In the world of fitness and weight training, it’s often times easy to get caught up in the hustle and continually pushing yourself.
This can lead to the recovery part of training can being overlooked.
The importance of recovery in any exercise routine should never be ignored. This becomes especially true for woman who lift weights.
If you push your body too much, you put yourself at risk of over training. Overtraining can lead to injury, mental fatigue, and other health problems like amenorrhea (losing your period).
In this post, I’m going to explain everything I know about rest days and why they’re so important for woman.
Understanding the cycle of training and recovery
The ideal way to workout is to repeatedly put your body through a cycle of stress and recovery.
Doing this gives your muscles a time to tear and a time to rebuild and grow.
By ignoring either of these parts of the cycle, your muscles won’t grow as healthy and strong as they should be.
1. Weight training (adding stress)
When you weight train, you not only put stress on your muscles but also on you joints and central nervous system.
This part of the cycle is essential to tear your muscles and later allow them to grow. However, this part can become dangerous if you don’t allow for proper rest.
2. Rest and grow
During your rest days, your muscles will repair and rebuild themselves bigger and stronger.
Skimping out on these days will leave your muscles torn and unable to repair themselves. Consequently, doing this would be extremely unhealthy for your muscles and constantly keep them in the stage where they’re under stress.
There are both physical and mental benefits of rest days
The physical benefits
1. Your muscles can grow and repair
Like I’ve said, rest days are when your muscles can repair themselves. When you’re working out, you’re making tiny tears in the muscles that you’re working on.
In order for these tears to heal, your muscles need to rest. Otherwise you’d just keep making tears on top of tears and your muscles would never repair.
When your muscles repair the tears, the muscle is repaired bigger than it was before the tears. This is actually how your muscles grow.
2. Prevent injuries
Overuse injuries can happen when you work your body too hard and don’t allow for enough rest. If you continually place too much stress on a certain area, the result will likely be an overuse injury.
Implementing enough rest days can give the body time to recover and heal. That way there is no excessive strain on any specific part of your body.
3. Hormone balance
Working out too intensely and too often can become extremely taxing on your hormones, especially for woman. This is what leads to things like losing your period and osteoporosis (brittle bones).
Both of these conditions are such common issues among women who work out. However, they’re often overlooked and ignored even though they can be seriously detrimental to a woman’s health.
Resting more often can give your hormones adequate time to rebalance themselves.
Regulating hormones is a natural function of your body. However, when you’re constantly putting it under immense stress, it pushes regulation aside and focuses on the stress at hand.
The mental benefits of taking rest days
1. Less mental fatigue
People may not realize it, but as much as weight lifting stresses the body, it also stresses the mind. There are so many mental battles we have to overcome when working out and getting ourselves to the gym everyday.
All of these mental challenges you face can build up and take an extreme tax on your mental health.
Resting your muscles gives time for your mind to rest, too. This helps prevent fatigue and burnout. Further allowing you to push yourself as hard as you can every workout.
2. Decreased irritation and anxiety
For me personally, when I workout too often I become extremely irritable. If this happens constantly, this is how I know it’s time for a deload week.
Taking rest days helps keep this irritability in check. They decrease the mental exhaustion that can come from working out.
Additionally, when we work out, our cortisol and adrenaline levels increase. This is part of the stressed stage of the cycle and can increase our anxiety levels throughout the day.
Rest days allow these hormones to fall back into place and balance themselves. Allowing our bodies to relax and decreasing our anxiety.
3. More motivation
When we take time away from the gym, we begin to miss and appreciate working out more.
Taking a step back for a day allows me to get super excited for when I can go back to the gym again. As a result, this brings all of my motivation back. Whereas working out too often increases my exhaustion and decreases my motivation.
Additionally, going to the gym everyday can make you bored with it. This isn’t something we want. Who wants to workout if it’s boring?
We can prevent this by implementing more rest days. Rest days can help renew your enthusiasm and excitement towards the gym.
What you can do on your recovery days
1. Some light activity
Doing light activity on your rest days is known as active recovery. Active recovery helps keep the blood moving throughout your body. In turn, promoting recovery.
Some active recovery exercises you can do are stretches, mobility exercises, or low intensity workouts. For example, walking, jogging, yoga, or swimming are all good examples of low intensity workouts.
2. Eat a lot of food
Nutrition and eating enough are extremely important for woman who lift. Even on rest days. You’re body needs just as much food to on days when it doesn’t work out as it does on days when it does work out.
You want to make sure you’re eating enough calories and enough of the right foods to support your health and recovery.
You don’t want to become underweight or nutrient deficient. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you’re getting a variety of both macro and micronutrients, even on your days off.
3. Hydrate
Much like your body needs food on recovery days, it also needs water.
Make sure you’re getting in enough water, even on your rest days, to support your muscles and keep them hydrated. Hydrating your muscles will promote recovery as well as helping them look fuller.
Learning how to listen to your body
1. Recognize when you’re overtraining
Like I said earlier, one of the signs I know that I’m over training is that I become extremely irritable. Some other signs I notice in myself are increased anxiety, fatigue, and loss of interest in my workouts.
Learning these signs comes with knowing your own body and a long time of working out.
If there’s anything you should listen and pay attention to it’s your own body. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about yourself. Including what works for you and what doesn’t when it comes to working out.
2. Personalize your recovery days
Earlier, I suggested active recovery on your recovery days, but this isn’t necessary for everyone. Some people train so hard that when they take a day off, they take the day OFF.
I don’t blame them. As a matter of fact, I usually do that, too. There’s nothing wrong with allowing your body time to rest completely.
Don’t feel bad if you decide to do absolutely no physical activity on your rest days. It all comes down to knowing your body and knowing what works best for you.
Don’t be shy to take the day (or multiple days) OFF.
What you can do now
In terms of long term fitness goals and success, rest days become an essential.
Never let anyone make you feel bad for taking rest days or extended time off from the gym.
Often times, rest can do more for our growth and development than another day of working out can.
The best thing you can do for yourself is learn how to listen to your body and don’t be afraid of recovery.
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