An area sports medicine doctor wants people to remember that when you’re building an exercise routine, what you don’t do can be as important as what you do. Dr. Jennifer Gourdin, a primary care physician and sports medicine physician for Kaiser Permanente, says she tells her patients to put at least one or two rest days a week into their exercise routines.
“This helps with muscle recovery, and overall, it will improve your performance,” she says.
Without rest, you run the risk of “overuse injuries,” Gourdin says, as well as mental fatigue and burnout.
Rest also improves your performance over time. “People will sometimes think, ‘I’m doing this workout every day, and I’m not gaining any strength, or my run time’s not getting any faster; I’m actually getting slower. And that can be a cue that you’re overexercising.”
Over-exercising can also compromise your immune system and make you more susceptible to getting sick, the doctor adds.
Rest days keep you “more motivated and more engaged, and you typically will get more enjoyment from your routine.”
What to Do Instead
Rest days don’t have to be spent on the couch; Gourdin says a rest day is a good time for milder forms of exercise, such as a 20-minute walk or light yoga. It’s also helpful to mix it up. If a lot of your exercise comes from playing basketball, “you could do something like a light swim,” she says.
You could even just do some simple stretching. “People often forget the importance of stretching, and how that can help improve your flexibility and your athletic performance,” she says.
The point is to use different muscles than you use in your regular exercise routine and give your body time to rest and recover.
How Frequently Should You Rest?
Goudin recommends at least one to two rest days per week for adults. For kids, her rule is one hour of concentrated exercise per week for each year of age. “If you’re 7 years old, you shouldn’t be doing a particular exercise or sport more than seven hours per week, consistently.”
That’s a general rule, though. Any time you feel burned-out and unmotivated to exercise, if you’re getting sick more frequently, or if you just aren’t lifting as much or running as fast as you normally do, “those may be cues for you to incorporate more rest in your routine.”
Feature image, stock.adobe.com
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