What to do on your days off from working out for best results

Everyone knows working out is important. And those who do workout often do it one to three times per week, but what are you supposed to do on your days off?

Should you take it easy and relax? Should you not have days off? Should you do cardio on the days in-between?

You’ll find tons of different answers on the internet, some are valuable, most are bad advice. I’m here to tell you the truth about what you should do on your days off from working out.

Luckily, it’s not rocket science, it’s simple advice that will make your progress better and your recovery more rejuvenating.

Taking days off is important

If you scroll through instagram reels regularly, you’ll probably see many fitness influencers who basically live in the gym. They are there all day everyday, lifting heavy weights and spreading poor fitness advice. It will likely make you think you have to do the same thing to get great results.

But that’s not the truth. You don’t have to set up shop at the squat rack. If you are a competitive body builder, you may benefit from being in the gym everyday, but for everyone else who wants to just be fit and healthy, you need days off from working out.

“Rest days” is the term you’ll most often hear associated with days off from working out. These days are meant to help you recover from your working out days so that you can make the most of your workouts.

Believe it or not, more isn’t usually better when it comes to working out. Working out everyday and never taking rest days will actually hinder your progression, not enhance it.

For most people, working out 1-3 days per week is optimal (1 day per week is great for beginners and 3 days is great for the more advanced lifters). And taking at least one rest day between workouts will help produce the best results.

But what do you do on a rest day?

Rest days don’t mean you lounge on the couch all day

Rest days can easily be misunderstood. It sounds like you should just sit around and do nothing. I mean, that’s what resting is, right?

But sitting around and doing nothing is actually going to worsen your recovery. Think about it this way, how do you feel after a long car ride? Pretty stiff and immobile, right? That’s exactly what happens when you lounge around on your rest days. You get stiff and immobile which worsens recovery and makes muscle building more challenging.

Your next workout won’t be effective if you can’t exercise through a good range of motion. And poor mobility is associated with higher risk of injury when exercising.

The best approach for maximizing your rest days is to use active recovery techniques.

Active recovery is the best approach

Active recovery is exactly how it sounds, you recover actively. Instead of lounging around, you stay active. This helps improve muscle recovery by stimulating blood flow and keeping stiffness at bay.

Light activities like walking, doing mobility exercises or yoga, and doing chores around the house are the type of active recovery techniques we are talking about. You can easily overdo it with activity just like you can under-do it.

We want them to be light activities that aren’t strenuous but still promote movement. A long hike or intense run are examples of overdoing it.

Another way you can help stimulate muscle growth and recovery is by doing “workout snacks” and “trigger sessions.”

Workout snacks are when you take a quick “snack” break and do some push-ups or bodyweight squats. It’s essentially a way to promote movement throughout the day. Doing 2-4 workout snacks per day can help promote active recovery.

Trigger sessions, coined by MindPump, are when you “trigger” the body to keep sending muscle building signals using bodyweight and band-assisted exercises.

Working out signals our muscles to grow, but this signal only lasts for up to 48 hours - and that varies from person to person. The further away you get from the workout, the weaker that signal gets.

When you do one of these trigger sessions, that signal is kept alive longer. An example of a trigger session would be 1 -2 sets of 10 repetitions of bodyweight push-ups, bodyweight squats, band curls, and banded overhead press. Doing this easy trigger session 1-3x per day will help keep the muscle building signal stronger and alive longer which can help promote better recovery and muscle synthesis.

What to do if you feel like you over did it

It’s pretty easy to overdo it in a workout. There’s a fine line of the perfect amount of exercise and it takes practice to know where that line is (working with a personal trainer can help you find that line much easier). But there are some things you can do when you find that you have overdone it in your workout.

But first, what are the signs and symptoms that you overdid it?

• One of the easiest signs is that you are super sore immediately after the workout. A great workout will make you feel better than when you started, if you’re super sore right after, you definitely overdid it.

• You are super sweaty and exhausted. Sweating isn’t always a sign of overtraining, but profusely sweating is. Having a t-shirt that’s drenched in sweat means your workout was more cardio than strength training. A good workout will have adequate rest and appropriate resistance: both of which aren’t correlated with profuse sweating and ehaustion.

• You get bad sleep that night. A hard days work often promote good sleep that night, but a workout that was too hard will do the opposite. Working out too intensely will send a strong stress signal to the body that puts us into fight or flight by spiking our cortisol hormone (the stress hormone). A large spike in this hormone is bad for sleep.

• Your muscles ache the next day. Like point number one, muscle soreness is not an indicator of a great workout, it’s the opposite. It is normal to feel a little it of soreness the next day, especially when you do something new, but it should feel like a good soreness, not a debilitating one.

These are some of the signs of overtraining to look out for, but now let’s talk about what you can do if you think you have overtrained.

Active recovery still applies, but you have to be a bit more strategic about it and really emphasis the light activity part. Anything to strenuous will only make matters worse.

Walking and easy mobility exercises or yin yoga will be your goto active recovery techniques. And you are better doing short, more frequent walks and mobility / yin yoga sessions throughout the day than you are doing one long walk or one long mobility / yin yoga session.

An example day would be doing 2-3, 10-15 minute walks accompanied by 2-3, 5-15 minute mobility / yin yoga sessions.

Though it isn’t fun, cold water exposure (yes, I mean ice baths) has been shown to greatly reduce muscle soreness and inflammation and promote better recovery. You can always follow with a warm shower to help reduce the shock from the cold water.