The importance of rest days

Listen to your body folks. It’s important. It gives us clues if we listen hard enough.

Rest is important

I am not always the best at doing this - but if we don’t, injuries, illnesses and other things can put you out of action for long periods of time, hamper your progress and you won’t see the results you’re after in the first place.

We think that we need to stay active and get regular exercise. This is true - BUT balance is key to this working effectively. Work smarter, not harder and you’ll reap the rewards.

Rest days are just as important as exercise and here’s why.

Allows your body to recover
During rest time the positive results of exercise take place. Rest is essential for muscle growth, because during this time your body repairs the tears in muscle tissue created during exercise. When this happens, you get stronger!

During exercise, your body uses up glycogen stores to fuel your workout effectively. Rest gives your body time to restock and allow you to work better during your next workout.

Prevents muscle fatigue
If glycogen stores aren’t restocked, you’ll experience muscle fatigue and soreness and get a way less impactful workout the next time you do.

Improves your performance
When you don’t get enough rest, it can be hard enough to do your normal routine, let alone challenge yourself.

When you do push yourself, overtraining decreases your performance - and it may show in reduced endurance, slow reaction times, and poor agility.

Rest increases energy and prevents fatigue which means consistently successful workouts.

Reduces your risk of injury
When you overwork your body, you’ll be more likely to drop form, or a weight, or move in an incorrect way.

Overtraining adds pressure to your body with repetitive strain and stress on the muscles. This increases the risk of overuse injuries, forcing you to take more rest days than planned and again setting your progress back.

Promotes good sleep patterns

While regular exercise can improve your sleep, taking rest days is also important to achieve this.

Physical activity increases energy-boosting hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Constant exercise, however, overproduces these hormones so getting quality sleep becomes hard to achieve.

Rest ensures hormones are kept to a normal, balanced state.

What does rest look like?
Rest days looks different for everyone. Depending on the intensity and frequency of your normal routine, will change what rest is for you.

Cardio more your style?

Walking or gentle dancing is usually the sort of activity you could do every day. Anything more than that in the aerobic world, you’ll need rest days to allow your body to recover.

Active rest is useful if you really can’t contain yourself: A great thing to include here would be a more gentle mat Pilates routine or meditation flow, or take a walk.

Strength your thing?
Weight training should incorporate rest days by rotating the muscles worked.

After exercising a specific muscle group, let it rest for one to two days. This gives your muscles a chance to repair and heal. On the other days, train different muscles. Working opposing muscles to maintain balance.

Weight management
Regular rest is key. As I’ve mentioned before; rest allows your muscles to rebuild and grow. More muscle means you’ll burn more calories at rest. That’s because muscle burns more energy than fat.

To get the most out of your rest day, make sure you’re eating enough protein. complex carbs and drinking enough water.

These guidelines are useful to take note of:

Each week, adults should get 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity. You can do a combination of moderate and vigorous activity.

These guidelines help you plan rest days. For example, if you’d like to do three days of 50-minute vigorous cardio sessions, you can plan rest days and other workouts around them.

Pilates and rest

Pilates is amazing as you can tailor your workout to fit in with an active rest day or level up the speed/ intensity to fit your cardio or strength training goals. It can work on its own to fulfill your movement goals or alongside a separate strength training regimen. Pilates allows your body time to heal, and gives you time to focus on your breath, your core engagement, and your proprioception, which can only improve your other activities.

When all is said and done:

Listening to your body is vital and a complete rest when you need it is not cheating, or a sign of weakness in any way. You won’t damage your progress, and in fact, you’ll likely find that you see MORE progress by taking these times to rest properly.