Home-based exercises during the COVID-19 quarantine situation for office workers: A commentary

What is it about?

Staying at home for the prevention of COVID-19 is an accepted fact. Office workers are a group of people, who had to wake up early in the morning and at least had a fixed pattern of sleeping and working. In this situation, complaints about the neck, shoulder and lower back tend to increase and this is a good time to learn and perform some practical exercises at home. This commentary presents possible home-based exercises for prevention of musculoskeletal disorders among office workers, following the guidelines prepared by the American College of Sports Medicine.

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Photo by Windows on Unsplash

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic makes it challenging to maintain a physically active lifestyle. COVID-19 is transmitted by groups of people in close proximity to one another. Therefore, guidance indicates that we should avoid public gatherings and keep a social distance of at least 6 feet from other people. This means that exercising in public gyms is challenging as many people frequent the same space every day and being able to maintain an appropriate social distance from others is not possible [1]. In a quarantine situation, you are strongly suggested to stay at home and keep distance from other people. What will happen? You will lose your normal physical activity routine, you will likely spend more time sitting on the sofa, watching television, and eating junk food. Your weight will perhaps increase, flexibility of your joints will decrease and musculoskeletal symptoms will appear slowly. Multiple risk factors, such as smoking, diabetes, hypertension and obesity will boost this critical situation. Regular home-based exercises could be useful to keep you active and prevent some of those issues and assist in keeping you fit and healthy [2, 3]. For health benefits, a combination of aerobic exercises and strength training are suggested for different age groups. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) has suggested performing 2 sessions of resistance training/week and 150–300 minutes of aerobic exercise training with a moderate level of intensity/week. The duration could be divided into short periods, such as 2, 5, 10 or 20 minute increments [4–8].

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