I get it for the first time in a while you’re seeing progress, good progress. You want to keep exercising keep lifting, training as much as possible. But sorry to say this can actually be detrimental to your progress. Let me explain why.
During whatever exercise you’re doing during that movement you muscles are breaking down creating tiny tears in your muscle fibres. Then your body will create additional muscle to fill these tears which over time will lead to an increase in size.
Muscle growth does not happen at the gym, it happens during your sleep and recovery.
Not allowing your body adequate rest would mean it is continually working and not allowed to recover. This will lead to something called overreaching, which is when you see a decrease in performance due to higher fatigued. Over time if not changed this will then become overtraining and you’re more likely to injure yourself. By not allowing yourself enough rest, what your body will do will use resources to simply survive the exercise rather than for muscle growth.
It’s not just our muscles that need rest as well, during exercise you attack your central nervous system (this is your brain and spinal cord working so you can move your body). Good to keep in mind it's not just our muscles that need rest its our bodies. Exercise to our bodies is perceived as stress, if you were at work and something was stressing you out you would take a break until you felt prepared to handle it again. Your joints need time to recover as well, sometimes we focus so much on our muscles we forget that there's a lot that goes on behind the scene that needs rest as well. Implementing something like a stretching routine on our rest days can help promote recover and increase our mobility. Helping to create stronger joints that will be less likely to get injured whether you're going for a PB.
Now to get around this doom and gloom of potentially never being at the gym some of us split our training into different categories e.g. push, pull, legs or upper, lower, legs. Doing this allows you to train a few times a week without hindering your performance or rest.
Beginner lifters may find they need to rest for longer periods of times to get accustomed to training than experienced lifters. DOMS (Delayed-Onset Muscle Soreness) will be most painful for new exercises and when your body becomes used to it the time to recover and pain will decrease, typically the worst pain is two days after training.
To find out how long you need to rest for a lot, it’s a lot of self evaluation as can vary greatly from person to person. If you find you’re tired, don’t have the energy and generally CBA with training then have a rest day. It will be more beneficial to your mood and overall health. AND YOU WILL NOT LOSE MUSCLE OVER ONE MISSED SESSION.
The rest period can vary however there are things we can do to maximise our rest to make sure our recovery can be quicker. The top two are a high protein diet & a good nights sleep, I’m sure there’s plenty more tips and tricks you could follow but those are the ones that provide the biggest help.
In conclusion, make sure you rest. You may not feel like you’re doing anything but trust me more is happening behind the curtain than you know about. So relax, watch Netflix, *cough* subscribe to this blog *cough*, go for a walk or do some mobility work if you really want to do something.
Thanks
Cameron
More information:
Picture Fit: How many times a week should I workout
Jeff Nippard: How To Maximize Gains and NOT Overtrain