While lifting, running and keeping a clean lifestyle are the basis for living a healthy life, one important aspect that many people overlook is rest. Rest is absolutely essential for everybody but even more so for athletes, fitness professionals and people who care about their health. The most common outlook for most athletes when it comes to rest seems to be to power through it while trying to maintain their regular workout schedule. This should not be the case. Just as muscles need time to heal to grow, other areas of your body need the same when you get sick. To add to this, people who work in gyms as fitness professionals or personal trainers risk poor performance with their clients or even potentially getting their clients sick as well. They may lose weight, but not the good kind! Getting a doctor's is absolutely essential. Below are three reasons why you need doctor's note.
1. Your Body Needs to Heal
As mentioned above. The biggest reason why you should get a doctor's note is for your own health. There is no point in trying to keep up your regular fitness regimen or schedule. Depending on the severity some more minor workouts might be okay, but it's never okay to push it hard when you are running a fever, an upset stomach or just generally feel under the weather. When someone is sick their body is already running on a higher metabolic rate to try and beat whatever illness is currently running its course through their system. Having a tough workout is just adding insult to injury. By getting a doctor's not it gives you the reasonable and accepted reason to skip out on a day of work, a practice or session with a client. Many people would be suspicious if you just canceled a session, didn't show up to practice or your gym buddies didn't see you. Getting a doctor's note gives you a reasonable excuse and builds credibility.
2. You don't want to spread it
If you play on a sports team you will understand this more than anybody. If you come down with a nasty stomach bug they usually come and go pretty quick. It's easy to throw up once at night and then go back to practice the next day. This is very dangerous. A team can perform while missing one member. They might not be at their peak performance, but they can fill in if need be. However, consider the alternative. You might be feeling somewhat better, but whether or not you notice it, your body is still recovering. At best, you will perform at a lower level potentially causing you to lose. At worst, you may infect other team mates. As we mentioned, it's possible to fill in for one player on most teams. If the illness has spread to other players of the team, and there aren't enough substitutes you either have a field full of vomiting players running to the bathroom or you just outright forfeit. Getting a doctor's note avoids all of this. You can watch from the opposite sideline and ensure that no one else on your team get's sick. They may be mad that you're gone, but they will be even more furious if you get them all sick.
3. You Could Injure Yourself
As we said, your body needs time to heal. We also mentioned that your performance will be not up to par. When sick our minds often drift away from their previously sharp states. If you are a regular runner, it's easy to drift off while sick and potentially twist an ankle. This is probably the best case scenario. When sick, your body is under a pretty serious amount of stress. This is the reason you feel so lethargic and also why fevers happen. The bacteria trigger an immune response which includes pyrogoens. These pyrogoens initiate the fever response to try and kill the bugs. What this means is that your body needs time to do its thing. If you put more stress on your body while sick you risk the illness getting worse. Most serious illness do not occur without warning or out of the blue.
They usually start as a minor illness that the body has been unable to defeat. One of these reasons could be that your immune system is under stress from two ways: rigorous exercise using up necessary nutrients needed to fight the infection and regular function to try and beat the bacteria or virus. What this means is that while it might seem like a minor activity to go to practice with a respiratory infection, you could risk it worsening into pneumonia. Getting a doctor's note erases all these issues and also allows a doctor to determine if there is a chance that what you have is something more serious.
So next time practice or a training session is coming up, do everyone a solid and go get the doctor's note now.
