Belén Castro's tips: defenses and sport
Every athlete needs to stay healthy and have a strong immune system to be able to face the activity they are going to do and achieve their goals without harming their health and well-being. To do this, it is important to take care of aspects such as:
- Nutrition. An inadequate or insufficient diet causes a drop in immune defenses. Maintaining a balanced diet complete with essential nutrients helps to strengthen them.
- Rest and sleep, both in quantity and quality. Ideally, you should sleep between 7 and 9 hours a day so that your body can really rest well. Acquiring healthy habits for going to sleep is also a routine to take into account every day. Electronic devices, room temperature...
- Temperature changes when exercising. When exercising outdoors, you should dress appropriately for the ambient temperature, because even though our body temperature is higher right after finishing training, when we stop physical activity, our temperature will quickly drop and we will feel cold, which makes us more easily exposed to infections.
- If you are one of those who practice many hours of sport or high-intensity activity, you should take extreme care of your diet as well as your rest and sleep.
Furthermore, practicing physical exercise on a regular basis helps us to:
- Improve our cardiovascular health
In addition to strengthening your defenses with sports, when you practice physical exercise you are improving your cardiovascular health, because exercise increases blood flow and increases the excretion of harmful metabolites from the body, which also helps the immune system to function well.
- Help our antibodies
Exercising also makes your antibodies and leukocytes circulate more quickly, giving them a better chance of detecting and fighting diseases more quickly and effectively.
