Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Nausea and Acidity during and/or after workout

A lot of people might have had this problem at some point or the other. I have been having a problem with acidity in the last 1 year or so, but I mostly neglected it. In the last 6 weeks it really started to affect my training. I had to cut short several training sessions when I started feeling nauseated. So, as always, I did a little bit of research on google and tried a few things. And after a couple weeks of trying different stuff, I am now totally fine. And now I share my wisdom.

One of the biggest reasons for nausea is excessive caffeine consumption, in whatever form you take it- coke, coffee, energy drinks, whatever it is, too much caffeine is bad for you. Earlier, I used to drink tea for 3-4 times a day and it was okay. I slowly switched to coffee and recently I have been drinking coffee for 3-4 times a day and I'm guessing that is when I started getting nauseated. It is also possible that this acidity and nausea are because of my change in lifestyle (I've gotten really fat in the last 15 months, and my physical activity has also gone down). Whatever it is, coffee is bad for you. Stopping coffee suddenly is not good since there are some problems associated with caffeine withdrawal. If you can't cut down on coffee, at least stop drinking it a few hours before workouts. Chocolates also cause acidity.

Another reason for nausea during workout is lack of endurance. If you have not been doing a lot of cardio and endurance training, chances are that you are getting tired too easily. People often get tired during their workout and start feeling light headed. Whenever this happens, nausea follows. I have found a simple way to work around this.
Usually, if you push for too many reps in a set, you start feeling light headed. Instead of that, split the reps into more sets. For example, if you have to do 3 sets of 12 reps with 90 seconds rest between sets, split it into 6 sets of 6 reps each (with a rest period of 45 seconds) instead. When you do this, you will still be training with about the same volume, the muscle will still be fatigued sufficiently since you are not allowing enough rest between sets, and your cardiovascular system gets sufficient time to recover from one set and start producing blood glucose again (This is all my theory. What matters is, splitting high-rep sets into low-rep sets with reduced rest period has worked for me, and I expect it to work for someone else too).

The final and the most effective suggestion is- start eating bananas and drinking curd. Even at times when I feel like I'm definitely gonna puke, I drink a couple of glasses of banana lassi and it goes away in a couple of minutes. Last month, I used to take antacid tablets to get rid of this problem, but the relief was extremely short-termed. A glass of banana lassi (put a banana, about 200 mL of curd, 50 mL of milk, sugar, and some flavor if you want) a couple of times in the morning and a couple of times in the evening, especially before workout, totally relieves you from acidity and nausea.


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