Colorectal Specialist: “The Reason 48% of Lifters Develop Haemorrhoids — And Why, Most Of Them Get Stuck With It For Life”
If you train heavy, squats, deadlifts, heavy pressing, and you’ve started wincing every time you sit down…
If you’ve noticed blood... If that burning, itching feeling has become something you just quietly manage between sets instead of something you treat…
If you’ve tried a cream from the pharmacy and it worked for about an hour, then left you right back where you started…
Then what Dr. Whitfield found after years of treating lifters is going to change how you think about every heavy set you’ve ever done.
And here’s the part that matters most: it’s not because you did something wrong.
48% of people who train heavy already have haemorrhoids, according to a 2026 observational survey of 312 athletes, published in the International Journal of Colorectal Disease. Not 4%. Not 14%. Nearly one in two.
Almost nothing sold to treat it, Preparation H, Anusol, Germoloids, actually addresses why it’s happening in the first place. Left to make the wrong choices, most men manage it for years instead of ever actually treating it.
The Patient Who Changed Everything
My name is Dr. Sarah Whitfield. I’ve spent years treating patients across London. Over time, one pattern kept repeating in my clinic. Men in their late twenties to fifties. Fit. Strong. Nothing wrong on paper. And yet, quietly, almost every one of them was dealing with the same thing: haemorrhoids they’d never told anyone about.
For a long time, I treated it the standard way. Recommend a traditional cream. Move on. The results were always the same: temporary relief, then right back to square one a few weeks later.
Until a patient, Jake, 32, who regularly trained at the gym, said something that stuck with me. “Doc, it’s not random. Every single guy at my gym who lifts heavy has this. We just don’t talk about it.”
I went back and pulled the research that night. What I found made me rethink everything I’d been recommending.
What’s Actually Happening Under That Bar
When you brace and strain under a heavy squat, deadlift, or press, holding your breath against a closed airway, what’s known as the Valsalva manoeuvre, intra-abdominal pressure spikes dramatically.
That pressure has to go somewhere. And the blood vessels around the rectum, thin-walled, poorly supported, take the brunt of it. Do that under heavy load, set after set, session after session, and three things start happening:
1. The vessels swell.
Repeated pressure spikes cause the blood vessels to distend and weaken. That’s the haemorrhoid itself forming, slowly, silently, one heavy set at a time.
2. The nerve endings around that area are dense.
So when it flares, it doesn’t flare quietly. It’s sharp, immediate pain, exactly the kind that makes sitting down after leg day unbearable.
3. Left alone, it escalates.
What starts as mild irritation becomes swelling. Swelling becomes bleeding. And bleeding, left untreated, can become a conversation about surgery.
This isn’t rare. This isn’t bad luck. This is what heavy, repeated straining does to the body — and almost nobody training seriously has ever been told.
I Tried Recommending Everything on That Shelf. Nothing Actually Worked.
I was frustrated. So I went through every option my patients had already tried before walking into my office.
Preparation H, Anusol, Germoloids? One active ingredient in all of them: an anaesthetic. It numbs the surface for an hour. It does nothing for the swollen vessel underneath. The problem is still there the second it wears off.
Natural remedies, witch hazel, wipes? Mild comfort at best. No real effect on the swelling causing the pain in the first place.
Every option treated the symptom. Nothing treated the vessel. I started looking for a formulation that actually addressed the mechanism, not just the pain.
The Second Patient Who Changed Everything
It was another patient, mid-thirties, deadlifts three times a week, who put me onto it. He came in for something unrelated. Looked more comfortable than I’d seen him in months.
”Doctor, remember what I told you about the haemorrhoids? Sorted. A mate at my gym who’d been through the exact same thing pointed me to something. Not from a pharmacy shelf. Itss called Silent Relief.”
I did what I always do. Looked at the composition before the branding.
Three active ingredients: Phenylephrine, Lidocaine, and Borneol. That’s when it clicked, because this combination answered the mechanism point by point, in a way none of the single-active creams ever could.
The Three Actives, and Why Each One Matters
01 - Phenylephrine shrinks the swollen vessels
A vasoconstrictor. It acts directly on the swollen blood vessels causing the problem, the physical source of the pain, not just the sensation of it.
Real-world result: the swelling itself starts reducing, not just the feeling of it.
02 - Lidocaine kills the pain and the itching
This is the ingredient every other cream relies on entirely by itself. Here, it’s one part of three.
Real-world result: fast relief from pain and itching, without pretending that’s the whole job.
03 - Borneol drives both actives to the actual source
The ingredient missing from every traditional cream. It isn’t an anaesthetic and it doesn’t reduce swelling on its own. What it does is force everything around it deep into the tissue, instead of leaving it to sit on the surface.
Real-world result: the formula actually reaches the swollen vessel, instead of stopping at the skin.
Borneol: The Ingredient With a 1,600-Year History
Of the three, Borneol was the one I’d never seen in a haemorrhoid cream before, and the one with by far the longest history.
Formulated by Someone Who Lived It For Years
Silent Relief wasn’t formulated by a lab chasing a trend. It was built by Claire Collins, a nurse who dealt with the same problem herself, and who knew exactly how the products on the shelf were formulated, single anaesthetic, temporary relief, guaranteed repurchase.
60 Days. 31 Patients who train heavy. The results are confirming Borneol efficiency.
I tested it myself first with a small group of patients, all of them lifting heavy at least three times a week, all of them dealing with haemorrhoids they’d never properly treated. Nothing else changed. No diet changes, no training adjustments. Just Silent Relief application.
Answering What You’re Probably Thinking
Everything you need to know
That’s why we chose to include Borneol, a rare botanical ingredient that’s significantly more expensive and harder to source than conventional ingredients.
However, in our patient evaluation, including 834 weightlifters, 783 didn’t just report feeling better — they reported that their symptoms resolved rather than repeatedly returning.
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