Hey {{first name | reader}},
It's Tuesday, which means your weekly fitness check-in. Welcome to Week #40.
The past week has been excruciating in multiple ways. The ankle pain has subsided to a dull ache as long as my foot is propped up on the couch, but the eight-minute walk to the gym is still more than I've been able to manage. Beyond hopping around my apartment — sometimes on crutches — my workout this week has consisted mostly of sets of pushups with my right ankle elevated.
So I've been forced to get better at resting.
I'm now caught up on the Canadian crime series 19-2, the next-generation version of A Different World, and Apple TV's Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.1 I've even eaten popcorn on the couch.
This is what personal growth looks like.
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
Rest isn't something you earn after training. Rest is part of training.
I know this intellectually. I have not, historically, been especially interested in practicing it.
I'm happiest when I'm moving or pushing hard at the gym. Anything else feels vaguely like I'm being too easy on myself. Which is, admittedly, a me problem. For the past week, I've been working on it. See ridiculous streaming list above.
Our bodies need recovery time to repair muscle, replenish energy stores, adapt to training and keep fatigue from accumulating faster than we can recover from it. Rest matters for injury prevention, too — although, as my ankle has recently demonstrated, no amount of sensible programming can protect you from every divot in Golden Gate Park.
Normally, I manage recovery by changing what kind of stress I'm putting on my body. I might lift five days, spin three days and run three days, with long walks on easier days.2 When I was putting in serious mileage training for marathons, I usually took one day of complete rest each week.
That's not a formula. It's just the balance that has generally worked for me.
And balance is the point.
It's actually pretty hard for a recreational athlete to reach true overtraining syndrome. But you don't have to be clinically overtrained for your body to be asking for more recovery. Some signs that it may be time to back off include:
Soreness that never quite goes away
Joints that are consistently achy
Starting workouts already tired
Performance drifting backward — slower runs, weights that suddenly feel much heavier
Irritability or mood changes
Sleep getting worse instead of better
None of these proves you've trained too much. But they're information.
Normally, my favorite kind of recovery is active recovery: moving without asking much of myself. Walking. Easy laps in the pool. Maybe an easy spin.
Right now, my ankle has voted for something closer to passive recovery.
This is substantially less fun.
There is also the least glamorous recovery tool of all: sleep. Training is the stimulus. Adaptation happens afterward. If you're constantly piling on more work without giving your body enough time to recover, you're interfering with the thing you're training for in the first place.
Which means the couch is not necessarily the enemy.
Sometimes the couch is part of the program.
📖 ASK ME ANYTHING
Question: How much rest is too much rest?
Answer: It depends on why you're resting.
If you're recovering from an injury, the right amount may be considerably more than you'd choose voluntarily.
If you're tired and take a day off, nothing terrible has happened. If you regularly need unscheduled days off because you're exhausted, that's useful information. Your program may need more recovery built into it.
And if you keep wanting to take long breaks because you simply don't want to do your workouts anymore, I wouldn't immediately label that laziness. I'd ask why.
Maybe the program is too demanding.
Maybe you're bored.
Maybe your goals have changed.
Or maybe you just need a break.
Rest shouldn't become an excuse to abandon something you care about. But neither should training become an obligation you drag yourself through indefinitely because stopping for a day feels like failure.
💡 MYTH BUSTING
Myth: A week off kills your fitness.
Reality: Your body is considerably less fragile than that.
After a week away from training, you may feel rusty. Your first run may feel awkward. The weights may feel heavier than you remember. But a short break does not erase months or years of training.
Meaningful losses in endurance and strength generally happen over longer periods, and endurance tends to decline sooner than strength.
More importantly, feeling different after time off is not the same thing as having lost all your fitness.
After an injury, of course, the goal isn't to prove how little fitness you've lost by charging straight back into your old program. Returning gradually is part of recovery, too.
And if you've been well trained for a long time, rebuilding after a longer layoff is generally much faster than building that fitness the first time.
Your body remembers more than you think.
🍽️ RADISH FUEL BOX
When I'm stuck on the couch watching episode after episode of some streaming show, I want something crispy.
Popcorn is obviously an excellent choice.
But if you'd like to feel extremely virtuous while still crunching continuously through a television episode, kale chips are surprisingly good.
Kale Chips
2 bunches kale
2 tablespoons olive oil
Seasoning of choice
Cut out the stems and thick veins, then tear the kale into bite-sized pieces.
Wash it and dry it completely. Any leftover water will steam the kale instead of crisping it, which is how you end up eating warm, limp salad while wondering where everything went wrong.
Toss with the olive oil.
Bake at 275°F until crisp, roughly 30–45 minutes. Start checking early; kale can go from "not quite done" to "charcoal" with impressive efficiency.
Let cool completely, then season.
Good options:
Nutritional yeast + salt
Cajun seasoning
Garlic salt
Plain salt
Definitely do not combine all four unless you are conducting an experiment.
Enjoy.
📚 WORTH YOUR TIME
UCHealth has a useful overview of rest and recovery for athletes, including both the physiological and psychological sides of recovery and ways to incorporate rest into training.
TL;DR: Recovery isn't what happens when you're not training. It's one of the things that makes training work.
💪 TRY THIS WEEK
Take one real rest day.
Not "rest day plus 14,000 steps."
Not "rest day except for a quick lifting session."
An actual rest day.
Give yourself permission to eat popcorn on the couch.
Then notice what happens.
Do you feel guilty?
Do you start mentally calculating how you'll make up the missed workout?
Do you feel desperate to move again?
Good.
That's useful information too.
The next day, get back to your program.
You haven't fallen behind.
You trained your ability to recover.
Stay strong,
{{first name | reader}}
P.S. Some days the program really is popcorn on the couch.
1 I've had to admit to myself that, regardless of how I feel about police propaganda, I like gritty crime shows. Give me a heroic but morally compromised cop who occasionally ignores procedure and apparently I am willing to suspend all objections. This is probably not good for society. It is excellent television.
2 Yes, I know that's more than seven workouts. Most days include two training sessions: one focused on cardio, like spinning or running, and another on strength. This is not a recommendation. It's just what I enjoy.