Resting day.workout a little or do nothing.

I have been working out lot lately.I took a day off.I didn't do any exercise today. I don't know if I am doing the right thing or not.Some people told me to do nothing but some people told me to do a light one.I have noticed I got hungrier today.Is it normal?

Replies

  • capgordon1293
    capgordon1293 Posts: 149 Member
    Hey amber I like to do is a working rest day like go for nice walk . Ice skating or do a active activity u enjoy
  • amberchen86
    amberchen86 Posts: 55 Member
    Thank. You.I will go for a walk next time when I have a resting day. Probably just a short one.I got really tired yesterday and hungry too.And the day before yesterday I was tired too so I force myself to finish the workout.Sometime I couldn't tell if I am actually tired or just mentally lazy.The hungry part is even worse,I got super hungry on the resting day. I am having hard time to pick myself up to do it today but I am going to try. My mind is like "should I take another day off".I have to fight with my mind.
  • Retroguy2000
    Retroguy2000 Posts: 1,430 Member
    edited September 2022
    If you rephrase rest day as "recovery day", any potential guilt should be mitigated. Your body needs recovery time. A walk would be fine.

    Do take into account the reduced exercise with your diet that day though, so your total calorie intake should go down.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,724 Member
    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
    amberchen86 Posts: 55 Member
    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.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,724 Member
    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.
  • Retroguy2000
    Retroguy2000 Posts: 1,430 Member
    edited September 2022
    Your weight one day after eating like that is irrelevant due to how your body weight fluctuates.

    I would recommend you do track all your calories even in a binge like that. It's useful for personal accountability, and also to look back at the end of the week if you weigh yourself then, to see your weight gain/loss relative to your weeks gain/loss in target calories.

    On a rest (recovery) day I have to resist the urge to start snacking a lot, because I have more time. That went out the window on Thursday last week unfortunately, when I had a rare binge and took in 2,200 extra calories above MFP's estimate of my maintenance. From Mon-Sun I was a total of 1,377 above maintenance, and my weekly snapshot weigh on Monday morning had me up 0.8 pounds. It's not going to be a 1:1 correlation because MFP's maintenance estimate for me is just that, an estimate, and it was a single snapshot weigh-in, 3.5 days after that binge. If not for the binge, if I had stayed a few hundred below maintenance that day as I planned, I'd probably have lost weight over the week.

    It's all a learning experience. YMMV, it may be better to have an extra healthy meal and snack on a day when you feel like you're going to go over, and take those several hundred unplanned calories as a win compared to starting on unhealthy snacks and ending up a couple thousand over, maybe also stopping tracking too.
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
    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.
  • nossmf
    nossmf Posts: 8,697 Member
    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.
  • HoneyBadger302
    HoneyBadger302 Posts: 1,983 Member
    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.
  • jdprincipe
    jdprincipe Posts: 2 Member
    Exercise produces cortisol, too much cortisol inhibits weight loss. Always take at least one but preferably two rest days a week, especially if you are working out hard the other 5 days. It is not surprising that you are hungrier on rest days, you should not skimp on calories on these days. Eating a few hundred extra calories on rest days (200-300) will help your body recover and fuels muscle growth.
    More muscle mass means more calories burned each day even if you just sit on the couch, so don't deprive your body of what it needs to thrive. Fatigue, both mental and physical, are signs you are not resting enough, don't be afraid to take scheduled days off and get enough sleep at night.
  • JaysFan82
    JaysFan82 Posts: 851 Member
    I always go for a walk on my rest day. Something as simple as a morning walk to a coffee shop.
  • amberchen86
    amberchen86 Posts: 55 Member
    Thank you.I have lots energy today,so recovery day is a good thing.I think I burned lot more today than other days. I looking forward to lift weights after 4 weeks.I would said my surgery recover well.I still can't ride bike without feeling sore.I feel good today.I will do one day a week for now to see how it goes.I might have to have more rest day later when Iift weight regularly.I would like to work on tracking food properly.I always love eating .what happen is I track the food and put in complete and then later at night I have more food.I hope I don't have eating disorder.I binge when I feel stress and feel food give me comfort for some reason.
  • Alatariel75
    Alatariel75 Posts: 17,954 Member
    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.



  • amberchen86
    amberchen86 Posts: 55 Member
    I think I did too much for sure.I just couldn't sit around and do nothing.It's already painful for me to wait for 4 more weeks to be able to lift weights again.I can't sit still for very long.I am always doing things doesn't matter what it is.I am also an early morning person I go out to see sunrise just about everyday.




  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 865 Member
    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.
  • spiriteagle99
    spiriteagle99 Posts: 3,668 Member
    I am like westrich20840, I let my body determine how much I do on the days I don't run. On my non-running days I may ride a bike, do yoga, go for a hike, mow the lawn, etc. Some days I do nothing but walk the dog. Since I have a large and active dog, we walk 2-3 miles every day, but given his pace (frequent stops to sniff and pee alternating with very brisk walking) I don't really consider that a workout most of the time.I find if I feel like I have to work out every day, it gets to feel oppressive, more like work than play. I exercise because I enjoy it and I enjoy the way it makes me feel. If I push myself too much, it stops being fun. It becomes just another chore and gets harder and harder to do. Taking time to rest and recover keeps me from burning out. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.