Why Getting More Rest Can Help You Lose Weight

Weight loss conjures images of endless running, sweating over an elliptical machine at the gym, and peddling until all of your fat melts away.  Contrary to popular belief, rest days are essential to every work out routine. 

Exercise is just one part of the complicated fat loss equation.  Rest days, and resting in general, can be as difficult as the first step.  The trick is understanding how rest days are essential and by creating a schedule that implements them.

 

Understand Over Training

It’s better to be overenthusiastic about your weight loss goals than to have lack motivation.  However, getting overexcited can hamper your workout by causing you to over train.

Symptoms of over training include fatigue, shortness of breath, elevated resting heart rate, prolonged healing of injuries, and decreased exercise ability.  If you over train, your body does not have enough time to recover from a workout, which can lead to injury.  Implementing rest days in your workout routine will assure you avoid over training.

Scheduling Rest Days

How often you schedule rest days depends on the type and intensity of your workouts, as well as your fitness level.  A person of average fitness can exercise every day if their work out consists of walking at a normal pace for 30 minutes.

Unless you are training to compete for a sport or event, the typical work out is a couple days of cardio mixed with a couple days of weightlifting.  If this is the case, then two to three rest days are suggested for optimum health.

A healthy amount is three days of lifting and one day of cardio per week, taking the weekend off and one day in the week.  For a beginner, you may want to do one day on, one day off, until you feel comfortable adding another exercise day.  Avoid working out every day of the week, ignoring rest days altogether, as this is a recipe for over training and potential burnout.

Rest Your Mind

Rest days are good for your body to recover, but if you don’t rest your mind, you may hamper your weight loss goals.  Two main factors decrease your body’s ability to stay fit: stress and lack of sleep.  Sleep is essential to rejuvenate both body and mind, but dealing with stress is often ignored.

The problem with stress is in the hormone cortisol.  Increased levels of cortisol makes it hard to build muscle or metabolize fat.

Amount of Rest

For successful recovery times, you should rest a minimum of eight hours every day.  Eight hours may seem impossible with your schedule, but it is essential to your health that you should attempt to sleep earlier, or push things back in the morning.

If you are able to get eight hours of rest, you will feel so energized in the morning that your productivity levels during the day will increase dramatically.

Rest days may seem inconsequential, but our bodies and mind requires it so much that almost half of our lives are dedicated to it.  Ignoring rest days is like ignoring nutrition: the longer you do it, the more your body will be affected.  Even if you can’t implement all these rest days in your schedule and sleep for eight hours a day, just increasing your rest days will result in dramatic benefits. 

 

Stay motivated, work hard… and don’t forget to relax!

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