On a trivial note, a lot of alternative medicine (not talking herbalisms here that can actually have chemical effects good or bad sometimes) boils down to:
A—avoiding sledgehammertastic chemical/surgical interventionism with all the attendant side effects and risks thereof for things that you can actually get better from on your own, and
B—ritualistically dealing with anxiety and expectation in a way that deeply seats these changes, which actually often matters for the human immune system and musculoskeletal system etc since the same organ system that runs all our autonomic functions bizarrely also does the thinking. The placebo effect is real, it matters, and can probably be enhanced in effectiveness over and above the ’oh I took a pill didn’t I?” that you see in clinical trials.
I’ve seen evidence both personal and scientific for shamanistic and meditative interventions doing all kinds of great things for people’s autonomic nervous systems from changing base inflammatory levels to enhancing the ability to maintain temperature control in extreme climates. I’ve seen actual biochemical evidence at a talk at the university that a good chunk of the cardiovactular benefit of exercise might come not from the metabolic effects but from it changing one’s mood and this then feeding into changes in the inflammatory pathway.
I’ve seen actual biochemical evidence at a talk at the university that a good chunk of the cardiovactular benefit of exercise might come not from the metabolic effects but from it changing one’s mood and this then feeding into changes in the inflammatory pathway.
How does the biochemistry of mood changes feeding into the inflammatory pathway work?
A lot of the interaction between the nervous system and immune system is just suspected without being understood. Some is being figured out however.
A few years ago I had the good fortune to see a talk by Dr. Kevin Tracey, a guy who has done a lot of work on modulation of the immune system via drugs. In it he laid out the history behind his discovery of what he calls the inflammatory reflex, a neurological circuit that modulates the ability of circulating immune system cells to produce TNF and other molecules involved in inflammation.
The short version of what he showed us is that he found a branch of the vagus nerve enervates an enteric ganglion in your abdomen which then sends a norepinephrine-secreting nerve fiber into your spleen. In your spleen, the nerve fibers branch out and form what look for all the world like synapses with a weird population of immobilized lymphocytes. These look like lymphocytes except that they are expressing genes that act as norepinephrine receptors and the production pathway for another neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. When this nerve arc is activated these cells produce acetylcholine and the macrophages and other circulating immune system cells which are temporarily hung up during their passage through your spleen receive the signal and become much less prone to be activated into producing inflammatory signaling molecules for something like a day, I don’t remember the exact timeframe. Incidentally, inflammatory signals in peripheral tissues being suppressed by acetylcholine is also partially why most smokers won’t get inflammatory bowel disease – nicotine is a mimic of acetylcholine (which blasts all your receptors hard rather than just those at the ends of particular fibers hence all the myriad psychological and physiological effects). It’s more complicated than that (of course it is, its biology) and it appears that there are particular circumstances in which nicotine can drive inflammation too, but overall thats its net effect.
Your vagus nerve is a key part of your parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, known for being responsible for lowering heart rate and regulating digestion when you are at rest and affecting a bunch of hormone glands. It regulates things like heart rate and blood pressure and digestion rate and hormone production with levels of arousal and mood. Its activity is strongly affected by mood and wakefulness and can be modulated to a point by all those lovely meditative/biofeedback etc things that some people do.
Dr. Tracy found that patients with autoimmune diseases tended to have quieter than average vagus nerve activity and that by cutting or overstimulating this particular vagus branch he could slow or accelerate the progression of genetically predetermined arthritis in mice by a factor of two. He indicated that he suspects there are other such points of contact that haven’t been pinned down yet, such as there apparently being receptors for inflammatory cytokines somewhere in the brain itself that directly affect brain activity within seconds of sensing them, and the fact that mice which received a local anti-inflammatory drug treatment to the brain were much less prone to death from the immune overreactions of sepsis. Your enteric nervous system in particular is an interesting place where there’s lots of nerves in close proximity to lots of immune system cells and you might suspect there could be more crosstalk.
He speculated that the strong vagus activity that you get from cooldown from exercise after working your autonomic nervous system through its dynamic range might have something to do with reducing the inflammatory response that is partially responsible for atherosclerosis, as might the mood improvements that almost always come from going from no exercise to more exercise.
I actually read the more technical one when it came out in 2012. Basically took from it that there is a lot of research going on and a lot of crosstalk going on.
The bit about the movement of different muscles altering the permeability of different parts of the spinal cord to immune cell invasion was particularly weird.
I’ve seen actual biochemical evidence at a talk at the university that a good chunk of the cardiovactular benefit of exercise might come not from the metabolic effects but from it changing one’s mood and this then feeding into changes in the inflammatory pathway.
This matches nicely what I am discussing here that I recommend fun sports over boring exercise because of the psychological effect. Most of weight loss comes from diet but you need to feel confident and courageous before fixing that and that is what sports do.
Also, since your nickname suggests you are knowledgeable about this, why do I feel inflamed all over when I try to lift heavy weights? Back when I was more into the boring kinds of gym stuff I tried to follow the new power lifting trend like Starting Strength instead of my old easier body building routines and I felt very inflamed from things like heavy deadlifting.
