What’s up, guys.
Sean Nalewanyj here at www.SeanNal.com-www-BodyTransformationTruth.com and I figured this was an appropriate time
of year to make this video.
I just got over a pretty bad cold myself and I wanted to talk here about the topic of working
out while sick.
Should you still train or should you just stay home and recover.
Now I know that a lot of people prefer black and white answers to these types of questions
because it makes things a lot simpler, but this is definitely a gray area subject and
when it comes to working out while sick it really depends on what exactly you mean by
“sick” and it depends what type of training you’re talking about.
is it just a minor cold, is it the flu, is it food poisoning, is it mad cow disease.
I shouldn’t laugh about that, but the type of sickness is going to play a huge role and
it also depends on what type of training you’re doing.
Is it a high volume leg workout, or is it just a moderate arm workout, and it also depends,
is it a high intensity hit cardio or is it a low intensity bike ride.
All of these are going to factor into it.
A lot of it really just comes down to listening to your body and assessing just how sick you
feel and what type of workout you’re dealing with.
So if it’s just a common cold with a regular cold symptoms but you otherwise feel physically
okay, and you feel like you would be able to train without any real issues then it’s
probably okay to go ahead with it.
Personally if I just have a bit of headache, cough or things like that then I generally
will stick with my workouts as planned, as long as I feel up to it.
On the other hand if it’s more than a cold and you’re dealing with more, sort of total
body symptoms, you know, aches, fever or stomach issues in that case you’re almost certainly
going to better off to just skip the gym altogether and rest.
Remember that if you are sick then your body is already under stress and it’s trying
to pull its resources together to fight that sickness off, so if you go ahead and introduce
even more stress in the form of intense weight training then you’re probably doing yourself
more harm than good.
Your body may not be able to recover as effectively from the workout and it could also prolong
your sickness even further.
Now if you’re sort of feeling on the fence and you’re just not too sure about it, you
feel, maybe under the weather but not quite sure what it is then an option there is to
just test out the waters, begin moving through your workout to see how you feel each step
of the way.
If, once you get going, you find that it’s really draining and you just know that you
don’t feel right then you can just bail on the workout altogether, or you can scale
back the volume and intensity.
So again, the topic of working out when sick is highly variable because it depends on many
things and I think that if you’re honest with yourself, you can probably feel, in most
cases, whether you really should be going to the gym or not, and on top of that you
should probably take other people into consideration as well because if you go to the gym while
sick and you’re hacking away, wiping your nose and touching everything then you’re
putting everybody else at risk as well.
Another thing that I would mention is that if you do need to stay home and rest, or if
you’re not too sure and you just want to be on the safe side by not working out, it’s
really not a big deal in the big picture.
Missing a week or even two weeks in the gym is not going to had any serious impact on
your progress and if you’re able to keep your nutrition reasonably on point while you’re
sick, it probably won’t have any impact at all.
Your physique probably will flatten out a bit during that time, where you lose some
of that fullness and definition to your muscles, but that’s really just the result of decreased
water and glycogen storage in the muscle and it’s not from an actual loss of muscle itself,
and you’ll probably find that those things bounce back very quickly once you start training
again.
So don’t panic if you do look in the mirror after a few days of being sick and you feel
like you’ve lost a bunch of gains, because it’s really just not the case.
So if you do have to take time off just do what you can to try to consume around your
maintenance calories, try to get in enough protein, protein powders and liquid shakes
can help with that if your appetite is down a bit, and on the other hand if you can’t
train and you’re sick enough that you can’t eat much either, honestly, don’t stress
about it, just relax, rest and get better, and realize that getting sick is an inevitable
part of the process, you’re never going to experience perfectly linear progress with
virtually anything in your life, and even a week or two of no training and core diet,
that’s still, in the big picture not going to be a big deal.
In my earlier training years when I was basically obsessed with bodybuilding, it would’ve
totally killed me to have to take time off, but through more experience and generally
just gaining more, sort of fitness wisdom, I’ve realized that this stuff is all about
the bigger picture and short term ups and downs are truly nothing to stressed out about,
because the impact will be so small or barely noticeable overall.
So thanks for watching, guys.
Feel free to share the video if you find it helpful.
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If you want to grab my step-by-step Body Transformation Blueprint that shows you exactly how to eat
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See you in the next video.