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Chronic inflammation spells bad news for our health, plain and simple.

And though inflammation is a natural and necessary way that the body stimulates healing, when inflammation becomes continuous and chronic, it becomes damaging. The most common causes of inflammation in the body are physical inactivity and diet.

And until recently, high-intensity exercise has been considered a factor in inflammation as well.

However, new information tells us we've only been seeing a part of the picture. This is good news!

Exercise scores again: a new look at the evidence

For some time, high intensity exercise has been seen as a source of inflammation to the body. By high intensity, we're talking something that pushes the muscle to perform and makes you reach deep to build new muscle: interval training, intense resistance training, long distance running.

The kind of training that you know from the burn you feel in the muscle that the muscle is breaking down a little bit.

Yes, this natural response is inflammation at the muscle as the body scrambles to repair and build new muscle (see Taking the mystery out of how muscles are made).

However, that's just a piece of the puzzle.

This "pro-inflammatory" view has also been adopted also due to the detection of the release in the body of myokines, a type of cytokine, as a response to muscle contraction. And cytokines are seen as pro-inflammatory markers. One cytokine that has been correlated with high intensity muscle demand is one known as IL-6.

But hang on a minute. This IL-6 release in response to intense exercise is evidently not the whole story.

Though the release of cytokines as been lumped together as pro-inflammatory when detected in the system, evidently it makes a difference what the cause of the cytokines release happens to be.


Let's take a closer look.

Whenever we move, our bodies release signaling molecules that communicate to the rest of the body. Muscle, like fat, has been proven to have endocrine properties. When it comes to muscle, myokines are released in response to voluntary contraction of the muscle...






The myokine IL-6 has previously been linked with a pro-inflammatory response in the body. It was thus concluded that intense muscle workload, stimulating the release of IL-6, was inflammation inducing.

But as it turns out, intense exercise is good anti-inflammatory medicine. What we're finding out is that when IL-6 is released during intense muscle workload, it is unique in that as part of this response, major anti-inflammatory inhibitors are released as well. Read the rest of this article by clicking HERE...