“Sleep is for the weak”, “rest days are for wusses”, “no days off bro!” - If you’ve been training for even a small fraction of time, you’ve likely heard one of these phrases - I sure as hell know I have, and I can tell you that generally it’s not being said by one of the brightest crayons in the box.
In my opinion, one of the most missed aspects of training is recovery. It’s common for people in Western society to look at resting as doing less and being a sign of weakness. What I want you to know, is that this is a huge misconception, and frankly not resting is going to make you worse, not better. Every time you train, you put your body through the ringer (unless training is eating donuts on the elliptical). Training is literally an external stressor that breaks down muscle, depletes your energy, and saps your hydration. In other words, at the moment, training is making you weaker and here’s the kicker, IT’S INTENDED TO.
Let’s say you’re learning math. If your teacher doesn’t hate you, you’re going to learn the basics first right? You start with addition, and you stumble on a problem, who know’s - maybe you even fail it. Your brain hurts and life sucks, so you decide to take a break and relax for a bit (I’m guessing netflix). After going over the processes taught to you again, something miraculous happens: understanding. Now that type of problem is too easy for you, and you’re ready to push harder. In this example, you’ve added mental stress, recovered, let training sink in and then the magic happened: you adapted. The concept is the same with the body.
When you’re training, we’re trying to send you to your pain cave and we want you to put forth all of your effort. This is because if proper scaling and implementation of movements has been taken into account, you’ll recover, adapt and come back stronger. This is the point of training. However, if the dose of training is too high and the stressors outweigh your bodies ability to recover, you will see negative effects and get weaker, not stronger. So how do we know when to rest? Well, the answer is simple one: listen to your body. Look, I want you all to workout as much as possible and achieve your fitness goals. However, if you’ve been out late partying, up studying, are just not sleeping, or you feel like garbage; take the day off. You training on an already broken down system will only break you down further. This is exactly what we don’t want! This doesn’t mean that you can’t train because you’re sore, it just means you need to be smart. If you wake up, and can’t get out of bed because your body is achy and you feel mentally defeated, Murph probably isn’t a good idea that day. If you push your body past its limits, it’ll make you pay, and that payment comes in the form of illness or injury.
Be smart, train hard - but train intelligently.