The Ultimate Guide on What to Do on Rest Days (and What Not to Do!)

Your body is a machine capable of performing heavy, intense workouts often. Even when your workouts consist of compound movements, like squats, deadlifts, and presses, it’s actually quite hard to overtrain. In fact, many people are undertrained, not overtrained.

But there is one thing that your body isn’t built for: intense exercise performed Every Day.

During a training session, we vigorously break down our muscle fibers lifting heavy weights. Right after, your muscles become vulnerable, weaker and more prone to injury. It’s only in the next 48 hours that your muscles can fully recover and grow.

This is why the concept of training a muscle every day is a flawed one.

To become stronger, your body needs time to rest and recover (at least 48 hours). If you don’t give it this, your performance will suffer, regardless of how much effort you put in.

This is why ‘rest days’ are commonly referred to as ‘active recovery days’ by athletes and gym-goers alike. Rest days offer the opportunity for you to recover and rebuild your muscles bigger and better than ever before!

What Should I Do on Rest Days

Rest days or active recovery days give our body time to recover, rebuild, and ultimately become stronger. Without them, we would be stuck in a cycle of fatigue. But while simply putting your feet up, eating sensibly, and binging on Netflix does work, it never really ends up that way.

The biggest problem most people have during rest days is that many people binge-eat. They get too relaxed, forget about their goals and mindlessly put aside their healthy habits.

Remember that physical exercise actually plays a minor role in losing weight and getting fit. It’s your diet that’s responsible for most of the results you see. So by binge-eating on unhealthy food, you’re undoing a lot of the hard work you’ve put in.

Plan your active recovery days

If your goal is to build maximum muscle mass, participate in activities that are low-intensity. By engaging in light physical activity on a rest day, you will increase blood flow to the muscles, improve flexibility, eliminate toxins and help facilitate optimal muscle growth. It also helps burn a few extra calories without putting too much stress on your body.

Although high-in-intensity activities may not be detrimental to muscle growth, they can cause an excessive amount of fatigue. This can then lead to overtraining and a plateau in your progress.

So how do you go about it?

First, make a plan.

Choose which days of the week you want to rest. If, for example, you do three full-body strength training sessions on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you should rest on the other days.

Schedule a few activities on your rest days, such as walking, a light swim or bike ride, and some stretching. You can then have a good idea of what foods you should eat to avoid the temptation of binge-eating. While indulging every now and then is perfectly fine, try not to go too off course from your caloric goals.

If you need help, try using a meal-planning app or service to keep track of your diet and make sure you’re eating the right foods.

Let’s go through a few examples of gentle workouts you can do on your rest days:

Rest Day 1 - Yoga

Yoga may seem like an activity to get rid of stress and relax, but it’s actually much more than that. Its low-impact nature and movement patterns will complement your strength training program.

While strength training works on short, quick-twitch muscle fibers and makes us stronger, it also tightens our muscles. Yoga stretches these muscles and tendons, enhancing recovery and reducing the risk of injury. They also release lactic acid build-up in our muscles and help us get rid of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS).

Now we know participating in yoga isn’t to be taken lightly. It’s fairly intimidating (especially for men, let’s be honest) to join a class and do some of the strange poses. So if that’s not your cup of tea, there are plenty of online classes you can take or apps you can download and use!

Rest Day 2 - Walking & Sightseeing

Walking is perhaps the most underrated form of exercise. In fact, I know bodybuilders and other physique athletes who have gotten shredded thanks to walking!

Now, some may scoff at the thought of going for a walk. After all, you could probably burn the same amount of calories doing a HIIT workout in a fraction of the time. However, unlike HIIT workouts, it’s a gentler form of exercise and requires very little recovery time.

A gentle walk, like yoga, can help facilitate recovery by increasing blood flow to the muscles while being more sparing on the joints. It’s also a mindless way to get your cardio in and maintain a calorie deficit.

If you want to make your walk more interesting, why not go sightseeing? You can combine the activity of walking with looking at beautiful sights and learning more about your local area.

Rest Day 3 - Interval Training or Sprinting

While we generally recommend light activities on rest days for muscle growth, sprinting and interval training is great at burning body fat. If you’re on a cutting diet, a few interval training sessions can help you burn a few extra calories and make progress faster.

