More than one in four people in England did less exercise than they would normally in the first lockdown, and didn’t increase it afterwards. The results from the first study of how physical activity changed beyond lockdown suggests that decreased physical activity could worsen obesity levels in the country.
Efforts were made to encourage exercise during the first lockdown, which took place between March and May 2020. Fitness coach while gyms quickly started offering zoom classes. However, a survey of 36,000 people taking part in the found that 29 per cent decreased their physical activity between March and August last year.
“It’s a sizeable number,” says Andrew Steptoe at UCL. “[Although] there were stay-at-home orders, people were encouraged to go out and exercise – but some people didn’t. Some people were frightened of catching covid. Some didn’t live in the circumstances where they had the opportunity to do this.” Steptoe says he was surprised that people weren’t more active after restrictions lifted in May.
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, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, found that 62 per cent of people maintained their old level of physical activity, and just 9 per cent increased it. Steptoe and his colleagues had expected that there might be an urban-rural divide, with people outside towns and cities having more space and therefore exercising more, but that wasn’t the case. Gender and ethnicity also didn’t seem to make a difference to how active people were.
However, people who were older, more educated, richer and lived with other people were more likely to be more active. “One of the things I was quite struck by was older people were [more] active compared to young adults aged 18 to 29, which is unusual,” says Steptoe. He suspects that may be partly due to younger people being more reliant on organised sports, which were limited by restrictions, with older people more often walking or jogging on their own. “That social component might be important,” he says.
The team says the decrease in physical activity has immediate and long-term implications for people’s physical and mental health. Other by Steptoe and his colleagues during the pandemic has found a short-term link between people exercising or taking part in outdoor activities such as gardening one week, and being less anxious the following week. “There is definitely an effect on morale and well-being,” he says.
While a few weeks of being less active won’t make much difference to a person’s long-term health, Steptoe fears that people “who were active get out of the habit and never start again”. The best antidote to decreased exercise is for people to try to weave it back into their everyday life, he says, such as breaking up sitting time by walking around the house and walking to destinations wherever possible.
There is indicating that a decrease in physical activity during the pandemic is linked to a rise in bone fractures. Naveed Sattar at the University of Glasgow, UK, says he has seen a growing number of patients who are struggling with weight gain during the pandemic and says he is worried that this may cause an epidemic of obesity. “[Obesity] levels are going to go up even more,” he says. “Obesity is a risk factor for covid-19, so it’s sad that one of the consequences of the pandemic is even more obesity.”
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