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Getting Rest

Nothing seems more contrary to the idea of reaching peak performance than resting. After all, isn't resting what you're doing when you're slouched on the sofa tossing back a Bud and watching war flicks on TNT? Isn't it what exercise pundits are always hounding us to get off our butts and stop doing?

On This Page

Getting Rest

Recovery Movement

The Overtraining Syndrome

The Intense-O-Meter

Pushing or Punishing?

How Exercise Affects Sleep

Well, yes. In fact, so much attention goes to butt-from-sofa extraction that you almost never hear about how crucial rest is to the success of any exercise program. We're going to assume you're beyond the need for prodding—that you're dedicated enough to being active that it's now more important for you to hear what, outside the world of elite athletics, is rarely recognized as crucial.

Training for peak performance seems a simple deal: You work out, you improve. It stands to reason that if you work out harder and more often, you'll get better faster. But that's not always the case. Studies of swimmers, for example, find that training 3 or 4 hours a day confers no greater benefit than training for just 1 or 1½ hours a day. In fact, the higher training levels significantly reduce muscle strength and sprint performance.

You don't have to train at elite levels for adequate rest to be an issue. For any regular exerciser, "if you want to steadily improve, you need to balance muscle overuse, which is training, with underuse, which is rest," says Houston training consultant Ronald Sandler, D.P.M., co-author of Consistent Winning: A Remarkable New Training System That Lets You Peak on Demand.

Recovery Movement

The need for rest harkens back to the overload principle that drives your gains: If you regularly work the body harder than it's accustomed to, it adapts by building ever greater strength or endurance. Fine. But what's really going on here?

Actually, exercise doesn't build muscles up, it tears them down. When muscles are worked intensely, they become marred by tiny tears and other forms of microscopic damage. Muscles sore? That's microtrauma you're feeling. Muscle-building kicks in after the exercise is over. "When damage occurs, there are processes for repairing it—repairs that make the muscle better than it was before," says Dennis Wilson, Ed.D., head of the Department of Health and Human Performance at Auburn University in Alabama. "There needs to be some kind of rest or reduction in exercise for tissue to renew itself." It's what athletes call recovery.

Recovery happens not only between exercise bouts, but while you're exercising. If you're lifting weights to build strength, for example, it's important to rest between sets to let your muscles recuperate as fully as possible. "If you don't, you'll reduce the amount you can lift with each set, which means your strength gains will come much harder," says Mike Stone, Ph.D., president of the National Strength and Conditioning Association.

How much rest and recovery you need depends on your goals, how fit you already are and your training potential. It's a truism among exercise experts that each person will adapt differently to the same workout, depending on individual makeup. "There are many ways to structure recovery," says Dr. Wilson. Still, there are some easy-to-follow general principles.

Allow more recovery for heavy exercise. If you take a brisk walk every day, the 24 hours between outings will probably be more than adequate for recovery. If you do a three-mile run, however, it's wise not to run the next day—unless you're already accustomed to running ten miles at a stretch. "Intensity is the key," says Dr. Wilson. It's sensible to take a day of rest between high-intensity workouts: For example, you would exercise on Monday, rest Tuesday, then exercise again on Wednesday. One way of measuring intensity is with metabolic equivalents, or METs. Each person's need for recovery may vary, but as a rule, the higher an activity's MET value, the more likely it will demand a day off after you do it.

For strength, rest more. When lifting weights, the amount of time you rest between sets helps determine the effects of your workout. If you're trying to build strength, a relatively long wait of three to five minutes between sets will allow you to pump heavier weights and make gains more quickly, according to Dr. Wilson.

For endurance, rest less. If you're building muscular endurance with your weight routine, you'll be using lighter weights and more repetitions, which allow you to take shorter between-set rests of one minute or less. According to Dr. Wilson, not resting at all between stations may actually provide an effect that closely mimics aerobic activities.

Progress gradually. Whether you're lifting weights or doing aerobic activities, it's important not to overtax yourself. As a rule, don't make more than a 10 percent increase per week in sets, repetitions, weight or, for aerobic exercise, pace or distance, recommends Dr. Wilson.

Don't fret about losses. Dedicated exercisers often fear that any tapering off will undo hard-won progress. But you lose nothing with short rests—or even relatively long ones.

Studies have found that runners and swimmers who cut back their training by 60 percent showed no loss of endurance even after two to three weeks. Another study showed that strength losses weren't noticeable even a month after a three-week training program stopped.

The Intense-O-Meter

One way to measure exercise intensity is perceived exertion: how much work you think an activity is. But, like any opinion, yours may be different from the next guy's. A more precise measure is how much oxygen a given activity requires, expressed in metabolic equivalents, or METs. As a rule, higher-MET activities demand more recovery time than lower-MET ones. Here are different activities and their MET values. Get to know your METs. It pays.

Lying down or sitting 1

Getting dressed 2

Making the bed 3

Playing golf 4

Ballroom dancing 4.5

Level walking at 4 mph 6.5

Chopping wood 6.5

Downhill skiing 8

Playing basketball 9

Playing handball 10

Level running at 8.5 mph 12

Swimming a crawl at 2.5 feet per second 15

Swimming a crawl at 3 feet per second 20

Running a 4-minute mile 30

Pushing or Punishing?

Everyone has off days. How can you tell if you're overtraining or just going through the run-of-the-mill blahs? Dennis Wilson, Ed.D., head of the Department of Health and Human Performance at Auburn University in Alabama, suggests these methods.

