Categories: Exercises

15-03-2023 – Today is LongCovid Day. Some people suffer from long-term complaints after a corona infection, also known as Long Covid or Post-Covid. Now that we have all resumed our normal daily lives and the Covid-19 pandemic is officially over, these people are less visible.

One in eight Dutch people have long-term complaints after a corona infection. This is the conclusion of researchers from UMC Groningen and Radboud university medical center after analyzing the health data of 13.000 Dutch people. They compared the complaints of people before and after they had COVID-19.

It concerns a wide range of complaints that can persist for a long time. For example; shortness of breath, fatigue, concentration problems and/or being sick after exercise. The intensity differs per person.

The term 'long' comes from the English word for 'long' and therefore indicates that it concerns long-term complaints. The name therefore does not say that it concerns complaints of the lungs. Below you can read a few recent tweets from people suffering from LongCovid.

What is LongCovid?

LongCovid is a condition with often severe symptoms that can affect many different organs. It occurs after infection with SARS-CoV-2. Symptoms include cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological. Think of loss of smell and taste, fatigue/exhaustion, cognitive complaints, dizziness, sickness after exercise (PEM), high heart rate when standing up (POTS) and mental complaints such as anxiety. The World Health Organization (WHO) has released an official clinical definition for Long Covid. This condition is called 'Post-Covid-19' by the WHO. Patients often do not belong to a risk group and sometimes led very active lives, as can be seen in the gallery below.

Recovery process

Unfortunately, little is known about an effective healing and recovery process. In my practice I deal a lot with people who suffer from LongCovid. In many cases they benefit from mindfulness and breathing exercises, but often massage can also reduce complaints and even promote recovery.

Why breathing exercises?

You can experience various Post-Covid complaints related to your breathing. Some people have lung damage, but you can also unknowingly exert yourself too much to breathe. As a result, you use more energy. That is extra tiring and you stay tired longer after exercise.

Breathing too fast can also cause tension and anxiety. It is good to start breathing more slowly and breathing exercises can help with that. You can achieve a lot with simple techniques.

If the respiratory muscles are tense all the time, they are much more active than necessary. You use unnecessary energy during quiet activities such as reading or watching a movie. What helps then is to breathe through your nose. And to focus on the exhalation, so that you breathe more relaxed. This also prevents you from breathing in too much air, which can be a cause of fatigue. The production of energy in the cells requires a good balance of carbon and oxygen in the bloodstream.

Simple Breathing Exercise

If you have Long Covid, you can do this simple breathing exercise. With this you observe and slow down the breathing and put your body in a more relaxed position:

• Breathe in through your nose.
• Exhale through your nose twice as long.
• Take a short break before inhaling again.

Do this for a few minutes. This nasal breathing exercise is best done sitting or lying down. Like other muscles, the respiratory muscles can be trained. It is better to practice briefly every day than for an hour once a week. If you're just starting out with breathing exercises, it can feel a bit uncomfortable. If you continue to practice, that feeling will probably go away on its own. Make it as easy as possible for yourself and practice in bed for five minutes in the morning, for example. You are already lying flat, so that the diaphragm can relax better due to gravity.

Relax neck and shoulders

Those who suffer from tension, stress or anxiety often have a tense neck and shoulders. You can experience this after corona. Relaxing your neck and shoulders affects your breathing, because the breathing muscles also relax. This has a positive effect on your energy level and also on your state of mind. A massage can help to make you aware of tension in the neck and shoulders and immediately ensures more relaxation of these muscles.

Breathing exercise during exercise

Speech therapist Hanneke Bax has developed various exercises that can help with the recovery from LongCovid. Do you often get out of breath or become short of breath while speaking? This may be because you started breathing differently in response to previous tightness or pain in the lungs. In this video show speech therapist Hanneke Bax how tiring it is when your breathing doesn't support your voice.

You can find more exercises from her on this page.

Recovery Massage at Long-Covid

The approach to cramps, tension, connective tissue and alertness that is common in Long-Covid can be reduced with a recovery massage, developed by PositiveTouch (School for Holistic Massage and Awareness). A Recovery Massage is aimed at restoring and regaining your own vitality by giving the body space to release tensions and to be able to reset. The massage is especially effective in the connective tissues of the muscles. In the massage, both breathing is reactivated and cortisol production is stabilized. Its own self-healing ability is also activated.

Read more here Massage Magazine about massage for LongCovid complaints:

Contraindications for massage

LongCovid has many manifestations and the symptoms differ per person. A deeper understanding of how it affects you as an individual is important to determine which methods of treatment work best for you. You have this conversation with the general practitioner and specialist. It often emerges from these conversations that a massage on a regular basis can be effective, because it stimulates the immune system, it also relieves tension and can therefore contribute to recovery.

But when your body is still actively fighting a virus like Covid-19, or when you go into fight-flight mode as a result of touch, a massage can make things worse. That is why choosing a suitable massage requires careful coordination with the client. You can read more about considering whether or not a massage is desirable in Susan Harrison's article (pdf document).