If your goal is to add some extra muscle to your body, you may think that the more time you spend in the gym, the better. But the truth is that there is only so much strength training our bodies can enjoy before the weights start to take their toll.
If this sounds familiar, you’re probably not placing enough emphasis on your recovery from sessions. This is a critical error that many novices make, failing to realise that recovery can actually be the key to muscle growth. Here are four reasons why spending a day out of the gym can actually be beneficial to your muscle-building objectives.
Extra Time To Focus On Nutrition
What you do in the gym is important for muscle growth, but what you eat is equally important, if not more important. Taking a day to recover doesn’t mean you have to spend the day worrying about undoing all your hard work. Spending your recovery day focusing on your diet and nutrition means you can continue to grow your muscle mass without even touching a weight.
Exercise can often get in the way of our diet, as we spend more time on the go and have to plan meals around our workouts. Having a day out of the gym clears our schedule to eat whenever we like. This should subsequently help you to hit macro goals and give you more time to consume those extra calories that you simply don’t have time for during a workout day.
You may also want to use this time to focus on meal prep. Preparing your meals for the week ahead of time is the best way to stay on track in terms of your diet, but it’s also time-consuming and can be hard to find time for if you are spending every day in the gym.
Keeps Motivation High
Even the most passionate fitness enthusiasts will experience days or periods where they are just not in the mood to work out. In the early days, fitness beginners will experience success quickly which helps to keep motivation high. But as time goes on, we’ll experience plateaus and gains become increasingly harder and we may find motivation levels drop.
Taking a day off from the gym gives you a chance to recapture your enthusiasm for working out if you are experiencing a drop in motivation levels. As the old saying goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and you may find this thinking can be applied to your time at the gym.
Not only will this leave you eager to get back in the gym, but it should also help improve your performance in the gym as you’ll be mentally and physically refreshed.
Helps With Routine
Having a dedicated day to work on things outside of your fitness journey can reduce the likelihood of things getting in the way of your time at the gym. Work, parenting and other hobbies can easily get in the way of our fitness if we’re not following a strict timetable.
Therefore, just as you may have a timetable for the gym, it’s important to have a timetable for your activities outside of the gym too. This could include putting time aside each week for a date night with your partner, to catch up on work/studies or to meet friends for other interests. Grouping these activities on the same day frees you up to attack the gym for the other days of the week.
Overall, this should improve your consistency when it comes to fitness which, as already discussed, is one of the most important factors to consider if you’re trying to add muscle mass.
Helps Avoid Injury
Finally, and most perhaps most obviously, recovery helps to avoid overtraining our muscles which is the most popular reason for taking a recovery day. Continuing to hit the gym when our bodies are screaming out for a rest will only result in one thing – an injury.
Whatever your goals are, it’s worth remembering that an injured muscle can’t be trained and nobody ever experienced substantial muscle growth while sitting on the sidelines. A recovery day can be the difference between an injury and full health, but it can also be the difference between a tired, aching body and a refreshed one. Allowing your body time to replenish will give your muscles a chance to repair and go again the next day.
Depending on what your body is telling you may impact how you spend a recovery day. For those who are spending time out of the gym for mental benefits, active recovery options like walking or swimming allow you to take part in some form of fitness without putting too much strain on your body. If you’re in need of a recovery day due to your body’s aches and pains, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a passive recovery day even if that means throwing on one of your comfiest women’s tracksuits and enjoying a movie marathon whilst laying on your sofa!
