The Importance Of Rest Days

Resting Is For Losers Bro

Rest is super important. Whether you're an advanced gym goer or a newbie at the gym, you've got to take at least one rest day per week. Rest days are extremely important because they give your body the opportunity to grow.

Think about it, every time you go to the gym, your body has to grow through a "breakdown". For example, let's take the sport of weight-lifting. You don't actually build muscle out of weight-lifting, but out of the rest period.

Doing bicep curls for example, leads to fatigue in my body and it sends to the muscle nerves the message that "I am tired!". Or, if. you go hard enough, it literally leads to muscle breakdown. In other words, your muscle fibers gets tears, and it has to repair those tears, so it has to GROW.

But in order to GROW, it needs time. It needs rest. It needs to stop being used so often, or else it will continue tearing. So, that's why, you need to avoid using the same muscle group heavily 24-48 hours after you trained it for real.

For example, if I had an arm day this week, my next arm day would be in two days. This leaves enough time for my muscles to rest. But if we look at a whole body phenomenon, my body takes on fatigue after fatigue after fatigue throughought all trainings during the week, so when it can finally rest, it makes sure to build muscle.

Think of rest days as GROWTH DAYS, not as "days where I can't workout and I feel like a shit for doing nothing". Really, think of rest-days as growth days that will push your progress farther. Rest days are ESSENTIAL because your muscles absolutely NEED one day to grow, or else it's not going to grow properly.

Without a proper rest day in a training plan, not only are you going to reduce and/or limit your muscle strength and size, you're also going to feel more tired, mess with your hormones, you're also going to be more easily irritated and you'll not be able to focus properly. Really, a rest day is essential to your body and mind.

But even tho that is true of building muscle and gaining muscle strength and size, it's also true for many different endeavors in life.

For example, let's take cardio-rich sports. Sports such as football, basketball, rugby, volleyball, hockey, jogging, sprinting (and especially sprinting), cycling, needs rest days. Even tho we're not really speaking about muscle breakdown and all that stuff, we're mainly speaking here of general fatigue on the body and cardiovascular fatigue.

Think of this: the law of nature is work/rest. See the bears? They work all day long searching for honey and hunting, and then they go to sleep at night to rest. See our brains? They keep working all day long and then, when they're tired to pilot us, they turn off the lights and go to sleep.

See your body? It's the same story. Be it for different reasons (general fatigue, muscle breakdown or whatever), we need to REST. Nature teaches us this universal law of working and then resting. Hell, even the Hebrews got it right! Look at the scriptures of the Bible.

I'm not advocating for any religion by the way, I'm just taking this as an example of a religious scripture speaking of this universal law. Moses says to rest on Sunday and do no work on this day because it's a holy day, according to God.

Every wise person on earth puts an emphasis on resting. We all need rest, it's fundamental to life. We all have powerful energy inside of us, that pushes us to act and to fight, and there is also a calmer energy inside of us, that needs rest and comfort. That is the truth in life, we need to balance our resting and acting periods, because if we act more than we can rest, we will burnout, and if we rest more than we can act, we will procrastinate.

Therefore, take REST DAYS. At least once a week is the perfect frequency. Two or more is very good. Try to workout at least for 45 minutes 3 times a week.

But what can you do on rest days? Should you just stay in bed inactive? No, of course, you can still work on yourself mentally and do a ton of activities such as journaling, writing, listening to podcasts or going for a walk, meditating, working on your business or reading a good book.

Physically, you should try walking a little bit during the day and still stay "active" but without doing any exercise. A light 5-10 minute jog is alright but don't take it too far. Remember, the goal is to make your body rest.

If your five year old self or if your young child told you you were tired, what would you say? You would say "Oh, you want to go to sleep? Okay, let's go to sleep then". So why not treat yourself the same way? Why treating others well and yourself like a piece of crap? So take a rest day.

Also, going to the sauna could be great. So try to go to the sauna more often, during rest days, or do cold immersions, or go and do little hikes in calm places. Do "active recovery", such as stretching too. Stretching and yoga are two great practices for rest days, they're low-impact and low-fatigue exercising forms that doesn't destroy your progress whilst giving you tons of benefits and making you generally more focused, well-rested, and healthier and happier.

Conclusion

This article was short, but I hadn't much to say on the subject. I simply believe that you should really put an emphasis on rest days, as they're an important part of any serious training program.

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