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Regaining Physical Fitness After COVID-19

AARP
by Stacey Colino, AARP, August 18, 2021

After being sick with COVID-19, many people are finding the trajectory back to good health to be full of twists and turns. Complications and lingering symptoms such as fatigue and brain fog make recovery unpredictable. Many also find that restoring their physical strength and fitness can be particularly challenging, regardless of whether they had a mild or severe case of the coronavirus.

"You might not bounce right back,” says Mitchell Elkind, M.D., a professor of neurology and epidemiology at Columbia University in New York and past president of the American Heart Association. The reason? “The inflammation and immune dysregulation that comes from COVID may have consequences for how people recover. It might depend on their age, what their other medical problems are and how much injury was done to their lungs, heart, brain or other organs when they were acutely ill."