migraine-remedy.com

Some people believe they suffer from exercise induced migraines, but as a migraineur myself, I tend to disagree. Take a look at my experience. For many years, I was a keen road runner, doing distances up to half marathon. This naturally involves quite a bit of heavy impact on the body, but I never experienced a migraine that I would associate with running.

I was also a SCUBA diver for over ten years. That entailed lots of vigorous exercise, hauling my heavy gear around, being tossed on the waves in dive boats and battling strong currents. I never had a migraine while diving or within a short period afterwards.

In contrast, as a young boy, swimming often produced the familiar symptoms that told me that a migraine could be on the way. I never liked swimming, wasn’t good at it and so, for me, it was a much less energetic activity. So what was happening then?

My belief is that it was down to stress. My early experience of swimming was on school trips to run down swimming pools smelling of chlorine, that were too hot and noisy. I never enjoyed these trips and they were anything but relaxing.

on the other hand, I loved the other activities. When running, I constantly challenged myself and never found it boring. And diving was the opposite. On a dive, my objective was to take it as easy as possible and enjoy the moment. Either way, I was totally absorbed. It was sometimes a Zen like state. And I believe that is the answer.

The activity is not the problem but the way you feel about it. And there has been some research that seems to agree that exercise itself is not a trigger for migraine. It was a small, inconclusive study, but it does offer some evidence that belief in exercise induced migraines may not hold water.