Smart ideas for rest days

Having convinced yourself that your rest days are worth honouring, what to do on a day you are not running? After all, you want to make even the down time count, right? Well you could try…

• Take a long walk – take the dog, take the kids, borrow one or the other or just take yourself off for a hike. Active recovery is by far the most effecting and hiking fits the bill perfectly. It is a great low intensity, moving activity that will help release some of the stiffness generated by running.
• Go do something really different – get yourself to the climbing wall, take to the pool, jump on the bike. Any activity that keeps your body moving but in a different way to your running will aid your recovery. That said, a 100 mile bike ride might be pushing that boundary a touch too far.
• Go yogi – make the most of the opportunity to get a good stretch, a yoga session or some pilates. They will all contribute to your overall conditioning and increase the ability of the soft tissues to cope with the stresses and strains that you accumulate through training.
• Volunteer at a race – well none of them happen without a team of voluteers and the atmosphere on the support side of the equation can be as invigorating and inspiring as actually running. It’s great mental reset.
• Get a massage – following a hard running day or a following a signigicant block of training, a massage is a great way to assist your recovery. You’ll feel the benefit in both mind and body and it will help to mobilise your lymphatic system (which needs muscle movement to circulate the lymph). If you schedule one on the day before a hard run or a race, let your therapist know so the massage can be devised accordingly.

Keep eating well and drinking your fluids so you are well prepared to step back into the next stage of the training programme and you should find you are running stronger in both mind and body. Go team you!

Training for spring marathons is reaching that critical station. The long runs are reaching their peak just as the days are getting longer. It might be tempting to skip on the rest days, to make the most of your increasing fitness. You’ll be missing a trick.

Most training plans work on the basis of progressive overload. Rest days are scheduled into the programme to enable the body to capitalise on the gradual increase in the effort. Recovery days are when the body deals with the metabolic consequences of your training efforts. This includes managing the inflammation and fibre damage within the muscle tissue and enabling the immune system to maintain its operational capacity.

Whilst taking some downtime may feel completely against the grain, it is the time that your training gains are consolidated, l time to reduce the effects of stress that the training sessions have generated. In the grand scheme of things, recovery days improve the overall quality of the programme overall.

This is especially the case if you have a niggling ache or pain that you have tried to pass off as nothing to worry about. Taking a rest day when you are feeling slightly run down could prevent something developing into a much more serious situation that would need far more down time to rectify.

Why you need those rest days…

Muscles take a pounding when running – that’s obvious. As you progress through each training block in your plan, you will be accumulating inflammation and cellular damage both of which reduce your capacity to generate power and stamina. Pile further training on top and you will notice a point at which your performance falls away. Beyond this point, you are into overtraining territory – in fact, further training will be counterproductive. Acknowledging the rest days in your programme and giving yourself permission to take them will allow your body to capitalise on your training effort and enable you to train again, stronger than before.

Even if you don’t feel sore, the cellular damage that training wreaks on your body will still be present in your system. The markers of skeletal and cardiac tissue damage will be present in the blood stream; this is what you body’s lymphatic and other waste processing systems are designed to handle. Continuing to heap further need on those systems by not taking those rest days where indicated, will only backfire, particularly as they are also integral to you immune system.

By overloading the lymphatic system, the capacity of this key component of your immune system to perform all it’s roles becomes compromised. This leads to one of the key indicators of overtraining, the common cold or similar viral infection. Suddenly a skipped rest day has turned into a far longer layoff.

So let yourself take those rest days. They are as important as your training days in the overall scheme of things. What to do on a rest day? That’s the next post.