Post Training Recovery
Taking regular breaks allows your body to recover and repair. It’s a critical part of progress, regardless of the fitness level or sport being prepared for. Not building rest periods into a training plan will eventually lead to overtraining or burnout, and become damaging to any aims for progress.
Benefits
Here’s a look at the advantages of taking regular rest days.
1. Allows time for recovery.
Rest isn’t about being lazy, it’s during this time that the benefits of exercise take place. More specifically, rest is essential for muscle growth.
Exercise creates microscopic tears in the muscle tissue, but during rest, cells called fibroblasts repair it. This helps the tissue heal and grow, resulting in stronger, more functional muscles.
2. Prevents muscle fatigue.
Your muscles store glycogen, which is how your body stores carbohydrates to fuel it. During exercise, your body breaks down this glycogen. If these stores aren’t replaced, you’ll experience muscle fatigue and soreness. Rest is necessary for avoiding exercise-induced fatigue.
Plus, your muscles need glycogen to function, even when you’re not working out. By getting adequate rest, you’ll prevent fatigue by letting your glycogen stores refill.
3. Reduces risk of injury.
When your body is overworked, it’ll be more likely to fall out of form, drop a weight, or take a wrong step. Overtraining also exposes the muscles to repetitive greater levels of stress and strain. This increases the risk of overuse injuries, forcing you to take more rest days than planned.
4. Supports healthy sleep.
While regular exercise can improve your sleep, taking rest days is also helpful.
Physical activity increases energy-boosting hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Constant exercise, however, overproduces these hormones. You’ll have a hard time getting quality sleep, which only worsens fatigue and exhaustion.
Rest can help you get better sleep by letting your hormones return to a normal, balanced state.
When to Take a Rest Day
.The number of rest days that are needed will vary from person to person but is mainly based on the type and intensity of your exercise and on the. In general, you should schedule a rest day every week if you engage in high-intensity physical activity.
Some training schedules incorporate rest days more often, such as twice a week. One of these days may be used as a passive recovery day, giving you the day off from exercise completely. The other could focus on active recovery or doing a light-intensity exercise.
What to Do on a Rest Day
There are two types of recovery you can do on a rest day:
Passive recovery involves taking the day entirely off from exercise.
Active recovery is when you engage in a low-intensity exercise, placing minimal stress on the body, if any.
Beyond the activities, though there are other elements to consider such as nutrition and sleep.
Active Recovery
During active recovery, the body works to repair soft tissue (muscles, tendons, and ligaments). It improves blood circulation that helps with the removal of waste products from muscle breakdown that build up as a result of exercise. Then fresh blood can come in to bring nutrients that help repair and rebuild the muscles. As opposed to passive recovery, active recovery better addresses how your body responds to extreme physical exertion, alleviating the stress placed on muscles, joints, connective tissues while improving muscle growth and strength. Examples of active recovery exercises include walking, stretching, and yoga.
Sleep
Sleep is also important. Make sure to get plenty of rest, especially if you are training hard. Even one or two nights of poor sleep can decrease performance for long bouts of exercises, if initially not peak performance. However, consistent, inadequate sleep can result in hormone level changes, particularly those related to stress, muscle recovery, muscle building, and eventually peak performance in competition.
Eating for Recovery
After depleting your energy stores with exercise, you need to refuel if you expect your body to recover, repair tissues, get stronger, and be ready for the next challenge.
A rest day menu that supports recovery from high-intensity exercise includes both protein (to help the muscles repair and grow) and carbohydrates (to restore the used glycogen). It also need to include the various vitamins, minerals and other substanaces that are needed to maintain a healthy body – in other words don’t worry too much about it beyond a balanced diet (Do consider, however biasing the quantities of protein or carbs towards what your aims are – endurance the following day – carbs, muscle synthesis and growth – protein, etc.)
One this that is probably not a factor is time. Many guides will state a perfect time for a protein intake post training, but unless hardcore, aesthetic bodybuilding is the aim, there is little to suggest any advantage is worth the added inconvenience.
Rehydrates Your Body
As finger in the air average, it is a reasonable assumption that for an hour of intensive training, about a litre of fluid is lost to the body.
Being correctly hydrated can regulate your body temperature, help prevent infections, move nutrients to your cells, keep all your organs functioning, improve sleep quality, better your mood, and reduce brain fog. For this reason, it is important to consider how this fluid will be replaced post training (and also before and during training, in reality!)
Drinks designed for rehydration can be very good for the purpose, as they often contain some of the electrolytes necessary to be absorbed and usable by the body more quickly. Avoid caffeinated drinks, however as these INCREASE dehydration as caffeine causes fluid loss.
The best rehydration method is probably water and if that is to slow, add a teaspoon of sugar and a pinch of salt per litre.