How Strenuous Exercise Affects Our Immune System
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Gyms are rarely purpose built facilities. Rather, theyre rented and renovated spaces. In turn, airflow in the structure is planned for light industrial or office space. Almost no thought goes into the fact that gyms are sometimes hundreds of occupants moving the air at two to three times what the OSHA or planning documents indicate. Paints with VoC's, sealants, and even offgassing plastics from gym mats or new equipment can turn the air quality from decent to garbage in a few hours.
I was once contracted to fix an air handler issue at a fitness center. The root cause was a set of 6 un-ventilated panini presses that were placed near the front desk as part of an effort to sell snacks and sandwiches. The added smoke and particulate had decreased the filter life and burned out a blower motor. The solution was either get rid of the electric grills, or start replacing 30 day filters every week.
I can’t imagine if the whole office was filled with people exercising.
https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...
> Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments
> ... Methods: Twenty-four participants spent 6 full work days (0900–1700 hours) in an environmentally controlled office space, blinded to test conditions. On different days, they were exposed to IEQ conditions representative of Conventional [high concentrations of volatile organic compounds (VOCs)] and Green (low concentrations of VOCs) office buildings in the United States. Additional conditions simulated a Green building with a high outdoor air ventilation rate (labeled Green+) and artificially elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) levels independent of ventilation.
> Results: On average, cognitive scores were 61% higher on the Green building day and 101% higher on the two Green+ building days than on the Conventional building day (p < 0.0001). VOCs and CO2 were independently associated with cognitive scores.
> Conclusions: Cognitive function scores were significantly better under Green+ building conditions than in the Conventional building conditions for all nine functional domains. These findings have wide-ranging implications because this study was designed to reflect conditions that are commonly encountered every day in many indoor environments.
The overall feeling I got was "tired". My eyes didn't want to stay open. My mind felt like gauze was wrapping it. My attitude was mellowed and slightly depressed. It took more effort to move (even to walk to the door outside, which I did often despite it being allergy season). As soon as I spent 10m outside my energy started to return.
https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/682/Sensirion_Gas_Sensors...
Home gyms can cover part of it. You can do a lot with a chinup bar, bodyweight exercises, powerblock dumbell sets.
I'm actually in a city too cold to go without a gym year round, and I do barbells so I can't do those at home (space too small). But, mentioning the options above for those who don't have the same constraints.
Just more pleasant in general as well.
It does a decent job.
For particulates, the Laseregg is the best I've found.
Apparently the laseregg 2+ measures VOC, but I'm not sure about that. From what I heard there are no VOC meters available at a consumer level. CO2 is the best proxy, because high CO2 means low ventilation, which prevents venting of VOCs.
* I am far more diligent about opening a window at my home and office. In winter I may open one a crack.
* I leave my bedroom door open at night
* I noticed I was getting extremely high AQI index readings when cooking. I was frying things in a pan after previously cooking something else in the same meal (meat, then sweet potatoes). I now wash in between, use coconut oil (less AQI readings) and am more diligent about opening the kitchen door if the AQU gets high
It's kind of like measuring weight. Once you have it stable, you don't really need to do anything. But, keeping the readings alerts you if something ever goes off track.
Also very useful to see that even openings in windows could make large and immediate differences.
That wouldn't make much sense: what if you feel ill only after doing certain exercises (e.g. cardio versus weight lifting)?
Conclusion: Figure out what works for you, have a daily routine, add a bit of obsession and stop reading stories about the pros and cons of exercising.
I really need to start doing it on the regular again...
Of course, my nose would be congested again a few hours later, but it was still a decent motivator since I hate taking medicine.
Wish my knee would stop being shitty.
Other sure ways how I can get sick: overdo sauna after exercising and, by far the worst, overdoing cold showers (Jim Hoff anyone? - I got seriously sick experimenting with that)
I guess the overall strength of my immune system is below average :-(
This winter I've tried only cold showers after running outside. Cold showers as in (sometimes) my neck hurt if I did it too long. Did not catch a cold until this spring and I think this is more correlated to insufficient rest/sleep (on top of exercising) than to water temperature.
