Most professional athletes know the importance of the alternation between training and rest. This is not the case however, for the regular guys starting out on a workout program or the guy who just got interested in improving his health and has started to take exercise seriously. These guys usually tend to over train themselves and end up not getting the results that they were aiming for and were expecting. This is because the body actually needs the rest between training sessions to repair the damage that it absorbed during the training. It is also during this rest that the body grows and strengthens itself to adapt to the increased physical activity. Without the alternation between training and rest, the body could actually weaken instead of getting stronger.
Rest days incorporated into training sessions are essential for physiological as well as psychological reasons. Rest is necessary to allow the body to recharge and prepare itself for the next series of training exercises. Rest is also necessary to avoid falling into the trap of overtraining syndrome – a condition that leads to an overall decrease in performance. Keep in mind though that rest does not mean slouching around and doing nothing. To rest in this context, means doing light exercises to let the body recover while still keeping the body in an active physical state.
There are two kinds of rest that are needed to be alternated with training: short term rest and long term rest. Short term rest is the recovery period immediately after the training. These include the cool down exercise after the main training and the light exercises in the days after the high intensity training. Long term rest refers to rest periods that usually last for over a week and are used for training programs that last for months or even a year. Long term rest includes making changes in the training variables such as distance, time, and intensity.
The exercise principle of adaptation sheds additional light to the importance of the alternation between training and rest. According to this principle, the body naturally adjusts or “adapts” to the amount of physical demand that is put on it. If the demand increases, then it will try to make itself stronger, if the demand decreases, then it will cease to grow. Thus, this principle explains why at the onset, beginners who work out usually end up sore and exhausted from the stress of the exercises, but after a few sessions the work out becomes easy and so they move up to the next level.
But there is only so much stress that the body can handle. If it is subjected to more stress than the maximum that it can handle it will begin to break down and injury is very likely to occur. This means that doing too much training with too little rest will increase the chances of injury and diminished performance. On the other hand, getting too much rest and too little training will lead to no physical improvement at all. This is why there is a great need for the alternation between training and rest.
