Dr. Giulia Enders

After exercise, for example, muscles tend to be a bit irritated.

And when you exercise a lot, they will learn to reduce this inflammatory reaction towards a muscle being maybe a bit strained.

like aching after exercise.

If you have this effect over and over again, the immune cells will start to notice, okay, there's a little bit of aching and maybe inflammatory processes in the muscles going on after exercise, but we'll fix it and then we'll tone it down.

So they practice this process of toning it down again and again and again.

And that is important to have a balanced immune system that doesn't overreact.

But also, you know, muscles regulate blood sugar and do those.

So lots of indirect effects also.

That's fascinating.

You're saying that if I'm doing exercise regularly, then there's many ways in which it's good for me.

It's like making my heart stronger, which will be really important if I'm sick.

It's creating better blood flow across my body so my immune system is able to sort of see everywhere.

But also, actually, I think you're saying that for my muscles, if I'm regularly doing exercise where, you know, they're sore and aching afterwards, like, you know, it happens to me after I go to the gym, but I guess if we have a run, you're actually saying, wow, that might be good because your immune system is sort of learning, ah, okay, I'm getting to start to realize that I should lower my immune system because I don't want to overreact because this is just a regular sort of normal thing.

And this is part of what you're describing, often overreacting.

One of the things we need to do with our immune system is not to boost it quite the reverse.

We actually wanted to get it to sort of relax a bit more into a more neutral setting.

And be able to do that a bit faster sometimes.

Sometimes just to like cool down faster.

Like in the office when you get a really stupid email and you suddenly are able to say, ugh.

I'll just reply later instead of going on about it for two hours inside of yourself.