Multisport: Advice for the Ailing Athlete - When and How to Exercise Through Illness

By Alyssa Gaebel, CTS Expert Coach

While it is widely known that moderate exercise can strengthen your immune system, active people and athletes can and do get sick. Whether you are a weekend warrior or exercising to stay fit, you need to take your illness seriously and know how it may affect your training. The way you deal with your illness plays a role in determining how long it will take to return to your full workout capacity. The most important steps to take during illness are assessing your symptoms, making training modifications, and knowing when you’re ready to return to exercise.

Assessing Your Symptoms

Different illnesses require varying actions to work towards recovery. A good general rule to use is the “above the neck” rule. If your symptoms are confined above the neck, like a stuffed nose, headache, itchy eyes, or sore throat, it is all right to continue with modified exercise. If any of your symptoms reach below the neck, or if they affect your entire body, you need to refrain from exercise. These systemic symptoms include a fever, chest congestion, body aches, and gastrointestinal problems. Exercising with these symptoms puts you at risk for a more serious illness. Strenuous exercise with a fever can, in rare cases, even lead to a viral infection of the heart, which can be fatal.

Modifying Your Training

If you have determined that your symptoms lie above the neck, then you may proceed with modified exercise. It’s a good idea to cut back on the duration and the intensity of your workout so you don’t put too much stress on your body. Your body needs energy to battle against the infection, and when you’re fighting an illness, intense exercise can rob you of the energy needed to beat back the infection. Moderate exercise can help you feel better, clear your head, and take your mind off the fact you’re ill. It’s important to remember, however, that any sort of exercise you do during an illness should not leave you exhausted. Your primary goal is to get healthy, and the focus of your exercise should be more about staying active and keeping to your routines.

As you begin your modified exercise, give yourself 15 minutes to determine whether to continue. Most likely, you won’t feel 100% at the start. If you don’t feel any worse after 15 minutes, continue with the exercise. However, if you’re laboring at 15 minutes, or you feel worse than when you started, bag it for the day and focus on rest. If you need to quantify how you’re feeling, a heart rate monitor is useful. Infections can lead to exercise heart rates that are either faster or slower than normal, so it’s more the difference from normal than a particular elevation or suppression you’re looking for. If your heart rate doesn’t match your normal level of perceived effort, and you’re you’re struggling to maintain your usual pace, you’ll be better off with rest. For instance, if you normally feel comfortable running a nine-minute mile, and today that pace feels like an all-out effort, turn around and walk home. Taking an extra day off won’t hurt your fitness, and when you’re under the weather, more rest is just what the coach ordered.

Getting Back To Work

If you’ve been taking time off due to an illness with symptoms below the neck, you’ll need to modify your workout schedule when you return to exercise. For every day you took off due to illness, you should perform two days of modified workouts. You should start with some light aerobic workouts, and gradually incorporate more training time and intensity in the second half of this recovery period. This is an area where having a coach is very beneficial. Your coach will be able to prescribe the modified workouts or discuss your ideas for modified workouts. As a rule, it is better to be conservative about returning to exercise. Even though your symptoms are gone, your immune system is still weakened. If your workouts are too taxing when you first return, you risk getting sick again, which means even more time away from training.

Although exercise is widely known to bolster your immunity to illness, getting sick is something every athlete will face at one point or another. It is important to know what to do when you get sick, so you can modify your training as needed. By changing your workouts and taking some time off, you can avoid a relapse and return to your normal volume and intensity much earlier than if you try to continue training through the illness.

Alyssa Gaebel is a CTS Expert coach and holds coaching certifications from USA Cycling and USA Track and Field. She is an avid mountain biker and can be reached at agaebel@trainright.com.

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