[ircommando]

Agree with Scott what a bummer.  I hope by now you are finding some relief.  I have had covid three times now and it has always kicked my ass.  After the first bout I wasn’t able to get active again and started to think about long covid as a thing I was dealing with.  This was the same time that I started looking into mountaineering and fell in with evoke.  At the time I was aerobically deficient and so I started out with a relatively small volume of low end zone 2 work.  This felt super easy for me at the time but I stuck with it for 4 weeks before starting the 16 week mountaineering plan, which honestly starts pretty light in order to transition the athlete in.  I felt like all this light work really helped me get past the exhaustion and PEM I was experiencing.

The other thing I worked really well for me was breath work.  My focus with this was aid my body shifting into the para-sympathetic nervous system, so I do it a lot for post exercise recovery, but also if I feel exhausted and rest just isn’t restful enough.  One general idea governed my work and two specific exercises helped.  Generally when I wanted to calm down I  would try to focus on belly breathing.  For me this meant using my diaphragm to breathe and not my chest (chest breathing I tried to associate with hard work and/or exercise).  The two specific exercises were:

1.  Box breathing (breathe in for x seconds, hold x seconds, breathe out for x seconds, hold for x seconds, repeat).  This I did only belly breathing
2. The physiological sigh as described by Dr. Huberman This one I started with chest breathing and then slow shifted to belly only breathing to end my session.  I will occasionally do this when running/hiking if I am trying to stay in zone 2.  If I come to a short hill and don’t slow my pace enough and shoot into Z3 I will slow down a bit and do 2-3 physiological sighs.  I have noticed that it drops my heart rate between 3-10 bpm.  My experience is that you should NOT do this when trying to do high intensity work.  I thought it would be great for recovery periods in stuff like 30/30’s but my anecdotal experience was that it reduced my performance and any speed or Z3 work I was trying to do suffered

Good luck, hope you feel better,

Steve