Fit through the Winter

How the five pillars of bodybuilding will guide you safely through the cold season

Who hasn't experienced it: Training is going extremely well, the heavy weights in the gym suddenly feel as light as a feather and your form is improving visually from training session to training session - and then it starts. Your throat starts to scratch, your nose runs and you somehow feel weak and exhausted. Awful!

Let's be honest, there is hardly anything worse for an ambitious athlete than being put out of action by a cold. One thing is also certain: winter is cold season.

The cold temperatures cause the blood vessels in our nasal mucosa to contract, which reduces blood circulation and makes it easier for viruses and bacteria to enter our bodies. The same thing happens when our mucous membranes dry out due to the heating air. Because we spend more time in closed, poorly ventilated rooms, the lack of air circulation can also contribute to the misery.

Bad conditions, but fortunately the situation is not quite so hopeless. After all, you can take proactive measures to prepare your immune system for the cold season.

As is so often the case, the basic pillars of bodybuilding postulated by our founder Joe Weider come into play here: regular exercise or training, a balanced diet tailored to your needs, sufficient sleep and rest, and adequate exposure to sunlight.

Sun in winter?

“Sunlight? Where am I supposed to get that from?” you are probably asking yourself. Well, unfortunately we can’t influence the weather, but sunlight is needed for vitamin D synthesis – and we can certainly provide vitamin D.

As already explained in our vitamin D blog article (LINK), the vitamin, which is actually a hormone, influences gene expression (i.e. the reading of a gene and its translation into a protein).

With regard to the immune system, vitamin D influences the differentiation (maturation) of various immune cells, including monocytes, macrophages (phagocytes) and lymphocytes (e.g. B cells & T cells) and is therefore essential for the function of the innate and acquired immune system.

The scientific literature on this topic is diverse, but the conclusion is clear: an adequate vitamin D level has a positive effect on immune function. Not really surprising when you consider that almost all types of immune cells have a vitamin D receptor (Martens et al. 2020).

Also in the wake of the emergence of the disease Covid-19, caused by novel coronaviruses, there is sufficient evidence that vitamin D deficiency is associated with a more severe course of the disease and vice versa (sufficient levels ensure a milder course) (e.g. Gotelli et al. 2022; Martineau 2022; Pereira et al. 2022).

If the sun does shine in the cold months, the UV-B radiation will not help maintain vitamin D levels in our latitudes, but you should still enjoy it. For example, by going for a nice walk (because exercise has a positive effect on immune function - but one thing at a time...).

Even in winter, the saying goes: You are what you eat!

Let's now move on from supplementing the sun hormone to general nutrition and other useful nutritional supplements. It is well known that fruit and vegetables are rich in micronutrients. In terms of nutrient content, meat and other animal products often do not fare so well in terms of image due to the ongoing trend towards vegetarian or vegan diets. Unjustly! Red meat, for example, is very rich in zinc and selenium, two trace elements that also play an extremely important role in the context of immune function. And the good old home remedy, grandma's chicken broth, also has a right to exist. A balanced mixed diet made up of foods that are as unprocessed as possible provides the body with many important nutrients that support the immune system in its work against pathogens. To be on the safe side, it can undoubtedly be a good idea to take a multivitamin supplement as a supplement. When the body is ill, the immune system is running at full speed and has a correspondingly higher consumption of micronutrients. Logical, right? A 2020 study by Lenhart and colleagues showed that the group of subjects who took a micronutrient supplement were less likely to suffer from upper respiratory infection (URI) than the placebo group (Lenhart et al. 2020).

Also exciting: Whey protein, the elixir of life for ambitious gym-goers, contains lactoferrin. Lactoferrin is a glycoprotein that has the ability to bind iron. Certain immune cells (neutrophil granulocytes) can release lactoferrin, which deprives microbacteria of iron that they need for growth. In addition, the molecule has an immunomodulating and anti-inflammatory effect (Kowalczyk et al. 2022). Whether Premium Whey or Clear Isolate - with a delicious Weider protein shake you are not only doing your muscles a big favor, but also your immune system.

Apart from fruit, vegetables, meat and whey, it can also be useful to supplement individual nutrients. For example, zinc is known to be able to reduce the duration of colds in higher doses (Hemilä and Chalker 2015).

Also worth mentioning here are vitamin C, selenium and quercetin. The latter is a flavonoid, i.e. a secondary plant substance (Mehrbod et al. 2021). It should be mentioned at this point that our zZZMA capsules contain quercetin in addition to zinc. The melatonin they contain can improve sleep - and sleep also has a positive effect on immune function, as mentioned at the beginning. Can this be a coincidence?

Anyway, let’s take this opportunity to move on to the next cornerstone of bodybuilding: sleep.

Time for hibernation!

As we all know, sleep is the best medicine. Everyone knows that, and there is no need for scientific publications to prove it. Experience and common sense are sufficient here. Nevertheless, we want to give you a little input and share a few findings with you.

A study published in 2015 by Prather and colleagues in the journal "Sleep" was able to show a connection between short sleep duration and susceptibility to infection. In the name of science, the test subjects allowed themselves to be infected with pathogens via nasal drops, while sleep parameters were recorded throughout the study. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their extraordinary courage and honor the sacrifice of the test subjects by taking the study results to heart and going to bed on time. One year later, in 2016, Prather and Leung published the results of a cohort study (an observational study of a representative population sample) which confirmed the results of the previously conducted experimental study.

Lack of sleep affects various immune-related parameters, such as the number and activity of immune cells, antibody levels and the production of cytokines (messenger substances) (Besedovsky et al. 2019). It is therefore not surprising that too little sleep increases the risk of infection.

Always keep moving!

Last but not least, we come to exercise. Even though physical exercise is a stress factor and can temporarily weaken the immune system, adaptation improves immune function in the long term (Wang et al. 2020).

If you have already caught it, you obviously have to listen to your body's feelings first and foremost. We athletes have the (hard-earned) privilege of being able to assess our physical condition a little better than non-athletes. After decades of training, we have become sensitive to our body's signals and can judge well when a break from training is appropriate. If the cold has not thrown us completely off track, it is certainly possible to continue training at a moderate intensity. A somewhat older study by Thomas Weidner and colleagues (Weidner, not Weider... what a pity...) showed that training at a moderate intensity neither worsens the course of the disease in the case of a rhinovirus infection of the upper respiratory tract nor prolongs the duration of the illness (Weidner et al. 1988). This is where individual experience comes into play, of course. If you have been completely destroyed by mild cold symptoms after training sessions in the past, you should perhaps give your body a little rest.

As always, our blog article only scratches the surface of an incredibly complex topic. However, we can say that you're doing quite well with the basic pillars of bodybuilding postulated by Joe Weider in terms of optimizing your immune function. Exercise, eat well, get enough sleep and rest, supplement sensibly (e.g. multivitamins and extra vitamin D) and you'll get through the cold season largely unscathed. With that in mind, dress warmly and get to work!