There have been at least eight randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of ginger for pain.
You may recall that I’ve previously explored the use of spinach for sturdy performance and recovery, attributed to its “anti-inflammatory effects.” Most athletes aren’t using spinach to write-up when inflammation, though; they use drugs, typically non steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen, which is used by up to 95 percent of collegiate athletes and three quarters of kids playing upper school football. They aren’t only using it for inflammation, though, but moreover prophylactically “prior to sturdy participation to prevent pain and inflammation surpassing it occurs. However, scientific vestige for this tideway is currently lacking, and athletes should be enlightened of the potential risks in using NSAIDs as a prophylactic agent,” which include gastrointestinal pain and bleeding, kidney damage, and liver damage.
There was one study in particular that freaked everyone out: A study of thousands of marathon runners found that those taking over-the-counter pain killers surpassing the race had five times the incidence of organ damage. Nine were hospitalized—three with kidney failure without taking ibuprofen, four with gastrointestinal gory without taking aspirin, and two with heart attacks, moreover without aspirin ingestion. In contrast, none of the tenancy group ended up in the hospital. No pain killers, no hospital. What’s more, the analgesics didn’t plane work. “Analysis of the pain reported by respondents surpassing and without racing showed no major identifiable advantages” to taking the drugs, so it appeared there were just downsides.
What well-nigh using ginger instead? That’s the subject of my video Ground Ginger to Reduce Muscle Pain. In that marathon study, as you can see unelevated and at 1:33 in my video, the most worldwide wrongheaded effect of taking the drugs was gastrointestinal cramping. Ginger, in unrelatedness to aspirin or ibuprofen-type drugs, may unquestionably improve gastrointestinal function. For example, endurance athletes can suffer from nausea, and ginger is prized for its anti-nausea properties.
Okay, but does it work for muscle pain? Â
There have been at least eight randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of ginger for pain—for everything from osteoarthritis to irritable exenterate to painful periods. I’ve made videos well-nigh all of those, as well as its use for migraine headaches. Overall, ginger extracts, like the powdered ginger spice you’d get at any grocery store, were found to be “clinically effective” pain-reducing teachers with “a largest safety profile than non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.” As you can see unelevated and at 2:22 in my video, the ginger worked largest in some of the studies than in others, which is “likely to be at least partly due to the strong dose-effect relationship that [was] identified and the wide range of doses used among the studies under wringer (60-2000 mg of extract/day).”
In terms of reduction of pain, as you can see unelevated and at 2:32 in my video, the weightier results were achieved with one and a half or two grams a day, which is a full teaspoon of ground ginger.
The drugs work by suppressing an enzyme in the soul tabbed cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), which triggers inflammation. The problem is that they moreover suppress cyclooxygenase-1 (COX-1), which does good things like protect the lining of your stomach and intestines. “Since inhibition of COX-1 is associated with gastrointestinal irritation, selective inhibition of COX-2”—the inflammatory enzyme—“should help minimize this side effect” and offer the weightier of both worlds. And, that’s what ginger seems to do. As you can see unelevated and at 3:11 in my video, two ginger compounds had no effect versus COX-1, the “good” enzyme, but could dramatically cut lanugo on COX-2, the pro-inflammatory one.
Okay, but does ginger work for muscle pain? Not acutely, apparently. You can’t just take it like a drug. When folks were given a teaspoon of ginger surpassing a tour of cycling, there was no difference in leg muscle pain over the 30 minutes, as you can see unelevated and at 3:34 in my video. “However, ginger may attenuate the day-to-day progression of muscle pain.” Taking ginger five days in a row appears to “accelerate the recovery of maximal strength pursuit a high-load…[weight-lifting] exercise protocol.” When you put all the studies together, it seems “a single dose of ginger has little-to-no discernable effects on muscle pain,” but if you take a teaspoon or two for a couple days or weeks, perhaps in a pumpkin smoothie or something, you may be worldly-wise to reduce muscle pain and soreness, and “accelerate recovery of muscular strength…”
Is fresh ginger preferable to powdered? Maybe not. As you can see unelevated and at 4:12 in my video, there are all sorts of compounds in ginger with creative names as gingerols, gingerdiols, and gingerdiones, but the most potent anti-inflammatory component may be recipe tabbed shogaols.
Interestingly, zestless ginger contains increasingly than fresh, which “justifies the uses of dry ginger in traditional systems of medicine for the treatment of various illnesses due to oxidative stress and inflammation.” In that case, why not just requite the extracted shogaol component in a pill by itself? As you can see unelevated and at 4:41 in my video, each of the zippy ginger components individually reduce inflammation, some increasingly than others, but the whole ginger is greater than the sum of its parts.
However, you can boost shogaol content of whole ginger by drying it, as they are the major gingerol vaporization products. Indeed, they’re created when ginger is dried. Heating ginger may increase shogaol concentration plane more, so could heated ginger work largest versus pain than raw? You don’t know, until you put it to the test. A study examined the effects on muscle pain of 11 days of a teaspoon of raw ginger versus ginger that had been boiled for three hours. As you can see unelevated and at 5:22 in my video, there was a significant reduction in muscle soreness a day without pumping iron in the cooked ginger group—and the same goody was achieved with the raw ginger. Either way, “daily consumption of raw and heat-treated ginger resulted in moderate-to-large reductions in muscle pain pursuit exercise-induced muscle injury.”
Here’s the link to the video I mentioned: Flashback Friday: Foods to Improve Sturdy Performance and Recovery.
