Exercise Will Improve Your Immune Function
Apart from exercise improving your immune function, it also helps depression better than some medications, promotes creative thinking, decreases the stress response, helps balance hormones, and improves insulin resistance.
Although individual circumstances will vary, I generally suggest the following in my programs:
- Physical activity. Although this is not actually exercise, it is very important for hormonal and stress support within the program’s model. This means you need to do things like playing with your kids, gardening, standing while working, house cleaning, etc.
- Stress relief cardio. This is once again not exercise, but more in the line of weight-bearing, full-body movements that need to be done with certain minimum requirements attached, such as 5 to 8 walks per day for 5 to 8 minutes each. These activities promote improved neurological tone and hormone spillover.
- Progressive intensity training. This training includes moderate burst or peak training that will eventually ramp up to high intensity, high-intensity interval training, and heavy weight lifting to peak or burst training with weights. All of this will ultimately promote the release of major repair hormones, maintain new stem cell genesis, build glycogen capacity, increase mitochondrial (energy production) density and efficiency, and much more.
The exercise progression needs to be synergistic with your overall hormonal profile and program. If this is not done, people tend to end up doing several programs at the same time – one for stress, one for exercise, one for diet, one for detox, one for sleep, etc., and this ends up not being good for them.
Exercise is vital not because it burns extra calories, because it doesn’t. It is however VITAL to bring about hormonal shifts, for the immediate improvement in metabolic efficiency, the positive brain impact, and for building metabolic flexibility over time.
Exercise also helps improve immune function, both in the short and in the long term and it DOES NOT suppress the immune function.
Exercise will help improve oxygen uptake and utilization. This is huge right now as people are being put on ventilators to help supplement low oxygen in the blood.
Another common problem today is lingering, chronic inflammation.
As inflammation is an essential part of the immune response, we DO NOT want to reduce it. Although we can fire up inflammation as and when we need it, the problem is to put that fire out once it’s done. This is where exercise can play a BIG role in promoting a more efficient resolution of inflammation.
This means that in today’s world, exercise is NOT OPTIONAL, but CRUCIAL.
Don’t feel bad if you are not doing any exercise at the moment. You can easily start at any time and at any level and take it from there.
You don’t need a gym or 2,500 lbs. of iron and steel in your garage as I do. There is also no need for a trainer (but it can help), or any need to do ONE specific thing versus another, such as heavy lifting or yoga, or CrossFit. Simply get started. Make a plan, show up and do something, and then stick to your plan!
I hope this clears up any misconceptions about my views on the matter.
We can do better!
