We all know that exercise is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. It promotes good cardiovascular fitness, skeletal muscle strength, bone density, better mood, and improved sleep quality, alongside lots of other benefits.
However, less is spoken about the benefit of exercise on digestion. When you incorporate regular exercise into your routine, you will find that you’re less likely to experience bloating, gas, sudden constipation, and abdominal discomfort. This is true whether you’re relatively healthy or suffer from a chronic digestive health condition like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), coeliac disease, or inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Think of exercise as nature’s laxative. It promotes bowel regularity by enhancing the efficiency of your digestive processes. And it does so in a number of different ways, which we will talk about later in this article. First, let’s look at why regularity is so important.
Why is Regularity Important?
You might not think it, but going to the toilet to empty your bowels on a regular basis is essential for your health. Your digestive health is a mirror of your overall health. Therefore, if you’re chronically constipated, it signals a deeper health issue that needs to be addressed, such as IBS or IBD.
Regularly emptying your bowels keeps the muscles within the lower digestive tract functioning optimally. It also promotes a more balanced and diverse gut microbiome, which is essential for metabolism, nutrient absorption, and nutrient production.
Generally, it’s recommended that you have at least three bowel movements a week. In a perfect world, you would be going to the toilet once a day or once every other day.
If you notice a sudden decrease in the number of bowel movements that you’re having each week and this persists for several weeks, it’s likely that you’re constipated (not so fun!). Whilst dealing with short-term constipation isn’t necessarily a huge issue and probably doesn’t mean you have an underlying health condition to be concerned about, ongoing constipation should really be investigated so you can identify why it’s happening.
Thankfully, if you are constipated and experiencing other digestive symptoms like bloating and gas, there are things that you can do to promote regularity and relieve constipation naturally. One of the best things that you can do is exercise regularly. Below, we have covered how exercise can improve bowel regularity.
How Does Exercise Improve Regularity?
Exercise promotes regular bowel movements in a few key ways. Firstly, it helps to keep the smooth muscle in the lower gastrointestinal tract nice and strong so it can contract and relax more efficiently to push ingested food out of your body.
Exercise can also increase blood flow to the digestive tract, providing the working muscles with the oxygen and nutrients they need to function efficiently. Good blood flow to the gastrointestinal organs means better digestive health and function and a lower risk of constipation.
The gut microbiome can be positively impacted by regular exercise. When you move your body and maintain a healthy weight, it allows your gut bacteria to thrive. The probiotic bacteria in your gut perform vital digestive functions, including metabolism and nutrient absorption, so it’s important to keep them happy.
Exercise is a well-known form of stress relief. Since stress can contribute to constipation, bloating, and gas, finding ways to incorporate exercise into your daily routine could be the key to keeping digestive symptoms at bay. It can be effective for period bloating, diet-related bloating, or stress-related symptoms.
You can gain every single one of these amazing benefits with all types of exercise. Whether you enjoy hiking, running, swimming, cycling, dancing, or sports, any form of exercise can benefit your digestive system and promote a healthy gut microbiome.
Make sure you find a form of exercise that you genuinely enjoy so you stay motivated to continue moving your body in a healthy way. Despite popular belief, you don’t need to force yourself to run for miles every day to maintain optimal health!
Aim for 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a week or if you prefer more intense forms of exercise like sprinting, you can get away with just 75 minutes of exercise a week for maximum health benefits.
What Are Other Natural Ways to Improve Regularity?
Alongside incorporating exercise into your routine, you can try the following natural remedies for relieving constipation quickly and effectively.
Eat more dietary fibre
Dietary fibre is essential for not just your gut health but your overall health. The recommended daily intake is around 30 grams, but the average intake for adults in the United Kingdom is only around half of this.
Fibre comes in two main forms - soluble and insoluble. Each type has unique benefits. Soluble fibre helps to stabilise blood sugar levels after eating meals and snacks by slowing down gut transit time. It can also reduce straining with defecation (reduce straining when you have a bowel movement).
Insoluble fibre is arguably more important for relieving constipation because it helps to draw water into the stool to keep it soft. A softer stool is easier to pass than a hard one, for obvious reasons. Insoluble fibre also helps to add bulk to the stool, stimulating the smooth muscle in the gut to contract and push the stool out of the body.
You’ll find soluble fibre in fruits and oats, and insoluble fibre in wheat bran, nuts, beans, and potatoes. Incorporating more of these foods into your diet can promote better bowel health and toilet regularity. Consider choosing wheat bran-based cereals instead of rice-based cereals, snacking on chopped nuts, and creating dishes like three-bean chilli to fill up on fibre.
