How You Should Train Before, During and After your COVID vaccine with Glen Davison PhD | Koopcast Episode 78

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast another special episode of the KoopCast as i am recording it out of mobile base camp that's right my adventure van we are recording the podcast live from this a special edition because it is very timely this is all about exercise immunology and how exercise affects your immune system with relevance to the new vaccines that are coming out i know that a lot of runners are now just getting in line for either their first or their second dose of the moderna or pfizer vaccines or the first dose of the johnson johnson vaccine or whatever vaccine is approved in your area we know we have listeners from all over the world here and so on the podcast today i brought back a repeat offender and glenn davison who is an exercise immunologist out of the uk and we discuss all of these areas of how exercise impacts your immune system and what runners should be taking into account as they are designing their training leading up to the first or the second dose of these vaccines or the the first dose the only dose of the one shot vaccines and as you guys will find out this is a topic that is incredibly nuanced right now we don't know a whole heck of a lot about it and

i think that we should all keep that in mind as we are going through this process together i don't want to put out any information that could otherwise be false or anything that we don't know about and so what you will find out is is what we tried to do is we wanted to educate the public first so that you guys can make correct training decisions as you're going through either one of these or any of the vaccines uh that uh that are available out there all right so that with that as a little bit of a prelude i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with glenn davison every time i turn on the world news something is something is something bad is happening in the uk oh god yeah it's always always the way we're rattling on with the vaccinations though so yeah that's that's good has it been going pretty well there the rollout yeah yeah we're we uptake i think is really high like 90 90 or more oh wow um and we are doing 41 year olds um the invites are going out to like people in their early 40s this week so if they keep that up they're looking to have everybody have had at least one one shot by july wow which is a all adults anyway so yeah yeah well that's kind of why i wanted to get this out sooner rather than

later in fact i might actually release it this week on thursday um if i can get all the post-production done by then because i think it's like the demographic that listens to the podcast they're all kind of like in some part of the queue you know because even here the u.s like we had a phased approach right and it's now just rolling out to like the healthier general you know public that i think a lot of the a lot of listeners are in that demographic right 35 to 55 healthy no pre-existing conditions or anything like that so they're all kind of rolling into it and it's kind of funny because i mentioned this to you in the email right like the they have now heard all of the stories and tales and news reports and things like that of all of these really wide ranging responses from the groups that were vaccinated before them and i i and i keep when i whenever i hear that i keep having to think i keep having the same thought is that because we've layered the the world right and everybody's got every different country has a little bit of a different flavor of this but because the world has had this uh like prioritized approach for the most part with layering in the vaccine we can't always rely on the news reports and the tales from the previous group because it's a different set of demographics and i think that's where this whole thing starts to become problematic of trying to like give advice to

people because we're basing it off of a user group that you know all of a sudden might not be valid i mean we might see completely different responses as we go up and down in age up and down in health up and down whatever or it could all be exactly the same it's like who knows yeah exactly yeah so we're gonna try to unwind all that or at least within your specialty of of of how exercise it impacts the immune systems i get yeah i was gonna say easier said than done to entangle all of that well but that's the other thing right like so what started to emerge and i'm sure you've seen this uh in a different in a bunch of different formats is the in the athletic community is people are starting to try to develop guidelines for athletes and they range from take the whole week off bordering your the whole month off i've seen that before take the whole month off bordering any of the vaccines whether it's the one shot two shot variety doesn't matter take the whole month off take the day off do a hard workout the day before and then take the rest of the week off so they're trying to like back load you know back load the the uh the the recovery i've seen the opposite try to front load the recovery take the week before off but then the day afterwards you're good and every single time i've seen any one of those i'm like nobody knows like nobody like you're giving these recommendations to a big broad group of people and

we don't really know if they're going to be able to stick to that or not yeah i think a lot of these are probably just kind of best guess or sort of suppositions just based on you know sometimes maybe being quite conservative or sort of cautious maybe sometimes not being cautious enough um but yeah like you said there's no there's no evidence out there so it really is if people are giving really rigid guidelines like that at best it's a kind of you know an educated guess based on bits of info bits of data that's come in or potentially looking at evidence from other types of vaccinations probably flu as as the most common but that that's going to be i guess useful to tell us some things about the way you know the strength of the response and stuff like that but it is yeah it is maybe not giving the the whole picture but you know i guess that they're just trying to fill fill the gaps and blanks in our knowledge with with something rather than just don't i know i know i i appreciate that i appreciate trying to give people guidance but i always think that when something is new and you don't really know you either need to make the recommendations almost so broad that they're kind of they're not as meaningful on an individual basis or and i think this is the

