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Pump Up Before Your Flu Shot?

Pumping some iron may boost not just your muscles but also the effectiveness of your annual flu shot.

A recent study has found that doing bicep curls a few hours before your flu shot increases your immune response, meaning that your body may get more out of this inoculation.

“We’re trying to find something that could be very simple to do, which would benefit your vaccine response,” says Dr. Kate Edwards, lead author of the study from the University of Birmingham in England.

For the study, Edwards and colleagues recruited 60 healthy college students. Forty of the participants did bicep curls for 25 minutes, and six hours later all of the participants received an injection of the flu vaccine.

Blood tests were performed several times over the next five months to measure the way the immune system responded to the vaccine. It was found that though the immune response differed in men and women who performed the exercise, both genders demonstrated an increased immune response to the vaccine when it was preceded by bicep curls.

This is significant because vaccinations work by exposing the body’s immune system to a tiny amount of the virus that causes the disease, in this case the flu. So, the better the immune system responds to a vaccine, in theory, the better able the body may be to defend itself against the flu.

Edwards believes that the immune response to the flu vaccine changes after exercise because of inflammation.

“Doing a [bicep curl] damages the muscle, causing immune cells to arrive in that area,” she says.

After exercise, muscles tend to get inflamed, and immune system cells flock to the area to try to ease the damage. With more immune cells in the area where the flu shot is given, more cells are quickly forced to respond to the vaccine.