Moderate exercise is healthy exercise
This article summarizes recent scientific research on the effect of exercise on illness. The bottom line: moderate exercise is helps prevent and moderate illness, but intense exercise lasting an hour or more weakens immune system protection to below that of sedentary people:
The bulk of the new research, including the mouse studies mentioned, reinforce a theory that physiologists advanced some years ago, about what they call “a J-shaped curve” involving exercise and immunity. In this model, the risk both of catching a cold or the flu and of having a particularly severe form of the infection “drop if you exercise moderately,” says Mary P. Miles, PhD, an associate professor of exercise sciences at Montana State University and the author of an editorial about exercise and immunity published in the most recent edition of the journal Exercise and Sport Sciences Review. But the risk both of catching an illness and of becoming especially sick when you do “jump right back up” if you exercise intensely or for a prolonged period of time, surpassing the risks among the sedentary.
Posted by James on Thursday, October 15, 2009