approach that we're going to take throughout the or more of the flavor i guess that we're going to take throughout this podcast is you serve the purpose of informing the public so that they can craft their own decisions and when i tend to steer towards the latter within athletic populations because of the individualistic nature of everything training response this is you know a very good example of this individual nature of response i always take education first and then we try to tailor that education towards the individual use case so so anyway that i'm saying that from the onset of this as a little bit of a backdrop if at the end of the podcast we don't have a definitive answer on take the day off before the day of off and then the day if there's something not that specific that you if the listeners are expecting that they're going to be sorely disappointed i think we can be confident in saying that right glenn yeah absolutely and if we do if we do drift into that then i guess it's the reminder that um you don't don't take that as a specific recommendation i guess that would be one example yeah that's not the answer that's not the answer the day off before the day off of the day off after is not the answer nobody go and start to run with that that could work out for you but if you get if it worked out for you you you know it's a total guess um okay so here's here's something to illustrate this uh quite quite well that i had with my athletes and then what i think we're going to dive into is the

the how exercise actually affects the immune system and then hopefully listeners can get a little bit of a better picture of that to kind of help design their own training so i had the second dose of the pfizer shot um three weeks ago and i got really lucky i snuck in and got one of the leftover doses um through our local clinic my wife is a high school english teacher and so i used the same clinic that she was using and it wasn't an easy process but i was definitely trying to you know get things early because i've got a number of you know projects uh going on this summer i did not want to take a dose from somebody who needed it more than i did i wanted to put myself in a position so i could live with myself at the end of the day since that i was literally taking there some something that they were going to throw away at the end of the night so that happened i got in line early probably about six or eight weeks early um if i'm looking at the whole time frame of thing because my peer group i'm 42 years old i'm healthy is just now either have they've just gotten their first dose or they're kind of almost on the border for getting their second dose so i was about four to six weeks early zero effects at all from either one of those i was personally training for a 50 mile race here in the united states called the zane gray 50 i did not skip one single beat i might have taken the day of easy but i still trained hard i still you know i i just didn't have any effects at all i've had i have had

athletes that are in my same peer group that have not the opposite end of that response spectrum but but one of the more like classic tales that we're hearing where they were down and out for four or five days after this particularly the second dose i think is the thing that everybody's you know the thing that's got everybody's hackles all all uh up in awareness and so we tailored that or i take i tailored that athlete's training and based it off of what that how that athlete was feeling and gradually started to kind of like dose test different intensities and volume along the way and the linchpin and it all was is we knew with that athlete we had a long time to train so whether around the second dose became a little bit of a recovery phase or not that all that whole architecture of the long range plan gets shuffled around because athletes can only handle so much stress over long periods of time and so what you don't do one week you're going to end up doing two months down the line or something like that so i've experienced it all over the board both personally and kind of with my athletes neither one of those to go back to our earlier caveats are what anybody should actually do right glenn i don't want somebody to take take that and like start to pattern it after themselves but let's let's go back to the basics a little bit this is going to be a recap of a podcast we did earlier in terms of how exercise actually impacts the immune system let's walk through that and

grade it a little bit on the exercise look we'll just say load we'll combine kind of volume and intensity into load because that is ultimately where the where the bigger where the i think that's the best lens to kind of like look at it through rather than to get caught in the weeds here so glenn you're the expert take us through what happens with our immune system we go out we go run for an hour we go out we go run for two hours we go out we go run for four hours how is the immune system going to respond to those different bouts of exercise yeah i mean that and this is where the individualization comes in or the sort of the i guess the variations between people because you it's interesting you use the term load there and obviously it depends why we're quantifying it for what purpose are we quantifying it for sort of training prescription are we quantifying it for you know some some other reason and like load is a nice i guess summary of all of the different parts of the equation but it is also relative as well to to the individual so the exact same on paper session for one person could be relatively a lot more difficult and a lot more stressful to another person so the the the models that are out there and the way that we kind of describe the relationship between load in inverted commas and what happens to the immune system is really just a very simplified sorry simplified stylized representation of it and again this is where

people can fall into the trap of thinking oh well this is what the textbook says this is what the literature says so i have to hard and fast go it's always one hour or it's always two hours where the where the tipping point is but it's really individual so but yeah the the that stylized representation is that some is good you know moderate amounts of exercise tend to enhance our immune defenses and the ability of the body to fight off a potential infection and because obviously a potential infection is you know something that you might be exposed to you could fight it off and never know about it or you could succumb to it and actually get the infection and so it's all about that defense system and generally speaking if we look at it in really simplified stylized terms moderate amounts enhance that defense and therefore reduce the risks of picking up these things whereas very strenuous and or prolonged or higher loads tend to reduce the defenses slightly which mean the risks are slightly increased um and again if you pick up you know an old paper or an old textbook you might see some people referring to the kind of tipping point um being you know somewhere at about between one and two hours so once you get over that at a moderate intensity that's when it starts to tip from positive to negative but again that is purely to draw that curve in a nice stylized way in real life

