The Importance of Rest and Recovery!
Spring break—the one or two weeks everyone looks forward to. Some use it to get away, “live it up” if you will—where others, myself included, use it to get long overdue rest. Yup, I personally took the last two weeks off and broke from any strenuous strength training—which also included writing my weekly blog post! So now that I’m returning feeling rested and reset, I wanted to talk about the importance of rest and recovery.
We live in a world where you can see how many calories we burn in a single day right on our own wrist. Tracking has become such a part of our life, that many of us are competing with our friends and family to take more steps and burn more calories every single day—checking our watches every hour. The problem with all this tracking is—we don’t allow ourselves to stop. We are less concerned about if all this work is even having an impact on our own personal health because we are hyper-focused on the tracking and competing components.
The reality of this lifestyle is that pushing yourself to the limit causes stress on your body, and your body needs time to recover! Don’t get me wrong, I work out 4-5 times a week, I watch my calorie tracker on my watch, and I try to make sure I “close my rings.” I am by no means saying to stop working out, but if you are working hard throughout the week - you also need to prioritize rest and recovery.
As I said before, any kind of training literally puts the body under stress so that it can adapt to that stress and improve by getting stronger or working more efficiently. In terms of weight training, your body breaks down and it needs to rebuild in order to make progress. If we train the same muscle group on back to back days, then we are not allowing our body anytime to recover from the previous workout and rebuild. The general rule is that it takes a minimum of 48-hours for a muscle group to recover and 72 to 96-hours post workout for a full recovery. If you don’t get sufficient rest to let your body rebuild, you’re just spinning your wheels in the mud. When writing programs for my clients, there are many factors that I take into account to ensure you are getting sufficient recovery. Age, training experience, total volume for the week, if you’re in season, and the intensity of your practices and training sessions are just a few examples of things to consider.
We do a lot of full body training at Incontrera Strength and Conditioning, but it’s calculated so that we have an emphasis on the lower body one day and the upper body the next. If someone trains at both my gym and on their own, I encourage them not to double up and work the same areas of the body to avoid the risk of injury.
It’s no secret I get annoyed when people come in, look at the plan on the board and say, “Oh, I just did squats yesterday!” The thing is, when you don’t get enough rest to recover, you will not see any progress. The stress is going to be too much physiologically for the system to handle, you will run into overuse injuries such as stress fractures, muscle strains, and joint pain.
Another extremely important factor to talk about is sleep! It is recommended that everyone gets 7-9 hours of sleep a night, with teens getting even more, in order to aid in growth and development. This is a personal struggle for myself and I know I’m not alone. We are in a fast-paced, hardworking world, and sleep sometimes feels like a waste of time. It sounds so ridiculous when I say that, but I know for a fact that a lot of people can relate. When we are in an REM cycle of sleep, our body’s production of growth hormone increases which helps with the rebuilding and recovery of muscle. Without quality sleep on a regular basis, your growth hormones will be negatively affected and your progress will be as well. Talking to a client who is a former marine, he spoke about how all pilots are forced to go to sleep at a certain time to ensure they are getting enough rest. With a lack of rest, your decision making abilities decrease and if you’re a pilot, that could have fatal consequences. Not getting enough sleep hit me recently in a way that it didn’t seem too bad until it was absolutely horrible. I was operating on about 5-6 hours of sleep a night and getting by, but I was never fully recovering. With every night’s sleep, I was taking two steps forward in my rest and recovery, but during the day I was taking three to four steps back. I was never fully recovered or rested and within two weeks it caught up to me. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. I wasn’t sick, but I was useless. I recognized what my body needed, and I actually took an entire day off of work—ONE WHOLE DAY. I am not someone that likes to cancel clients, plans, practices, so it was a wake up call (no pun intended)to say the least.
I say all this in hopes others can learn from my own experience. I am making an effort to prioritize my sleep and pay attention to my body when it tells me I need to slow down—and I’m encouraging others to do the same. We live in a society where we take pride in working harder than the next guy—we never want to show any weakness. Let this serve as your wake up call. Recognize that if you want to keep moving forward and making progress, rest and recovery need to be taken seriously and prioritized in your training program!
How to rest and recover
Don’t train the same muscle group on back to back days
At least once a week, take a day completely off
Get 7-9 hours of quality sleep a night
Stay hydrated and maintain a healthy diet
Implement mobility days
Plan ahead - write your training program ahead of time and schedule when you want to be in bed.
Listen to your body - if you’re tired and sore, don’t feel like you have to push it!
- Coach Tom