ALL ABOUT ‘REST DAYS’
You’d be surprised how many people overtrain. Unfortunately, that’s detrimental for both your health and your progress when it comes to your fitness goals. Training every day does not allow your body to recover properly. No matter how you plan your workouts, your body needs those rest days more than you think.
Things to keep in mind
❗️Not having rest days can easily lead to injury, sleep problems and it can even cause a mental or a physical breakdown.
❗️Not having rest days can impact your ability to progress on your workouts. Your muscles grow on those rest days. Even though you train different groups on different days, many exercises will work more than one muscle group (push-ups, squats, bench press, to name a few). Thus it will not let your muscle grow since you’re putting more stress on it on the day when it was supposed to recover. So you’re directly impacting the process of hypertrophy (muscle growth).
❗️Not having rest days can have a negative effect on your body’s immune system. Intense exercising and periods of hard physical activity, make you more likely to infections. This is partly caused by increased levels of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, which suppress white blood cell functions, leaving you open to infection.
Benefits of rest days
✅When you have a rest day you allow your body to recover and replenish the energy levels.
✅ Your mind will get benefits as well – training without a rest day will lead to fatigue and your mind will be affected as well. Your mind needs to rest as much as your body needs to rest.
✅ Rest day will keep your motivation high! If you train every day the motivation has good chances to decrease in time. After a day off you’ll enjoy a lot more your workout when you are fully rested.
How many days off should you get?
There’s no best answer to this question. You’ll need to determine how many days off you need. If you’re a beginner you will need more rest days than someone who is advanced or a regular gym person. Personally, over time, I’ve had 1 or 2 days off, depending on my specific goals for each training cycle. On my rest days, I still remain active by taking long walks (I love walking) but that’s just my personal preference. If you just want to stay in bed, that should be totally fine. Your body deserves a break. However, my days off are never based on my schedule. No matter how busy I am, I would never skip my workout.
What do I like about my rest days?
For me, a rest day is also a day off from work and a break from my busy routine. On this day I love to take things slow, make no plans at all and just relax. I also stay away from my computer and do my best to avoid being on my phone. What I like the most is that I do not set any rules for this day, I just go with the flow and give my mind the freedom that is so needed. Many times we don’t think how much our mind needs a pause. I force myself not to make any plans or take decisions on this day. It works wonders and I’ve been doing it for a few years now.