My take away from the abstract is to work-out as early as possible assuming the gym is not 24hours:
1) Ensures that any surface or airborne pathogen generated the evening prior is likely dead.
2) Less people creating respiratory borne aerosols.
3) Intensity of exercise is probably lower, thereby spreading less aerosols, given most people do not have peak performance early morning.
4) Someone who is sick or is recovering from illness is unlikely to get to the gym early.
5) Perhaps skip the gym during peak flu and cold season.
For decades I would get sick 3 to 4 times a year but now I haven't been sick in 28 months (personal best by 2x) since becoming a pandemic hermit. I wonder how many of my colds/flu's were contracted at the gym and have hesitated returning but miss this part of my life.
You're probably reducing your life expectancy much more by skipping the gym (or publicly socializing, but that's a whole other discussion) than you would be from those 3-4 illnesses a year.
Not if they were finding alternative ways to exercise. Speaking as an ex power-lifter turned runner, I'm surprised at the number of people who believe they NEED a gym to exercise.
I can counter you anecdote with one of my own. I go the gym a lot. I rarely get sick. I kept going to the gym when the state allowed it to be open during the pandemic and still never got sick. Telling people to skip the gym to prevent contracting the flu might be some of the worst health advice there is given heart disease is the number one cause of death. Severe covid correlates strongly with obesity too. There was a substantial jump in obesity rates during the pandemic from people sitting around inside. Personally I think gym's are overrated in spreading disease. Almost nobody goes to the gym when they are still feeling sick.
I was fully with you up until the final couple sentences. Anyone who's been in a gym knows it's not a sterile place. Again anecdotally people I have met specifically from going to the gym would go while mildly sick 100%. Justified with some variation of "just power through".
If you're healthy moderate exposure to pathogens can definitely boost your own immune system response. The impact of hosting those pathogens is one of the talking points COVID brought up that I think will be around for a long time.
I've started wearing an elastomeric respirator to the gym with n100 filter cartridges. It impedes breathing slightly, but that's fine with me: I don't do sprint or cardio work at my gym, and I can afford an extra 20 seconds of recovery time between sets.
I got an MSA Advantage 900, which filters exhalation too. It's a lot sweatier, and if you aren't trying to comply with now-expired mask mandates, you could get a valved model. I haven't been professionally fit tested, but it passes the self-fit test. I wouldn't trust it in a TB ward, but to the gym or an airplane? It's great.
If you have the influence, try to get your gym to set up UV air sanizizers and Corsi-Rosenthal boxes.
If you're going to wear a mask, you should wear an effective one. Elastomeric>n95==FFP3>kf94==FFP2>kn95>>surgical>>cloth>>>gaiter
And if you have a beard, the masks that fit more tightly will still retain 75%+ of their effectiveness.
The gym, where I learned the truth about despair, as will you. There's a reason why this Smith machine is the worst hell on earth... Hope. Every man who has ventured here over the centuries has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom. So easy... So simple...
Poe's law aside, not satire. I've avoided catching Covid even though I've lived in a very red state during a pandemic for years, and I'm all out of fucks to give.
- If people need to take pictures of me and my quads for their inspiration board, I'm not going to stop them
- I'm wearing an elastomeric respirator, so I deeply don't care if anyone takes a picture of me
- People at my Y generally mind their own business
> Do you have a chronic health condition where Covid-19 is more dangerous than it normally is for people that go to a gym -- i.e. a bad cold / mild flu?
Covid-19, while less deadly thanks to vaccines, remains significantly more dangerous than a bad cold or the flu.
A respirator mask may look silly but is a cheap and highly effective. I'd rather take a little damage to my pride than a significant risk of damaging my immune system, blood vessels or brain :-)
I've found that I don't even like wearing earbuds when I get sweaty, so respirators were right out. I'm fortunate that I've been able to create a reasonable gym at home, but I do miss the iso machines. What I wouldn't give for space for a Smith or something at home. Glad you found something that works for you too.
Why a Smith machine? I don't touch that machine at the gym since it's fix and when using it gives you an unnatural range of motion.
It's the machine I view as only existing for people recovering from an injury and only doing light exercise.
The downside of the Smith machine is its fixed nature that isolates muscles. The upside of a Smith machine...is its fixed nature that isolates muscles.
