Do Exercise at Home During Quarantine

Due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, most of us have been forced to stay in doors for a number of weeks/months now. In some countries, fitness centres such as gyms where individuals are normally exercising have been closed for some time now.

But being in a lockdown is not an excuse you can use to avoid working out. You can still do some exercise at your own house. In fact, the World Health Organization recommends that you do 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity physical activity per week, or a combination of both.

ALSO CHECK: Avoid Binge Eating During the Lockdown

You don’t need to be in the gym or any special working equipment to achieve these recommendations. You can still achieve all this in the comfort of your house. Below are some tips on how to stay active and reduce sedentary behaviour while at home in self-quarantine.

Kind of Exercises You Can Do It at Home

There are different types of exercises you can do on your own at home without using any sort of equipment. Here is a few of them:

Pilates

Pilates is a form of low-impact physical exercise that aims to strengthen muscles while improving postural alignment and flexibility. Pilates can be done with or without equipment –and that makes them an ideal form of exercise while at home in self-quarantine.

A typical Pilates workout takes between 45 and 60 minutes.

Although pilates exercises work other areas of your body, it normally targets the core body so that you can move efficiently while improving your posture, flexibility and mobility.

Pilates are different from other forms of exercise as they do not over-develop some parts of the body while neglecting others. Yes, this form of training focuses on core strength, but it trains the body as an integrated whole.

Yoga

Yoga is a term used to describe a variety of exercise movement styles. You can think of yoga as a group of physical, mental and spiritual disciplines that have their origins in ancient India and the Himalayas. The Bhagavad Gita gave this sweet description of yoga:

"Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self."

Generally speaking, yoga is a system that recognises the multi-dimensional of humans as it focuses on the body, the mind and the spirit. Yoga has six branches that represent a different set of characteristics and focus. These branches are:

So, when you are considering going for yoga, having a specific goal will help you choose the most appropriate branch to follow.

High-intensity Interval Training

HIIT refers to a very specific and particular type of workout, and it's possible to do interval training, or high-intensity training, without actually doing real HIIT exercises. Generally, HIIT exercises combine short bursts of intense workout with periods of rest or lower-intensity exercise. You can think of them as a mix of aerobic and resistance training. 

There’s a lot of misinformation about this kind of training out there that might lead you to believe that you can get shredded results in just a few days. It’s true that HIIT can be incredibly effective in helping you attain the desired shredded results, but you need to put in more hours and also do it right.

Several studies have concluded that working your hardest is key when it comes to boosting endurance, increasing metabolism, regulating insulin levels, and losing body fat. The whole point of HIIT workout is to kick up the intensity of your cardio.

So when you are doing HIIT training by yourself at home, here is the key: just move as fast as is challenging for you. You’ll get the best results when you’re actually making yourself breathless as you do each exercise.

If you don’t do any exercises you can have some health problems like obesity

There is a general misconception about exercising – some people actually think that exercising is only for athletes who need to build physical activity into their lives. But that’s not true, we all have to exercise so as to keep our bodies healthy by doing some exercises on a daily basis.

Exercising your body is a necessity for anyone who intends to stimulate his or her own body's natural maintenance and repair system. If you keep your joints, bones and muscles busy, they will definitely remain younger and fit.

But if you are not physically active, there is a great chance of increasing your health risks in many ways.

One of the health problems you might end up contracting, if you do not exercise more often is obesity.

Obesity is medically defined as having too much body fat. Some institutions actually define it as a complex disease involving an excessive amount of fat in the body. The fact that it is regarded as a disease itself, it’s an indication that obesity affects one’s health status.

Experts usually interpret one’s obesity levels based on the body mass index (BMI). The value of the BMI is derived from the relationship between one’s weight and height. So for example, if two people have the same amount of weight but one is shorter than the other, the shorter person has a higher BMI.

There are two types of surgeries - that are designed to help you lose weight.

The first one is known as the Gastric sleeve or gastric band. This surgery is used to make the stomach appear much smaller. After having this surgery, you literally cannot eat more food as you used to do before. So you see what this surgery does? It reduces your food intake!

The second surgery is known as the Gastric bypass. This is an invasive surgical procedure that involves dividing the stomach into a small upper pouch and a larger lower pouch. The basic idea of this surgery is to make food bypass parts of the digestive system, specifically the first part of the mid-section of the small intestine.