What 6 Months in Lockdown Has Taught Me About Fitness
Being stuck at home for a couple weeks is a hard slog, try six months.
That’s us down in Victoria, Australia. We currently have the harshest lockdowns in the world. Aside from a period of 10 days in June, gyms haven’t been open for six months. The fitness industry is suffering and we don’t know when they’ll re-open. As a personal trainer, I don’t know when I’ll be going back to face to face work. I don’t know how many of my colleagues will still be in the industry in twelve months through no fault of their own. It’s honestly very frustrating and it sucks.
The down time has offered me a lot of perspective. It’s given me a chance to reflect on what’s important in my life, where my values and priorities and where my focus needs to be.
I love weight training, it’s my most favorite thing in the world. I’m a fairly simple human, I like very few things but when I like them, I like them a lot. Lifting is one of them. But even I have struggled during the iso period.
As Melbourne enters another month of lockdown as we wait for real life to resume, I thought I’d open up on my experiences and findings during the isolation period in the hope that someone reading this who is struggling along can help make sense of this period.
The good news is that you’re not alone and that there will be a fix at some point, that decision ultimately falls in your hands. Here are some of the struggles I’ve had, the benefits I’ve seen and the realizations I’ve made that have shifted me not just back on course, but to progress beyond my wildest dreams.
There is consequence in the shuffling priorities, but fitness doesn’t always have to be number one
Let’s be completely real here; your fitness goals don’t care about your feelings, the fact that gyms haven’t been open or that the only equipment that you have in the house is a backpack loaded up with high school textbooks you’re hoarding for some reason.
The principle of reversibility states that in order to maintain the effects of training, we must continue to do so. Achieving your fitness goal needs to be a priority to become a reality and COVID-19 lockdowns have truly thrown a spanner in the works for many people.
My ambitions in powerlifting are up there with the biggest priorities in my life, but during the iso1.0 I let my goals slip dramatically. During the initial stages of the lockdown, motivation was still high. The novelty of a lockdown and improvising with training was just a new hurdle to overcome and for the first couple of weeks I was up to the task. But eventually I wasn’t. I started missing a session a week. One became two. All of a sudden I had missed a week of training, soon several weeks.
My body started to change as a result. I started to feel softer as my fat mass increased and my muscle mass decreased. I wasn’t training with any meaningful loads but I knew I had gotten weaker. This bothered me a little, but truthfully I didn’t care enough to do anything about it. Training with 10kg dumbbells in my lounge room for 20–30 reps began as a novelty and ended up being something I loathed and resented. I did my best to get up for training but I couldn’t breathe any consistency nor routine.
But that was okay. At that point, I accepted that while I could make progress at home, my desire wasn’t enough and that I was willing to cop the losses on the chin knowing that they would return at some point in the future. I had put orders in for a squat rack, a barbell and some plates and that I would eventually return to regular training.
But for the three months without equipment I chose to concede that I wasn’t going to get any bigger or stronger, in fact I was going to go backwards. I chose to look after my mental wellbeing in other ways and focus on other activities that caught and retained my attention.
When it was time to step back into gear, it doesn’t take long to recoup lost gains
I’m fortunate in some way to have experienced this before. During my time living in Europe, I lost 6kg and a heap of muscle mass due to not eating enough, partying, backpacking, stress and anxiety. I came back to Melbourne a far smaller human. Fast forward two months and after the initial first week of immense soreness, my strength and muscle gains were pretty much back on track.
Having this experience already made it easy for me to put training on the backburner. I knew that the setback was temporary.
Fitness is a marathon, no matter what your goals are. There’ll be peaks and troughs along the way, you’ll cruise through periods of high motivation and enthusiasm and you’ll fumble through periods of monotony and inconsistency. We’re only human. Taking a macro outlook on your journey will open your eyes up to the fact that this is only a temporary situation. Yes; gyms are closed. Yes; training with resistance bands and light dumbbells at home sucks, but it’s such a small period of time in the larger scope of the plan.
Once my equipment arrived, again it took a good six to eight weeks to not only get back on track with training, but to completely recoup any lost muscle mass and then some. With the aid of a new coach, a new coaching philosophy and sky high motivation, I was able to not only recover the muscle and strength gains I lost but also add to them. As of two weeks ago my training total is 67.5kg above my powerlifting competition total which in three months of training. I am by no means a new lifter so this rapid progress is astronomical!
Don’t get it twisted, not everyone can expect crazy gains on the resumption of training, but if you’re concerned that you’re going to never recover from the time off, you’ll be pleased to know that after a couple months of consistency and well thought programming you’re going to be back on track.
The importance of recovery cannot be overstated
Recovery is the single most underrated aspect of training and the reason why people cap their ceiling of potential. It’s easy to thrash our bodies in the gym because we enjoy training, but if we aren’t taking care of our nutrition and our sleep then the room for improvement is truly limited.
Isolation has been a blessing for my sleep. I am naturally an extremely tired person and that only snowballed as I dealt with life overseas. I came back to Australia, stepped quickly into work still with high anxiety and found myself very quickly in debt. The mental stress of life and the physical stress of long work hours and strenuous training through a big curve-ball towards my training and it was only during this lockdown period that I truly understood how much.
My sleep has never been more consistent than it is now. Maybe dating back to primary school and forced bed times. That’s almost 16 years of shit sleep. Due to not being able to work and not having anywhere to be, I’ve managed to successfully have 7–9 hours sleep a night for the majority of the last six months.
Not just that, I’ve been far more attentive to my nutrition. I’ve almost doubled the amount of protein I consume on a daily basis and despite eating less than I was pre-iso, the quality of the food I am getting in coupled with the drastically improved sleep has helped me achieve the high performance training I’ve managed to put together.
It’s really put into perspective how bad these aspects of my life were before lockdown and is something I’m going to give serious consideration into fixing when real life resumes. For those currently not training, these are two aspects of your life you hone in on and fix for an improved quality of life. Simply getting more sleep, drinking more water and consuming more veggies will do wonders and the habits you build now will carry over immensely once you step back into the gym.
Something is better than nothing and enjoyment is sometimes more important than what is optimal
If you’re reading this and you’re still in a rut six months down the track, I just want to let you know that it’s okay. It’s okay to focus on other aspects of your life or to only do enough. Sure, there are consequences. Every action has it’s reaction, but everything is a choice.
I’ve noticed a lot more people are returning to more “traditional” forms of exercise, in running and bike riding. If that’s what brings you enjoyment during the down period then this is a great use of your time. If I hadn’t forked out thousands of dollars into my garage setup and hundreds of dollars into coaching then this is most likely what I would have been doing.
Something I have really gotten into in the last three months that I hadn’t done in a long while was simply going for a walk and getting some fresh air. Most of my steps are typically done at work on the gym floor and in the first phase of iso were non-existent so just heading to the park for a walk and a bit of sun and being in tune with nature and my thoughts is something I’ve found very therapeutic.
If that’s all you can muster up at this point, then that’s okay. The gym will be there eventually and you’ll have a chance to get back on course with your training. Focus on enjoyment and take the path of least resistance and when things start to click, motivation starts to move in and enthusiasm skyrockets, you’ll know. Trust me.
