At Home Exercises to Keep Fit During Quarantine
Moving your body is important on so many levels. During this time of social distancing, maintaining fitness should be a top priority, along with good diet and stress mitigation. And it’s entirely possible to get a stellar workout, without all of the expensive equipment.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, seven-time Mr. Olympia and action-hero extraordinaire, said, “There are a lot of things we can’t control during this crisis, so we need to focus on what we can control.”
He said, “Gladiators and Vikings didn’t have gymnasiums. I started my own fitness journey with chin-ups on a tree branch by a lake in Austria.”
If the idea of pumping iron, a la Arnold, doesn’t do it for you, get into yoga during this time away from society. While any kind of sport or exercise can be food for the body, mind, and spirit, yoga guru BKS Iyengar said, “Yoga allows you to find an inner peace that is not ruffled and riled by the endless stresses and struggles of life.”
When it comes to staying fit at home, there is something for everyone, whether it’s calisthenics, aerobics, Tai Chi, Qigong, yoga, pilates, or bodyweight exercises.
None of these activities require a gym, and they can all be done at your own pace. Or, if you’d like, you can follow online videos of expert fitness teachers. There are plenty of great yoga classes online taught by a variety of dedicated and experienced teachers.
Six Facets to Consider for At-Home Workouts
Make sure you’re healthy
Whenever starting a new workout program, it’s highly recommended that you first visit the doctor for a checkup.
Cardio
These exercises help with blood circulation and include some degree of increased heart rate. If you haven’t exercised in a long time, it’s good to get back into cardio gradually to build up your endurance, without putting too much strain on your body.
Lymphatics
Moving all of your body parts, including head, neck, feet, hands, arms, legs, and torso are important to get lymph moving throughout your body. Lymph glands help remove toxins from the body and can be stimulated with exercises that cause muscle contractions.
Respiration
Deep breathing is amazingly beneficial and has been practiced for thousands of years in the older parts of the world, such as Asia and India.
Muscles
Stronger muscles grow when we put them under strain (not enough strain to cause injury, of course). Then the body is forced to repair the muscle fibers so that they rebound stronger and larger. With stronger muscles, it’s easier to balance. Two of the greatest benefits is that using weights also strengthens the bones, which helps to stave off osteoporosis.
Balance and Sports Performance
We’ve learned a great deal about exercise over the last few decades — it’s become both an art form and a science. Even if you are sequestered at home, you can still work on strength, conditioning, and balance, so that you can excel at your favorite sports activities when you next engage in them again.
Yoga Checks All the Boxes
Just over a century ago, yoga masters began to travel to the West to spread the practice of yoga. By the 1920’s Hatha Yoga was strongly promoted in India with the work of T. Krishnamacharya, Swami Sivananda, and others. Today, yoga practice is a worldwide phenomenon, and the reason is easy to understand: anyone can do it, and no equipment is needed. Of course, there are fancy clothes, mats, blocks, and balls that can enhance your workout, but none of these are absolutely necessary to the discipline.
Yoga’s benefits are unparalleled — increased flexibility, better muscle strength and tone, greater respiration and vitality, weight loss, improved cardio, superior balance, and even protection from injury. There is even evidence that yoga reduces inflammation when practiced regularly. Yoga is a mind-body exercise, which makes it helpful for reducing stress, thinking more clearly, increasing focus, fighting depression, feeling happier, calming down the mind and body, reducing anxiety, and even feeling more altruistic.
Getting Started With Your Yoga Practice
If you are patient and easy on yourself, yoga is rewarding from the very beginning of practice. Of course, beginners may feel awkward, unsure, or rigid, but this is to be expected.
Yoga is all about poses. As you go along, you learn where your strengths and weaknesses are, and your balance increases. When you can go out into the world again and find a yoga teacher, he or she can help make little corrections in your practice. It’s a work in progress. But if you want to know how to get started, the answer is simple: Get started now. Sign up online and go for it.
Gaia’s yoga videos offer much more than just a taste of what yoga is like — they offer hands-on experience from expert teachers representing different schools. And if you want to go beyond yoga, or add other forms of exercise to your stay-at-home program, Gaia also offers other fitness content, including pilates, Tai Chi, Qigong, and many general workout classes, as well.
B K S Iyengar once said, “Yoga saved my life. I took it up for my health, and then I took it up as a mission.” Now you can take it up for your own reasons — whether it’s because you’re stuck at home, in need of at-home yoga workouts, or you just want to give this Eastern art form a try.
