Exercise being good for your health isn’t news, but did you know it can help fight inflammation? The proof is in the pudding—or on the treadmill, actually. Here are some of the easiest exercises to help fight inflammation.
Inflammation isn’t always a bad thing. It’s actually a vital part of your body’s immune response. It helps your body heal after an injury or illness, defends against foreign invaders like viruses and bacteria, and plays a role in tissue repair.
When inflammation is high and lingers for a long time, that’s when it becomes a problem because it can start to attack healthy tissues. Chronic inflammation is associated with diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease—to name a few.
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Research shows that moderate-intensity exercise reduces inflammation and pain, and can help with mental and physical health issues. Better still is that there’s evidence that even just 20 minutes of exercise is enough. This can be any activity that raises your heart rate, from walking to gardening.
What exercise actually does to inflammation
A 2011 review article published in Nature Reviews Immunology reports two mechanisms whereby exercise can have an effect on inflammation.
The first and more rapid of the mechanisms is as a result of cytokines secreted during muscle contraction, whereas the slower mechanism is the result of a reduced amount of visceral fat as a result of regular exercise, which thereby reduces the amount of adipokines secreted from these tissues.
During muscle contraction, interleukin 6 is secreted from the muscles into circulation, and this is the first cytokine to increase during exercise with increasing concentrations during continued exercise. However, this interleukin 6 then stimulates the anti-inflammatory response; during exercise the muscle-derived interleukin 6 increases the circulating concentrations of anti-inflammatory cytokines (interleukin 1ra and interleukin 10), and inhibits production of the pro-inflammatory cytokine TNF-alpha.
Infusion of interleukin 6 in healthy people resulted in increased interleukin 1ra and 10, and suppression of TNF, indicating that this muscle-derived interleukin 6 is responsible for the subsequent anti-inflammatory responses. What’s more, it is not the case that athletic levels of exercise are required to see a significant effect, and simply contracting the muscles results in an anti-inflammatory response.
How much exercise you actually need
The CDC recommends getting 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise each week. That might sound like a lot, but that’s only 21 minutes a day and should be doable even with a busy schedule. (It can also include 75 minutes per week of vigorous-intensity exercise, or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity aerobic activity. Plus muscle-strengthening exercises that work all major muscle groups at least 2 days a week.)
Exceeding the physical activity guidelines has even better health benefits, but don’t feel discouraged if you’re not able to reach them, as the CDC says some physical activity is better than none! So even if you aren’t getting the recommended amount, rest assured that your hard work isn’t for nothing and all of that sweat will add up in the long run.
Start wherever you’re comfortable, even if that’s below the CDC guidelines. Every little bit counts toward the grand total!
To help you reap these health benefits, here are five easy exercises to help fight inflammation:
1. Walking
Walking just 20 to 30 minutes has been shown to lower one marker of inflammation by about five percentage points, according to a 2017 study. Walk on treadmill, take a walk during your lunch break, or pick up the pace while walking your dog. Even walking in place at a moderate pace while watching your favorite may help!
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2. Swimming activities
Swimming isn’t just a fun and easy way to exercise while sparing your joints, but also effective in reducing inflammation, stiffness, and pain, including in those with inflammatory conditions, such as arthritis. Can’t swim? Try water aerobics or even just walking in the pool’s shallow end.
3. Yoga
Chronic stress has been linked to chronic inflammation, as well as other damaging health effects. There’s evidence that yoga and yoga breathing help reduce the damaging effects of both stress and inflammation. Spend just a few minutes a day practicing simple yoga poses or breathing techniques, like alternate nostril breathing, to help fight inflammation and keep your stress in check.
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4. Dancing
Yes, dancing. Do it at a club, in a studio or workout class, or at home like nobody’s watching. Shaking your groove thang to your favorite music for 20 to 30 minutes isn’t just an inflammation-fighter, but oh-so-much fun! You don’t even need to know any actual dance moves; swaying in place and incorporating your arms is enough if it gets your heart pumping!
5. Simple strengthening
Performing simple strengthening exercises, like arm curls or knee extensions, can help you reduce chronic inflammation. The beauty of strength training is that it can be done seated or standing, making it easy for all ages and those with mobility issues. You can add resistance to arm and leg movements using resistance bands, light weights, or even just your own body.
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How long before it makes a difference
The effects of exercise training (duration, frequency and intensity) on inflammatory markers (C-reactive protein, TNF-alpha and interleukin 6) have been examined in a meta-analysis of 38 randomized controlled trials conducted in 2,557 healthy adults. They report that exercise training significantly reduced C-reactive protein concentrations (standardized mean difference: -0.18, 95% CI: -0.31 to -0.06, p = 0.005), TNF-alpha and interleukin 6.
Importantly, the results of this meta-analysis suggest that anti-inflammatory effects are greater in response to an intervention of over 12 weeks compared with a shorter intervention.
