Should you take a rest day between workout days?
Once you begin a strict work out routine the last thing most people want to do is stop, skip a day or take the weekend off. We feel like it will throw a wrench in our momentum to work out but it is crucial to your success to take a day or two a week to rest and recover. Allowing your muscle groups to take a day off is always critical to help with muscle repair and growth. Typically if I work out lower body/legs on Monday, then Tuesday is my upper body day and then on Wednesday I am doing some type of cardio/plyometrics day with some legs but always different exercises. On the fourth day I usually just take the entire day off from working out all together. I find that when I take the day off and then go back to the routine the next day I feel even MORE motivated. In order to keep track it’s always good to keep a workout log or write down what you work out each day. I like to use MyFitnessPal or just make mental notes of what I work out and your body will usually tell you when you need a rest day as well. Listen to your body! Taking a day off is just as important as the hard work you put in with the weights.
My current routine consists of 2 rest days a week
- Day 1 is leg day/lower body day
- Day 2 is upper body/bi’s tri’s back/shoulders
- Day 3 is cardio day with some additional leg exercises not done in Day 1
- Day 4 is rest day – no gym at all!
- Day 5 is upper body again
- Day 6 is full leg day like Day 1
- Day 7 is only cardio or rest day
Some information that is very good from SportsMedicine.About.com
Rest days are critical to sports performance for a variety of reasons. Some are physiological and some are psychological. Rest is physically necessary so that the muscles can repair, rebuild and strengthen. For recreational athletes, building in rest days can help maintain a better balance between home, work and fitness goals.
In the worst-case scenario, too few rest and recovery days can lead to overtraining syndrome – a difficult condition to recover from.
What Happens During Recovery?
Building recovery time into any training program is important because this is the time that the body adapts to the stress of exercise and the real training effect takes place. Recovery also allows the body to replenish energy stores and repair damaged tissues. Exercise or any other physical work causes changes in the body such as muscle tissue breakdown and the depletion of energy stores (muscle glycogen) as well as fluid loss.
Recovery time allows these stores to be replenished and allows tissue repair to occur. Without sufficient time to repair and replenish, the body will continue to breakdown from intensive exercise. Symptoms ofovertraining often occur from a lack of recovery time. Signs of overtraining include a feeling of general malaise, staleness, depression, decreased sports performance and increased risk of injury, among others.
Short and Long-Term Recovery
Keep in mind that there are two categories of recovery. There is immediate (short-term) recovery from a particularly intense training session or event, and there is the long-term recovery that needs to be build into a year-round training schedule. Both are important for optimal sports performance.
Short-term recovery, sometimes called active recovery occurs in the hours immediately after intense exercise. Active recovery refers to engaging in low-intensity exercise after workouts during both the cool-down phase immediately after a hard effort or workout as well as during the days following the workout. Both types of active recovery are linked to performance benefits.
Another major focus of recovery immediately following exercise has to do with replenishing energy stores and fluids lost during exercise and optimizing protein synthesis (the process of increasing the protein content of muscle cells, preventing muscle breakdown and increasing muscle size) by eating the right foods in the post-exercise meal.
This is also the time for soft tissue (muscles, tendons, ligaments) repair and the removal of chemicals that build up as a result of cell activity during exercise.
Getting quality sleep is also an important part of short-term recovery. Make should to get plenty of sleep, especially if you are doing hard training.Long-term recovery techniques refer to those that are built in to a seasonal training program. Most well-designed training schedules will include recovery days and or weeks that are built into an annual training schedule. This is also the reason athletes and coaches change their training program throughout the year, add crosstraining, modify workouts types, and make changes in intensity, time, distance and all the other training variables.
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