Coverload - injuries that happen because of Covid-19.

Since lockdown, my husband and most his friends, who have office based jobs, are now working from home. It appears that they seem to be spending all their time sitting down. These chairs are not ergonomic chairs – just normal dining chairs! Their travel time has reduced from 60mins to 2 mins. (They don’t get to read the metro or snooze on the tube). 

They don’t move as much as before and their actual working hours have increased. They get their lunch from the kitchen, which is literally in their office and therefore they don’t have to go for their usual 15 minute walk getting some lunch, catching some rays and increasing their natural vitamin D intake. 

It appears that there doesn’t seem to be an actual knocking off time either! Normally, the cleaner annoys them to go home to their families so that they could wipe off the food from their keyboards. (However, I now have a second job as cleaner and there is a fairy who miraculously empties the bins) Their work seems to continue even after dinner.

They spend their time talking to colleagues through Teams or attending Zoom meetings at their desk tied by their headphones, again there is a lack of movement. 

This means when they finish work late at the night, they are either rushing to get their 10000 steps in or are too tired to exercise. This means that at the weekend, they end up doing a number of classes in one go leading to over use of their muscles, overloading their tissues in a short space of time. Result, more chance of injury to their lower limbs!!!

This new way of working during the lockdown is going to see an increase in lower limb and foot injuries and possible other musculoskeletal injuries. Personally, I feel these will be divided into two distinct groups. One set of people may increase the stress on the tissues by overloading them by doing too much in short space of time, not warming up nor cooling down i.e. rushing to get their exercises in before the day ends. They are either rushing to get their 10000 steps in daily or at the weekend, they end up doing a number classes in one go leading to over use their muscles, overloading their tissues in a short space of time. 

The other group of people who used to be active before lockdown, particularly in contact sports but, now are fairly inactive. They will rush out to exercise once lockdown has been relaxed, may play 5 sided football. In their case, they will have decreased the ability to load the tissues to a normal level due to lack of movement and will begin exercising to the same standards as before and forget that they need to build up their strength and resistance slowly before reaching their end goal, leading to injury. 

During this time, nobody is actively seeking help as it is not considered an emergency and either continue with their misguided behaviour leading to overloading or stopping exercise completely because of injury, which can have a significant effect on their mental well-being.

I recently had a patient who started an aerobics class on Zoom during lockdown. She works as a hairdresser and has a young family. Normally, she had very little time to exercise, mostly playing catch up like the rest of us. Her main form of exercising used to be walking, but during lockdown, she found she had ample time and decided to exercise. Instead of building it up slowly, she decided to do three classes a day for a period of 6 weeks and wondered why her legs and feet hurt, especially first thing in the morning. I held a virtual clinic on the telephone with her but it transpired she would start the class at the exact time without warming up herself, nor cooling down, sometimes even missing the five minutes of warm up from the instructor. She was using muscles that had not been used in a very long time. I gave a simple stretching routine and some footwear advice to help her. She had a review appointment last week, expressing that she was pain-free now and still able to exercise. She reduced the classes to 5 times a week instead of 15.

If you have an injury, I urge you to contact me. At least, let us have a telephone consultation so that you can continue exercising and be pain-free.