you know for one person it could be what you would consider you know not really a high load at all whereas for another person the kind of the bulletproof guys if you like they could do you know three times that and still be okay and it's all relative so i guess the the takeaway point is it's relative to the individual and not just them as an individual but also where they are right now in in terms of their current state their current physiological state so for example that tipping point for you as a person will differ at different stages of the season you know when you're maybe off season you'll have a different threshold when you're you know really well trained and well conditioned then you'll be a bit more resilient to that sort of higher higher stress that higher demand um but yeah in a nutshell the big loads the kind of the high level stuff are the ones which theoretically reduce those defenses and make an individual you know less well equipped to fight off a potential pathogen should they come into contact with it and the we had a really interesting discussion amongst our internal coaching group kind of kind of about this and one of the points that i brought up to them is if you're coaching your athletes correctly that decline or that compromise in the immune system really shouldn't be that much on a daily or

weekly basis if you're applying training stimulus and removing that training stimulus in an intelligent fashion like all of our like all coaches should be doing we should know how to do that yeah every once in a while you're gonna you're gonna have to take the hit because you have to stress the body out in order to improve that's just a consequence of training but it shouldn't be so much that you have to take extraordinary measures for anything albeit we're talking about the immune system now but anything to bounce to bounce back up through these really big lows and so if you're looking at preparing your athlete for either one of these covid vaccines through this lens of well i have to give them a whole i have to remove a whole lot of training stress in order for their immune system to bounce back you're either looking at it through the lens that you're either you're either saying that your athlete is already overcooked in the first place because you have too much training stress supplied or you don't understand that with a moderate amount of training load reduction you should get that bounce back because it's a fairly it's a fairly quick bounce back as long as things aren't out of control in the first place yeah absolutely yeah definitely and so okay and so we have so people are going to want to know we try to use these relative load terms glenn and i are laughing our asses off on the youtube version of this by the way people are going to want to know like what's like relative and the stereotypical

literature like you said is define this is like one hour 90 minutes of moderate exercise and above higher than that or more than that you're going to compromise your immune system and below that you should actually enhance you should enhance it enhance it because exercise is good but we know that athletes in particularly competitive athletes that train chronically are going to have a higher threshold so in terms of the immune system's up down sideways response is it really as simple as almost taking an average and once again we're stylizing load as volume and intensity but let's really simplify it and just say volume let's just say you're doing no intensity at all and let's just say for really simplistic purposes they're running two hours a day and not having any you know they can run two hours a day every single day and feel great if they go up to three hours a day for a few days would that then cause a compromise in their immune system and then they would have to go back down to a down to an hour a day is that literally the way things are happening in this like up down sideways fashion sort of yes um in that i mean it's interesting that you said and they're feeling great right i did that intentionally yeah so because that is one of the kind of internal markers that we can use and it's often overlooked but it's so powerful and and so valuable in terms of how insightful it is telling you about actually what's going on physiologically in the body so i would say definitely if that if they're not

feeling you know if how they are feeling during that um and in the recovery after subjectively um it is good then yeah then that suggests that that that's you know you know that's a reasonable load um and then in terms of the i guess the scenario that you gave is what if they then go up to three hours it's hard to say how much of an increase is too much and how much is okay right and again it could come down to how how they feel so if it's enough of an increase to make them go whoa this feels awful now or i can really tell or i feel like i'm i'm not going to be ready to to go again tomorrow i'm going to maybe need another day to recover if you're starting to feel that that would suggest to me that that's for that person that's where that tipping point is or that threshold is um and the one of the other things that has come out in some of the literature out there um is it's not just the total volume per se but it's it's the rate of change in that so the rate of increase so it's not the total volume that you get to you know in that particular week but if you were at a much lower volume and you get to that volume really really quickly so it's not the absolute volume per se but if your rate of you know um acceleration to that point is too steep um then that could be more of a stressor more of a demand um than and therefore cause more negative effects than the actual total volume per se so and again i mean this is exactly the same as you know general training general training physiology and sort

of general training responses but it applies to the immune system as as well so yeah with that example if they were fine with two and would going up to three be okay or not okay again it would really for some people it might be and for others it might not so it would be more if i think they would be able to know and tell based on how they felt and how they responded to that particular session where that sat for them on that you know continuum of okay to maybe maybe not so okay and the athletes that are listening to this they're generally going to be experienced enough to know that and the one of the things that i always take away from conversations with people like you and i just happened to meet with the training peaks co-founder dirk friel a couple of days ago on this very this very same topic is that your training history is so incredibly important to capture not just the miles that you've run and the strava segments that you conquered or like whatever it is but the subjective feedback that also encapsulates what happened during that workout because over long periods of time and i'm talking about years if you do a really good job capturing that you know what relative training load increases or decreases actually do to you and how you react to them it takes a lot of deliberate energy to encapsulate that you know that feeling and that sensation but if you do a really good job with it it actually is incredibly powerful

