2018
Importance of Recovery
The right amount of recovery is crucial in your pursuit for results. A lot of people don’t allow themselves enough recovery from the rigors of their training routine.
Recovery is quite possibly the most important part of your training plan. From high intensity strength training sessions your muscle fibres can take up to 7 days to fully recover, your nervous system, which controls all of your messages in your body, can take up to 14 days to recover from an extremely intense strength training session.
Bear this is in mind when designing a programme, the rest period is directly related to the intensity of your workout, of course if you aren’t training very hard, the rest period can be less.
Even if you are training different body parts in your sessions there may still be other muscles that may not have recovered from your last session as there are more than one muscle group being used a lot of the time and smaller muscle groups fatigue quicker. For example, if you have done an intense chest workout utilising compound exercises, there is a high chance that your shoulders and triceps will be fatigued even still in 2-3 days when you want to train shoulders or triceps, which means you won’t get the most out of them in your session and could possibly even go backwards.
So as much as going to the gym becomes an outlet and you love going, be prepared to have a rest day here and there or even a week. Perhaps choose to do cardio over strength a couple of times a week and allow your body to get stronger in the process.