Why Skipping Rest Days Can Derail Your Progress as an Athlete

Pushing it to the limit is the ultimate motto of sports champs. However, taxing yourself beyond your current fitness level on a daily basis does more harm than good to your physiology. If you’re skipping breaks, you’re training the wrong way and must change your approach. Here’s why rest days are important for athletes and how they support progress and performance.

Why Are Rest Days Important for Athletes?

You break down your body with every kettlebell swing or barbell lift. Rest is as important as toning those muscles to build endurance. Here are three reasons you should insert recovery periods within your daily training regimen.

1. Repairs and Grows Muscles

Training without respite is like driving a car without ever stopping for maintenance. What do you think will happen? Excluding regular tune-ups and pauses will eventually break the vehicle down. The human body’s engine is similar.

Each pump of iron riddles your muscles with microscopic tears. The muscle’s control center — nuclei — dash toward the injured sites to fix them up. In an experiment, scientists found these clusters of nuclei move to the microtears to apply a patch within five hours after exercise and get closer to them 24 hours post-training.

Rest is essential because it gives this repair crew ample time to heal the muscles and increase their resilience. Only after they’re restored will they effectively respond to the effects of your training.

2. Restores Hormone Balance

When you exercise, several coordinated responses and processes occur inside your body, involving multiple biochemicals. For instance, the pituitary gland releases growth hormones, which are important for tissue and bone health. The endocrine system produces cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine and dopamine, all of which activate the fight-or-flight reflex of your body. Your insulin sensitivity also increases after exercise.

Rest gives your biology a lull to return to baseline and restore balance in these internal processes. If you keep training without breaks, fight-or-flight mode will stay switched on, simultaneously raising the stress hormone cortisol in the blood. High levels of this in circulation can have multiple health disadvantages. Therefore, an interval is critical in reinstating these biochemicals to their average elevations.

3. Prevent Injuries

Rest days are important for athletes to reduce their risk of getting injured. A break allows your body’s architects to heal the microtears in muscles after repetitive exercise-induced stress.

For example, many lifting routines and other gym equipment encourages repetitive movements with heavy weights. But without ample rest time, any athlete could injure or inflame their back muscles from these repetitive movements. If you push through the pain and fatigue, you’ll likely make errors in execution techniques and forms. Muscle sores also linger if you deprive your body of its much-needed rest. These downsides can increase your risk of injury.

As the saying goes, “Too much of everything can be bad.” Ensure you do biological maintenance some other days to allow the body to recover and keep up with your intense activities.

What Are Signs You’re Overtraining?

One sign of overtraining is experiencing muscle soreness like never before. The rigorous fitness sessions can become a syndrome if not managed, affecting your performance and increasing the incidence of sprain and injuries.

Overtraining syndrome happens when athletes push beyond their limits by doing intense training day after day. As a result, the body keeps breaking down, outpacing its healing mechanism and accumulating fatigue. This flaw ultimately leads to declining performance.

Fortunately, overtraining is correctable with rest and good nutrition. Some athletes may find it emotionally challenging to step back from their training, which is understandable for people whose sports are their life’s work. Psychological therapy can help one process the overwhelming emotions associated with taking a training break.

What Are Active Recovery Workouts?

Rest days don’t mean skipping the gym sessions to avoid muscle contractions. Active workouts are a series of gentle movements that substitute intense routines. They keep your heart rate at 30%-60% of what it would be when doing the usual extreme routines. Reducing training intensity gives the body sufficient time to recuperate.

This sequence for active workouts looks like this:

5-10 minutes of warm-up to prime yourself and prevent further injuries
20 minutes of low-intensity movement, such as walking, biking or swimming
5 minutes of cooling down to normalize the body

As opposed to passive recovery or doing nothing during breaks, active movement recovery boosts workout performance. Furthermore, it promotes homeostasis or balance between several internal systems.

How Long Should a Recovery Period Last?

The general recommendation is to take at least one day off from your daily workout every week. However, this isn’t a hard and fast rule since it also depends on the duration and intensity of yourfitness, physiology and many other factors. Talk to your doctor or a fitness coach to get personal advice on the frequency of your breaks.

Rest Days Are Important for Athletes

The right and safe method of working out is adding downtime between strenuous training sessions. These intermissions are crucial, giving your body the pause to activate healing and increase resilience. Remember to honor your physiology with a much-needed rest.