Your Body Needs a Break Too

By Caroline Patafio

One of the most important things that I have learned from working out and pushing myself to my limits is the importance of rest days. However, I hadn’t always understood why I needed to take days off until very recently.

The first thing that I needed to do to get myself to take rest days was to understand why my body's need for a break mattered. The answer to this is that rest days are important for your muscles to recover from all of the stress put on them from working out and simply just living. Without these breaks, the stress put on your body can exceed the amount it can handle and potentially could result in injury. 

So now that it's been established why the body needs a break, the next obstacle I faced was differentiating between feeling unmotivated and genuinely needing to take a day off. For a long time I got these two things confused because when I got to college, I was terrified of getting out of shape. This led me to believe that going a day without exercise meant that I was lazy, unmotivated, and losing progress. Believing this, however, did a lot more damage to my body than good. Pain that could have been avoided grew into more serious issues, and I ended up needing to take a break from working out in general to let my body heal. This was the turning point for me because I finally made the connection that taking a day or two off is not me being lazy or out of shape. It means I’m allowing my muscles to rebuild all of its tears and kinks from previous workouts.

Coming to this realization allowed me to become more in tune with my body. As a result, I started to take more days off to either relax or do lighter activities like walking. Regardless, I still have to remind myself that it is okay to give my body a break and to take these days to relax, catch up on work, fuel myself with good whole foods, and to stay hydrated. You will not lose all of your progress by taking a day or two off. In fact, it will actually help you perform better. So please, don’t be too hard on yourself because your body needs a break too.