In the world of fitness, there are many concepts and valuable training principles that you’ll need to be especially mindful of if you want to achieve your goals.
Whether you’re intent on losing a certain amount of fat, building up your muscle, or honing your athletic performance, there are things you need to know when improving your body. As you continue to work on your goals, you’ll eventually realise that you can never stop learning about what you can do to further your development and go beyond merely lifting weights, running, and moving around.
Among the different concepts that you’ll end up learning about during your fitness journey, the principle of rest is one that can seem rather unfamiliar above all else. As any fitness coach or professional will tell you, however, resting is just as important as consistent training and nutrition in the hierarchy of factors that will determine how well your body performs and improves.
This brings us to one question that many Australian athletes, gym-goers, and fitness buffs ask at some point in their journeys: how does one maximise their rest days?
What is a rest day?
If you’ve been training for quite some time now, you’ve probably heard of the idea of taking rest days. Before we talk about how you can maximise these off periods, it’s important that we first define what they are so that it will be much easier to approach them from the right mindset.
The best and simplest way to define the concept is that it’s a day off from training, functioning as a necessary pause throughout the duration of a set routine or program. By taking the time to help your body recuperate with minimal activity, you’ll be able to help your body and mind recover significantly so that its various trained parts can grow.
With the help of a rest day, you’ll be able to:
- Help your muscles recover, adapt, and become much stronger
- Allow your nervous system to regenerate
- Prevent workout plateaus and instances of overtraining
Blueprints for rest day maximisation
When you start using rest days wisely and treating them as a means to reach your fitness goals, there are certain components that you should be mindful of, such as eating, scheduling, and supplementation. If you’re looking to ensure that your days off are conducive to your long-term performance, progress, and health, let’s look at each component of a maximised period in further detail:
Eating
Achieving a maximised rest day begins with fuelling your body with the right food that can help it recover as best as possible. Generally, your day-off diet should consist of lots of protein for muscle repair, complex carbohydrates for sustained energy, and constant hydration to ensure that the nutrients you take in go where they need to be.
Scheduling
When it comes to scheduling your rest days, the golden rule is that you should have one (or two, for intense training schedules) a week to help your body recuperate without compromising your momentum. However, it’s worth noting that the time when you take your rest day should be at the end or in the middle of a week depending on various factors, such as:
- Training intensity
- Whether you’re doing full-body workouts or split workouts
- How long you’ve been training for
- Your training style
Supplementation
If you want to ensure that your rest days help your body recover as much as possible, then you’ll also want to keep your supplementation on point with items like creatine, BCAAs, whey, and casein. Using Recov’s powerful protein-peptide concentrate, for instance, will allow your body to recover well so that you can hop back on your training regimen with stronger muscles that are ready for more work!
Conclusion
When it comes to maximising your rest days, it’s important to be mindful of all the right factors that affect the quality of your recovery experience so that your body performs best in no time. Once you take the key points mentioned above in mind, you’ll be able to ensure that you dial in all the right factors during your days off so that you come back stronger and achieve more during your training sessions!
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