Scheduling Your Workout And Rest Days

In the grand scheme of conquering your fitness journey, the sheer process of scheduling workout and rest days almost seems needless. In other words, there are surely more important things to concentrate on, aren’t they?

In a simple answer, no. Scheduling your workout and rest days efficiently can really make the difference with your process, particularly if you reach points where you are struggling to get any further.

Bearing this in mind, let’s take a look at how you should approach workout and rest days to get the most out of your new lifestyle.

The common mistakes made by beginners

Before we get into the meat of how exactly how to plan your days, let’s mull over a few common mistakes. These are quite important to be aware of, for the simple reason that so many people just starting a fitness journey make them time and time again. Let’s take a look.

Prioritizing accordingly

When it comes to your new journey, there’s no doubt that your priorities need to change. One of the big reasons behind a lot of failures, as we’ve alluded to several times, is because people say they “can’t” do something. Most of the time, this is because they are just placing lower priority on their fitness task.

The point we’re trying to make here is that you should schedule your workouts around your current lifestyle to make them convenient. Don’t try and fool yourself into thinking that you don’t have time for your desired amount each week, you can make time if you prioritize accordingly.

Skipping rest days

Another common mistake in the eyes of the beginner is to just skip rest days. This course of action is almost understandable, as the theory tends to be that the more exercise you do the stronger your body will become.

While we can’t disagree with such a statement, rest days are absolutely crucial for the growth of your muscles and without them your progress will stall. We’ve got more on this topic slightly later.

The aggressive beginner

In a similar vein to above, a lot of beginners are just too aggressive with their workouts. They attempt to cram in five workouts a week, and such an amount is just too much for the body which isn’t used to exercising. During the early days, there’s certainly nothing wrong with just two workouts per week.

The importance of rest days

We touched on this in the last section of the chapter, speaking about the misconception of rest days.

In short, they are utterly important and without them, your body isn’t going to benefit. Every time you put your body through a workout, you are breaking down your muscles. These same muscles need time to repair, which is where rest days come in.

If you don’t provide such days, your muscles will be subjected to far too much stress.

So, what’s a general rule when it comes to rest days? Generally, you should wait between 24 and 48 hours before training the same muscle group again.

In truth, there are countless other factors to consider and something seemingly trivial such as your sleep can cut or lengthen this recovery process. As a ballpark figure, between one or two days fits perfectly though.

It’s at this point that some people might throw a curveball into the equation and ask about athletes. Naturally, they don’t wait two days between training.

The big difference here is that their bodies have been used to years of training, while their whole environment is also tailored to training and muscle recovery. As such, their recovery periods are much shorter.

How should you split your workout and rest days?

Following on from the above, let’s now look at ways in which your workout and rest days can be split to suit your body. As we all know, there’s no one-fits-all approach here, not everybody is going to be able to follow the same routine.

One thing that we do suggest should be constant across routines is the position of your rest days. It’s recommended to always rest for one day between workouts, meaning that you’ll never combat two workouts in succession.

For example, if you were working out three times per week, the most obvious solution would be to train on the Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This workout also incorporates a two day rest period over the weekend, but that’s completely fine.

If you want to increase your level to four sessions per week, simply start your week a day earlier. Train on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday – with this meaning that you truly do get a day of rest between every session.

There will be occasions where you will miss one workout, and the trick here is to just make sure that this is where the mistake stops. If you stick to a two-in-a-row rule, where you never miss two workouts in a row, it will serve you remarkably well.