In the hot days of summer, common warnings involve avoiding the heat. What about the advantages of heat? Hot environments can improve your health in several ways.
Done right:
Exercising in the heat improves your fitness level and ability to exercise.
Exercising in the heat increases your tolerance to heat, making life more comfortable in the heat.
Exercising in the heat prevents the decreases in heat tolerance that otherwise occur with increased age, which can be unhealthy, even dangerous.
Exercising in the heat makes positive changes in your body that improve your fitness. You increase blood volume, improve cooling ability, make changes in sweating, increase the vasculature that helps circulation, cooling and exercising at the same time, increase specific chemical compounds in the body that improve health and ability to exercise.
When you exercise and increase body temperature, your body produces more of an interesting compound called heat shock protein. Heat shock proteins are families of proteins that do several things including preventing other proteins from damage by infection, ultraviolet light, starvation, heat, cold, and other harsh conditions. Heat shock proteins are thought to mobilize immune function against infections and diseases, even cancer.
Improved ability to tolerate heat without discomfort, called heat adaptation, occurs fairly quickly - with large improvements within the first week of exerting in the heat. Exercising in heat is more effective to produce heat acclimatization than heat exposure without exercise. Aerobic fitness is a major factor in heat tolerance.
It is a myth that you must avoid sweating to stay healthy. Exercising enough to sweat makes you more flexible, increases many chemical reactions in your body that are healthy. Sweat itself has compounds beneficial for your skin and body. Don't worry that you must exercise only indoors in air-conditioning in order to do healthful exercise. A protective environment does prevent initial discomfort, but reduces benefits and the ability to be comfortable in the heat.
This all does not mean to go out and cause yourself heat injury by overdoing without thinking. It is to gain the many benefits of exercising safely in the heat
I will cover more physical changes from exercise in the heat that improve health and exercise level in future articles.
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Losing most of your heat through your head is a popular myth. Head heat loss is not the majority of body heat lost. Not even close.
Years of my career in research have been to study how the human body performs in extremes - exercise, injury states and how to prevent them, working and exercising in heat and cold, changes in air and pressure on mountain tops, and the related but different problems in space and underwater. I have lived in laboratories underwater and done experiments aboard aircraft. I have studied combat swimmers and done extreme swims with them for fun. For military research, I put men in vats of freezing water to see how we can keep pilots alive after bail-outs and how to get covert swimmers to their objective and, I found out, an entire separate topic to get them back again. Strong brave men got hazardous duty pay just to have a day with me. My life is scientific research and finding out why things are the way they are and how to make us better at surviving them. After finding out all these interesting things, I found out another thing - people still like myths more than fact. Here are some interesting facts (cool facts on cold):
Head heat loss is usually less than one-third to one-fifth of total heat loss. That means it is not the majority, which would be more than 50%. Head heat loss is usually less than 20-30 percent or so of total heat loss.
Head heat loss changes with how cold it is. The lower the temperature, the higher percentage head heat loss. Head heat loss is linear with temperature. At 0 degrees Centigrade, up to about 30 to 35% of heat could be lost through your head at rest.
Head heat loss changes with how much you exercise. When exercising at about a work rate of 50% of aerobic capacity, head heat loss falls to less than half of heat loss at rest.
Head heat loss changes if you are in water compared to air.
The heat you lose from your head is small compared to the rest of your body. Some people have bigger heads than others in proportion to their stature, so maybe they can lose a percentage more heat. To reduce heat loss, wear a hat.
All about cold, cold immersion, and scuba, try my book Diving Physiology in Plain English www.DrBookspan.com/books. Post about body heat and cooling after death - Time of Death From Body Temperature? All posts on myths - click the label 'myths' under this post. All posts on aviation and aerospace - click the label 'aerospace' under this post. All posts on cold or heat - click the corresponding label under this post.
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Several readers asked what else they can do for painful head and sinus congestion, because after two+ weeks of medicines and doctor visits, they were no better, or were worse. Common treatments do not work as claimed, including decongestants and sprays, and can cause sinus pain to continue and recur.
What Are Sinuses? The sinuses in your head are eight spaces in your skull behind your eyes and nose. They produce mucus, and that is good. Mucus produces antiseptics, and traps and filters germs and particles that you don't want to pass into your respiratory system and the rest of your body. Sinusitis occurs when one or more of your sinus cavities become inflamed.
