| 11 December 2009
You have just started on a fitness kick and you wake up one morning with what seems to be a really bad cold. You are coughing and sneezing, and it is hard to breathe.
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 health professionals but more seriously it often derails attempts of those trying to get into the habit of regularly exercising.
It turns out that two little-known studies that were published a decade ago in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise addressed this question.Results from the studies were so much in favor of exercise that the researchers themselves were surprised.
Firstly the researchers asked, “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,” said head researcher Dr. Kaminsky. “I was surprised their overall exercise performance wasn’t impaired, even though they were reporting feeling fatigued.”
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.”
Researchers concluded that if you have a cold you should continue your exercise program. This is particularly important for people just getting into an exercise program because too often taking time off because of a cold is the start of falling away from the program entirely.