A Smith machine is essentially a universal, versatile isolation machine. A single Smith machine can do the job of a suite of selectorized iso machines in a far smaller overall footprint. It's the equivalent of the barbell and power rack, but for isolation exercises instead of basic compound exercises.
Do you do this to get exercise in a simulated low oxygen environment?
Edit:
To clarify.
All the research I have read points to no increase in risk to catch covid at training facilities so I assume it serves a different purpose.
No, I do this because it dramatically increases my safety without imposing much personal cost. It makes me mad that our response to an overdispersed airborne virus is so ineffective this many years later, but that just helps me move a little more weight.
Altitude adaptation can happen passively, so it's technically better to train low and recover high. You want your training to be limited by your physiology, not by oxygen availability.
I don't really see how it dramatically increases your safety when gyms haven't been shown to increase your risk to get covid in the first place.
We are no longer at the start of the pandemic. We now have vaccines and the medical establishment has developed the tools and the experience to treat people so society goes back to "normal". I don't find that very surprising?
Got a citation for that "haven't been shown to increase your risk" statement? Or is it just an absence of evidence? Because America has had uncontrolled community spread since about March 2020.
We had a glorious two months with vaccines and no meaningful variants last year, and in that time I didn't wear a mask. Since then, several variants with substantial immune escape have evolved.
I'm not worried about dying, but that doesn't mean I'm going to start taking meaningless risks. I'm not going to start licking handrails in the subway. I'm going to wear my seatbelt. I'll dine indoors at restaurants, but again--I'm looking at my integrated risk.
If people readily got COVID at my gym something tells me at least 1/4 would be dead the way they pack themselves in there without masks. I am shocked to be honest.
Even myself with an N95 mask that try to keep my distance would have probably caught it also.
It really depends on the air flow in your gym. Mine has pretty low ceilings where the free weights are, but the cardio hall used to be a gymnasium/basketball court.
Also, most people aren't isolating and taking home grocery delivery except for when they go, unmasked, to the gym. It would be hard to measure in the best of times, and our extremely high community spread levels make it pretty much impossible to quantify the risk posed by going to the gym specifically.
Vaccination is available for a minuscule subset of infectious diseases.
The immune system can't function against viruses it's never encountered, and the health of the immune system does, in fact, rely on exposure.
No need to start licking doorknobs or whatever, but people who have isolated themselves in a comprehensive way from the common human biosphere should expect to get sick when they decide to rejoin humanity. This will get worse the longer it's put off.
I'm nonjudgemental about the choices people are making to mitigate risk in their lives, but declining immune system health is a real risk of extended isolation which should be factored into the decision-making process.
It's not as though having a cold makes you more likely to defeat the monkeypox. They are separate diseases with separate responses. So yes, I'm going to have a cold the next time I get exposed to someone with a cold, but I was going to do that anyways.
You may be interested to learn there is a lot of evidence that suggests prior coronavirus and even rhinovirus infections boost the immune system against SARS-CoV-2
That would have lead to an opposite number of deaths, though wouldn't it? If the idea is that isolation leads to us being able to be less able to fight COVID then the earliest results should have been the least dangerous. Now this is complicated by strains and vaccines, but as the initial year went on the death rate should have been increasing. I have no idea if this was the case or not, do you?
Most viruses which cause human illness aren't mediagenic breakthrough infections from a different species, they are ambient in the human biome with waves of greater or lesser infection. Vaccination and water purification have drastically reduced some of the worst of these, which is wonderful. Hundreds remain.
Two things happen when someone is isolated from that ambient biome: they stop producing as many antibodies and t-cells, and they miss opportunities to develop immune response to new mutations as they arise.
In the worst case someone can be hit with a variant of, say, influenza, with an already depressed immune system facing more immune-evading mutations than they would otherwise see in a novel strain.
So the isolationist wouldn't have gotten sick from the first flu bu they would be sick by the second? That's still a total of one illness, or if the second is more immune evading, the non-isolated person exposed to both could be made sick by both, no? Is the assumption the isolationist will get more sick?
There's an enormous amount of ceteris paribus in any such discussion.
The isolated (isolationist has an implication of ideology which I don't care to impute) person can expect to get sicker for a given amount of exposure. Given a (spherical, frictionless) Person of Ordinary Health, they will have hundreds or thousands of distinct exposures in a year and get sick once or twice.
