United States – Subjects with Long-term COVID will be able to exercise and have health benefits, which have been forbidden so far if new results are proven right.
Equal Performance Despite Symptoms
“The World Health Organization [WHO] and other major bodies have said that people with post-COVID should avoid intense exercise,” said lead researcher Andrea Tryfonos, a postdoctoral investigator with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, as reported by HealthDay.
According to recent results, long-term COVID symptomatic patients do just as well as their healthy colleagues, even though they had more symptoms in the first place. Consequently, they can equally perform their tasks before and after 48 hours without increasing their symptoms.
Researchers stated that preliminary studies showed that doing physical activity with long COVID may be bad.
People with Long COVID often report symptoms such as increased heart rate, breath problems, pain in the chest, and muscle weakness, and vigorous activities can worsen these.
Study Design and Findings
To see if exercise helps or hurts, scientists recruited 31 people who had been ill with Long COVID and relevant them to 31 healthy people.
Each participant participated in 3 different exercise sessions, which included high-intensity interval training, aerobic exercises on a stationary bike, and strength training.
Various sessions took place in a few weeks’ time and were arranged randomly, the research said.
All participants underwent a full medical checkup before, after, and two days after the training sessions to determine the nature of their symptoms and their overall health situation.
Addressing Fitness and Muscle Strength
“People with post-COVID had generally lower levels of fitness and muscle strength, which could be due to both the infection and lower activity,” Tryfonos said. “After two years of prolonged symptoms and being discouraged from exercising, it’s not surprising that you have lost some of your work capacity.”
It was stated that 62% of Long COVID patients also felt myopathy symptoms and changes in the muscles being the cause of muscle weakness, as the results showed.
“This percentage is far too high to be explained by reduced activity alone. Therefore, we are currently analyzing the biopsies to see if we can explain the reason behind these muscle changes,” Tryfonos said.
Nevertheless, the general outcome indicates that Long-term COVID patients can be better than not exercising, as reported by HealthDay.
Encouraging Exercise under Supervision
The respective study was published on April 4 in the JAMA Network Open journal.
“People with post-COVID should not be discouraged from exercising in general,” Tryfonos said. “Instead, under supervision, they should be encouraged to start with any kind of exercise they enjoy, at an appropriate level, of course, and then slowly increase the intensity.”