3 things you can do in lockdown to maintain your physical health and fitness

1) MOBILITY
– Spend some time working on the controlled movements of your limbs – particularly those that may be of heavy focus in your sport i.e. shoulders for throwing sports, hips for running sports. What is old is new again, and “CAR’s” or “Controlled Articular Rotations” are making a comeback in the vernacular of sporting clinician. A CAR, as the name suggests, involves taking your limbs through slow and controlled range of motions or movements representative of your sport so as to develop a smoother more refined quality of movement.
A gentle CAR’s routine can be found via the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyJ3omVBIho

2) SOFT TISSUE EXTENSIBILITY
– Depending who you talk to they will either swear by or swear against things like foam rollers, massage balls and the new(er) Thera guns – you name it, there’s a passionate camp either side. Does it really change ‘fascial length’, does it really ‘break up scar tissue’ or ‘adhesion’ – it remains to be seen. What I can see from both anecdotal patient experience as well as my personal experience, is that I have seen promising results relating to recovery – especially if you have had either a large training session or conversely you haven’t moved around a great deal for the day – perhaps shackled to the couch watching Netflix. Foam rollers and massage balls in particular are a cheap and non-invasive method used by athletes around the world. I think it’s worth giving it a go!
An example of a foam rolling routine can be found below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTcRYJsuhkI

3) BODY WEIGHT EXERCISES
– The beauty of body weight exercises is that you don’t need any equipment (other than perhaps a bar overhead if you want to do some pullups), you don’t need a lot of room, they can be done indoors or outdoors (great for winter), they can be grouped together for a high intensity interval session if that’s your thing and they are easily scalable (progressions/regressions).

Below I’ve outlined a couple of pathways of progressions and regressions to keep your exercises interesting.

LOWER BODY
Double leg bridge à Offset bridge à Single leg bridge
Double leg hip thrust à offset hip thrust à single leg hip thrust
Sit to stand à Offset sit to stand à Single leg sit to stand
Offset Romanian deadlift à single leg Romanian deadlift
Double leg calf raise à single leg calf raise

UPPER BODY
Incline push up à kneeling push up à push up on toes à decline push up
Let me up/inverted row à chin up à parallel grip pull up à regular pull up