Fitness Alert: Tobacco Blocks Top Performance!
It’s no secret that tobacco use can lead to serious health problems like heart disease, lung disease, and several forms of cancer.1 Smokeless tobacco use can cause gum disease, tooth decay, and cancer of the mouth.2 Still, you may keep using tobacco because you think these problems are far in the future and—with luck—they won’t strike you.
Not so fast! Tobacco use can impact fitness, performance, and mission readiness now. If you take pride in being active, fit, and healthy, you may not think tobacco could really affect your performance, but it can. Here’s how:
- Smoking is linked to lower scores for activities such as running, pushups, and sit-ups.
- Smokers usually have smaller fitness gains than non-smokers, so they often see less improvement when they train hard.3
- Smokers have more accidents in training or on duty, miss work more often, and get less done on the job.4
Tobacco's Impact on Fitness
Smoking narrows your airways and slows down the air moving in and out of your lungs. This resistance can double or triple within just seconds of inhaling! It also lowers your blood’s ability to carry oxygen and your blood vessels’ ability to expand.5 What does that mean? It means that a smoker’s heart has to work harder to make up for the lower levels of oxygen reaching muscles.6 If that’s not enough to make you think about quitting, consider those around you: breathing second-hand smoke before or during an event weakens an athlete’s results.7
What about dipping instead of smoking? Smokeless tobacco still has nicotine, and that causes your veins to narrow. Narrow veins supply less oxygen to the heart so, like when you smoke, it has to pump faster to get as much as it needs.8
If you still think smoking isn’t affecting your fitness, just wait. Researchers found that over 4 years, male U.S. Navy personnel who smoked had a bigger drop-off in run/walk times, curl-ups, and push-ups than non-smokers.9
Tobacco's Impact on Mission Readiness
Tobacco’s effects on physical ability go beyond strength and stamina. Smoking can limit your eyesight in low light; smokers’ vision adjusts more slowly to darkness and they don’t see as well at night.
When faced with a mission, times when military personnel cannot smoke are also reason for concern.10 While the nicotine in tobacco can boosts alertness, nicotine withdrawal actually slows your reaction time and lessens your ability to think quickly and clearly.
Smokeless tobacco use also causes nicotine highs and lows that impact performance and can be unsafe.11 When you can’t chew, you become short-tempered and restless, react less quickly, and find it harder to stay focused.
The bottom line: Tobacco use decreases fitness and physical performance
Keep your team at its best by quitting tobacco. Quitting is hard, but Quit Tobacco—Make Everyone Proud is here to help.
References
1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2011). Health effects of cigarette smoking. Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/health_effects/effects_cig_smoking/index.htm#definition
2 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2011). Smokeless tobacco facts. Retrieved July 16, 2012, from http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/smokeless/smokeless_facts/index.htm
3 Institute of Medicine. (2009). Combating tobacco in military and veteran populations. S. Bondurant and R. Wedge (Eds). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.uthscsa.edu/hscnews/pdf/IOMReport_CombatingTobaccoUseinMilitaryandVeteranPopulations.pdf
4 Institute of Medicine. (2009). Combating tobacco in military and veteran populations. S. Bondurant and R. Wedge (Eds). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.uthscsa.edu/hscnews/pdf/IOMReport_CombatingTobaccoUseinMilitaryandVeteranPopulations.pdf
5 Institute of Medicine. (2009). Combating tobacco in military and veteran populations. S. Bondurant and R. Wedge (Eds). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.uthscsa.edu/hscnews/pdf/IOMReport_CombatingTobaccoUseinMilitaryandVeteranPopulations.pdf
6 Non-Smokers’ Movement of Australia. (2006). Fact sheet—Smoking and fitness. Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.nsma.org.au/facts/fitness.htm
7 Non-Smokers’ Movement of Australia. (2006). Fact sheet—Smoking and fitness. Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.nsma.org.au/facts/fitness.htm
8 National Cancer Institute. (n.d.). Smokeless tobacco: Health and other effects. Retrieved July 16, 2012, from http://dccps.nci.nih.gov/tcrb/less_effects.html
9 Macera, C. A., Aralis, H. J., Macgregor, A. J., Rauh, M. J., Han, P. P., and Galarneau, M. R. (2011). Cigarette smoking, body mass index, and physical fitness changes among male navy personnel. Nicotine and Tobacco Research, 13(10), 965-71. Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21624940
10 Institute of Medicine. (2009). Combating tobacco in military and veteran populations. S. Bondurant and R. Wedge (Eds). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.uthscsa.edu/hscnews/pdf/IOMReport_CombatingTobaccoUseinMilitaryandVeteranPopulations.pdf
11 Institute of Medicine. (2009). Combating tobacco in military and veteran populations. S. Bondurant and R. Wedge (Eds). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.Retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.uthscsa.edu/hscnews/pdf/IOMReport_CombatingTobaccoUseinMilitaryandVeteranPopulations.pdf