Is it safe to run in cold weather when you have a cold or flu?

Running In Cold Weather With Cold or Flu

• If you dress warm and in rain wear, then there is no reason you couldn't run in cold weather. Don't over-do it though and take a good hot shower when you return home. Running actually gets the lungs functioning well and helps with congestion.
  

• Be sure to wear something warm on your head because that is where you lose most of your body heat.
  

• I recommend running in the cold, if a person has a cold or flu. The congestion in the throat and lungs is coughed up much easier, resulting in you getting better sooner. The coughing and hacking in the cold may hurt, but you will feel very well afterward.

• NOT if you have bronchitis or pneumonia, or strep throat, or influenza; if you force yourself to exercise with any of those, you can do yourself serious damage.

• If your fever is higher than 99 degrees, just give your body the rest it needs in order to drive away the illness and stop trying to prove how tough you are.

• Aerobic exercise is also FAR WORSE if you have COPD, asthma or other lung disease and especially if you exercise in cold weather. Colds and Influenza are similar. Rest.
  

• NO! Medical professionals (and most moms) will tell you to rest in bed with a cold or the flu. That is the correct advice (along with drinking fluids, eating nutritious foods and treating the symptoms so you don't feel so miserable). Your lungs that are one of the prime targets of cold and flu viruses don't function as well in colder weather and stressing the respiratory system from aerobic exercise like running can cause more symptoms and increase coughing and runny nose.
  
  Your body and especially the immune system need to use a lot of energy to fight infectious disease. Therefore, you need to rest so that the most energy is available for the battle against the infectious agent.
  
  Additionally, your kidneys and liver are also working overtime when you have infections, trying to clear out the dead cells resulting from the "war". When you exercise, your body also releases additional things for these organs to have to clear from your body, just from the normal damage strenuous exercise does to muscle tissue. Make that strenuous exercise or exercise with stiff and cold muscles, then the damage is worse.
  
  When there is exercise damage to muscle tissue when you are dehydrated, have a fever, and especially with infections by Type A and B influenza viruses, even more serious damage can occur to your kidneys with a condition called rhabdomyolysis. It is a condition that directly results from the build up of the proteins and other waste from infection and exercise especially when exercising with dehydration, fever, etc. and that can cause kidney failure and severe muscle pain, requiring hospitalization. So be better safe than sorry and take it easy and rest in bed when you have a cold or the flu.