Photo Credit: skeeze
Lock Credit: zarubin-leonid – www.feepik.com
Today, I have a guest writer for the first time and she will talk about exercise during these peculiar times. She will be sharing her insights, ideas and positivity on the current lockdown we are experiencing in South Africa.
Louzanne Coetzee is a Paralympian athlete and takes part in the 1500m, 5000m and marathon for the T11 class. This means she competes in the class for the totally blind.
She holds the world record in the 5000m and the African records in the 800m and marathon.
Let’s find out how she keeps herself busy and makes sure she stays fit during the lockdown.
Louzanne Coetzee
Intro
We have entered a strange time in the history of our country. Since 1994 South Africa has not had a state of emergency announced.
Along with this and the 21-day lockdown period, we have many challenges: our freedom of movement has been affected, we are cut down to essentials when shopping, we cannot visit friends or family and we cannot be seen outside of our houses if we don’t have an essential destination to go to.
So now that your freedom of movement has been temporarily been taken away from you – do remember it is for the greater good – how can you make up for not going for that run, hitting the gym or going on that bike ride? And how will you complete those move and exercise goals on your smartwatch?
How to Reach Your Goals
The answer could actually be staring you in the face… Almost all the smartwatches today have a variety of activity settings you can use to track your activity and exercise goals during the day. For example, the Apple Watch has two settings that give you freedom: “other” and “high-intensity interval training”. These settings allow you to start a workout, and essentially do what you want to.
The watch still measures your activity level by tracking your heart rate though. Polar, Garmin, Tom-Tom and other smartwatches will have similar settings. So this, in essence, allows you to track activities such as gardening, washing your car, vacuuming and cleaning your house and so forth. Because they count as physical activities right? Your heart rate is up, you are walking and moving things around and you are being physically active.
Proof
I experimented with this over the weekend and for one hour and 30 minutes of washing my car did a workout of about 230 calories on my Apple Watch. This is almost half of my move goal for the day and surmounts to about 6km of running/jogging at an easy pace or 30 minutes on a spinning bike.
Ten minutes of mowing the lawn burned about 20 active calories. This is about a 1km of jogging at a light pace. My lawn is only about 20 square meters so if you have a bigger lawn, you can do the math.
Vacuuming my 3-bedroom flat burned about 40 to 50 calories in an activity on the “other” setting on my Apple Watch which could be translated to 10 minutes on a spinning bike or a 2km run.
Final Piece of Advice
Luckily most of the smartwatches these days also allow you to do indoor activities such as indoor running or indoor cycling. If you are fortunate enough to have equipment at home this is also a great option to get in your daily dose of exercise.
There are also many ways you can keep fit without equipment such as doing bodyweight training, jumping with a skipping rope, short sprints in your yard and so forth. Your watch should also have a setting to accommodate such activities such as the “other” setting on the Apple Watch.
Closing
There you have it. Some metrics to compare running or cycling to indoor activities and make sure you reach your goals. Who said you need to run or cycle to get exercise?
Hope this helped you to see that you will be able to reach your goals, even without leaving your house.
Stay safe South Africa, but don’t stop exercising!
Interesting Read
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