So .... what exactly do you do at a gym that you couldn't do, or do the equivalent of, at home? For a few bucks you can get some resistance tubes for anaerobic exercise and a mat for bodyweight stuff. Cheaper than the gym and (if you're interested mostly in health) just as effective, and you don't risk getting or spreading a deadly virus.
I"m not judging, I'm wondering what your reasoning is, because you inevitably knew everything I just posted. You're smarter and better-educated than me, after all. (Hi, this is Carl from that panel at Philcon.)
It's a space problem. Living in a very small space as I live in with another person, I just don't have room for much equipment. I do a lot of work with weights, and while early in the pandemic I purchased some in-home weights, I can't get and store more here. I also don't have a lot of space to physically work out; I can't actually get a lot of footprint. I certainly can't do anything resembling aerobic exercise inside, and that's really what's most important for long term health anyway.
I tried to make it work (and will again try in future) when the gym was closed due to high background COVID-19 transmission, but there was a definitive negative impact on my fitness. I lost muscle mass, no question. However, it wasn't safe to be in the gym at that time so that's how it had to be. It was also a fair bit warmer and less rainy at the time, with sunlight outside of my working hours, so outdoor aerobic exercise was a substantially more viable option. Indoors, I don't love wearing a mask during aerobic exercise, but it's a necessary disease control measure and I can make do.
A gym may seem like a luxury, and in our society it is treated like one, but to be quite honest, it's really not. Everyone should have access to one because it provides a health service that keeps people healthy. It's not just about "living longer," but about getting the benefits of exercise--including substantial benefits to immunity, lung function, and other things that are quite handy during a global pandemic.
We know--based on studies like the one that I linked--that with physical distancing and masking, a gym is not a particularly risky environment, as long as background transmission is low. If I lived elsewhere, with different transmission dynamics, I'd act differently.
I don't feel that everything needs to be closed all the time while we ride this out. The big difference between going to the grocery store for an hour for me, vs going to the gym for an hour, is that the grocery store doesn't enforce physical distancing nearly as well as the gym does, particularly here in NYC. Put in perspective, I should be marginally more worried about getting groceries than I should be about using a gym. I think there's a certain amount of carried-over worry about gyms because they were closed early on in the pandemic, but that isn't a rational concern--when they were closed early on, it was because we didn't know what the worst environments for transmission were and we had no studies on the dynamics of different locations. We now have that information, and we know the circumstance under which gyms can be safely open.
What I'm more concerned about is the fact that indoor dining and bars are still open anywhere. These two things cannot be made safe, and it's not only obvious but scientifically supported that they cannot be made safe. It's a disaster for the restaurant and nightlife industries, but they do need to be closed, with policies in place that help their employees survive that situation.
So .... what exactly do you do at a gym that you couldn't do, or do the equivalent of, at home? For a few bucks you can get some resistance tubes for anaerobic exercise and a mat for bodyweight stuff. Cheaper than the gym and (if you're interested mostly in health) just as effective, and you don't risk getting or spreading a deadly virus.
I"m not judging, I'm wondering what your reasoning is, because you inevitably knew everything I just posted. You're smarter and better-educated than me, after all. (Hi, this is Carl from that panel at Philcon.)
Hi Carl! I appreciate the question.
It's a space problem. Living in a very small space as I live in with another person, I just don't have room for much equipment. I do a lot of work with weights, and while early in the pandemic I purchased some in-home weights, I can't get and store more here. I also don't have a lot of space to physically work out; I can't actually get a lot of footprint. I certainly can't do anything resembling aerobic exercise inside, and that's really what's most important for long term health anyway.
I tried to make it work (and will again try in future) when the gym was closed due to high background COVID-19 transmission, but there was a definitive negative impact on my fitness. I lost muscle mass, no question. However, it wasn't safe to be in the gym at that time so that's how it had to be. It was also a fair bit warmer and less rainy at the time, with sunlight outside of my working hours, so outdoor aerobic exercise was a substantially more viable option. Indoors, I don't love wearing a mask during aerobic exercise, but it's a necessary disease control measure and I can make do.
A gym may seem like a luxury, and in our society it is treated like one, but to be quite honest, it's really not. Everyone should have access to one because it provides a health service that keeps people healthy. It's not just about "living longer," but about getting the benefits of exercise--including substantial benefits to immunity, lung function, and other things that are quite handy during a global pandemic.
We know--based on studies like the one that I linked--that with physical distancing and masking, a gym is not a particularly risky environment, as long as background transmission is low. If I lived elsewhere, with different transmission dynamics, I'd act differently.
I don't feel that everything needs to be closed all the time while we ride this out. The big difference between going to the grocery store for an hour for me, vs going to the gym for an hour, is that the grocery store doesn't enforce physical distancing nearly as well as the gym does, particularly here in NYC. Put in perspective, I should be marginally more worried about getting groceries than I should be about using a gym. I think there's a certain amount of carried-over worry about gyms because they were closed early on in the pandemic, but that isn't a rational concern--when they were closed early on, it was because we didn't know what the worst environments for transmission were and we had no studies on the dynamics of different locations. We now have that information, and we know the circumstance under which gyms can be safely open.
What I'm more concerned about is the fact that indoor dining and bars are still open anywhere. These two things cannot be made safe, and it's not only obvious but scientifically supported that they cannot be made safe. It's a disaster for the restaurant and nightlife industries, but they do need to be closed, with policies in place that help their employees survive that situation.