Routine, Routine, Routine

In this crazy time, it's all too easy to lose routine, especially if you are working from home. You are used to getting up at 6.30 am to drive to the gym and train before work and all of a sudden you are at home and dragging yourself out of bed at 9.40 am to sit at your 'desk'. This is extremely bad for you and will make it even harder to get back into a routine when your job does re-open (never mind getting the kids back into a routine!).

Get yourself out of bed at roughly the same time, maybe 30 mins later but no more and have your gym session in your living room or back garden before others get up.

Have your shower and breakfast and be ready to face your day.
If you normally have lunch at 12.30 pm, have it at that time. The same goes for other meals. Finish your workday at the same time as you normally would (unless you've got one of those jobs with a flexi-finish, and if so, finish at a reasonable time)

If you were never all that fussed on watching TV at 11pm, why is it suddenly a necessity now?

I know boredom is probably setting in but food and alcohol intake also needs to be looked at while you are at home! If you have a few glasses of wine 1-2 nights a week how are you even getting out of bed when your drinking nightly or every 2nd night! If your not as physically active as you were when you were walking to work and training 5 days a week you don't need the same amount of food that you did. You will only eat the food and drink the wine if it's in your house, so stop stockpiling and pick up that bottle of water!

When it comes to exercise, it's great that you are still doing something at home but don't stress. Yes, you're not lifting the same amount of weight then you as you were in the gym but trust me, you are not going to lose all that hard-earned muscle in 2-3 weeks. Bands and slow bodyweight (or light weights if you have them) movements with squeezing the muscle will train you every bit as much as your gym equipment in the short to medium term and will give you much-needed headspace in this stressful time.

Be careful thou, there are many online programs are being thrown out there and a lot of them focus primarily on the quads and glutes. This will cause imbalances, weakness and tightness and does more harm than good. If you were training quads in the gym, chances are you were training your hamstrings as well. Training chest? bet you threw in back work as well. Why should it differ at home?

If you do full body in the gym, do this at home. If you split your days in the gym, you can still do this at home, you just need to be a little bit creative. You might want to throw in some cardio moves to make up for the lack of movement because your office is only 10m away from your bedroom!

We will get through this, looking at early signs they seem to indicate that we are seeing a flattening of the upward curve so remember, try not to stress, stay at home where possible and keep to your routine!