to say exactly what you just went through is a one hour increase going from two hours to three hours is that going to be enough to make me feel good is it enough to make me feel bad am i going to feel the same and then you can use that information to draw out training and create scenarios for the future because your body is smart i mean you never exactly you never exactly copy paste what you've done from season to season but it still should rhyme right you should still be playing to strengths and weaknesses and i really screwed up over here so i'm not going to screw up as bad next time like it always rhymes from season to season in terms of how you can apply and remove load and how that affects the body and i think the immune system is just a microcosm of that yeah absolutely it gives you your baseline as well so and i mean sometimes you might not realize until it's too late and you know you have overcooked it and then you do get you do get ill but if you've got all of that recorded and logged in your training logs or your training diaries or whatever then okay yes you didn't spot it early enough you didn't avoid it you did get ill but at least afterwards you could look back and you might spot you know you might be able to look back at the the sort of days and weeks before that illness and you might be able to spot actually now now kind of taking a step back and looking with a wider lens at that you can learn from it and you can say actually looking at this look i did do that big jump up and and my you know my feelings i was keeping logged i did see that

then my resting heart rate was a bit elevated in the days going into this sort of thing so you could you could use that as a sort of a learning um i guess a learning tool that might help you next time round to sort of start to spot get your baseline and start to spot your patterns so that you could identify this what's okay for you relatively speaking i mean it will change throughout your career as well i suppose as you as you mature you know if you're kind of going you know up the sort of development but also once you get to a certain age as we unfortunately all do then and you start to you know get onto the sort of the other side of uh you know 40 50 then it's gonna things are going to change again and what what was okay before might not be okay anymore just because you're you know you're aging unfortunately and uh not as fit and robust and don't recover as quickly as you may be used to when you were a little bit younger yeah i always like to say that it rarely repeats but always rhymes in terms of the training response to anything good bad sideways so here we go glenn we're trying to avoid this but let's like try let's like dip our toes in the water a little bit because i think we have something to pull on right so if an athlete has done a good job encapsulating their training they've got good training logs and things like that we know that we can derive future training and how we adjust training architecture we modulate volume and intensity and training load and all those components in order to produce adaptations we can also look at it as where we've potentially kind of

screwed up where we've overcooked ourselves we can look at previous bouts of illness and once again infection and illness or multifactorial it's not just training that's causing it you still have to have as you mentioned last time on the podcast you have to be exposed to the agent in order to get infected from it yeah um but can't can can we reasonably look back at once again as trying to come up with some actionable piece of information for the listeners to take away with can they look back at their previous training and use it as a little bit of a guidepost particularly during a portion where they got they might have gotten sick and said well at least i'm gonna avoid that terrain trap i'm not gonna repeat that pattern of whatever i did going into it exactly going into when i'm getting these vaccines or i would say even ever because if you made that mistake once you should be making it twice they can it can give some clues and some hints but it it's i guess it would be a mistake to assume that it was definitely caused by that because like you've said it is multifactorial you know we everybody's going to get ill at some point and they might have you know they might have been completely sedentary their whole life they're going to get ill they might have only had moderate levels of training and activity they're still going to get ill sometimes so they could look back at a period when they got ill and they could look back at what they did before and actually it wasn't because of what they did before it was just unlucky they were exposed to that

particular illness and and they got infected so i think as long as they are conscious of that they can look back at occasions maybe probably more than one would be good and they could see if there are any clues in there if it all lines up you know if it gives them some hints great and but i wouldn't get obsessed with it with it and think okay i was ill then whatever i did that week before was definitely wrong because it could have been okay and it was just they were unlucky and they just you know came into contact with that particular pathogen that was you know highly contagious highly infective and no matter what they'd have done they'd have still they'd have still succumbed and got it clues i think is a really good way to put it you're not and that's why i like to say it rhymes it's never copy paste right it's never the exact same thing because all of this stuff is multifactorial and you can't ever say oh well i got injured because i switched shoes or oh well i got injured because i did 2 000 more feet of vertical or whatever it is there's always several things at play some of those things at play dominate the landscape certainly but there's always there's always several things at play and this is and this is definitely one of them but i do think that if the listeners go if this is a catalyst for people to go back and either look back at their training and really scrutinize it for those things and look for the things that are rhyming and look for the clues you know these really soft things that glenn and i are trying not to pigeon our pigeonhole ourselves in i think that that's a good exercise because it can help you inform training going forward or if this is a catalyst to start that in the first place

mission accomplished right there because that is i encapsulating your training is one of the most power and then periodically reviewing it for these clues is one of the most powerful things that you can do because you are really able to leverage the individual nature of all of these things this exercise immunology just being one of them so with with that individual token i'm almost kind of i'm almost kind of thinking are there also patterns to pick up based on previous infections because we all know the people that never get sick we all know the people that get sick that always get sick same time every single year and we also know the people that whenever they do get sick they get the cold they get the flu or whatever they're out for longer periods of time than the rest of the the population do you think that that is worth something to take into consideration in terms of how to or like how to organize training going into these one of these vaccines or is it something completely unrelated a tough question man i know i was gonna get you that one i think it's probably not yeah i mean i couldn't say to be honest with you with you jason i think it's it's it's kind of i'm i'm speculating um maybe maybe a bit a bit wildly here i i would say it's not necessarily um the same thing but on the other hand i could equally see how that same person who gets rid of it quickly you

