want your immune system in tip-top shape so that you can fend it off or have a mild case if you do contract it. According to tantric traditions…
Your age minus 7 divided by 4 is the minimum days to have between ejaculations to maintain health.
I’m 34 years old so I should only ejaculate about once every 6–7 days according to this formula. So if you’re going to enjoy some adult videos, try to do some not more than once a week, more frequently it’s harmful to both your immune and mental health.
Prepping
We’ve all now heard speculation about how a pandemic could cause social or civilizational collapse, it’s probably not going to get that bad, BUT you can assuage a lot of your anxiety by taking some survivalist action towards better preparedness. I didn’t stockpile vast amounts of shrink-wrapped rice, toilet paper, and ammo but I did spend a couple of weekends cleaning out an attic full of dusty old junk and accumulating a few months’ food supply there.
And taking some deliberate action towards preparedness did a lot assuage my anxiety about the looming crisis. The time may have passed to buy long-term food supplies but there’s a lot that you could do still do to make yourself a bit more antifragile.
