Thursday, 28th March 2024 20:00
Home / Features / Sports stars in quarantine: Creative ways to train, be fit — and pass the time

We might all be getting used to it, but this year of lockdown and quarantine has been tough. With vaccines now being deployed across the world, there’s hope that things might improve at some point soon, but for the time being the strong advice it to follow your country’s guidelines and stay safe.

In many countries, professional sport has been allowed to carry on despite everything, with players getting tested almost every day, as well as sometimes living in bio-secure bubbles and strict exclusion zones. For all that, there are still numerous stories of sportspeople being infected with the Covid-19 virus and being forced into long periods of quarantine.

But what are these highly tuned individuals doing while they’re locked away? How are they keeping themselves occupied and, more specifically, how are they keeping fit? What are their home workout plans? What are their lockdown exercise regimes? Perhaps if we can answer these questions, we can all figure out how to stay motivated too, and keep ourselves fresh for whenever we can get outside again.

WORKOUTS FOR ALL

During the various lockdowns in the UK, a man named Joe Wicks has become a sensation. A couple of years ago, Wicks was a personal trainer and nutritionist, who made occasional appearances on daytime TV shows offering ideas for workouts and diet changes, as well as posting videos and recipes to his popular YouTube channel and Instagram page. He also released a few books containing healthy and nutritious food suggestions. Wicks had a solid following and was well placed, in March of last year, to offer his services as a stand-in fitness instructor to British schoolchildren, who were being kept out of schools. He launched “P.E. with Joe” (“P.E.” means Physical Education in the British school system) — but little did anybody know how successful this would become, as adults too joined in.

Joe Wicks: The nation’s favourite fitness instructor

Wicks’s 20-minute workout sessions, posted daily to YouTube during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK, quickly gained an enormous following. The very first broadcast received more than 700,000 viewers; the second peaked at 954,000, the most ever for a live workout broadcast. The British public — including plenty of celebrities and sportspeople — became devoted disciples of Wicks. His daily workout became the anchor point in millions of viewers’ otherwise suddenly disordered day.

The home workout has been a defining motif of lockdowns, launched by people of varying qualifications. At one end of the spectrum, we find the rehabilitation specialists of Aspetar hospital in Qatar, who have a strenuous set of exercises for mountain climbers and other elite sportspeople. However, if “workout” for you means flailing a few limbs in the student union Megabop every Friday night, then gangling freeloader Bez, of Happy Mondays fame, has also got in on the act.

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STUCK IN A ROOM? STAY FLEXIBLE

What Joe Wicks is to workouts, Adriene is to yoga. Every single day, Adriene Mishler, from Austin, Texas, provides a yoga workout for more than 8 million subscribers — many of whom have flocked to the channel for the first time during the difficult past year.

In Adriene’s own words, she welcomes “all levels, all bodies, all genders, all souls” and has free existing programs available for everyone, in addition to a new daily class. With millions of people across the world excluded from their regular yoga session, Adriene has stepped in.

Yoga instructor Adriene, keeping the world flexible

Yoga is incredibly good for both body and mind — and it is ideal for home workouts. It’s ideal for poker players too, and our Yoga For Poker Players remains exceptionally popular. Elite athletes and house-bound office workers alike can gain a great deal from adding yoga to their daily routine

While yoga’s principle purpose is to improve the flexibility of body and joints, pilates focuses on strengthening the body’s core muscles. It’s also very good for home workout — and has proven similarly popular as a YouTube led activity during lockdown and quarantine. The California-based YouTube channel Blogilates has actually been in existence for more than a decade, and has more than 5 million subscribers, but has never been so popular as it is now, posting at least two new videos per week. Even the British National Health Service (NHS) has a YouTube channel offering pilates videos, so there’s further proof, if it was needed, of the health benefits of this particular pastime.

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TURN THE ROOM INTO YOUR COURT

Belinda Bencic makes the most of her quarantine conditions

It’s often difficult to feel sympathy for professional sportspeople, particularly those who excel in the most popular sports and who could keep fit by just counting their money. However the news of participants in the Australian Open tennis tournament locked in mice-infested quarantine hotel rooms for 14 days perhaps proved an exception to the rule.

Even if you take the rodents out of the equation, it must be have been difficult for elite tennis players to be cooped up in a room measuring only a few metres square. These are the people who usually spend about ten hours a day dashing around a sun-drenched court. It’s necessary too in arguably the most competitive era the sport has ever known.

Faced with the exacting circumstances, it was fun to see the players improvise. Plenty of videos surfaced on the usual social media channels of players continuing their practice regimes, using mattresses, walls and windows as stand-in hitting partners. Just pity anybody trying to get some shut-eye next door.

DON’T GO OUT!

During the early days of lockdown in the UK, footballers were caught breaking regulations about as often as government advisors and ministers. The Tottenham Hotspur manager Jose Mourinho was spotted training with Tanguy Ndombele on a London common, while team-mates Davinson Sánchez and Ryan Sessegnon were out jogging together; the Manchester City defender Kyle Walker was caught out twice and Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish popped round to a friends’ house, a few days after imploring fans to stay at home. (These weren’t the only offenders.)

However, plenty of other soccer players found unusual and engaging ways to pass the time — and sometimes keep fit — during lockdown. Dries Mertens of Napoli did crunches while carrying a magnum of wine (conspicuous consumption, anybody?), while Arsenal’s Shkodran Mustafi taught his kids how long they need to wash their hands for by doing keepy-uppies at the same time.

Plenty of other footballers decided to kill the time by cutting their hair — so much so that this Twitter account decided to log them all — while “Boring” James Milner, of Liverpool, engaged in some gentle self-parody, sharpening pencils, cutting grass with scissors and counting out tea bags.

On the subject of tea bags, they also became a way for some footballers to keep their skills sharp. Over to you Harry Winks…

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