If you have colitis and you’ve had a flare up (or even if you haven’t!)you may find that you are left having lost a lot of weight, you maybe feeling weak and you may not think that exercise is a particularly good thing – well exercise can be a good thing if you exercise in the right way.

The wrong way to exercise with Colitis and any inflammatory condition is to go out and do lots of very long duration cardiovascular exercise – because in fact that has been shown to actually increase inflammation levels in the body and that’s not what you want, because inflammation is the root cause of colitis.

So what you need to do is to find yourself an exercise program that can help you to reduce your information levels. Now the best way to do this is actually to take up strength training, strength training will help you build lean muscle mass and gain weight in a healthy way, it also will tone you up whatever your size. Strength training has been shown to have an anti-inflammatory effect on the body – initially it slightly increases inflammation – immediately post exercise. But the longer term effect of it is to increase your ability to deal with insulin well as this is connected with inflammation, and also it lowers certain markers of inflammation in the body.

Ideally as well is doing some strength training you want to do some of what is called interval training which is where you do very short bursts of cardiovascular exercise with rest periods in between. Interval training is done by performing a short burst of activity followed by short rest period. Sounds hard but you could still do this even if you’re not very fit.
Start off by walking briskly for 60 seconds and then walking slowly for 30 and again walking briskly for 60 etc.. for about 10 minutes initially. If you’re feeling a bit stronger and are in a healthy state you could do running  for 60 seconds walk for 30 seconds et cetera you could do it riding on a bicycle or in the pool swimming. To begin with really just about 10 min a week is enough – more if you feel up to it, but no more than 30 minutes once a week.

If you combine these two things you will soon find that you start to not only look a lot better and feel a lot better but your Ulcerative Colitis symptoms will also be helped by these types of exercises – so why don’t you give it a try and see how you get on with two sessions of strength training at a good gym focusing on the whole body evenly twice a week for about half an hour, and one session of high intensity interval training for 10 to 30 mins a week.

Its also well worth trying to get half an hour to an hour of easy gentle exercise every day, this could be a walk at lunchtime or something like a gentle swim or bike ride. But do remember start gently and build up slowly, in fact you’ll be amazed how quickly you see results, and how good you feel.

After my first Colitis flare up I was left weak and unable to even walk up stairs. I had drop foot which meant whenever I went for a walk I was likely to keep falling over, so I needed to find a way to get exercise which wasn’t to hard, would build me up and wouldn’t cause me to damage my self in any other way. Basically I needed exercise that wasn’t like normal forms of exercise. Prior to my illness I used to go to Tai Chi classes, which I really enjoyed. Although I was really too weak to do Tai Chi, there is an exercise that I had learned in Tai Chi called Zhan Zhuang which is pronounced Jam Jong in English. It is best described in simple terms as Standing Exercise, that’s right an exercise that only involves standing still!. In china it is used as a method to heal the weak and sick, but it is also far more that that. Zhan Zhuang is a form of Chi Kung (Qi Gong), which actually forms the basis of many Martial Arts, often in China Marial Arts students are taught Standing Exercise before learning any kicks or punches ! It really is a unique form of exercise and has many benefits, it helps to build up muscles and tendons, improves balance and coordination, builds up your Chi energy, exercises the Heart and also has a meditative element which calms the mind. It  is an amazing form of exercise, which has really really helped me in so many ways. If you want to learn this form of Chi Kung and I would strongly recommend that you do there is an excellent book on the subject for beginners called The Way of Energy.