Your body requires an active routine in order to stay fit and healthy, but along with that, it also requires adequate rest.
Rest is essential for healing and energy recovery. Failure to do so may cause fatigue, muscle damage, and other health related issues.
How Is Resting Important For Your Body?
Your body is under constant stress during exercise, which allows you to build stamina by adapting to change.
In this entire process, you end up draining a lot of energy. The down time is like a pit-stop for your body to rest and refuel. If you don’t fuel your body, it won’t make it to the finish line, keeping you back from achieving your training goals.
How To Tell That You Need To Rest
A healthy body should be your number one priority. Don’t overtrain to achieve your goals. Listen to your body. It will show signs and symptoms that will indicate it needs to rest.
Lethargy
Due to excessive drain of energy, your body will remain in stress. This will make you weak and lethargic. You might be completing your 8-hour sleeping cycle, and still feel exhausted.
This indicates that sleep won’t be enough to recover from the energydrain; you need to put off training for a few days or possibly a week. This resting period will restore your body to its optimal condition.
Thirst Increases
When you’re training, it tears down musclesin order to build better and stronger ones. This dehydrates you. If you continue to train without resting, your body will demand for more water intake.If you’re making a lot of trips to the water cooler, think about taking a break from your gym.
Pain And Soreness
A torn muscle tissue disrupts muscle cells. This activates the muscle fibers. Thesecells reach the damaged area, and replicate mature cells into fully grown ones into the muscle fiber.
During this process, new protein strands are created to strengthen and add volume to your muscles.
If you don’t take rest, your body is unable to complete this process of recovery, which leaves you in a lot of pain and soreness.
Increase In Resting Heart Rate
Training increases your metabolic rate, causing your heart to beat a little faster. If you experience that your heart rate is increasing while at rest, it’s a sign that you are overtraining. Use heart monitors when you train, or check your pulse in morning and monitor it throughout the day.
Sickness Frequency
If your body is busy healing and recovering itself from physical stress, it leaves your immune system weak and defenseless. This makes you susceptible to allergies and viruses, causing an increase in sick days.
How Many Days Should You Train?
As per CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) adults should dedicate 150 minutes of moderately intensive exercise in a week.
You can evenly spread 2 hour 30 minutes of exercise throughout the week for regular activity. If you are performing a high-intensity workout it should be limited to 75 minutes a week.
People who want additional benefits from their training should increase their workout duration to 300 minutes a week for moderate intensity aerobics, and 150 minutes for high and moderate intensity training.
CDC also suggests that the duration of a single aerobic episode should not last for more than 10 minutes.
This means you can spend 30–60 minutes in the gym for 5 days a week, or 20–60 minutes of vigorous workout sessions for 3 days a week.
If you are strength training then build specific muscle group for 20–30 minutes for 2–3 days a week. Leave a gap of 48 hours between training of the same muscle-group.
How To ensure Adequate Recovery?
- Plan your rest day; schedule them in.
- Provide adequate nutrition to your body. Increase water, protein, carbs, and fats intake.
- Get quality sleep.
- Avoid self-medication.
- Get a massage.
- Reduce stress
- There should be a correlation between your training and resting period. For example, a boxer might need long period of rest compared to yoga
or Pilates class.
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