The bushfire season can present significant challenges to maintaining your fitness routine. With smoke-filled air, fluctuating temperatures, and potential evacuation orders, it's essential to adapt your exercise regimen to ensure safety and health.

This guide will provide you with practical tips and strategies to stay active, fit, and motivated, even when outdoor conditions are less than ideal. Whether you prefer indoor workouts, low-impact exercises, or creative ways to stay moving, we've got you covered.

Let’s explore how you can continue prioritising your wellbeing while navigating the unique hurdles of the bushfire season.

What are the risks of being exposed to bushfire smoke?

One of the reasons bushfires are alarming is because the smoke contains a dangerous combination of water vapour, gases which can include: carbon dioxide and monoxide as well as nitrogen oxides. The danger in this toxic vapour cocktail is that, according to research from institutions like NSW Health, inhaling this smoke can cause respiratory symptoms to emerge that are similar to that of smoking a large volume of cigarettes due to the PM2.5 particles present.

Early symptoms of smoke exposure can include: headaches, ear irritation, worsening lung conditions. They are clear indicators that your health may be at risk due to smoke exposure. It’s also important to note that for those of you who are living with chronic lung conditions, like asthma, COPD or have a heart disease, finding relief from the smoke is critical.

This means that popular past times of going to the beach, jogging, walking and hiking in the country are becoming increasingly hazardous to our health. In relation to this, Australians impacted by smoke are recommended to practise indoor activities to the best of their ability.

Indoor activities can include: going to the gym, practising yoga, swimming in pools at large centres, or even exercising within your home. To explain the reason for this switch is, according to Doctor Kieran Kennedy, higher intensity exercise results in far greater inhalation through your mouth which causes us to consume far more dangerous particles that would normally be processed, filtered and not consumed by our noses.

How can you exercise safely in this bushfire season?

It has been widely recognised that P2 masks, are a popular method for filtering out the harmful particles caused by the smoke. Unfortunately, they might not be very comfortable to wear for a longer period of time. Wearing these puts stress on users as they make breathing more difficult. As such, whilst we do recommend these masks for general outdoor protection, we do not advise users to wear these at all if their intention is strenuous exercise or where breathing is more likely to be laboured due to a higher output of effort.  

Understandably, exercising indoors is not an option that many people enjoy, especially as we’re more accustomed to far more pristine conditions. This is why we advocate that you try to find alternatives to outdoor exercise that you find enjoyable, and that do not impact your health so severely.

To make things more manageable at home, and if they are available to you, using fitness equipment like yoga mats, a pair of dumbbells or a device that provides greater joint movement like a pedal exerciser to stimulate your body during these very confronting times.

How to stay motivated with your fitness goals during this bushfire season?

We don’t know how long this bushfire season will last or if it will repeat itself to this degree in the future. But for those of us that can action our fitness goals for the year then we still have ways to kickstart our plans to stay as healthy and fit as possible around our current circumstances without severely impacting our wellbeing in the process.

Disclaimer: the information provided in this blog is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Bettercaremarket uses reasonable endeavours to check the accuracy of the information provided however no we can not guarantee it is without error.