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  • Writer's picturemanoj ghimire

The Importance of Rest Days: Giving Your Body Some Rest


The days of rest are a component of any effective training program that one can hardly overemphasize, and at the same time they are one of the most disregarded aspects of the fitness regimens of one who wishes to claim to have sufficient health and well-being. This is why it is often tempting to think that the more is better concept applies to exercise, but training on most of days of the week is counterproductive and only leads to injuries. In fact it is just as important as the exercising part because it gives the body, muscles and joints a chance to recuperate.

In a rest day, muscles are given time to heal the breakage done by rigorous workouts and in a way help them strengthen even more than before. Thus, you decrease your chances of getting over trained exercising to the point at which your body gets fatigued and become easily prone to injuries. It further has importance of low intensity days in avoiding the state of exhaustion and giving the physiological as well as mental health a break. If you make sure that your body is getting enough rest, then over the long term you can be very sure that during your workouts you are giving it your all and therefore you are bound to achieve your long term fitness goals.

The Importance of Rest Days: The Art of Just allowing Your Body to Rest

The Importance of Rest Days: Tuesday: Allowing Your Body to Rest

Many a times, people give very little importance to rest days or may underestimate the importance of rest days thinking that they have to train hard every single day in order to get a better result. But it is very important to have rest days as this helps the body tissues to heal in order to perform better and enhance the health standards.

If you are doing weights, running or any other form of exercise, you are somehow straining your muscles and thus exercising causes your muscles to fail. It enables the growth and adaptation of the muscles, but at the same time, it leads to the micro rapture of muscles’ fibers. If left unresolved, they can form and create over-training which leads to tiredness, poor performance and can cause injuries.



Using the break to allow the muscles to recover from training, including the repair of micro-tears on the subject’s muscle fibres. As you rest your body enhances protein synthesis, this is the building up of new proteins to reform muscle tissue which has been broken by stress. Also, rest days provide a chance of clearing metabolic waste products from muscles that are produced during some rigorous exercises such as the build-up of lactic acid that leads to muscle soreness and stiffness.

Besides the physical aspects, rest days are critical in averting or even managing mental and emotional stress. Exercise as you may know is a form of stress on the body and taking time off is a way of recharging both the physical and the mental arsenal. Always driving oneself to the limit results in getting tired or even most likely bored, stressed or anxious. Raw days enable you to take time off and recover and also enhance your concentration when you resume your exercises.

In addition, rest days assist in avoiding the cases of injuries that are as a result of exercises. Repetitive stress injury is one type of overuse injury, and it happens when structures that are subjected to stress – muscles or joints, get injured over time due to repetitive stress. If you insert a number of rest days in your workout routine, you stand a small chance of accumulating long-term injuries on your body. Pain and stiffness are usually body signals of having overstretched and as such one must not train through these signs as they could lead to severe injuries that would take a longer time in rehabilitation.

To clarify it, rest days don’t necessarily mean that you have to be a couch potato all day. Some gentle motion exercises like a few yoga poses, simple stretches, a gentle walk, or other practices that do not cause additional pain to the muscles can assist in the flushing out of the toxins besides improving circulation. These activities can also be used to decrease experiences of muscle soreness and stiffness, increase an individual’s flexibility, as well as get better recovery.

Lastly, it is imperative to reiterate that rest days are very critical in any exercise regimen. All these reasons stress the importance of allowing the body to rest as this is very essential in enhancing performance, reducing incidence of injuries and enhancing health of the body. Do not look for the option to exercise daily to the extreme, it is important not to forget that true progress is not made in the gym, but in the process of the organism’s complete recovery. Thus, do not deny yourself rest days as it is an important component of the training program and receive a strong, fit, and healthy body.

Hence, it is crucial to include rest days in your exercise plan to avoid becoming tired and avoid getting injured. In other words, through emphasizing rest and recovery you are also helping yourself to achieve sustainable goal of maintaining fitness. Do not forget that rest is as crucial to the process of gaining that perfect fitness as is exercise and following a healthy diet. Something is physically tired, do not race against time when you are exhausted, offer the body the needed rest.

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