So you’ve been working out for a while now, seeing progress and losing weight. You know you need to rest properly between workout days, but you’re scared that taking a couple of days off might make you lose your fitness gains or even put on weight.
If this describes your current situation, then here’s what you need to know!
Benefits of rest and recovery
- Helps you get stronger: There is a misconceived notion among many people that fitness gains happen when you’re exercising. In reality, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. When you exercise, you create micro-tears in your muscles due to the load and stress placed on the targeted muscle. During rest, the body releases growth hormone, which helps in the repair of these microtears. Increased protein synthesis also occurs during recovery, contributing to muscle growth and strength, allowing you to adapt properly for future training sessions.
- Help you avoid overuse injuries: Just like machines need servicing to avoid breaking down, your body also needs rest to avoid sustaining injuries. Overuse injuries occur when you repeatedly subject your body to constant training without giving it enough time to repair and heal. These injuries happen when the tissue is damaged from repeated stressors and can put you out of training for weeks. Proper rest between workouts helps your body repair these tissues before they become damaged from repeated use.
- Helps with Fitness progress: One of the best ways to see steady growth in your fitness progress is through consistent training. However, sustaining an injury can put you out of the gym for weeks, as you would need to recover properly before training again. This injury recovery period can hamper your fitness progress and even make you lose gains depending on the severity of the injury and how long you’ve been out of the gym. To prevent this, you can build rest days within your workouts to allow you to recover after each workout and keep training consistently.
- Helps maintain consistency: Absence makes the heart grow fonder, not only in relationships but also in exercise. Constant exercise without periods of rest can lead to physical and mental burnout. This can make exercise seem like a chore over time, reducing your zeal to workout or go to the gym. Rest days provide the necessary mental and physical reset, rekindling your enthusiasm for the next workout.
Signs that you are overtraining and need rest
- Poor performance: Poor performance is one of the telltale signs that you are over-training. Normally, when you train, your body gets stronger over time. This is shown by being able to do more reps of the same weight or lift heavier weights than you did before. However, if you find yourself struggling to lift the same weight you used to lift in the past, you’re probably overtraining and need to rest so that your muscles can recover and come back stronger.
- Prolonged muscle soreness: It’s okay for your muscles to be sore after a workout. But when this condition continues for a long time, even before your workout, your muscles are obviously weak and need time to rest and recover.
- Retaining body fat despite training: Strength training puts stress on your body. This causes your body to release the hormone cortisol, which can increase or decrease your appetite. High levels of cortisol in the bloodstream can eventually lead to insulin resistance, which slows your metabolism and causes you to retain fat.
- Lack of motivation to train: When training starts feeling like a chore or a distasteful activity, that’s your body telling you that you need to take a break. Training causes both mental and physical stress on the body. Over time, this can cause you to burn out and lose motivation to train.
How many rest days do you need each week?
The amount of rest days you need each week varies for different individuals. Some people might be able to cope with 1 to 2 days of rest, while others might need 2 to 3 days or even more to rest and recover properly. Ultimately, the number of rest days you need will depend on your fitness level, training intensity, and duration of workouts. Nevertheless, beginners should take as much as 4 days to allow their body to recover and adapt to the new training stimulus.
Building rest days within your workouts
There are various ways you can incorporate rest days into your workout. For starters, you can add a rest days between each workout day. This can be structured like this: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for workouts, while you rest on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends.
Alternatively, if you workout for more than 3 days, you can alternate between upper and lower body or between push and pull exercises to give the muscles time to recover before the next workout. One workout system that I follow in my routine is to work on different body parts on different days and then rest on weekends.
My workout routine is structured this way.
Monday – Chest
Tuesday – Back
Wednesday – Shoulders
Thursday -Arms
Friday -Legs
Saturday – Cardio / Rest
Sunday – Rest.
This routine works for me because I workout for 5 to 6 days weekly. Still, you can customize your workout routine with your rest days to suit your lifestyle.
What you should do on rest days
Rest days are not just for you to sit on the couch with the remote. Not that that’s a bad idea. However, there are activities you can do on rest days to get blood flowing through your body and help your body heal. These include:
- Stretches: You can perform stretches like cobra stretch or some form of yoga activities to stretch and relax your muscles.
- Massages: Massages are one of the best ways to help your muscles relax and recover. You can use a massage gun to massage the sore areas of your body or ask a friend to give you a massage. This recovery method has helped me a lot, especially after tough leg and back workouts.
- Low-impact exercises: Activities like brisk walking, dog walking, or even playing with your kids in the park are good ways to help your body recover. These activities are a form of active recovery, and they help get blood flowing through the tissues and tendons, carrying out metabolic wastes and getting in proper nutrients for recovery.
- Sleep: Of all the ways to recover, sleep is one of the most important things you can do to recover. When you sleep, your body releases HGH (growth hormone), which is vital for the repair and growth of your muscles. So, if you value your fitness gains, aim to get at least 6 to 7 hours of sleep daily.
The Story of Burnout and Rediscovery:
Allow me to share a personal experience. I once pushed myself to run up to 25km seven days a week without rest. After two weeks of running daily, my calves and legs hurt so bad that it made me hate running, and I swore never to run again. Surprisingly, after a week of complete rest, I found myself missing running and started incorporating it back into my training sessions. Now, I run 2 to 3 times a week, allowing for proper rests in between each session.
Key Takeaway
While exercising daily is important for your fitness goals, remember that your body needs rest to recover after each workout. Rest days are how your body repairs itself and grows stronger to allow you to progress in your fitness journey. Above all, always get at least 6 to 8 hours of sleep each day. This is when your body does the majority of its repair and recovery activities.