Interval training is basically when you alternate between high-intensity and low-intensity activities in a set amount of time. For example, you can do a fast job for 2 minutes, walk for 60 seconds, and then repeat the cycle. You can also add in various bodyweight exercises like burpees or squats to add variety.

Sprinting is an even higher-intensity form of cardio and is best done in short bursts. Instead of running on a treadmill, you can perform short sprints outside and combine them with a few bodyweight exercises.

Remember, less is more when it comes to doing intense activities on rest days. Stick to one or two sessions of interval training or sprinting and keep the total duration to under 30 minutes.

Rest Day 4 - Do General Physical Preparedness (GPP) Work

General physical preparedness (GPP) is all about making sure your body is ready for any physical activity. For basketball players, who need to become more agile on the court, this could mean incorporating agility drills like skipping and footwork drills. They may also do stability exercises such as planks, bridges, and hollow holds.

GPP activities can include:

jumping rope
box jumps
hill sprint
kettlebell swings
rope climbs
sled pulls/pushes, and more

GPP, however, doesn’t just apply to athletes trying to improve specific skills. It also provides gym-goers with a creative way to improve core strength, agility, and overall conditioning. And by working on these elements, you can prevent injuries and improve your gym performance.

Rest Day 5 - Just be Productive

Sometimes an active recovery day doesn’t have to focus on exercise. Instead, use this day to do something productive or creative that can help you feel good about yourself.

Let’s go through some ideas:

Prep Your Meals

Having ready-made meals helps you stay consistent, save time, and ensures you eat the right foods.

If you find yourself loitering around the kitchen on rest days, use this time to prep your meals. This can involve anything from weighing out ingredients and portioning them into containers to pre-cooking meals and freezing them. It’s also the time to cook foods in bulk and make them last for the whole week.

Have a Massage

If you have the spare money and time, a massage can be highly therapeutic. Besides its relaxing nature, it can help with muscular tension, inflammation, and other aches and pains associated with exercising.

A massage helps to facilitate muscle recovery by increasing blood flow and releasing lactic acid. It helps us get rid of toxins, thus improving our overall health and performance.

Pursue your Passions

Passions outside of fitness can help keep our lives balanced and make us feel fulfilled. This can include anything from picking up a musical instrument to painting, or writing.

Rest days are the perfect opportunity to pursue our passions and hobbies and use some of that free time available on them. This can help relieve stress, remind us of why we do what we do, and create a positive environment that helps facilitate recovery.

Rest Day 6 - Use your Foam Roller

A Foam roller is the weird-looking, cylindrical-shaped piece of foam that nobody seems to know what to do with. But you know it’s a useful tool simply because they’re everywhere, and your favorite athletes can’t seem to get enough of them.

But is the foam roller really that important for recovery?

Yes!

Foam rolling helps increase blood flow to tight and sore muscles, reducing stiffness and pain in the process. This is also known as “self-myofascial release”, where your fascia (the connective tissues around your muscles) is being released and stretched.

Should you perform foam rolling before or after a workout?

You often see bodybuilders and other athletes perform foam rolling before a workout. The idea is to use it to increase muscle activation and blood flow. And while this is true, Kelly Starrett, P.T., author of Becoming a Supple Leopard, says it actually has a relaxing effect, turning on your parasympathetic nervous system. This, in turn, will not prepare you for the demanding workout ahead.

So, if you’re looking for a way to get the most out of your rest days, do foam rolling after your workout. By putting your body in a tranquil state, accelerates the recovery process and gets you ready for the next session.

Rest Day 7 - Relax & Recover (Just don’t binge-eat!)

We kinda saved the best for last as who doesn’t love to relax, watch youtube and chill?

And don’t feel guilty about it either – this is your time to rest and recover, both physically and mentally!

So if you don’t feel like doing anything, that’s okay. Just relax and enjoy some downtime, eat the foods you enjoy (a little over your normal intake is okay!), read a book, watch some movies and catch up on sleep.

It may feel like you’re not doing anything productive, but rest days are just as important, if not more so in your fitness journey. After all, it’s only after a full night of quality sleep that we can start to feel the benefits of our hard work in the gym!

We hope this guide helps you get the most out of your rest days while avoiding any pitfalls along the way. Remember, rest should be treated with the same respect as a workout day. So, make sure to take full advantage of your rest days for optimal recovery!

What to Do on Rest Days – The Right Way to Recover

Contents

The Problem with Working Out Everyday