Prevent chronic inflammation and get better at running (and life)

• Inflammation, while annoying, is a natural response of the body to intense training.

• If it becomes the cause, it may result from overloading or unbalanced training. It is necessary to listen to the body.

• With adequate rest, moderate workouts, or practicing an active break and a balanced diet, it can be controlled and resolved.

Thereare some words that in a runner’s vocabulary we wish would never enter, or would only be uttered as if they were something exotic and almost impossible to experience, a sort of first rule of Fight Club so we never talk about FightClub .
Here, one of those words is INFIAMATION. Well, if you’ve come this far by now the damage is done and you can’t avoid learning it anymore, then you might as well try to talk about it and try to figure out how we can deal with it and come back in the best condition possible.

Let me introduce myself, I’m a friend of yours

Exactly, you read it right. When we run (or practice any other sporting activity) and exert more effort than usual, for a few hours afterward, or sometimes for a day or two in the case of really very intense efforts, the accompanying feeling is that of having wooden legs. It is partly due to the accumulation of lactate, partly due to microinjuries that occur in muscle fibers, to protect which our body reacts by calling up blood (and thus nutrients) and raising the temperature and cellular activity. For the same reason, when we get the flu, it often raises our temperature so that our antibodies work faster, or when we get a cut or scratch on our arm, it swells and becomes red and more sensitive. The result is beneficial in the long term, but in the short term it causes some discomfort. Here, all these activities can be encapsulated under the term inflammation. It is a very very simple explanation eh, the mechanisms are quite complex but I would say it can go well enough to understand the concept.

Too much is too much!

As the saying goes, when you overdo it, it is not good at all. If one assumes that inflammation is an almost physiological condition of a healthy body responding to a stimulus, in fact, one might be inclined to think that with every workout one should feel some discomfort. This is not so, of course, because although it is a reaction generally conducive to cellular reconstruction and restoration to the best condition, an ongoing inflammatory state, or one that is triggered by very low stimuli, is an indication that our body is malfunctioning, and we should investigate the causes that lead us to have discomfort or chronic pain. Examples of chronic inflammation are all the seasonal allergic manifestations, for which we need only put our nose out of the house for a few seconds (literally) to have watery eyes, a runny nose and a constant headache for days, or, speaking of things purely inherent to running, those real bogeymen for runners that answer to the names of plantar fasciitis, piriformis syndrome or that of the iliotibial bandelletta are inflammations of a chronic nature. The fact is that by the time these inflammations are manifest, we have already gone too far beyond our body’s standard restorative capabilities, and it is time to take a break.

Keep it under control

Getting to the point where you have to stop is never good, so if you are experiencing pain and discomfort a little too frequently, it is not the case to run with it and it is good to review something in the way you train or the load of activity you do. You can also try to keep an eye on a few things that can help you better manage your body and give it everything it needs to self-repair without going to the limit:

1. Sleeping well: easy to say, you’ll tell me, but not always possible. I absolutely agree with you. I am well aware that it is not always easy to reconcile our lives with getting a sufficient amount of sleep and a good quality of sleep, but it is something of absolute importance to give our bodies a way to recover, especially when we add workouts of a certain intensity to our daily activities.
2. Do lighter-than-usual activities: you can’t (but read it as a shouldn’t) always run at your best. A well-calibrated training plan mainly involves light workouts in which heart activity and exertion are restrained. Longer but less strenuous activities, which may perhaps seem a little more tedious than usual, serve to get things back on track at the cellular level.
3. Take a day off once in a while-the principle is the same as in the previous point. Dozens of scientific studies have pointed out that stopping altogether for a day (but even two or three, if you need to) does not compromise your fitness; in fact, it allows you to recover much faster than you would by training-even at a much lower pace than usual.
4. Eatwell: an open door should be broken down here. Food, in addition to mere caloric intake, should also be chosen for the quality of the calories it provides and for all the other components that our bodies can take advantage of, and it is good to remember that the time you choose to run should also be considered infunction of meals. In fact, things change if you run in the morning, afternoon or evening, so having a varied and personalized diet-possibly studied with a nutritionist-is definitely a favorable factor in reducing the risk of chronic inflammation.
5. Take care of your thoughts: I do not know if it is right to place this suggestion at the end of the list, because it should always be the basis of our activities, whether they are sports or not. Physical health is inseparable from mental health, and this aspect should definitely not be underestimated. Running well, training properly in preparation for a race or simply taking an hour to oneself is closely related to being mentally well, and taking care of one’s thoughts will also help prevent not only our mind but also the whole rest of the body from becoming inflamed.

(Main image credits: belchonock on DepositPhotos.com – Via Women’s Running)