Inflammation and Recovery

Inflammation is your body's way of protecting itself from infection, illness, or injury. As part of the inflammatory response, your body increases its production of white blood cells, immune cells, and substances called cytokines that help fight infection.

Inflammation is a natural response to training that all athletes experience.  Here is an article describing the issues athletes can face https://furthermore.equinox.com/articles/2017/02/inflammation

Inflammation is a good thing for athletes in moderate quantities because it indicates your body is building new muscle and capillaries to help you for the next effort of that kind.  The problem is that eliminating inflammation can be slow creating aches and pains and fatigue. 

Aging athletes will take longer to recover because their bodies have accumulated more levels of inflammation due to diet, habits, pollutants, smoking, obesity, illness, allergies to name a few causes. 

You can use medical methods to reduce inflammation but there may be better ways for athletes to control inflammation levels and help their bodies make progress in training. 

As you might imagine there are many companies that have claims that they reduce recovery and inflammation.  There so many choices it can be very confusing.  Symptoms of inflammation can include

• ·         Swelling
• ·         Feverishness
• ·         Fatigue
• ·         Achiness
• ·         Feeling ill, cold symptoms, hives, allergy symptoms
• ·         Chills
• ·         Loss of appetite

Here are a few of the ways that people say they can reduce inflammation for athletes:

• ·         Compression boots
• ·         ICE and cooling therapies contraindicated and ICE therapy supported
• ·         Heat Therapy and/or Infrared Therapy
• ·         Muscle massage or acupuncture Therapies  (MAT, dry needling, massage)
• ·         Medications or Nutraceuticals, IGY Therapy
• ·         Diet
• ·         Electrical stimulation
• ·         Traction
• ·         Rest

The question is, what is the best for you and how do you choose? It can depend on the injury in some cases, in other cases the situation is more generalized. 

Here are a few links to articles about specific injuries and healing protocols that have been used to reduce inflammation

• ·         Achilles Tendonitis
• ·         Overuse Tendon Injuries
• ·         Hamstring tendonitis
• ·         Lower Back pain
• ·         Piriformis pain
• ·         Shoulder Bursitis

Recent discoveries about inflammation indicate that the best way to reduce inflammation is infrared light therapy and that ICE is not an effective method although it can reduce the feverishness you might feel.  Unfortunately, the feverishness indicates that your body is working and ICE can actually impede this process.  Here is an article on a NASA test on the efficacy of these treatments: Infrared treatment

Here are a few ways you can get infrared treatments that are rated.  Another alternative not noted here is Therasage Infrared heating pads. 

As you can see there are many theories and therapies that are touted as the best for recovery but the science is slow to develop the clinical proof because these trials are very expensive to support.  Basically you need to find the method that works best for you.  I hope this blog helps you to understand the wide range of potential ways to reduce inflammation and how important it is to pay attention to the period of time after the training so that you are able to keep training and recover faster.