Catch a cold? You can still workout

By PETE GRATHOFF - The Kansas City Star

About a decade ago, Thomas Weidner realized he was being asked a common question.

The director of the athletic training education program at Ball State University, Weidner was being approached each winter by athletes who were sick.

“In working with athletes who acquired a head cold (quite common) as an athletic trainer/sports medicine specialist, I realized that there were no guidelines for exercising with a cold,” Weidner wrote in an e-mail.

When you’ve got a cold, should you rest and help the body recover or continue your exercise regimen?

Weidner wasn’t sure, so he set out to study the question.

First, he and other researchers studied 24 men and 21 women, who were between the ages 18 to 29 and of varying levels of fitness. All were infected with a rhinovirus, while another group of 10 men and women were not infected and served as controls.

For the study, which appeared in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise in 1998, the researchers assessed the lung functions and exercise capacity of all the subjects. The 45 subjects then had a cold virus was dropped into their nose, and all caught head colds.

Two days later, when their cold symptoms were at their worst, all the subjects exercised by running on a treadmill. The researchers reported that having a cold had no effect on either lung function or exercise capacity.

“Honestly, we were hoping the duration and severity of the cold would be mitigated somewhat (but no luck in this regard),” Weidner wrote.

For a second study, 34 young men and women were randomly assigned to a group that would exercise with a cold and 16 others who were assigned to rest. All were infected with a rhinovirus.

The group that exercised ran on a treadmill for 40 minutes every other day at 70 percent of their maximum heart rates.

Every 12 hours, all the subjects in the study completed 13-item questionnaires regarding their physical activity and their well being. The researchers, whose findings appeared in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2003, also collected the subjects’ used facial tissues, weighing them to assess their cold symptoms.

There was no difference between the groups that rested and the ones that had a cold.

So, if you’re under the weather, there’s no reason to stop exercising.

“If the symptoms are restricted to a head cold, and no fever, then exercising with a cold does not seem to prolong the cold or make it worse (nor does it make it any better),” wrote Weidner, who is an avid cyclist.

“The advantage in continuing to exercise is to maintain fitness and enjoy the positive psychological effects such as improved mood (particularly when you are not feeling all that well).”

Watching Your Child at Swim Lessons or Swim Practice

News For SWIM  PARENTS Published by The American Swimming Coaches Association

By Guy Edson

For many years I watched my daughter swim under the direction of other coaches. I have also watched her at basketball practice and games, and dance, and figure skating.  I know the joy of watching her in these activities.  I also know and understand the overwhelming desire to direct, correct, encourage, and sometimes scold her at practice.  But these are not proper parental behaviors once I have released her into the care of a coach or teacher.  As a parent, I am not to interfere with the practice or attempt to talk to my child during the practice session.

At swim practice coaches want the children’s attention focused on the coach and the tasks at hand.  Occasionally children miss an instruction, or have a goggle problem, or are involved in some other distraction, or are simply playing and having fun – which are all normal behaviors for young children.  Coaches view these little difficulties as opportunities for the children to develop good listening skills, ability to reason, and self discipline.  Sometimes we allow failure on purpose -- a missed instruction leaving the child confused often results in the child learning to pay better attention the next time.  We endeavor to provide an environment for the children to develop these skills.  A well-intentioned and over-enthusiastic mom or dad sometimes has difficulty allowing their child to miss something and wants to interfere.  It’s understandable.

We know it is common in many other youth sports for parents to stand at the sidelines and shout instructions or encouragements and sometimes admonishments to their children.  However, at swim practice coaches ask parents not to signal them to swim faster, or to tell them to try a certain technique, or to offer to fix a goggle problem, or to move away from some other “menacing” swimmer, or even to remind them to listen to the coach.  In fact, just as you would never interrupt a school classroom to talk your child, you should not interrupt a swim practice by attempting to communicate directly with your child. 

What’s wrong with encouraging your child during practice? 

• There are two issues.   First we want your child to focus on the coach and to learn the skill for their personal satisfaction rather than learning it to please their parents.  Secondly, parental encouragement often gets translated into a command to swim faster and swimming faster may be the exact opposite of what the coach is trying to accomplish.  In most stroke skill development practices we first slow the swimmers down so that they can think through the stroke motions.  Save encouragements and praise for after the practice session!  This is the time when you have your child’s full attention to tell them how proud you are of them.

What’s wrong with shouting or signaling instructions to your children? 

• When I watched my old daughter play in a basketball league I felt an overwhelming desire to shout instructions to my child and so I understand the feelings that most parents have.  But those instructions might be different from the coach’s instructions and then you end up with a confused child.  Sometimes you might think the child did not hear the coach’s instruction and you want to help.  Most of us do not want to see our own kids make a mistake.  The fact is that children miss instructions all the time.  Part of the learning process is learning how to listen to instructions.  When children learn to rely on a backup they will have more difficulty learning how to listen better the first time.

