Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [63]
This suggests that the women in this group who suffered from stress fractures weren’t guilty of not getting enough calcium—instead, the relative weakness of their bones was a response to the lack of muscle in their legs. And the fix is simple: strengthen your calf muscles by doing exercises like calf raises. The extra muscle should help cushion some of the impact when you run and jump and also stimulate your shin bones to get stronger. (And this doesn’t apply only to your shins: the best way to ensure the bones throughout your body are strong is to keep the surrounding muscles strong.)
Should I exercise when I’m sick?
The answer to this question seems obvious: if you’re sick, your body needs its strength to fight off the infection. But exercise is a deeply entrenched habit for many people, so when illness strikes, they want to know if they can exercise without doing themselves harm.
For any sort of serious illness, there’s no doubt that you shouldn’t exercise. The question usually arises with less serious conditions like colds, which are unpleasant but not debilitating. Although there isn’t a great deal of research on the topic, many researchers apply a rule of thumb known as the “neck check,” according to Thomas Weidner, the head of the athletic training program at Ball State University in Indiana. Patients are generally free to exercise if their symptoms are above the neck, like a runny nose, sneezing, or a scratchy throat. But symptoms below the neck like fever, aching muscles, or a chest cough are grounds for caution.
Weidner was responsible for a couple of unusual studies in the late 1990s in which volunteers were infected with rhinovirus, better known as the common cold, in one of the very few attempts to address this question in a controlled experiment. First, he infected 45 volunteers, who began to develop sore throats the next evening and proceeded to full-blown symptoms by the third day of the experiment. At the peak of their illness, he put them through a series of treadmill tests and compared the results to a group of uninfected controls. To his surprise, he found no difference between the two groups in their running performance, lung function, or any other physiological responses. In other words, having a cold doesn’t seem to make you a worse athlete.
In the second study, Weidner infected 50 volunteers and had half of them do 40 minutes of exercise at 70 percent of maximum heart rate every second day, while the other half just rested. There was no difference between the two groups in the severity and duration of the symptoms—and in fact the exercise group reported feeling slightly better than the controls. Though they’re more than a decade old, those results haven’t been contradicted by any studies since, Weidner says. (No doubt it’s challenging to assemble a group of volunteers willing to be infected with a cold!)
There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to support Weidner’s finding that light exercise when you have a cold makes you feel better. People believe it clears the airways, or that the enhanced circulation speeds healing, or that it simply feels good. It’s well established that moderate exercise boosts immune function (see Chapter 1)—and one study even found that a single 45-minute treadmill run helped mice battle a virus. So it’s not that far-fetched to believe that staying active while sick might have real physical benefits. For now, though, we’ll have to be content with Weidner’s finding—that at the very least, exercising with a cold doesn’t make your symptoms worse.
Will having a few drinks affect my workout the next day?
That depends on what you mean by “a few.”
In 2010, researchers in New Zealand published a surprising study that found significant delays in muscle recovery when the subjects drank a “moderate” amount of alcohol after a strenuous workout.