Don’t Starve a Cold of Exercise

[Guest guest]

Don't Starve a Cold of Exercise

Filip Kwiatkowski for The New York Times

 

 

By GINA KOLATA

Published: December 24, 2008

 

YOU have what seems to be a really bad cold. You are coughing and

sneezing, and it is hard to breathe.

Related

Health Guide: Colds

 

Filip Kwiatkowski for The New York Times

 

 

Should you work out?

 

And if you do, should you push yourself as hard as ever or take it

easy? Will exercise have no effect, or make you feel better or worse?

 

It is a question, surprisingly enough, that stumps many exercise

physiologists and infectious disease specialists.

 

" That question has not been actually studied, " said Dr. Aaron E.

Glatt, a spokesman for the Infectious Diseases Society and the

president of New Island Hospital in Bethpage, N.Y.

 

Many avid exercisers make up their own rules, and it seems that many

of them, like Dr. Michael Joyner, an exercise researcher at the Mayo

Clinic who is a swimmer and runner, decide to keep exercising if they

possibly can.

 

" I can tell you that unless I am really wiped out, I still work out

but maybe scale back a bit, " Dr. Joyner said. " I think that would be

the answer from most relatively hard-core, old-school types.

 

" If I have an obvious fever and muscle aches, " he continued, " I do

very little or take a day or two off, but I really have to be in a

bad way to skip more than that. "

 

Dr. Bill Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine

at Vanderbilt University and a member of the board of directors of

the Infectious Diseases Society, said he was unaware of any studies

that addressed the issue.

 

Dr. Schaffner described himself as a jogger who runs a few miles most

days and goes to a gym for resistance training. And, he said, he

continues his workouts when he has a cold.

 

Exercise, he said, makes him feel better. He speculates that perhaps

it is because his blood vessels are dilated when he exercises.

 

" I think exercise pushes me along a route to recovery, " Dr. Schaffner

said. " Of course, I recognize that I might have been on a route to

recovery anyway. But I can't think of a reason why exercise would

affect you adversely. "

 

It turns out that, even though they were unaware of them, the

strategies of people like Dr. Schaffner and Dr. Joyner are actually

supported by two little-known studies that were published a decade

ago in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Results

from the studies were so much in favor of exercise that the

researchers themselves were surprised.

 

The studies began, said Leonard Kaminsky, an exercise physiologist at

Ball State University, when a trainer at the university, Thomas

Weidner, wondered what he should tell athletes when they got colds.

 

The first question was: Does a cold affect your ability to exercise?

To address that, the researchers recruited 24 men and 21 women ages

18 to 29 and of varying levels of fitness who agreed to be

deliberately infected with a rhinovirus, which is responsible for

about a third of all colds. Another group of 10 young men and women

served as controls; they were not infected.

 

At the start of the study, the investigators tested all of the

subjects, assessing their lung functions and exercise capacity. Then

a cold virus was dropped into the noses of 45 of the subjects, and

all caught head colds. Two days later, when their cold symptoms were

at their worst, the subjects exercised by running on treadmills at

moderate and intense levels. The researchers reported that having a

cold had no effect on either lung function or exercise capacity.

 

" I was surprised their lung function wasn't impaired, " Dr. Kaminsky

said. " I was surprised their overall exercise performance wasn't

impaired, even though they were reporting feeling fatigued. "

 

He said he also tested the subjects at different points in the

exercise sessions, from moderate to intense effort, and found that

their colds had no effect on their metabolic responses.

 

Another question was: Does exercising when you have a cold affect

your symptoms and recovery time?

 

Once again, Dr, Kaminsky and his colleagues infected volunteers with

a rhinovirus. This time, the subjects were 34 young men and women who

were randomly assigned to a group that would exercise with their

colds and 16 others who were assigned to rest.

 

The group that exercised ran on treadmills for 40 minutes every other

day at moderate levels of 70 percent of their maximum heart rates.

 

Every 12 hours, all the subjects in the study completed

questionnaires about their symptoms and physical activity. The

researchers collected the subjects' used facial tissues, weighing

them to assess their cold symptoms.

 

The investigators found no difference in symptoms between the group

that exercised and the one that rested. And there was no difference

in the time it took to recover from the colds. But when the

exercisers assessed their symptoms, Dr. Kaminsky said, " people said

they felt O.K. and, in some cases, they actually felt better. "

 

Now, Dr. Kaminsky said, he and others at Ball State encourage people

to exercise when they have colds, at least if they have the type

producing symptoms like runny noses and sneezing. He is more cautious

about other types of colds that produce fevers or symptoms below the

neck such as chest congestion. Exercising with a head cold is not an

issue for athletes, Dr. Kaminsky said, because most of them want to

train no matter what. " If anything they tend to push too much, " he

said.

 

Dr. Kaminsky also runs a fitness program at the university, dealing

with regular exercisers. When he tells them it is all right to

exercise when they have a cold, many are " a little suspicious, " he

said. Often, they want to back off a little, lowering the intensity

of their efforts.

 

" We tell them that's O.K. if it's for a short period of time, " Dr.

Kaminsky said. " But what you have to be cautious of, where I see it

as more of an issue, is with people who are trying to build that

exercise habit. They've got all these barriers anyway. "

 

AND too often taking time off because of a cold is the start of

falling away from the program entirely.

 

Dr. Kaminsky, who runs and works out on elliptical cross trainers and

does resistance training, takes the studies' findings to heart. Now

when he has a cold, he continues to work out.

 

" It did give me the personal assurance that it was a good thing to

do, " he said.