Recovery from sickness + is it the same for Covid

Medical Q&A [Moderated]
1

Hi,

i’ve recently listenened to the podcast about immune system and training and i found it WILDLY fascinating! It goes soooo against conventional “wisdom” that you should just rest when you’re sick. So thank you for that, it was a real eye-opener.

I however have 2 more questions since i would love to know more about the subject:

  • I get the point of the immune system not suffering when training while you’re sick, but what about actual energy and stress? I mean i would assume that fighting a disease or infection uses a lot of energy from the body. If you’re training heavy (or as heavy as you can at that point), wouldn’t that make it possible so the body has less energy to fight back and thus inhibiting getting better? Or would the fact that you’re not able to give it your all cover that aspect?
  • In regards to covid: i’ve seen university professors claim that you shouldnt train heavy while you’re positive or just recovered due to potential inflammation of the heart muscle. Is this true?

Thank you in advance for an answer. I am stoked to learn from this and grow as a coach! I had corona recently myself and did not do a single thing due to not wanting to impair recovery. So it really was very interesting to listen to the podcast.

2

Hey there,

Thanks for the post and glad you liked the podcast.

For your first question, the body’s energy expenditure does tend to increase during an illness and yes, there is a stress response that takes place to help with fighting the infection… The amount of actual energy expended varies based on the illness, but this is really besides the point. Physical activity doesn’t really cost a lot of energy save for extreme ultra-endurance efforts and similar. For example, walking 10K steps costs the average individual about 250 Calories…about 20 M&M’s worth of energy. It’s just not that much and based on existing data, exercise doesn’t seem to compromise the immune system’s function, which was extensively repeated over and over again in the podcast.

COVID and other viral infections sometimes can cause a myocarditis afterwards, though it doesn’t really seem like COVID does this at a very high rate or that exercise increases the risk of this happening in a reliable way. This may change as new information emerges, of course.

-Jordan

3

Thank you for the reply! This covered what i wanted to know.