We know what it’s like: yesterday you pushed your legs and lungs to the limit with a sweat-soaked cycling class with the most fierce Spin instructor, Cat — and today you can barely pick up your legs to walk; or maybe you powered through your compound training HIIT routine, and now lifting a spoonful of cereal feels like the finale of an Ironman competition. The fact is, if you’re pushing yourself during your workouts, you’re probably gonna feel it for a day (or three) afterward. And that’s totally ok. In fact, it probably means you’re doing something right!

But what do you do during these achy, breaky, hard-to-take kind of days? You listen to your body, that’s what! At Studio SWEAT onDemand, we’re all about pushing ourselves to the limit — the healthy way. Because you ain’t getting any trophies for injuring yourself, or putting yourself through a tortuous routine when your body just isn’t up to it. This is why we’re huge proponents of the almighty rest day.

On the subject, Studio SWEAT’s head trainer AJ says, “No rest days means no forward progress. You have to let the muscles in your body heal in order to allow them to grow stronger.”

And it’s important that you don’t think of rest days as slovenly carbo-loading extravaganzas; think of them as a vital part of your fitness. After all, what’s happening on those rest days is actually the real deal stuff of getting fit! So sit back and relax (as if you had a choice), because we’re gonna jump into the reasons why rest days are so important for muscle recovery!

How Muscle Recovery Works
When we fiercely activate our muscles, what we’re actually doing is destroying them, in a manner of speaking. When our muscles are stressed, the actual fibers start to break apart. And when your body puts them back together again, it makes them even stronger, which is the process of muscle building. Rest days are key for this because it allows your muscles to slowly rebuild uninterrupted. And the next time you work for that muscle group, you might not notice it, but you’re a little bit stronger.

Preventing Muscle Fatigue
Muscle fatigue is a big no-no in the fitness world. It results from muscles being overworked, with depleted glycogen levels. If these levels are not replaced, you’ll experience serious fatigue that will set you back in your fitness goals. When you take a rest day, your body is doing the job of recovering these glycogen levels and maintaining your strength and performance in the long term.

Reducing Incidence of Injury
Injury is a slippery slope when it comes to working out. On the one hand, the last few reps are usually the ones that actually get you those real gains. And on the other, if you overdo it, you could be looking at some pretty gnarly injuries, which could take you out of commission altogether. Your best bet is to push yourself to your limit, whilst being aware of your body enough to know what that limit is. But if you continually work out when you’re exhausted, our lazy muscles will try to take the easy way out and substitute other, less appropriate muscle groups to pick up the slack. This results in poor form, which results in injury. A major benefit of rest days is that you’ll be allowing your body time to recharge, making sure you can focus your workouts on the right body part.

Better Sleep, Better Results
Although regular exercise boosts hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, exercise too much and you can overproduce them, resulting in some less-than-stellar sack time. When you take a proper rest day, you can recalibrate your body’s chemical balance, resulting in better sleep, and better results.

How Muscle Recovery Works
What do you think the most important factor is to building and maintaining your fitness? It’s not frequency or intensity, it’s not even your diet (though all those things are important). No, the key to crushing your fitness goals is LONGEVITY. What’s the point of working out hard for three months? No, the real work gets done over time. A long time. A lifetime, perhaps. One of the biggest benefits of taking a rest day is what it does for your mind. We all need to step away from time to time, to refresh ourselves and remember why we are doing this. And rest days give you exactly that — a chance to really listen to your body, step away from the grind and prepare yourself to give it your all tomorrow.

Well, we hope we’ve convinced you to take a day off when your body needs it. And when you’re rested and ready to get back on the fitness train, why not sign up for the best streaming fitness platform on the planet – Studio SWEAT OnDemand! We offer members unlimited access to the best virtual workouts around, with classes like cycling, TRX, HIIT, Tabata, Yoga, Barre, Kickboxing, Zumba, Pilates, and a whole lot more. And with passionate trainers, plus our worldwide community of members cheering you on, you can’t lose! So sign up for our 7-Day Free Trial, and check us out for a week. We promise we’ll give you something worth resting for!