When?

I am currently asking myself one of those ageless athlete questions,

"When am I well enough to return to training".

I think it is a question that athletes ask themselves time after time when they get sick. I know I certainly did. Obviously the first aim is to not have to stop training in the first place, but assuming that you have got sick enough that stopping is a necessity when is the right time to get going again?

It is a tricky question, on one side is the desire to get back to things and get on with the training and on the other side the is the concern of training too early and prolonging an illness. Where does the right answer sit?

Well unfortunately I don't have a good answer for this question. I asked myself this question time and time again when I was training and I am not sure I ever found the right solution, in the end I am not a Doctor. The best advice I ever got from my old coach was "wait until you feel better and then wait another day". That advice always seemed to work pretty well, but it is based a lot upon personal perception and that doesn't work for everyone. I suspect it may be such a difficult question to answer because there may not be a single correct answer.

There are certainly things that you can use as a guide. Resting Heart Rate can be a good one. As resting heart rate returns to normal it can be a sign that the body is recovering. Heart Rate can be a little temperamental and hard to track accurately, but if you are familiar with your resting Heart Rate and are able to track it confidently, then it can work well. Perhaps more of a guide than a hard and fast guarantee that things are all good to go, but still useful.

The other rule of thumb that I used to hear was, "if the symptoms are above your neck then you are okay to train, if they are below your neck then you need to rest". I think the idea of this was that if you had a bit of a headache or a head cold then you were all good, however, if you had a bit of a chest cold or something like that then you needed more rest. To be honest I am not sure where this "rule" comes from or how reliable it is, but it does sort of make sense. I am not sure how strickly I followed this rule, but I did think about it quite regularly when I was unwell. 

One of the self checks I used to do when I was training was to try and judge whether what I was feeling was the sort of thing that was likely to get worse with exercise or not. If I had just got sick and things were clearly on the downward slope then going training would most likely make that worse. However, if I had been sick for a week and on the upswing and just had a few symptoms remaining, then I usually judged that I was probably good to head out for some easy training. The idea being that I didn't have to feel perfect (that could take weeks), I just had to be well enough that I wasn't going to make things worse. I found that typically worked well for me, although I still used the +1 day model.

As mentioned above, sometimes the best go by can simply be how you are feeling. I think deep down we have a pretty good inkling of whether or not we are well enough to train. When you are sick and miserable you know it, you don't need a particular test to tell you. When you are in that mid point, where you are starting to feel human I think you are probably getting close, are perhaps not quite there yet. That is probably the point to start thinking about, "what till you feel better and then wait another day". However, I don't think you need to wait until you all shiny and new again, that is probably being overly conservative. 

In the end I don't think it is a question that is ever going to have one neat and tidy answer that fits all cases. However, I think with some familiarity with your body and how it reacts to illness it can be possible to figure out a couple of signals that work for you.