I could ramble about my own exposure to influenza, its relation to extended stays in the tropics, and so on, but this discussion doesn't need to be carried on the strength of anecdote.
The strategy should be to avoid severe outcomes. Long Influenza is a real thing and tends to follow severe infection, people who end up in the hospital with flu often have problems for years afterward, or the rest of their lives.
Vaccination (ceteris paribus again!) is superior to infection and raises the odds of transcribing new mutations to the immune system without ever getting sick. But there isn't always a vaccine, influenza in particular is notoriously skilled at vaccine evasion, and the immune system has a sweet spot in terms of antibody and t cell concentration which is kept in homeostatis by exposure and only exposure. that's how vaccines work, it's controlled exposure, nothing more.
Edit to add: so if you're someone who has isolated yourself from the rest of humanity's biome for a few years, I'm sure you had your reasons and I don't question them. It's probably not a lifetime's worth of strategy, and when it comes time to get back into it, be smart about it.
Maybe don't go straight to New York and ride the subway for eight hours without a mask. You wouldn't go back to the gym after a year and try and squat what you were pushing then, it would snap your spine. Same thing with rebooting the immune system. Slow and steady, and realizing that a mild infection (could be covid, rhinvirus, influenza, for our purposes this doesn't matter) is inevitable and doesn't constitute moral failure.
If only viruses were a simple catch the virus -> get the illness relationship. See Mononucleosis, chicken pox, and I'm sure there are many more examples. As much as I love XKCD this seems to gloss over a lot.
This is a widely held but incorrect belief. The immune system does not work like a muscle - it doesn't atrophy when unused and it doesn't become stronger from repeated challenge.
The immune hypothesis is about specific kinds of pathogens - parasites and bacterial microbiota[1] that humans co-evolved with and have specific defenses against (such as IgE antibodies). The exact mechanism(s) have yet to be determined but it's clear that lack of exposure during early childhood increases risk of autoimmunity.
Other than that, getting exposed to a larger variety of pathogens - especially viruses - just means you get sick more frequently[2].
The frequency of exposure to modern human viruses are a relatively new occurrence and there's no evidence that it benefits health - quite to the contrary, viruses are implicated in the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases such as ME/CFS or MS.
I walk past a big box gym and a specialty gym (climbing) regularly. The big box gym has had a lot less of the "return to normal" but the specialty gym is packed.
Part of it may be due to economic changes, people less likely to forgo their specialty workout/activity/hobby but would skip their routine cardio sessions, people who splurged on their own home equipment, or those who tried cardio outside in 2020 and stuck to it.
I wonder if we'll see another bump in gym bankruptcies or closures, after the initial one from the pandemic.
I kind of really like the trend towards specialty training spaces, and most other people who go to specialty gyms probably find more community within that specific niche. I personally just forewent a gym membership for a hybrid physical therapy/workout space, and I love it!
I used to work out at a gym in the same building as my job. During lockdowns I switched jobs to a company that doesn't have a gym in their office and is mostly remote. I bought a power rack that got shoved in a dark corner of my basement and find I'm working out more regularly now than I ever did when I had to go to a gym during my workday.
Particle counts increased what looks like quadratically with power/weight and volume increased linearly with power/weight.
The number of virions in these particles was not measured. So I think we have an upper bound of cubic growth, and since the air velocity also increased linearly, information about particle size given air velocity would also be helpful. I imagine that particle size at least goes down with air velocity, so I think more realistically, the increase in number of airborne virions increases somewhere between linearly and quadraticly.
>While aerosol particle emission is a major contributor to that risk, it is not the only one, as infection risk also depends on the concentration of the pathogen in the exhaled aerosol particles. So, ideally, others and we would have measured aerosol particle emission and the SARS-CoV-2 titer in aerosol condensates of infected, COVID-19 patients. However, we were unable to perform such an experiment safely.
Kind of a bad study, in my opinion. It is not impossible to get in vitro estimates for these quantities and include them in your analysis.
"Particle counts increased what looks like quadratically with power/weight and volume increased linearly with power/weight.
The number of virions in these particles was not measured. So I think we have an upper bound of cubic growth,"
I wonder if it increases the overall virus expelled. If it does, maybe vigorous exercise could reduce the disease impact if done early in the infection. Like with people who exercise strenuously on a regular basis and do so during the asymptomatic portion.
