Every locker room I've been in has bottles of Advil that are relied upon. In the trainer's bag, medical room, a guy's stall. Pre-game, post-game, sore back, tweaked groin, headache, hangover. Two Advil and you're back. Nobody questions it. It's just part of the routine.
That’s the default.
THE HIPS
A few years back I was dealing with hip inflammation that wasn't responding to anything. I was loving every second on the ice, it was just starting to hurt to play the sport I love. I was looking into PRP and starting to think about what else might be on the table.
My mom called me about it. She's spent years around the natural supplement world and told me to try curcumin — the active compound in turmeric. She figured it was worth a shot before I tried anything more invasive. I trusted her. I usually do.
That's not the point of this issue though. One supplement working for one guy isn't a story. The point is the experience flipped an order I'd been operating in for my entire career without ever choosing it. Athletes treat pharmaceuticals as the default and natural options as the alternative, and after looking into the research it should probably be the other way around.
THE COST OF OVERRIDING THE SYSTEM
This is the part nobody in the locker room really talks about.
Elite athletes use NSAIDs at six to ten times the rate of the general population. At the 2010 FIFA World Cup, more than half of the players were on them. The FIFA medical research lead called it a cultural issue, part of the game. Surveys of American football show one in seven high school athletes take them daily. In college, twenty-nine percent take them as a preventive measure on game day. Advil and Aleve aren't unusual. It's the norm at every level of sport.
Here's what they actually do. NSAIDs work by blocking the inflammatory pathways your body uses to repair tissue. The inflammation you feel after a hard skate or a heavy lift isn't the enemy. It's the signal your body uses to rebuild. Block the signal often enough and you blunt the rebuild. The 2025 sports medicine review in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport found that long term NSAID use interferes with muscle growth, impairs tendon and ligament healing, and damages the gut lining.
That's the part that bothered me when I first read it. We're taking something that works against the system that's supposed to be doing most of the work for us.
WHAT WORKS WITH THE SYSTEM
Your body is built to manage inflammation. That's part of the job. The question isn't how to shut inflammation down. The question is whether you're supporting the system that's already running or fighting it. The majority of natural ingredients support your body's natural process.
The most powerful anti-inflammatory tool you have is sleep, you already know that. I'm not going to spend a section on it. Go to bed.
Food does most of the next layer of work. Fatty fish, fresh turmeric, ginger, leafy greens. The mediterranean diet has been studied for decades for its inflammatory profile and the results are consistent across hundreds of trials. None of this is exciting. None of it is going to get a marketing budget behind it. But this is the layer most athletes skip on the way to the supplement table.
When food isn't enough, the natural supplement options have real research behind them. Omega-3s have some of the strongest evidence outside of NSAIDs themselves for reducing inflammatory markers and supporting tissue repair. Tart cherry has solid data in athletes specifically for post-exercise soreness. Curcumin is the one I personally landed on. The 2014 trial that compared 1500mg of curcumin against 1200mg of ibuprofen in 367 patients with knee osteoarthritis found the two matched on pain reduction, stiffness, and function. Same job, fewer side effects.
None of these are magic. The point isn't to swap one pill for another and call it natural. The point is that when you support the system instead of overriding it, your body does most of the work it's already trying to do.
THE ORDER
I still take ibuprofen every once in a while. Playing through pain is part of the game and sometimes you need it. The point of this issue isn't to tell you to throw out the bottle.
The order is the whole point. Pharmaceutical first, everything else last, is the order most of us inherited without ever choosing it. Flip it. Your body, your sleep, your food, and the natural options do most of the work. The pill bottle is the backup, not the starting point.
Go stretch, see you in two weeks!
— Ethan Edwards
Natural Athlete Co.