Continue training after a flu

Hi everyone.

As some of you may know, I’m following Coach Jack’s complete plan and I’m currently in the last week of BUILD. It is a long plan of six months.

Unfortunately in the week before entering Peak I am suffering from a normal cold but it will prevent me from continuing with the plan as I have been doing normally.

So I have a doubt and I hope that someone with good knowledge can answer, and that is what I should do after the recovery time, which can be between one and two weeks.

Should I continue right where I was in the plan? should I start with some base? how long?

I like to know in as much detail as possible what I should do.

Thank you.

Sorry to hear. I am on vacation so I can’t give any lengthy answer.

I belive most flu’s happen when we have lowered immunity. How were you feeling prior to the flu? What was your TSB? Were you feeling over trainined at all, meaning even though Jack plans are not super hard if you have a lot of stress or not getting good sleep it still might contribute. Understanding if stress was a contributer to getting ill partially changes the answer.

Generally I would say ease back into it with some easy riding for a week or two, but it depends on total number of days off the bike, and to some degree your physilogical age. I tend to like to wait until it is really gone but I am 55 so take things cautiously these days. Also depending on how hard the workouts were feeling when you got sick would depend on how far you back up your schedule. I have discussed this before with Coach Andrea, and generally I think after a couple weeks no riding and one week of taking it easy you could back up your schedule to the previous recovery week before 2-3 weeks ago and start there. But if you only took one week 100% off the bike then that can change it a little. Once I understand your answers I can try confirming with Coach Andrea too.

Hello Alex, as always thanks for your answers, these are mine

I felt strong and better than ever, even during the previous days I did PR on the most important climbs in my city.

47

not at all tired, I followed the rest days according to the plan and as you say it is very doable.

the flu was because my daughter brought it from school.

so far since last friday i don’t do anything at all. I also took the opportunity to go on vacation for a few days with my wife taking advantage of the flu hahaha

I think that if I feel good, next week I could start again, but I would like to know how and not lose all this training time, since I was going to PEAK and it was what I expected.

TSB of 47, sounds off unless you mean now after your rest. You can send PMC if you want. Yes we get sick from kids too but I still believe in many cases if we are well rested our body can fight it. But adjustments to training every time kids get sick is difficult. Congrats on PR and performance.

So in your case if you recover quickly, you should not lose much if any fitness. Do your peak period as planned but just shorten and adjust your build period a little. It’s hard to say exactly how without seeing your weekly tss targets starting 3-weeks before you got sick and ending 4 weeks from now.

This si the chart. Sorry I give You the wrong data.

Interesting you have a very positive TSB, were you taking it easy before you got sick? :slight_smile: It does not look like training contributed to your sickness.

So yes I would say a week off (now), if you are feeling good then do an easy week of about 200 TSS or so, maybe delay your easy rides until later in the week if necessary… Then I would just do your last recovery week again and continue your plan (so really 3-weeks behind schedule. End your build period 3-weeks early and start your peak plan. That is just rough idea as it might need more detailed tweaking based on how you feel and what makes sense to you.

yes, that week of positive TSB was for work reasons, but it didn’t affect my performance much.

Perfect, I think I’m going to do what you advise me.

No positive TSB will actually put you in better “form” so you will perform well, but you are also slowly loosing fitness in a positive TSB state so you don’t want to spend too much time there. I don’t take these numbers too seriously, but just look at the basic perspective. Super deep negative TSB for too long and feeling symptoms of this (risk of illness) vs closer to zero vs losing fitness and performing well at approximately zero to positive.

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