See above for a bit of a related comment on first paragraph.
Not sure about feeling inflamed after weightlifting other than perhaps the mild muscle damage is getting noticed and fixed? I do know that letting muscles extend rather than shorten while exerting force with them tends to cause much more pain in the days after since it can jumble the fibers at scales smaller than a cell which takes some time to remodel back into perfect working order...
More of a joint thing, if that makes sense. With traditional body building, my elbow is happy with curling with 10kg each, my lower spine or hip is less happy with deadlifting 100kg. Can joints become inflamed?
It sounds to me that your problem is very likely to be bad form. In the majority of cases that is the problem. I am a regular “work-outer” myself (and my current goal is a master´s degree in cellbiology in case that matters) and I notice that most people seem to have bad form when they deadlift. But 100 kg sounds like an odd number to have problems with. If I knew you gender, weight and age I could perhaps give better advice. Try arch your back some more and learn about the correct form.
Deadlifting and other compound exercises take much energy and put alot of pressure on your body, especially if you´re not physically active in your work, so make sure you rest enough and don´t exercise too long at a time.
M,37, 110 kg, 190 cm, so that is not the issue. Frankly I never understood terms like arching a back or keeping a back straight, I think they are described from how it looks outside not how it feels inside and that is bad. To me a good position to keep the back in is to use the lower abs to pull the lower pelvis forward in order to counter the usual problem of anterior pelvic tilt, and pulling the shoulders back with the rear delts, and relax the upper traps, letting the shoulders fall from being pulled up the ears to downwards. This is what good back posture feels like from the inside. It is possible that this is not enough. I don’t really have any mobility in the upper vertebrae so that must be part of why I have no idea what these terms mean, as when changing my back position I change other things than vertebrae, such as shoulders or hips / pelvis. I think otherwise my form was good, of course I cannot see myself from the outside, but it felt like the same feelings as how it was described in articles how it should feel like from the inside: first pushing the heels into the ground, then moving the lower pelvis forward with the lower abs and glutes as if fucking the bar, and this penis-into-bar is the major movement, then just locking out at the top. Then the same thing back down as power lifting is not accepted enough here to just drop it. It would look like showing off.
If you can maintain a tension in the lower back, you have managed the most important thing. The form is very similar to squatting. The only major differences are variations in the actual lift. I am not an expert though. From my experience, I would say that the crucial part of deadlifting is when your legs form 135 degrees. This is where most people fail to maintain a tension and the back starts to crook as far as I have seen.
To answer your question, can joints become inflamed? Yes! But I don´t know if this can happen due to hard exercise.
On a trivial note, a lot of alternative medicine (not talking herbalisms here that can actually have chemical effects good or bad sometimes) boils down to:
A—avoiding sledgehammertastic chemical/surgical interventionism with all the attendant side effects and risks thereof for things that you can actually get better from on your own, and
B—ritualistically dealing with anxiety and expectation in a way that deeply seats these changes, which actually often matters for the human immune system and musculoskeletal system etc since the same organ system that runs all our autonomic functions bizarrely also does the thinking. The placebo effect is real, it matters, and can probably be enhanced in effectiveness over and above the ’oh I took a pill didn’t I?” that you see in clinical trials.
I’ve seen evidence both personal and scientific for shamanistic and meditative interventions doing all kinds of great things for people’s autonomic nervous systems from changing base inflammatory levels to enhancing the ability to maintain temperature control in extreme climates. I’ve seen actual biochemical evidence at a talk at the university that a good chunk of the cardiovactular benefit of exercise might come not from the metabolic effects but from it changing one’s mood and this then feeding into changes in the inflammatory pathway.
How does the biochemistry of mood changes feeding into the inflammatory pathway work?
A lot of the interaction between the nervous system and immune system is just suspected without being understood. Some is being figured out however.
A few years ago I had the good fortune to see a talk by Dr. Kevin Tracey, a guy who has done a lot of work on modulation of the immune system via drugs. In it he laid out the history behind his discovery of what he calls the inflammatory reflex, a neurological circuit that modulates the ability of circulating immune system cells to produce TNF and other molecules involved in inflammation.
The short version of what he showed us is that he found a branch of the vagus nerve enervates an enteric ganglion in your abdomen which then sends a norepinephrine-secreting nerve fiber into your spleen. In your spleen, the nerve fibers branch out and form what look for all the world like synapses with a weird population of immobilized lymphocytes. These look like lymphocytes except that they are expressing genes that act as norepinephrine receptors and the production pathway for another neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. When this nerve arc is activated these cells produce acetylcholine and the macrophages and other circulating immune system cells which are temporarily hung up during their passage through your spleen receive the signal and become much less prone to be activated into producing inflammatory signaling molecules for something like a day, I don’t remember the exact timeframe. Incidentally, inflammatory signals in peripheral tissues being suppressed by acetylcholine is also partially why most smokers won’t get inflammatory bowel disease – nicotine is a mimic of acetylcholine (which blasts all your receptors hard rather than just those at the ends of particular fibers hence all the myriad psychological and physiological effects). It’s more complicated than that (of course it is, its biology) and it appears that there are particular circumstances in which nicotine can drive inflammation too, but overall thats its net effect.
