One of the biggest misconceptions in fitness is the role of recovery. Getting regular exercise is important but so is knowing what to do on rest days.
Your training breaks you down intentionally. Your recovery is how you rebuild your body stronger. The training dose and recovery response are both vital components in the results equation.
The typical approach is to keep adding training volume and intensity with little regard for the recovery side of things. While this works in the short run, the long-term version of this approach leads to chronic soreness and injuries.
You’ll need to stop viewing rest days as missed opportunities for additional exercise. Done correctly, your rest days are what allow you to enjoy the rewards from your work.
Let’s take a smarter approach. This post will outline how to improve your recovery.
What To Do On Rest Days
The answer to this question is largely influenced by your goals, how hard you’re training in the gym and how frequently you’re exercising.
If your goal is to run a marathon or complete a Spartan race, you’ll need to train more than twice a week for 60 minutes.
But if you’re like most people we train, you’re likely a busy professional who simply wants to be healthier, get stronger and have more energy to improve the quality of your life outside the gym.
If you’re training two, three or four times per week, when you schedule those training sessions, the intensity of your training and what you’re doing for recovery will influence the specific results you see.
The more frequently you train, the less intense each individual training session would need to be. Ideally, every session would NOT have the same level of intensity. Within a given week, you should have a session that is noticeably heavier or more intense and a session that is intentionally lighter or less intense.
As your training volume and intensity increase, there should be an equal response in your recovery.
Our biggest recommendations for what to do on rest days are active recovery, increase protein, and improved sleep.
What Is Active Recovery
Active recovery is light movement such as a walk, easy bike ride, light swimming or mobility work. This keeps blood flow elevated without adding meaningful training stress.
Active recovery helps shuttle nutrients into damaged tissue and clear out waste products faster than sitting on the couch does, which is why people often report feeling less sore and “gunked up” after a light session than after a full rest day.
This also has a mild parasympathetic effect (the “rest and digest” side of the nervous system) since low-intensity movement doesn’t spike stress hormones the way normal training does.
Total rest can be more practical when your overall nervous system is exahusted. A significantly more intense week of training or exceptionally stressful work week might require a day of total rest when fatigue goes beyond sore muscles. The trade off is that too many full rest days can leave you feeling stiffer and more sluggish than active recovery.
As with anything, the key here is to learn how your body reacts and adjust accordingly. There isn’t a silver bullet universal approach that works for every individual and training schedule.
Our top recommendation for active recovery is consistently getting 7,500 steps per day.
This increases your NEAT (Non Exercise Adaptive Thermogenesis) and it’s one of the best things you can do for your overall health. In most cases, if someone is training 3 days per week, we recommend getting 7,500 steps per day before adding another day of training.
Increasing your daily step count and your active recovery will have a significant impact on your daily readiness and performance inside & outside the gym.
Increase Your Protein For Recovery
You might think as you get older, you need less protein. Many people are surprised to learn that the opposite is true. Your body needs a bigger protein signal after the age of 40 to build muscle than it required when you were younger.
Aim for a minimum of 30 grams of protein per meal. If you’re only eating 2 meals per day, shift your target to a minium of 40 grams. If you can add a protein shake or snack with another 30+ grams of protein, even better.
Protein aids recovery because it provides the raw materials your body needs to repair itself and get stronger. This is even MORE important if you’re recovering from an injury.
Why Sleep Is Important For Recovery
While you sleep, cortisol — your stress hormone — drops, and growth hormone rises to do the repair work.
You need to think about cheating your sleep on the same level as cheating your workouts. Putting in the work and optimizing your sleep are 2 sides of the same results coin.
If the intensity of your training increased, there should be an appropriate adjustment to your sleep. Increasing the stress on your body without increasing your recovery is an equation that’s out of balance.
Your body does not know the difference between gym stress and work stress. It all gets addressed in the same Recovery bucket.
Improved sleep is your ultimate recovery weapon.
Conclusion
The stressors in your life OUTSIDE the gym need to be factored into what you do on your days off from the gym as well.
So here’s what your off day actually looks like if you’re doing it right:
Get your steps in and get your body moving.
Eat enough protein so your body has the raw materials to build a stronger you.
Get the quality and quantity of sleep needed to support the best version of you.
Your training breaks you down…on purpose. Your recovery is how you improve and come back stronger.
This might mean regular massage, sauna, or mobility work.
Training harder and longer without a similar adjustment to your recovery is nothing more than a personal beat down.
