Our Guide to Rest and Recovery
Maximising your rest days and recovery sessions plays an essential part in progressing your training and preventing injuries during exercise, but do you struggle to understand what you should be doing on a rest and recovery day? To help you get to grips with what it all emans, we’ve broken it down!
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REST DAYS AND RECOVERY DAYS
A rest day is what is says on the tin, you allow your body a day off exercise and take a break form training. A recovery day is a chance to keep your muscles moving and avoid a build up of tension, it usually involves a light session in the gym, a shakeout run or some conditioning work.
WHAT SHOULD A REST DAY LOOK LIKE?
A rest day doesn’t mean you need to spend all day on the sofa (although there’s nothing to say you can’t!) it just means you don’t do a gym session or take part in exercise, you are giving your body a chance to take it easy. It’s a good idea not to sit still all day, moving around the house or walking to the sops can help to avoid delayed onset muscle soreness so you don’t seize up completely.
WHAT SHOULD A RECOVERY DAY LOOK LIKE?
A recovery day can come in many forms. For example if you have completed a race, a match, a long cycle ride or similar on a sunday, you might use monday to do some light work in the gym to keep the blood flowing, expel waste products from the body and keep engaged. Equally a recovery session might come a couple days after a big event where you have put your body through a higher level of exertion, for example you ran a 10k on sunday so on wednesday you might do a short easy 20 min jog.
RECOVERY IS SPLIT INTO ACTIVE AND PASSIVE:
Examples of what you could include in a active recovery session:
Light cardio, low intensity and a short time
Easy core exercises, keep it slow and gentle
Working with resistance bands to keep the upper body engaged
Example of a passive recovery session:
Yoga class to help stretch out
Low impact strength work e.g. beginner pilates class
light stretches with resistance bands and light core work
SUMMARY:
At the end of the day there is no one way to do a recovery day as we all train and work differently, the main thing is that you are listening to your body and not pushing yourself where you don’t need to.
People often forget to have rest days or avoid them because they feel like they should be training more, remember that in order to keep training at an optimal level, you need to let your body catch up!
