Long Covid, the path out of it…

Being an effective personal trainer means being multifaceted, you have to be able to turn your hand to everything. Yes it’s great to have clients that want to excel and push themselves to their absolute limit, but you also need to be able to work with the less confident, the less fit and also those who are unwell. There is no ‘one size fits all’ and being a one trick pony isn’t going to cut it.

One morning at the beginning of this year (2021) I was approached during a session with one of my regular clients by a lady who who’s husband was suffering with Long Covid and she was very concerned about his ongoing symptoms and how he wasn’t showing any signs of improvement. She wondered if I might be able to help? Obviously Long Covid is a relatively new health issue which we are all still learning about, but I immediately knew that I wanted to try. So we arranged for her husband to contact me (which he did immediately) and he came to see me for a chilly outdoor chat a few days later. As they live very close to my Horsham studio I had often seen him around (pre-Covid), mainly in his garden mowing the lawn and trimming hedges and trees, so the man who was slowly, almost painfully, walking towards me on that day was a complete stranger to me. He could hardly move, in fact his movement was almost robotic, it was as if his body was recovering from a traumatic impact and was just starting to walk again. I have to stress here that I am not exaggerating, he was taking pigeon steps to move about and was evidently also suffering with Lordosis.

As we talked I discovered that David had Covid back in early 2020 during the first wave and although the virus had left his system months ago, the long term after effects had remained, significantly impacting his day-to-day life. He was experiencing lack of movement due to a complete fatigue in his body, he had atrial fibrillation and he was experiencing breathing problems. He also had a problem with the meniscus in one of his knees, my opinion on that was because he was so fatigued and everything was in spasm it had caused a lot of stress on the knee joint. All of the aforementioned was post Covid, he’d been fine before that. The effects of Long Covid can vary dramatically from person to person, but there are a few main symptoms that most seems to experience: fatigue, breathing problems, muscle wastage from lack of movement and low mood being some of the main offenders.

After David left me I knew exactly the approach I was going to take with training him and helping him to recover. It seemed obvious to me that I would treat it like a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) case. I have had extensive experience successfully training clients with CFS and as many of the symptoms were similar, this was the path to take. Remember, as with CFS, when someone has Long Covid their body has gone into ‘limp mode’. All the body’s receptors are in defence, working to simply just get them through the day on a basic level. A good analogy is a modern car – if the engine management system (the car’s brain) senses that there is some kind of problem with the vehicle, it puts the car into limp mode. This means that you can’t drive the car faster than 40 miles an hour, it just wants to get you to a garage for repair so as to not strain any part of the vehicle that could cause engine failure. Long Covid/CFS/M.E. follows this line of behaviour.

After emailing David with my thoughts on his training plan a week later we started his sessions. I’m happy to report that within 3 sessions I was already noticing positive changes in him, we also did a lot of work strengthening his knee and the muscles around it. On his 4th session we did a light jog (just a short one) picking up the feet just a little bit, but that was already amazing progress. As his receptors fired up and his body started responding to training the aim was that his hormone levels were changing and that the happy hormones, (serotonin, endorphins) were increasing in his body, along with testosterone. The more we trained the better he started feeling and moving. It was great to see that steady transformation and for David to be coming to me at the start of each session and saying how much better he was feeling. The main indicator for me though was visually seeing him change, how he was walking more smoothly and with a better range of motion, the confidence in his body and how it wasn’t in defence (limp mode) any longer.

Just over two months in and David is now walking perfectly. He’s cycling again, is back gardening and mowing the lawn, his strength has improved immensely and he is now able to jog half a kilometre straight. Bearing in mind that he’s in his seventies and has had Long Covid and atrial fibrillation etc. that’s a massive achievement. In fact he recently went to see his heart specialist in London who is over the moon with his progress, the atrial fibrillation has settled down and things are looking good. So if you are suffering with Long Covid, depending on your symptoms, there can be light at the end of the tunnel.

If you’d like more information for training with me to help with recovery from Long Covid, CFS & M.E. please get in touch via my contact page.