I have a love/hate relationship with rest days. A friend of mine once said to me, “you don’t know how to rest…” It’s true. There’s so much going on in my life with work, teaching, socially, and with my ministry, that I have gotten out of the habit of resting. Well, more accurately, I gotten out of the habit of resting voluntarily.
As you can imagine, when I started Crossfit, the idea of taking a day off from Crossfit seemed natural because the coaches were quick to tell me that I needed to stick to a schedule of either one day, one off or two days on and one day. Try not to do three days in a row without then taking at least two days off. When I started Crossfit, I accepted that because in the beginning, I was always sore after the workouts.
Then as I progessed and was able to do two days on, one day off, I noticed that maybe, I didn’t want that “one day off”. I wanted to keep going. At this point, I’m going to blame two things; my obsessive personality and the Crossfit Games Regionals. Watching the Crossfit Regionals made me want to do more; it made me want to be better at Crossfit. Also, training for the Spartan Sprint also got me more excited about doing my workouts.
But here’s the thing; I’m not going to the Crossfit Games. I don’t have that as a goal. So ideally, taking a day off should be no big deal. Only Games athletes workout out 2-3 times a day everyday. I don’t need to do that. So why is it so hard to take a day off? I’m going to blame it partly on consistently great challenging programming on the part of our coaches. I will blame part of it on having a really strong love for athletics. But lastly, I blame it on not knowing what to do with myself fitness-wise on those days off. I read something that said “just sit down” on your rest days and realistically, I know that’s not going to happen.
So what should you do on your rest days? Well there are rest days and active rest days. There are pros and cons for both. A Rest day is when you don’t work out and an active rest day is when you still get moving, but at a super low intensity, like going for a walk, riding a bike or playing a low intensity sport.
So I decided to look up what I should do on a rest day versus an active recovery day. I found the following article, “ACTIVE RECOVERY & THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REST DAYS AND RECOVERY DAYS“. Read it and decide how you’ll spend your next rest day.
