Regular exercise protects against COVID hospitalisation and death

As physios, we do everything we can to help people meet their exercise goals.  If you have an injury, our focus is to get you back to full activity as soon as possible!

Best practice exercise guidelines have been well publicised by organisations such as the WHO and are very clear that we should be active on most (preferably all) days of the week.  The Australian Guidelines also include reference to strength training 2 x week, and breaking up periods of being sedentary as much as you can.

But this recently published article adds a whole new spin to the power of regular activity – there was a very clear association between bad health outcomes from COVID and low levels of activity.  And this isn’t a small study – it involved almost 50,000 people!

People who exercised for 10 minutes or less each week had twice the rate of hospitalisation compared to those who exercised for 150 minutes each week, and were also 2.5 times more likely to die.

Should we be surprised by this?

Not really!  The health benefits of exercise have been well documented for years.  This animation is from 10 years ago (and has had over 6 million views on YouTube) and clearly outlines how amazing exercise is for us.

The take home message is that we all absolutely need to engage in physical activity as much as we can.  If something physical is holding you back, drop us a line at Ergoworks and one of our qualified physiotherapists can help you get back on track.