The importance of rest days

One of the most important and overlooked parts of exercising effectively is giving our bodies time to recover.

When physiologically the stress becomes too much for the system to handle, it can and will lead to overuse injuries, such as stress fractures, muscle strains, and joint pain. So often we hear about the important health benefits of exercise and the negative side effects of inactivity, but it’s not as common to hear about why we also need to allow our bodies some time to rest.

National health guidelines recommend that adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity cardio exercise per week. This can be achieved through spending 30 to 60 minutes working out moderately five days per week or spending 20 to 60 minutes working out vigorously three days per week. For strength training, recommendations suggest training each major muscle group two or three days per week and leaving at least 48 hours for recovery between each training session.

However, different factors, like the intensity level of your workout, the total volume of your weekly training, your training experience, and your age, will all influence the exact amount of recovery you’ll need.

Working out, especially resistance training, breaks your body tissues down. Resistance training breaks down muscles causing microscopic tears and rest days allow your muscles, nerves, bones, and connective tissue time to rebuild.

This regeneration process, which also requires sleep, water, food, and sometimes supplements, rebuilds your body tissues allowing them to grow back stronger.

Rest days prevent injury and CNS fatigue

Every time you hit the gym for an intense workout – whether it’s a HIIT session on the treadmill or a powerlifting routine in the weights area – you’re doing damage to your body. As a rule, this isn’t a problem. It’s actually the whole point of working out. You do minor damage to your muscles, and exhaust your lungs and heart in a controlled fashion, so that your body adapts to the stress and recovers stronger and more capable than before.

But when you overdo your training or cut back on your much-needed rest, those intentional “micro-injuries” can easily become real injuries that prevent you from training indefinitely, or worse.

And this damage isn’t just limited to an increased risk of spraining your ankle, tearing a tendon, or suffering a rotator cuff impingement, either. There’s an actual condition known as Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) which refers primarily to the stress done to your body’s central nervous system by training too hard without sufficient rest.

I will cover Over Training in more detail in my next blog post.

Rest days boost morale and keep you moving forward

One of the most important parts of any fitness routine – and one of the most often overlooked – is consistency. It’s all well and good to hit the gym like a wild animal fighting for its life, but that intensity won’t be worth anything unless you’re able to maintain it over a significant period of time.

Progress in the fitness world is made by moving in the right direction in a controlled way, one step at a time. Not by going wild for a little while, then burning out and taking a month off training.

One of the easiest ways to go off the rails in your training is to lose morale and end up giving in to feelings of irritation, hopelessness, and despondence. And one of the easiest ways to end up there is by over training to the point where you dread and despise each workout, all while not giving yourself enough time to recover.

If you over train to the point of breakdown, not only will you be physically unable to train for a while, but your mood and motivation will take a serious battering, too.

Muscle is built while resting, not while training

It’s an old axiom of strength training that muscle isn’t built in the gym but the kitchen and bedroom. You might also have heard something weird-sounding like “lifting weights is only 20% of building muscle”.

There’s a reason why these statements are floating around the fitness world. Weight training is just the beginning of the muscle-building process. It’s the stage in the cycle where you break down your muscle tissue so that it can adapt to the newly introduced strain and grow back stronger.

For it to actually do the “growing back stronger” part, it needs to be allowed sufficient rest and nutrition for the recovery to take place.

Interestingly, a major part of this recovery and growth happens during sleep, as confirmed by studies which have shown growth hormone to spike dramatically during deep sleep.

When should you take a break from training?

How much rest you need is largely dependent on how you feel at any given time.

A generally accepted rule of thumb is that you should take a rest day after each day of intense training, with plenty of sleep, to ensure that you avoid accidentally over training.

This is often the way things are done with full-body powerlifting style workouts, where three training days a week, with a rest day between each, is a common formula.

For more bodybuilding-oriented “split” workouts which target one body part a day, it’s common to train up to five days in a row, as long as each body part is only worked once or twice per week. Weekends should still be taken off to allow your CNS to recover.

In the event of CNS over training, or a strength plateau you just can’t seem to overcome, allow your body a week or two off training to recover before diving back in.

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Information sourced from the following sites; https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/behar2.htm, https://www.theactivetimes.com/why-rest-days-are-just-important-working-out, https://www.puregym.com/blog/fitness/why-rest-days-are-important/