Why Rest Days Are Important.

This article aims to dissect the misconception around rest days. For many, rest days are a day wasted, a day where you could have been burning more calories, lifting more weight, tearing down more muscle tissue. The misconception that results are obtained only in the gym have stormed over social media in recent years. The mantra that you must work hard 24/7 has created a toxic culture around fitness. Demonizing rest days has caused more harm than good. Numerous individuals complain that they never see results even though they work out all the time. What they fail to realize is that results are lacking because of that very reason, rest days are the reason we grow. Here are a few reasons why.

Recovery

Recovery is all about resting, recuperating, and preparing your muscles to train once again at 100 percent. Without adequate recovery our muscles are prone to injury and long-term damage. According to Lauren Bedosky at the daily burn: “After a hard workout, the body initiates an inflammatory response to help you recover. But if you do too much high-intensity exercise, that inflammatory response can work against you”.

By working against us, our body no longer creates that anti-inflammatory response. Instead, more inflammation spreads throughout the body leading to dreadful workout recovery.

Resting is important because growth does not occur when we are working out, it occurs when we are recovering. The process of exercise is the breaking down of muscle tissue and rebuilding it back stronger and larger than before. If we keep breaking muscle tissue down without giving it time to recover, then we will eventually incur injury and muscle breakdown. It is important to incorporate active rest days where mobility and stretching can take a front seat. 

Plateaus

As mentioned above, if we do not allow our body and our muscles time to recover, we will not grow stronger, we will eventually hit plateaus. Many people understand plateaus as a sign of not working hard enough and therefore, work harder and eventually spiral down an endless cycle of setbacks. Plateaus occur when there is no progress being made, and when that does happen our instinct must be to take a step back, rest, and figure out the reasons why. Our first move should not be that of going harder in the gym. As you never know whether you are making progress or not.

Lastly, the stigmas around rest days must change, for that to happen both extremes must be addressed. Not resting at all is detrimental to your progress. However, laying around and sitting all day on your rest day does not actually help you much either. For our muscles to recover we must get our blood flowing into those muscles using light movement that is not rigorous. For that reason, stretching, mobility training and walking is highly recommended. An active rest day is not one where you exercise and put stress on your muscles, but rather, it is a day where you get the blood flowing, move freely, and allow your body to do what it does best, move.