Strategies to Remain Healthy with an Increase in Covid-19 Cases: Series Part 2
This is the second installment of several video blogs that we will be doing on strategies to remain healthy with an increase in Covid-19 cases.
In our last blog, we spoke about 4 lifestyle changes you can make to improve your overall immune function and take some degree of control over your health during these uncertain times.
- Stress reduction
- Sleep
- Regular Exercise (A great New Year’s/Life resolution)
- Eating more healthy
Today we’ll discuss Cardiorespiratory Fitness (CRF,) as improving it can help manage stress (#1) and sleep (#2). Also, because CRF is improved through regular exercise, by default it also covers exercise (#3)– that’s 3 of the 4 lifestyle changes you can make to improve your immune system. Seems pretty cool right?
As outlined in a recent article in the prestigious British Journal of Sports Medicine, “High CRF has been suggested to be beneficial in COVID-19 by better controlling proinflammatory responses and potentially enhancing antiviral host responses following infection.”
How amazing it is to think that improving CRF helps control inflammation which, in turn, enhances our immune system.
The article continues… “In line with this assumption, an inverse association of CRF with hospitalization due to COVID-19 has recently been described: women in the lowest quartile of CRF had about two-fold greater hospitalization rates than those of the highest quartile. The effect for men was even more pronounced.”
Wow! So, improving CRF also reduced the rate of hospitalization in women but even more significantly in men!
Check out the following diagram to better understand how improving CRF through Physical Activity (PA) negates the bad stuff as shown with the blue lines.
Stay tuned to our next video blog for information on how we, at Studholme Chiropractic, measure and improve CRF. Here’s a little hint: there is much more to it than simply exercising more, although that’s a great place to start!
If you’ve like to learn more about how you can improve your cardiorespiratory fitness and overall health, give us a call at 303-939-0004 or contact us today!
