Quit Starving Your Tissue

After only 20 minutes of sitting, glucose transporters become more incapable. That is, you become slightly more diabetic after only a few minutes of sitting.

Damaged cells have only a few mechanisms for repair. All rely on local transportation (nearby blood flow and oxygenation). Thus, although we must rest, recover, and sleep well, me MUST move, especially when something hurts.

Think back to when you were a kid. If a peer fell out of a tree, his leg or arm was cast for the whole school year practically. No more. You won’t see it even in complicated breaks for more than 6 weeks or so. Medicine has evolved a lot in even the past YEAR. Recovery recommendations are unrecognizable from 10 years ago. Yes, you read that right. There are recommendations on recovery which have changed in the past 18 months. Neuroscience has a paradigm-implicating discovery daily. That isn’t hyperbole or rhetorical device.

Every.

Single.

Day.

We have discoveries which upend decades of dogma.

We are all under-active versus most of the rest of the world and human history. We do basically nothing, then tissue hurts. We take that signal of “hurt” to mean we must’ve “overdone it” and we have to rest more. But the “rest” is what led to the creaky joints, the weakness, the underfed tissue to begin with.

Your tissue is starving. If you don’t move, it’s starving and drowning. Muscle contraction IS an endocrine signal. It is the mechanism of lymph movement, cell waste removal, osmotic and diffusion transport, localized IGF use, mitochondrial function, and receptor up-regulation (ie - makes you less diabetic).

In a way, we have the causal relationships backwards. We wait for “energy” and “feeling good” in order to move. But it’s precisely the opposite. Yes, as you challenge the functionless body with movement, some things may hurt MORE. Follow the logic; don’t succumb to the phobia. This is a natural consequence of growth. Growth hurts.

Trade the chronic death of tissue for the acute irritation of training. Yes, movement will shift structures. That can be interpreted as “pain.” Especially when we’ve become so deconditioned that the effort of EFFORT itself is unfamiliar, the only context your brain has is “pain.” You may not even be in pain to be in pain.

Regardless, in order to have any hope of restoring tissue, you must get blood and oxygen in and around whatever it is you aim to improve. This is a biological fact. You cannot restore anything in the body with a dearth of building material.
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Quit starving your tissue.