Although there are only a few legal excuses for leaving one's home daily, and only two of them apply to me - going out for food shopping and for exercise - I don't in any way feel that this situation is bad for my fitness. On the contrary, the need to make the most of that one daily outing for exercise has made me quite self-disciplined about getting a brisk 10,000 steps in - with consequent improvements to my heart rate and quality of sleep.
Here are screenshots of the Fitbit app on my phone, after syncing early this morning (Tuesday). First, those steps:
My heart rate had been averaging about 55 bpm. The steady fall in the last fortnight to 52 surely has to be attributed to brisk walking in my highly focused exercise hour:
Now sleep:
Fitbit's 'Sleep Score' combines various things to arrive at a measure of 'sleep quality'. I used to struggle to get 70, which according to Fitbit was only 'Fair'. Lately it's mostly over 80, and Fitbit says that's 'Good'.
My target bedtime is 12.30am, and my target length of sleep is 6 hours. Recently I've been on target rather more consistently than in the past:
I'm not interested in getting super-fit, but a decent level of fitness is apparently a good safeguard against succumbing to an infection, the coronavirus included.
I'm not controlling my weight with fitness, so I'm not expecting all this extra walking to get the kilograms off. But with social distancing in force, I'm not eating out; and I'm able to follow Slimming World guidelines perfectly. Now that will get me slimmed down! I next weigh myself at the end of this week, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the result is.
