Physical Health and Exercise
How to stay in shape during quarantine for high schoolers and the importance of a good diet.
By: Aadi Sudan and Rishabh Pandey
It can be difficult to ensure that you keep a healthy lifestyle during the quarantine and continue to exercise. Being stuck at home all day limits one’s ability to work out, as you can no longer do some activities you may have once done to get exercise, such as playing sports or going to a gym. However, it is still possible to exercise, and you must maintain a healthy lifestyle because it can have many benefits for you, both in the short and long term.
Exercise is a necessity for staying healthy and keeping in good shape. On top of the obvious benefit of losing weight and preventing obesity, exercise has many benefits that you may not know about. For example, many studies show how exercise can lead to decreased stress. This is because physical exertion speeds up the production of endorphins, hormones located in the brain that instigate positive feelings. This is very important for everyday life because many of us lead very stressful, work-filled lives, and exercising can reduce the pressure we feel from our work every day. This, in turn, would result in a happier overall attitude and a more positive life experience. Additionally, exercise can decrease your chances of suffering from several different diseases, such as cancer and heart disease. This is because keeping healthy helps reduce the amount of LDL, artery-clogging cholesterol, in your system while simultaneously increasing HDL levels, HDL being helpful cholesterol. Exercise also reduces cancer by helping your body regulate its internal hormone levels and boosting digestion, preventing harmful substances from staying in your body for too long. It has been scientifically proven that exercise can provide up to a 35% decrease in the likelihood of coronary heart disease, a 20% decrease in the likelihood of breast cancer, and a whole 50% decrease in the possibility of colon cancer.
However, exercise alone is not enough to keep healthy. One must also watch what they eat. Studies have shown that a diet is actually more effective at losing weight than exercise. This is because a diet will lower your average caloric intake. Exercise won’t help if your meals consist of more calories than the amount you are burning by working out. It is important to make sure that your caloric intake is less than the amount you are losing every time you exercise. This way, you will slowly start to lose calories, which will lead to actual weight being lost and exercise proving to be effective. It can be difficult to create a diet that works for you, and even more difficult to stick to it without reverting to a state where you consume too many calories. In fact, studies show that as many as 95% of diets end up failing. However, diets that do work can have incredible health benefits. On top of assisting exercise in burning calories, diets can also help people stay healthy by ensuring that they get necessary supplements such as proteins and vitamins. For these reasons, it is recommended that everyone at least try to stick to a healthy diet, which is arguably more beneficial than keeping a strict exercise regimen.
In quarantine, it can be especially difficult to both exercise and watch one’s calories. However, it is not impossible. Even if you may not be able to rely on your traditional forms of exercise, such as sports and the gym, you can still get sufficient exercise by going for a bike ride, jogging in the morning, or doing something as simple as a couple of pushups and sit-ups every day. As for a diet, it is more difficult to stick to eating healthy when you can’t leave your home, but all it takes is a bit of dedication. Remember the reason you are dieting, and let that be your motivation to keep going.
For some, however, working out just might not be enough. Sports are another great alternative to pure working out, and you can have fun while staying healthy! A majority of sports help boost cardio, such as running up and down the court/field for basketball, soccer, football, etc. While other sports tune certain muscles, such as baseball with arm power, or Waterpolo/swimming for stronger legs. What’s most important, however, is having a strong fundamental of whatever sport you plan to go into. For example, I’m a Waterpolo, and before I ever went into Waterpolo I swam competitively for Santa Clara Swim Club for about 4 years. Having fundamentals in the sport you plan to go into greatly boosts your athletic performance and understanding of the sport.
Although sports are another great alternative to pure working out, some pros and cons come with it. First would be the extensive training/conditioning one needs to do to stay in shape for the sport. My weekly schedule as a Varsity Water Polo player for Lynbrook High School is as such: Practices/games are 6 days a week, leaving Sunday for rest and recovery. Mondays and Fridays are reserved for conditioning, as the practice is in the morning, from 6:15–8:30 AM. These practices contain mostly long swim sets, alongside the targeted leg and arm training through the use of a weight belt to add resistance while in the water. For these practices, I usually get up at 5:45 AM so that I have time to eat a quick breakfast, warm-up, and drive to Lynbrook.
Afterward, I have to drive home quickly so that I have time to shower and eat again before class starts. Games are usually on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, where we play various high schools from around the Bay Area. For home games(games held at Lynbrook) we have to be at the pool at least 1 hour before game time so that we can set up the entire course which consists of loneliness, cones, cages, shot clocks, and canopies for the benches. For these games we have a full MedlinePlus workout we complete before getting in the pool to warm up our legs and shooting arms. On Wednesdays, we usually run through game plans and reflect on our last couple of games and see what we could do better. During these practices we run through “specialist plays”, plays meant for a certain person in the pool.
While that is the “schedule” for the regular season, the offseason for water polo is just as important. It is very important to keep one’s cardio up, as it is a vital part of performing well in the sport. Usually, to keep my stamina up during the offseason I play for club water polo, specifically West Valley Waterpolo, a club I’ve been going to for the last couple of years. If you don’t have time to sign up for a club sport in the offseason, however, I highly recommend doing weekly runs, if not daily runs. Running keeps your vo2 max level at an athletic performance level while still building and maintaining muscle.
Most important however is one’s diet. While playing sports does give you the physical activity needed to build muscle, you need a solid diet to actually build muscle, otherwise, you run the risk of losing weight at abnormally fast levels. For younger athletes I recommend a diet with lots of protein, the recommended amount of daily protein intake should be about 1.2–2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. This only helps you build muscle, but you remain energized throughout the day and ready for the next. The best form to get this protein from is from chicken or other alternatives such as protein shakes/protein powder. All in all, your motivation to workout must come from within, and whichever path you choose, whether that be pure working out, or signing up for a sport, remember to keep a good diet, and to stay in shape during the off-season, or during a period where you can’t work out.
