Exercise is essential for good health and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that every adult person should 150 minutes per week in any form of exercise. It takes only 30 minutes of exercise per day which is not too hard to do. But what if exercise makes you sick and gradually you lose interest in it? It sounds strange but exercise-induced nausea is a real condition and is a medically acclaimed issue. But what causes this type of nausea? Is it all in your head only?
Of course not. Exercise-induced nausea feels like churning in the stomach. You might feel that your heart is racing, or it is also common for some people to feel fatigued like feeling. All of this progress feels unworthy if you don’t feel worse by the end of this.
Surprisingly, exercise-induced nausea is very common and it even affects approximately 90% of the athletes too.
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Typically when a person does any exercise, the skeletal muscles present in the arm and legs began to contact and require a sufficient amount of oxygen. To fulfill this requirement, the heart muscles also play their role and contract. In turn, these activities improve blood circulation to the body and the hemoglobin in the blood delivers the oxygen to the skeletal muscles.
The body tries to balance this blood supply by diverting it from inactive areas to active areas for example from gut to legs. This mechanism is naturally activated as a survival strategy developed by the brain. The blood supply is not physically stopped to the inactive areas but the body narrows down the blood supply which lowers the amount of blood flow. On the other side, the excessive blood is supplied to active skeletal muscles. All of this takes place on its own and you have no choice to do it or not to do it. This process is scientifically called vasoconstriction.
But the skeletal muscles of the body also have a natural power by which they can ‘preserve’ this extra blood flow. They can show resistance towards the body’s plea for vasoconstriction. This resistance is medically called “functional sympatholytic.” There is not much scientific evidence to explain why the body does this.
But is it because of the lack of blood supply that causes exercise-linked nausea in people? the change in blood flow or ischemia can cause a number of problems for example it can change the cellular response to absorb nutrients and food movement inside the gut. It is also responsible for nausea and throwing up feeling.
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It suggests that the interrupted blood supply is extremely tricky for the digestive system which is constantly working t digest and absorb the food. It also explains how a workout after eating a heartful meal is the worst idea and had the highest chances of exercise-linked nausea especially if you eat high fat or high carb food.
So, does this mean you can never exercise if you are a victim of exercise-linked nausea? Health experts suggest changing the intensity of exercise. According to the experts, nausea is often linked with any form of high-intensity training because the blood supply is maximum high during these types of exercises. Try starting from low-intensity exercises and gradually shift to moderate and then high-intensity exercises to lower the chances of exercise-linked nausea and other digestive issues.
