Does exercise improve your immune response?

For the major proportion of the population social distancing, regular handwashing, mask wearing, getting double doses of the vaccine and testing when a known close contact made the most sense. However what other measures like good nutrition, regular physical activity and stress management can play an effective role in maintaining good immune and respiratory health. During and in the hours following a single bout of exercise there is an increase in cell recruitment, the number of circulating pro and anti-inflammatory cytokines and lymphocyte circulation. A secondary review paper published by da Silveira et al. (2020) indicated that such factors influence a lower incidence, mortality rate and reduced intensity of symptoms associated with virally infected individuals.

Typically, COVID-19 is clinically characterised by fever, cough, fatigue, breathlessness, pneumonia, other neurological symptoms, or mortality. The immune dysregulation that occurs with COVID-19 has had fatal outcomes for individuals with other comorbidities or those of old age. If you consider the statistics that in 2019, around 703 million people were over the age of 65 worldwide that put 10% of the world’s population at risk of a negative prognosis related to COVID-19 infection. Therefore, the implementation of physical activity and exercise has been widely prescribed due to its anti-inflammatory properties and its ability to promote healthy ageing reducing all-cause mortality risk.