Last week was my recovery week in the gym. These are preprogrammed days in which I let my body rest and recover.
When we workout, we accumulate two things at the same time:
Progress, in the form of muscular and other physiological adaptations
Fatigue, in the form of accumulated stress
I'm going to illustrate this point in the graph below. This is just a way of visualizing this and in no mean scientific data.
Fatigue is in red, and physiological adaptation is in blue.
In any proper periodized program, you should experience progressive overload: the act of slowly making your training tougher.
This will elicit physiological adaptations in your body. When your body adapts, it takes energy, you need to recover properly, train hard and eat well. This takes it's toll on the body in the form of fatigue.
I won't go into specifics of what causes fatigue (although it's a fun rabbit hole), but the body can't keep adapting forever. At some point, fatigue catches up with us, as you can see in week 4 on the graph.
If we are smart about our training, we can plan for this and actually help our body recover faster and manage fatigue (week 5). If we train too hard for too long, our body will make us take a break either by getting sick or injured.
Have you ever experienced the following scenario: your training is going perfectly, you're hitting PRs regularly and then you get a sore throat or your old nagging shoulder injuries pokes it's head around?
That's just your body begging for a break. Recovery weeks are there to avoid this forced breaks.
How do recovery weeks work?
During a rest week, I still workout, but I aim to do 70%-80% of my regular training volume. I usually do this by decreasing the load of all my lifts and keeping the sets and reps the same.
There are a ton of ways you could do it. You could lower your set number by 70%. You could lower your reps by 70%. You could do a combination of both.
What matters is that it keeps you engaged and happy. I personally like the way I do it because the weights are lighter and I focus on my form and technique for a full week.
Many may dislike these types of weeks due to their banalities. It's not sexy to have a break and lift easier weights, especially if the preceding weeks were full of excellent workouts.
It's important to remember that your body does adapt during it's recovery time. When you train hard at the gym, your muscles don't grow during your session. They grow while you sleep. Imagine the recovery weeks like a longer period for your muscles to grow and recover.
How often should you take recovery weeks?
Honestly, this all depends on how you adapt to your training. The more you train, the more you'll intuitively know when you should schedule them. A basic rule to follow is every 4-6 weeks.
Knowing your body
The more time you spend working out in the gym, the more you'll notice signs that your body needs a break.
For me, it's usually how I sleep. I am usually a great sleeper. Every time I train hard, I fall asleep easily, and sleep soundly throughout the night.
When fatigue catches up with me, I don't fall asleep as easily and my nights are more restless.
This is usually combined with a great performance in the gym. It is extremely tempting for me to think "I'll keep training hard and hopefully my sleep will adjust". I have done that in the past and unfortunately, it always resulted in a minor injury or sickness the following week.
Once again, if you don't know those signs yet, aim to take a recovery week every 4-6 weeks.
You can also plan those weeks around your time off and holidays. When we travel, we usually don't train as hard, I find this to be a good, natural way to balance our fitness life.
Conclusion
I plan recovery weeks to allow my body to recover both physically and mentally. I do this by lifting less weight than usual and focusing on my form. It's also a good opportunity for me to reflect on the past training cycle. What did I like? What went well? What could I have done better?
For example, at the start of this rest week I had a minor calf strain and some hip pain. Nothing bad, but I could not have gone another week of regular training. So first reflection: take a rest week sooner. Second, more in depth reflection: why did that happen?
Upon reviewing my training plan, I noticed I was doing way too much volume on my legs. I really enjoy training legs and the new gym I started working at has equipment I've never used. I would very frequently add leg workouts throughout my weeks. Although I really enjoyed all the training, I was doing 30+ sets of leg exercises per week, which is way, way too high. I just got too excited.
I've since corrected my training plan and told myself that those machines aren't going to fly away and that I should just do them when my plan allows me to. Not every other workout.
Here is what I'll be doing for the next training bloc.
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