Focused Nutrition: How Inflammatory Foods Can Negatively Impact Movement Mechanics

Did you know that your diet can impact the way you move?

When academics talk about sports nutrition, it’s typically with regard to recovery, muscle growth, and a vague bigger-picture concept of general health. But what if there are more nuanced layers to the discussion?

I’ve previously covered the role of nutrition spanning performance, health, rehabilitation, and more; however, one notable branch of the conversation that tends to be universally skipped is the potential impact of nutrition on biomechanics.

I should first acknowledge that this concept—like many others in health and performance—remains under-explored in a formal research setting. That said, I believe that nutrition—specifically inflammatory foods—can negatively alter our movement mechanics.

I believe that nutrition—specifically inflammatory foods—can negatively alter our movement mechanics, says @RewireHP. Click To Tweet

The significance of this is clear, as the goal of all athletes is to chase higher levels of movement expression. Any type of mechanical degradation or breakdown may potentially result in injury or poor performance. Obviously, this is something to avoid, whether you’re an athlete or a professional who works with athletes, such as a trainer or coach.

Although nutrition can impact motor output in a variety of ways, this article will mostly explore its impact on core (thorax and pelvic) function.

What Foods Are Defined as Inflammatory?

Defining foods as good or bad can be a polarizing experience, but I’ve proposed a reframed definition before based on a given food’s ratio of energy provided: energetic cost of assimilation.

This model is something I modified from retired nutrition consultant Ronnie Smith and his company Energy Concepts. Ronnie was a direct student of Dr. Ray Peat and also served as an advisor to well-known sports technology inventor Mike Mattox (inventor of the accelerating isokinetic machine, among many others). Mike wound up connecting Ronnie and some of these ideas around bioenergetic nutrition to Marv Marinovich and Gavin MacMillan of Sports Lab in what was, in all likelihood, one of the original examples of applied bioenergetics in the sports nutrition space.

Since this isn’t meant to be an anthropological article, I’ll keep this short, but the basic idea Smith presented was a digestion-absorption-utilization model of food.

What the hell is this, you might ask?

The simple answer is the foods we should base the bulk of our diet around are the ones that have the highest nutrient yield relative to minimal energetic expense from the cost of digestive obligations and dealing with potentially inflammatory components.

We should base the bulk of our diet around foods that have the highest nutrient yield relative to minimal energetic expense, says @RewireHP. Click To Tweet

For instance, foods like fruit and gelatin represent a couple of examples on the highly favorable side of this spectrum. This is because of their high nutrient yield relative to minimal energetic expenditure from the digestion and assimilation process, as well as their relatively minimal energy-stealing inflammatory ingredients. In the view of both Ronnie and me, this means they have a high energy potential.

This is no different than a currency. Ideally, you want to keep as much of your dollar or currency for yourself and be taxed minimally. As promised, this wasn’t a long tangent but rather a helpful context for how the following list was constructed.

With that said, some foods that you likely want to mitigate are:

• Artificial sweeteners, food dyes, gums, stabilizers, fillers, and ingredients not originally intended for human consumption.
• Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs).
• American wheat and gluten-containing products.
• Fake meat and plant-based food-like products.
• Soy.
• Legumes and lentils.
• Junk food in the form of high-calorie malnutrition (high caloric yield relative to low nutrient density—e.g., pastries, although in today’s Frankenfood world, this is general and can be applied elsewhere).
• Certain vegetables that are highly challenging to digest while providing minimal nutritional yield.

It should also be said that poor-quality versions of otherwise favorable food should be avoided. Gas station sushi and fast food meat come to mind as easy examples.

Keep in mind that these concepts that help identify a food as being less optimal are more of a framework and guidepost rather than (for the most part) hard no’s.

Also, keep in mind this list is not exhaustive but is meant to serve as a brief primer. My guide, Adaptive Nutrition, gives a much more thorough list of favorable/less favorable food choices evaluated on this scale.

What Impact Do These Foods Generally Have on the Human Body?

There are a lot of different ways to answer this question, as anyone who’s seen the current best guess map of our physiology can attest to. Again, in this case, we’re selectively focusing on their impact on the core.

