Physical activity and physical exercise in a pandemic: Changes and consequences

Abstract

COVID-19 (coronavirus) was discovered at the end of 2019 and became a global pandemic in 2020. To fight the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous countries around the world have imposed different social restrictions in the hopes of slowing the virus's spread. For more than two years, humanity has been exposed to stress, which has resulted in a significant change in human lives and a negative impact on people's health due to the need for a completely different adjustment to everyday life. Every new, unfamiliar scenario triggers tension, which is a natural response to a threat. All of this resulted in people being confined to their houses, prevented them from seeing loved ones or taking care of daily tasks, decreased their mobility, forced them to work from home, and completely altered their daily routines. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic has created a global social threat, both economic and medical, with significant lifestyle changes. Part of the strategy to limit the spread of the virus was social isolation, which is incompatible with the human need for physical activity. The COVID-19 pandemic has stopped sport and its development in a significantly different way than any known pandemic so far. People whose main occupation is sports were especially affected. The fight against the spread of COVID19 has resulted in the closure of sports clubs, facilities, gyms, stadiums, swimming pools, dance and fitness studios, physical therapy centers, parks and playgrounds. A significant number of studies were conducted during the pandemic in order to determine the impact of the pandemic on various aspects of social life, precisely because of the situation that was imposed on the entire society and because of the change in the format of everyday life that deviated from the usual. Physical activity is one of them. This work aims to review those works by systematizing the goals, contents and results of those researches, in order to determine how much they were represented and what conclusions were reached based on them.