Auto immune disease and fitness gains

Due to the frequent topic of inflammation being a necessity for fitness gains i was wondering what the effect of chronic inflammation due to disease would be. I have psoriatic arthritis and I take Humira for it, but what is that doing to my training and fitness. With the constraint stress on my body due to my immune system attacking itself, would that be lessening my adaptation. on top of that Humira does its best to lower that immune response which could also affect adaptations, I was wondering if anyone had a clue how best to maximize fitness gains with chronic inflammation.

2 Likes

I’m no expert and cannot speak from experience, but I do know of several Olympic medallists with colitis/crohns/similar, and both my parents have rheumatoid arthritis that is significantly helped by regular exercise. In terms of performance impact, I expect there is a bell curve here. Just do your best, would be my take-home; being fitter can only help.

I feel you… I know what it is, not the same thing. But there are a lot of implications for sure. One of them being the stress of the training load that has a tendency to increase crisis frequency. The constant back and forth training detraining so you cant really expect to ramp up your load like any other human being.

For a couple of years my training went about like this… I would do a month of training block. Got huge gains. Like +20-25% went to the next block ramping up volume, intensity and power. the would be too much to handle, I would crash for several weeks. Would restart the training block less 1 week. Got huge gains again. Crashed. Rinse and repeat.

Overall I did and resdid TBLV ssb1 and ssb2 over and over again. And always crashed at the end of SSB2. But was able to see nice gains anyway. Overall + 50% in three years. This year is the first year I can really expect to complete the full base-build-specialty cycle because I’m treated. But then what I take is so powerful I don’t do inflammation at all.

2 Likes