You really can have too much of a good thing, even with exercise. The importance of incorporating rest days into your workout regime cannot be stressed enough. When first starting to exercise, or even if you’re an exercise veteran, we tend to error on the side of too much. We often mistakenly believe that unless we exercise every day we’ve somehow failed. That belief couldn’t be more wrong. We’re not suggesting months or even weeks of inactivity, but including a regular rest day can make all the difference in your fitness and motivation level.

To understand the importance of rest days, you first have to understand how our bodies work. In the simplest terms, to build muscle you must break it down first. When exercising, whether it is running, lifting weights or biking you cause small tears in your muscle fibers. Rest days give your muscles the opportunity to repair the tears that occur during training. It gives your bones the opportunity to rebuild and become stronger. This post-workout 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 time to recover, adapt and benefit from the first workout. Rest allows your body to truly take advantage of your exercise efforts.


Rest days are also crucial to building and sustaining your motivational levels. Think about it, if you never allowed yourself a break from something, even something you love, you’d start to get bored and burn out. I mean really, you can only go shopping so often before the thrill begins to wane. It’s the same with exercise, not only do we need variety to keep it interesting and effective, but we need breaks. While absence can make the heart grow fonder, rest makes the motivation grow stronger.

But, what exact is a “rest” day? Am I suggesting lying around with your feet up eating cookies all day? Not quite. 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 100 plus miles a week, a rest day could be a 45-minute run at a very easy pace. But for the rest of us, a rest day is more likely to be a day without any exercise or perhaps just some low-impact work such as a 30-minute walk. 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. And as you get more fit, the definition of rest will change.

The all or nothing philosophy has got to go especially when it comes to fitness. While your regular workouts should be strenuous and challenging, enough to stress your body to make it stronger, it doesn’t have to be all out every time. And after you do go “all out” it is critical to your long-term fitness success to take a rest day. To truly improve your health and fitness don’t ignore the importance of incorporating rest days into your workout. Your body will thank you.

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