Keep in mind the significance of the core—this being the tissues that make up the thorax and pelvis—as well. As proposed by Professor Gracovetsky, the spine (encased by said trunk tissues) is the origin of all movement. It functions as the primary strength and movement platform of the body. Dysfunction here leads to dysfunction in both static and dynamic actions.

Now that we’ve identified some chief offenders when it comes to inflammatory food and the significance of the core, let’s talk about what these foods specifically do to negatively alter its function.

Bloating

One of the chief issues with these foods is that they are difficult to digest and tend to create bloating. However, before we go on, consider this train of thought:

• Is it possible to have a stable spine with optimal thorax and pelvis integration if the core is not sufficiently engaged?
• Might chronic bloating result in an inability to engage the musculature of the core?

Ultimately, this concept of bloating interfering with fundamental core function isn’t hard to grasp, even for those less scientifically inclined.

Bloating is part and parcel of inflammation and digestive issues. If you’re even decently in tune with your body and have ever eaten foods that present digestive challenges (such as indigestible fibers found in some plants, artificial and natural sweeteners, certain grains, gums and stabilizers, etc.), you’ve no doubt experienced some type of bloating or distended stomach.

This could be from less ideal food sources, leading to longer digestive transit times, including food and eventual fecal matter lingering in the body. It could also be from grains’ propensity toward absorbing water and expanding in your stomach.

Bloating can put outward pressure against your abdominal wall, which can make adequately recruiting these tissues—including the deep core musculature—potentially more challenging, says @RewireHP. Click To Tweet

In any case, the downstream effect on core function doesn’t seem to grade out favorably.

This swelling can put outward pressure against your abdominal wall, which can make adequately recruiting these tissues—including the deep core musculature—potentially more challenging.

One of the foundational functions of these tissues is to naturally engage and support the stabilization of the body while in motion as well as in standing neutral positions. This includes retracting to stabilize the spine, ribcage, and pelvis. Conceptually, the idea of trying to retract your stomach during such bouts of bloating surely seems difficult, no?

Also, keep in mind that this distended stomach leads to an athlete displacing their center of mass and potentially losing their ability to control it statically and dynamically. Maintaining control over one’s center of mass in the sagittal, frontal, and transverse planes is the critical piece in movement. More specifically, a chronically distended stomach stemming from an inability to fully recruit the tissues of the core can lead to compensations with the lower back, including excessive lumbar arching.

These are a few reasons why nutrition has played such a significant role in our rehabilitation process.

Inflammation

Inflammation isn’t all bad. It’s highly necessary to recover from training or other stresses (good and bad) to the body. For example, if you injure your ankle, the subsequent inflammatory response is protective and actually part of the healing process.

However, these are examples of acute inflammation. The type of inflammation we’re trying to avoid through proper diet patterns is known as chronic inflammation.

Although inflammation is a tool the immune system uses to facilitate healing, perpetual tissue inflammation can lead to further injury or potentiate injuries in a downstream capacity. Chronic inflammation promotes tissue degradation by making recovery and regeneration more challenging, eventually opening athletes up to structural and functional issues.

Keep in mind that the brain and gut are interlinked, and thus, disturbances to one can affect the other: it’s a two-way street. As a matter of fact, the term “neuroimmune” is often used as a precedent to describe certain disorders relating to motor skills, pain, and more.

Perpetually consuming insulting foods can disturb gut function, inflame the gut lining, and potentially cause leaky gut—a form of intestinal permeability that can provoke a neurological response, leading to chronic inflammation throughout the body.

This chronic inflammation is a result of a prolonged, unchecked overreaction by the immune system, which tends to cause joint pain and potentially even greater systemic issues. These issues lie in the aforementioned neuroimmune overlap and can manifest as issues with motor output in the brain, with mismatches in sensory processing experiences, including one’s interoception and proprioception (ability to sense your own body), rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Guillain-Barré syndrome, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or motor neuron disease), and more.

