Editor’s note: Before beginning any new exercise program, consult your doctor. Stop immediately if you experience pain.
CNN
—
You’re finally sticking to your New Year’s resolution to exercise regularly when you become sidelined by Covid-19. Or maybe you’re a seasoned fitness buff training for a marathon, then have to hit pause due to a nasty bout with respiratory syncytial virus or influenza.
No matter the scenario, the big question is how to safely reboot your fitness regimen once you have recovered.
If you had a simple head cold or 24-hour stomach flu bug, there is not too much to be concerned about. But Covid, RSV and influenza are more serious maladies that require a thoughtful approach to resuming exercise. That’s because the three are viral infections, which tend to cause whole-body inflammation, said Dr. R.J. Turner, a primary care and sports medicine physician with UTHealth Houston.
Advertisement
“What that inflammation can do is irritate your heart and lungs, which ultimately can affect your breathing and the way your heart beats,” Turner said. “It takes time for your body to completely recover from a viral infection.”
It can take even longer than average to be ready to hit the gym if you’re an older adult or have underlying health concerns, such as diabetes or high blood pressure. And if you already had heart or lung issues, that requires even more caution.
Another factor to consider is how long you’ve been ill and inactive. “You start to lose strength in your muscles after five to seven days of inactivity,” said Marisella Villano, a certified personal trainer and owner of Marvil Fit in Hampton Bays, New York.
Indeed, your muscles can begin to atrophy within eight hours of surgery. And being bedridden for less than two weeks can result in a 5% to 10% reduction in muscle mass in your quadriceps, according to a 2013 study published in The International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology.
No matter which virus you had, wait at least five to seven days after recovering before packing your gym bag. You also should be able to do all of your daily activities without excessive fatigue.
Advertisement
“Your body, heart and lungs need to recover,” Turner said. “You don’t want to push it too early and then have complications.”
If you had Covid accompanied by heart- or lung-related symptoms such as chest pain or difficulty breathing, the American College of Cardiology recommends seeing your physician before resuming exercise. And if Covid caused you to develop myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, the ACC guidelines say to abstain from exercising for three to six months.
Once you’re cleared to resume your workouts, take it slow and easy. Turner recommended calculating your maximum heart rate and keeping it below 70% to start, which is considered light exercise. To determine your maximum heart rate, first subtract your age from 220, then calculate 70% of that. For example, a 40-year-old would have a maximum heart rate of 180 beats per minute (220 minus 40). Since 70% of 180 is 126, a 40-year-old’s heart rate should initially stay below 126 beats per minute. You can use a heart-rate monitor or fitness watch to track your heart rate.
Villano recommended walking at an easy pace for the first 10 days post-recovery before progressing to more moderate exercise. “But don’t go back to 100% of what you were doing before you became ill,” she said. “Decrease your loads by at least 10% or 15%.”
At her fitness studio, some of Villano’s clients tried to jump right back into their workouts after a bout with Covid, despite her warning against it. The result was always the same: The overly eager go-getters fatigued earlier than previously, as their heart rates accelerated at lower workloads than before their illness. Some got lightheaded.
Advertisement
“I have to talk them off the ledge and tell them their gains are cumulative,” she said. “Decreasing your workload doesn’t mean you will lose all of your gains.”
As you’re slowly working back to your normal fitness routine, pay attention to how you’re feeling. Yes, you’ll likely feel some fatigue as you get back into shape. But if you feel like your heart is racing or beating irregularly, or if you have any chest pain, stop immediately and see your physician.
“The biggest thing to be concerned about are heart attacks and developing heart arrhythmias,” Turner said.
Being well-hydrated and consuming nutritious foods are also crucial, Turner said, both while you’re ill and when you’re returning to activity. That’s because your body needs energy to fight off the infection while you’re sick and later to fuel your workouts.
Should you become frustrated or down about how long it’s taking to get back in shape, remember this: Those who are physically active are less likely to become ill, and if they do catch an infection, it’s typically less severe than for someone who is a couch potato.
Advertisement
“At the end of the day, the healthier we are, the better outcomes we have if we do get sick,” Turner said.
Melanie Radzicki McManus is a freelance writer who specializes in hiking, travel and fitness.
“Alright dumba**, welcome to lesson two here at fat f*** university.”
So begins one of the countless fleshy blurs of locally-produced fitness content pumped algorithmically into the feeds of Australian Instagram, TikTok and Facebook users.
It’s the sort of engagement-baiting approach that yields viewers and followers — designed to push men out of some apparent masculine malaise and into retaking control of their body and masculinity, usually via paid workout programs, products or supplements.
