The Day Nobody Talks About

The day nobody talks about (enough)? Why, it’s the rest day, of course.

In a fitness (and work) culture that all too often promotes productivity and output above all else, rest days (and rest in general) can easily be lost as you try to navigate the labyrinth of mainstream fitness and diet advice.

Why bother taking a day off when you could use that day to do some cardio? Or, at the very least, a “recovery workout.”

I would encourage you to think about your workout plan in it’s entirety, not as some separate entity of workouts and meals and stretching sessions and walks and so on.

This leads us to counting the days, counting the workouts, adding them up, and often comparing to what we’ve been told is “optimal.”

Why are rest days important? Well, truthfully, they aren’t. (Or at least they might not be. It kind of depends.)

Rest days aren’t necessarily important, but rest is.

Simply put, we need to carefully balance our stressors and rest-ors in order to move forward thoughtfully without burning ourselves out physically (or mentally).

This means paying attention to the hours we work, the stress of the work itself, and the amount of volume we’re going in the gym (whether that’s aerobic or strength-based). 

Then we need to carefully counterbalance those things with adequate nutrition, sleep, and general “us” time. 

You’ll know if you’re doing too much. Your joints will ache, your muscles will feel stiff, and you’ll be tired. 

You’ll probably feel hungry and your motivation will plummet.

But this doesn’t mean that you need one rest day. It means you need rest in general. So put your feet up, cut out a workout, or run fewer miles. 

Fitness is built one brick at a time, not all at once, so stop trying to outwork your recovery. It’ll only set you back in the long-run.