How do I know if I should train if I am not feeling 100%?
At some point in their athletic career, every athlete has a point when they’re unsure if they should or should not train. This is often a result of illness or fatigue or something similar. They are feeling a bit “yuck” but do not necessarily understand why, which makes deciding whether they should train a tough challenge. In this article, coach Philip Hatzis explores how athletes can decide whether to train or not.
Endurance athletes, in particular, have to be very careful in balancing the training needed to build endurance and stay healthy. Endurance athletes are trained to endure mild discomfort and to push on whenever possible. However, that is precisely the thinking that can get them into trouble when deciding if they are too tired or ill to train or should push through and tough it out.
Using metrics to help you decide if you are under additional load or not
To decide whether you should or should not train, it is often helpful to think about the inputs you have for that decision. For example, some athletes may be tracking, resting, heart rate, mood, heart rate, variability or other device-specific scores like whoop or strain scores to objectively measure whether or not they are okay to train. This can often be used effectively to see if something doesn’t quite line up, in which case you may decide to stop training. For example, if your mood is low, you feel fatigued, and you see an objective measurement that says you have a low level of recovery, it is helpful to reinforce what you think, and you are likely to listen to that score. It justifies your internal assessment.
Unfortunately, these trends are often easier to see retrospectively than they are in the heat of the moment. For example, it is often easier to see a steady HRV downward trend a few days later than to trust the scores and not assume they are outliers because you currently feel okay! Even the significant drops or changes can often be ignored if an athlete feels good and chooses to ignore the objective measurement. Taking the example above, if you don’t feel tired, but your mood is low, and your recovery score is down, you may choose to ignore the data because you don’t feel tired.
Checking how you feel
Although there are ever-increasing ways and means of measuring your life stress in addition to your training stress (like the example in the previous paragraph), there are also other training ways of checking to see if you feel okay to continue.
One means is particularly compelling: just start. Endurance athletes are notoriously motivated and very, very good at getting training done. Regularly getting training done is part of their weekly schedule. Athletes often end up starting sessions without realising they’re not feeling great. When an athlete thinks, "I’m not too sure if it’s a good day to do something or not?” “I’m just a little bit tired or jaded?” or “Am I actually ill?” it's a chance to test the hypothesis. It is tough to justify not doing a session if an athlete doesn’t have a temperature, cold or other apparent symptoms.
Therefore, the best thing to do is start the session and see how you feel after the warm-up or a few intervals. It may be that through the warm-up, you quickly realise that the session will not work: the numbers may be too hard to achieve, you just don’t feel your zip, or you find it more challenging than you should. You now have more information.
Athletes may also use indicators from other measures and metrics throughout the session. For example, if your heart rate is significantly elevated from what a power or pace target says it should be or you feel that something is a lot harder than what the measurements are (assuming that it is accurate), this could be quite a good indicator that maybe you are not feeling too great.
Always ask yourself: am I more likely to add to my fitness with this session, or will I have a more significant negative impact by pushing through and actually being ill? If you will take away from fitness, it’s time to stop or downgrade the session focus quickly. Think about the flip side of that discussion, too. If you didn’t do the set session, what could you do that will make you feel better faster? It could be that scrapping the session in favour of an extra 90 minutes in bed would be the best medicine! Or perhaps, go for a leisurely walk or ride instead of the interval session you had planned.
What do coaches resort to when an athlete asks us if they should train?
One of our favourite techniques is that if an athlete is usually reasonably diligent at getting a session done and starts asking the question whether or not they should be doing a training session because “I feel a bit off”, that’s usually a pretty good sign that the athletes should take it easy, drop the session in favour of having some time to recover and rest.
Indeed, if you are unsure now and have found this article because you’ve googled the very title, the chances are you probably do need to have time off and the fact you’re looking for information about whether or not you should or shouldn’t is a sign that you shouldn’t!
If you are unsure, the benefits of taking some time off or skipping a session, making you ready for the next day, outweigh the negatives of pushing through and taking several days off.
It can be helpful to think of these points as being in a hole. If you push on, you dig the hole a bit deeper. If you stop digging, you can start climbing out of the hole, but you can’t dig and climb simultaneously. It is one or the other! In which case, as long as training isn't urgent, it’s always best to favour not doing something and being fresher the next day rather than pushing in and being ill for weeks. The risk of skipping a session that you didn’t need to has less of an impact than pushing through an illness, having a sub-par training performance and taking longer to recover.
Philip is the founder of Tri Training Harder LLP. He’s a British Triathlon Level 3 coach, and has been coaching for over a decade and is involved with mentoring and developing other coaches.
Philip has coached athletes to European and World AG wins, elite racing, many Kona qualifications, IRONMAN podiums and AG wins.
Alongside the conventional development through many CPD courses, he has also been fortunate enough to work alongside experts in the fields of Physiotherapy, Strength and Conditioning, Nutrition, Psychology, Biomechanics, Sports Medicine. Putting this knowledge into practice he has worked with thousands of athletes to various degrees, from training camps in Portugal and around Europe, clinics in the UK and online coaching.
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