Physical Exercise Programs and the Spanish Post-Pandemic Context

The implementation of sports habits in the elderly is important to establish efficient prevention policies that help them keep their quality of life in the context of pandemic. So, this manuscript will show the principal lines to perform physical activity with the elderly during a lockdown period. With stay-at-home lockdown measures, many elderly people spend more time on their own and have lost their support and health networks. Physical activity has been proven to be an effective therapy for most physical and mental diseases. Together with its well-known benefits, there is some first evidence that relates regular exercise with a reduction in the risk for acute respiratory distress, a significant cause of death in the case of COVID-19. Therefore, there is still the need to perform physical activity on a regular basis during lockdown and in the new periods of normalcy among the elderly population. Even though we get over the COVID-19 crisis, the healthcare, social, and sports systems will change in order to prevent possible new outbreaks or similar situations, and will have to keep on applying imaginative and effective strategies in order to maintain this continued physical activity practice. This implies considering post-COVID physical exercise as a multimodal practice to have an impact on the different dimensions of the elderly, whether frail or not. This multimodal vision is related to: ¿ Sports centers, whose focus will be on gaining customer loyalty among groups with special vulnerability, combining physical training sessions with home sessions conducted by a monitor of reference, thus preventing the effect of social isolation ¿ One of the main developments that will be carried out has to do with the new technologies, including those systems using sensors and mobile phones to support monitoring in the daily tasks of the elderly, not only in the field of medicine but also in the fields of social and community services ¿ Finally, we have to consider outdoor activities. Outdoor facilities of gyms can be a key element for the post-pandemic periods of new normalcy. In any case, they will have to adopt the prevention measures as established by healthcare institutions Despite the negative effects of the crisis, this situation also offers opportunities to find new ways for performing physical exercise and develop new technological ways that promote it. The COVID-19 pandemic has gathered the joint work of direct care professionals, sports managers, healthcare providers, and researchers, who are working to find novel and appropriate solutions to maintain physical activity habits for large groups of people.