Today we are going to go over how and why you should use proper rest days to recover from workouts faster. We’re going to talk about how to incorporate strategic rest day workouts. These workouts will increase blood flow, improve flexibility, improve cardiovascular function, and reduce the risk of injury. 

Why should I have a rest day?

You may be asking yourself why you should have a recovery day at all. Isn’t just takin the day off good enough?

Active recovery has been proven effective at speeding up recovery in between sessions resulting in more weights lifted, more miles ran, more competitions won, and more muscle gained.

I am not saying you will lose all your gains and become a shrimp because you don’t have a day dedicated to recovery. What I am saying is you will have less pain and have much faster results incorporating active recovery days 1-2 days out of the week.

How do I do it?

Thought you’d never ask. There are 4 stages to an effective active recovery day.

• Foam roll
• Stretch
• Flow
• Low intensity cardio

We will get into each of them one at a time.

Foam roll

Foam rolling has gotten a lot of accolades recently as the ultimate recovery and pain-relieving tool. Today I’m going to show you how to maximize your return when using this apparatus for recovery.

You know when you workout and the next day you have these tender spots scattered throughout the muscle you just annihilated? The pain and soreness make you move slow, stiff, and sometimes is even worse the day. This is known as DOMS (delayed muscle soreness).

A large part of that pain is built up by-products from your workout lingering inside of your muscles causing pain and inefficient sequencing of your muscles.

Using the roller to elicit large sweeping motions onto large muscle groups is going to increase circulations and encourage the movement of those by-products out of your muscle and into your blood to be filtered and gotten rid of.

Here is how to do it

Spend about 1-3min on each major muscle group throughout your body rolling in large motions making sure to cover as much space as you can. This is going to wring out your muscles like a wet towel and force the bad stuff into your circulation.

Major muscle groups

Quads

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Glutes/hamstrings

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entire back

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pecs

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Stretch

A very controversial topic, some say it works others say it doesn’t. My verdict, it depends. To keep it simple, when using techniques that use active muscle contractions to stretch out a muscle your body will naturally relax to allow for more movement to occur.

That being said here is what to do

We are going to go back over those muscles we just rolled and hit them with a stretching technique known as biphasic stretching.

How to biphasic stretch:

• Get into a position with optimal joint alignment that puts the target muscle on a stretch
• Generate as much tightness as you can throughout you entire musculature
• Occilate into and out of the stretch for your target muscles using active muscle contractions of the target muscle and antagonist (opposing muscles)
• After 10-20 reps hold the stretch for about 30-60s

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Flow

Now you want to work your muscles at a low intensity in a way that puts a loaded stretch through most muscles of the entire body. This can be done using a couple different techniques:

Stretching/yoga flows: compiling your favorite stretches or yoga positions in a sequence of 3-5 stretches is a great way to

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Flow. Make sure the stretches you pick are not passive like just sitting and touching your toes, but active such as alternating between pigeon pose or down dog.

Kettlebell flow: using a light to medium sized bell you can compile 3-5 exercises in a sequence to increase circulation and load your muscles.

Don’t get carried away remember this is for recovery, so a double kettlebell clean and press with 28kg bells is probably not at a low enough intensity.

Something like single arm swings or halos with a 12-20kg bell is better. Try to hit a different movement pattern with each exercise.

Barbell/power complex: picking 3-5 barbell or low impact plyometric exercises can be used as well. This I great for you lifters who like to feel like your lifting and struggle taking days off. This takes careful finesse to do right, make sure the weights are 60% or less of your 1rm and the reps stay 2-5 rep range to still call this a recovery workout.

Exercises like squats, push press, box jumps work good here. Again, try to hit a different movement pattern with each exercise.

Low intensity cardio

For some reason people are obsessed with HIIT. While there are some benefits to this technique it is brutal on the body and keeps you in a heightened state of stress known as the body’s fight or flight response.

On our recovery days we want to bring this state of stress down into a state known as the rest and digest state. Completing 15-30 min of low intensity cardio does the trick. It maximizes blood flow and takes all those by-products from your muscles to your detoxification centers to be excreted from the body.

Here are the rules:

• Don’t do anymore than 30 min
• Keep your HR between 105 and 130 or RPE Rate of perceived exertion (1-10, 1 being very very easy, 10 being your maximum effort)
• You should be able to hold a conversation the entire workout.

Example:

• 30 min walking on incline adjusting speed and incline periodically to maintain our heart rate parameters.
• 20 min amrap of squats, kettlebell swings, push ups, sled drags. Done at a pace slow enough to maintain the heart rate zone

Use this article to improve your strength training through smart rest days. let me know in the comments is this has helped you in any way 🙂