Why rest days are as important as working out
You may perhaps be interested to maintain comfortable bodyweight and good health or to run in a marathon. Whatever be it, you need to perform quality exercises regularly, but of essential amount to grow your muscles and endurance. But more is not always better, especially when exercise is concerned.
You need to vary your exercises from high to moderate to low intensity workouts with sufficient breaks in between to get adequate rest to your otherwise tired muscles. If proper rest is not availed, then your muscles will not get sufficient amount of recovery time and will result in painful injuries.
Why need rest in-between exercises?
Your body does require sufficient time to refuel and repair worn out and injured muscles. This means, harder workouts need to be spaced out and combined with low intensity ones. During 7 day workout schedule, for instance, you can perform 2-3 high intensity, 2-3 moderate and 1 low intensity workout.
You may be eager to perform three more hard workouts in some weeks and at times manage to perform just a single hard workout along with few moderate ones. Rest day is often the most crucial aspect overlooked by many people.
Reasons to take complete rest day
Trying to perform tough workout will need lots of stamina and mental toughness. This means, your body is likely to experience physical exertion and also tire your brain. You can get a psychological break by taking a break and also relax your mind and body. It also helps to recover your muscles.
Also Read:
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The rest day ensures that tissues that are damaged due to mechanical stresses associated with exercise are repaired. It also allows individual cells (fibro blasts) to repair damaged tissues like muscle proteins.
Your muscles are likely to feel sore after performing exercises. Taking rest will your proper removal of metabolic by-products accumulated in the muscle cells (since energy is used during exercise), thus allowing better performance of your circulatory system. Moreover, nutrients and oxygen is delivered efficiently to repair damaged tissues.
Therefore, avoiding rest days will only result in overtraining and repetitive stress injuries.
