Preventing Injury

5 Reasons to Take Rest Days Seriously

By Tyler Traskos|Updated on June 27, 2023 (originally published on March 10, 2022)

There are a lot of factors to take into account when you're training. The mix of exercises you are doing, your diet, and genetics are just a few of the things that come into play when talking about training. Some hardcore athletes may tell you that “no days off” is the mantra to live by, but that is far from the truth. Rest days are one of the most important, yet most overlooked aspects of athletic training. Your progress as an athlete relies on rest days just as much as it relies on your intensity and form while weight lifting (just as long as not every day is a rest day).

In this article, we address a few of the many benefits you and your body will get from taking your rest days seriously.

1. Muscle Growth
To understand the benefits of rest days for muscle growth, let's first dive into the biological aspect of muscle training and growth. When you lift weights or do any type of training, you are creating tiny micro-tears in your muscles. The idea behind this is that once your body heals these micro-tears, your muscles become stronger so they can do the same workout with less effort. Even if you workout every day of the week, you have at least 12 hours or so in between sessions, but this may not always be enough. Rest days allow your muscles some extra time to heal and repair to ensure your progress stays on track.

2. Injury Prevention
More obviously but no less importantly, rest days can drastically reduce your chance of getting injured. Like we said above, taking a rest day can allow your muscles a little bit of extra time to heal up. This, in turn, also helps with the prevention of injury. If you don't allow your body enough time to heal those micro-tears in your muscles, they can develop into something much worse, like a muscle sprain. It can also cause injuries of tendons, ligaments, and even bones in some cases. Tendons and ligaments can strain and sprain just like muscles, and other ailments like tendonitis and stress fractures in bones are also possible. You can also drastically reduce your chance of accidentally overtraining and damaging your body even more. If you want to stay injury-free and at peak performance, rest days are paramount.

3. Motivation
Another reason we're going to feature is something that I am sure we have all struggled with at one point or another in our training. If you ever feel yourself no longer enjoying the training that you usually look forward to, it might be a sign that it's time to take a rest day. Diminishing motivation also leads to a lack of focus during your training, which can lead to various other issues including injury! If you want to keep enjoying your training, then taking a rest day periodically can keep you motivated and excited to train every session.

4. Immune Health
Taking rest days on a regular basis is also proven to assist in immune health. Your body's internal systems are affected in a very similar way to your muscles after intense training. Taking a rest day is just as beneficial to your immune health as it is to your muscles. During over-intense training, your body releases hormones like cortisol that may lead to decreased immune health for a period of time. This can leave you susceptible to the cold, flu, and many other illnesses.

5. Sleep
Sleep is another very important benefit of rest days. As we've said a few times earlier in this list, the bottom line is that you need to give your body time to heal and recover after intense training, and while you're sleeping is when the majority of that healing happens. In a simple sense, training while you're exhausted is like starting a long road trip with a quarter tank of gas in your car. You won't be performing at your best from the beginning, and that burnout is going to catch up to you a lot faster. This can lead to accidental injuries and just straight up exhaustion. If you ever notice yourself feeling abnormally tired at the gym, it might be time for a rest day.

Rest days are a crucial element of training that is often under-appreciated. Living by the “no rest days” mantra is a common misconception that can lead to a lot more serious problems. Injury prevention, consistently high motivation, and good muscle growth are just a few of the benefits, but there are many more that weren't discussed in this article. The bottom line is, if you think it's time for a rest day, it's probably time for a rest day. If you take care of your body, it will reward you in your training. It's not enough to just know your body, you also have to listen to it.

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