Take Vitamin C to Boost Immunity and Fight Stress

You’re working out hard, pushing yourself to the max. Everything is going great and you’re happy about seeing the results until… One evening after a tough workout you’re nose starts to run a little, and your throat feels funny. Next morning you wake up feeling terrible as you got a nasty cold. Sounds familiar?

It’s not easy to avoid catching a cold when it’s that time of the year and everyone around you is getting ill. Especially when your immunity is not at 100% as your body is recovering from a workout. Research has shown that runners who train more than 60 miles per week have roughly double the risk of infection, compared with runners who ran less than 20 miles a week.

Vitamin C is known for its ability to help stave off or shorten the duration of colds and flu-like illnesses, and in normal health it is also responsible for keeping the body's tissues healthy. Aside from helping the body to absorb essential iron, vitamin C acts as an antioxidant, and helps control the formation of free radicals that damage cells and contribute to ageing.

Studies also show that vitamin C plays an important role in helping to remove cortisol and minimize the catabolic stress response post-workout. Cortisol is a hormone produced in the human body by the adrenal gland and it is released in response to stress. Have you ever boosted yourself up with a dose of caffeine before a workout and had that anxious, jittery feeling afterwards? That’s the effect of increased cortisol. The first point is to take it everyday or for an extended duration, and a good idea is to take 1.5 to 2g of vitamin C post-workout with your protein shake because that will help clear any excess caffeine or other stimulants left in your system, clear cortisol from the body and speed recovery.

Another benefit of taking a large dose of vitamin C daily is that over time it will also elevate testosterone. There are not many human studies into this effect, but two recent studies show vitamin C supplementation for 30 days can improve testosterone levels in diabetic rats. Testosterone is typically very low in diabetics, and in one studies, the vitamin C totally restored testosterone levels and the rats recovered normal reproductive function. In the other, vitamin C partially restored testosterone and reproduction.

A great product to use is BioCare Informed-Sport Vitamin C 1000 as it provides a readily absorbable form of vitamin C and magnesium with synergistic antioxidants in the form of bioflavanoids bilberry and grapeseed extract.