Why we should exercise now, more than ever.
With the winter coming and the imminent spread of COVID-19, people will be contemplating stopping their exercise routines (for various reasons). Here are four reasons why you should not.
- When we are acutely cardio vascularly exercise (huffy puffy), our body opens up the arteries and increases the blood flow into our tissues down to the cellular level. With this comes an increased chance our immunity cells, stimulated by the exercise, will be able to seek out the pathogens in our body and destroy them before they become an issue.
- With chronic cardiovascular exercise, our body will increase the amount and the distance of capillaries (our blood vessels) into those micro tissues of the body, ensuring that our blood flow and our immune cells will always reach those places the pathogen may be hiding.
- Our acute resistance exercise (weights and heavy lifting) has the effect of stimulating epinephrine (our adrenaline response). This releases the immune cells (natural killer, B cells and T cells) into our blood stream and lymph glands, which circulate to repair any damage and destroy any contagions in the body. The second response elicited is the stimulation of the bone and bone marrow (which produce our immune cells) to produce cells, replacing the ones used. A bonus is it will produce more cells to be stored (in the spleen and lymph glands) to be ready to fight other infections we may come into contact.
- Our chronic resistance training builds lean muscle, making is more resilient to and pathogen contact and amplifying the acute resistance response and effect on the immunity, to exercise.
Other bonuses of exercising and keeping healthy are diseases resilience, improved quality of life and the faster removal of waste products from the body.
If you are isolating and cannot get out for your favourite exercise, use the garden or any physical activity (home projects or house cleaning) as your physical activity.