My takeaway is enough rest is not optional and cold showers are doable even in very cold water. I have no idea how hard would be a bath in water + ice.
I know of an old woman who's beed ice-cold bucketing for years and looks great and hasn't been sick in a long time. Does this with -20C outside too. Yet I find I may get sick easier if it's too cold outside and I go all out freezing shower.
The topic was covered in a BBC programme:
(Not that it's a trend limited to the 20th century. But it seems to me to have been extremely bad in the health area in that time frame. Not uniquely so necessarily, but quite bad.)
Kind of like social media algorithms today.
My under-researched model of how this happens, is that there is a lot of tear-and-wear in the muscles where the effort is happening, which leads to inflammation, and that's where the white-blood cells might end up.
So that looks like the fault of the ends (read: the event) was actually led by the means (training).
I have an optometrist friend who says he can tell easily in eye exam which old people have worn glasses or sunglasses and which haven't.
"Their first conclusion was that athletes are lousy at identifying whether and why they are sniffling. The original 1980s studies had relied on runners’ self-reports of illness. But newer experiments that actually tested saliva showed that less than a third of marathon runners who thought they had caught a cold actually had. Statistically, their odds of becoming sick were about the same as for anyone else in the race’s host city.
The athletes probably had misinterpreted allergies or short-term scratchiness in their airways after the race as a cold, says John Campbell, a professor at the University of Bath who was a co-author of the new review."
Rapidly producing immune cells during exercise, then letting them (and more) die off would be a baffling response. But pumping them into the lungs (because you've been breathing hard through your mouth) and gut (for when you make up lost energy, and maybe eat some raw meat you've been hunting)? That makes a great deal of sense.
That effect is unconfirmed in humans, but it would ground our observations in an evolutionarily-sane outcome.
Hunting isn't like going to the store, success isn't guaranteed.
Ketogenesis requires over a week of carb restriction IIRC. I think fasting yields energy because the body increases various stress hormones to push you to find food so you don't starve.
Have you ever tried to focus on a hard problem at work after a big lunch?
I had the idea that I wanted to reduce time in the gym, so I used the potential energy equation
PE= Mgh
I'm not getting any taller, so the only thing I could change was either the reps or mass of weight moved.
I made it my goal to lift heavy weights so I'd only need to deadlift 1 time and be able to pig out.
TBH, it works, I lose 1 lb a week eating 3,000 calories a day. We lift 2 times a week. Warm up, then do 2+ reps of a heavy set.
I dont really sweat after a workout, but I look pretty big and I'm still deadlifting 450lbs. But I only deadlift that weight 1 time a week.
Is that 'Strenuous'?
People always overstate their level of fitness by several orders of magnitude on anonymous internet forums.
450 is almost the expectation for anyone casually lifting for a few years.
A 315lb deadlift is obtainable within a month.
I didnt mention that I have to warm up, but the point of the workout is to complete a heavy set.
How many warm up sets do you do?
Working up to a deadlift max doesn't take a lot of time, or a ton of sets. Like, 4-6 sets of 3-4 reps.
Longevity and injury-prevention is key to long-term gym vitality... but people don't usually appreciate this until they injure themselves somehow.
<40-something lifter, out...>
1 heavy deadlift set usually means 15 minutes of warmups.
I thought using the potential energy equation gave me a little credentials.
I also wrote a book about this topic. But I didnt include it in the comment.
You cannot do 5x5 deadlift sets once you are past 4 plates.
looks like mkirklions responded and really he does 5 sets with increasing weight, then does his heaviest.
So it is more like the classic "pyramid" or "increased weight until near-exhaustion" sets, which have been around since forever...
Deadlift warmups at 45lbs, 135lbs, 225lbs, 315lbs, 405lbs, then heavy set 435lbs.
