The following is an article written by Matt Fitzgerald. He is a journalist and author specializing in the topics of health, fitness, nutrition and endurance sports training and has written many books on triathlon training.
How muscle recovery plays a key role in peak performance.
Every endurance athlete understands the importance of rest—on an intellectual level. But on a gut level, many find it hard to believe that not training could possibly make them perform better. That’s because most endurance athletes attribute all their hard-won fitness and performance gains exclusively to their workouts. This mentality, however, is based on a misunderstanding of how the body adapts to training stress. Simply doing a workout does not guarantee that your body will adapt to that workout. In other words, there is a difference between doing a workout and absorbing a workout. You absorb a workout during the period of relative inactivity that follows the workout. This post-workout muscle recovery period initiates the cellular changes that ultimately increase your fitness level. If you follow up a hard workout too soon with another hard workout, chances are your body will not have a chance to recover from and adapt to the first workout. Rest is, therefore, required to absorb—and benefit from—a hard workout.
How do you define a “rest” day? Rest is relative. A rest day for an elite runner in marathon training probably isn’t the same as a rest day for an average runner gutting out a 10K training plan. For the elite marathoner, who may normally run twice a day and 110 miles a week, a rest day could be a 45-minute run at a very easy pace. But for Joe or Jane 10K, who may normally run 30 miles a week, a rest day is more likely to be a day without any exercise. The point of a rest day is to subject your body to much less training stress than usual so that it has a chance to recover from and adapt to a prior harder workout. The amount of activity or inactivity that is required to meet this objective depends entirely on how much you normally train on non-rest days.
How often should you take rest days? Every endurance athlete, whether in long-distance triathlon training or pool sprint training, should have one designated rest day per week. No athlete, no matter how fit, can train hard seven days a week without eventually becoming overtrained or injured. In fact, the athletes who train the hardest need a weekly rest day the most. How should your rest day fit into your weekly schedule? In general, there should be variation in your training workload from day to day. Only three or four days per week should be designated hard days. The other non-rest days should be moderate to light. And your rest day should be even lighter still. Here’s an example of a sensible weekly mix of hard, moderate, and light training days, plus a rest day, for most endurance athletes:
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: Hard
Wednesday: Light
Thursday: Hard
Friday: Light
Saturday: Moderate
Sunday: Hard
What should your weekly rest day look like? As I explained above, what constitutes a hard training day versus a rest day will differ from one athlete to the next. Thus, a rest day is not necessarily always going to be a day without any exercise. As long as whatever you do on Monday (in the above example) does not interfere with your recovery from your hard workout on the previous Sunday or sabotage your performance in Tuesday’s hard workout, then it is an effective rest day.
If you follow a sensible training schedule such as this one, you should get all the recovery you need to make steady fitness and performance gains. However, it’s important that you listen to your body and take additional rest days whenever necessary. Anytime you feel unready for a planned hard or moderate training day due to lingering fatigue and/or muscle soreness, be prudent and take the day off or train very lightly. That said, try to avoid planning more than one rest day per week. Daily or almost-daily exercise is a requirement not only for peak endurance performance but also for optimal health.
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