I'm curious what the long-term impact of increased disease prevention measures will be. It appears that post-covid(Fingers crossed) we are installing more air filters, using more surface sanitation procedures, staying home more when ill, and occasionally using masks/respirators in public spaces.
Is the end result going to be a change in transmission vector for diseases? what other evolutionary adaptations are happening amongst common human pathogens?
59 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 92.2 ms ] thread1) Ensures that any surface or airborne pathogen generated the evening prior is likely dead.
2) Less people creating respiratory borne aerosols.
3) Intensity of exercise is probably lower, thereby spreading less aerosols, given most people do not have peak performance early morning.
4) Someone who is sick or is recovering from illness is unlikely to get to the gym early.
5) Perhaps skip the gym during peak flu and cold season.
For decades I would get sick 3 to 4 times a year but now I haven't been sick in 28 months (personal best by 2x) since becoming a pandemic hermit. I wonder how many of my colds/flu's were contracted at the gym and have hesitated returning but miss this part of my life.
Regardless, I hear what you’re saying, but that didn’t sound like what GP meant when they said they missed their gym life.
If you're healthy moderate exposure to pathogens can definitely boost your own immune system response. The impact of hosting those pathogens is one of the talking points COVID brought up that I think will be around for a long time.
Someone somewhere just said "Challenge accepted!"
I got an MSA Advantage 900, which filters exhalation too. It's a lot sweatier, and if you aren't trying to comply with now-expired mask mandates, you could get a valved model. I haven't been professionally fit tested, but it passes the self-fit test. I wouldn't trust it in a TB ward, but to the gym or an airplane? It's great.
If you have the influence, try to get your gym to set up UV air sanizizers and Corsi-Rosenthal boxes.
If you're going to wear a mask, you should wear an effective one. Elastomeric>n95==FFP3>kf94==FFP2>kn95>>surgical>>cloth>>>gaiter
And if you have a beard, the masks that fit more tightly will still retain 75%+ of their effectiveness.
There's a desire to fix it.
Humans maintain sanity by giving and receiving constant feedback from others.
That feedback may be correct or incorrect, but it's crucial to our ability to maintain mental health.
That sounds needy. Gym time can easily be rewarding as solitary time.
But you need look no further than the effects of solitary confinement for evidence.
Humans require interaction and constant feedback for mental health.
Covid-19, while less deadly thanks to vaccines, remains significantly more dangerous than a bad cold or the flu.
A respirator mask may look silly but is a cheap and highly effective. I'd rather take a little damage to my pride than a significant risk of damaging my immune system, blood vessels or brain :-)
A Smith machine is essentially a universal, versatile isolation machine. A single Smith machine can do the job of a suite of selectorized iso machines in a far smaller overall footprint. It's the equivalent of the barbell and power rack, but for isolation exercises instead of basic compound exercises.
Edit: To clarify. All the research I have read points to no increase in risk to catch covid at training facilities so I assume it serves a different purpose.
Altitude adaptation can happen passively, so it's technically better to train low and recover high. You want your training to be limited by your physiology, not by oxygen availability.
We are no longer at the start of the pandemic. We now have vaccines and the medical establishment has developed the tools and the experience to treat people so society goes back to "normal". I don't find that very surprising?
We had a glorious two months with vaccines and no meaningful variants last year, and in that time I didn't wear a mask. Since then, several variants with substantial immune escape have evolved.
I'm not worried about dying, but that doesn't mean I'm going to start taking meaningless risks. I'm not going to start licking handrails in the subway. I'm going to wear my seatbelt. I'll dine indoors at restaurants, but again--I'm looking at my integrated risk.
If people readily got COVID at my gym something tells me at least 1/4 would be dead the way they pack themselves in there without masks. I am shocked to be honest. Even myself with an N95 mask that try to keep my distance would have probably caught it also.
Also, most people aren't isolating and taking home grocery delivery except for when they go, unmasked, to the gym. It would be hard to measure in the best of times, and our extremely high community spread levels make it pretty much impossible to quantify the risk posed by going to the gym specifically.
Look up the hygiene hypothesis.
The immune system can't function against viruses it's never encountered, and the health of the immune system does, in fact, rely on exposure.
No need to start licking doorknobs or whatever, but people who have isolated themselves in a comprehensive way from the common human biosphere should expect to get sick when they decide to rejoin humanity. This will get worse the longer it's put off.
