By Nolan Kowal, Sport Performance Specialist
Keeping healthy while holed up at home can be hard, but it can also be rewarding and fun.
If you want to stay active and live a healthy lifestyle while staying home, here’s a few tips to help you meet your goals.
Fitness
Gyms were among the first facilities to shut down – hardly surprising, given how many people go through their doors every day.
However, there’s no reason to put getting into shape on hold.
The internet is a great resource to help you find all the tools to turn any room in your house into a makeshift gym.
Body weight exercises like push ups, planks, and the bridge work multiple muscles and require no equipment to perform.
Better yet, they all have different variations, some more challenging than others, that target specific muscles to help you sculpt your body.
But, it’s important you keep your workouts fun and engaging, and nothing does that better than challenging yourself.
The Sport Manitoba Fitness Centre may be closed, but our app is open to the public on a free trial base, giving you access to new weekly challenges, free virtual workouts, and more.
Athletes
The journey of an athlete requires determination, sacrifice, and willpower to push the human body to its limits, but it’s not a journey one can complete alone.
It’s also not a journey that stops for anything, even a global pandemic. Everything, from diets to exercise regimens, is designed to help athletes excel.
“It’s not about general fitness, it’s about focusing on the key needs of the sport and where the athlete is in relation to those requirements [to] develop a plan to get [to that threshold],” said Jeff Wood, a Sport Performance Specialist.
If you’re an athlete, you know you can’t currently meet with trainers or go to performance centres, so it’s important they find ways to keep yourself motivated.
A motivated athlete is a mentally strong athlete, and you can’t grow without being mentally strong.
“Sport is 100 per cent physical and 100 per cent mental,” Wood said.
Honing mental skills like developing your mindset, goal setting, and visualization are all essential to your growth. It helps you improve your mental health and pace yourself in a healthy, productive way.
“Progress at the right speed and building a strong foundation is essential, and it pays off in the long run,” said Neal Prokop, also a Sport Performance Specialist.
Prokop and Wood lead Sport Manitoba Performance, helping provincial athletes develop to become as strong and skilled as possible.
COVID-19 is just another hurdle for athletes to power through, and Sport Manitoba Performance remains committed to helping them evolve their game.
Health
Many of Manitoba’s stores and facilities are closed, some of which are now cautiously reopening under new restrictions, to help stop the spread of COVID-19. But even during a pandemic, people require accessible medical services.
In the Sport Manitoba Clinic, services such as physiotherapy and chiropractor that were closed since March are now slowly being reopened. However, the physician services were always operating, and Dr. Gail Sawa was the only practitioner in the clinic for weeks.
“It’s quiet around here,” she said.
As an essential service, physician offices were always going to stay open. It’s important that people have access to medical care, but it’s also important to be responsible to help the healthcare system.
Although Dr. Sawa still wants to help keep people healthy, she doesn’t want anyone heading for the doctor whenever they feel off.
“Anyone feeling sick should stay home regardless of what [their] symptoms are,” she said.
If someone absolutely has to see Dr. Sawa, she makes sure she knows exactly what they need before meeting face-to-face.
“I’ve been trying to do an initial phone visit to get most of the history, so we can minimize the time patients spend in the clinic,” she said.
It’s a tough time for everyone right now and many people have expressed their support for healthcare workers. Dr. Sawa is greatly appreciative of the support but is happier to see the love being spread around.
“It’s refreshing to see the praise for other essential workers such as cleaners and grocery store workers,” she said.
For everyone else, Dr. Sawa says the most important thing they can do is practice social distancing until the cases start to dwindle.
“We all have a role to play in helping flatten the curve in Manitoba and for many that role is staying home,” she said.
You can learn more about how the Sport Manitoba Clinic can help you here.
