Dr. Squat - Dr. Fred Hatfield

I get the same thing. I believe in my case it's overtraining and non-exercise stress (teenage kids). Doc has written about it on this site. Here's another web site that talks about it. http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/fatigue.html
Exercise support your immune system only if you don't overtrain.

I would have to agree with this statement...I am a fire fighter and exposed to crap all the time but I never touch my nose or mouth unless I just washed my hands...I lift heavy and 4-5 times a week and can count the number of times I have been sick in the last 3 years on 1 hand...

THanks .

It may seem like ho-hum advice, but wash your hands. They've done studies on, for example, encephalitis, where they tracked the correlation between hand washing and rate of sickness and it's straight forward that people who don't wash their hands not only get sick more frequently (much more) but they also get sicker.

What blew me away was the number of people who don't wash their hands. For instance, they did this thing where they observed the percentage of handwashers at baseball games and it turned out that the number of people using a fully-equipement public bathroom (available soap, paper towels, TP, etc) that washed their hands after using the bathroom was something in the range of 20%. So in a way, it's not so much that you're spreading disease, but that 80% of the people around you are, and you need to sort of be on the immune defensive.

Another fun fact is that the number of people who get sick by way of coming into contact with feces is much higher than most people expect. The assumption is that it's almost always by touching something with excrement on it and then touching your eyes or mouth.

I've been sick once in the last couple of years and it was right after getting home from Japan (I now consider myself healed). Japanese folks are neurotic handwashers. And now I am, too!

I once read the #1 factor for a healthy immune system is adequate quality
SLEEP.

Here's another big vote in favour of washing hands.

My home is a case study on sickness avoidance as my wife is currently undergoing chemotherapy treatments which have resulted in a steep drop in her white blood cell counts and thus her ability to fight infection. As a result, something like a simple flu can develop into pneumonia in a matter of a couple days.

On top of that, my work requires that I interact with a large number of people on a daily basis, and we also have a very active 6 year old son enrolled in kindergarten. However, neither of us have had so much as a cold all winter and my wife hasn't had to deal with anything more than the standard side effects of her treatments.

The main thing we have done differently (driven by my wife's health concerns) is to be extremely millitant about washing our hands as soon as we come home. I also keep a small container of hand sanitizer like Purel close by in my car or at my office. This simple routine seems to work well especially given the winter weather we've had - and the fact that we've had more than our share of hospital visits in the past few months.

Other things like using disposible j-cloths for washing dishes (and throwing them out each day), using paper towels when drying your hands after washing them, and wiping down bathroom and kitchen counter tops with disposible Lysol or Clorox wipes once a day are also simple but effective steps in warding off sickness.

Just my two cents.
cab

i also have the same problem, as soon as I hit the gym and lift heavy for two/three months.. i will fall sick after that , which prevents me from crossing my own personal best. And after falling sick i have to take rest for two weeks before lifting again. Todd is again very right in saying the combined stress of personal life and exercise vary from one person to another. So I have decided to take it easy, I can not get rid of personal stress and so I am slightly relaxing the gym schedule. This would perhaps ensure slow but steady upward trend. Fingers crossed.

This is another reason undulating periodization is so effective!