Exercise and your immune response!
How much exercise should you do to improve your immune response?
As everyone is aware of coronavirus, as well as the weather beginning to cool down meaning the start of the flu season is upon us, it is more important more than ever to boost your immune response. There can be many ways of helping boost your immune system, this article will focus mainly on how exercise can really help stop you getting sick.
When it comes to exercise, there is something called the J-curve of immune response. This graph details at what intensity of exercises gives you the highest or lowest risk of infection. What may come as a surprise is that very high intensity training or the type of training that high level athletes perform creates the highest risk for infection. You may ask why? This is because athletes are often pushing the limits of doing too much exercise and not allowing the body to get in sufficient amounts of recovery. At the other end of the scale, being sedentary or very little exercise gives you an average level of immunity. The best exercise for your immune response is moderate intensity based exercise.
The main way to measure exercise intensity is by using a Rate Perceived Exercise (RPE) scale, which is numbered 1-10. On this scale 1 represents very light activity and 10 represents maximal activity. For you to exercise at moderate intensity this would be between 4-6 on this scale. When performing cardio this would be described as heavy breathing when exercising. You should be able to hold a short conversation and the activity to still be somewhat comfortable but becoming noticeably more challenging.
The above table is a guide to weight training or any exercises involving repetitions with a measured approach, moderate exercise would mean you should be able to do 4-6 more repetitions at the point of stopping the exercise. If you are getting close to failure on your exercises this is more like an 8-10 on the exertion scale.
It can be hard to give an example of activities that are in the moderate intensity range as everyone’s fitness level is different. Moderate activities that start to elevate the heart rate would be things such as brisk walking, gardening, household and domestic chores, certain gym based exercises, light bike riding.
It is really important to exercise and keep moving for your general health and wellbeing. If you have questions book in or organize a Telehealth Consult to speak to Matt Werner our Exercise Physiologist.