This has been observed elsewhere, whereby another review article reported that there was no significant change in C-reactive protein in response to 1 to 12 weeks of exercise training, whereas significant reductions were observed as a result of 3 or more sessions per week.
Perhaps most reassuringly of all is the finding from this meta-analysis that lower intensity exercise actually resulted in a greater reduction in inflammation compared with more strenuous activity; they report that the relative change in C-reactive protein as a result of more intense exercise was smaller than with a moderate intensity, and a meta-regression analysis reported that increasing exercise intensity was associated with a smaller reduction in C-reactive protein.
What inflammation looks like on a blood test
When researchers have looked for biomarkers of inflammation after people have exercised, they haven’t always found a change. For example, markers of inflammation commonly looked at in research studies include C-reactive protein, interleukin 6, TNF-alpha and more. One particular version of C-reactive protein is measured with high sensitivity (hsCRP for short). The American Heart Association and the CDC
say a measurement of less than 1.0 milligrams per liter is low risk, 1.0 to 3.0 milligrams per liter is average risk and more than 3.0 milligrams per liter is high risk. But just because there wasn’t a change in a person’s hsCRP doesn’t mean there wasn’t a response to the exercise.
So getting a blood test on any given day is just one snapshot of your inflammation levels and isn’t a whole picture by any means.
For example, in a 2017 study, 47 healthy participants were assessed for the peak volume of oxygen their bodies could use during exercise on a treadmill. Then another day, the participants went back and exercised on the treadmill for 20 minutes at a level that used up 65-70% of that peak amount. The intensity of that level would probably be perceived as somewhat hard.
Researchers were interested in looking at inflammatory cytokines before and after that bout of exercise. They looked at the percentage of monocytes, a type of white blood cell, that make TNF and at the actual amount of TNF in the blood plasma. They found the percentage of those cells that made TNF went down slightly from 47.1% to 42.0% after exercise.
However, there was no change in the amount of TNF in the blood plasma (it was 8.6 picograms per milliliter both before and after exercise). The lesson is that just because one marker of inflammation didn’t change doesn’t mean exercise didn’t have an effect on inflammation.
Remember that blood tests are looking at steady state levels of certain chemicals whereas tests that look at what is going on in cells can show more immediate changes.
What if you already have arthritis?
In the 2019 guideline on osteoarthritis of the hand, hip and knee from the American College of Rheumatology and the Arthritis Foundation, exercise is strongly recommended.
The guideline points to a substantial body of research supporting a wide range of exercise options, and concludes that the vast majority of people with osteoarthritis can take part in some form of exercise and benefit from it in both pain and function. It says all patients should be encouraged to treat some form of exercise as a central part of their plan.
The recommendation covers several joints and doesn’t rank one form of exercise above another. For knee or hip osteoarthritis, walking, strengthening, neuromuscular training and aquatic exercise are all listed as options, and the guideline sets no hierarchy among them. Supervised programs, usually run by a physical therapist or held as a class, came out more effective than exercising alone at home.
Even so, the guideline is clear that the choice should follow your own preference and what you can actually reach, because an option you find unacceptable, can’t afford, or can’t travel to is of no value to you. Weight loss is also strongly recommended for people with knee or hip osteoarthritis who are overweight or obese, with an apparent dose response.
Walking has been by far the most studied aerobic intervention in the osteoarthritis literature, either on a treadmill or as part of a supervised community-based walking program, and the other aerobic option that shows up is supervised group cycling on stationary bikes. The strengthening trials used isokinetic weight machines, isometric holds, and resistance training with and without elastic bands.
Tai chi, yoga, and why the guidelines treat them differently
Tai chi is strongly recommended for patients with knee or hip osteoarthritis, or both. Tai chi is a traditional Chinese mind-body practice that consists of a combination of meditation, gentle and slow movements, deep diaphragmatic breathing and relaxation. It earned the strong recommendation on the amount of evidence behind it.
Yoga is only conditionally recommended, and only for knee osteoarthritis. The guideline says yoga is far less well studied than tai chi, though it may help through a similar blend of physical and psychosocial factors. For hip osteoarthritis the data was thin enough that the panel made no recommendation about yoga at all.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is conditionally recommended too. So are balance exercises, for knee or hip osteoarthritis, held back to a conditional grade because the evidence was low quality and no randomized trial had yet tested whether balance work reduces falls in this group. Hypnosis and qi gong couldn’t be graded at all, for want of data and any standard definition of them.
A conditional recommendation isn’t a vote against something. It reflects how much evidence exists, and tai chi simply has more of it than yoga does.
You don’t need to engage in a high-intensity or elaborate workout regime to reduce inflammation through exercise. Just moving your body at a moderate-intensity for you is all it takes.
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Adrienne Santos-Longhurst is a freelance health and lifestyle writer that has written for Healthline, Medical News Today and Verily Magazine just to name a few.
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