I watched your vid. Enjoyed it.
My PhD is in Sport Physiology and Performance. Not an MD!
I'm still a little unclear on if you mean exercise during an active case of covid or if you mean having been a regular exerciser before contracting covid.
It is important to make a distinction in exercise science whether you are talking about acute or chronic "exercise." Responses to acute vs. chronic exercise are vastly different, of course. (example: acute exercise raises HR, and chronic exercise reduces HR for a given work rate).
Things I think we agree on:
High fitness doesn't prevent contraction of covid.
Higher fitness levels before contracting covid are associated improved outcomes for both mild and more severe cases, probably across all populations/ages.
Skepticism:
I'm skeptical that actively endurance training, even mildly for short durations, is a wise idea during an active and even mildly symptomatic, covid case. I'm not sure if this is the case that you're making though.
Is it? FYI: my skepticism for the claim that endurance exercise during a symptomatic covid case may be useful, even if it upregulates EcSOD production, is that this is a very mechanistic approach to drawing a broader and unverified application. This is one of the most common ways that the field of exercise science has been led down years of dogmatic but erroneous and harmful thinking.
Example:
In resistance training for the purpose of hypertrophy (muscle growth), if rest intervals between sets of lifting are cut very short, and greater metabolic disturbance is present within the muscle tissue, as a result, there is an increase in testosterone post-workout, that exists to a much lesser degree, if no such cellular disturbance is caused in a scenario where the lifter uses longer inter-set rest periods. On it's face, this increase in testosterone, which is often quite substantial, and is highly reliable at least among male resistance trained subjects, seems like it is a hugely desirable goal. Testosterone is one of the most anabolic (muscle growth-promoting) substances on the planet. Thus, there were books published, including the NSCA's gold standard textbook for more than a decade, that cited that the best way to cause muscular hypertrophy was to train with low rest intervals between sets. The painful irony is that the tradeoffs of taking shorter rest between sets far outweigh any very transient increase in intramuscular protein accretion (hypertrophy) caused by the similarly transient increase in post-workout testosterone.
The dogma died hard and it was all caused by looking at the mechanism in an acute scenario and drawing chronic adaptation-related conclusions from it.
It seems likely from what you're saying that EcSOD production is indeed increased during or post-exercise, and it sounds like you're speaking about acute exercise in the video. But, the health-promoting effects of EcSOD in a symptomatic covid case outweighing the illness-furthering effects of exercise (increased systemic stress, mechanical irritation of tissues, increased tissue inflammatory response, tissue swelling, etc) seems unlikely to me.
I would at the VERY least wait until non-mechanistic studies, and more purely applied studies on the matter have been completed. Certainly, promoting blood flow is ideal for most pathologic situations, but doing so with anything that might be classified as endurance exercise, even if mild, comes with a whole host of other possible mechanisms that might further illness. Namely, acute endurance training load of any kind reduces immunity and increases susceptibility and severity of virtually every illness. While there may be acute responses of increased blood flow, clearing out lungs via increased respiration, coughing, and clearing out airways via increased respiration and reduced viscosity of the mucus/fluid in those passages, that is purely an acute response and usually results in worse symptoms 6-24 hrs post-exercise during illness, in my humblest of both personal and professional experience.
Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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