Staying active and getting regular exercise is always a good practice, but regardless if you’re training for a competition or just trying to stay fit so you can squeeze into those favorite pants from four years ago, balancing and incorporating rest into your lifestyle is crucial.
Rest days are just as important as the exercise you’re doing itself. In fact, a healthy workout regime consists of a balance of exercise and rest. Including rest days in your workout regime and breaks between sessions are essential for your body to both recover and repair.
Here are 4 benefits of taking regular rest days:
1.Time For Recovery
A rest day doesn’t mean you’re sitting on a couch and watching your favorite sitcom, whilst eating a burger. Your muscle fibers are torn and require the correct nutrition for recovery, incorporating a high protein diet is the way to go to properly supplement muscle healing.
Having good sleep, and resting allows for your energy levels to replenish and for the food you’ve eaten to break down and absorb for a full recovery.
Image via : TrainingPeaks
2.Prevention of Muscle Fatigue
In layman’s terms, muscle fatigue is ‘weakness’, where your muscles become weak from overuse, and less efficient and open the gate to injuries. You will observe a decrease in the force that you exert during workouts and exercise.
Staying hydrated and having a good diet accompanied by rest is the best practice to avoid fatigue. Consuming around 2 liters of water a day is optimal and advised by healthy physicians globally.
3.Reduces Risk of Injury
Injury is a term that we all are aware of but dread. The direct approach to tackling injury is through rest and recovery. Our bodies have limits that we need to be conscious of, but there is a grey area between injury prevention and progression.
Progression of exercises and workouts are essential for results, but pushing yourself too hard above your body’s limit is when injury lurks in. Resting and creating healthy habits such as stretching and mobility drills can avoid your risk of injury significantly.
Image via : Physiotherapy Matters
4.Aids to healthy sleep.
Rest doesn’t equate to sleep, rest can be physical, mental, and even spiritual. If your body gets the rest it needs, it will aid in sleep quality significantly. Imagine being too sore to a point where you can’t sleep comfortably, and you’re tossing and turning all night. By the time you feel like you’ve managed to sleep, the alarm goes off and it’s the next day.
Rest is vital for better mental health, increased concentration and memory, a healthier immune system, reduced stress, improved mood, and even a better metabolism; if one reason wasn’t enough to convince you. Rest needs to be accompanied by a healthy diet for its full effect, so plan your new workout schedule with rest days and watch the magic happen.
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