Are Rest Days Necessary For Me?

girlwithcurls2 wrote: »

Can you swim? I have strengthened my core significantly with swimming and an aqua fitness class. No impact, great resistance, works the whole body.

Yes. I use no-impact swimming to extend how much I am able to exercise. Walking, social dancing, gardening...there are lots of ways that you can stay active while giving your body a little bit of a break from the high-impact stuff.

One of the great joys I get from exercise is learning to hear my body when it speaks. Your body told you it performs better with a rest day. Pay attention to it.

I think you can be active every day if you want but like people have said working up to it is smart, so you don't burn out before you have a chance to get in the groove. If you don't want a rest day, tone down everything else to something mentally sustainable and go from there. Your idea of rest days will change over time as well - a rest day for a beginner might be a complete feet up kind of day, whereas a couple months down the line it might be an easy couple miles on the treadmill.

Hello OP. A quick read tells me that your exercise program is mainly intended for you to lose 2kg which you decided you need to lose. But halfway through the program you are feeling lack of energy and are not completing the program at the same intensity level. You also mention words like petite and dancing in your past, etc. And you mention being extremely hungry when done exercising... and not immediately fuelling that hunger.

Would it be a fair assessment that even though you are now less "ripped" than you used to be in your 20s, nevertheless an independent assessment would consider you to be squarely within the normal weight for your height category?

Cause it does sound like you may be doing... too much activity for the amount of food that you're currently letting yourself have.

And without some care and attention instead of increasing your lean mass and reducing any hints of fat you've developed... which I assume is your goal... you may end up losing more lean mass than you would want to.

If my above assumptions are correct... you want small deficits. good strength building well fuelled workouts. Not random cardio to burn calories.

Your cardio activity at a large caloric deficit will reduce your weight by reducing BOTH your fat and lean mass.

For obese people the fat to lean mass ratio that they lose tends to be "favourable" lets say. Think 5:1 or better ranges (hey, I used to get 10:1 in the beginning).

However, for most people as they approach a normal weight range the loss ratio becomes less favourable. 2:1; 1.75:1, even 1:1 (and yes, in extreme cases more lean mass than fat gets lost)

On top of that there is a maximum amount of calories that can be supplied from fat stores in a 24 hour period (If I recall correctly in the range of about 30 Cal per lb of non essential body fat that is available to be lost).

So, assuming that the assessments you are going were correct (and there is no real guarantee that they were as many measurement errors exist especially when it comes to body fat determinations), you are now "skinny fat".

This is term that is usually used to describe a person in the normal weight range who is over-fat/under lean massed for their weight.

One of the traditional ways people unintentionally achieve this skinny-fat result is by doing lots of cardio and having a steep caloric deficit while losing weight.

You can see then why the same plan that often results in the problem condition would probably not be the right plan to re-mediate it!

Please look up the threads on recomposition.

In any case, you are looking at small deficits (and yes, that would involve eating back cardio exercise burns, so you would only be doing them for health reasons and enjoyment, not fat loss) and strength training.

Sounds like you're willing to do the work; so go for it! (and I am sure others can recommend great programs though quite a few are discussed in the recomposition threads)