Performance from the Inside Out Part 6:
How do healthy gut and gut microbes help us meet physiological challenges in endurance sports?
By Lillian So Chan with Manny W Radomski, PhD
Exercise Benefits Gut Health
Intense training and competition impose extreme physical, physiological, and environmental stress on the endurance sports athletes.
Exercise-induced physical and physiological stressors elicit both muscle-based and systemic responses, disrupting whole body homeostasis and overwhelming normal functions of almost all organs and systems. These result in both acute and longer-term immune and stress responses as the body tries to regain homeostatic equilibrium.
Our body’s main adaptations to these stressors involve energy metabolism and harvest, hydration status and electrolyte balance, regulation of stress resistance and inflammatory responses, muscle damage and oxidative stress, control of metabolic rate, blood flow, oxygen uptake, and core temperature regulation.
Gut microbes play central roles in and contribute to the modulation of all of the above endurance adaptation processes.
