May 7, 2021

Author: Brandon Schoenwether

Topic: recovery

#restdays #tidestrained #tidesfamily

Either you really look forward to them or they’re your least favorite day of the training week.

Regardless of how you feel about them, that doesn’t change their level of necessity.

A quality rest day can look like many things but first let’s examine what a good rest day doesn’t look like.

More of the Same

A quality rest day will not look the same as the other training days. By no means are you not allowed to move around, however, don’t expect to move with similar speed, intensity, power, or duration as your training days, otherwise what you’re doing is called…training.

A well-planned rest day also will not prioritize the same things as a training day. The goal of training is to give your body a reason to change and grow from the physical demands of exercise, a rest day is what allows your body to catch up to this built-up fatigue/stress/whatever you want to call it.

Now for some things that a thought out rest day will have.

Rest Days = Rest

A well-thought-out rest day starts with waking from a great night of sleep. Now, there is no such thing as ‘catching up on sleep’ but this day is a great chance to capitalize on the extra time and bank some recovery currency. Find a way to decompress, whether this is physical, mental, or social, let the pressure out of the valves that have built up over the last several days. You’re great, you’re a superstar, but everyone still needs to recharge the batteries here and there.

Lastly, a great rest day should have you feeling better than when it started. Common themes of recovery are sleep, movement, and relaxation. Get 7-9 hours of high-quality sleep, move in a way that alleviates stiffness, soreness, and fatigue while also mentally and physically winding down.

Experiment

There is no one way to use rest days to help recover from exercise and stress in general so it falls to you to conduct your own experiments on what works best. Multiple rest days in a week may work great for you or only one rest day per week may be best. Each rest day may also not look the same as the next because what you need that week is different from the previous. The best way to test if your rest days are doing the trick is to track your mood, performance, and restfulness then peel back which areas you are coming up short in.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” – Peter Drucker