The Importance of Rest Days For Runners

Does this dilemma sound familiar? You wake up feeling sleepy and sluggish. You have heavy legs and sore muscles; you are definitely feeling the effects of your last few workouts. You grapple with your tired body, pulling yourself up and out the door, convincing yourself that once you start running, everything will feel better.

Your training has been going well and you would like to keep it that way. Pushing through that blah feeling and continuing your training sessions is the best way to improve and surpass the competition, right?

… Right???

We’ve all agonised over to-rest-or-not-to-rest scenarios. Let’s take a look at why frequent, planned rest days are so critical in the scheme of staying healthy and getting faster.

Fitness gains in running follow the principle of progressive overload. This is just a fancy way of saying that in order to keep getting better, you need to keep challenging yourself.

This means that if you want to keep seeing improvements in running performance, you’ll need to keep challenging yourself with increasingly difficult training. Running the same route at the same pace day after day will get you fit to a point, but then you will plateau. If you want to continue to improve, you’ll have to add some intensity or additional kilometres to your training.

Following the principle of progressive overload, you may be tempted to keep adding more and more mileage and intensity to your workouts in order to see significant gains in performance. Not so fast.

It's not possible to keep making your workouts longer and harder indefinitely. Training actually causes micro-damage to your body’s tissues, and if they aren't given time to recover, you’ll not only never see the fitness gains you’re hoping for, but will also probably end up with an injury.

Training without proper rest has also been shown to lead to a myriad of not-so-fun-effects, such as:

• Decreased performance
• Constant fatigue
• Overuse injuries
• Altered hormones
• Poor sleeping patterns
• Decreased immune function
• Loss of appetite
• Mood swings

We'll take a pass on all of those, thanks!

Regardless of how fantastic you feel afterwards, when you finish a hard run, you're not actually gaining any fitness while you're out there. The fitness gains happen after the workout, when you're sitting on the couch being the laziest version of yourself possible. A bit counterintuitive, but a slight shift in thinking sheds a lot of light on why rest is so incredibly important.

The workout is the stimulus; the rest is when you reap the benefits.

Your workout provides the stress that will make your body adapt and grow stronger. But without the rest, all you've done is break down your body without gaining any benefits. Taking a rest day allows your body to absorb the training, adapt to the stress, and grow stronger. It also ensures that your on days are on, which allows you to gain more from future workouts.

Most experts recommend taking scheduled rest days every week. Working planned time off into your schedule while you're healthy reduces the risk of having to take unplanned rest days down the track due to injury or extreme fatigue. Many top-level athletes will agree that consistency is the most important aspect of training.

Taking rest days doesn't have to mean becoming the king or queen of all couch potatoes for a day (although it certainly can), but it does mean that you should avoid running. If you're one of those people who feels guilty or stressed about taking a day off from training completely (we feel ya), there are a number of ways you can still work towards achieving your running goals, such as:

• Working on your mental game, whether it's race visualisation, training reflections and adjustments, or goal-setting.
• Planning logistics: Get all your ducks in a row for your next race or adventure.
• Running your errands so that come tempo or interval day, you don't have to worry about anything except completing your workout.
• Stretching, foam rolling, or working on a few simple stabilisation exercises to improve performance and decrease the chance of injury.
• Spending time with the non-runners in your life will go a long way toward keeping you emotionally healthy in the long run. Remember, hard training does not mean having to sacrifice your friends and loved ones!