Resting day.workout a little or do nothing.

How much to do on a rest day is partly about the person's fitness level. As an extreme example, a rest day activity that would be perfect for an elite athlete might be something as objectively intense as one of my hard days.

That idea of thinking of it as a recovery day is good - it is an essential part of getting fitter. Recovery is when the muscles we challenged with our exercise repair and get stronger. It's like pulling back the bow to shoot the next arrow: May feel like you're heading away from your goals, but it's essential to moving toward them.

As you get exercise pinned down as a part of your consistent routine, you'll learn what your individual body needs, and learn how to interpret the signs it gives you. (That makes it easier to tell "actually tired" from "mentally lazy", among other things.)

Until you reach that experienced point, it can be good to experiment and notice how your body responds. Maybe start with a mild walk on your rest day, see how you feel in the day(s) after. If still fatigued, consider more frequent days with less exercis le intensity, or a day with really no exercise. See how that feels. And so forth.

With time, patience, experiments, and attention to result, you'll learn more about you - and that's very powerful knowledge.

P.S. Some people do find that they feel hungrier when they don't exercise, so you're not alone in that. See, you've already learned something about your body! Trying mild exercise next - like that walk - sounds like a good idea: See if that helps. If not, another option would be to save up a few calories or eat at maintenance calories on your rest day.

P.P.S. I usually take one full rest day each week, don't do much at all exercise-wise . . . maybe some yoga or stretching, or some house/garden work, but sometimes just relax and do my household routine chores plus some non-exercise hobby stuff. But that's just me.

amberchen86 wrote: »

Thank you. Yesterday I was really hungry so I let myself eat whatever I want.I didn't track all my food intake. I ate more than 3200 calories atleast. I weight myself this morning I am 1lb lighter.Thank God I thought I was going to gain 2lbs.I think I was really burned out because I usually work out to my shirt is all wet from sweat.I am all rest up from yesterday. I just had 2 slices of toast and peanut butter and ready to do my cardio.

A pound of fat is 3500 calories approximately. Most fat you can gain from 3200 calories is 3200 minus the calories it would take to maintain your current weight for a day.

So - just an example - if your maintenance calories were 2000 daily, most fat you could gain from 3200 calories would be 3200 - 2000 = 1200 calories of fat, 1200 divided by 3500 calories in a pound of fat = less than 1/3 pound of fat gain from the 3200 calories.

It would probably be less fat gain than the theoretical maximum, because of stuff I could explain, but the explanation would be tedious for both of us. 😉

Anything above the theoretically possible maximum fat loss that shows up on your scale is either water retention (needed to digest/metabolize the extra food), or weight of the parts of food that will eventually be waste (pee/poo), so not worth worrying about. It'll drop off over a couple of days to a couple of weeks, typically.

Never panic over a sudden scale gain until you've let at least a couple of weeks go by, maybe even a whole menstrual cycle (monthly) because hormones can be weird, too.

Not 100% certain-sure, but that you dropped weight after eating extra is maybe/probably a sign that your body was feeling stressed, needed the rest/food or something like that.

Just keep going, using common sense and moderation, stick with it - you'll do fine.

amberchen86 wrote: »

Some people told me to do nothing but some people told me to do a light one.

Both answers can be correct for different situations.

Personally I make a distinction between recovery and rest (although of course they have a close relationship).

Rest is very rare for me and reserved for situations where a long and hard training block has left me feeling drained and in need of whole body rest. That would be all of me feeling fatigued, might have clear signs of overtraining such as elevated HR, sitting on the sofa becomes more attractive, hunger can be a cue too....

Recovery is far more common for me but is mostly to do with letting muscles recover after a particularly hard training session or an extended series of sessions with cumulative muscle fatigue. That type of recovery is mostly active recovery and might simply be a gentle session of the same exercise. Could also for example be alternating training stress between different body parts. e.g. Upper body strength training alternating with cycling - half of me is recovering while the other half is being worked.

Example from this year was a three month ramp up in cycling volume and intensity following a training plan for an event - recovery was built into the plan. The final couple of weeks of the plan were extremely hard and left me needing rest. That was one week before the event.
The event itself was five and half hours cycling with second half really pushing my limits to get a PB.
Next day my legs were tired but I felt fine otherwise so went for a one hour gentle recovery ride to pump blood through leg muscles to help them recover faster.

Sometimes my "recovery" day is spent hiking or taking the dog for a walk - and sometimes it's being a complete couch potato doing nothing at all (that's generally more because I need a mental break from everything than a physical break).
Cardio-heavy workouts tend to make me hungry the next day, lifting generally doesn't have a day to day swing, just an overall hunger. If I'm doing both, weirdly enough is when my hunger seems the lowest...I dunno! lol.
When I did 75Hard, for a recovery day I would do a light walk for my outdoor workout and stretching or light yoga for my second workout. Doing that lighter day made the program and workouts pretty sustainable for me.

I always go for a walk on my rest day. Something as simple as a morning walk to a coffee shop.

nossmf wrote: »

In reading the OP, I wonder if she's jumping too fast into the deep end of exercising. Phrases such as never taking a day off, every workout isn't over until the shirt is soaked with sweat, feeling rundown and mentally forcing herself to workout... I'm just concerned she's doing too much, too early, without first working gradually up to that point. If I'm off base, I apologize, I'm just expressing concern.

That said, the original question was is it ok to take rest/recovery days. I always take at least one, often two recovery days per week, where my only physical activity is whatever's required around the house (laundry, simple cleaning, walking the dog). In addition, every 3 months or so I take an entire week off from working out. This allows my body to breathe, heal up minor aches and pains, and be ready to hit the gym fresh. Last week was my off-week, and today at the gym felt fantastic, pain-free, energized, a great session.

I shared your concern, especially as OP is recovering from surgery.

This is largely something you need to learn on your own. Listen to your body. I take full on recovery days (where I do nothing) as well as active recovery days (where I walk, or hike). I base this largely on how I feel.