The lazy days of summer combined with social distancing and modified community activity recommendations due to the coronavirus pandemic have led many people to reduce previously typical levels of physical activity. Gyms have been closed, races have been cancelled, and for many people exercising alone simply isn’t as much fun as a group run or yoga class. However, just as exercising creates changes in your body to cause you to be more healthy and fit, not exercising does the opposite. This process is called Deconditioning.
Use It or Lose It
Regular exercise creates many positive changes in your body. To name just a few – your heart begins to pump blood more efficiently, your lungs use oxygen more effectively, your muscles gain strength and learn to contract in a more coordinated manner, and your body gets more proficient at turning food into fuel. Deconditioning is the reversing of these changes. Exercise is a “use it or lose it” kind of thing, and deconditioning is the process by which we “lose it.” Typically, cardiovascular fitness is reduced first, followed by muscular strength. As people become less fit and activity becomes more difficult, they continue to do less, leading to further deconditioning. This process can readily turn into a vicious cycle. Two factors that are related to the way that deconditioning occurs are your age and your exercise history. If you’re younger, you’ll probably lose fitness at a slower rate than someone older. If you’ve been consistently exercising for a long time, or at a high intensity, your losses will probably be slower than for someone who just started.
Deconditioning can lead to increased aches and pains, illness, and disease and can also increase injury risk. According to the American College of Sports Medicine, it only takes two weeks without exercise to lead to significant loss of cardiovascular fitness. Two to eight months of inactivity can potentially erase virtually all of your reserves.
Reversing the Loss
The best way to deal with deconditioning is to prevent it in the first place. If you’re struggling due to the current pandemic with a period of increased time commitments at work or with family, using a shortened exercise routine can help to minimize your fitness losses. Even one exercise session each week will help you to keep most of what you’ve already built up. Other options are to use shorter but more intense interval training sessions, or to try breaking up your physical activity into multiple short chunks during the day. If your layoff from regular exercise has been lengthy, it may take a more lengthy period of time to retrain.
The bottom line about improving fitness is that doing ANYTHING is better than doing nothing. Try not to be frustrated if you don’t feel as capable as you remember that you were prior to the period of inactivity. Resuming some type of regular body movement is the first step towards whatever your goal may be. Relatively quickly, you will be able to notice the positive effects of your efforts. Even after several activity sessions, you may observe improvements in your mood, energy level, and sleep cycles. Muscle coordination and movement dexterity also tend to start to improve fairly quickly – within a couple of weeks. Aerobic capacity typically begins to improve within 1-2 weeks after starting a regular activity program. Muscle strength gains can be observed by approximately 4-6 weeks after initiating a resistance training program, with more significant changes in strength and muscle size occurring over the course of 8-12 weeks.
Whatever your individual situation may be, your physical therapist can help you to get back on the right track. Particularly if you’re having trouble getting started, or if aches and pains are making it difficult to get moving again, you will find that your PT is a valuable resource for trouble-shooting and for planning and enacting course of action. For people who have reduced their activity levels because of injury or illness, a PT can not only help you recover faster, but they can also help you to find activities that maintain your fitness while safely working around an injury or illness.
If you’re ready to shake off the effects of this odd pandemic summer – give your physical therapist a call. As the American Physical Therapist Association’s Vision Statement states, your therapist can help you to “optimize movement and improve the human experience”. Who wouldn’t want that?