know they don't suffer for very long that could be you know they've got an immune system that is you know a bit more robust a bit quicker at clearing it that might mean that they have um you know a more robust response to to vaccination but that is you know complete speculation um on on my part i've never seen any research you know directly comparing how people normally suffer um with a normal um sort of free living infection to how they respond to it to a vaccination um so yeah interesting interesting idea would be nice a nice study to do i guess for somebody but i i i don't know the answer there are any enterprising graduate or PhD students that are out there that want to do that glenn's uh contact information will be in the show notes you can get a hold of him and he could be your supervisor for it uh okay i i and once again i i i caveated this we both caveated this pretty hardcore from the beginning that i think that we we did not want to speculate on a lot of these things because all of this is so new and the last thing we want to have happen is to create some basis of recommendation or even theorize on a basis of recommendation and have that all of a sudden go awry a year from now and we both look like idiots that's something that we definitely want to avoid um okay so let's take a little bit of another tact with this and i i say this a lot of people are gonna probably think of this next section

is like well duh but i do think that um looking at the the terrain traps to avoid i think is really important because it's not like you're gonna get sometimes when you're going into these situations you're getting a vaccine or you know you're going into a high contagion area the olympics is always a great example of this you have thousands of athletes coming in from all over the world and all of the ngbs get super paranoid about their athletes getting sick and so they have to do a big job a large job educating their athletes which covid kind of did for us this year but they have to do a really great job educating their athletes to simply not get sick before the olympic games which only comes around once every four years and it'd be horrible to get a cold right before your competition which happens a lot so what are the terrain traps that we need to be avoiding as people are going through these different vaccination doses what are the things that they definitely like should not be doing going into them that we can say close to for certain or it's just bad practice uh to do in advance of either of these vaccines so i mean if you're wanting to get the optimal response um from a vaccination then obviously the the what the vaccine is doing is is basically activating an immune response and developing immunological memory so you need your immune system to be operating optimally if you want to get an optimal response so you don't want to be doing silly things that could have a detrimental

effect on your immune system so i would say avoid all of those things that we know could have a negative impact so that's you know nutritional things so have a good diet life stresses you know minimize them as much as possible sleep and quality and quantity if if that's affected then that could potentially have a knock-on effect i mean again this is all of these things i'm not aware there's probably you know because this this is evolving so so quickly there's probably some data out there that somebody's you know dug out and mined and stuff like that showing correlations between these things and covid outcomes and and covid vaccination but i'm i'm not aware of any of them just yet but just looking at general responses to other you know vaccines for things like influenza and and stuff like that um yeah basically be healthy be as healthy as you can so avoid all of those negative health things as much as possible would would certainly be a pragmatic thing to do even if you know that study hasn't been done yet and we haven't got that hard robust evidence out there it's not going to be a bad thing you know to be healthy as possible have optimal diet try to you know minimize your stress as much as possible try to sleep well all of that sort of stuff so i would say they would be yeah the the clear sort of um avoiding those i guess would be the you know the traps to try and avoid falling into what about things like hydration just basic hydration stuff does that have any effect

again i don't i don't know that i've seen anything to suggest it would be a major thing unless it's you know really severe dehydration but just moderate amount that are normal um i think i haven't seen anything to suggest that that would be bad as long as you're not chronically doing that and you're just like with you know you're still training you're still exercising you're you're disrupting you know homeostasis there and you bring it back um into balance as quickly as you can that's part of your recovery so um but i've seen the reason the reason i mentioned that is i've seen that specific recommendation right make sure that you are more hydrated than than than normal going into the vaccine and once again i say well you should always be well hydrated like more it's probably not bad but it's probably not better but you shouldn't get lured into a false sense of hope thinking that you know you're going to chug a couple extra liters of water right before this vaccine and you're going to have some sort of super response to it yeah i mean i don't know where that that's come from really maybe that maybe it's just like a general bit of advice to try and avoid people being overly dehydrated obviously if you're if you're dehydrated i guess there's a slightly higher chance of maybe feeling a bit faint or fainting or something like that but i would question the the kind of the notion of see being more hydrated than normal because what if an individual is already very very well hydrated and they they hear that advice to them more than normal would potentially be taking too much and why would

