Rest days and eating.

hunter092292

How often do you take rest days and also, how do you eat on your rest days? Is it usually lower or higher than you normally would?

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this so if so tell me and I'll move it!

janejellyroll

I have one light exercise day per week and I take one day off completely each month.

I use NEAT to determine my calorie intake, so I usually eat 200-500 fewer calories on the days which I'm not working out as hard or resting.

canadianlbs

depends what you're doing . . . ? not that i feel entitled to give you advice, but i lift. so in that context the answer is: i try not to lift more than two days in a row, and quite often i eat my face of on those rest days.

back when i was just riding a bike, the answers were different. it basically wasn't something that i scheduled or organized; it was just something i did.

cwolfman13

I usually have 1-2 rest days per week...I don't consciously change how I eat on rest days...and I'm still usually pretty active on rest days...I should also note that I don't log and when I did, I did the TDEE method which averages your calorie intake over the week regardless of whether it's a rest day or not.

If you're using MFP's methodology, your calorie target is before exercise...so if you did no exercise you would eat that amount...if you did exercise you would eat more as per whatever you logged (less some kind of allowance for estimation error).

Gallowmere1984

One day off from lifting per week (when I'm not cutting anyway), and I'll eat the same as I would on a training day.

hunter092292

What the hell are you guys eating to not go over and not go to be starving every night?

ntnunk

During most of the year I'm on a bike 6 days per week, and doing hard intervals or racing for 3 of those. With that as context, my rest days are no different than any other in terms of caloric intake. This time of year when my race season is done and I haven't started my training cycle for next year yet I'm a little more careful about eating on rest days because I'm riding sporadically and lifting weights 3 days per week.

Evamutt

I have my largest meal at dinner & save calories for a snack...like P&J open faced sandwich or my newest is 1/2 cup oatmeal with fresh fruit & a tub of my coffee creamer

DresdenSinn

"Rest" days are cardio days which are 4 days a week with 1200kcal, the other 3 days are weight training days at 2100kcal.

canadianlbs

hunter092292 wrote: »

What the hell are you guys eating to not go over and not go to be starving every night?

made me laugh. must be even worse for guys since you grow muscle faster, but even for me it's like throwing kleenex into a furnace some days. an extra 30g protein shake sometimes helps me if i drink it before bed on the previous night.