How Exercise Unlocks Your Body’s Internal Pharmacy
Your muscles do much more than help you move around. Every time you exercise, they become like a powerful pharmacy, making and releasing hundreds of helpful substances that travel throughout your body. These tiny messengers carry important health instructions to every organ and tissue. This is the amazing reality of myokines, your body’s exercise-made healing compounds.
Myokines are small proteins released by your muscles when they contract. They’re one of the most exciting discoveries in modern health science. Your muscles use them to talk to the rest of your body, sending signals that help heal damage, fight disease, and keep you feeling young and strong.
The Science Behind Your Body’s Exercise Pharmacy
When you move your muscles, something remarkable happens at the cellular level. Scientists first discovered that muscle could work like an organ that makes and releases substances with the discovery of a muscle-derived compound in 2000. By 2003, they had defined these muscle-produced compounds as “myokines” (Pedersen & Febbraio, 2012). Since then, researchers have identified hundreds of different myokines.
These molecular messengers work in three important ways. First, they act locally within your muscles, helping repair and strengthen the tissue you just worked. Second, they communicate with nearby tissues, coordinating healing and growth in surrounding areas. Finally, they travel through your bloodstream to distant organs, delivering health benefits throughout your entire body.
Physical activity decreases the risk of numerous diseases, and exercise may be prescribed as medicine for lifestyle-related disorders such as type 2 diabetes, dementia, cardiovascular disease, and cancer (Pedersen, 2019). This happens because myokines act like natural medicine, targeting specific health problems and promoting healing from within.
Key Players in Your Internal Pharmacy
Irisin: The Fat-Fighting Messenger
One of the most studied myokines is irisin, often called the “exercise hormone.” Irisin is a newly discovered protein that skeletal muscle releases specifically in response to exercise-induced muscle contraction (Reza et al., 2017). Scientists have found that your muscles produce this substance as a direct result of physical activity.
What makes irisin special is its ability to transform harmful white fat into beneficial brown fat, which burns calories even when you’re resting. Irisin plays a crucial role in energy metabolism throughout the body and helps regulate metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes.
IL-6: The Multi-Tasking Healer
IL-6 might sound intimidating, but when released during exercise, it’s actually one of your body’s most powerful healing tools. Research shows that exercise-induced IL-6 significantly improves fat metabolism by enhancing the breakdown of fats and helping cells use glucose more effectively. This happens through the activation of important cellular pathways that boost energy production.
BDNF: The Brain Booster
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is like fertilizer for your brain cells. Physical exercise produces numerous benefits in the brain that enhance cognitive function, blood flow, and resistance to injury. Exercise induces BDNF expression through specific pathways, with this protein playing a major role in learning and memory formation (Wrann et al., 2013). When you exercise, your muscles release factors that increase BDNF production, helping your brain form new connections, improve memory, and protect against age-related decline.
IL-15: The Muscle Guardian
IL-15 is particularly important for maintaining lean muscle mass as we age. This myokine facilitates collagen synthesis and cell proliferation while also stimulating fat oxidation, glucose uptake, and mitochondrial biogenesis in both skeletal muscle and fat tissue (Son et al., 2019). This makes it a key player in preventing age-related muscle loss and maintaining a healthy metabolism.
Optimizing Your Body’s Myokine Production
The Power of Resistance Training
If you want to maximize your myokine production, resistance training is your most effective strategy. Research demonstrates that exercise effectively induces irisin expression, with resistance training showing a more pronounced effect compared to moderate-intensity aerobic exercise. This type of exercise creates the muscle contractions necessary to trigger robust myokine release.
Start with bodyweight exercises like push-ups, squats, and lunges, or use resistance bands and weights. Aim for 2-3 sessions per week, focusing on major muscle groups. The key is to gradually increase the challenge of your workouts to keep your muscles adapting and producing more beneficial myokines.
Aerobic Exercise: The Endurance Approach
While resistance training might be the champion for myokine production, aerobic exercise offers its own unique benefits. Different forms of aerobic training, high-intensity interval training, and combined exercise protocols all show positive effects on myokine levels in both healthy and clinical populations.
Activities like brisk walking, cycling, swimming, or dancing for 150 minutes per week can help maintain steady myokine production and support overall health. The beauty is that you don’t need to become a marathon runner—moderate, consistent activity is enough to keep your internal pharmacy running smoothly.
Timing and Recovery
A single bout of exercise typically induces increases in myokine expression immediately after and up to 60 minutes post-exercise, while myokine responses usually return to baseline levels within 3 to 24 hours post-exercise. This means the benefits are both immediate and temporary, emphasizing the importance of regular, consistent exercise.
Allow adequate recovery between intense sessions—your muscles need time to repair and adapt. This recovery period is when many of the long-term benefits of myokine production actually take place.
Natural Ways to Support Your Body’s Pharmacy
Nutrition for Myokine Production
Your muscles need the right building blocks to produce myokines effectively. Focus on:
- High-quality protein from sources like fish, (ideally organic) meats, beans, and nuts
- Anti-inflammatory foods like leafy greens, berries, and fatty fish
- Complex carbohydrates to fuel your workouts
- Adequate hydration to support cellular function
Sleep and Stress Management
Poor sleep and chronic stress can interfere with your body’s ability to produce and respond to myokines. Prioritize 7-9 hours of quality sleep and incorporate stress-reduction techniques like connection with supportive people in your life, deep breathing or gentle yoga.
Consistency Over Intensity
Remember that your body’s internal pharmacy works best with regular, consistent stimulation rather than sporadic intense efforts. It’s better to exercise moderately five days a week than to have one extremely intense workout followed by a week of inactivity.
Using Your Body’s Healing Power
The discovery of myokines represents a fundamental shift in how we understand exercise and health. Your muscles aren’t just there to help you lift, carry, and move, they’re sophisticated endocrine organs capable of producing their own medicine cabinet of healing compounds.
The next time you exercise, remember that every muscle contraction is like pressing a button in your body’s pharmacy, releasing hundreds of beneficial compounds into your system. Your muscles are literally manufacturing medicine, customized perfectly for your body’s needs. That’s more than just exercise, that’s true preventive healthcare in action.
If you’re ready to harness the power of your own body’s incredible self-healing mechanisms, I’d love to help you create a customized wellness plan. Book a complimentary discovery call here [link] to discuss how we can work together.
References:
Pedersen, B. K. (2019). Physical activity and muscle–brain crosstalk. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 15(7), 383-392.
Pedersen, B. K., & Febbraio, M. A. (2012). Muscles, exercise and obesity: skeletal muscle as a secretory organ. Nature Reviews Endocrinology, 8(8), 457-465.
Reza, M. M., Subramaniyam, N., Sim, C. M., Ge, X., Sathiakumar, D., McFarlane, C., … & Kambadur, R. (2017). Irisin is a pro-myogenic factor that induces skeletal muscle hypertrophy and rescues denervation-induced atrophy. Nature Communications, 8(1), 1104.
Wrann, C. D., White, J. P., Salogiannnis, J., Laznik-Bogoslavski, D., Wu, J., Ma, D., … & Spiegelman, B. M. (2013). Exercise induces hippocampal BDNF through a PGC-1α/FNDC5 pathway. Cell Metabolism, 18(5), 649-659.
Son, J. S., Zhao, L., & Chen, Y. (2019). The role of myokines in exercise and metabolic health. Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews, 47(1), 15-22.
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