GUT HEALTH / Lifestyle

Why personalised training is good for your gut flora

When it comes to exercise, we all have different abilities. It’s all about our age, our genes, how much we are currently exercising, and how active we have been in the past.

To get the most out of all the health benefits, it’s a good idea to personalise your workout based on your unique set of circumstances. At the same time, personalising your workout gives you realistic goals that motivate you to keep going. It also reduces the risk of training too hard, weakening our immune systems and putting us at risk for infection. In this article, we explain what personalised training means, and how it strengthens both the immune system and the flora in your gut.

What does personalised training mean?

Personalised training, is about finding the right style and intensity of exercise for you and your body. Important factors that have an impact on what type of exercise is best for you includes:

Your age
Gender
If you have or have had any illnesses
Genes
How much you currently exercise
How used you are to exercising

Factors like heart rate, oxygen uptake and subjective experience assessments, are also important in finding the right intensity for you. In addition, we tend to be more motivated to exercise when workouts are adapted to our individual abilities. If your goals are realistic, and you can monitor and measure the various positive effects.

The open window after training

While low- or moderate-intensity exercise strengthens the immune system, prolonged and high-intensity exercise, can instead temporarily weaken the immune system, immediately after a workout. This is known as the “open-window theory”, and means that the body is more susceptible to harmful viruses because of a weakened immune system. For those who like to train hard, therefore, ensuring enough recovery time, avoiding over-exercising and strengthening the immune system through a proper intake of nutrients is vital.

Anti-inflammatory diet

A good way to strengthen the immune system, is to eat a balanced and anti-inflammatory diet. An anti-inflammatory diet, consists of foods that help to reduce inflammation in the body, while being both nutritious and healthy. If you want to eat anti-inflammatory, you can indulge in plant-based treats such as: green leafy vegetables, fruits, berries, nuts, gluten-free grains (like quinoa and sorghum), legumes and fermented foods (such as kimchi and sauerkraut). At the same time, it’s a good idea to avoid inflammatory foods such as sugar, refined carbohydrates, fried foods, gluten, red meat, dairy products.

It’s also important you get all those vitamins and minerals that help your immune system work properly. Such as: vitamin D, vitamin B9, selenium, vitamin B6, zinc, and vitamin B12. These vitamins and minerals, are mainly found in animal foods such as fish, meat, seafood, eggs, offal, milk and cheese. But you can also find them in some anti-inflammatory foods such as: whole grains, potatoes, pulses, beans, chickpeas, lentils, green leafy vegetables, various types of cabbage, fruit, berries, almonds, wheat germ and sesame seeds. Vitamin B12, is also present in fermented foods such as kimchi and kombucha, which are both anti-inflammatory, and full of good bacteria, that boost the flora in your gut. If you want to make sure you’re getting all your essential vitamins and minerals, it might be a good idea to add some supplements to your diet.

Gut flora, immune system, and personalised training

Personalised training is not only good for your body and for motivation, it’s also good for your gut flora. The flora in our gut, is home to 70% of our immune system. A well-balanced gut flora is essential to help us feel good and stay healthy. Research shows, the amount of good bacteria in the gut increases when we exercise regularly. It has even been shown that people with active lifestyles tend to have a different gut flora than those whose lifestyles are a lot more sedentary. At the same time, stress levels drop when we exercise, which also has a positive impact on our gut flora.

Our immune system and the good bacteria in our gut, are damaged by stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. When we exercise regularly, our bodies become more resistant to these harmful stress hormones. And if a workout is tailored to our unique, individual circumstances, we can make sure we’re training neither too much nor not enough. This reduces the risk of overexertion, which would weaken our immune system, and makes us less likely to catch infections. At the same time, we get all the positive effects that come from regular exercise. This in the form of increased production of the happy hormone serotonin, reduced stress levels in the body and better sleep. All of which do wonders for both our gut flora and our wellbeing.