Taking time off gives your body and mind time to reset, recharge and recover. Your muscles will be less sore and fatigued and, instead of just going through the motions, you'll be able to give your next workout the effort it needs to get results.
Yes, it is definitely ok to take a week off, in fact your body will love you for it. You'll feel a little guilty and weird for a few days but you will also appreciate not being sore, and getting a little extra time back in your schedule.
Taking one week off from the gym is unlikely to result in significant muscle loss. While there may be some temporary changes, such as a decrease in strength and power, actual muscle mass loss is not expected to occur within such a short period of time (1)(2).
Yes, it is. A short break every once in a while is good for the body. It gives your body a chance to rest and recover. When you get back into it, the body responds by showing greater affinity for faster progress.
Working out 7 days a week is not necessarily bad for your muscles, but it can lead to overtraining if you are not careful. Overtraining can result in decreased performance, increased risk of injury, and reduced gains. To avoid overtraining, it is important to give your muscles adequate rest and recovery time.
Downtime between workouts (whether you're lifting, doing cardio or training for a sport) is when our bodies have a chance to actually build muscle. Strenuous workouts cause muscle breakdown, while rest allows our bodies to build it back up.
If you don't sleep well or long enough consistently for a few days, your reaction time, immunity, cognitive functions, and endurance will decrease, with compounds the symptoms of overtraining. Dr. Wickham says that two rest days in a row should be enough to reset the body back into a normal sleep schedule and cycle.
Deciding how many rest days a week you should take depends on your fitness level and exercise intensity. But most people should aim for 1 to 3 rest days per week. You can use your rest days to support recovery by doing light exercise and working on mobility. Your workout schedule may not always go as planned.
According to Jesse Shaw, D.O., associate professor of sports medicine at the University of Western States, this is typical for the general population, too: It usually takes between three and four weeks to start noticing a decrease in strength performance with a complete cessation of activity.
Even if we're super-fit to begin with, stopping training altogether will result in a pretty rapid degradation in fitness. Admittedly, the losses in the first week of total inactivity are small and in the first 2-4 days there may even be fitness gains as you recover fully from prior training.
"When you go on vacation for a weekend, a week, or even two weeks, it's physiologically impossible to gain that much fat," he told BI in 2022. In addition to water weight, the food inside the stomach can actually cause the scale to go up, he added.
You look smaller because of water loss
It's used as an energy source during exercise. More importantly, glycogen binds to water. And when you lose glycogen, you also lose water. And since your muscles are ~76% water [6], they look smaller [3].
Try to plan one recovery day for every 2 to 3 days of training. Except after a competition or a very intense effort, it is ideal to avoid choosing 2 consecutive rest days.
However, skipping a workout here and there typically doesn't cause weight gain, and taking regular rest days is healthy for muscle recovery and preventing injury.
Your rest day nutrition should include plenty of protein from a variety of sources, complex carbohydrates to fuel recovery, and healthy fats to help bring down inflammation created by training. Aim for 20-30g protein every 2-4 hours throughout the day.
Doing 100 push-ups a day can help build muscle mass, strength, and endurance, especially in your core and upper body. But it can also increase your risk of muscle imbalances, injury, and overtraining. It's important to focus on proper form when practicing push-ups.
But in some cases, extreme exercise can damage the heart. Research is showing that a small percentage of middle-aged and older athletes who compete in endurance events over many years may be at higher risk for developing atrial fibrillation – an irregular heartbeat – and other heart problems.
A lot of people fear de-load weeks as they believe they will make them weaker, when in reality, the opposite is true. On average, you won't begin seeing reductions in strength and power until around 3 weeks away from the gym, so don't worry about that.
A good place to start is with three rest days per week. This means you'll be strength training four days out of the week. Give your muscle groups 24-48 hours between workouts to allow those muscles to recover. An upper- and lower-body four-day split is a common program that gives three rest days per week.
As long as you have the energy for it, you can do some light cardio on rest days without problems. For example, if you're giving your upper body a rest after lifting weights, nothing is stopping you from getting your feet moving with a light jog.
Working out every day is okay as long as you do not overexert yourself. It's important to take care of your body so you can produce efforts that support your goals.
If you skip rest days, it could lead to longer spells out through injury.