Consume more magnesium
Magnesium is an essential mineral that we feel doesn’t get enough credit. It plays a vital role in energy production, protein synthesis, nerve impulse transmission, and blood glucose regulation.
Magnesium also influences digestion because it’s a natural laxative. It can help to draw water into the colon just like insoluble fibre, softening the stool and preventing constipation. It can also promote peristalsis, which refers to the ongoing contraction and relaxation of the smooth muscles in the gastrointestinal tract, an essential process for digestion.
Finally, magnesium also acts as a cofactor (a sort of helper) for digestive enzymes, enabling these enzymes to perform their functions efficiently. With magnesium providing a helping hand, digestive enzymes can metabolise ingested foods into their consistent nutrients quickly to prevent blockages in the lower digestive tract.
It’s recommended that you consume between 270 and 300 grams of magnesium a day to achieve optimal health. You can find magnesium in leafy green vegetables like broccoli and kale, almonds, cashews, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, quinoa, and brown rice.
You can consume magnesium in supplements. A Dose For Blocked Bellies is our brand-new supplement at Wild Dose, and it contains magnesium citrate, a form of magnesium that has been shown in scientific research to promote bowel regularity and prevent constipation.
Drink an extra cup of caffeinated coffee or tea a day
We're not going to tell you to drink several more cups of coffee a day if you’re experiencing constipation and bloating, especially if you already drink loads of caffeine throughout the day. However, adding one extra cup of caffeinated coffee or tea could be beneficial.
Caffeine can stimulate the smooth muscle in the gastrointestinal tract to contract, helping to push food through the colon and preventing constipation. Therefore, it can be a helpful remedy to use to your advantage if you’re blocked up and adding an extra cup of caffeinated coffee or tea to your daily routine. We recommend adding this cup in the morning or early afternoon to prevent the caffeine content of your drink from negatively affecting your sleep.
However, be careful not to overconsume caffeine. Because it stimulates smooth muscle contraction, it can lead to abdominal cramps and even diarrhoea in some cases. You don’t want to swing the pendulum too far to the other side and end up with diarrhoea if you’re trying to alleviate your constipation! You want to be somewhere in the middle.
Some people are more sensitive to caffeine than others, so the amount of caffeine you can get away with drinking without feeling any negative side effects might be higher than the amount somebody else can drink. Everybody's tolerance to caffeine is different, so make sure you listen to your body and understand where your limits lie.
Eat foods with high water content
Staying hydrated is essential for healthy and efficient digestion. You can increase your fluid intake by drinking more water throughout the day, but another great technique for staying adequately hydrated is consuming foods that have high water content.
Foods that contain a high volume of water tend to be fruits and vegetables, such as watermelon, strawberries, oranges, peaches, cucumber, lettuce, celery, tomatoes, and bell peppers.
Here are some great ways to make things more interesting when adding these foods to your diet:
- Make a vibrant and colourful fruit salad to eat for dessert with yoghurt, ice cream, or whipped cream
- Grill some veggies to have as a side dish to your main meal
- Slice some cucumber, celery, tomatoes, and bell peppers to dip into tzatziki or humous
- Blend some strawberries, peaches, and watermelon to create a deliciously fruity and hydrating smoothie
- Swap standard dough for cauliflower when making a pizza
Adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet will also provide your body with essential vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, which can promote better overall health.
Certain vitamins and minerals, such as vitamin C, potassium, and magnesium, aid digestive processes by supporting the function of digestive enzymes and lowering inflammation. Antioxidants can also reduce inflammation in the gut, reducing the risk of chronic digestive disorders or making such conditions more manageable.
Practise stress management techniques
Stress causes cortisol production from the adrenal glands, a hormone that diverts blood away from the digestive tract. When there’s less blood flowing to your digestive organs, digestion slows down, and food will stay in the colon for longer than usual. This metabolised food then gets fermented by the gut bacteria, causing gas production and bloating, and water is drawn out of the stool, making it hard and lumpy.
Practising stress management techniques can lower your cortisol to a nice baseline level, preventing it from negatively impacting your digestion. Gentle exercise, yoga, and meditation are great ways to reduce psychological stress. Of course, reducing your workload can also do wonders for your stress and mental health, but we understand that it’s not always easy to lower your workload in today’s economic climate.
