Micro Managing your Fitness- Inflammation

In sports performance and fitness for desirable body composition, results are dependent on maintaining an optimal balance between training and recovery. Tom Purvis teaches that a desired health inducing or performance based outcome for clients can be achieved by micro adaptations and micro progressions.* This strategy involves a training principle that is based on the idea that exercise results in a disturbance in cellular homeostasis, and these exercise induced changes are assumed to be the main stimulus for initiating the physiological responses that induce training adaptations by restoring cellular homeostasis.

Part of this process is muscle inflammation. If the amount of inflammation is not strategically monitored a person can become vulnerable to losses in training gains, overtraining syndrome, tissue injury, and excessive soreness. Strategically managing inflammation includes appropriate exercise program progression, nutrition management, and inflammation control. Over the counter use of NSAIDs (non steroid anti inflammatory drugs) like Advil involve more cost than benefit, in my opinion. Besides their ability to cause ulcers and kidney problems, i found an interesting piece of information from the journal, Spine that indicates they don’t help the body with tissue healing. Researchers looked at patients who had undergone spinal fusion treatment, where two or more vertebrae are fused together, and discovered that patients who had taken a conventional NSAID (Toradol) were five times less likely to achieve successful union of the vertebrae than those who had taken no NSAID. (Spine 1998;23(7):834-838).

My advice: supplement your recovery with natural anti inflammatory aides and pay your recovery process a lot of attention!

Fighting inflammation naturally

1. Omega-3 oils, especially EPA (fish oils)

2. Green tea

3. Ginger

4. Curcumin (tumeric)

5. Cat’s Claw

6. Anti-oxidants: Vitamin C and Vitamin E

Anti-Inflammatory Treatment of Muscular Injuries in Sport: An Update of Recent Studies, Sports Medicine, Volume 28, Number 6, 1 December 1999, pp. 383-388(6)

Peterson, Angela. Overtraining: proposition for Debate, Curtin University, Educational Exercise Physiology Resources, 2000.

*if you have ever heard me write or speak about ‘appropriate progression’ in exercise programming I am referring to micro progression and adaptation.