Inflamed by Inhaling Things Sinuses can become inflamed without any germs causing it, for example from inhaling particles, allergens, or liquids up the nose. If you have ever "gotten water up your nose" in a pool, you have felt the results. The practice of irrigating the nose and sinuses with salt-water sprays is often prescribed for sinus congestion, and even for preventive "maintenance," but it removes important protective mucus layers and natural disease-fighting compounds, and is irritating in itself. Some people regularly spray the sinuses using a variety of squeeze bottles, or a device called a neti pot. It is an unnecessary practice, and does not prevent the underlying cause of sinus pain. It sets up an addictive cycle of rebound congestion and irritation, and increased risk of infections and discomfort to follow.
Another contributor to rebound congestion is regular use of camphor inhalers. Sniffing camphor is a widespread practice throughout Asia, where decorative camphor containers shaped to fit the nose are sold in most grocery, pharmacy, and convenience stores. Camphor irritates mucus membranes causing a cycle of irritation, more camphor inhalation, and more congestion. Some people develop a habit of inhaling camphor, thinking it is for their congestion, not realizing they have a substance inhalation addiction called "huffing."
Decongestants Decongestants are a big money item in drug store sales. They are not the best treatment for sinus pain and congestion. You are already too clogged up. You do not want more "drying out." The clogged areas would do better becoming more dilute by drinking hot liquids, not by becoming more gummy and concentrated with the "drying out" of a decongestant. After the decongestant wears off, a rebound can occur of more congestion. Taking more decongestant perpetuates a negative cycle, and can raise blood pressure. Cough syrups and pills that contain dexomethorphan (DXM) to block coughing are not as effective for coughs as hoped, but are popularly abused by kids looking for a cheap, easily available "high" ("rhobotripping") with unhealthy physical and psychoactive effects. Infections and Antibiotics Sometimes sinuses fill with bacterial or viral fluid. Antibiotic do not help against sinusitis, even the kinds colonized by bacteria. Antibiotics can kill your body's good "bugs" or weaken them, leaving you susceptible to stronger bad bugs, who learn how to live and multiply in your body. Antibiotics taken orally reduce the needed numbers of beneficial flora that normally live in your GI tract. The nutritional and immunogenic products that they normally make in your body are not made, and the organisms responsible for several illnesses can rapidly reproduce and get out of control. An example is antibiotic-associated Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) colitis, an infection of the colon that occurs primarily among patients exposed to antibiotics. More than three million C. difficile infections occur in hospitals in the U.S. each year. He number is growing. An estimated 20,000 C. difficile infections occur each year in the U.S. outside the hospital - directly caused by taking antibiotics.
Healthier Ways to Decongest and Sooth:
Hot steamy showers and baths.
Hot facial compresses.
No need for fancy vaporizers with chemicals (more camphor or other irritants to inhale). Put on a kettle or any pot of water and heat until steaming. Stand at a distance where you feel the warm steam, without standing close enough for any chance of burns. No need to bend over as in the photo at right. Stand in healthy comfortable position for your back and neck.
Eat spicy foods that you like, such as wasabi or chili peppers.
Drink hot peppermint tea, or other warm, aromatic teas with lemon.
A walk outdoors in fresh air and sunshine helps clear breathing and pain.
Do any fun exercise to heat your body. Increasing body temperature loosens clogging secretions and generates heat shock proteins that have been found to be pretty good for you. The post Exercise and Cancer touches on the basics of heat shock proteins.
More information on preventing and resolving sinus problems, things to know about antibiotic use, and other infectious topics are in the book Healthy Martial Arts.
We have been traveling for the past 2 months in Asia and are on the way to the chilly Smokey Mountains of Tennessee USA to teach medical students for a week during their rotation elective in Wilderness Medicine. This is the third year I will teach there.
I will teach the entire curriculum of diving medicine and physiology, plus a workshop on why commonly prescribed stretches are not healthful, and what to do instead. Several members of the Knox County Sheriff's Office from Knoxville TN have requested to attend my lectures, and several readers made the effort to find the class information on my web site and make arrangements to travel to the camp to attend.
As a physiologist, I design the techniques that physicians use. I spent many years as a military and university researcher in environmental physiology, which is how the body functions in the heat and cold, at altitude and underwater, breathing different mixtures of gases, doing different forms and intensities of exercise. It's important to understand why things work. If you don't understand, then you can't think for yourself, and all you can do is repeat the mistakes of the generation before you, who also were just repeating what they learned in a book from teachers who just were repeating what they had heard.
This problem occurs with some of the exercises and stretches given as physical therapy. An introduction to the problem is in the post What Does Stretching Do? In the past two years teaching at the camp, we encountered young students who were not interested to change bad stretches, and made a point of showing me after my lectures that they will keep doing their rounded bent forward toe touches, since "everyone knows" that is how it is done. However, Sitting Badly Isn't Magically Healthy by Calling It a Hamstring Stretch.
