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Home » Exercise Programs » Do You Really Need a Rest Day After Exercise? – Lifehacker

Rest days are a standard part of exercise programs, but theyre not the only way to avoid overworking yourself. Lets look at the difference between rest and recovery, and when you can bend the rules.

Most strength-focused programs like weightlifting either work your whole body and then skip the next day, or else they have you split up your workouts so that, for example, your arms get a rest on leg day. The idea is to let each muscle recover from a workout before you ask it to do the same thing again.

But not every activity works this way. Runners, for example, often run every day, and may only take one or two true rest days a week. But within that pattern, they will alternate days of hard running (like speedwork, hill running, or long runs) with easy runs that feel less challenging to the body.

Other sports may fall somewhere in between, but nobody expects to work every body part to exhaustion every day. Even when elite athletes do workouts every day that look killer to us, its because our hard is their easy. You can bet their coaches schedule in just enough of the easier workouts to keep the athletes progress on track with minimal risk of injury.

Rest days and splits help us to pace ourselves. Too much hard running, if youre not used to it, sets you up for tendonitis and other overuse injuries. And too much exercise of any kind can lead to a syndrome called overtraining where your body may develop flu-like symptoms and disturbed sleep because it just cant keep up with the demands youre putting on it.

Taking a single rest day after a hard workout isnt the only way to keep yourself from overtraining. There are a few reasons its a good rule of thumb, though:

If you can accomplish those goals with another schedule, though, feel free to do so. If you enjoy all your workouts, even the hard ones, slowly include more hard days in your schedule. If you feel okay with that, keep doing it! But if you end up sore or fatigued, listen to your body and put those rest days back in.

If soreness is your problem, be aware that skipping one day may not be the best way to deal with it. Soreness peaking at 48 hours is just an average, and the true timeframe can vary. Your muscles might only feel sore and weak for one day, or if you tried something new and difficult, you might feel it for a week. At the beginning of a new workout routine, you might even need three or four easy days.

Some people prefer the term recovery to rest days, because total rest isnt necessarily your goal. After all, lifting a fork to your mouth is a similar action to a bicep curl, so if you just did a heavy arm day, would you be unable to eat? Clearly, some amount of activity is fine on a rest or recovery day.

This is where you have to calibrate your own sense of effort. If youre new to exercising and you just did a day of heavy squats, a five mile bike ride is probably not a great choice for the following day. But if you bike five miles to work every day, you should be able to keep doing that even on your rest days.

When I did push-ups every day for 30 days, a few people suggested that I was setting myself up for injury by not taking rest days. But as I wrote in that article, I ramped up my fitness very carefully. A few sets of pushups every day is my new normal, and its no more taxing to me than a bike ride is to a bike commuter. Some days I might try a more challenging type of pushup or I might do more reps than usual; but I balance out those harder days with, you guessed it, easier days that are closer to my baseline effort level.

As you learn your own strengths and limitations, you too can alter your workout schedule according to what works for you. That might mean you only take one or two rest days per week, or it might mean you do mega-hard workouts and then lay low for a few days. If youre getting a reasonable amount of exercise in total, and if you arent getting sore or injured, youre probably doing okay.

Illustration by Jim Cooke.

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Do You Really Need a Rest Day After Exercise? - Lifehacker

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Home » Exercise Programs » Do You Really Need a Rest Day After Exercise? – Lifehacker