Feel great
How exercise can stop constipation
I bet you’re thinking I’ll stop at nothing to get people moving. That I’ll even blame inactivity as the reason for a blocked bowel! Well, before you tut and roll your eyes, it’s not actually that extraordinary.
You don’t even need to jump up and down, which would be an obvious solution, to get things shakin’. No… all you need to do is move. Walk. Cycle. A spot of gardening. Nothing unpleasant. And that very simple action can have a great effect on your peristalsis (O-level biology, anyone?), which is the involuntary contraction and relaxation of the muscles of the intestine, which pushes the contents along in a wave-like fashion.
The thing is, exercise reduces the time your food hangs about in your large intestine and therefore limits the amount of water your body can absorb from the stools. The longer the contents of your bowel take to pass through, the less water there is to plump up the resulting stools (no point in beating about the bush) and the harder they are to pass.
Small pellets (or rabbit droppings as we call them in my family) and hard sausage-shaped but lumpy stools are an indication of constipation. These two types are at the ‘tricky to pass’ end of the stool scale (yes, there is such a thing, referred to in the UK as the Meyers Scale). At the ‘no holding me back’ end are the mushy and watery varieties. The optimal stool is around courgette-sized, maybe with cracks, but smooth, soft and easy to pass, resulting in a not unpleasant empt
