Should I Train While Sick?
Whether you’re feeling rundown from the holiday/silly season, or if you’ve contracted a virus doing the rounds, feeling unwell isn’t the ideal start to pursuing our health and fitness goals in 2022. When forced to stay home and rest, it’s easy for our minds to start wandering to places of guilt and hopelessness around the progress that we’re missing. However when you break progress down it consists of making daily decisions that support your health.
The question of whether you should train while sick is very case by case dependant and all comes down to how it may impact your recovery.
Sometimes exercise can help to improve energy levels while feeling rundown. However sometimes exercising may take up the precious energy that your body requires to recover, and may extend your recovery period.
If you’re feeling guilty and anxious about not being able to exercise, sometimes resting is the best decision for your health on that particular day. And the day after that, you can make the same assessment. Sometimes committing to rest will allow you to bounce back faster so you can get back to training at your full capacity.
These are our tips for navigating your fitness goals from home while recovering from illness.
Accept it and commit to proper rest. Recovery is still an act of prioritising your health and is still a step towards your ultimate goal. In some ways you could also treat this forced rest as a chance to take a de-load week.
Listen to your body. Understand that your body’s energy and immunity is compromised, therefore you may not perform at your usual capacity. If you want to get some movement in (within your isolation environment,) work within your means and your body will communicate to you if you’re reaching your limits (ie. fatigue, headaches/migraines, nausea, dizzy spells)
Stay hydrated. Nothing feels worse than consuming water with a sore throat, but it’s important to keep your fluids up.
Stay away from saunas or high intensity training, you don’t need to “sweat it out.” Raising core body temperature places the body under more stress, and if your body has an infection, it’s already stressed.
Eat the same amount of food you usually would. Even though it may make sense to eat less/restrict your food intake because you’re not able to move as much, it is still very important to fuel your body the same as any other day. Where your body may utilise energy to move on any other day, your body requires more energy to help you recover on your sick days. Your immune system is working hard to fight infection and restore your health so ensure you support it by eating adequate food.
When you feel ready to train, reduce your intensity initially. This can look like training at an RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) of 7 and leaving some reps in reserve.
While frustrating to start your year unwell and isolating, it does serve as an important reminder to let go of the need for everything to be perfect in order to achieve what you want.
In reality, circumstances won’t always be ideal, but achieving a healthy lifestyle is about making daily decisions that support your health.
*Disclaimer - In no way are we saying to leave your isolation environment to train. An illness and infection can be contagious and spread to others, please see your Doctor before returning to your usual training environment