Inflammation
Besides diet, pay close attention to what activities aggravate your pain and inflammation: Is it from sitting on the lazy-boy chair, or vacuuming, is your bed getting a little soft, or is it just the weather? Be very careful when starting a new exercise or new job. You need to gradually get used to doing anything new or you run the risk of aggravating your tissues with inflammation. If muscle tendons become inflamed we see tendonitis, with joints we see arthritis, with nerves we see neuritis, and an inflamed bursa is bursitis.
Consider a common scenario where inflammation is noticed, you feel significant pain, and you really didn’t expect it. You feel like you weren’t active enough through the winter and when spring hits, you can’t wait to ride your bike again. By the end of the season last year, you were cycling for an hour at a time and feeling refreshed afterwards. Now, six months since you last rode, you decide to ride for an hour and are surprised to feel so much pain afterwards. You should start out with only a short bike ride and gradually increase your distance and speed. If you try to do too much at first, you will notice your muscles becoming tight, you feel sore, and finally your legs give out as your muscles and tendons are too inflamed. This could also lead to irritated nerves which could cause burning, tingling, tenderness, or weakness down your legs. This same scenario could happen after your spring gardening, cleaning out the garage, playing baseball, or hiking. The inflammation could be helped by stretching and giving it time to heal before going back to whatever caused it. You may find you need to see your Chiropractor, have some adjustments, and also have your muscles released. We enjoy an enviable success rate with these conditions, but sadly it could have been avoided by stretching more, being careful to start out easy, and by being patient gradually increasing your work outs. The other thing that can help prevent these conditions is regular Chiropractic care where many of the joint, nerve, and muscle conditions can be corrected before they get so stiff and inflamed as to cause the pain.
Eat Well, Move Well, and Think Well (manage your stress): all these lifestyle improvements can help your whole body to perform and feel better. They will help to keep inflammation down and allow you to relax more completely when you want to and be active when you want to.