Do You Really Need a Day of Rest After Exercise?
Rest days are a standard part of an exercise program, but they are not the only way to avoid overwork. Let’s take a look at the difference between rest and recovery and find out when to break the rules.
Cause of rest days
Most strength programs, such as weightlifting, either work your entire body and then skip the next day, or divide your workouts so that, for example, your arms are resting on leg day. The idea is to allow each muscle to recover from exercise before you ask it to do the same again.
But not all activities work like that. Runners, for example, often run every day and can only rest for one or two days a week. But within this pattern, they will alternate days of intense running (such as speed work, hill jogging, or long runs) with light runs that feel less challenging to the body.
Other sports may fall somewhere in between, but no one expects to work every part of the body to exhaustion every day. Even when elite athletes do what seems to be killer workouts every day, it’s because our “hard” is their “easy”. You can challenge their coaches’ schedules by choosing as many simple workouts as possible to keep the athlete progressing while minimizing the risk of injury.
Rest days and splits help us calm down. Running too often, if you’re not used to it, can lead to tendinitis and other overuse injuries. And too much exercise of any kind can lead to a syndrome called overtraining, in which your body can develop flu symptoms and sleep disturbances because it simply can’t keep up with the demands you put on it.
There is nothing magical about a one-day vacation
A rest day after a hard workout isn’t the only way to keep yourself from overtraining. However, there are several reasons why this is a good rule of thumb:
- Delayed muscle soreness peaks after two days. If you did too hard workout on Monday, you may feel a little pain on Tuesday and think you can workout again. If you wait until Wednesday instead, you will get a better sense of how sick or injured you are. Then you can better understand whether it is worth training again and how hard it is.
- Resting every other day means that only half of your day will be a hard workout. The other half will be rest days or lighter days, so the schedule allows you to control the overall intensity of your workout.
- It’s mentally easier to stick with a workout when you like it. Training hard isn’t always fun, and you may have to cheer yourself up to try something really challenging. It’s okay if you don’t feel like it every day. Several lighter, almost relaxing days will help you stick to your schedule.
If you can achieve these goals with a different schedule, feel free to do so. If you enjoy all workouts, even the hardest, gradually add more tough days to your schedule. If you’re happy with that, go ahead! But if you feel pain or fatigue, listen to your body and bring back those rest days.
If your problem is painful, know that skipping a day is not the best way to deal with it. Peak soreness at 48 hours is only an average, and true time frames may vary. Your muscles may only feel sore and weak for one day, and if you try something new and difficult, you may feel it within a week. At the beginning of a new workout, you may need three or four easy days.
Recovery does not necessarily mean complete rest
Some people prefer the term “recovery” to “rest” days because complete rest is not necessarily your goal. After all, bringing the fork up to your mouth is similar to curling your bicep, so if you were just having a day with heavy hands, would you be able to eat? It is clear that some activity on the day of rest or recovery is acceptable.
This is where you need to calibrate your own sense of effort. If you’re new to exercise and have just done heavy squats, a five-mile bike ride is probably not the best option for the next day. But if you cycle five miles to work every day, you can continue to do so even on “rest” days.
When I did push-ups every day for 30 days , several people suggested that I was preparing for injury without taking any rest days. But, as I wrote in that article, I was very careful to improve my fitness. Multiple sets of push-ups every day is my new norm, and it’s no more tiring to me than cycling for a bike ride. On some days, I may try a more difficult type of push-up or do more reps than usual; but I balance those hard days with, you guessed it, lighter days that are closer to my baseline level of effort.
As you become aware of your strengths and limitations, you can also alter your training schedule to suit what works for you. This could mean that you only take one or two rest days a week, or it could mean that you do mega-hard workouts and then lie on the bottom for a few days. If you are getting a reasonable amount of exercise overall, and if you are free of pain or injury, you are probably fine.