Hi, been following BBM for a while and I keep up with all the awesome content so I’m fairly familiar with the general approach to training while sick but I just had a few concerns.
I came down with some flu symptoms (Mainly head cold/sniffles/throat pain) yesterday and powered through a workout and managed to PR conservatively (Pulled 375 for 11@7 ! ), and I also had a great training session today, despite having a fever earlier.
I’m still intent on training tomorrow, but my symptoms are flaring up and kicking my butt right now and I just had a fever spike right after today’s session. It’s only the 1st week of a pretty nice development block so my training fatigue is minimal and the load/volumes are familiar. So Is there anything I can do to alleviate my symptoms/recover faster without going off program and taking days off? I can’t help but feel that training is exacerbating my symptoms, but I still want to train since it’s going so well.
It’s unlikely that training is exacerbating your symptoms.
Medicines like Tylenol/NSAIDs, decongestants, nasal sprays, etc. might be useful for symptom control. Otherwise not much else to do besides getting plenty of sleep.
They would be entirely made up, as I have no evidence to say when training results in significantly worse outcomes than not training. With that said, if you’re training in a public place with other people around, I’d probably recommend not training there if you’re actively having fevers, productive cough, etc. for the sake of others.
Dovetailing off this post, I have also recently come down with what seems to be a cold but it got me wondering about what causes the muscle aches/neck/back pain when one comes down with an illness? I assume in the same manner as other nonspecific pains it’s due to some kind of subjective threshold being surpassed and the brain outputs pain to get one to rest and fight off the illness?
Likely related to the systemic inflammatory response from acute illness. Acute inflammation sensitizes nociceptors (e.g. Nociceptor Sensory Neuron-Immune Interactions in Pain and Inflammation - PMC ), among many other neuro-immune interactions in the body. The whole field of psycho-neuro-immunology is pretty fascinating.
Try a flu shot? Only in the United States, there are over 110,000 persons to be hospitalized each flu season. Moreover, the record shown that around 36,000 people died just because the flu every year. However, most people never pay attention to the result of a flu shot, that is, does it really work? Is it safe enough? Does just one flu shot “do it all?”
Case studies have shown there are many people who still get the flu after having the flu shot. Most of them did not know why they were ill but saw a doctor and took medicine in order to recover. Actually, a cold and the flu are totally different. Flu is the more dangerous since it may cause the harmful sequela. In theory, the bacterin should be working to defend against the flu virus. Unfortunately, certain types of bacterin only work for certain types of flu virus. In additional, the ability of flu virus to modify itself is truly amazing. Consequently, it is very difficult for us to keep up with changing types of flu. We definitely are not in control.
), and I also had a great training session today, despite having a fever earlier.