This article answers the question, Exercise when sick good or bad? In addition we show important points, which one should consider with illness.
Sports and Disease: What to do?
Sport is healthy. If you do sport within a reasonable framework and have a training program that is individually tailored to your body and your own performance, then sport is a great thing for your body. But what does it look like when the body is stricken by illness or other factors?
No sport when the body is weakened
Sport puts a greater or lesser strain on the body. That’s healthy, too. A strain always means for the body that it carries out an adaptation reaction in order to be able to cope with these loads better and better in the long term. Whether these adjustment symptoms consist of increasing muscle mass in weight training, improving cardiac muscle capacity in endurance performance, or simply only at long physical loads, increasing the effectiveness of fat burning.
The body is very busy both during and after exercise to achieve the required performance and to adapt to the last exercise at rest, i.e. regeneration.
These adaptations require a lot of energy from the body. Likewise, in case of inflammation, infection or other clinical pictures, the body also needs all energy to keep the immune system at full speed, so that the disease defense is fully functional. Both at the same time is not possible.
If the body is busy with an active sport load or regenerative functions after sport, it has hardly any resources for the immune defence. The weakened immune system makes the body more susceptible to diseases. For this reason it is counterproductive to go jogging when you have a cold, for example, or to exercise.
Sport during illness can have far-reaching consequences
Even with a comparatively harmless cold, the weakening of the body, due to the athletic strain, can impair the immune defence to such an extent that a cold can turn into a heart muscle inflammation, which can have serious consequences.
For this reason, in case of doubt, you should not do any sport if you feel sickly and stricken. In such situations, the body is fully occupied with the function of the immune system. This is also the case after blood donation, for example, or even if you have been vaccinated.
Even if you were first ill and now want to start the sport again, you should take your time and rather wait another day.
And even then, keep the athletic strain a little lower in order to test how you feel after the sport.
Doing a lot of sport by nature is very advantageous for the prevention of diseases, because the body is more resilient. The body is accustomed to working at a high level, both from the circulation, the immune system and the supply of all organs with sufficient nutrients. As a result, the body is also much better able to cope with the defence against the disease.
