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Scott Webb: Due to COVID-19 most of us are spending more time at home than ever and it's a great time to exercise and stay fit. Joining me today to discuss some of the ways we can stay in shape during this time is Dr. Joanna Oppenheim, Director of the Wellness Clinic at Salinas Valley Medical Clinics and a Family Medicine Doctor at Prime Care Salinas. This is Ask the Experts, a podcast from Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System. I'm Scott Webb. Doctor, thanks so much for your time today. It's always a good idea to stay in shape of course, but why is it a good idea for us to exercise during this shelter at home period?

Dr. Oppenheim: One thing I can say is we all seem to have more time now to exercise, but the benefits of exercise go well beyond the physical benefits you feel better mentally. And at this time, which can be very anxiety provoking as so many of us are facing a situation we've never been in before and we're not really quite sure what's going to happen in the future. Exercise can definitely help with our mental wellbeing. Other areas that exercise can help with are improving anxiety, depression, sleep, helps boost our immune system, which we could all use right now and helps us maintain our weight and actually also gives us something fun to do. What I'd like to remind all of your listeners today is that all movement counts. Even things like cleaning the floor, cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, going up and down the stairs to put the laundry away. All of that counts as movement. I think the real challenge is for people who like to exercise in large groups or go to exercise classes is motivation. I think that group of people has a harder time kind of maybe motivated to do something at home or self motivating because they like exercising with other people.

So I think of exercise in terms of three kind of areas of exercise that I like to focus on. One is cardiovascular exercise, the second one is strength training, and the third one is stretching. I'll talk about each of those separately. But the real pitch I want to make for is right now is that the number one thing I'd like all of your listeners to do is to avoid sitting down for long periods of time. It's really easy to sit down, watch Netflix, and then you know how the next episode just comes on. And then you look up and you think, Oh my gosh, five hours have gone by. You know, and basically you sat down after [inaudible 02:15], you get up and make dinner and then you haven't gotten up in between. So I do recommend that every, you know, every hour or every show that you watch, you get up at least walk around your house cause this'll get you moving, gets your blood moving, gets your heart pumping a little bit harder and actually help you feel better. But getting back to exercise, you know, cardiovascularly I think, there's several things that we can all do. You know, I think right now the best thing that you can do is actually get outside and walk.

Obviously maintaining the physical distance from others that is recommended. In our neighborhood here, I have seen people that I haven't seen in six to nine months outside walking that dogs walking with their families or even walking by themselves. And it's actually a really nice thing to see the community actually getting outside and moving. Walking to me is one of the best cardiovascular exercises that you can do. You don't really even need special shoes. You don't need special a special outfit. This is something that you can get out and you can do for five minutes. You can do the 10 minutes, you can do for 45 minutes. You can break it up throughout the day, but really if you can get outside and just move. The fresh air is wonderful for your health as well. And again, if you're anything like me mentally, it's just a wonderful break from just life inside the house. You know, if you have a pet, I'm sure you know, most of us who have pets have dogs. I'm very happy that we're walking them very often. I honestly think that I look at my dog and she's lost about five pounds since the shelter in place order. And then I think by the end of the day she sort of looks at us and goes again, we're going out again, just sort of please leave me alone. But I think if you have a pet, this definitely will help spur you to go outside. For those of us that can't go outside or don't want to go outside, are fearful, you know, maybe now's the time to dust off some of that exercise equipment that you bought five years ago, or was six years ago and bring it out and use it.

You know, the goal is to aim for at least 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise a day. But you know, obviously if you want to do more, you can, you don't have to do all 30 minutes at once. If you want to go out for a 15 minute walk twice a day, that counts as well. Other things that you can do if you don't have an exercise equipment at home is walk around your house. If you have stairs, you know, every time you go up and down the stairs to do something in the upper floor of your house, maybe you go up and down the stairs three times instead of just, once again, it's just sort of getting your body moving in any way that you can really. I have some friends that work out with CrossFit and other group exercise activities and what I've noticed is that the gyms have also done online workouts for them every day. I know some gyms are lending out equipment. I mean not like, Oh you take it for an hour and then bring it back. But actually giving it to somebody to keep for a week or two, which I think is wonderful. And I think for those people that have that option, I would definitely talk to your gym owner or trainer and I'm sure that they will, they're happy to help make a workout program for you to do at home. But those are the kinds of things that I like to do cardiovascularly in our neighborhoods because I think that's accessible to anybody. Walking is really, it's probably the most underused form of exercise that I can think of.

Scott Webb: Funny you mentioned that because my wife and I for years have been talking about going for walks together but then something happens. Dinner, kids, homework. Oh we've got a baseball game and we're actually doing that for the first time after all these years of talking about it. And it is really nice. It's nice to get outside and we can talk about things we don't talk about when the kids are around, you know, it's kind of great. Let's go through the other two facets of exercise you wanted to discuss.

Dr. Oppenheim: So the next one is sort of strength training, which is a great way to help build muscle. That's also a great way that I counsel my patients who are trying to lose weight. This is a great way to increase your basal metabolic rate and kind of boost how many calories you bond. We also know that as you get older, the more muscle you have, the less likely you are to fall and the stronger you are. So I'm a big fan of just using my own body weight and I'm a very basic person when it comes to strength training. I'm not a big fan of going to the gym and doing all those machines. So I kind of, you know what I do is I do just things like pushups, sit ups, squats. These are very basic. You can do them anywhere. You can do them in your house, you can do them before you shower. You don't even need a special room. For those people that like to add weights but don't have weights at home. You know, you can use soup cans, jugs of water, anything that you can actually hold onto. And sometimes the weirder shaped it is the harder it is for you to do things like push it over your head or just lift it up.