they want what would they gain from from from that i don't know so again i don't know maybe there is some evidence out there to that's back that up i'm i'm personally not aware of it though so yeah i would i always worry i always worry about those types of recommendations because i know athletes and i know athletes take it to the extreme they're like oh if i need to be really well hydrated i'm gonna go get a gallon of water and i'm gonna chug it right before the vaccine because then it's gonna be i mean so seriously i mean they take people take dose recommendations many times as the dose is linearly related to the response that you get and sometimes it's many times it's not sometimes it's inversely related past a certain threshold and so whenever i see you we can go through supplements ad nauseum where this is the case and they've and people have had really bad outcomes that's not this that's not this podcast but i guess my point with the with with trying to nail down that recommendation is that it's a common one that you see oh go into it while hydrated but i think the more pragmatic is just make sure you're if you're optimally hydrated anyway keep it that way yeah continue yeah continue right not necessarily more is not necessarily better sometimes yeah absolutely yeah what about the need and we're gonna this is kind of diving back into your expertise what about the need to really back off the exercise dose so we're training we'll go back to our two hour a day runner right let's just say hey i want to be

super conservative and i'm gonna take a whole week off a whole week off bordering the vaccine three days before the day of three days after that's a whole week i'm normally exercising 14 hours a week that's typical endurance athlete right but for whatever reason i'm super paranoid i'm taking the extremes just to set up the example for you we're gonna take the whole week off beforehand zero physical activity outside of normal steps and things like that what like is that a reasonable course of action or does that somehow impact the immune system in the opposite fashion yeah i would say it's probably that probably wouldn't be sensible um because it again it's a big diversion from what is normal for for that person and we've seen like in some other areas of sort of health you see that from if people significantly reduce their levels of activity even just for a couple of days you start to see negative changes in their general health even just after a couple of days um i mean this is you know going from somebody who's regularly active and hitting those 10 000 steps a day or whatever dropping that down to like less than 3 000 steps per day you see big changes in health markers after like two days of doing that so with that in mind i would i would imagine that somebody who's training 14 hours a week to then do zero um is probably not going to be normal and it's not going to be good for them

and it would probably be unnecessary we can get some clues on this from um other vaccination research of the vaccination studies that are out there again it's a bit of an assumption to say that the covid vaccine would respond in the same way but kind of best guess based on what's out there at the moment when we look at how people respond to flu vaccines um then you don't tend to see in in healthy people so you know you're if we take these athletes as an example of that then they tend to respond normally um even if they're still training as normal so the one exception to that is a study that came out last year um where actually the conclusion of the study was not even if they trained right before their job it it didn't have any adverse effects on their response to the vaccination um however if you actually look at the data in the study a little bit more closely um one of the virus strains um did respond not so well if they'd trained two hours before if they'd done a hard session two hours before so this would be like a super acute response right you're training like literally immediately before you get you uh you get your shot yeah so for this all of the other strains they weren't really different but there was one of the flu strains um and the antibody response to that they they separate they had a group of athletes it i mean there's i guess one of the

difficulties with this study is they were actually quite vague in terms of giving information about the athletes and what they did so they they described them as elite athletes and they said that they trained hard and they had a hard session um and they then had a flu jab and that flu jab was either two hours after their last hard session or 24 to 26 hours after their last hard session so essentially the next day um but they didn't give any more information about what that session was and this was a mixture of different types of athletes but anyway when you look at that one strain the amount of increase in antibody levels um in the people who waited a day was 16 fold so antibody levels are down here they go up 16 fold um and the ones who had it two hours after it was only four which is still a good increase but you know this one's four times greater than that um and again in that wasn't statistically significant but you know who if you're not bothered about statistical significance if you're like i want the optimal response from this vaccination do i want a 16 fold increase in my antibody levels or do i want a four fold increase i'd go for the 16 thank you um so that's that i guess that's the the biggest clue that we've got is from that study but the the also the problem with that is we've got we haven't got all of the details available from that study about exactly what was their definition of you know they did a hard session a couple of hours before but it

certainly it certainly gives us some clues to say if you leave it at least a day then that's probably a lot better than you know running to the clinic or something like that finishing your interval session at the clinic yeah exactly yeah i've seen but i've seen something like that too like okay it's or or it's okay to do a hard session the day of right and this is why i'm getting this is kind of why i'm trying to like filter through all the noise a little bit because there have been a lot of in in my world and training world across runners trail runners cyclists triathletes there have been a lot of really specific recommendations on everybody wants to center on when is your last hard workout before the jab and when should your next one be right they're trying to optimize the amount of training and avoid as much downtime as possible and i just kind of come back to it's like we really don't know like we really don't know and you're just rolling the dice yeah and i mean i wouldn't be surprised if that that guideline that you've just said that recommendation um about it's okay to do a hard session on the day i wouldn't be surprised if that came directly from the study that i've just talked about and because that came out about eight eight ten months ago something like that um so i wouldn't be surprised if somebody's seen that and and and for all of the other flu strains actually it was fine but it was this one we don't know if covid would be more like that flu strain where the response was

