If you have been in the health and fitness space for a long enough time, you will see a trend in buzzwords: cortisol, oxidative stress… Inflammation. A lot of the time, they are wrapped up under the same umbrella. And rightfully so, but with online marketing, a lot of the details are swept aside: feeling sore. Just take this herbal supplement of dubious intent.
At Scepter Wellness, we would prefer you understood what was going on with your own body well enough to make informed decisions on it… I know, crazy concept.
So, in today’s video, we are going to walk through what inflammation actually is, how it can lead to long-term soreness and premature biological aging if left unchecked.
Now, a disclaimer. Scepter Wellness is a supplement company; we have a vested interest in selling supplements. However, our philosophy is building trust and awareness through educational content rather than making you feel insecure enough to buy our products.
So while we have Safeguard for soft tissue support, this video is going to be as unbiased as we possibly can be on the matter.
Also, like the video and subscribe to the channel if you like this content and want to be in the loop for regular updates on it.
What is inflammation
Inflammation is an immune response. When your cells sense stress, they release signals that the tissue is under duress. Immune cells in your body flood the scene and inspect and interpret the issue. These signals encourage blood vessel dilation and therefore increase blood flow and nutrient delivery. They also increase blood vessel permeability, allowing fluid, plasma proteins, and immune components to move more easily into the surrounding tissue, leading to localized swelling.
Inflammation is a vital step in the body’s natural healing response. This increased blood flow, immune activity, and movement of materials into the affected tissue help create the conditions needed for repair.
How inflammation occurs
Inflammation is a very important and very common response in the body. The easiest way to describe it is from a literal contusion or bruise. It causes a localized healing response, which brings very localized inflammation.
But inflammation is present in all healing responses. Minor wear and tear will have minor increases in inflammatory markers; this can be perceived as tissue fatigue or stiffness, but that is just the natural healing response in action at a more subtle scale.
Inflammation happens when you’re sick because the immune system is fully activated, which in turn signals an inflammatory response throughout the body. Even seasonal allergies can cause systemic inflammation as your body declares war on pollen without you signing off on it.
And exercising can also cause inflammation locally in the muscle. Stressed tissues in general are subject to inflammation.
In general, inflammation is a good thing; the problem is when it goes unregulated or the response always has a small reason to stay activated. This is not necessarily from just physical strain, but there are links to sleep dysregulation, mental stress, and autoimmune diseases that can increase inflammation chronically or cause a disproportionate amount of inflammation when the response activates.
Why you feel sore
Inflamed tissues tend to make you more sensitive; brushing against a healing bruise, you have probably experienced that for yourself. Intuitively, you would think the swelling itself is responsible for the soreness as it limits range of motion and increases the pressure in the surrounding area, but that is only partly true. During the inflammatory response, a plethora of different mediators increase the nerve sensitivity locally. This is to signal to the body not to overuse the tissue, and it’s part of the reason why we feel sore when sick. The same hormones are released globally, causing chronic soreness and inflammation.
The increased pain sensitivity is supposed to signal to the brain that this tissue is damaged; be careful. So, you don’t aggravate the already damaged tissue.
Why you always feel sore
The inflammatory response is supposed to signal an increase in sensitivity, but as we already mentioned. This inflammatory response can become chronically on, leading to mild ache and soreness, as the nerves are pretty much primed 24/7 to feel a minor disturbance, as they are letting the brain know something is still off. The inflammation does not have to be from injury to happen. If chronic inflammation impacts the tissue. It can be healed and functional, but the increased sensitivity remains as the inflammation response is still present to some degree.
In normal circumstances, the immune cells clean up their own mess when they are done, with the help of the lymphatic system. However, if the cause of inflammation is still present, they won’t clean up fully. Meaning you can have prolonged tenderness in the tissue as the immune system still is interpreting the area as “at risk”
And on top of this. There is a chance the cells fail to clear out all the miasma responsible for inflammation, leaving a low-grade signal for chronic inflammation, whether it be damaged proteins, dead immune cells, or general cellular waste—these act as inflammatory triggers on their own, causing chronic inflammation in the tissue.
Aging populations
Aging populations have a disproportionate loss in inflammation regulation.
I probably don’t have to explain this to you, but as we age, things stop working correctly. Older individuals tend to have a dysregulated immune response in general. Inflammation is regulated by the immune system. If your immune system is worn down or not as effective, your ability to clear the inflammation becomes objectively worse. So, it takes longer to clear, and you are at higher risk of developing chronic inflammation and subsequent soreness, but again you probably already noticed that effect.