Your vagus nerve is a key part of your parasympathetic autonomic nervous system, known for being responsible for lowering heart rate and regulating digestion when you are at rest and affecting a bunch of hormone glands. It regulates things like heart rate and blood pressure and digestion rate and hormone production with levels of arousal and mood. Its activity is strongly affected by mood and wakefulness and can be modulated to a point by all those lovely meditative/biofeedback etc things that some people do.
Dr. Tracy found that patients with autoimmune diseases tended to have quieter than average vagus nerve activity and that by cutting or overstimulating this particular vagus branch he could slow or accelerate the progression of genetically predetermined arthritis in mice by a factor of two. He indicated that he suspects there are other such points of contact that haven’t been pinned down yet, such as there apparently being receptors for inflammatory cytokines somewhere in the brain itself that directly affect brain activity within seconds of sensing them, and the fact that mice which received a local anti-inflammatory drug treatment to the brain were much less prone to death from the immune overreactions of sepsis. Your enteric nervous system in particular is an interesting place where there’s lots of nerves in close proximity to lots of immune system cells and you might suspect there could be more crosstalk.
He speculated that the strong vagus activity that you get from cooldown from exercise after working your autonomic nervous system through its dynamic range might have something to do with reducing the inflammatory response that is partially responsible for atherosclerosis, as might the mood improvements that almost always come from going from no exercise to more exercise.
Very interesting.
A couple of followup links: more popular and more technical.
I actually read the more technical one when it came out in 2012. Basically took from it that there is a lot of research going on and a lot of crosstalk going on.
The bit about the movement of different muscles altering the permeability of different parts of the spinal cord to immune cell invasion was particularly weird.
This matches nicely what I am discussing here that I recommend fun sports over boring exercise because of the psychological effect. Most of weight loss comes from diet but you need to feel confident and courageous before fixing that and that is what sports do.
Also, since your nickname suggests you are knowledgeable about this, why do I feel inflamed all over when I try to lift heavy weights? Back when I was more into the boring kinds of gym stuff I tried to follow the new power lifting trend like Starting Strength instead of my old easier body building routines and I felt very inflamed from things like heavy deadlifting.
See above for a bit of a related comment on first paragraph.
Not sure about feeling inflamed after weightlifting other than perhaps the mild muscle damage is getting noticed and fixed? I do know that letting muscles extend rather than shorten while exerting force with them tends to cause much more pain in the days after since it can jumble the fibers at scales smaller than a cell which takes some time to remodel back into perfect working order...
More of a joint thing, if that makes sense. With traditional body building, my elbow is happy with curling with 10kg each, my lower spine or hip is less happy with deadlifting 100kg. Can joints become inflamed?
It sounds to me that your problem is very likely to be bad form. In the majority of cases that is the problem. I am a regular “work-outer” myself (and my current goal is a master´s degree in cellbiology in case that matters) and I notice that most people seem to have bad form when they deadlift. But 100 kg sounds like an odd number to have problems with. If I knew you gender, weight and age I could perhaps give better advice. Try arch your back some more and learn about the correct form.
Deadlifting and other compound exercises take much energy and put alot of pressure on your body, especially if you´re not physically active in your work, so make sure you rest enough and don´t exercise too long at a time.
M,37, 110 kg, 190 cm, so that is not the issue. Frankly I never understood terms like arching a back or keeping a back straight, I think they are described from how it looks outside not how it feels inside and that is bad. To me a good position to keep the back in is to use the lower abs to pull the lower pelvis forward in order to counter the usual problem of anterior pelvic tilt, and pulling the shoulders back with the rear delts, and relax the upper traps, letting the shoulders fall from being pulled up the ears to downwards. This is what good back posture feels like from the inside. It is possible that this is not enough. I don’t really have any mobility in the upper vertebrae so that must be part of why I have no idea what these terms mean, as when changing my back position I change other things than vertebrae, such as shoulders or hips / pelvis. I think otherwise my form was good, of course I cannot see myself from the outside, but it felt like the same feelings as how it was described in articles how it should feel like from the inside: first pushing the heels into the ground, then moving the lower pelvis forward with the lower abs and glutes as if fucking the bar, and this penis-into-bar is the major movement, then just locking out at the top. Then the same thing back down as power lifting is not accepted enough here to just drop it. It would look like showing off.
If you can maintain a tension in the lower back, you have managed the most important thing. The form is very similar to squatting. The only major differences are variations in the actual lift. I am not an expert though. From my experience, I would say that the crucial part of deadlifting is when your legs form 135 degrees. This is where most people fail to maintain a tension and the back starts to crook as far as I have seen.
To answer your question, can joints become inflamed? Yes! But I don´t know if this can happen due to hard exercise.