The posts before have shown the dramatic outcomes of too much exercise and training. In between, I would like to take another perspective on the whole topic to encourage your efforts, and perhaps give you more cues at hand to make the detrimental results of too much training and racing more understandable.
Modern exercise physiology and biology put a lot of work into studying the healthy body. That has not been the case for many decades where scientists only looked at sick bodies. Exercise physiology gives an amazing insight into the body’s “normal” way of functioning.
Inflammation is a phenomenon of the healthy body
You are probably used to the view/fact that inflammation is only present in cases of disease such as infections or chronic non communicable diseases (atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes-type-2, multiple sclerosis, bowel diseases etc.). Since very recent, scientific data talk a different language. Inflammation is a condition of the healthy body, it is a contained process essential for being healthy, a process that keeps our body with all its diverse functions going. Along all the mucosal linings (bronchi, guts, urinary bladder etc.) that connect us with the outside world, minor inflammatory or immune responses respectively take place… always and throughout our whole life. These borders colonized with its very own microflora are areas where controlled inflammatory processes secure the borders and guarantee our survival, where the communication with the environment takes place, often termed as friends (nutrients, bacteria, virus, macromolecules) and foes (e.g nutrients, viruses, bacteria, macromolecules).
As you can see from the listing in brackets, whether an agent or a molecule respectively is friend or foe is determined by the environment and the time of encounter at the very place of the encounter. There is no bad or good per se! Inflammation is a physiological/healthy activity/process of the human body! The meaning, whether a molecule is treated as friend or foe, is determined by the condition of the milieu at a given time (e.g. such different conditions may be diseases, the different development stages, we go through; or different situations of stress etc.)
The multiple systemic inflammatory processes ongoing in our body are termed low-grade systemic inflammation and are characterized by a state of perfect well-being. Diseases or discomfort start, if this process deteriorates and gets out of control which is generally spoken the case in all illnesses.
Well, this inflammatory situation is initiated and controlled by the same system, the stress system. I mentioned it already in my former post that it consists of the super system of regulation: nervous system, immune system and hormones (endocrine system). The basic mode of regulation is a loop, many loops connected by positive and negative feedback by structured by circuits on various levels. The context determines whether the system activates or suppresses a process. Under the condition of well-being exists a perfect equilibrium between pro- and anti-inflammatory currents. I name them currents, because you have myriads of molecules with either properties depending on time and place of the encounter.
What has this got to do with physical activity, with you as a high-end athlete racing Hawaii?
Moderate physical activity stimulates the stress system in a very positive way. It helps to avoid the deterioration of systemic low-grade inflammation into chronic systemic low-grade inflammation. Chronic systemic low-grade inflammation seems to be one cause for atherosclerosis, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes-2 and some forms of cancer such as breast or colon cancer. Physical inactivity has been identified as a stronger predictor of chronic illnesses than risk factors such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, and obesity for all-cause mortality. Physical activity protects against these diseases and premature death because of its ability to down-regulate inflammatory states in our body.
As an athlete you find yourself on the path of health and youth ! If you don’t exaggerate!
You are well familiar with the fact that endurance training means stress for your body, positive in the case of overreaching, negative in the case of overtraining. The more you push your body to exertion, the more stressed it gets. The control mechanisms that contain your body’s low-grade inflammation have a hard time to remain under control. If you manage your training within these limits where training stress is not harming your immune system, autonomic nervous system and/or your hormone regulation, then you can be sure that sport is one (please, keep in mind that there are other factors as well such as genetic outfit and nurtition that play a significant role too) preventive measure for a long and healthy life.
If you do otherwise and drive your body permanently over the edge, then pro-inflammatory processes may take over and lead your body into a state of chronic systemic low-grade inflammation, one of the strongest disease predictors identified until now.
A remark at the end: In this post I am not taking about local acute inflammations due to injuries or other traumata. Acute inflammation is a short-term process, usually appearing within a few minutes or hours and ceasing upon the removal of the injurious stimulus. It is characterized by five cardinal signs: rubor (redness), calor (increased heat), tumor (swelling), dolor (pain), and functio laesa (loss of function).
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