How Exercise Keeps You From Getting Sick, and Helps You Get Better Faster
Cold and Flu season are rapidly approaching, and one of the most powerful tools you have for prevention is consistent exercise. The average American gets 2-4 colds per year, and each one sticks around for 7-10 days, which is 14 to 40 days per year spent feeling miserable. At the low end this means you’d lose 336 hours per year, whereas working out 3 days per week only takes 156 hours per year. So, since regular exercise definitely helps to reduce the frequency, duration and severity of colds, exercise is definitely worth the investment.
How Exercise Keeps You From Getting Sick and supports your immune system:
- Exercise speeds up finding and killing pathogens. The faster your immune system can get to a pathogen and recognize it the less likely it is to reproduce (make you sick).
- Exercise refreshes your immune cells. Exercise speeds up the elimination of the incompetent immune cells that can no longer do their job so they can be replaced with fresh recruits.
- Exercise improves immune system regulation. Reduces overreactions to non-threats, and improves reaction to real-threats.
- Exercise improves sleep quality which is vital for a useful immune system.
- Exercise makes you breath hard, which helps the mucous find its way out of your lungs, nose and sinuses. Your mucous is an important part of your immune system that traps pathogens before they can enter and cause problems, and you want to keep the snot moving, which exercise is excellent at.
- Exercise increases your body temperature which activates heat shock proteins, which help fight cancer and infection.
How Exercise Keeps You From Getting Sick and Rest Makes and Keeps you Sick
While we’ve talked about the benefits of exercise, it’s crucial to talk about it’s opposite – rest, inactivity or being sedentary. Resting (not moving much) is a dangerous prescription for anyone who is ill. Resting – especially horizontally – increases the odds of developing pneumonia, promotes blood clots, rapidly depletes muscle mass, and more.
On the last one – rapidly shrinking your muscles (John’s Hopkins suggests you lose 1-2% per day). Many people, wrongly, assume that this is just a vanity problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. The older you are the more dangerous any loss of muscle mass is. The amount of muscle mass and strength you have at the start of any health crisis determines your odds of survival. The amount of muscle mass and strength you have also determines your levels of independence – can you safely live alone, go to the bathroom alone, etc.
Furthermore, your muscles make things called myokines, which are messenger or signaling proteins that your muscles make when they have to do work. These myokines cause change (for the better) in almost every part of your body, and here are some examples:
- Breast tissue: where they inhibit mammary gland cancer growth
- Bones: where they inhibit bone breakdown (thereby promoting density)
- Brain: where they promote learning and memory, and fight back against dementia, etc.
- Heart: where they keep your heart cells from dying, help the heart self-repair, etc.
- Immune system: where they improve your ability to fight infection, kill tumors, etc.
Rest is risk.
Should You Exercise When You’re Sick?
Yes! Resting is going to keep you the sickest for the longest, and increase your risk of complications. Given that resting is the riskiest option, it would be the option to avoid. I understand that you can get many opinions to the contrary, however opinions are not scientific evidence. Consensus of opinions is part of politics, but it is not any part of the scientific method. Here’s a great place to start looking at evidence.
Considerations
Please be considerate of other people who don’t want you coughing and sneezing on them. We do zoom training sessions if you’re not feeling well.
With vomiting and diarrhea that is a little more difficult because…we will just call it logistics.
Anything else?
Besides exercise, vitamin D (if you’re low), probiotics (perhaps), and getting enough sleep (turn the phone off) help a lot. The more you move and exercise the better you will feel and the faster you will deal with the pathogens that you encounter each and every day. Just remember, exercise keeps you from getting sick and helps your recover faster.
True 180 Personal Training for Women was recently voted best gym for personal training in Charlotte. We’d love the opportunity to help you reach your goals.