Being Fitness in an Apartment Quarantine
Before the pandemic hit Brazil in mid-March, I moved from Campinas to Sorocaba. They’re close cities around 100 kilometres, but I didn’t know anyone in Sorocaba. Then quarantine started and I took it seriously.
I was going to the gym for four years, since I stopped being a couch potato, and making exercise was great for me. It allowed for me to ditch the anxiety medicine that I took during three years, and the anxiety control was the main factor that made me love going to the gym. If I didn’t went I started to feel inside my head. So…how did I dealt with that?
I will talk about three changes I did in my fitness, and link several recommendations in Portuguese and English. These are Yoga, Calisthenics and the breathing discipline necessary to run masked on.
Yoga
Yoga is almost like a natural mid term between meditation and exercise, two things that I was already doing. There are some days that I’m not into a intense activity like calisthenics or running, that when I do yoga, it’s relaxing and refreshing and very suitable for doing in the morning, I don’t have many tips to give you, I’ll this recommend these Youtube channels, the equipament you need, all the necessary knowledge are here:
Fernanda Yoga — YouTube (Portuguese)
PsycheTruth — YouTube(English)
Calisthenics
When the pandemic hit, I was without a gym, due to changing between cities, so I was already doing exercise in my living room, and it was perfect to me. It made me pay WAY more attention to the movements I do, to my body sensations, I do the exercises dressed the way I want because I’m not in public., so that’s why I recommend so much. Calisthenics I prefer to do later in the afternoon, after my job, to put an end to the productive day. My two references are in English, and for equipament I just bought the Yoga mat and some pillates elastics that sell everywhere now.
Pamela Reif — YouTube(lighter)
THENX — YouTube(harder)
Breathing Discipline
Sometimes is fundamental to go out in the street and run, and during this pandemic I run masked on, and when I learned how to do it, had two advantages. The first is to control my allergy in the street, to not breath so hard the dust, the pollen and other particles that are around the air. The second is that it forced me to menage my breath, to keep a constant rhythm that I can carry on for about 40–60 minutes that I usually run.
The tip I can give you, is to run with a lighter mask like a surgical one, a lighter tissue, because you’ll be in open space, so it’s much more safer than a treadmill inside a gym, if you put a heavy tissue on will be suffocating.
And also of course, pay a lot of attention on your breathing, you must not go to the limit because might be too tough to recover just with nose breathing, if you breath through your mouth the tissue will colapse on your face, and suffocate you too. So that perception you’ll create with practice, wish you the best in this fitness journey.