Decide, Immunity or no Immunity?
Isolation is no Excuse to Skip Workout
by Dr. Shreyash Gujrathi, Senior Exercise Science Professor, Gold’s Gym Fitness Institute
.If you want to call someone “Fit”, there are 5 criteria that you need check as follows:
- Cardiovascular fitness [CVF] : In simple words, CVF means how well your heart is able to supply blood and oxygen to a muscle when the muscle is busy working/exercising/ performing daily chores and activities. If a person has low CVF [for example special population like Hypertensives who are chronically sedentary] they will not be able to perform simple daily activities efficiently. Which means, low CVF directly affects a person’s normal day to day functionality.
There is absolutely no physical activity/exercise in our life which does not need CVF. As every activity you perform directly has an impact on your blood circulation.
- Muscular endurance [M.E.]: When a person is performing an activity, for how long can their muscles sustain that activity indicates their M.E.
We need this component for common activities life carrying a grocery bag for a ‘long’ time, even carrying a bag pack to college standing in the bus.
ME has a direct relation with CVF, the more your CVF the more your muscles will be able to perform.
- Muscular Strength [M.S.]: When we talk about ME we talk about how many/how long, but when we talk about MS, we talk about “how much”. In simple word, Muscular Strength means How much weight that a muscle can lift in just one single rep/one single effort. For example, the 1 rep max which is displayed by professional power lifters.
Comparatively, there are very few scenarios in our daily life where we really need to display our muscular strength, for example, briskly shifting a bike in the parking-lot which is parked incorrectly, lifting a heavy gas cylinder in your kitchen.
P.S. – performing M.E. and/or M.S. activities on regular basis helps shoot up your B.M.R [Basal Metabolic Rate]. BMR and Body Fat % are inversely proportional. The higher your BMR the lower shall be your Body Fat Percentage.
- Flexibility [FX]: If a person is able to take each and every joint and muscle in his body to its full natural range of motion, he is flexible!
Lack of flexibility is one of the prime indicators of old age. Flexibility is the 1st fitness component that you loose with age.
- Body composition –Body composition simply means how your body looks – lean/muscular, obese, stocky, underweight. In the process of achieving above mentioned components, your body composition gradually changes.
During this quarantine, if you abruptly stop workouts – no lifting, no long duration activities, no stretching, and not even running, then this is what happens –
- Your body has an amazing habit of Adaptation. ‘No long duration enduring muscular activities’ [no ME] and ‘No heavy lifting’ [no MS] sends a message to your brain “muscular strength and endurance is not needed” so your body adapts by gradually reducing the muscle mass and strength. Which in-turn reduces your BMR, which leads to increase in Body Fat Percentage!
- ‘No stretching/flexibility training’ again leads to an adaptive response by making your joints stiffer and tightening your muscles, as there is no enough blood circulation happening, no clearance of waist products happening!
- Last and most importantly, ‘no running or cardio activities’ leads to lethargy, laziness and even eventually lack of efficiency in performing daily activities.
Loss of all these important components, leads to loss of normal functionality and loss of functionality means reduced Immunity!
In today’s date, a human need not be equipped with weapons but with Immunity.
