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The way you handle your rest days can have a big impact on your training progress. As a disciplined strength athlete, the problem usually isn't that you take training breaks, it's that you don't schedule enough rest days into your training rhythm.
For enthusiastic weightlifters, rest days can feel like sheer torture. My experience as a personal trainer in Zurich has shown that many people feel undisciplined and weak if they're not training six or even seven days a week. But if you look at the most successful athletes, four to five training days at most is the norm.
Those who train six or seven days a week usually make slower progress than those who deliberately schedule rest days. Of course there are exceptions. But unless you happen to have been born with truly exceptional genetics, you should build your training plan around the most successful principle, not the exceptions to the rule.
It's a growth day, not time off
Adjust your mindset like this:
- See training days as "stimulus days" and
- See rest days as "growth days."
When you take a rest or growth day, you build more muscle, refill your glycogen stores more easily, and give your nervous system the chance to return to an optimal state. That doesn't just help you make faster progress, it also improves your performance in the gym the next day.
Your body has limited resources. If you invest more of them into training days than into growth days, your muscles have fewer resources available to grow.
On rest days, your nervous, immune and hormonal systems have the chance to return to a state that enables growth and performance. When you're rested, you can perform at a higher level, which makes your training more effective.
Growth days help you directly, then, because they let your body rest. But they also help indirectly, because they give it more strength to draw on during training.
A big nutrition mistake
Most strength athletes reduce their calorie or carbohydrate intake on rest days, following the usual recommendations. That's a mistake, though.
The assumption is that the body doesn't burn as much as on training days, so calories and carbs should be cut. If your goal is purely fat burning, this approach can be helpful. But if you want to build as much muscle and strength as possible, you should think of these days as an investment.
If you eat fewer calories and carbs, your muscles won't be refilled with glycogen, and you won't be able to take advantage of insulin's anabolic benefits.
Speed up growth on growth days
Insulin is the most anabolic hormone in the body. It prevents catabolism and promotes anabolism, meaning protein synthesis. Put simply: it speeds up muscle formation. It also activates mTOR, which triggers muscle growth and increases the glucose supply in the muscles. Muscles full of glycogen are, by definition, anabolic. Bonus: a fuller muscle is also a stronger muscle!
So if your goal is maximum muscle growth and strength gains, it's important that you eat enough high-quality carbs and protein on these rest/growth days. Think of these days as the only days your body can actually build muscle. You surely don't want to hold that back with too few nutrients, right? So at the very least keep your usual calorie intake, or increase it slightly.
How many growth days per week – and when?
Most strength athletes should train four days a week. It's fine to train five days now and then, but that's not a long-term solution.
Rule number 1 is to avoid two rest days in a row. Your performance usually drops after that much time off. Here's an example of what an ideal training week could look like:
Monday: Training day 1
Tuesday: Training day 2
Wednesday: Growth day 1
Thursday: Training day 3
Friday: Growth day 2
Saturday: Training day 4
Sunday: Growth day 3
How do you structure your training days?
In our example, your performance is highest on Thursday and Saturday. So make these two days your most intense training days. Monday should be challenging, but not too much so, since another workout day follows on Tuesday. You could, for example, increase the reps but not the weights.
Regardless of which split you use, here's my recommendation for the intensity of your training days:
Monday: Moderate load and volume
Tuesday: Highest training volume
Wednesday: Growth day 1
Thursday: Intense training
Friday: Growth day 2
Saturday: Intense training
Sunday: Growth day 3
Don't focus on the wrong things
The only thing that counts in training is results. Full stop. That's what you should measure yourself against, not the number of training days or hours.
If you want maximum muscle growth and progress, you need rest, or growth days, along with optimal nutrition on those days.
Invest in your next workout
Say you have a competition on Friday and need to deliver an absolute peak performance. What do you do the day before? Run a marathon? Do sprints or an intense workout?
No, you'd give your body rest. And that's exactly how you should view your rest days. You should do everything you can to put your body in the best possible starting position for the next day. That applies to nutrition, supplementation and training.
Stimulate, recover, grow
Training is actually quite simple: the training session exists to trigger the biochemical process that tells your body to adapt and grow. Once that's been triggered, doing more just drains your resources.
Once you've triggered the right response, just give your body the chance to do its job, without getting in its way. Instead, support it, with the right nutrition.
Suboptimal workouts can happen from time to time, but they shouldn't happen because you haven't recovered enough from your previous training. The biggest problem with insufficient recovery is that it adds up. It only makes a small difference for your next workout, but over time you can kiss your fast training gains goodbye.
So: Train smarter, not harder!
Looking for professional support with your fitness and nutrition plan? I can help you as a personal trainer in Zurich. Just send me an email, I'd love to hear from you!