Bench is 45lbs, 135lbs, 190lbs(or whatever my workout buddy does), then 235lbs for my heavy set.
The goal is to do 2-3 since that means its good form. I am for 1 heavy set rather than 1 heavy rep.
Ok, seriously.... math: if you eat 3000 kcal per day and lose 1 lb per week, you're burning 3500 kcal per day. This is quite a lot. It's near impossible unless you work out a lot and are veeeery muscular... or are impossibly tall... or, well, fat. (Or a combination of those.)
Take me for comparison: I am 187cm (6'1ish) tall and weigh 75kg (165 lbs), pretty much smack in the middle of the "normal weight" range. I like running, do about 50km (30 miles) per week. I count calories and let my wrist watch measure my energy expenditure 24/7. On rest days (mostly sedentary), I burn about 2100 kcal. To get up to 3400, I have to do some sort of hard run and some lighter activity in addition, or do a long run (18km+).
Now I'm not everybody of course, but you can't be that abnormal, right? So I'm not buying your numbers.
Since about 3 years I've been counting calories and let various wrist watches with 24/7 heart rate trackers (fitbit, later garmin devices) estimate energy expenditure.
So I measure energy in and out (with unknown error bars). The energy balance I get as a result predicts what my body weight should do.
My control is stepping on the scale every time before I take a shower, log, and observe trends.
Result, consistent over the last three-ish years: my measured weight does almost exactly what the calorie counting and wristwatch estimating predicts. I see absolutely no systematic error in one direction or the other (measured over weeks, that is, to do away with short term fluctuations).
A serious endurance cyclist or swimmer will certainly go through 3000 kcal on a normal training day if not more.
I've burned an estimated 5000kcal daily on the bike for weeks. What's more is I know these numbers are very accurate as we train with power meters that record our energy expenditure with minimal error.
It's important to distinguish between serious athletes and average people who exercise. It's possible that truly competitive athletes - for instance, who run 120 miles a week to your 30 - will be much more likely to get ill from their efforts. It can take serious fitness - and a mentality acquired only by years of serious training - to push yourself to the extent that you fall ill, and maybe the recreational "athlete" described in this text can't reach that point.
Put another way, an average cyclist will find a 2 hour bike ride to be an average ride but an average runner will consider a 2 hour run to be quite long.
This is not correct. They are relatively close, though in fact swimming on average will burn slightly less calories than running per hour of activity for most paces of comparative effort [0].
> I've burned an estimated 5000kcal daily on the bike for weeks
This is around 3.5 to 10 hours of cycling a day depending on your weight and speed... There is individual variation of course, but there is no way you are burning this many calories without A LOT of hours on the bike.
"Each day participants ride, on average, about 100 miles and burn some 6,071 calories"
As a competitive, but still amateur cyclist I would do something in this ballpark almost every day. Hence 3000 - 5000 calories. And I'd often run for an hour or play soccer on top of this since I wasn't a pro.
I did spend a lot of hours on the bike, as serious athletes tend to do. Years of experience with myself and many other national caliber athletes tells me that we do in fact get sick from strenuous exercise, all the time.
This is a very bad baseline for an average athlete. You are referring to pro athletes in a race event who average 40-45km/hr speeds on a notoriously hilly race. They don't maintain this level of exertion during training season, and an average athlete is nowhere even close to it.
> As a competitive, but still amateur cyclist I would do something in this ballpark almost every day. Hence 3000 - 5000 calories.
If you bike 160km a day, then you're cycling 4 - 6 hours a day. My original statement that you're not burning that many calories without ALOT of hours on the bike is correct.
> I did spend a lot of hours on the bike, as serious athletes tend to do. Years of experience with myself and many other national caliber athletes..
It's very impressive if you're able to sustain >30hrs week of exercise for weeks as you mention, but be cautious to not sound elitist.
