Rest and Recovery

Personally, I like to workout everyday because it makes me feel good. However, I know that it is important to take days off to allow your body to rest and recover. Getting enough rest after exercise is essential to high-level performance. Continuous training can actually weaken the strongest athletes.Therefore rest days are critical to sports performance for many reasons.


According to sports medicine, building recovery time into any training program is important because this is the time that the body adapts to the stress of exercise and the real training effect takes place. Recovery also allows the body to replenish energy stores and repair damaged tissues.When a person lifts, they are breaking down their muscles so that their body can rebuild their muscles stronger. If you do not allow this recovery time, then you are only going to keep breaking down your muscles and not rebuilding anything. This can actually lead to what is called overtraining syndrome.

Symptoms of overtraining often occur from a lack of recovery time. Signs of overtraining include a feeling of general malaise, staleness, depression, decreased sports performance and increased risk of injury, among others.
Keep in mind that there are two categories of recovery. There is immediate (short-term) recovery from a particularly intense training session or event, and there is the long-term recovery that needs to be build into a year-round training schedule. Both are important for optimal sports performance.The short term recovery occurs in the hours immediately after intense exercise. Active recovery refers to engaging in low-intensity exercise after workouts during both the cool-down phase immediately after a hard effort or workout as well as during the days following the workout. The long term recovery refer to those that are built in to a seasonal training program. Most well-designed training schedules will include recovery days and or weeks that are built into an annual training schedule.
All in all make sure that you take at least one day off a week to allow your body to rest and recover.