I want to talk a bit about rest and recovery. I've been really hammering training recently and my body is certainly feeling it.
For anyone who's got a fitness smart watch or a data tracker, like a whoop, you can get information about your training loads, HRV, sleep etc. which is all be neatly bundled together by these devices to let you know if you body is showing signs of overtraining/under-recovering.
Today was one of those days. Given my sleep, overnight HRV, and acute training data, my watch suggested that I took the day off to recover. I'm quite enjoying using these modern tools as an insight into taking rest days. As it happens, when I woke up this morning, I felt like I didn't want to train today, so the fact my watch suggested it anyway gives me confidence that the data is correct.
For those of you who don't have these one of these handy devices, I would suggest using your intuition to guide you when to take some more time to rest. If you really don't want to train and feel tired and achy, chances are you should take it easy that day.
Now I also want to talk about modalities of rest. Taking a day off doesn't mean you have to do nothing, nor should you. There are actually much better, healthier and more efficient ways of promoting recovery.
First and foremost, during the day, we should still be trying to get lots of steps in, this is known as active recovery and it also helps us to stay healthy rather than just remaining inactive the whole day.
Secondly, I have been doing a minimum of 15 minutes of mobility work every day to help keep me moving well, reduce muscle tightness and improving my range of motion. This is something I continue to do on my days off training to keep the body ticking over. It doesn't add any strain to the muscles and actually helps promote blood flow which aids recovery.
Thirdly, I still aim to hit my protein targets and maintain my baseline diet on rest days as though it's a typical training day. This provides my body with all the nutrients it needs to recover effectively. However, I just skip the pre and post session meals.
Fourth, is, I try to get as much sleep as possible the night of my rest days. I usually aim for 8-9hrs on so that when I wake up the following day, I am fully recovered and raring to go.
So these are my 4 hacks for recovering effectively when taking a day off training. I usually am govererned by the data provided by my watch and don't take dedicated days off each week. This has worked well for me and stops me under training, something which can kill progress just as easily as overtraining.
As ever, I'll keep you posted with my progress.
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