One was a runner a Marathon was nothing for him and now almost a year later he can do a half Marathon.
The other one was a natural body builder. They know the weights they can push. He told me that 8 Months after Covid he was down 20% in weights.
Anecdote: I'm an avid runner and cyclist, but after I had dengue fever, it took me months to regain my fitness. I used to run 10K's before breakfast, but the first time I attempted a 5 km walk afterwards, I was basically comatose for the rest of the day.
I noticed a huge difference in performance before and after getting sick with Epstein Barr in 2017. Even years later I've never returned to the same performance. Maybe related, maybe not, but that's how it looks to me with my sample size of one.
And how would they know, really?
If I had a cold it would set me back a day or two sometimes not at all but I didn't go to the gym when sick. If I had the flu even with a flu shot it knocked me off my weight routine for months. The effects of having the flu was very noticeable on me it set me back six months. I can't imagine what covid would be like.
I wish you a good recovery (as much as possible)
https://www.uclahealth.org/heart/cardiac-repair-regeneration
Except that you got a year older.
I got COVID early on in February 2020, and while it initially seemed mild, the tail end was severe. Pain that made me worry I might have been having a mini-stroke, and after that lung issues making it painful to take a shallow breath. After a week or so, it was just painful to breathe deeply but otherwise OK.
I started doing low heart-rate running, trying to keep my HR below 132. Initially, this was really hard, and even jogging slightly too fast could cause my HR to spike to 180 and stay there for 5 minutes. But over the next couple of weeks as my lungs improved again, it got better and better. Within a few months, I was doing at least 5km every time I went for a run, and running 3 or 4 times a week. I've got faster and faster as a result, and I've knocked a third off my 5km PB time from pre-COVID.
My health hasn't been better for many years, and that's only because the lockdown conditions meant that I was working from home so could take a long break at lunchtime, we were allowed out for exercise, but otherwise the streets were deserted. I think lockdown was the best thing that's ever happened to me in terms of exercise opportunities.
Wow. Congratulations, that's got to feel good.
* increased personal time for workouts for anyone working remotely (or forgoing employment entirely)
* dramatically increased demand & prices for home exercise equipment
* shifts to cooking at home
March / April 2020 seemed to be marked by a lot of people going outside and running. Personally, I shed over 35 lbs of bodyfat in 2020 and have had few comparable periods where I hiked as often or ate as cleanly, and I'm far from alone in my circle of acquaintances.
Anecdotal: I run almost every day. Don't get excited, only 2 to 4 miles :) Early in the pandemic I saw plenty of new faces - often couples - out exercising. Some running, mostly walking. I don't see many of those faces any more.
Neither do open gyms. :)
Though post-holiday covid peaks may have slightly altered the long-running wry observations about January in the gym.
But there were some very cautious times during lockdown. Events like Parkrun were cancelled for months on end. Loads of races were cancelled. Gyms were closed. Indoor fitness activities like dance, yoga, pilates, and aerobics were cancelled (and their online alternatives much more sparsely attended). If the place you were doing swimming/squash/tennis/golf is closed, you're out of luck. Football, hockey and basketball aren't compatible with social distancing. Neither is boxing, judo or MMA. People who commuted by foot or bike started working from home.
Running and cycling were certainly winners, but I'm certain there were a lot of losers as well.
Sweden, though, did not lock down, and I hear (and experience) the same issue as the parent.
The first day back after COVID and I reached my max heart rate in 60s of moderate jogging.
This is how the disease will be dismissed. Why bother researching it when you can just blame the victim? It works for ME and endometriosis, and it's far cheaper than diagnosing and treating people.
Individual anecdotes (such as my personal friends who did not change behaviour), while unscientific, paint a similar picture to what is being presented as evidence, so it's an additional data point to consider.
So, at least there is some correlation with the sentiment, and by people whom I know have not adjusted their behaviour. (including myself)
Sweden's restrictions were excessively light, by the way, 8pm closing of restaurants and gyms is not exactly a big deal to people going to the gym after work.
Fitness24/7 in town was so small that it was impossible to get in due to covid retrictions. Something like a maximum of 9 people which meant that it was impossible to get in during popular hours.
My girlfriend is the manager of one of the Malmo branches.
If anything, I think I actually got a bit healthier because of lockdown. Eating healthier due to fewer restaurant meals, drinking less due to not being able to go to pubs and parties etc.
Probably got more exercise too because for a while it was one of the few valid excuses to get out of the house!
No citations on that though.
Why do you make assumptions about "everyone"? I'm sure there are as many diverse experiences during 'lockdowns' as there are people who experienced them. Obviously if you include the rare cases where people were actually kept indoors (how long did those actually last?), then healthy exercise might have been more difficult.
In my case, my health has improved immeasurably, as I no longer need to sit in an office all day, eat an unhealthy lunch and eat office-supplied snacks the way I did before.
I eat more healthily, get more fresh air, walk and cycle at lunchtimes - and even get more work done in fewer hours.
And before you come out with the usual "you just need to use more imagination and take your kids with you" - for a start, the situation I described above drained more energy and life than I care to remember. Also, there's only so much a 1 year old will put up with, when I am used to rides of up to 100 miles.
Personally, I am deeply embittered by the whole experience.
But gains from no-commute / remote setups weren't limited to single/childless people. Some of the people I know who were taking rides / runs in the hills were couples with kids working schedules out with their partners, and I can think of families who demonstrated that reproduction doesn't bar one from buying home exercise equipment.
