The Most Boring Superpower Ever

People don’t brag about how much rest they get the way they brag about how much they bench press or how fast they run a mile or a marathon.

Rest is not sexy. 

Yet it is every bit as important a part of good fitness as any exercise routine you will ever do.

It may even be more important because when we rest we are allowing our bodies to recover from recent workouts and we are decreasing injury risk.

Yep, rest may be boring and maybe nobody brags about it, but it is a legitimate superpower.

Why Rest?

When we exercise, we physically tax our bodies. We put stress on our muscles and joints. We can be tired, suffer inflammation, dehydrate, and the like..

If we are resistance training, we create microscopic muscle tears that ultimately make us stronger but take time to heal.

This is all good over the long-term but over shorter periods of time, our bodies require time to recover.

We recover by resting.

So when we ache, feel stiff, or get exhausted, our bodies are communicating something important.

They are telling us to take some time to recover. They are telling us to rest.

These aches and pains are internal gauges flashing a warning the same way a gauge in our car flashes red when we are low on gas or the engine is overheating.

Injuries Are Bad 

People get injured all the time when they are trying to get fit.

This is ironic and a shame, because injuries are bad.

When we get injured, it might:

1. Disrupt a good habit that we either spent a lot of effort forming or were in the process of forming. 

2. Take an emotional toll and cause frustration and other negative emotions.

3. Negatively affect other areas of our lives like sleep habits or mood etc.

4. Hurt, which is never fun.

5. Set us back in terms of goals we’ve set.

6. Put us at risk of further aggravation especially if we ignore the internal cues.

7. Have greater negative effects the older we get as recovery times lengthen (see more on this below)

Why We Don’t Rest

There are several reasons we don’t rest properly and everybody is a little different. Here are a few of them.

Ignoring Internal Cues -  We are not reading our internal cues right. Maybe we are ignoring the aches or exhaustion or we have falsely learned they don’t mean anything important.

I wrote about reading internal cues in a post called The Captain’s Dashboard.

Musterbation - 

Sometimes people can be really hard on themselves.

They experience a strong sense of urgency like they must workout or else they will get punished somehow or be a failure.

That sense of urgency or irrational I Should self-talk can be incredibly powerful in people who tend to be overly hard on themselves. It can drown out those real bodily cues.

Comparisonitis

Some people compare themselves to others who are more advanced and feel the need to  compete.

This one has been exacerbated by social media where professional fitness experts market themselves by showing off their prowess.

Maybe we forget that by definition improvement comes from self-competition not neighbor comparison. 

I wrote much more about this here in a post called The Cure for FOMO.

Fear of Slipping

Some people think they can’t miss a workout even when their body is telling them to rest, because, if they do, they will permanently slip back into old unhealthy patterns like inactivity.

Often, this fear has a behavioral component because this type of thing happened before. Maybe we were getting on a healthy course and then missed a workout, then missed another, and then we slipped back to an inactive lifestyle.

This one can be tough, because there is an experiential component. It happened before.

If this is you, just remember, past performance is not Indicative of future results!

Pro Tips for Rest

Here is a list of pro tips for building rest into your health and fitness routine.

Schedule Rest Days

You don’t need to workout everyday.

This is especially true for strength training. You can do strength training two or three times/week and that is great even at the intermediate level. You can build muscle this way.

Let your muscles heal. You don’t need to lift everyday bro. You can refigure this when you’re Lou Ferrigno.

Tune In

Our body communicates clearly.

It sends us all kinds of signals. It tells us when we are hungry or when we are tired.

It also tells us when we need to rest. We might feel tired or we might ache or maybe we are stiff.

Take a few minutes a day and tune into these signals.

The longer you do this, the better you get at discerning whether you could use a day off or not, or whether you might have an injury.

Make Time

Schedule time everyday to move your body. This is the greatest gift you can give yourself.

This is especially true if you are busy, because once you begin to move everyday, you will find that you have more energy for all that busy stuff.

In fact, using energy to exercise is the only thing in the universe that does not follow the laws of conservation of mass and energy, because, somehow,  the more energy you use the more you have.

Plus, making time for movement everyday allows you to rest a day and then pick up the next day without having to fit it into your schedule somewhere at the last minute.

Active Rest

When I say Rest I don’t mean we have to stay in bed all day.

Rest can mean avoiding intense exercise, while still taking a walk, or a casual bike ride, or doing some stretching or light yoga once or twice per week, depending on our level of fitness.

It might mean skipping a workout altogether if we are exhausted or experiencing more severe aches or pains.

Active Rest is just the term fancy people use to say they're going to get some very light exercise one day.

The Rested Workout

I take an unplanned active rest day once or twice per month. I take a day off even though I was planning to exercise, because my body is dragging or my shoulder is tweaking a bit or whatever.

I have little doubt I will return the next day and I haven’t been injured in years even though I used to get injured frequently.

The beauty of this approach is that I often have my very best workouts the day after I take an unscheduled rest day.

I LOVE when this happens and it happens consistently.

It’s like my body is saying, thank you for listening to me yesterday Phil, now I am ready to rock!

Rest But Don’t Get Too Comfy

Take a day and do active rest. Take two if you need it or if you think you might be injured. 

If you think you are injured, go see a doctor.

But if it was just aches, don’t take too much time. Don’t take a week.

Your body begins to give up gains faster than you think.

If you take a week off running for example, you’ll feel it if you go out hard that eighth day.

Plus, the longer you take off, the more the laziness begins to creep up on you.

Aging and Rest

Ok, one last tip.

The older we get, the more important rest becomes for a few reasons. 

We require more recovery time after workouts, so if we are feeling aches or stiffness, our body is REALLY telling us something important.

Second, our bodies heal more slowly the older we get. This means that if we do get injured, we pay a larger price in terms of how long before we can start working out again.

Third, the older we get, the more risky exercising with an injury becomes in terms of complications arising from the injury.

Rest and Sleep are different but they are related. If you get your sleep game and your rest game on point, chances are you will age slower, feel better, and avoid injuries.

I wrote about How to Get Better Sleep here.