Hello, hello my tribe. My name is Shameen Lenny. I am fitness and nutrition expert and owner of Shameen's model health. So we have been on a slide hiatus for a couple of weeks while we set up new computers and researched some new topics and what not for you.
But we're back on track and I misspeak in two weeks. So we're going to be back to weekly podcasts from here on in and hopefully enlighten your life and health journey in some way. And this week I was asked about taking painkillers after your workout to ease the pain and aid and recovery. So what we're talking about today is why maybe taking Advil, Alever, aspirin, so NSAIDs after workout or exercise is not going to be such a great idea.
It actually is more popular than you would believe, especially in the fitness world and competitive world for people to take NSAIDs right before or right after strenuous activity. Actually, there are some personal trainers and athletic coaches out there who do recommend this to their clients by saying that it would help reduce inflammation and facilitate recovery. But this is horrible advice to give to anyone, especially your client, because the truth is that the science overwhelmingly supports the opposites. There are many studies that showed taking NSAIDs before, during or after exercise actually results in less muscle adaptation or growth.
And over time, this can actually contribute to the speeding up of soft tissue damage. So what is an NSAID? NSAID is an acronym for Nonstero-Bidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs. These include over-the-counter drugs like Advil, aspirin, Aleve, and there are a couple of prescription drugs as well, like Valterin, Lodine, and Daypro.
And if you go online, you can find a full list of what they would be. NSAIDs basically work by reducing the Cox 1 and Cox 2 enzymes, which play key role in making prostaglandins. So this basically means, in layman's terms, is the body's natural system of inflammation and pain becomes blocked since Progras-Danalins play a key role in the modulation of inflammation. So you would think that less inflammation is a good idea, but not all the time and not in cases like this, because inflammation is a very important signal that the body relies upon to tell it where it should send resources to heal, regenerate, repair, and adapt or grow.
So without the signal, your body simply wouldn't recover well from any trauma. An exercise basically is a small amount of trauma that puts your body under tremendous stress. And this then trauma facilitates a recovery reaction, and then that rolls over into adaptation or growth of new muscle, but exercises loses some of its effectiveness in the presence of NSAIDs. Studies have shown that long-term use of NSAIDs, where exercise actually reduces protein synthesis, and this is what we need to help muscle growth.
And another study showed that the presence of NSAIDs can actually decrease strength. So inflammation went unchecked and unbalanced, is the root of most of our chronic diseases nowadays. We know if we've got inflammation, it generally is not a good thing, but there are some inflammation that are good that we rely on to stay healthy. So completely blocking the inflammatory process is not going to be a good alternative.
Instead, you would want to make sure that you have healthy inflammatory response. And how do we do this? Generally, we do this through exercise and nutrition. So we know that foods high in sugar, wheat, dairy, processed meat, alcohol, and then being low in greens, your vegetables, your dense nutrition, that's going to create an unbalanced inflammatory response.
Average diets are also low in omega-3 fatty acids too. So supplementing with omega-3 can help reduce systemic unbalanced inflammation, along with other natural foods and herbs that are out there. And you can generally find these in your local health store, and even some grocery stores are doing pretty well nowadays with their organic or natural food. We know that tumor against cinnamon are at the top of the list for anti-inflammatory herbs, and they're something that you should be trying to incorporate into your diet daily if you feel that you have some sort of inflammatory reaction going on in your body.
Then when it comes to exercise, we know that exercise does create inflammation. It's a response from our body because we put our body under stress. But then improper form and techniques can add to this inflammation, so can increase the inflammatory response. So where your joints might be imbalanced or you might have pain or dysfunction, then you will be getting too much inflammation in that specific area.
And then that can lead to chronic pain, especially if you're overdoing it with exercise. Although frequency is important, if you're overloading or putting your body under these high-intense exercises on a daily basis, then this can then overproduce inflammation as well. So that makes dealing with recovery a priority over adaptation. So if you're heavy weight training every day, every day, every day, then all your body is going to focus on doing is trying to recover.
It's not going to focus on building new muscle and adapting. So the right kind of exercise will produce the right kinds of inflammatory signal, which then will result in your adaptation or your stronger muscles. And then there are studies as well that show that the right balance of prostaglandins is quite anabolic too. So that's going to basically send a signal to your muscle cells to adapt them to grow.
And that's not saying that NSAIDs don't have their place for acute injuries. They provide relief and are well tolerated for short-term use for chronic long-term pain. However, they might be detrimental. Instead of like reaching for your bottle of Advil, maybe you could find out what the root of your pain is and find some sort of natural cure that's going to help you with inflammation and pain relief.
So make sure that you're exercising properly and that you're eating anti-inflammatory foods. And then we can try avoid NSAIDs that are unnecessary in our daily diet unless you are suffering with severe pain and you feel that it's the only option would be to supplement with an NSAID. But I hope you found that enlightening. And if you have any questions, of course, shoot them at me.
You'll find me on Facebook at Chameen's Model Health or also on Chameen's Model Health.com. And if you have any topics or questions that you might like me to address in the future, do of course share this with anyone that you feel may benefit from it. And I look forward to chatting with you soon. Have a happy, healthy week.
Bye, you guys.