How Much Recovery Do You Need Between Workouts?
If you train hard on Monday, then on Tuesday you will get a little tired. You can still go to the gym, but your performance may suffer a little. This perspective can make you wonder whether you should skip the gym until you are fully recovered, or how professional athletes are quitting training every day. Let’s talk about recovery and timing.
Rest days are an easy way to set your own pace, but they are not the only way.
If you are just starting out on an exercise program, it is often recommended to rest during the day between workouts. The 5K couch asks beginner runners to rest every other day; The same can be said for starting strength and 5×5 deadlifts , which are aimed at people new to powerlifting (squats, bench press, and deadlifts).
This is a good strategy for beginners, mainly because it limits the number of hard training days. Every training day is a hard day at first, and thus you get a good combination of hard work and lightness.
But after a few months of regular training, you should be able to do more than zero work in your daylight hours. Experienced runners often don’t think about jogging every day, just as we all have a basic level of activity (standing at work, walking the dog) that our bodies barely register.
The same is true for lifting. One strategy is to alternate upper and lower body days so that you don’t work on the same body part twice in a row. But you can work with your whole body every day if you like .
It’s important to keep track of how much work you are asking your body to do overall. Even though I train 5-6 days a week, the intensity varies. For example, heavy deadlifts are the hardest to recover, so I usually only do them once a week. Most workouts for me are full body workouts, but medium intensity, and often at least one day is a “fun” day where I do lighter work: some accessories and cardio, for example, or technical work that is not leaves me feeling too tired.
For an endurance athlete, the principle is the same, but the schedule may look different. For example, during a marathon workout, a runner might do a speed or strength workout on Wednesday and a long run on Saturday. The rest of the weekdays will be short, easy runs. Think about it: you need to run 15 miles at some point in your workout, but most of us would be jaded if we were trying to run 15 miles every day.
By varying the duration and intensity of your workouts throughout the week, you can keep your overall body load at a reasonable level. This is why it is helpful to use a workout plan drawn up by a coach or other professional that gives you an idea of when to act hard and when to walk easily. The 5K sofa and starting strength make it for beginners; as you get more advanced, the idea will remain the same, but the specifics of the training plan will adapt to continue to challenge you.
We build up fatigue and that’s okay
So here’s the puzzle. If you are new to exercise, or if you are increasing your schedule to include more workouts, you may find that you may not be able to do as much in the gym on the second day as you did on the first. You work harder, but your productivity drops. What’s up with that?
While it may seem logical to conclude that you’ve done too much and need to back off, it’s important to maintain perspective. If you feel tired all the time, you might be. Or, if you’ve just doubled your workload from one week to the next, then yes, you’re probably doing too much too early.
But small differences from one workout to the next don’t really matter. If you can do ten push-ups on Monday and then on Wednesday and Friday – barely until seven, that’s okay . This is fine. Keep working on it and soon sevens will turn into eights and eights will turn into tens, and before you know it, you can hit 15 a day when you are well rested.
When you are fully recovered, you will become a beast
In fact, every workout makes us stronger in the long run, but a little tiring in the short run. If you had to wait until you were completely, completely recovered before heading to the gym again, you would hardly exercise or make much progress.
Instead, we train through it. If you are preparing for something that matters, like a race or a powerlifting competition , your training will get harder and harder, until a certain point. Shortly before the competition, you will relax just enough so that your progress will be highlighted.
For a marathon, this is a three-week r ribbon . The 5K (3-mile) race only takes a day or two to rest. If you are going to a powerlifting competition, you will be lifting slightly less than usual a week or two before competition day.
Every workout you skip during this constriction sacrifices a little long-term improvement, but also relieves you of short-term fatigue. For example, if you want to test your max push-ups yourself, you can do the same by simply taking a few days off before the day you schedule your test. And chances are, after the right workout and rest, you will have a lot more reps than you ever did the first time.