The key is to keep your exercise in the light-to-moderate range. There is a wide range of cardio activities that pair well with rest days, including: These activities can give your body a good workout and help you burn fat, but they don’t necessarily trigger muscle growth. You can follow a program of low, moderate or vigorous cardio, including cycling and jogging. On the other hand, cardio exercises involve activities that raise your heart rate. Strength training activities such as lifting weights or doing lunges effectively break down your muscles and rebuild them stronger. One of the reasons that you can do cardio on rest days is that resistance training and cardio have different objectives and effects on your body. Cardio Exercises Versus Strength Training Even if your core muscles are feeling a little sore, you can probably squeeze in some low-key swimming. For example, if you’re giving your upper body a rest after lifting weights, nothing is stopping you from getting your feet moving with a light jog. Can you do cardio on rest days, or should you let your muscles relax completely? Can You Do Cardio on Rest Days?Īs long as you have the energy for it, you can do some light cardio on rest days without problems. You did good, and there’s nothing wrong with taking a rest day if you need it. Completing an intense workout fills you with a sense of accomplishment. You will NOT lose any progress from taking ONE day off.The “work hard, play hard” mantra is often used in the world of business, but it applies to exercise, too. And, if you’re still coming into the gym and just going through the motions there is no benefit to that. You cannot go as hard as possible EVERY DAY. At some point, the workouts are ALWAYS going to win. Taking a day off and making sure you get to bed EARLY can really aid in the recovery process and allow you to hit the next day’s workout even harder. So, if you aren’t sleeping much and are working out every day or more than once a day, you are flooding your bloodstream and brain with consistently elevated levels of cortisol. This is why people who sleep so little and don’t recover properly always crave a pastry and coffee in the morning. For example, chronically elevated cortisol levels have been shown to kill brain cells, cause premature aging in the brain, weaken the immune system, as well as cause a heightened craving for sugar and caffeine. If it’s constantly elevated, you could run into some problems. Now, cortisol, like any other hormone has its time and place in our body. You work out and the cortisol, your fight or flight hormone, helps push you through the challenge. The same goes for your body’s reaction to working out. For example, you aren’t actively telling your body to breathe as you read this, you’re just doing it. It’s all the same and it would still send back the same feedback to the brain in order to kick start the same involuntary actions that help keep us alive. My body wouldn’t know the difference from picking up a heavy barbell or heavy boulder. ![]() We evolved moving heavy things that prevented us from getting somewhere. We evolved running away from something or someone trying to eat or kill us. It just knows you’re doing something strenuous. When we workout our body doesn’t necessarily know that we’re exercising. It’s your body’s fight or flight hormone. This hormone helps facilitate the activity indirectly but still has a lasting effect on your body. The reason rest days are important is because there’s a very specific hormone that gets released into your bloodstream every time you workout. If you want to go for a leisure walk, I’m all for that but otherwise you’re still working out. A rest day is by definition a day without doing ANYTHING. The point of this blog is to discuss exactly why it’s important to take rest days and I don’t mean “active recovery.” What does that even mean? You don’t actively sleep or actively sit. You have to pay attention to the details of the movement and perform it better in order to get better at it. Just because you work out every day DOES NOT mean you’re going to get better at a movement. So, naturally when CrossFit came along, if doing one or more workouts in a day was good then doing that EVERY DAY was even better. Surplus is always a good thing in our minds. ![]() ![]() Human beings love to take a mile when you present them with an inch.
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