Exercises that Help Digestion and Elimination

How Exercising Helps Digestion and Elimination

In general, exercise is beneficial to your body in many ways. It helps lower your risk of heart diseases. Your heart is a muscle and exercising strengthens it and improves your circulation by increasing blood flow and elevate your body’s oxygen levels. Of course, exercising helps you to lose weight and maintain a healthy weight. Exercise helps you burn calories that would otherwise result in your body gaining fat.

The risk of cancers, such as colon cancer and lung cancer are reduced by exercising.  Exercise also helps you to control your blood sugar. It can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. Exercising can help you sleep better and improve your mood by resulting in endorphin release and increase blood flow to your entire body and increases bone density.

Contemporary life’s stresses can harm your immune system. And your digestive system, with its active gut microbiota, is part of your immune system. Exercise reduces the stress that can harm your immune system and impair your immunity as well.

Exercising not only helps your muscles work better but stimulates lymphatic movement. As mentioned, your lymph system transports the fats that are part of your diet to your liver for processing. The largest group of lymphatic vessels in your body reside near your gastrointestinal tract and has an important role in your digestion. If your lymph becomes clogged, it can create digestion difficulties. As the lymph system has no pump as the circulatory system has the heart as a pump, the working of your muscles in exercise. help to move your lymphatic fluid. Also, by augmenting the lymph circulation, the transit time of your digestion speeds up, helping you to eliminate.

Another important way that exercise helps digestion is by increasing peristalsis or contraction movement of the intestine and colon resulting in better bowel movements. Of course, more consistent bowel movements result in a cleaner intestinal tract that doesn’t contain fermenting waste.

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Exercises that Help Digestion and Elimination

Walking – your digestive system and lymph system flourish from movement throughout your day. Walking briskly 30 – 45  minutes a day or setting a step goal will help keep these systems working more consistently. It also helps insulin delivery. Walking stimulates the forward contractions in your intestines to help your stools pass.

Yoga, Breathing, and Stretching – Yoga that stretches your abdominal muscles and organs is beneficial. It also can push out toxins in your intestines. Yoga, combined with breathing exercises, also stimulates your organs to help digestion. Stretching the abdominal muscles also helps relieve bloating and help reduce stomach acids. Yoga and other simple stretches help relieve pain in knotted-up muscles which relieves stress, resulting in better digestion. Deep breathing is a very effective and simple way to aid your digestion. They also help relieve bloating and help reduce stomach acids. Deep breathing, like Yoga and other forms of stretching, helps relieve stress, resulting in better digestion.

Abdominal Crunches – By working your core abdominal muscles, you improve your intestines and bowel movements and help you get rid of gas and the bloating that comes with it. In addition, by working your abs in a variety of crunch exercises, you will also lose abdominal fat and get a leaner waistline.

Sleeping – When you get up in the morning and have breakfast, you are literally breaking your fast of the hours that you were sleeping. And what happens during that fast? When you sleep, since there is no food entering your digestive system to process, your GI tract has your sleeping hours to process what you have already eaten–utilizing nutrients and preparing toxins to be eliminated in a morning bowel moment. Sleeping regenerates your body, improves your immune system, and removes stress-all of which aids your digestion.

Dancing – For similar reasons as walking, I know when I regularly dance,  I have better and more complete bowel movements. And, of course, it’s fun!

Bicycling – Cycling helps the fast and smooth passage of food through the intestines. It can reduce the water that otherwise is lost in the stool. This helps create a more complete bowel movement. Of course, bicycling also helps to remove fat around your waist.

Jumping Rope – Jumping rope creates a similar but stronger, “hitting the ground: movement” than walking, running, and dancing–which are also excellent in moving chyme (the semi-fluid, partly digested food mass that makes its way from your stomach, through your intestines, and is finally eliminated from your body.) Now, “gentle pounding” may be a contradiction in terms, but when you lightly pound jumping rope, you help gravity and the natural action of the intestines to move the chyme along and out of the body. Jumping rope may be the best exercise for helping gravity create a bowel movement. Each time you touch the ground, you push along the chyme toward the descending part of your colon and out of your body!

 

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