It’s also the type of content increasingly filtering into the phones of teenage boys.
Meme culture is a big part of fitness and gym content.(Supplied: Instagram)
Advertisement
While there is a more developed conversation about idealised images on social media and body image pressures on young girls, experts say research is less advanced when it comes to boys.
“I think boys are now objectifying themselves like never before and we do need to be really concerned,” said Danielle Rowland, Head of Prevention at national eating disorder charity the Butterfly Foundation.
“The intensity of training advice, nutrition and misinformation is greater than ever.”
Feeds serving up different diet
When Anthony Lee started high school in regional Victoria six years ago, social media had a different feel to it.
“In Year 7, it was just basically a way to keep up with your mates,” he said.
Advertisement
Anthony Lee says social media came to mean something very different by the end of high school.(ABC News: Jeremy Story Carter)
By the time he finished Year 12 last year, the feeds of his classmates had changed. So too, the surrounding culture.
“There is a growing problem with men having that feed of perfect body content,” he said.
“There are people who will see influencers on social media and say, ‘I’ve got to have bigger arms, toned legs, I got to have calves the size of mountains’.”
Engaging with fitness content online will generally see a user receive more and more of that type of content.(Supplied: Instagram)
Advertisement
Linger on one Instagram reel showing off a set of dumbbell exercises, and you’ll likely get five more videos zeroing in on how to get “boulder shoulders”, or some protein-heavy diet advice from a shirtless influencer.
Josh Ward travels to schools in Sydney and around regional NSW, hearing from young boys as part of his work as a facilitator for men’s mental health organisation Tomorrow Man.
“There’s been a huge jump in the last two to three years in the amount of boys opening up in workshops around their body,” he said.
Tomorrow Man facilitator Josh Ward runs school workshops around ideas of masculinity and mental health.(Supplied: Josh Ward)
Mr Ward believes there’s no coincidence it’s occurred alongside a “big spike” in the amount of fitness and gym influencer content turning up in their feeds.
Advertisement
“If someone was in school walking around with a fitness mag in their pocket, bringing it out every recess or lunch, you’d think ‘that is some strange behaviour’. But that’s what [teenage boys] are celebrating now,” he said.
“The danger for young people is they don’t realise they’re actually the pioneer generation in terms of that exposure.
“In the last five years there’s been a crazy amount of fitness content, but that’s just what they’ve always been exposed to, so they don’t realise how strange it is.”
‘It creates a false sense of the world’
For many teenage boys on the path through puberty, working out in gyms has long represented an accelerated part of the journey into manhood.
Images of muscle-ripped celebrities and athletes serving as aesthetic inspiration, if not an unattainable physical ideal, is nothing new either.
Advertisement
Going to the gym can be an important and healthy part of puberty for teenage boys.(ABC News: John Gunn)
But it’s the nature of that exposure — the type of content and the saturation of it — that has experts concerned.
“It’s that ‘in-your-face, all-the-time’ aspect of it,” said Associate Professor Ivanka Prichard from Flinders University.
“It’s seeing something on Instagram when we’re perhaps not in that frame of mind, making a comparison to this really fit person and have that influence the way we might feel about ourselves.
“We’re fed a whole range of things through those algorithms that we would never have had exposure to before and would never have sought out.”
Advertisement
Experts report seeing digitally altered and AI-generated images in fitness content.(Supplied: Instagram)
Multiple experts the ABC spoke to reported seeing digitally-altered and even AI-generated images of supposedly naturally-fit bodies on social media.
Ms Prichard, a former fitness instructor whose research sits at the intersection of psychology, social media and exercise science, believes the constant barrage of perfectly sculpted bodies could destabilise the mental health of some teenage boys.
“For young people shaping their identity, it creates a false sense of the world,” she said.
Of the estimated 1.1 million Australians who had an eating disorder last year, one in three were male, according to the Butterfly Foundation.
Advertisement
For over a decade, Scott Griffiths has studied body image and psychological disorders, with a recent focus on male eating disorders, body dysmorphia and particularly, muscle dysmorphia.
“Muscle dysmorphia is a psychological disorder. It’s not just being a gym junkie,” said Mr Griffiths, an associate professor and lead of the Physical Appearance Research Team at the University of Melbourne.
“It’s a preoccupation. You are always thinking about food, training, your appearance. It’s on your mind all the time.”
Jokes about mental health are regular among gym memes.(Supplied: Instagram)
According to the Butterfly Foundation, people aged between 15 and 19 are 2.7 times more likely to experience an eating disorder. It makes social media an animating and potentially potent driver.
