Home-based exercises during the COVID-19 quarantine situation for office workers: A commentary
Abstract
Staying at home for the prevention of COVID-19 is an accepted fact. Office workers are a group of people, who had to wake up early in the morning and at least had a fixed pattern of sleeping and working. In this situation, complaints about the neck, shoulder and lower back tend to increase and this is a good time to learn and do some practical exercises at home. This letter presents some of the home-based exercise notes for prevention of musculoskeletal disorders among office workers, following the guidelines prepared by the American College of Sports Medicine.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic makes it challenging to maintain a physically active lifestyle. COVID-19 is transmitted by groups of people in close proximity to one another. Therefore, guidance indicates that we should avoid public gatherings and keep a social distance of at least 6 feet from other people. This means that exercising in public gyms is challenging as many people frequent the same space every day and being able to maintain an appropriate social distance from others is not possible [1].
In a quarantine situation, you are strongly suggested to stay at home and keep distance from other people. What will happen? You will lose your normal physical activity routine, you will likely spend more time sitting on the sofa, watching television, and eating junk food. Your weight will perhaps increase, flexibility of your joints will decrease and musculoskeletal symptoms will appear slowly. Multiple risk factors, such as smoke, diabetes, hypertension and obesity will boost this critical situation. Regular home-based exercises could be useful to keep you active and prevent some of those issues and assist in keeping you fit and healthy [2, 3].
For health benefits, a combination of aerobic exercises and strength training are suggested for different age groups. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has suggested performing 2 sessions of resistance training/week and 150–300 minutes of aerobic exercise training with a moderate level of intensity/week. The duration could be divided to short period, such as 2, 5, 10 or 20 minute increments [4–8].
Resistance training could be doing things such as squats using your body weight, push-ups against the wall, sit and stand exercises, single leg step-ups on stairs, and also shoulder lateral raises using bottles of water as resistance. Aerobic exercises could be including dancing, jumping rope, use of a cardio machine, or walking around the house [8, 9].
TThe main purpose of those exercises is to keep you active and healthy during the quarantine situation.
We believe that this situation will be resolved soon, but during this time, it is necessary to stay at home, stay fit and improve our immune system by performing a combination of resistance and aerobic exercises.
Conflict of interest
None to report.
References
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