How To Maintain Your Immune System When Exercising
Constantly getting sick while trying to get in shape is not fun and totally unnecessary. Unfortunately, a single bout of sickness can set you back for weeks.
So here is how not to get sick from intense exercise:
1. Eat complete nutrition from all the food groups: Excluding food groups is a sure fire way to stress your body until it gets sick. Because of the way food groups interact with each other, you can’t single them out and expect to stay healthy.
2. Don’t lose weight too quickly: If the weight is flying off it’s probably not fat. It’s a mix of fat and muscle. And if you are breaking down muscle for energy, your body will enter a very negative state in terms of immunity.
3. Stay hygienic: Your body is in a constant war against foreign invaders even if you don’t feel it. And if you keep personal hygiene ultra high, you will give your body a much needed break and more resources to focus on exercise recovery.
4. Get your shots: Specifically, you don’t want to miss your flu shot. It doesn’t take that much time to get it and it can save you from a devastating bout of flu. Even better, flu shots aren’t that expensive.
5. Have a pre workout snack: Eating some carbs before you exercise is a great way to not only burn more fat, but to reduce levels of stress hormones. Exercising on an empty stomach is a horrible idea that will compromise intensity, recovery and immune health.
6. Have carbohydrates immediately after exercise: You need to do this for two reasons. First, you want to take advantage of your body’s ability to suck up extra carbs during the short post workout window. Second, the carbs will bring down exercise-induced stress hormones that reduce your immunity.
7. Do not push it when sickness begins to creep up: You need to rest if you feel like you are getting sick. Do not work through the pain and please understand that a minor cold can turn into a nightmare if you keep on adding exercise stress to the mix.
Staying healthy during your quest to get in shape is extremely important. After all, it only takes a single bout of sickness to take you out of the game for weeks!
Writer Katherine Crawford, an exercise expert and former flabby arms sufferer, instructs on how to do arm exercises for women. Figure out how to get sexy arms by exploring her blog with advice on how to lose arm fat now!