4 Tips for Working Out Post COVID-19
Everyone has been going through the whole COVID pandemic. It has had an effect on all of us.
For those of us who work out or train for a specific goal, going to the gym and working towards those goals were most likely put to a halt when all of this happened. Not everyone has a fully equipped home gym, or smart home gym, and because of that, most of us had to resort to bands, small dumbbells, or even bodyweight workouts to try and get some semblance of a training session in.
Don’t get me wrong, those are all viable forms of loading, and doing that is definitely better than sitting on the couch and binge-watching Netflix.
But, as gyms begin to transition to a point where they can open up their doors to the community again, working out and training has to be approached conservatively.
With clients that we work with inside of Cressey Sports Performance in Hudson, MA, we are incorporating some of the tips mentioned below.
In today’s post, we are going to offer some tips on gradually building up your strength as you return to your routine pre-COVID 19.
1. Start Small
When heading back to the gym and to training, don’t rush back and try to go at it 5 days a week. Whether you went to the gym 3 days per week or 5 days per week or somewhere in the middle, gradually build back up your frequency.
For example, if you were originally doing 4x/week, start with 2-3x/week for a couple of weeks and gradually ramp yourself back up to your usual frequency over the first month. By doing this, it will allow your body to adapt to the new stress and stimulus you are placing on it to allow a positive change can occur.
Just like when you first started training, you didn’t go 7 days per week. You started small and built yourself up to a schedule that worked for you.
2. You’re Not As Strong As You Were Before
I hate to say it, but you aren’t as strong as you were before. Unless you had access to a full home gym, the amount of weight you were lifting during quarantine is less than it was when gyms were open. This is a common theme among most people. It’s ok.
You will get stronger and you will be able to get back to your usual routine. If you go back and try to lift what you were lifting before, your body will have a difficult time adapting to such a large increase in weight and you will either not be able to complete your training sessions because it is too difficult, your body doesn’t have the capacity to handle said stress just yet, or you could potentially irritate something and injure yourself.
We are not trying to put fear in your mind that this will happen. They key is to use common sense and gradually increase weight on certain movements as your frequency at the gym increases.
So how much should I lift?
This is going to vary from person to person, but typically we would recommend starting at 60%-70% of what you were training at before.
For example, if you were deadlifting 225 before COVID started,
Then 225 x .6 = 135, 225 x .7 =157.5.
Start between 135 and 158 and see how things feel. I know this may seem light compared to what you were doing before, but it’s better to start light and realize it’s too light and gradually build back up vs going too heavy too soon, tweaking something and not being able to train and setting yourself back.
3. Incorporate Tempo Work
If you’ve read any of our other articles such as:
We are big proponents of incorporating tempo work into training sessions. Whether it be an athlete coming back from an injury or someone just looking to move and feel better, tempo work can be great at improving mobility, work capacity, tissue loading capacity, stability, and athletic performance.
Tempo work consists of performing movements at a certain speed or tempo. For example, if you normally perform a squat and squat down and squat back up, that would be considered a certain speed or tempo.
With “tempo” work, we consciously want to think, or watch a clock, of performing certain parts of a movement at a specific speed.
Take a Goblet Squat:
As you can see during the lowering portion of the movement, this person is performing it at a rate of 3-4 seconds. Instead of lowering themselves quickly and coming back up and completing the rep, the athlete is consciously think of going slower on the way down.
You can incorporate a slow lowering (slow eccentrics) as well as a pause at the bottom position of the movement as shown here during a Front Squat with a Pause.
By incorporating a slow eccentric or a pause, or both, into a movement, it forces you to have to go lighter and control the movement vs using momentum to lift the weight back up to the starting position. There is a time and a place for speed movements, but when returning to training after a lay off, incorporating tempo work can be a great addition to help in getting back to the gym.
4. Conditioning
Some people like to go out for a run, some don’t. If you are one of those people that likes to lift weights and you don’t even look at the treadmill, bike, elliptical, rower, etc. as you walk out the gym, we hear you.
Depending on the implement, it can be boring and monotonous, but it can also be beneficial and not as boring as some may think.
Incorporating some form of low level conditioning can be beneficial for cardiac health, but also for building up your body’s work capacity to tolerate higher levels of stress in the gym and outside of it.
These are unprecedented times. COVID-19 has affected all of us in one way or another. When returning to the gym and training, make sure to:
Start Small
Lower the Weight and Gradually Increase It
Incorporate Tempo Work
Don’t Forget Conditioning
Are you dealing with an injury that happened either during quarantine or has been going on longer? Are you just hoping it’ll go away or are training around it while at the gym?
You can continue hoping it will go away or you can take control and take that first step in helping yourself. We are here to help. Click HERE to getting back to moving and feeling pain-free.
