Exercising While Sick: Should You Be Doing It?

Getting ill annoys bodybuilders for one reason and one reason alone – and that’s that it hampers their workouts. I’m not a big fan of getting a cold anyway, but when it prevents me from getting my normal weekly workouts in then it really gets my goat.

And get in the way of your workouts it will – or at least it should – and you shouldn’t be working out if you have a cold, an infection or any other kind of illness. It might sound like taking the easy option and making a fuss, but ultimately the most hardcore gym goer knows that it’s not worth training when they’re not running on all cylinders. Here we will look at why.

It Will Worsen Your Illness

When you exercise you use up the energy in your blood, and this then means that you have less energy for other things – things like fighting your infection and getting better. Like every other system in your body your immune system needs glucose and if you’ve use all of it up on a workout then that will mean you don’t have any energy left to help you recover. So in other words that’s bad news.

But that’s not all. By exercising you will also be causing little microtears in your muscles when you place then under stress. This is a good thing, because it’s those very same microtears that lead your muscles to then get bigger when your body heals them. But it’s bad news for your immune system because it means that it has one more thing it needs to worry about fixing when it’s already combating your cold. This can mean that you not only will take longer to get better, but even that the illness might get free reign to get worse.

Finally, working out will increase your heartrate and that will increase your metabolism. That means that if you have any problem it’s going to make its way around your system quicker meaning it progresses faster and is going to set in more. If you have a slight sniffle before you start to workout, then you can end up with a full blown flu by the end of it.

It Will Damage Your Regime

And here’s the main point – while you perhaps could force yourself through a workout you wouldn’t actually be doing yourself any good anyway. The thing is that while you might still be able to workout, you aren’t going to be working out as well or as efficiently as you would be if you were at full health. You’ll have less energy, everything will hurt more and you’ll break out in a cold sweat. In short then these workouts are going to be pretty much useless and you may as well have spent the time resting. And recovery from each workout will be slower and less effective too so you will end up with lots of microtears that don’t get build back into bigger muscle.

And because your workout will have protracted your illness, it’s not even like you can just tide yourself over with small workouts. All you will end up doing is making it much longer until you are able to get back to your normal routine. What makes much more sense then, is to just give yourself some time to recover so that you can more quickly get back to working out properly. By giving yourself the time you need to rest you can instead ensure that you are back to full health as quickly as possible and training hard once again and this is ultimately the best solution not only for your health but also for your physique as well.

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