Today we’re talking about how inflammation management can make you slower.

After giving my lecture in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago I’ve had so many different questions about inflammation that I thought we should doing an entire series of episodes about inflammation management in runners and other athletes.

There are lots of things you think about inflammation and one of the things you have to understand first and foremost is that you don’t always have to prevent inflammation. Runners think that inflammations is bad. We hear all this stuff about inflammation, about how it causes chronic Achilles tendon problems and chronic disease. But inflammation is just the thing that happens when you train. It’s a normal consequence of training.

You run, you train and when you do that you get tissue damage. That’s part of the process. You damage the muscles, you get little micro tears and then your body repairs them and you get stronger. 

Inflammation is the very first step to repairing any tissue damage when you’re training and is the first step to getting stronger. So you have to have the inflammation as that initial response to the injury that you inflict on yourself when you’re training.

So today we’re going to talk about some basic guidelines about inflammation management.