How Many Rest Days Should I Take?
It’s important to schedule rest days into your training. At Paragon Training Methods, we program a minimum of 2 rest days per week. Technically, Saturday is a 3rd rest day as we prioritize the bulk of our program around training 4 times per week.
If feeling good, we encourage people to “choose their own adventure” on Saturdays via Olympic lifting, our scheduled conditioning or pump session, or sliding in the community class at their gym.
Our goal is sustainability, so we like giving you the option to choose whatever sounds appealing based on how we’re feeling physically and what we’re craving.
Why Rest Days Matter
The point of a rest day is just that – it should allow our body to rest & recover so that we can positively adapt. More is not always better.
If our boss asked us to come to work 7 days a week for months on end, we’d get burnt out, become less efficient at our job and completing tasks, feel increasingly unmotivated, etc. Yet, take a lil vacay and some time off, and we come back renewed and ready to crush it.
Our body is no different: We need to recover just as hard as we train!
Should a rest day mean we become an immobile couch potato? Not that either.
We’re a big advocate of tracking steps and netting 7-8,000 steps per day, regardless of whether we train or not. It’s great to spend an hour at the gym, but it’s arguably more important how we spend that other 23 hrs.
Easy Ways To Get More Steps
- Walk for 10-20 mornings morning and night
- Skip the elevator, take the stairs
- Walk while you take phone calls
- Park as far away as possible in parking lots
- Walk on your lunch break
- Walk around between lifting sets
- Walk a 400m lap or two after working out
Also, a quick plug as it’s common to see people drop their caloric intake on rest days with the justification that they’re “doing less.”
This may or may not be great practice. Glycogen stores are delayed in replenishing, so if we take down food on rest days, we’re less equipped to crush it when we return to the gym.
At @paragontrainingmethods, we typically prefer nutrition goals stay consistent and NOT change on non-workout days. Thus we’re not usually a fan of big fan of “rest day & training day” macro protocols or carb cycling for most super-active individuals.
Big Takeaways
- Rest 2-3 days/wk
- 7-8k steps every day
- Consider keeping food/carb intake the same every day
At Paragon Training Methods, we have the life-changing remote workouts, coaching, and online fitness community you’ve been searching for to help you build muscle, achieve your goals, and look/feel your best in just 30-90 minutes per day.
