Scientific guide for training during illness – Articles
What do you do with your workout when you are under the weather? Are you the one who ignores the symptoms to start a daily workout at any cost? Maybe you are typing, who is the ghost of your training partner at the slightest hint of a stuffy nose?
What if none of the approaches are optimal?
Exercise can and should be an extremely useful part of a healthy lifestyle. We know that a small exercise is better than nothing, a moderate amount is pretty good, but a lot of exercise can be negative.
When we participate in any physical activity that causes our body to go out of homeostasis or basic functioning, we stimulate several physiological systems, including our neuroendocrine, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, lymphatic, and immune systems.
People are meant to move, and when we are active, often these systems work together to coordinate adaptation to our environment — we become adapted and resistant to a certain “dose” of movement and strengthen our immune system when we move enough (not also a lot) and at the right time. This is balancing.
That is why it is important to approach your exercises a little differently when you are also struggling with a disease or feeling unwell. Read on to learn how to approach exercises when you are sick.
Being active and “exercising” is not the same thing, so for the purposes of this article, the term “training” refers to structured training models that are intentionally used to sweat, burn some calories or break muscles.
“Activity” or “being active” refers to other non-sitting parts of your lifestyle, such as walking, standing, doing laundry, or walking with a dog — parts that don't really prepare you for the half-marathon or adventure race.
General health guidelines suggest that we should train for a total of about 150 minutes a week, in addition to doing non-working hours every day. To achieve optimal health and fitness, we must include two to three workouts with weights, as well as two to three workouts of the cardiovascular system per week.
Of course, these are common features, and they belong to the minimum effective dose for health, so they do not cover general training recommendations for athletes.
The net effect of your chosen exercise depends on the total. Frequency Intensity, Ttime and Tun the training you choose, as well as your ability to withstand the various stressful effects of the training program and adapt to them (in addition to the demands of life itself).
Listen to your body.
Our bodies, as a rule, respond best when they are given a physical challenge, after which they are allowed to properly recover, rest and recover. We tend to react negatively if we exercise each session to exhaustion, so it’s helpful to pay attention to how the FITT principle is related to your individual fitness and fitness. If you are listening, your body will give you many tips on how to manage your choice of workouts, or you can work with an experienced trainer to bring better logic, objectivity and art into your program.
Exercise introduces two main forms of stress in our body systems – mechanical stress and / or metabolic stress. Mechanical stress refers to physical damage to muscle tissue caused by weight training or high intensity / duration cardio. Metabolic stress refers to the short-term need for energy that exceeds the rate that cardiovascular exercise has on our body.
Both types of stressors are necessary when we try to change our physical shape or physique, but depending on the total amount and intensity of stress, it may take up to 72 hours for your body to return to its original homeostasis.
Many experts give recommendations on training, based on whether the symptoms appear above or below the neck, and this may be some truth. Studies show that exercises of medium duration, medium intensity have a neutral or even beneficial effect on the common (head) cold. [i],
As a general rule, if you feel too exhausted to get out of bed or leave your home, you should probably put off any strenuous workouts. If you have a fever, cough, or lack the courage to stray from a toilet more than a few feet away, I would advise you to transfer any tax training to your plan.
These symptoms are a way of your body to show that it can be busy fighting for something other than the last representative or interval. He tells you that he is not ready to adapt to any new physical skills, but you can tolerate (or even benefit from) some easier workouts or reduced versions of familiar workouts.
I suggest you also use objective measures, such as heart rate at rest or heart rate variability (HRV), to monitor your body condition, physical fitness, and readiness for further training. If you measure these factors before and during disease control, you will find a very strong correlation between illness and poor training / learning efficiency and adaptations.
Be active but be modest
When we exercise, we stimulate the activation and circulation of important immune cells throughout the body, and depending on how you balance your FITT variables, this can be good. However, if you increase the volume or intensity faster than your body is ready for it (for example, when you are sick), you risk getting injured, prolonged illness, or at least getting a plateau at work.
Damage to tissues from intense workouts with weights or oxidative stress from cardio with a higher intensity / longer duration can suppress the immune system and make us more susceptible to disease [ii] [iii]Some reports state that the immune system is “weakened” within a few days or a few weeks after a competition or sporting event, opening a window of opportunity to get sick or exacerbating the current illness. [iv] [v],
When your immune system fights infection, it needs key nutrients (vitamins, minerals, amino acids, glucose, essential fatty acids), extra rest, and some relief from your normal stressors. These are the same nutrients that your body needs to recover from strenuous or difficult workouts, so if you fight a disease and physically exercise your body, you are likely to have few nutrients and building blocks to maintain your resistance. . [vi],
While working during an illness, you are not going to set any personal records, and you may even notice that you cannot even carry out your “ordinary” routine. Be modest and take abbreviated versions of your workouts.
If you have a fever or symptoms below the neck, you will probably need from several days to one week of complete rest from all strenuous exercise. On the other hand, if you are struggling with a runny nose, sinus congestion or a sore throat, but you want to stick to the planned workouts, you will probably find several modifications.
Here are some ways to set your program's FITT variables to work. with your body and not vs it [vii]:
- frequency – If your curriculum includes three hard lessons this week, think about reducing to two
- intensity – gain weight or heart rate by 20-30 percent of your normal level or keep the intensity level <60% of your VO2max; This will allow you to stimulate more gently without overloading your body's resources.