Particularly, your body’s ability to remove cellular waste from the initial healing response begins to be less effective, causing a higher chance of chronic inflammation. As cleanup becomes less efficient, more inflammatory debris and signaling can linger after each healing response, making it easier for low-grade inflammation to stick around. Add in the fact that it takes longer to heal from normal wear and tear as we age, and it becomes a perfect storm for chronic inflammation despite you trying your best with a healthy lifestyle.
For athletes
Your immune system has not yet stood the test of time, but you might be practicing something arguably worse for chronic inflammation. Overtraining. And I am not saying this is in the classical sense with CNS (central nervous system) fatigue, higher stress levels, all that jazz. I am saying that depending on the exercise choice or sport, certain joints are going to receive much more wear and tear. Basketball players always complain about their knees eventually. For baseball pitchers, it’s the elbow. For sports, repetitive strain injury and stress accumulation is practically unavoidable. Even in weightlifting and running in particularly grueling training blocks, inflammation will increase. It is almost unavoidable, as it’s part of the healing adaptation response.
But if we always go hard. We never give our body a chance to fully clear out the inflammation, but we are always aggravating the same tissues, making them chronically sore. Then, we might start compensating and then start an inefficient movement pattern, which can lead to injury from an undertrained, or now chronically fatigued, muscle group that has no business doing what you are asking it to do. … Speaking from experience.
From a sports science standpoint, the simple solution is to properly schedule rest. But getting a person with drive to sit down and take a load off for the day is like pulling teeth.
How we limit inflammation
Well, if you made it this far, you should know we should not limit inflammation. But we should understand that we don’t want it to linger. I briefly mentioned already that sleep and psychological stress can lead to higher inflammatory responses. But telling you just to chill will not solve your issues.
The first obvious solution is to allow for proper recovery. When you do feel tense and tight, it’s probably best to rest.
Sleep in general upregulates the immune system, which in turn will help clear inflammation. If your sleep schedule is less than ideal. It will negatively affect your ability to regulate inflammation.
Stress, whether physical or mental, raises stress hormones like cortisol and changes immune signaling. Short-term, that response is useful. But when stress becomes chronic, the system can become less effective at controlling inflammation as your body adapts to that level of stress and cortisol release, blunting the effects.
Diet can cause higher levels of inflammation, but this is a massive rabbit hole that deserves its own video… probably multiple.
Active recovery, which is basically rest days that you don’t just vegetate on your couch all day, will help the lymphatic system drain while not causing wear and tear to build up.
There are a bunch of ways to go about it, but the big ones are largely stress and recovery management. I know it’s very unsexy.
If you are looking for a boost
At Scepter Wellness, we sell supplements to help you feel your best. For soft tissue support, we have Safeguard. I am also secure enough to tell you that you do not need this supplement. Worse, you can just use the dosages of the ingredients listed on the product page to make your own formulation.
But I will say it is a lot more convenient to have one formulation already measured out for you, with trusted sourcing and third-party testing.
What can I say? I’m biased.
Inflammation is a multifaceted response, and there is no single supplement that simply “clears” it. Drugs like cortisone or ibuprofen can directly suppress parts of the inflammatory response, but that is not what Safeguard is designed to do.
With Safeguard, the goal is to make cells more resilient to stress, support normal inflammatory regulation, and improve the cellular environment needed for recovery.
Another boogeyman term in the health and wellness industry is oxidative stress. Broadly, oxidative stress is chemical stress on a cell, and too much of it can contribute to inflammatory signaling. The antioxidant-focused ingredients in Safeguard help cells better handle that stress.
The main ingredients in Safeguard for this purpose are:
Green tea extract
Coenzyme Q10
N-acetyl-cysteine, or NAC
All three support antioxidant defenses, but they do it in slightly different ways.
NAC supplies cysteine, which is an important precursor for glutathione, one of the body’s major internal antioxidant systems. That helps cells protect themselves from oxidative stress.
Green tea extract contains compounds like EGCG that support antioxidant defenses and help regulate inflammatory signaling.
Coenzyme Q10 plays a direct role in mitochondrial energy production. Since normal energy production creates some oxidative stress as a byproduct, CoQ10 helps support the mitochondria while also helping protect cells from some of that self-inflicted oxidative stress.
Taurine and Vitamin D round out the formula by supporting overall cellular function, signaling, immune regulation, and the broader recovery process.
So Safeguard is not an “anti-inflammatory” in the sense of shutting inflammation down.
The goal is to support the systems around inflammation so your body can respond to stress, recover, and return to normal more efficiently.
If you are interested, check out scepterwellness.com.
This video will also be available as a blog post at blog.scepterwellness.com for my fellow readers.
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