Invest in Rest…
My main demographic of clients is women. Busy women, to be precise. Kids, jobs, businesses, caring for parents… The list goes on and on. Women pulled in many directions and stretched thin.
So, if you are exhausted from every other aspect of your life, when is it a case of 'enough is enough'? When do you need to take a rest day? What are the signs?
Our training is a stress on our body, this is important to note. We can only get fitter, stronger, faster by exposing our bodies to stress and gradually building these 'stressors' to cause adaptations. This is why we add weight. reps, time to our workouts to progressively overload and in time, adapt. This all sounds great in theory and 90% of the time it works but what happens when your body cannot take any more stress? Sickness, injury, burn out and fatigue. We don't want to get here and if you suspect you are heading here STOP.
In general, I would recommend 2 rest days per week. Now this does not mean a day of Netflix and ice-cream. This means reducing intensity & volume but still enjoying movement. A long walk, a yoga session, a swim for example. These rest days will not stunt progress, the opposite in fact, it will boost your progress. Slow is fast.
Now, this can be hard to look at objectively when it comes to how we feel so a nice rule of thumb to go by when it comes to rest days is this. If you wake up on a planned training day and don't feel like training show up anyway and give it a shot. This does not include sickness... if you are sick...rest. If you're just not firing on all cylinders, reduce the intensity if needs be, move at 50% but do it. Chances are you will feel much better afterwards and that funk you were in will be forgotten.
If you wake up 2 days in a row and feel rough, it might be time to take a rest. You are an individual, so your body and situation is completely different to mine. A rest for you might be skipping your next session, getting a few extra hours sleep or maybe taking a full week off training if you are really zonked.
For people like us, i.e. not professional or competitive athletes, over training is never really going to be the issue... we are simply not doing enough. Our issue is bigger than this, it is under recovery.
Taking the rest & reducing the stress is usually the antidote. If after this break you are still feeling off, it might be something else and I would recommended seeing your doctor for a little MOT.
Yours in whole health,
Emma x