So anything like that I think is a really great way to build muscle. Again, I think YouTube is great for a ton of free videos on just about anything. And now I kind of am trying to encourage patients. Maybe now at the time you can experiment with something like yoga, or Pilates, or other workouts that you're curious but you know, haven't tried yet because you've never had the time. You know now at the time to Google, you know, beginners yoga. It's a 30 minutes on YouTube, it's free, you have the time. If you don't like it, you never have to do it again. But you also might discover something that works for you and that you enjoy doing and the things that you enjoy doing are those are the things that you're going to come back to. So I never encourage patients to do things that they don't like because they'll only do it once. They'll hate me for it, and then they'll never, they kind of throw it all, throw it all the way, and then they don't do it. So now it's a great time just to go online and it's all free. It's actually, I've been looking at it. It's amazing what people have to offer online.

Well I do encourage people to find something new cause now at the time to do it, the other things that people can use at home too, if they have them exercise bands as well, which I think are great, you can order them off Amazon and you know, I tell people, look, sit in front of the TV. You could just put the bands around your arms and move them out, move the front, move them back, you're building muscle. Anytime you're doing something against resistance, you're building muscle. And again, it's even easy to do this while you're sitting down, which is what a lot of us can do. Which a lot of us are doing right now. And then the last part that people forget about is flexibility. And this is really important because over time this helps decrease pain and stiffness in your body. And especially as we're sitting more now and a lot of us are using our iPads, more, our computers more, our phones more because we're sitting down watching TV, scrolling through Facebook, checking the Corona statistics every hour. So I really recommend this is sort of you getting up, stretching and moving in a way that's different than you normally moving.

So for most people who sit down a lot, the one thing I like to do is just stand up. I clasp my hands below, you know, by the back of my bottom and basically just stretch backwards. And everyone knows once you do this, how good it feels because you're basically stretching in a way that you're normally not. So stretching again is a great way to keep nimble. It helps you stand taller, keeps you all your joints more flexible. And all you can do is things like stand on one leg, lift one leg, bend it, straighten it, turn your ankles from side to side. Lift your legs from side to side to help be more flexible in your hips. Put your neck back, do neck rolls, all those things help and they feel great. Actually. People love it, especially when they've been sitting for a long time. And so even people, like I mentioned before, I'd like you to get up every hour, but if you don't want to get up and take a five minute walk or a 10 minute walk, even just stretching to two minutes feels so good. You know, don't forget your shoulder rolls, especially as we sit so much, I hope those things help.

Host: And it's probably a good idea for us to take things slow, right? To have reasonable expectations.

Dr. Oppenheim: I don't think people need to go crazy and you know, sometimes I think people really worry about if I don't make it to my gym session, you know, four days a week I'm going to gain 10 pounds over this whole Coronavirus thing and they start getting really worried. I think people should really look at exercise as something that's fun to do. So find something that you'd like to do. Remember that, you know, sometimes changing what you do for your workout regimen is actually very good for your brain and your muscle memory because now you might be doing something that you ordinarily wouldn't do and this stimulates, you know, building new muscle groups that maybe you weren't doing before. It's good for your mind to get outside and do something. You know, I try and encourage all my patients, look, this is a really worrisome time for us all and life has changed so quickly. I think that's the hardest thing about this, there was no real, Oh, you know, we're changing it slowly. It was like boom, everyone stays at home.

I like to remind myself this is a temporary situation, you know, and we all need to do what we can to do now to decrease the spread of the virus. But we will get back to, you know, our workout groups, our workout friends, people that we can, you know, larger groups of activities that we like to do. It will happen. But in the meantime, I do recommend that everyone do something every day. So that when life does come back to normal, you can be fit and enjoy all your, you know, all there is to offer in your community. Now we live in Monterey County, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. And we have hiking, we have the ocean nearby, people bike here, people run. It's almost April. Springtime is coming. So when summer comes everyone's really active. So I encourage people to keep up their activity, to keep up their strength. So that when we do get back outside again, we can just enjoy it without worrying about being weak, not having done it for awhile.

Host: Definitely all great advice. Great for the mind, the body, the soul, a really, really awesome doctor. Just a couple of practical things as we wrap up here. Is age a factor in deciding what we should do to stay in shape?

Dr. Oppenheim: You know, I think it really depends on what you've already done. So I have 70 year old patients that have been very active their whole life. And I have 70 year old patients that have basically been sitting for the last 10 years. So there's a big difference in what people can do. If you're a very active person, to me age doesn't really matter. You know, you know, most people are doing a little bit of cardio strength training already. Those people that are very into their own fitness and into their own health, for people who are not very active or sedentary. So you can do some of these things just sitting down in your chair, there's things like chair yoga or chair exercises that again, you know, someone could Google the videos for you. You can just sit there and lift your legs straight out and just move it up and down. That again is building strength. If you're not one of these people that's walked very far, then maybe you start by walking just five minutes at a time. For me the key is really consistency. Like you don't have to do a lot at a time, but just get in the habit of doing a little bit every day. But you know, it's interesting even if you are older, you can still build muscle. You can still improve your cardiovascular system. You just actually have to do it. You might be doing it at a slightly less intense level than someone who's fitter than you, or you might be doing it for a shorter period of time, but you can start and you can build on that and get stronger over time, whether you're 30 years old or 75 years old.

Host: Agreed. And that's a great sentiment. Great advice today. I just love, I love what you brought to this today and I love your accent. I love listening to accents. I hope that this helps people. I hope that we can have you back on again and really thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. For more information on COVID-19 visit svmh.Com/Coronavirus, and to schedule an appointment with the Salinas Valley Medical Clinic Prime Care physician, call (831) 751-7070. We hope you found this podcast to be helpful and informative. I'm Scott Webb. Stay well, and we'll talk again next time.