Exercise and Gut Troubles
How exercise can impact your gut - the good, the bad & the uncomfortable.
If you are an avid runner, you may know from first-hand experience the effects of intense exercise on the gut.
Strenuous exercise – especially in the heat – can lead many people to experience gastrointestinal distress.
We are talking, urgency, pain, loose stool, and in extreme cases, blood. This is actually a fairly well researched topic – and well-known phenomenon in the running community!
That being said, there is also evidence that consistent endurance exercise actually helps the gut – and can reduce symptoms of IBS.
How does this happen?
When we exercise, many physiological phenomena occur - including our blood flow gets prioritized to our working muscles that need fuel and oxygen. This shift leads to reduced blood flow to our organs that are doing less work – like the gut!
As the intensity of exercise increases, this decrease in blood perfusion to the gut can lead to our digestive tract receiving less fuel and oxygen – leading to pain, digestive upset and even damage to the gut lining.
There seems to be a threshold of exercise intensity that above which, GI distress is more likely to occur. This threshold may also cause a microbial disruption, or shift in the bacterial species within our gut.
How do I know if my exercise is intense?
The threshold of intensity that starts to impact is anything exceeding 60% of our maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max - a measure of how our body uses oxygen in exercise) or longer duration exercises (>90 mins).
In both of these cases we see increase HPA axis (our stress response system) activation.
What can we do to prevent?
Thankfully, we also know that consistent low to moderate intensity exercise may actually increase our bacterial diversity (that’s a good thing!).
One group of researchers even found an association between fitness (measured by VO2max - again how well your body uses oxygen in a workout) and the amount of short chain fatty acids (SCFA) people produced.
SCFA are anti-inflammatory compounds that are produced by the healthy bacteria in our guts. They are thought to play a major role in our gut-brain communication system and are an indicator of a healthy gut.
How do we find balance?
Recovery and mixing up intensities is important for many reasons - and the gut is no different! Balancing your intense workout days with some more low-intensity days will likely help your training as well as help train your gut.
There is also some cool research on gut supportive supplements and dietary support to ease the GI distress many of us face – especially when we get the perfect storm of heat, intensity and long duration of training.
There’s a lot we can do to optimize your recovery and make you feel your best while getting your sweat on. Book with one of our naturopathic doctors to learn about how we can support you!