Can Earthing Repair Free Radical Damage, Improve Sleep, Increase Energy?
In all likelihood, you’ve tried Earthing (also known as grounding) whether you knew it or not. You know, you were strolling down the beach or sitting in your backyard, and you decided it was time for the shoes to come off. Sinking your toes into that warm grass or sand feels so good, doesn’t it? Turns out there’s a reason for that, and it’s more than just a moment of peace. It’s also a booster for your health!
You have the basic idea of Earthing, but getting into the specifics, it’s defined as the practice of obtaining the healing properties of the Earth through the simple act of touching it. You might be a little skeptical, but the good news is, there are medical practitioners who back it up, such Laura Koniver, M.D., of Summerville, S.C.
To understand the health benefits, Dr. Koniver says, we must also understand free radicals. You’ve probably heard of them as something to protect our bodies against, and you’re on the money. Free radicals are highly reactive atoms, molecules or ions that have unpaired electrons. Free radicals are “intimately connected to inflammation,” and inflammation is linked to cancer, heart disease, immune dysfunction, aging and cognitive decline. Dr. Koniver explains, “Using your body in any way, shape or form can create inflammation, so even during something healthy like yoga, where we’re stretching and creating microscopic tears to the muscles, we’re still building up free radicals.”
It’s pretty unavoidable, but it’s also just what happens living on our earth. It’s natural and normal, but it’s also something to actively combating, as free radicals do damage to our bodies. The most common and talked-about method is through antioxidants that neutralize the damage. However, Koniver maintains that Earthing is the best practice, and that consuming antioxidants is “definitely a drop in the bucket compared to what Earthing can do.”
The science behind Earthing is simple. According to Dr. Koniver, the free radicals that we build up throughout the day are positively charged, and the surface of the Earth is negatively charged.
“It’s a symbiotic thing,” adds Dr. Koniver. She argues that if we can get our vitamin D from the sun and our oxygen from the trees, we too can get healing electrons from the ground. In Dr. Koniver’s words, “We are meant to build up free radicals and inflammation by the way we live our lives, and the Earth is our docking base.”
A list of Earthing Health Benefits:
- Reducing inflammation by defusing excess positive electrons
- Reducing chronic pain
- Improving sleep
- Increasing energy
- Lowering stress and promoting calmness by reducing stress hormones
- Normalizing biological rhythms including circadian rhythm
- Improving blood pressure and blood flow
- Relieving muscle tension and headache
- Lessens menstrual and female hormone symptoms
- Speeds healing- used in some places to prevent bedsores
- Can eliminate jet lag
- Protecting the body from EMFs
- Shortens recovery time from injury or athletic activity
- Reducing or eliminating snoring
- Helping support adrenal health
- Weight loss
Getting started on Earthing is an extremely easy thing, as well. It’s free. It can be practiced almost anywhere. The instructions are simple. You just have to take off your shoes, to make sure you have exposure to the ground itself. You can wear socks if you want, as well. Koniver assures that you will still get the electron transfer necessary for the benefits.
This transfer, according to Koniver, can also be made through any point of the body, as long as that body part is making direct contact with the ground. So you can always take a nap in a sunny field, writing it off as a health benefit! How awesome is that?
Again, Earthing can be practiced almost anywhere, but Dr. Koniver points out that some places are better than others. “To me, if healthy grass is growing outside over a layer of soil, it’s connected to the crust of the Earth, and that’s all it needs to be,” says Koniver. Beaches are on the top of the list, as the moisture from the ground acts as a conductor, but grass, sand, rock, dirt, soil, all give health benefits as well.
Even concrete that’s been laid over the crust of the Earth can do the trick, though it’s not optimal. “Concrete acts as a semi-conductor,” says Koniver, “so if you live in a city with no real access to nature, you can map out a little patch and kick off your shoes.”
More good news about Earthing is that there is absolutely no such thing as overindulgence. Your body can benefit from just a few minutes, though 10 a day is the sweet spot as the minimum, according to Konniver. She truly believes you should work as much barefoot walking into your day as possible, whether it’s walking barefoot to get the mail or taking a quick stroll around your block.
In conclusion, it’s important to note that there are no current studies that definitively prove that Earthing has a major impact on human life. Some critics call it a placebo effect and nothing more. However, getting out in nature, grabbing a little sun, and moving your body a bit more during your day cannot be a bad thing for you. So there is nothing to fear if you want to give the practice a try. After all, all you have to do is kick off your shoes and sink your toes into earthy goodness. Ahhhh!