Advertisement
“It can reinforce in your mind that your worth is very closely tied to, if not wholly dependent upon, your appearance, which is not the basis for healthy self-esteem,” Dr Griffiths said.
“[TikTok and Instagram] are more likely to feature influencer bodies you are extremely unlikely to be able to achieve without performance enhancement, or a level of commitment to dieting and exercise that would overcome most people.”
Blurred lines at the gym
Joshie Glover, 27, has seen just how profoundly positive a gym environment can be for young boys.
In his work at young men’s mental health charity Man Cave, he estimates he’s facilitated over 170 school workshops of more than 5,550 students.
In that time, Mr Glover has witnessed countless examples of the physical and mental health benefits that a gym can provide, as well as the connection between mates working out.
Advertisement
In Man Cave workshops, young boys are increasingly raising body image concerns.(Supplied: Man Cave)
It’s when those workouts veer toward the obsessive that problems emerged.
“With gym habits, it’s very blurred lines, which is why it’s quite insidious,” he said.
In Man Cave workshops, boys often speak about being bullied over their weight, only to reframe it as a positive.
“A lot of them will say, ‘I’m actually really grateful that I’ve been teased about how [fat] I was, because it motivated me to get to go to the gym and get big’,” Mr Glover said.
Advertisement
“The line of when it goes from a positive social thing, motivating each other, doing something physically, to slipping into a pressured, coercive kind of motivation by ridicule, it’s really blurred.”
Andrew Tate and the problem with ‘discipline’
Another online fixation that routinely comes up in workshops is Andrew Tate, the disgraced misogynist content creator currently awaiting a criminal trial on allegations of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women.
Mr Glover said there was an uneasy through line between the much-discussed appeal of Tate, who used to be a professional kickboxer, and the growing obsession with social media gym culture.
A police officer escorts Andrew Tate from the court in Romania in March 2024.(AP: Andreea Alexandru)
“Many boys are so confused as to what it means to be a man, who are the role models?” he said.
Advertisement
“One thing they’ve really latched onto is that a man is disciplined. Whenever you ask, ‘what’s the good bits about Andrew Tate?’, they’ll say, ‘he’s disciplined’.
“The main way that discipline can play out is attending to your physical body. There’s not really much desire for discipline in schoolwork or discipline in any other areas, it’s manifested in the gym.”
The irony that past generations have decried a lack of discipline in today’s kids is not lost on Mr Glover — but he said the dangers lie in its interpretation.
“The toxic, maybe unhealthy, part of it is that there are so many different kinds of bodies that a teenage boy would have, and they’re all being channelled into this one kind of mould of what the body of a disciplined person looks like,” he said.
The influencer credibility gap
Where parents and teachers may try, often in vain, to ward young boys away from specific individuals like Tate, telling them to ignore an entire social media ecosystem is even harder.
Advertisement
Fitness influencers and gym content creators have argued they are merely promoting healthy physical habits and dieting advice.
Some accounts function almost as communities of collective support for people trying to reach their goals, while many frame workout content through the lens of positive mental health.
Not all influencers are qualified to give diet and health advice.(ABC News: Mary Lloyd)
Recent studies co-authored by Associate Professor Ivanka Prichard have analysed the content and credibility of fitness accounts on Instagram and TikTok.
The research found two-thirds of the accounts audited on Instagram “lacked credibility or contained potentially harmful or unhealthy content”, while exercise and diet advice promoted on TikTok was often at odds with national health guidelines.
Advertisement
Fitness influencer Brian Johnson, known as “Liver King”, belatedly admitted to steroid use.(Supplied)
In late 2022, US fitness content creator Brian “Liver King” Johnston suffered an ignominious fall from grace after admitting to spending tens of thousands of dollars on steroids and performance-enhancing drugs.
The Liver King had previously maintained his improbable physique was the result of hard workouts and eating raw meat, and that others should aspire to do the same.
Ms Prichard recommended seeking out content creators with relevant qualifications or failing that, the accounts of athletes and those who emphasise physical performance over aesthetics.
“From a user perspective, red flags are anything that has quite a lot of skin on display, is sexualised or is hyper-focussed on the appearance of the body,” she said.
Advertisement
“I would definitely encourage parents to also just talk to young people about what they are viewing on social media.”
Using the gym to tamp down on mental health problems is a common joke online.(Supplied)
At a recent barbecue, Danni Rowlands bent an ear toward a conversation her 10-year-old son was having with a few boys his age.
“They were looking at each other’s calves and deciding who had the veins popping out,” she said.
“They ranged from 10 to 12. One was saying ‘here’s my six-pack’.”
