Exercise Helps Your Immune System

As we move into cold and flu season, everyone is taking extra precautions to help build up their immune systems. But vitamin C and hand sanitizer might not be the only options for fighting flu season. Studies show that exercise helps your immune system along with all of it’s other health benefits.

Studies show that one thing that helps prevent people from catching colds and flues is regular moderate exercise. People who take short 20 to 30 minute walks everyday, ride bikes with their kids, or go to the gym every other day have been shown to catch fewer colds and suffer from fewer seasonal disease. Scientists believe this is because exercise helps flush bacteria from our lungs and respiratory system. It also may clean diseases from the the rest of the body via the wastes it creates such as sweat and urine. Exercise also sends antibodies through the blood stream at a quicker rate and even increases the number of anti-bodies for the duration of the workout. People who exercise consistently have been shown to keep the high level of anti-bodies and disease fighting cells even after the exercise is finished. Exercise also reduces stress, which has been known to compromise the immune system.

It’s not just the flu and a few colds exercise can prevent either, new studies show that regular exercise can even strengthen your immune system against cancer. Doctors believe that exercise can also help wash carcinogens from the blood steam as well causes the immune cells to change to a form that is better prepared to fight off cancer. So far studies have shown that exercise decreases your chance of ever developing certain cancers, helps improve the immune systems pf people already battling cancer, and helps prevent secondary cancers in patients already affected. The cause of these links in not completely clear yet, but the out come is very promising.

All of these health benefits don’t mean that you should go crazy with your exercise regime though. You can exercise too much, at least as far as your immune system is concerned. Marathon runners and other hard core athletes actually have suppressed immune systems because of all the stress that their exercise regimes put on their bodies. However, as long as you don’t work out form ore than two hours everyday you don’t have to worry about your immune system being compromised by exercise. Remember, a little exercise helps your immune system and could keep your body in tip-top shape for years to come.