Defining Rest

Yesterday I wrote a little about how we need to temper our enthusiasm for working out with periods of rest.  Today I want to dive into what rest looks like, because it doesn’t always look like lying on the couch like a slug (although there are times when that is a perfectly valid way to rest!).

 

When we first start working out, we want to be building the habit of working out as much as we want to be building up our endurance and our strength.  It is better to do short workouts almost every day than one long workout and then nothing until the next Monday rolls around.  For fresh-off-the-couch fitness enthusiasts, I recommend starting with fifteen to thirty minutes of cardio on five days of the week and maybe one weight workout per week.  That leaves one day for the couch.

 

As we get more fit, our workouts can get longer and/or more intense.  We may not have a couch day every week, just days when we take the intensity down a lot (walk versus run, yoga instead of heavy weights, etc.).  We also may realize that things that used to be workouts aren’t really all that strenuous anymore—that walk to the coffee shop that used to take half an hour round trip now takes half the time and we don’t even sweat—so now it counts as activity rather than exercise.  Activity can be a form of rest, too.

 

One kind of rest that should be (but isn’t, here in Reality Land) nonnegotiable is getting enough sleep.  It is hard to fit our 7 to 9 hours of sleep in with all the other things we have to get done, but without it, we are hamstringing our ability to make progress with our workouts, not to mention the even more important parts of life.

 

Work hard and then get some rest!