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Why Clinicians Should Encourage Patients to Exercise During the Pandemic

Published On 1.27.21

By Joshua Middlecamp, PT, DPT

Physical Therapist

For the last 10 months, we’ve been looking for a way to fight COVID-19. Vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine, even bleach, and now a vaccine. Though even before this pandemic, the scientific community has been looking for the end-all-be-all of immune-boosting illness-fighters. But maybe we’re looking in the wrong place.

As a physical therapist, I work to help make people healthier by prescribing exercise and modifying patients’ lifestyles for the better. Now I know what you’re thinking: “Here comes the ‘everybody should exercise more’ talk,” and you’re right! To date, exercise has been linked to a wide variety of impressively helpful effects for your health and body:

  • Relieving stress
  • Strengthening your muscles
  • Improving joint health

But what if I told you exercise could also help improve your body’s defense system against illnesses just like COVID-19?

What Effects Does Exercise Have on COVID-19?

Whether we like it or not, COVID-19 has played a huge role in our lives this past year, and it continues to loom as we look forward to the future, vaccine or not. The good news is, we are constantly looking for ways to bolster the health and safety of humanity, and we have a secret weapon.

That’s right! Exercise, or regular physical activity,  can do much more than release endorphins and help us look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime. In a recent systematic review, Chastin et al. found that exercise can do the following:

Decrease Your Risk of Getting Sick

With a 31% lower risk of getting sick from community-acquired illnesses, similar to COVID-19, it almost seems silly to not get up and go for a walk every day. Exercise can even help improve the function of your immune system, giving your body a better chance at finding and fighting the infection. But exercise also helps prevent and improve chronic conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, and/or hypertension. So if chronic diseases put you at a greater risk for complications due to COVID-19, and exercise can help mitigate the severity of those chronic conditions, it’s pretty clear how getting up and staying active can help keep you safe and healthy.

Improve Your Immune System

Regular physical activity has been shown to help increase your body’s concentration of immune system cells. Think about it like this, if your immune system is made up of surveillance equipment that alerts your body to an intruder (in this case, illnesses like COVID-19), then exercise provides a much-needed boost to that security system, giving your body a better chance at catching the virus sooner, in addition to giving it a stronger system to fight off the intruder. To put it into numbers, Chastin et al. found that increased levels of physical activity are associated with a 38% lower risk of infectious disease-related mortality.

Improve Your Body’s Response to Vaccines

Increased levels of physical activity on a regular basis can improve the use of vaccinations. How is this possible? This study shows that participating in physical exercise on a regular basis can increase the number of antibodies your body produces after being vaccinated, and even more notably in older adults! More exercise means more antibodies, and more antibodies mean less risk of infection!

We’re talking huge benefits to our health here! If an exercise can play a role in the risk of getting sick with things like the flu, or pneumonia, both similar to COVID-19, and it improves your immune system function, not only are you less likely to get sick, but if you do end up contracting the illness, the effect can be less severe. And when it comes time to get your doses of the vaccine, regular physical activity can help maximize its effect, further decreasing your risk of getting community-acquired illnesses like COVID-19.

So, What’s Next?

At a time where infection and hospitalization rates continue to rise despite efforts to increase testing availability, understanding the information above is of the utmost importance. Regular physical activity can facilitate improvement in one’s immunity, as well as improve the body’s resilience against diseases such as COVID-19. Exercise can better prepare preventative methods and establish prevention protocols that will be both wide-ranging and long-lasting, if successful.

We know now what we need to do. That’s right. The first step we need to take to help minimize the impact of this pandemic may be as simple as watching one less episode of The Great British Baking Show, and instead of going for a walk, picking up some weights, or doing something we love that gets our heart rate up for a bit. Start small by taking a walk around your neighborhood block, and work your way up from there. Habits can take a few weeks to develop their place in your day-to-day routine. But when their effects may amount to establishing nearly a one-third reduction in catching the coronavirus, I say let’s get to walking!

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