Check your habits. Have you recently made a significant change in your program? Are you constantly trying to keep up with someone who's better at your sport than you are? Do you always exercise at the same pace, never lightening your pace or intensity? If you've answered yes to any of these, you've fallen into classic overtraining patterns and are probably pushing yourself too hard.

Monitor your mood. The single best indicator of overtraining is an otherwise inexplicable plunge into the emotional toilet. Mood often deteriorates before physical performance does.

Take your pulse. Overtraining typically makes your resting heart rate go up over time. To keep track of it, take your pulse in the morning before you get out of bed, counting the number of heartbeats in one minute. A persistent rise of the same amount over a period of weeks may indicate a problem.

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The Overtraining Syndrome

Maybe you're the kind of guy who likes working yourself hard every day. What harm is there in continually pushing your limits?

It depends on how fond you are of feeling chronically tired, having trouble sleeping, being sick all the time with colds, flus and infections or feeling depressed. These are some of the signs of overtraining, a clinical condition in which you've pounded yourself so hard for so long that you've gone beyond your body's ability to quickly recuperate, says Dr. Wilson. Overtraining can also produce potentially more serious symptoms as well, such as high blood pressure and increased heart rate.

It's no coincidence that these same symptoms are tied to emotional stress. By overtraining, you physically stress yourself beyond your ability to cope and you burn out, just as you do after weeks or months of unrelieved out-of-control pressure at work. This relationship—in case you're thinking only elite athletes get overtrained—may make overtraining more common in nonelite, dedicated recreational athletes, according to doctors who treat the condition. That's because, unlike top competitors, with their sponsors and patrons, average Joes have to mix their training with the additional stresses of workaday life.

Treating overtraining is difficult. For one thing, its symptoms overlap with so many other conditions (Lyme disease is one), that it's often hard—but not impossible—to spot (see "Pushing or Punishing?"). Once it's identified, the main remedy is rest or reduced activity, says Dr. Wilson. In many cases, if the overtraining was minimal or caught early, a few days' recovery may be all that's needed, he says. If you're suffering from bona fide overtraining syndrome, however, recovery can take up to 12 weeks.

Preventing overtraining is easier—and wiser. If you're hard-driving, here are some precautionary steps to take.

Mix it up. You can work out every day as long as you're not constantly stressing the same muscles in the same way. Do upper-body exercises one day and lower-body exercises the next. Or get what's called active rest by alternating heavy workouts (like a ten-mile run) on a Monday with light workouts (like a two-mile walk) on a Tuesday, says Dr. Wilson. If you're a serious athlete in training, though, you may very well utilize the same muscles on successive days—with good results. It really depends on your fitness level, he says.

Eat more carbohydrate. Remember, if muscle-powering glycogen stores aren't constantly replenished, your energy will dwindle further with every workout. Think you're already getting enough? Get more anyway, keeping your plate colorful with lots of fruits and vegetables, especially if you're doing endurance training, recommends Dr. Wilson.

Get enough sleep. It's equal parts recovery and stress-resistance. Studies find that people who say they average less than six hours of sleep a night are three times more likely to say they're under great stress almost every day than those who sleep seven or eight hours a night. Both stress and sleep loss can lower your immunity, an important contributor both to fatigue and respiratory illnesses like colds and flus. In one study, 23 men who were cheated out of four hours' sleep in a lab suffered 30 percent drops in natural killer-cell activity, a key measure of immune-system strength.

In the end, men who exercise excessively make both cautionary and inspiring examples: They have problems we almost wish we had. For most men, the main issue isn't spending too much time exercising. It's eking enough time out of our busy schedules to get what little exercise we can.

How Exercise Affects Sleep

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You've had a tough workout, you've set a personal distance record, you've hauled furniture all day: Better turn in early, right? Well . . . maybe. A review of different studies concluded that a single bout of exercise might, at most, make you sleep an extra ten minutes—barely a blip on the slumber charts.

Overall, being sleepy and being weary aren't the same thing, says Patrick J. O'Connor, Ph.D., who has studied the interaction of sleep and exercise as an associate professor in the Department of Exercise Science at the University of Georgia in Athens. Your body could be sore and aching, and you could feel physically exhausted, but that's a muscle matter, not a sleep issue. Muscles can rest even when you're awake. "If you're getting good sleep, exercise won't affect your normal needs or patterns much," Dr. O'Connor says.

But what constitutes "good" sleep? It varies from person to person, but most of us feel refreshed after seven or eight hours—assuming we get those seven or eight hours when it makes sense to our bodies. Sleep is governed by a number of daily rhythms, such as internal temperature, the release of hormones and the perception of daylight. Everybody's rhythms are a little different, says Dr. O'Connor. While it's broadly true that we sleep at night and are awake during the day, if you go to bed at 10 p.m. when you're accustomed to turning in at midnight, your sleep may suffer. But don't worry that you could be sleeping at a more optimal time than you do. "What we're accustomed to and what our bodies want are usually close to the same," Dr. O'Connor says.

Although exercise doesn't much affect our need for sleep, it does appear to improve sleep quality and energy levels. One study, for example, found that physically fit people went to bed later, fell asleep faster and spent less total time asleep, yet awoke feeling less tired than more sedentary people. Another study found that sedentary people say they feel tired during the day almost twice as often as active people do. Bottom line, there's no need to head for the sofa after a workout. Of course, if you want to, there's no harm. Just be sure to keep daytime naps short. "If you sleep for two hours in the middle of the day," Dr. O'Connor says, "you might have trouble sleeping at night."

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