Gut health can be a very complex topic, but here are some basics you can consider if you are experiencing issues. If you are experiencing serious problems with digestion, this is not a substitute for working with a licensed professional, but it can give you some starting points to potentially rule out some things.
There are many symptoms of potentially sub-optimal gut health. They can include excessive gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, or irregular bowel movements to name a few.
Let’s begin with the basic considerations that may be contributing to, or even be the cause of, digestive issues.
For someone who is training regularly, one of the first things to consider is the type of training you’re doing. Excessive volume or pushing certain training stimuli without proper nutrition can potentially create or exacerbate gut issues.
Learning when to appropriately switch training stimuli, periodize your training, and match your nutrition will do wonders. We’ve seen this time and time again working with clients. Start with the simpler foundational things before trying to come up with a complex (and often expensive) protocol to target symptoms.
Mental stress is still stress and can significantly impact your hormonal balance. If you’re consistently experiencing stress, whether mental or physical, hormones like cortisol are being elevated. Perhaps not to the same level as during an intense training session (but maybe), but a chronic elevation of stress hormones begins to cause other hormonal imbalances which can have an effect on both your gut health and body composition.
I’m not going to try and prescribe a DIY protocol or attempt to “solve” this, but there are some action items that you can take into consideration to help address daily stress. Meditation is a commonly suggested aid, as well as gratitude journaling, but that is not right for everyone. Even trying to take a little extra time during the day to get a mental break and do something purely for enjoyment is a step in the right direction. The first major step is identifying and acknowledging what the stressors are. Then look for ways to mitigate and manage them.
Sometimes supplementation can be a good aid for short-term assistance. Check out the video linked at the bottom for more on that.
I’m not talking about organic vs GMO or anything like that here (that’s another topic altogether). In this context, “quality” comes down to simplifying the process of getting the food from its source to your stomach. Avoiding highly processed foods with lots of additives like preservatives, artificial sweeteners, partially hydrogenated fats (trans fats), etc can be very positive for your gut health overall. Sometimes it is one or multiple of these things that can give people digestive issues, or at least irritate existing ones.
I list artificial sweeteners here not because of a concern for impact on insulin (as existing evidence doesn’t support that very well), but because they can feed certain gut bacteria and increase their growth which may not be a good thing in all cases. If there is already an imbalance in gut flora, artificial sweeteners can sometimes make it worse.
Choose single ingredient foods for the most part and sticking with getting fresh whenever possible can be a good start to troubleshooting and working on improving gut health.
With supplements, quality is of utmost importance. Third-party testing (to make sure you’re actually getting what you’re paying for) and a GMP Certified facility producing them are two of the first things to look for when choosing which brands to buy.
Fillers or poor quality products (like rancid fish oil) can wreak havoc on your digestive tract either acutely or cumulatively. Just because a company is popular, doesn’t mean they’re high quality.
Making sure you’re using top-quality products is extremely important because you do tend to get what you pay for. This is why we prefer using practitioner-grade supplements that are certified and tested consistently like Nutri-Dyn and ATP Lab.
Ok, now that we’ve covered some of your initial considerations, let’s get to some basic steps to help troubleshoot potential gut issues.
There is a reason this was consideration #1. If your gut issues just recently started during your current training plan, there is a good chance that it was a contributing factor.
Most often this occurs when doing some type of metabolic program that is either more than your body is ready for (too much volume of the stimulus) or the nutrition is not matched properly.