- Time – reduce the total time of insufficient tension (the number of approaches and / or repetitions) in your resistance sessions or reduce the time from 60 minutes to 40-45 minutes for cardiovascular sessions
- Type of – instead of jogging, choose a walk or a jog, or agree to a workout with weights, for example, yoga or a more intense session in the gym.
affairs Little exercise or exercise when we are sick is useful for another reason; physical movement is necessary for the functioning of our lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is a network of vessels similar to the arteries and veins of our circulatory system, but instead of transporting blood, the lymphatic system transports immune cells, antibodies, and fatty acids throughout the body. It plays a critical role for our immune system, but unlike the circulatory system, we need to move our body to keep the lymph moving; there is no pump [viii]We are a pump.
Use extra time to optimize other life models.
I always encourage my clients to think about why they get sick in the first place, and we often find that there may have been lifestyles that could make them more susceptible. It is well known that unresolved mental stress, malnutrition, rapid weight loss, and improper hygiene (ie, hand washing) are all factors associated with impaired immunity. [ix]From time to time, their attitude of “walk hard or go home” to exercises also plays a role, so we learn valuable lessons about the meaning of “unloading” training phases.
Therefore, when we return to the volume and intensity of their training, in order to speed up recovery, we turn our attention and “extra” time to the study of their general lifestyle model. Here is a checklist that I usually use:
- Improve sleep hygiene – we recalibrate nightly procedures to ensure at least 8 hours of sleep, a faster onset of sleep and a deeper, more restful sleep, setting the screen time after sunset, temperature (<68 * F) and darkness in the bedroom (darkening shades can simply change your life).
A proper, peaceful sleep is the main mechanism of treatment and a reset button – there are no shortcuts around it. - (re) Connect to idle for stability – in our go-go-go culture, we rarely take the time to simply be present, but deep breathing and meditation actually play a crucial role in balancing our neuroendocrine and immune systems in such a way as to improve our immune health and promote healing [x]Laughter is also always good, everything that helps the lymphatic system and your spirit rejuvenate.
- Improve cooking procedures – eating a healthy, unprocessed diet based on enough foods and enough protein is a simple idea, but it's not easyto master. It takes time, practice, and sometimes a feeling of sadness to inspire us to direct energy to optimize our nutritious lifestyle. The rewards are worth it, especially if they help you get back to the training program faster. An experienced nutrition trainer can help you in a hurry to make your nutrition lifestyle more healthy, so if you are struggling with this skill set, hire a trainer.
- Master the daily supplements – "Most nutrients work in all tissues, all tissues need all the nutrients; therefore, inadequate consumption can adversely affect every body system … [xi]“This statement stresses the importance of constantly getting adequate daily intake of vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids to keep your body in working condition. In my experience, even if customers try to eat a lot of head-sized foods, enough protein and unprocessed carbohydrates every day, they still need to maintain their plan with high-quality multivitamins, omega-3 fatty acids, and often greens. [xii],
Unfortunately, none of these lifestyle patterns will correct themselves, so if you lower your training obligations during an attack of illness, you will not go wrong by spending time optimizing lifestyle patterns that will support even better training responses after you will return. accelerate, gain speed.
Come back wisely
This leads to the last tip – when you deal with everything that torments you (it can take from several days to several weeks, depending on the type and severity of the disease), it is unrealistic to expect that your physical form, energy or performance will drop dramatically. return to your previous baseline. No matter how tempting the transition to frequency, intensity / stress, time / volume, or type of training before the disease, allow yourself to gradually return to your usual routine to reduce the risk of relapse or become infected with another disease.
Prefer training with weights or yoga / Pilates instead of stationary cardio – they naturally follow the structure of interval / intermittent effort, rather than a model of stationary effort that can tire you more easily. Muscle contractions and deep breathing also better stimulate lymphatic drainage, so if you have any residual antibodies or an immune response, you need to “wash” lifting weights — a more beneficial activity than stationary cardio.
Increase volume and / or intensity week by week, but be careful not to increase them at the same time. The general rule of thumb is to increase just 10–20% of the total week over the week, and follow the wave pattern of the progression that allows for moderate “unloading” or “regression / maintenance” every week or so. If this sounds too technical to follow, I would recommend meeting with a fitness professional to analyze your goals, experience and overall lifestyle program and chart a reliable path to success.
After reading this post, if you think that you have a better understanding of how to cope with your exercises when you feel under the weather, just remember to keep listening to your body and change your approach so that any illness you encounter , passed quickly and you return to a healthy lifestyle.
If you notice certain setbacks or repetitive delays, when it comes to returning to normal workouts after normal everyday illnesses, it may be time to work with a fitness professional. By working with a fitness professional, they can help develop a return plan that will be personal to you and help you achieve your goals.
In the field of health care, Paul Kriegler, development manager of the program “Nutritionist and Life Time – Nutrition”.
This article is not intended to treat or prevent disease, nor as a substitute for medical treatment, nor as an alternative to medical advice. The use of recommendations in this and other articles on the choice and the risk of the reader.
[i] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9813869
[ii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1320353/
[iii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2803113/
[iv] http://eir-isei.de/2011/eir-2011-006-article.pdf
[v] http://eir-isei.de/2011/eir-2011-064-article.pdf
[vi] http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rbme/v18n3/en_15.pdf
[vii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9129268
[viii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5551392/pdf/nihms890943.pdf
[ix] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9129268
[x] http://www.annfammed.org/content/10/4/337.full.pdf
[xi] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4109789/pdf/1475-2891-13-72.pdf
[xii] http://www.lifetime-weightloss.com/blog/2016/10/23/why-greens-should-be-a-part-of-your-supplement-routine.html