When it comes to training, the fitness world loves to brag about hard work. They talk about the countless hours they spend in the gym, in the kitchen, and being active throughout the day. The one thing they don’t mention enough is how they recover. We don’t see the Instagram posts about how much sleep they get per night. We don’t see the posts about the importance of their off days. The general population can be misled into thinking that just training and diet alone will get them strong, lean, and healthy. There are many other pieces to the puzzle.
Rest and recovery is a topic that I feel needs to be more stressed than ever. There are so many people who exercise 5-7 days a week and don’t get any stronger, leaner, healthier, etc. They have no problem putting their foot on the gas, but they don’t know how to slow down. They fear that by taking a day off they are going to lose everything that they worked for. Or even worse, they fear they will gain nothing but fat from sitting around. I’m here to tell you that by taking days off you are going to get stronger and healthier.
[thrive_leads id=’9063′]
Why We Need Sleep
We all know the importance of sleep. We know that our body needs sleep. When our body is tired, it shuts us down and forces us to sleep. We don’t really have a choice. We use our body straight for 16 hours and it takes 8 hours to rest and recover from those previous 16. Our phones and computers need to be recharged after we use them all day. Our body needs a break too.
The same way our body needs a break from working all day to recharge, our body needs a break from training at a high intensity all the time. You cannot train every day of the week with 100% intensity without taking time for your body to recover.
Exercise is stress on our body. You can see this in the chart below. For a brief period, it actually makes us weaker. We are fatigued and cannot activate our bodies to its highest output until our body recovers from that exercise bout.
Achieving Supercompensation
If you look at this model, you can see that we can use rest for our advantage. By taking planned time to rest, we can achieve “supercompensation”. This will allow us to perform better than we have ever performed before. Our body is going through this stress – recovery- supercompensation cycle constantly. When we skip the recovery phase of the cycle we DO NOT GET SUPERCOMPENSATION. Instead we get something called “Overtraining”. Our strength and health will actually get worse without recovery. More is not better. Everyone needs to find their best balance between rest and exercise.
Image credit: Sports Performance
Plan for Rest
When we plan for rest we need to look at it on multiple levels. Your program should plan for rest weekly, monthly, and yearly.
There should be a certain number of days per week you rest. These days can be used for recovery with light aerobic work, work around the house, or days to just have some fun! It should be a day or two where you are out of the gym. Go bowling, go walk the dog on a long walk in nature, go hike, or go play some pick up ball.
There should be 1 week every 3-6 weeks of your training that is lower in intensity and volume. This will allow you to recover from the previous 3-6 weeks so that you can continue to make improvements in the following weeks.
Lastly, there should be 2-4 weeks a YEAR. Where you take off from your specific training. We see this in all sports. Once the season ends, athletes rest their body and their mind before off season training starts back up. Even your typical gym rat would benefit greatly from this.
Remember that we are training to make our life better. We want to be healthier, move better, and improve our quality of life. Don’t train like an idiot and beat yourself up every day. Train, rest, recover, and love life. Train to improve your life!
You don’t always need to do more to get more. Take a break when your body tells you it needs it. Listen to your body and plan for rest!
[thrive_leads id=’8207′]