Our lifestyles have undergone considerable changes in recent years: changes that have affected our daily rhythms, our way of viewing work, our social relationships and, last but not least, our approach to exercise.
In this context, the difficulty of managing living in outdoor environments where group sports can be practised in confined spaces has, as the most immediate consequence, led to a considerable increase in individual activities being practised outdoors, accompanied (especially in the winter months) by greater appeal in indoor sports.
If gyms have taken steps to provide courses online, training apps that allow people to continue their fitness programmes remotely have also grown exponentially. This new way of exercising has led many people to continue this experimentation well beyond the months of coronavirus lockdown – to the extent that many people have even set up mini-gyms at home to allow continuous exercise.
But are our indoor environments really ideal for exercise? Do we pay enough attention to the air quality of our home gyms?
Exercising at home: the main enemies to our health
Having dispelled the myth that home environments are guaranteed safe and protected places, we now know how much worse the quality of the air we breathe within our walls can potentially be compared to outside. If urban pollution and pollen in the streets easily enter our homes, bad air can also arise from the effects of the many daily activities carried out in our homes.
This problem is all the more serious given the importance of breathing during our exercise sessions at home. Let’s not forget that during physical activity, our respiratory rate increases and the amount of air we take into our lungs increases (by up to 15 times) - so just think how harmful the increased amount of pollutants we intake could potentially be!
Here are some of the main causes of indoor pollution that we are subjected to when we exercise in our home gym:
- chemicals released into the air by cleaning products;
- paints and building materials;
- room fragrances and scented candles;
- fumes and food odours from cooking;
- mould spores from damp areas (even the presence of a clothesline is enough);
- bacteria and microscopic material spread by pets.
Home gym:how to improve air quality
At this point, we must ask ourselves how to purify the air in our home gym by reducing the harmful effects of these pollutants on our health.
First of all, regardless of the space available, selecting where to exercise at home should take into account the presence of windows, which are important for enabling air circulation and adequate ventilation of your home gym. If no window is present, this function can be performed by a ceiling or wall fan system.
Although ventilating a room well before and after exercise may represent a healthy habit, it is unfortunately not sufficient to guarantee an environment that is truly healthy and protected during our training – and during the winter, exercising with the window wide open is not really an option.
To make sure that you don’t miss out on the well-known physical benefits of exercise, it is essential to train in a space that is completely purified of the pathogens that make the air we breathe unhealthy. This goal can only be achieved with the skilful contribution of a purifier capable of monitoring and improving air quality by effectively eliminating bacteria, viruses, moulds, and fine dust precisely when we are more susceptible to their exposure and therefore most vulnerable (due to increased ventilatory activity).
In perfect harmony with our new lifestyles, where we spend up to 90% of our time within the four walls of our homes, and the growing attention given to the air we breathe, Faber has created an air purifier that fully meets the needs of safety and protection in confined spaces, and is also ideal for a home gym. It has done so by launching Air Hub Portable, a stand-alone product with an essential design and exclusive 4X4 Tech technology, capable of combining a sophisticated filtering system with the sanitising action of UV-C lamps.
Like Air Hub and Air Hub Glass, this state-of-the-art device guarantees the elimination of viruses and bacteria up to 99.99%, without producing ozone. It also eliminates volatile organic compounds (VOC) and microparticles. This means that it can remove all major indoor pollution elements from our home gym, allowing us to benefit from the undeniable psychophysical wellbeing that exercise provides.
