What are the best tips for reducing inflammation (beyond cutting out gluten, dairy, refined sugars etc.)?

Question

Erin Carson · Answer

Hey, Amy, Aaron here. I'm a strength coach. Here's my response about inflammation and the inflammatory response to exercise. The bottom line is inflammation, is there to protect you? And so, in my opinion, the best way to control inflammation is to get the recovery, right? And just really, pay attention to how you feel over time after intense, exercise or strength training, or whatever you're doing. Because what you don't want to have, is just this on and on inflammatory. Three spiral downward actually letting your body recover is probably the best way to get rid of inflammation and deal with it on an ongoing basis.

Dr. Dan Plews · Answer

Hey, Amy. Thanks for this question. It's a really, really good one. So firstly, obviously, the refined sugars, I think, is the major one. And alongside that, any processed foods which particularly comes with a lot of sugars generally anyway a lot of hidden ones. I don't agree with the dairy comment, though. In fact, there was a meta-analysis that was published in 2020 that showed the exact opposite, with people who consume more dairy had lower levels of inflammation as measured by C-reactive proteins. So I'm not sure. I think that one's slightly true, and I think dairy is actually a good source of calcium, a good source of protein, and totally fine, and a very good one for athletes, in particular. And then, finally, one of the things that I think is really important is obviously high-intensity interval training and more high intensity, particularly things that are high loading and induce a lot of muscle damage so, like eccentric loading heavy weights. They're really good. Of course, they're very beneficial. They activate a lot of things that are important for growth and important for training adaptation. But I think having the right recovery between it's really, really important, and that's something else that can be considered. So the timing and the periodization of when you're doing those high-intensity intervals is really important. Generally, around 48 hours between those exercises where you're doing significant amounts of work above your second ventilatory threshold or the anaerobic threshold. So I hope that helps. Bye bye.

Matthew Pendola · Answer

Hi, Amy. This is Matt Padilla, I'm a strength and conditioning coach but also an LMFT, so I appreciate this question, I get it a lot. This is, something first and foremost that I like to cover with athletes is, we understand that inflammation is a part of the process and it can be a good thing. But I'm going to assume here that you're talking about too much inflammation or too much soreness, that sort of thing, and how can I recover faster. Well, first we want to look at what our sleeping hygiene looks like. Are we getting eight hours? Are we getting good quality eight hours? All right. So in the past, I've just experienced maybe a little bit of overreaching in training for a while that can lead to that overtraining effect, less sleep, or the sleeping patterns are just not as good qualitywise. And so that's an indication that overstress it's too chronic and we're doing it too often, too soon, that sort of thing. So looking at those things first and foremost. But from there I would move into what the recovery days actually look like. So if I have a quality day on a Wednesday and a quality on a Saturday, I want to look at Thursday and Friday and what is in that for quality recovery. So walking is so underrated. Movement is medicine. I do believe that we have nasal breathing with the mouth closed, that's rest and digest, something that we call parasympathetic. And that's nice, low intensity steady state work. So I really like that. I even love to fracturize a lot. What that means in the easy running I'm doing, I might run for three minutes, walk for one. And when I'm walking, I get back to the nasal breathing. That really truly helps my easy day stay easy and not push towards potentially that moderate day or moderately hard day. I've personally noticed that my recovery has improved so much more once I started that fractionalized approach in training. And by the way, I got that from Bobby McGee, another running coach on this app. So definitely give that a try. And I would also just tell you that overall when you're looking at how you are responding, a little bit of journaling goes a long ways. You wake up in the morning, do you feel that inflammation is a 4? OK. Now incorporating some of these ideas, you wake up and you see now that it's a 3 or a 3. You see it start to come down. That shows progress and sometimes just reviewing that or taking note of that helps. So I hope this helped you. If you had more specific questions, please let me know, happy to answer.

Dr. Aaron Baggish, MD · Answer

Hey, Amy. Dr. Baggish here. I saw your question about reducing inflammation and thought I'd throw out my 2 cents. So first off, I think it's important to remember that not all inflammation is bad. Inflammation is a response to stress. And as athletes, when we put in a hard workout, inflammation is actually the recovery mechanism by which our body gets stronger again and adapt. So inflammation is not all bad. However, chronic inflammation, which is there for long periods of time independent of exercise, probably not a great thing. When it comes to reducing inflammation from a dietary perspective, probably the most important thing is to target foods that are high in antioxidant metabolites. Antioxidants help battle oxidative stress, which is actually probably the primary trigger for inflammation. And when it comes to easily-digestible, high-antioxidant foods, there's only one word to remember, and that's berries-- strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, goji berries. Those are incredibly potent from an antioxidant perspective and should really be a staple of all athletes diets. Hope that helps. Keep the questions coming.

Daniel Moedas · Answer

Hey, Amy. Hope you are having a wonderful day. So Amy Brown is asking what are the best tips for reducing inflammation. So Amy, inflammation is a natural imperative healing process that our body actually has to undergo, in a way, to manage the stress that it was exposed to during exercise. So the best strategies actually to reduce or to control, manage, this inflammation is nothing more than actually performing low to moderate intensity exercise, because it can actually cause a cellular response by suppressing inflammation. And actually, I would say one thing that all athletes lack the most is actually putting active recovery blocks as a part of their training periodization. So we actually want to add as much active recovery as we can to manage the stress of exercise and continuous exercise in their plannings. So we don't go on a barrier that we don't want to cross that is the chronic inflammation condition that can actually cause a lot of symptoms, such as muscle and joint pain, muscle weakness, fever, like loss of balance, insulin resistance, and many other symptoms. So I would say perform low to moderate intensity exercise and really manage those blocks of active recovery.

Emma Pallant-Browne · Answer

So I think it really depends on what is causing the information. Often. You have an allergy to something, and if you can't take away that stimulus, if it's something like hay fever dust in the air smoke, whatever it is, that is, that is causing that then, it's okay. How do you deal with it? If you're talkin about hard training, information, then easing, a good antioxidant. So, Having your berries, having your, your variation of colors in fruit and veg can really help that. And being on top of your hydration. That doesn't always mean that overload of water also having electrolytes in there. Keeping tabs on levels of things like potassium, salt, magnesium, and even just general good blood levels. So good vitamin D and making sure you're eating all those things that have that nice varied diet and a ticking, all those nutrition boxes.

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"What are the best tips for reducing inflammation (beyond cutting out gluten, dairy, refined sugars etc.)?"