And "it became illegal to have anyone else look after our kids" -- I get that it's frustrating to have a service that you rely on closed. I can see that'd be especially hard with group daycare. I saw that frustration play out. I also saw people continue babysitting or au pair arrangements with whatever behavioral stipulations for epidemic-safety made sense to them, and that got easier as lots of people pulled out of service/retail labor force. Childcare was different but illegal seems like hyperbole.
I'm sure your experience was difficult or stressful; lots of people found adapting difficult in various ways (nor were single/childless people exempt, though the challenges might be different). But the idea that the parent poster forwarded that somehow civil policies generally "broke" people's health/exercise habits is a poor generalization... and whatever the truth about the difficulty of your particular situation, the idea that adapting was just impossible for people with kids and additionally that anyone pushing back on criticism of restrictions just isn't thinking about that doesn't hold up as a generalization either.
I mean what I said. Where I live (Wales, UK), it was illegal to have people in your house (and obviously, that meant you also couldn't go into anyone else's house) until mid-2021. Obviously, we did not follow that law, as it was absurd and would have caused significant harm to me and those close to me.
Do not patronise me, by suggesting I should have "planned better" or "adjusted quicker". Saying such things is incredibly demeaning to the effort we did have to go to, to do our best as a family. Trust me, once I realised that no-one else was looking out for us, I did plenty to ensure that those closest to me would be ok (and mostly, that consisted of breaking newly-passed Covid laws, including the one I already mentioned. It was also illegal for me to go to our nearby woodland, because we were not allowed to leave the county we live in and I live in a city that is its own county.). I am proud to say that my two young kids will probably have no memory of Covid, and am very proud to say that we have also not succumbed to the new parenting norm of allowing kids of almost any age to spend as much time as they like staring at screens. In doing so, selfish pursuits like my cycling and other hobbies have had to take a back seat.
Maybe lead with that specific, then. You know, the idea that people weren't properly accounting for Wales, rather than what you said, which was that people weren't properly accounting for those with children.
Though if we're accounting for Wales, my understanding is that like the rest of the UK (and similar to many other western countries) it had established "alert levels" as described here:
https://gov.wales/covid-19-alert-levels
with restrictions that varied over time. Looking at the alert levels for early 2021 via the wayback machine, it seems like up through Alert Level 3 [0], it's hard to read the restrictions as "illegal to have anyone in your house" so I don't know what to make of that. Even if we're saying Alert Level 4 [1] was simply constant from 2020 onset through mid 2021, the language under that seems to have some wiggle room in it.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210309231028/https://gov.wales...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210302230652/https://gov.wales...
> Do not patronise me
If acknowledgement that there were genuine struggles alongside examining the shortcomings in generalizations within your comment feels patronizing, I can drop the empathy. Would that be better for you, or would you like us to stick with politely allowing that regrettable difficulty and acceptable adaptation could actually overlap?
I appreciate that I have lived through a particularly draconian and frankly absurd set of restrictions since 2020. However, my comments on being a parent over this time are still valid. It has been especially tough, and I doubt that anyone I referenced in my original comment has kids of their own.
I have a good deal of empathy for those who don't get to work from home, but I'm the opposite of "healthy habits got worse."
The fact is, this is the first time in a long time that we've had a substantial sample size of infected humans, as well as a spotlight on the topic. The point being, there could be previous history with regard to treatment / solutions used for Covid and we've never bothered to look and see. That's not being critical. We had no reason to look. People survived and that we moved on.
But now we have a significant amount of data, yet we seem to be presuming - again, without proof - that the cause of "long Covid" is exclusively due to the virus. Simply put, that assumption isn't supported with science. It's based on assumption and narrative.
Problem is plenty of people were still getting delta and they still worked, with lesser efficacy, against omicron
And the antivirals they're handing, you're better off fighting covid without them
remdesivir is a garbage drug
Two examples that might help frame things:
1) Chemo. It's toxic.
2) A couple of yrs ago a family member was hospitalized from a stroke. They needed to be put on assisted breathing. Well that helped, but it also led to a lung infection. And then that required treatment. Fair enough, it prevented death.
The point is, not every treatment is without sidside effects. But with Covid, evidently there are no longer comorbidies, and the treatments have no side effects.
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/
Mechanical ventilation was overused early in the pandemic and likely killed quite a few patients. Now less invasive therapies are preferred and ventilators are only used as a salvage therapy when all else has failed.
Sure there are outliers (i.e., people in very good health getting long Covid) and the media is great in highlighting them. It makes for profitable "news." But the typical American doesn't exercise enough, and doesn't eat particularly well. These things impact health. They impact recovery (from any illness or injury). Yet we continue to be stuck with leadership and a narrative that is afraid to discuss such things.
That's all I'm questioning.
I don't think there's any tissue that takes longer than a year to regenerate.
Nerves, for instance[0].
[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/peripheral-ne...
From what I remember from a family members heart attack ... the heart doesn't really heal.
Hence pace makers for a lifetime.
>The heart is unable to regenerate heart muscle after a heart attack and lost cardiac muscle is replaced by scar tissue.
https://www.uclahealth.org/heart/cardiac-repair-regeneration
https://www.uclahealth.org/heart/cardiac-repair-regeneration
https://www.uclahealth.org/heart/cardiac-repair-regeneration