affected more like the other ones that weren't affected or something completely different so you know if if i was to be i guess conservative and maybe a little bit tentative i would say don't do the hard session on that day beforehand just either have that day off or do a light one um because it's only one day i mean it's like and what if we don't know because we haven't we haven't seen that exact study yet but what if it did have a bit of an effect on your vaccine response and you weren't as protected as you should have been and then you go and get covid how many days are you going to be off because of that you know some people get long covid and they're wiped out for months and months or even longer so for the you know it's a big risk to take in my eyes for the sake of one more or two more hard sessions um so again we said we weren't going to say you know specific recommendations but if if i was to be constant i'd say do you know what that day just just just don't do the that super hard session it's only one day and then see how you feel the day after or the day after that here's what here's what i've always felt that helps this is kind of outside of exercise immunology and gets more into my world which is training architecture and training design if you look at training through a really long lens months not days which training should endurance training should always be looked at through this you're not really out anything there might be certain circumstances where if you're like

budding right up to an event that that day-to-day architecture might be somewhat material i'm using the word somewhat pretty generally is probably still not that material but if you back the training lens out to months not you know not days as i mentioned earlier you can only handle so much training stress over long periods of time and so if you just rearrange things and say okay well i'm going to take these three days easy it's not like they go and evaporate into thin air you just have the opportunity to do something different sometimes several weeks down the line it all comes out almost all 99 of it kind of comes out in the wash yes you can have perfect perfect architecture and perfect structure structure but for a lot of a lot of these like substitutions whether it's due to logistics or illness or in this case a vaccine like you're just moving the different puzzle pieces into a different order and at the end of the day it just like i said it just kind of comes out in the wash it's interesting as well when you're saying about substitutions for for other types of sessions because one thing that there is quite a lot of literature on is using exercise to enhance the response to vaccination again this is primarily on influenza on flu vaccines but there's been a pretty good body of evidence showing that exercise can enhance how an individual responds like acute exercise but but chronic as well so the the you take a group of you know sedentary unfit unhealthy individuals and you just train them to be reasonably fit they're going to

respond better to a to a vaccination on average than than an unfit group so generally you know being a fit individual a healthy individual you're probably going to have a better response in general on average um and then also some work that has been done looking at things that enhance response they've they've tended to use like resistance or sort of conditioning type exercise so there's some studies that have shown that actually um shortly before a vaccination doing some you know moderate resistance exercise is actually really good at enhancing um the the response to vaccination so when you talked about that kind of switching it around or you know moving things about a little bit it could be that that's the session that you want to put in there on that day instead and if you if you do have that in your schedule um and i guess there's based on the literature on things like flu that's probably the one that's going to be or has the greatest probability of actually conferring a beneficial acute um response to the vaccination that's interesting so you literally you'd be substituting resistance training session you'd be substituting an endurance session for resistance training session the day before or the day of yeah day of i think if you if you must train on that day if you want to get really specific i still think this all comes down to just be reasonable you know like don't like don't hit either one of the extremes just be super reasonable and it'll be fine um okay last piece this might be the most speculative

piece so if you totally punt this we can end the podcast right there there there seems to be a certain cohort of people that it takes a week and they have elevated heart rate for a week they you know they're running they might run a slight fever for several days and things like that is there anything that we can draw upon to give those athletes in particular some guidance on what they should be doing if they run into that because once again you don't know what you don't know um yeah i don't i don't know to be honest with you yeah it's the so the people or terrain traps to avoid or terrain traps to avoid right yeah i mean i i think this would be i guess one of those examples of listen to your body um it's you know you're feeling like that for a reason um so you're probably not going to feel if you're if you're feeling wiped out you know as a side effect of the vaccine that feeling probably isn't going to get better if you go out and you know smash a really hard session so i think that would probably yeah so the the trap there would be oh i feel like crap i better train twice as hard to get rid of it yeah so so yeah i mean you i would that would probably be the biggest sign to say you know what let's just take it easy for a bit maybe something really light but yeah just be see how you feel and hope that it's improving day by day um but yeah i i i'm not aware of any any particular

reasons or any particular mechanisms or evidence that's identified why some people respond like that and others don't um so without knowing that it's hard to say oh what can you do to avoid it or what can you do to get to get by it more quickly and other than just listen to your body and and respond accordingly i guess i just keep saying write it out be patient zoom the training lens out it'll all come back long term i know that it's not ideal or what you want right now but you got to zoom the lens out see we didn't get a whole bunch of nothing burgers we got some like practical things glenn the listeners won't know this but glenn and i had some brief email conversations beforehand that we wanted to make sure that we stayed a stayed within glenn's expertise but b because we don't know a whole lot as i've kind of mentioned earlier we don't want to we don't want to add to the speculation we want to add to the clarity right and i think we did a good job absolutely yeah yeah hopefully we did a bit of that at least glenn if you send me that one paper i'll put it in the show notes with the caveat that that don't derive too much from this because it's hard to actually uh it's hard to scrutinize some of the methods and and and what the actual protocols were but i'll absolutely include that yeah um anything else you want to uh mention to the listeners before we let you go i mean yeah just on on the note of that paper i think obviously you you have to you have to take or i guess don't overlook the conclusions that the authors put forward um but you've got the data there as well for a reason um

