COVEPIC: An investigation of the effects of physical training and cognitive stimulation at home.
Target population: You are 50 years of age or older, have heart disease, no contraindications to exercise, and have access to the internet.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the population has not had access to training centers during lockdown. This increases the risk of de-training, and therefore complications from physical inactivity. Health authorities recommend finding ways to stay active at home. In this effort, the kinesiologists at the MHI’s ÉPIC Centre offer physical training videos. With the gradual reopening of the training centers, many people will return to the sports centers, but many may not return to their usual workouts in order to maintain social distancing. In this context, our research team wishes to study and document the benefits of home-based physical training, as well as of remote supervision of physical activity practice. In addition, this research project will evaluate the effect of adding cognitive training conducted at home to a physical training program on cognitive and physical health. We therefore wish to compare the effects of a physical training program alone to a program combining physical and cognitive training.
A better understanding of the effects of training programs will allow us to optimize our programs in order to propose them for the maintenance of health of people unable to move, or within the framework of crisis periods such as those which we cross.
Duration: The duration of your participation in the training program will be 6 months. During the first week of your participation in the study, you will complete 4 assessment sessions at your home supervised by a member of the research team via telephone or video conference. The training program, as planned for this study, will begin after the first week of assessments and will end 6 months later. New evaluations will be conducted 3 months and 6 months after the beginning of your training. Also, in order to observe the long-term effect of the training program, you will be asked to perform the same evaluations 6 months after the end of the training program, i.e. 1 year after the beginning of the study. All of the training and evaluations in this study have been adapted to be conducted remotely, from your home.