The Importance Of Rest And Recovery In Training
Remember when you first started training? You were excited and ran every day, or lifted weights every day, nothing could stop you. But eventually, you burned out, you became more tired, less motivated and made fewer improvements or results in size, speed or strength. You were run down, overtrained and your body was letting you know. Every time you lift a weight or run a lap, you do microscopic damage to muscle fibers that can only be repaired when you rest. That rest day is just as important as any training day. Rest days allow your body to rebuild, and refuel and avoid injury and overtraining. Are YOU overtraining? Signs to watch for include: * Constantly sore muscles. * A rapid, elevated resting heart rate. * Weak immune system and frequent colds or infections. * More injuries, more often. * Irritability or depression. * Lack of motivation. * Restless sleep or insomnia. How often should you rest or take a training day off? Rest day frequency is directly related to the intensity of your training program. The harder you train, the more rest, or more frequent rest you need to allow proper recovery before you train again. Additionally, a beginner needs more rest days than an advanced athlete, the longer you have been training, the more quickly you recover from your workouts. A beginner should train every other day, even advanced athletes and bodybuilders avoid training the same muscle more often than every other day. One effective approach to overall fitness is a combination of strength and cardio in the following sequence. Three days should focus on resistance and strength training, and two days should focus on cardio training, leaving two rest days. This basic schedule can be adjusted based on YOUR specific fitness goals. If you are focused on weight loss, try three cardio days, two weight training days with alternating rest days. Cardio, weights, cardio, rest, cardio, weights and rest and repeat. Once you become more fit and advanced in your training, you can consider adding “active rest” days where you perform light exercises like swimming or light cycling that stimulate the recovery process without creating undue stress on your body. An active rest day may help your recovery, and make you feel stronger and faster when you’re back to your full intensity workout. Sleep is also important to your recovery process. A full, deep sleep allows time for tissue repair and also releases hormones beneficial to the recovery process like testosterone and HGH.