Yes, running is extremely inefficient. The most efficient form of movement known is a human on a bicycle. One's choice depends on whether the goal is to burn calories, or travel efficiently.
I've burned an estimated 5000kcal daily on the bike for weeks.
Wait a minute, what? You're going to take the most efficient form of locomotion and use that as an example of how to burn calories? The only reason you burned that many calories is because you spent all day on the bike. Maybe I'm completely missing your point, but for time spent, running burns more calories.
EDIT: According to this chart, I probably burned around 600 kcal per hour:
http://www.nutristrategy.com/caloriesburnedwalking.htm
It took us about 8 hours, so the total was probably closer to 4800 kcal.
In any case, the point I'm trying to make is that it's easy to burn a lot more than 2000 kcal per day.
Who's willing to be the truth is significantly lower still?
https://www.bettercheaperslower.com/ways/to-the-summit-of-mt...
Oh you put a smiley, that makes it alright then!
Incorrect. My BMI is 21.4, which is almost exactly in the middle of the "healthy" range for my height. (Healthy BMI range is defined 18.5 - 25)
I suspect your weight loss may be due to the exercise affecting your eating patterns (if you eat high calorie food before going to bed you will likely gain more weight than if you get same calories in a sweet drink right after a long ski race; not sure why).
I don't think that's right. Eating a hypercaloric diet will likely gain you more weight, and hypocaloric will result in weight loss. It doesn't matter when you eat the food. Eating carbs or protein right after a workout is the subject of the nutrient timing, which is largely moot for protein (as long as you get enough during the 24 hours), and only important for carbs if you are an endurance athlete or have multiple workouts per day.
Got a gym crew that probably takes the longest to put on my friends weights.
In any case, I don't think the premise underlying this makes sense. Resistance training is for triggering muscle growth, not burning calories. Perhaps there's some biological reason why a 1 rep workout is effective for you, but I don't think the PE equation helps here.
But the problem statement begins with- You need to finish the gym in less than 2 hours/week.
I like strength training, especially 3x5s.
My workout looks closer to a 5/3/1/5 pyramid due to warmup and trying to burn myself out on the last set.
I'm glad you mentioned this, I'll play with the math this weekend and try to find a point of diminishing returns.
How high do you lift it?
How's your back?
Who's we? (can I join)
Day 1 Deadlift- 435 Bench- 235
Day 2 Squats-345 OHP-160
Back is surprisingly great, my first deadlift was only 90lbs. Ive come a long way.
Here is the cheatsheet I follow: http://efficiencyiseverything.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploa...
If you're going in cold right to 450+, my back is scared for you.
Also, never knew this, they make self-powered treadmills which are really ideal for sprinting on. I just bought a ASUNA Hi-Performance Cardio Trainer Self Powered Manual Treadmill, it's pretty much ideal for Tabata/sprinting for a home-gym.
Also has the added benefit over my old 40 minute jog routine of increasing my quickness. I play hockey so it was noticeable how much quicker my first 3 strides have become the past 2 years.
Pretty good read regarding all this: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-17177251
I wish there was a chip that monitored hormones and immune system factors, etc.
ive tested this theory time and time and seems to be on point.
there have been a number of times when i was feeling sick and instead of resting, id go out in the cold freezing and walk outside for hours. next day i would be completely healed.
but when im just home bed ridden that sickness can linger for days or even weeks.
im also a huge fan of taking cold shower the moment you feel like you are carching a cold. it works way too often to be a coincidence.
Not an expert, but wonder if this is caused by a hangover from the endorphin dump from the marathon. I felt that way afterwards.
I've had maybe 2-3 colds in the decades since I quit racing.
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/preserving-immune-function-...
> The review concludes that, contrary to widespread belief, a long, tiring workout or race can amplify immune responses, not suppress them.
Would be even better if that was reflected in the title, but alas, my expectations from a modern website are not so high.
There are perhaps a dozen times in my life when I was training with abnormally high intensity even for a very competitive endurance athlete and fell ill immediately afterward.
