When and How to Take a Rest Day
Image by Drew Coffman via Unsplash.com
Rest days can be as effective as training days in contributing to your goals. Most programs you see will schedule in a rest day or two.
Allowing the body to rest and recover can mean that you come back stronger, fresher and more energised.
But how much rest should you take? Should you do nothing at all? What if you don’t feel like you need a rest? What if you feel like you do need a rest but it’s not a rest day? Does having a cheat day on the same day interfere with recovery? What will happen to all your gainzzzz if you mess it up? All these questions will be answered below.
Recovery
Here’s how I calculate how much rest to take: As much as necessary, but as little as possible. Basically, rest should serve a purpose. That purpose being recovery. Muscle tissue needs to heal and grow. Ligaments, tendons and bones need to strengthen. And the nervous system needs to produce healthy neural cells. If that process is taken care of, then it’s ok to workout again.
Rest and digest
This is all a function of the parasympathetic nervous system, which activates our “rest and digest” response (the opposite of “fight or flight”). If someone is overtraining or in a constant state of stress, they will have limited ability to recover and adapt to their training. They will only experience the breakdown and not the recovery. These cases are rare. Usually, the issue is more a case of under-recovery than it is overtraining.
Active recovery
That being said, how do you make sure that you are recovering enough? Well, as you guessed, taking a day to rest and recharge can certainly help with that. But the truth is, most of us don't really need to take a day off. I would go so far as to recommend being active every day.
Now, that’s not to say that you have to workout as hard as you can every day but you should do something. Alternating between hard and easy(ish) days is the way to go.
The sessions that you do in the gym I would consider hard days. The whole body is getting worked, every joint is moving fully, you're using your strength and high intensity energy systems.
So, on your easy days, you could do more steady state workouts like: jogging/fast walking, cycling, rowing, mobility work/yoga/pilates. If you play a sport, all the better.
The other 23
You might be wondering, “if I’m exercising every day, how will I recover?” Fret not. If you workout for an hour then you have 23 hours to recover. That is plenty for a healthy person. In fact, how fast you can recover is a sign of fitness.
What you eat and drink, how many hours of quality sleep and your mental stress levels will all play an enormous role in your recovery.
Food glorious food
Nutrient dense foods are key. In other words; fruit, veg and unprocessed meat. It’s tempting to “reward” ourselves with junk food after a tough workout or even a tough day at work but that is taking two steps forward and one step back. Get the good stuff in and you will see and feel the difference.
Enter sandman
Quality sleep is such a game changer that once you start taking control of that you will never go back. If you don’t sleep enough or you don’t sleep well enough, you’re seriously doing yourself a disservice in life. I know as well as anyone about that paradoxical feeling of being too tired to go to bed, so you let Mr TV take you on another adventure. But waking up in the morning feeling fresh, energised and, simply, in a good mood (after maybe a few minutes) is better than the next episode of whatever.
Mental stress
Mental stress might be the hardest to control. How we react to things becomes ingrained in our personalities as we age. Some of us are just more easily stressed than others. Some may have high pressure jobs. Maybe there is stuff going on in your personal life, I don’t know. What I do know is that there are things that can help. Interestingly enough, exercise is one of them. Exercise brings down the level of cortisol (stress hormone) in the body and helps make you more zen. So that’s a two for one. Massage, meditation and my personal favorite; the steam room are also excellent ways to lower cortisol. And I know I’m a few weeks early for 4/20 but cannabis has been shown in many studies to help reduce stress and inflammation. I’ll leave that up to your own discretion though because it can also make people a bit paranoid.
To wrap up
A fit and healthy person should be able to exercise every day. It’s a good measure of how fit and healthy a person is. It’s also a good measure of how smart you are training. So, instead of needing a whole day of putting the feet up just so you are able to do another training session, look to improve the things mentioned above. Treat your recovery with the same importance as your workouts. Plan your meals, get to bed on time, keep stress low, drink loads of water and eat foods your great grandparents would recognise. Not only will you recover better but you will get to your fitness goals faster, which is why you're training in the first place.
If you have any questions about how to structure your training so you don't burn out, feel free to drop us a line.
