tarheelhockey
Offside Review Specialist
One of the very quiet, sneaky things about the pandemic is the amount of time people spent sitting down. Most of us are already pretty sedentary, but WFH slashed away a large portion of the average person's daily walking and standing time. Simply walking to and from the car, up and down the office hall, across your corporate park, back and forth to lunch, whatever. All of that was replaced by a few dozen steps from your bed to your desk (if that... I found I could usually at least start my day with my laptop on the bedside table).
That doesn't sound like such a big deal in the context of athletics, but that movement is absolutely crucial to core muscle and joint function. Workouts don't make up for it. It's frightening to think of how many people out there have literally withered from the inside, and what that's going to mean for their long term health outlooks (which were already clearly tied to a lack of standing and walking before pandemic conditions began).
Someone out there is currently compiling future Nobel Prize winning research on the health outcomes of tens of millions of people just sitting around for a year.