These range from 2 hr brutal races to 3-4 days of 5-7 hrs daily intense training or race efforts. I very rarely catch a cold, but it's more often than not after an effort that stands out to me as memorably difficult.
Any serious cyclist will agree with me. Even competitive high school athletes know that you are most likely to get sick right before taper.
This is an example of misinterpretation of scientific experiment, most likely by the journalists but possibly by the scientists themselves.
EDIT: I don't take issue with "immune response is heightened after exercise". I'm sure it is. I take issue with this quote: "But it is unlikely to have made you vulnerable to colds or other illnesses afterward, according to a myth-busting new review of the latest science about immunity and endurance exercise".
> Their first conclusion was that athletes are lousy at identifying whether and why they are sniffling. The original 1980s studies had relied on runners’ self-reports of illness. But newer experiments that actually tested saliva showed that less than a third of marathon runners who thought they had caught a cold actually had. Statistically, their odds of becoming sick were about the same as for anyone else in the race’s host city.
I suppose you are unlikely to see anyone here back me up since HackerNews isn't exactly an athletic demographic.
Fever, red eyes, overflowing mucus, extreme soreness and raw throat for days or over a week - are you trying to tell me that this isn't sick? Maybe that's your normal state, but I've seen hundreds of cases of amateur and professional athletes reduced to this shortly after performing national caliber efforts.
I'm saying (and so is this study) that these symptoms are not necessarily due to infection. You strain your body to an incredible degree when racing, so it's perfectly plausible to me that these symptoms are just the body recovering from the strain rather than fighting infection.
One might think oneself able to safely make unfounded assertions due to the rest of HN being overweight nerds coding away in their basements. OTOH, one might be surprised to find out how many former Cat 1 bike racers and formerly national-class 5K runners frequent HN. And they're not backing you up because their anecdotal evidence says otherwise.
Let me try to explain why there is no contradiction, and why the science here can't be relied upon across the board.
First, my anecdata pertain to athletes who are competitive on a national or regional level - Olympic Trials qualifiers, Cat 1 and pro cyclists, and similar. Science will confirm that these individuals have profoundly altered physiologies as compared to average "fit" people.
A problem with extending exercise physiology research to elite athletes is that most of the time, the scientists do not have elite test subjects available. There is a world of difference between the 4 hr marathoners they probably surveyed, or even 3hr Boston qualifiers, compared to the 2:20 and under marathoner I have in mind. There simply isn't much science published on these guys, because there aren't that many of them.
Many exercise physiology papers will say "well-trained subjects between the ages of 21 and 30", and the layman will think this means they studied top athletes. But then you look at the data and see that the average 5K run time for these people is something like 18 minutes, which is much slower than even the easy 20 mile pace for the subjects of my anecdata.
So maybe, the average marathon jogger is not more likely to fall ill after an effort. But talk to anyone who has run under 2:30 for men or under 3:00 for women and they will agree with what I have found
> With the peer-reviewed literature dominated by articles on exercise, forming an “evidence-based practice” – the term fashionably applied to exercise prescription based only on evidence from peer-reviewed exercise science literature – devoted to the actual training of athletes is essentially impossible. Drawing conclusions about training for athletes based on a body of literature devoted to exercise for a few small subsets of the general public cannot be and has never been productive, and all the peer-reviewed publication-worship in the universe will not make it so.
> The observations of experienced individuals – in this case, experienced coaches who have dealt with thousands of athletes over decades – are often regarded by academics in the exercise science publishing business as mere “anecdotal” reports, tantamount to hearsay and innuendo. This is a misunderstanding of the definition of “empirical,” which most definitely includes the direct, informed observations of experienced coaches. Empirical evidence gathered from an experimental study is only one type of empirical evidence, and it is dependent on observation in precisely the same way an experienced coach gathers data through observation. It is therefore precisely as valuable, especially when you consider the fact that data from a study is only as good as the methods that generated it.
