There is no doubt that people exercise for a wide variety of reasons. Some exercise to achieve a specific physical appearance. Some exercise to avoid lifestyle-caused diseases. Some exercise for mental health purposes. No matter what you’re goal or purpose is as an athlete or a fitness enthusiast, having a specified rest day in a week is crucial to your recovery and progress.
Whether you take a light walk at the mall or stay in a massage chair, having a rest day will help alleviate the soreness from your workouts. Needless to say–but you may need reminding, anyway–overworking your muscles will have counter effects on your body, further hindering you from achieving your goals.
What happens to the muscles during exercise?
During a workout, muscles are being minutely torn. It may sound severe, but it’s perfectly normal when performing resistance training. The harder you workout, the bigger the tears. However, when you start going overboard, muscle strain and serious injuries will take place.
Additionally, these tears are essential to building muscle. When they are torn, “satellite cells from outside the muscle fibers… rush to the area of damage. These cells replicate, mature into grown cells, and fuse to your muscle fibers.” As a result, new muscle fibers are formed, and muscle groups grow bigger.
Muscles usually need 48 hours of recovery after being trained. This is why alternating between muscle groups is essential to recovery. Here are two things that can help with muscle recovery:
Massage
Because muscle growth depends so much on inflammation, scientists are skeptical of ways that reduce this. Ice baths and pain-killers, for example, hinder muscle repair and growth. However, a study has shown that this is not the case for massages.
According to this study, a massage reduces inflammation while also allowing growth and repair. Their findings suggest that massage triggered genes that are responsible for alleviating inflammation, and it also “promoted the creation of mitochondria.” This is an indicator of muscle fitness because “the fitter a muscle cell is, the more mitochondria it tends to have.” Getting an Osaki massage chair would be a good idea.
Sleep
One of the many benefits of sleep is increasing muscle-building and recovery. During REM sleep, the body produces human growth hormone (HGH) that helps repair the muscles and promote muscle growth. When you sleep, tissue growth is supported as blood flow to the muscles increase. REM sleep also relaxes the body, reducing stress and other kinds of pains.
Because exercise gets your body pumped up, it’s imperative to avoid strenuous forms of exercise two hours before sleeping. Aside from this, exercise also helps you have a better quality of sleep. This means that you won’t be waking up frequently in the middle of the night and feel more well-rested. Therefore, getting 7-9 hours of sleep every night should be incorporated into your lifestyle.
As much as exercising is crucial to your health, overworking the body may lead to painful–and often expensive–consequences. This is why having a rest day is essential to reaching your fitness goals because you may not know it, but you’re already stopping your body from recovering and building muscle.