The Practical Impacts of Exercise-Intervention on COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

PURPOSE: Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) was first reported in China at the end of 2019. COVID-19 infected people increased and spreads COVID-19 rapidly across the globe. Finally, this outbreak turn into a pandemic and yields national crisis and finally to endemic. Most individual are exposed to stressful situation because of unknown duration of COVID-19. Most of all, smoking, obesity, metabolic syndromes, lowered immunity such as decreased natural killer (NK) cell, T cell activity were significantly correlated with the COVID19 incidence. However, all this variables were concerned with exercise habit and exercise-intervention, therefore, the present study aimed to assess the relationship between COVID-19 incidence and physical activity status.METHODS: PubMed database was searched from December 2019 to August 2020 using predefined search terms “COVID-19”, “exercise”, and “immunity”.Based on reference search, more than 65 articles were identified whereas 50 papers (36 references) met the inclusion criteria and were well connected with COVID-19 and physical exercise with immunity.We analyzed the connections between exercise and COVID-19 with many variables, and dealtabout COVID-19 prevention and exercise-intervention programs in the main text.RESULTS & CONCLUSIONS: Smoking, obesity, metabolic syndromes, reduced respiratory muscle mass, lowered immunity such as decreased natural killer cell and T cell activity were significantly correlated with the COVID-19 infection.However, all this variables were also concerned with exercise habit and exercise-intervention.Regular physical activity have shown to be an effective prescription for obesity, many metabolic syndromes and good immunity. However, physical inactivity and chronic metabolic syndromes were associated with reduced immunity such as reduced NK cell activity, uncontrolled T cell immunity, decreased respiratory immunity and even URTIs (upper respiratory track infection) for elite athletes. Multicomponent exercise program is considered especially for the elderly people, 5 days per week, 40-60% HRR (heart rate reserve) intensity, and 150-300 minutes aerobic and resistance training (200-400 minutes/week under the quarantine period) were recommended. Moreover, all form of psychological support also to increase immunity against COVID-19.More mechanism studies are urgently needed to determine which mode and which duration exercises are best most suited, and effective for prevention and treatment of COVID-19.