As parents, many of us want our children protected from discomfort and adversity and we will attempt to create or place them in an environment free from distress.  So, what’s wrong with helping your child fix their goggles during practice time?  Quite simply, we want to encourage the children to become self-reliant and learn to take care of and be responsible for themselves and their own equipment.  Swimming practice is a terrific place to learn these life skills.  Yes, even beginning at age 6 or 7.

If you need to speak to your child regarding a family issue or a transportation issue or to take your child from practice early you are certainly welcome to do so but please approach the coach directly with your request and we will immediately get your child out of the water.  If you need to speak to the coach for other reasons please wait until the end of practice. 

Thanks for bringing your children to swim practice.  Every swim coach I know coaches each child with care for their safety and concern for their social, physical, learning skills, and life skills development. 

OVER THE YEARS, I HAVE BEEN QUESTIONED QUITE OFTEN ABOUT COMPETITIVENESS . . .

By Geoff Brown, Head Coach NOVA Swimming

…mostly from parents who fret about their child’s seeming lack of burning fire. My answer has never wavered:

1. Competitiveness is learned
2. It emerges over time and strikes different children at different times.
3. Since it is learned, it can be taught or stimulated; since it can be taught, proper “gardening” can cause it to emerge.

Children with siblings near to them in age will often be competitive because they have spent a fair part of their lives competing for limited family resources (a favored seat in the car, for example). I strongly believe that self-reliance is a necessary precursor to competitiveness. Self-reliance blossoms in a garden of everyday tasks. For example, a child who is made to pack and carry his own swim bag will learn self-reliance; a child who learns to wake to an alarm is learning independence. The parent-assisted child often persists at the level of parent-assisted child, sometimes for a disconcerting length of time. A casualty here is problem-solving ability because this child’s solutions all too often come from somebody else.

Finally, failure is wonderful fuel for competitiveness. It is painful to watch any child fail but it is glorious to see that same child rise from failure, adopt new behaviors and succeed. It is difficult to see failure as the author of that new triumph but there it undeniably is. So failure is just a part of the competitive journey Hope this helps !! 

Learning To Prepare For The Best

News For SWIM  PARENTS Published by The American Swimming Coaches Association

By John Leonard

As I write this in early January in Fort Lauderdale, the air temperature is a “balmy” 42 degrees….well, balmy if you’re from Green Bay, Wisconsin, maybe.  Here in South Florida, that’s a cold wave.  We swim outside, and the water temperature is 75 degrees…..the heaters can’t keep up when the air is this cold.  The wind chill factor, according to Channel 7, is…well, we don’t want to know the wind chill with a nice brisk 20 mile an hour wind coming off the Everglades. 

My phone rings at 5 AM  and a small voice on the other end asks plaintively, “Do we really have swim practice, Coach John?”  Yes, we really do.

WHY? Is the next question, which I wrestle with myself on the 15 minute drive to the pool….why put teenagers in the water on this cold and nasty morning  when both they and I would prefer to stay snuggled in at home for another hour or hour and a half. 

Now, I KNOW why, but can I express it to my swimmers?  Yes, I’ll try.  Everyone, on the day after the high school state meet, vows that “next year” they will A) make a final, B) Make the meet C) win an event or D) write in your own goal here.

It’s easy to vow to do something the day after, when you are excited, full of the promise of life and get up and go. It’s a lot harder to REMEMBER what you wanted to do in early January when it’s 5 AM and cold outside.  Then it’s a lot harder and a lot easier to rationalize, “it’s just one workout”.

The problem is, when teenagers begin to learn to rationalize, they get really good at it really fast, and pretty soon, the ACTION required to fulfill the commitments to those goals/dreams, falls prey to the rationalization.  And after you rationalize the decision you want to make the first time, it’s so much easier to do it the next time, and the time after that, and pretty soon, the goal is just a dream, because you’re rationalizing yourself into thinking, “I’d like to do that if everything could be perfect for me, and it would never be cold in the morning, or no social events would ever conflict with practice,  and time with my friends always went the way I want it to.“

But things never go perfectly.  The ONLY thing you can successfully predict is that obstacles to your goal WILL come up, and little or nothing will go smoothly.  And that consistency in preparation is the only way to raise the percentages of the chance you will reach your goal.

Read that again….”raise the percentages of the chance…”  Not a guarantee.  If it’s a good goal, there are no guarantees, EXCEPT that if you don’t prepare correctly, according to the plan, you won’t raise your chance of success, you’ll lower it.

So why go to practice at 5 AM in the cold? Because it’s part of the plan, and it raises your chance of success.  But most of all, because you have told yourself that you will commit to doing it.  And if you let yourself down, who won’t you let down?  Prepare for a chance for success.  And feel really good about doing that.

Because not very many people do.