and sometimes you know people get obsessed with the was this statistically significant or wasn't it statistically significant um in the real world sometimes not always sometimes you know they do align but sometimes statistically significant and actually clinically relevant or clinically meaningful are separated and they're not necessarily the same thing so yeah when you see papers like this look at the data you know sometimes it could be that they were underpowered you know that the sample size wasn't large enough and if they'd have had more people or if they repeated it and added to the data then these things would come out as statistically significant but yeah so that when you see that paper it's it is really striking to me that there is you know 16 fold versus four fold you know and well actually they report it as a trend i think and and some people in statistics don't like people using trends because it's either it is or it isn't sort of thing but um but yeah i mean which you know if you want the optimal response which one would you rather be i i guess and the other yeah if i think even like some of the athletes in this were like wrestlers like um you know high level wrestlers or something like that so we can only theorize but if we'd have took a group of you know endurance and ultra endurance runners and did that exact endurance athletes and did that exact same study we might have got we might

have got a different picture so i would say you know don't hang all of your sort of hope on that one paper and you know stay open-minded and you know for the sake of one day then you know it could be worth backing off yeah 100 i mean you mentioned this a little bit earlier we do know that the immune response to different types of exercise whether it's endurance exercise or resistance exercise we'll kind of leave it in those two categories just to avoid any sort of further nuance we do know that that is different depending upon how much just depending upon the nature of those two exercises so i think that you're you're it's it's a very important point to note that when we're looking at some of these studies that look at athletes in quote and even elite athletes in quote we have to look at the types of athletes and the types of uh training activities that they're actually performing within this specific area of uh immune response yeah and i think one of the other things i i think is really important is when you talk about that kind of you know almost zooming out and taking the sort of the long look at things and we've you know we've focused so much on the acute like what what i do this one day that i'm having the vaccine or this one day where i might be going to be exposed to a pathogen and when we get obsessed with that for good reason because you know it it affects you know your risk of getting ill it affects how you respond but the thing that we always must remember is that like for

the the long lens i guess is a lifetime you know for for um athletes and it's easy to overlook but when you look at the illness over the lifetime of an athlete you know athletes are generally healthier so you know there's a lower incidence of of certain types of cancer um in in in you know individuals who have been highly active for their whole life or in in elite level athletes and actually the the risks from things like influenza and you know flu is actually lower if you look at like across the whole population and you look over the course of a lifetime it's lower in athletes and it's just that we're talking about acute time points when they might be you know not quite as good as normal but again taking that long lens look it's always good to remember that kind of it's not all bad and actually athletes are generally better on average it's just there might be this odd you know little period here or there where they've increased risk so i think that's a really important thing to bear in mind as well um it's the sort of the long game i suppose glenn that's a brilliant way to end it always take the big picture always look at the long lens thank you for coming on the podcast again repeat offender and also on such such short notice i realized i just got a hold of you last week but super important really appreciate your work in the area and i do want to bring up one thing that you brought up at the end of the last podcast people like you are still valuable this covet thing still running and people who

know exercise immunology we're still going to tap into into your resource and i do think that that is going to be something that's evergreen so it's good for people that are in the line of work and the profession and expertise that you have brilliant thank you very much yeah it was a pleasure chatting again jason yeah it's great stuff all right glenn all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to glenn for coming back on the podcast as a repeat offender and discussing some of these aspects today i know that this is a time where a lot of this information is confusing and it's confusing because it's new it's a new vaccine that's out several new vaccines that are out actually and we're just learning about how some of these affect individuals i do think that one of the things that we can take away from this is that these recommendations for how to come back from the vaccine post vaccine and how to start training or how to train coming into the vaccine we have to realize that we don't know what we don't know and i've seen these play i've seen these types of recommendations play out all over the space in the lay literature from take a week off to take two weeks off to do this if you're taking this vaccine to do that if you're taking that vaccine and while all that advice is certainly well intended i do think it kind of misses the mark because it really is just a lot of guessing at this point so you guys hopefully can use some of the information that you gleaned from this particular podcast to make your own training decisions we have these big general

guidelines uh mapped out for you but at the end of the day you're going to have to see how you react going to into uh either one of your vaccine doses and how you react coming out of it i do think that everybody is very well served to always look at training through a very long-term lens when you look at training through a long-term lens you're more likely to make the right decisions and less likely to make the wrong ones that is always a good way to approach the entirety of your training all right that's it for today folks thanks a lot to all the listeners appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you and as always we will see you out on the trails you