School’s back in, it’s officially fall, and several of my friends have already succumbed to one form of sickness or another. Since it’s timely, I thought I’d talk a little about illness, and how you should handle training when you have caught a bug.
To start, let’s define the parameters for cessation of training, because all too often, people think they are being “tough” by riding through illness (GUILTY!!! Yours truly made this mistake last year and got a little talking to at the doc’s office). Generally speaking, if you’ve got a fever or sinus discharge, training should stop. Training should also stop if symptoms are at all in the throat or chest. Basically, if you feel bad, stop training. If there is a question in your mind about whether or not you are well enough to ride, err on the side of caution. Just remember that it’s better to have 2 days off than 10!
Once you have a green light to ride from your doctor, it’s important to know what to expect when you throw a leg back over the top tube… When you stop training, it takes about 3-4 days (on average, everyone is a little different) for your body to start losing what it’s not using. Enzymes that assist the aerobic process start to go first… athletes have much higher levels of these owing to training adaptations. Once you start to exceed 3-4 days, you start to get into a detraining curve. Basically, if you are off 5 days, it should take almost 10 to get back to where you were before you got sick.
Of course, that’s not always the case. Remember, one of the 4 principles of training is individual difference-different people respond to time off in different ways, and that is heavily influenced by both training phase and fitness level. For example, if you were in a competitive phase of training with higher intensity workouts before you were forced off the bike, you could come back much faster than the 10 days depending on how ill you were.
Coming back from illness also depends on the amount of time off and the severity of the symptoms. For example, if you are very fit, and had a week off because of a common cold, you could likely tolerate intensity within 5 days of beginning retraining. But, if it was the flu, or the illness lingered for more than a week, then you would need to spend more time regaining fitness. You should also consider the risk of relapse: even for a mild cold whose symptoms subside, you should be careful of returning to training too quickly because symptoms might return with a vengeance.
When returning to training, start slow and make sure you aren’t feeling overly fatigued. If you’ve been off a while, or were really ill, build your volume back up in shorter rides over a 2-3 week time frame. No racing, no intensity. Once you start to feel solid on the bike again, then some lower intensity, specific workouts could be added into the training such as tempo work. The focus should be 100% recovery within and between workouts. So, once intensity begins, the recovery time between intervals should be long, and the recovery time between training bouts should be timed so that the legs feel fairly fresh each ride.
If you are in a less competitive phase of training, come back at as little as 30-50% of volume/week for the first week of training, and at about 50% of the intensity. The next week, you could add 10-15%, and build in a little more intensity. If you were in a competitive phase of training, you could get away with a higher volume the first week, but wait several days before hitting higher intensities.
Training set-backs are hard to take, but I often tell my athletes this, “they hold that race next year, and they’ll hold it this year, with or without you.” It might sound harsh, but the reality is that a few weeks off is a mere blip on the radar with respect to training and racing. The bottom line is this: err on the side of caution if you start to feel sick. If you try and train through it, chances are, you’ll just make yourself tired and won’t get anything out of your workouts.
Sara Krause, M.Ed. is an exercise physiologist and owner of Krause Sports Performance in Austin, Texas.
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