How important are rest days?

IllustriousBee

I have recently started working out every day. I typically do 30 minutes of cardio and then 30 minutes strength training focusing on one area of my body. An example of a week for me would be: lower body on Monday, core on Tuesday, upper body on Wednesday, core on Thursday, lower body on Friday, upper body on Saturday, and core on Sunday. I don't feel like I'm doing too much, but I see everywhere that one or two rest days with no strength training are necessary for muscle growth. I feel totally fine with what I'm doing, but I don't want to halt my progress.

Lietchi

You need rest days per muscle group, so what you're doing (alternating muscle groups) seems fine to me 🙂

sijomial

Muscles are both repairing/building and being torn down 24 x 7 - they are both constant (but opposing) processes.
It's a myth muscles only grow at rest, people confuse recovery and rest. Rest is recovery but not all recovery is rest!
The rate of both processes varies but doesn't stop/start depending on training or resting.

You are rotating body part focus and also working out for a short duration. Not seeing a problem you need to fix.
If your lifts are progressing, you aren't feeling too sore, you aren't getting progressively more fatigued and are enjoying your training then carry on.

SOME people may need two rest days depending on the training load, training style, their training status but that's individual not universal.

cwolfman13

You're doing a split and your workouts aren't of long duration so I don't really see much issue. The general rule of thumb is that you shouldn't work the same muscle groups on consecutive days...so someone doing a full body routine would only want to train every other day or 3x per week for example.

I don't think with an hour per day you are approaching overtraining. The only time I really worried about recovery days was when I was doing a lot of cycling events and training and some of those training days were either gruelingly long or intense and I would need a couple of days recovery. I can tell when my body is stressed and needs recovery by watching my HR...when my RHR is. Usually it's around 62...when it's routinely in the 80s and 90s when I'm just sitting around doing nothing I know I'm overdoing things and need some rest.

Leefitunlimited

Rest days are very important. You need to give your body a day or two to recover from the workload. If you don’t get proper rest you will start to get negative results and likely to get an injury. Make rest days a regular part of your training program.