Let's be honest, this is not something that anyone wants to do. We've all done enough isolating during lockdown, so the thought of having to do another two weeks sounds bad. But we can't think about only ourselves at this time and need to make sure we're doing the right thing to help protect the safety of everyone around us. The issue when it comes to fitness, is that spending two weeks indoors can be a very good excuse to not do anything, and give up on all our hard work that we have put in for our health and fitness. A break in routine typically leads to picking up bad habits, and we all know how quickly we can lose our fitness. A study by Maeda S, Miyauchi T, Kakiyama T, et al. (2001) showed that participants who had completed a 2 month bicycle programme and then stopped completely for another 2 months lost all fitness that they had gained. So for this reason, we need ways we can keep ourselves going when we're told to stop.
The first thing I would consider (and this may be too obvious), but get yourself into a routine of home workouts. If you're fortunate to have gym equipment at home then you can afford to be more creative with your workouts, and make them replicate a regular gym workout. If you don't, then you may be stuck to doing bodyweight HIIT sessions. Either way, any workout is a good workout. A good source of workouts to do is always YouTube, and even if you typed in "HIIT home workouts" on Google, you would get plenty of examples. The main thing to remember with home workouts is to always do an effective and thorough warm up. It can be quite easy to just jump straight into a workout because you've probably only had to jump off the couch and turn the TV on to set your workout up. The less risk of injury we have, the better we can kick start our gym workouts when you're allowed back out.
The second consideration that I believe is very important is your diet. Remember, this is a good time to give up on our routines and pick up bad habits like snacking and ordering takeaways. In reality, two weeks at home is the perfect chance to get more creative and spend some more time making dishes from scratch. This is obviously a lot healthier than ready made meals and also a great chance to learn a new skill while we have more time at home. Obviously if you are working from home already then you'll have a busy day in the first place, but without the chance to go to restaurants, you can still take more time to create more dishes. We also want to avoid snacking and late night eating which could start to creep into our routine. Remember, you'll only have two weeks off, so don't ruin all your hard work by going off the wall for such a short period of time.
Lastly, and probably the hardest area to change, is making sure we have an active day. When we were able to work from offices and travel to work, we would be walking a lot more and be more active than what we are doing when stuck at home. An active day is so important to your fitness and health, because it allows us to keep burning plenty of calories throughout the day, more than what we would if we were just sitting on the couch. However important it is, it's still hard to be active if we're stuck inside. Therefore, we have to get a little creative to make sure we can stay as active as possible throughout the day. Examples of this could be walking up and down the stairs a few times throughout the day, or walking lengths of the garden. This is even harder if we live in a flat. You could get even more creative, so rather than walk around your place, you could lunge! This may sound a little obscure, but we need to make sure we are staying as active as possible when we we are forced inside.
You may find that these points seem a little straight-forward and obvious, but remember, we need to make sure we can stay as active as possible if we are going to keep smashing our goals and staying fit and healthy! Get in touch if you want to keep the conversation going!