I'm nonjudgemental about the choices people are making to mitigate risk in their lives, but declining immune system health is a real risk of extended isolation which should be factored into the decision-making process.
Two things happen when someone is isolated from that ambient biome: they stop producing as many antibodies and t-cells, and they miss opportunities to develop immune response to new mutations as they arise.
In the worst case someone can be hit with a variant of, say, influenza, with an already depressed immune system facing more immune-evading mutations than they would otherwise see in a novel strain.
None of this is controversial.
The isolated (isolationist has an implication of ideology which I don't care to impute) person can expect to get sicker for a given amount of exposure. Given a (spherical, frictionless) Person of Ordinary Health, they will have hundreds or thousands of distinct exposures in a year and get sick once or twice.
I could ramble about my own exposure to influenza, its relation to extended stays in the tropics, and so on, but this discussion doesn't need to be carried on the strength of anecdote.
The strategy should be to avoid severe outcomes. Long Influenza is a real thing and tends to follow severe infection, people who end up in the hospital with flu often have problems for years afterward, or the rest of their lives.
Vaccination (ceteris paribus again!) is superior to infection and raises the odds of transcribing new mutations to the immune system without ever getting sick. But there isn't always a vaccine, influenza in particular is notoriously skilled at vaccine evasion, and the immune system has a sweet spot in terms of antibody and t cell concentration which is kept in homeostatis by exposure and only exposure. that's how vaccines work, it's controlled exposure, nothing more.
Edit to add: so if you're someone who has isolated yourself from the rest of humanity's biome for a few years, I'm sure you had your reasons and I don't question them. It's probably not a lifetime's worth of strategy, and when it comes time to get back into it, be smart about it.
Maybe don't go straight to New York and ride the subway for eight hours without a mask. You wouldn't go back to the gym after a year and try and squat what you were pushing then, it would snap your spine. Same thing with rebooting the immune system. Slow and steady, and realizing that a mild infection (could be covid, rhinvirus, influenza, for our purposes this doesn't matter) is inevitable and doesn't constitute moral failure.
Citation needed. In what way is it worse?
This is a widely held but incorrect belief. The immune system does not work like a muscle - it doesn't atrophy when unused and it doesn't become stronger from repeated challenge.
The immune hypothesis is about specific kinds of pathogens - parasites and bacterial microbiota[1] that humans co-evolved with and have specific defenses against (such as IgE antibodies). The exact mechanism(s) have yet to be determined but it's clear that lack of exposure during early childhood increases risk of autoimmunity.
Other than that, getting exposed to a larger variety of pathogens - especially viruses - just means you get sick more frequently[2].
The frequency of exposure to modern human viruses are a relatively new occurrence and there's no evidence that it benefits health - quite to the contrary, viruses are implicated in the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases such as ME/CFS or MS.
[1]: https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g5267
[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5320962/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03324-7
Part of it may be due to economic changes, people less likely to forgo their specialty workout/activity/hobby but would skip their routine cardio sessions, people who splurged on their own home equipment, or those who tried cardio outside in 2020 and stuck to it.
I wonder if we'll see another bump in gym bankruptcies or closures, after the initial one from the pandemic.
The number of virions in these particles was not measured. So I think we have an upper bound of cubic growth, and since the air velocity also increased linearly, information about particle size given air velocity would also be helpful. I imagine that particle size at least goes down with air velocity, so I think more realistically, the increase in number of airborne virions increases somewhere between linearly and quadraticly.
>While aerosol particle emission is a major contributor to that risk, it is not the only one, as infection risk also depends on the concentration of the pathogen in the exhaled aerosol particles. So, ideally, others and we would have measured aerosol particle emission and the SARS-CoV-2 titer in aerosol condensates of infected, COVID-19 patients. However, we were unable to perform such an experiment safely.
Kind of a bad study, in my opinion. It is not impossible to get in vitro estimates for these quantities and include them in your analysis.
The number of virions in these particles was not measured. So I think we have an upper bound of cubic growth,"
I wonder if it increases the overall virus expelled. If it does, maybe vigorous exercise could reduce the disease impact if done early in the infection. Like with people who exercise strenuously on a regular basis and do so during the asymptomatic portion.
https://datacranker.com/cycling-power-to-weight-ratio-calcul...
Is the end result going to be a change in transmission vector for diseases? what other evolutionary adaptations are happening amongst common human pathogens?