I was wondering if you have any specific advice for those experiencing “long covid” symptoms like fatigue and muscle weakness. I’m about six weeks out from being sick and a warmup with just the empty bar leaves me feeling terrible the next day. My conditioning is nonexistent, which crazy because conditioning had always come easy for me before this (I’m not naturally gifted with strength, but I’ve always had great conditioning).
The beginner prescription looks like a good starting point along with trying to ramp my protein back up to where it was, but do you recommend anything else? I can’t imagine my experience is that uncommon but every article I can find on this doesn’t really seem to be relevant to strength training.
Sorry to hear about this, I’m sure it is frustrating.
I would manage this in the same way we approach the rehab process - see this article: Pain in Training: What To Do? , and mentally replace the word “pain” with “fatigue”.
The beginner prescription, as-is, may still be too much for your starting point - particularly with the top-end RPE targets of the program. You may need to find your own tolerable entry point into the process, which may require starting out with lower RPE targets.
Thank you. That article has quite a few points that resonate, particularly the ideas of finding an entry point and undershooting load, frequency, and progression expectations.
The idea of exercise selection is interesting too. I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of stimulus to fatigue ratio and whether I might have more luck in the short term with movements like Bulgarian split squats and deficit pushups. I like the idea in the article of using tempo sets and higher reps to make progress.