Advertisement
Ms Rowlands, who played netball at an elite level and has her own lived experience with eating disorders, knows an obsessive focus on physique can affect mental health, school participation and relationships with friends and family.
“I think it gets minimised and oversimplified — that it’s just a teenage thing — but there’s a real danger for a young person’s self-esteem, their identity, their mental health,” she said.
“It’s not wrong to want to take care of ourselves, but the pursuit of perfection, because we think that is the answer to all of our problems, is really setting ourselves up in a negative way to move through adulthood.”
This video provides an easy and effective way to prevent wrist pain and injury. In just three minutes, viewers can learn simple exercises that can help improve flexibility and relax the muscles in the wrist. No equipment is necessary to complete these exercises, making them perfect for those who are always typing on the keyboard. With regular practice, viewers can keep their wrists healthy and free from pain.
According to Fabiano, new clubs are allocating between 600 to 2,000 square feet to recovery spaces.
West Wood Clubs, which has six locations in Dublin, Ireland, recently opened a new recovery room with heated hydrotherapy massage and cryotherapy beds at its Sandymount location. At the Clontarf Club, the company gutted its existing spa to build a bigger space that includes two giant Jacuzzis, a larger sauna and steam room, an ice room, a salt room, heated loungers, and a cold plunge pool.
“Members absolutely love the new spa area, and usage is out the door,” says Karen Polley, the managing director at West Wood Clubs.
Longevity Club created a dedicated stretching and recovery area, and also now offers acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, and functional medicine in-house.
“We built our brand on hospitality, where people feel cared for,” says Jennie Brooks, the owner/president of the Longevity Club. “So, we offer convenience in as many ways as we can, including a variety of curated services that we know members appreciate having under one roof.”
Advertisement
Healthworks Fitness Clubs in the Boston area debuted the Restore Spa after refurbishing its 19,000-square-foot flagship facility in Cambridge. It features a cold plunge pool, infrared sauna, eucalyptus steam room, whirlpool, spa showers, and restorative massage services.
“Recovery and longevity technology and services are just as important as cardio and strength,” observes Mark Harrington, the president of Healthworks.
Because recovery also encompasses mental health, some clubs are incorporating meditation pods, quiet rooms, and spaces with a strong connection to nature to help members release stress and relax.
Accentuating Ambiance
In addition to recovery spaces, locker rooms represent a haven and are a frequent target for upgrades.
“Members now expect more spacious grooming areas, increased privacy, and larger showers, and upscale clubs are offering heated shower floors, full-body dryers, and private dressing niches,” Fabiano says.
Advertisement
Carter adds that unisex bathrooms with private showers are becoming more common among studios and smaller clubs.
Equally as important are club lobbies and reception areas, which today are viewed as places to showcase the brand and linger.
“Lobbies have become much more inviting and less intimidating,” Carter reports. “Rather than offering sightlines to a mass of exercise machines, these areas are being designed to make a great first impression that is welcoming to both new and existing members.”
West Wood also unveiled a new reception and café area in Clontarf, which Polley describes as “a bright, beautiful, and friendly hub of the club.” Healthworks likewise designed a new reception area and lounge where members can relax and socialize.
At the Longevity Club, Brooks focuses on sensory appeal and making a stellar first impression when members enter not only the reception area, but also each floor of the multi-story facility.
Advertisement
“Taste has a big effect on memory, so we offer amenity bars with complimentary mints, fruit, tea, and coffee at the entrance and exit of each floor so that members come in and leave with a lasting pleasant impression,” she explains.
Co-working spaces have been limited to large, multipurpose facilities to date, but some clubs are placing communal tables with charging stations in the lobby as a convenience for members.
“The integration of co-working areas reflects a broader, more holistic approach to member services, acknowledging evolving lifestyle needs that blend work, fitness, and wellness,” Fabiano observes.
Lighting, colors, and flooring all contribute to fostering a custom environment that differentiates brands, attracts customers, and encourages repeat visits.
“There’s a trend toward creating visually stunning and immersive environments through thoughtful lighting, color schemes, and overall design as consumers increasingly expect higher quality in fitness facilities,” Januszek says.
Advertisement
Return on Reinvestment
Design upgrades and remodels are an ongoing cost of stimulating growth amid competition.
“We are always busy, and the facilities get old and tired every few years,” Polley says. “It’s a constant cycle of reinvestment, which is essential to meeting the evolving needs of our members and keeping us ahead of the curve.”
Januszek acknowledges the worth of engaging spaces. “By offering a comprehensive experience that goes beyond traditional workouts, clubs give members more reasons to value their membership and return.”