Faulty movement patterns and compressed joints can already cause inflammation on their own, but when you combine them with these systemic issues, it’s easy to see how this could be problematic. When you combine biomechanical issues with a chronically overactivated immune system, you can get further compensations and/or accelerated tissue degeneration. This is multifactorial, but it also circles back to the aforementioned piece on energy expenditure. If your body has to waste energy putting out fires in dealing with these states, it’ll have less left over for performance and health.

If your body has to waste energy putting out fires in dealing with these inflammatory states, it’ll have less left over for performance and health, says @RewireHP. Click To Tweet

Furthermore, anything that has the potential to affect your frontal cortex—including both motor cortex and sensory cortex divisions—has the potential to negatively impact your performance.

Collectively, this is why restoring gut function and tissue quality is so critical when it comes to silencing unwanted inflammatory responses in the body.

Tissue Quality

An inflamed tissue is less likely to receive adequate circulation, which means fewer nutrients are delivered to working tissues. Not only is this blockage a potential issue, but dehydration may also be a factor.

A calcified, dehydrated tissue can occur because of compression and/or lack of recruitment. But it can also occur because of altered cell water allocation resulting from such inflammatory states, as well as the nature of some of these foods to retain water that would otherwise be put to use elsewhere in the body.

Identifying and Troubleshooting Your Gut Inflammation

Sometimes, there may be obvious signs of gut inflammation visible to the naked eye. Other times, these can be more subtle. It’s worth first identifying whether you’ve been regularly consuming some of the foods on the list above. Whether or not these foods are causing issues that present in a way that’s obvious yet, it’s worth doing a multi-point inspection and seeing if some of the following signs and symptoms ring true for you. Some are more obvious, others less so.

• Visual abdominal bloating.
• Poor gut motility (infrequent bowel movements once/day or less).
• Full-on constipation, diarrhea, or other issues with bowel evacuation.
• Poor stool quality in general (solidity, color).
• Stomach pain.
• Joint pain.
• Gas.
• Heartburn.
• Skin issues.
• Food intolerances or non-native allergies.
• Brain fog.

Helpful Tests

Exhalation Test: Get into a simple position you have easy access to so as not to throw off the test—let’s say standing, laying supine, or in a side-lying position while reasonably stacked and aligned. Take a natural inhale before forcefully exhaling your breath through your mouth and holding that position. You should feel your ribcage come downward and feel tension in your abdominals. If it’s tough to maintain this position for more than 10 seconds (taking away the potential of breathing patterns and infrasternal angle to be confounding variables here), you could be dealing with a gut issue.

Pressure Test: If you don’t present with any of these issues, consider further testing by applying pressure to your stomach near the navel with your fingers or some type of MFR (myofascial release) tool such as a Theracane, thin PVC pipe, or lacrosse ball. If you experience a high degree of sensitivity or pain, you may be dealing with some type of bloating or inflammation.

Recruitment Test: Try drawing in your abs from your navel toward your spine. If you cannot hold this for at least a couple of minutes or so, you may be dealing with some type of bloating.

Before & After Test: If you cut out or greatly mitigate any suboptimal foods from the above list in your diet for an extended period, consider re-examining the signs above and redoing the above tests to see signs of improvement.

Suboptimal Foods Could Be Holding You Back

The reality is that the ways in which the food we eat impacts our health and performance are layered and nuanced and not just confined to the typical associations. Our nutrition truly can impact our movement for better or worse. Unfortunately, many athletes have poor diet patterns, which can impact movement dysfunction.

Not only can poor nutritional habits influence a myriad of health and performance issues, but they can also interfere with the stability of our spine and our ability to hold both resting and active tension in the core. Once static and dynamic stability of the thorax and pelvis are compromised, all aspects of our biomechanics can be negatively altered—opening us up to further injury and pain susceptibility.

When viewed through this lens, suboptimal foods may not just impact our health but may also have a compounding effect on exacerbating biomechanical issues already present in the body.

Thus, you can add movement to the list of reasons to minimize inflammatory foods. Often, it’s the act of removing the things holding us back that truly enables us to make the greatest leaps forward.

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, check out my Adaptive Nutrition guide. It covers sports nutrition fundamentals such as food choices, macros, recovery, and how to set up your own diet while also exploring previously unaddressed topics such as nutrition for rehabilitation and more.

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