Head Colds Suck

So I spent the majority of last week trying to fight off a head cold, and I think I’m finally turning the corner and ready to breathe through both nostrils once again. This is a strange thing, since it’s been probably about 5 years since I last had anything resembling a cold. Now, given the fact that I work in close contact with sweaty hard-breathing people all day, I work long hours, and tend to have a lot of irons in the fire at any given time, this is a pretty remarkable feat, and it allows me to work with more and more people with my mad ninja fitness trainer capabilities that sneak up on you and before you know it BAM!!! you’re 8 times more fitness awesome-er.

Now at any given time in the Edmonton and surrounding area, there seems to be outbreaks of no less than 87 different kinds of colds, flus, viruses, bugs, or other fun things that makes a lot of people miserable and whiny. The fact that I’m diesel enough to fight off all these pathogenic jack-bags (Note: a jack-bag is an awesome combination of the phrases “jack-ass” and “douchebag”) means I must be doing something right, so today I’m going to share the best advice to avoiding a cold you could ever get from anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Step One: Get Your Ass to Bed

Sleepie-time is important for more than simply daydreaming about Justin Bieber and which of the Kardashians you’d like to shoot. It helps your body recover from the stresses of the day and gets you a big boost in your immune system. I tend to go to bed at around 10pm so that I can wake up at 5am each morning, meaning about 7 hours of sleep each night. Most of the research available on sleep and health shows that you have to get an average of 6-8 hours of sleep, but more important is the fact that you need to enter into REM sleep about 3-4 times during an evening. This is the stage of deep sleep where you do the most dreaming, and means that you will have gone through some deep restorative cycles of recovery in order to enter into it. Some people can sleep for 10 hours and not feel rested simply because they have a hard time getting into deep REM sleep, whereas some people can get completely rested on only 4 hours of sleep.

The best way to have a great night’s sleep is to get to bed at roughly the same time each night, avoid eating within 30 minutes of going to bed, and for the love of god stop reading in bed!! If you have trouble falling asleep because your brain won’t stop running on high, try doing a brain dump before going to bed, where you write down everything you have to do, need to work on, angles you’re thinking about, or anything else that may be important. This way you won’t keep thinking about them to try to remind yourself, allowing you to relax and catch some Z’s.

Step Two: Eat Good Food

This is a simple one, but one that gets overlooked a lot. Eating foods that have lots of vitamins and minerals in them, aside from being delicious, can help to boost your immune system and help keep you strong in the face of germ-time nasties. There’s a lot of controversies about whether a multivitamin is better than foods or whether the whole food is best. My thoughts? Essentially, multivitamins only have the compounds nutritional science have identified and consider important. There’s also a lot of compounds in foods that science hasn’t figured out yet, and combinations that haven’t been studied yet, which means the multi still is able to be considered incomplete as far as nutritional needs are concerned.

I remember a friend of mine who was hard into bodybuilding, and who did all his grocery shopping at GNC. His thoughts were that by taking meal replacements, protein bars, and multivitamins and all sorts of crazy supplements, he would wind up being the picture of health and have women dangling off him 24/7. Not so much. After a month of that, he wound up on the floor and craving a salad like no one’s business. Once he started eating food again, not only was he able to make it through the day without explosive diarrhea, but he actually got stronger and was able to push more weight. Amazing, right??

Step Three: Calm the Hell Down, Would Ya??

Keeping stress levels relatively low is stupidly important at being able to fight off a cold, as stress, specifically prolonged distress, tends to lower your immune system. I remember playing sports in high school, and whenever we would go into playoffs or an intense long tournament, we would play lots, practice lots, and had a lot of stress on us to be fantastic. Once the playoffs were over, I usually got some form of a cold for a few days as my immune system tried to recover.

Additionally, the people who get the most colds and flus tend to be the ones who get stressed out by everything, and approach minor situations like a missed bill payment with the intensity of  nuclear apocalypse. Understanding that not everything in your life demands life or death scenarios to be played out in your head (My favorite show is a repeat!! GAAAAAAAAH!!!!) can go a long way to making you one happy camper and live a long and disease-free life.

Step Four: SMILE, DAMMIT!!!!

It’s no wonder the people who laugh the most actually tend to be the happiest, and will also be the ones who get sick the fewest times in a year. Laughing does some weird and mysterious things to the body and psyche, so I try to laugh pretty much all day long, and I try to make my clients laugh at least a few dozen times each session. Some accomplish this within the warmup, others are a harder sell,  but I always try.

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Step Five: Work it Out

You knew I would have to bring up working out and getting your swole on in here, right?? I mean, come on, it’s a fitness blog!! Working out is fantastic for pumping up the immune system, except for one simple fact of everyone and their mouth-breathing tendencies are coughing into their hands and then grabbing dumbells and barbells, spreading their lung butter on to everyone else who touches them. While it may be too anal-retentive to wipe down each handle and sanitize every surface like an obsessive pageant mom, using some form of sanitizer can go a long way. Additionally, most facilities are offering hand sanitizers around the way, so use them once in a while to keep your exposure to a minimum.

I use the rule of anytime I touch a client, whether it’s stretching them or assessing strength or range of motion, I use a hand sanitizer. This could be up to 5-10 times a day, so it works pretty well for me.

Doing some form of resistance training and anaerobic-based cardio can have a big impact on immune function. I know this from working with cancer patients, who typically have no immune system, or very little for that regard. While they’re working out, their risk of infection is typically much lower than if they are not physically active, and there’s even some fancy research to back it up HERE. The study (from the University of Alberta, my alma mater no less!!) showed that following a 15 week trial of 3-times per week of cycling training, those who exercised showed a significant increase in the activity of their killer-T cells, as well as an increase in their number and effectiveness per cell, which means that if exercise can help a cancer patient, it can help you get over your sniffles.

So hopefully this will bethe one and only cold I get for the next five years. I figure that’s a pretty good average, and the fact that I didn’t even need to skip a day at work meant that I was able to retain my status as bulletproof, even if my tough outer shell was slightly dented from this last assault. Being sick is no fun, and I hope I don’t have to experience it again anytime soon. I swear if I get another cold or flu or anything like that I’m gonna scream at my sprinkler.