Strength and deconditioning : The importance of a rest day

The most important thing you can do, if you're trying to get bigger, get strong, lose weight, whatever, is to exercise with great intensity every time you step into the gym or onto the track. By the time you finish you ought to be staggering, dripping and gasping, but not hurting... endorphins will keep you from hurting, and if you're truly hurting, you're doing it wrong.

Anyway, that's the most important thing: working out hard. The second most important thing is to take a rest day, when you need it. When one lifts weights, one causes micro-tears in the muscles affected by the movement you engage. If you never allow these tears to heal, then they'll continue to get bigger, making you weak and eventually causing an injury. If you give them a day or two to heal, however, they muscle fibers will knit together, a little bigger and tougher than before, and produce a world class physique! That feeling of soreness, common to beginners and those just returning the Iron Game, is called Direct Muscle Soreness. Serious strength athletes, like power lifters, face a more insidious problem called Deep Muscle Fatigue. DMF is a leaden feeling that pervades the body, emanating in waves from the core and making it impossible to move the limbs. When the symptoms of DMF are ignored, and you keep punishing your body, you'll end up blowing a lift and hurting yourself, or find yourself simply unable to get out of bed in the morning, since advanced DMF feels like a mild form of paralysis. I can remember one of my biggest limit squats, taken earlier this summer... I had been working out hard for two weeks with little rest, and knew that a limit squat was a bad plan. I was all hyped up, though, and there were a couple of cute girls over on the cardio machines watching, and that can make a man foolish. After barely beating my old PR, I staggered two steps back, got light headed, and fainted into my two spotters arms. I was just glad that I didn't get a nose bleed. I have seen that, during a max on squat or dead lift, and worse. For the next three days, I moved through life like something out of a zombie movie, sluggish and moaning for food. It was the worst!

I say all of this because today is a good day for rest, like Dr. Seuss used to talk about a great day for up. I've been exercising hard for a full week, and just need to rest. There are bruises all over my body... my neck is bruised from back squats, my chest from bench press, and there are huge, ugly, purple blotches on my shoulders from cross-grip front squats. The ever present scuff marks on my shins, from dead lifting, are raw and ready to bleed, and I have a huge, ugly abrasion on my stomach from a clean that I almost lost at the top without racking it completely. I look like I just lost a fight with a small, angry bear, and to prevent something bad from happening I took today off and am mostly sitting still, aggravating as that is to me. Resting can be as hard as working out, but it's just as important!