The problem can occur with medical treatments that are in the books, even though wrong. In my diving physiology lectures, I try to show that if you understand the physiology, you will know why certain treatments do not work or are not needed. Immersion in water, for example, creates many interesting effects such as distributing blood volume more out of the limbs to the body. This is similar to the effect that occurs in space, described in Collapsing Astronaut Gives Healthy Reminder. Recently, during our travels, Paul wound up in the hospital with a swollen leg. The doctor who was Chief of Medicine of the hospital, announced that the treatment was bed rest. Paul was told he must lie flat in bed for at least three to fours days with the leg elevated to drain the fluid. We understand that bed rest is often listed in books as a treatment for this, but it is wrong. I asked the doctor if going in the water could help. The doctor said that standing in the water meant the leg would be "hanging down" and the leg needed to be elevated to drain. If you understand immersion, then you know why immersion can more effectively treat limb edema and water retention than medicines and lying in bed. Extended bed rest is unhealthy, and reduces muscle and bone health so much that it is used to study the damage to the body from floating around during space travel. We escaped the medical care and went into the water. I will post more on immersion, edema, and health soon.
I will not have Internet access for the next week to read or reply to comments. Enjoy the Fitness Fixer using the links in this article. Start taking and sending in fun photos of your successes using all the fun techniques.
Regular physical exercise is documented to reduce risk of cancer. Exercise has also been found to increase survival in those with existing cancer, (JAMA and J Clin Oncol.) improving both number of years and quality of life.
Until recently (sometimes currently), cancer patients, along with heart patients and back pain sufferers were told to rest and stop activity. Inactivity creates new health problems and worsens existing health problems. Lack of regular exercise decreases strength, endurance, energy, blood sugar regulation, cellular repair (lengthy list here) and increases fatigue. Cancer treatments of radiation and chemotherapy do the same, and worse. This is called iatrogenic harm, which means injury or illness brought on by medical treatment. One medical report found that debilitating tiredness and loss of energy from cancer treatments can be more disruptive to the patient than the original pain of cancer. Another report called fatigue, "The most important consideration for the patient with cancer." Cancer fatigue can be a problem for months, even years, after treatments end.
Reader Dr. Zoe E., cancer survivor with personal experience writes:
"I don't think I'm quite ready for prime-time yet - but if I can be a source of encouragement to those trashed by chemo, I'm happy to be displayed.
"Yes, exercise helps if you can do it. Lots of people are lucky to experience low toxicity during chemo and are able to keep up their exercise programs or active life through treatment. Others are laid low and must stop treatment or are just trying to recover enough between treatments to continue them.
"While the Lance Armstrongs and Tony Snows of the world are inspirational, it would be a bad thing if the general population thought that people should be able to work and function during cancer treatment. Many, maybe most, can't and they shouldn't feel bad about it. Chemotherapy is as close to killing you as modern medicine gets."
Dr Zoe sent an update the day before yesterday:
"I did the Relay for Life on Saturday (a fund raiser for the American Cancer Society). It's a 12-hour team event where you keep one person on the track for the full time. I did the Survivor's Lap and several more with lots of rest stops. I managed to hang out there for 4 hours before I got too pooped. No photos though, I'm even more camera shy than blog shy! You can draw a picture if you want."
One of the benefits of exercise is that your body produces more of an interesting compound called heat shock protein. Heat shock proteins (HSP) are families of proteins that do several things including accompanying and helping other proteins under stress (called chaperoning). Heat shock chaperones keep the other proteins neatly folded when they are being deformed by stress factors such as infection, ultraviolet light, starvation, heat, and other harsh conditions. Heat shock proteins help cell survival and are thought to mobilize immune function against infections and diseases. One of the big stressors of focus in heat shock study is cancer. Heat shock proteins have been investigated for their role in activating immune response to cancer, and in cancer vaccine research.
Molecular physiology isn't my research area, so I haven't done any work in it personally. I just read the work of others. Heat shock proteins are intensely fascinating to me for their role in exercise, in increasing tolerance to hot environments (interestingly, cold too), and other extreme challenges to the body. I hope to post more about it from the sports medicine meeting next week.
Getting enough exercise to improve strength and quality of life doesn't only mean exhausting yourself or stopping your day to change clothes and go "do exercises." Get exercise that is healthy and fun, and as a normal part of how you bend and position your body in healthful ways during your day.
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