> Exercise science has its problems. The populations it studies are typically small, often fewer than 20 people in the group. These people are very seldom trained athletes, and are most usually untrained college-age kids for whom any stress is adaptive. This makes for a poor way to study the effects of two different exercise methods, and completely precludes any questions regarding training. Often the methods themselves are poorly constructed, [...], completely omitting any quantification of the movement pattern being studied (precisely what is a squat? How deep is it? What is the hip angle? Does this affect muscle recruitment? How is this measured?), or display a failure on the part of the staff to standardize its interactions with the study population (“Try really really hard this time.”). Sometimes the study duration is too short to reveal anything meaningful about the question being investigated, since we are dealing with students in the study population that will only be available for one semester. Most importantly, if the study is being directed by a person without the experience to know that the study question itself is stupid (Can more weight be bench-pressed lying on a bench or balanced on a swiss ball?), and if the review staff lacks the experience to know that the PI is asking a stupid question, then stupid peer-reviewed “evidence-based” research enters the literature and adds to the problem.
> In the absence of any meaningful experimental data generated by peer-reviewed studies regarding the long-term effects of barbell training, we are forced to rely on the observations of hundreds of thousands of coaches and athletes who carefully picked their way through the mistakes made during the process of acquiring experience. This makes a rationalist out of every effective barbell training programmer. This process – if it is to be logical, effective, and productive, i.e. rational – must be guided by a thorough grounding in the sciences of physiology, chemistry, and physics, since the “exercise sciences” have proven themselves to lack the rigor and scope necessary for the task. The well-prepared coach has either a “hard” science degree or an otherwise extensive background in biology, anatomy, physiology, physics, chemistry, and probably psychology as well. Textbooks on these subjects should form the basis of the coach’s library, with practical experience under the bar and many thousands of hours coaching on the platform rounding out his abilities as a coach of barbell training.
I'm sorry but any comment that starts out "I have a PhD from a top institution" reeks of Appeal to Authority: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Then you appeal to science without actually citing any science, but yet more anecdotal data and thoughts from your own mind.
Your arguments are just not very strong because they're all coming from your own experience and thoughts. Your qualifications in exercise and academia (especially on a partially anonymous internet forum) do not make your thoughts any more valuable than anyone else's here without resources to back them up.
The problem is confounded because of conflicts of interest. Either the investigators are being remunerated by a commercial interest or the investigators are hoping to establish a commercial entity.
It's not uncommon for a study to come out with interesting results and conclusion only to be found to be completely unreproducible. It takes a while for this to happen, and even then, people are confused over who is right.
Also, linking to the wiki page for a logical fallacy is a very passive aggressive swipe and low quality.
Most on HN lack the background knowledge and training to usefully interpret a review article like this, let alone a journalistic simplification. Yes, I cite "thoughts from my own mind", a mind which has spent years researching this theme.
You're wondering why I don't cite any articles contradicting the claims of the review article? That's because this paper already cites many published peer-reviewed works, only to dismiss their findings. You'd know this if you actually read the paper and had the background and training to properly interpret it!
It's an interesting review. The main idea of the paper is that we shouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly when thinking that strenuous exercise can increase risk of short-term illness. The authors point out some logical and mechanistic fallacies of past studies.
I take issue with the interpretation that most people will have after reading - that strenuous exercise will not increase risk of getting sick. I know firsthand that this is not the case in truly elite athletes. But, for many people this may be true. It's important to be specific however, when discussing scientific matters, which is why I contributed my thoughts
> Most on HN lack the background knowledge and training to usefully interpret a review article like this, let alone a journalistic simplification.
It seems like you can't help but belittle the audience you're replying to. It comes across as if you're saying "I'm the elite academic talking down to all of you plebs." You may have some good ideas but your tone and arrogance suck. And I think you'd be surprised by the "academic qualifications" of many of the people on HN. Many in this audience are perfectly capable of understanding the article. You're not "unique."