By: Chris Gates

Regularly taking adequate time to rest and recover is crucial to making progress with weight training.

I mean, think about it. You do all of that work, put in the hours in the gym each week… You want to see results, right?

Well, if you’re struggling to see progress, and you don’t have any type of plan for sleep, it’s time to understand that rest is a crucial piece to the puzzle.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know about how often you should rest from weight training.

Let’s start by talking about the demands of weight training and why your body needs rest, and then we’ll discuss specific recommendations on how much rest you should take, and why.

Let’s dive in!

How Hard Should You Train?

If you’re training hard, it’s going to take a toll on your body.

And to build muscle and strength, you need to be training quite hard.

No, you shouldn’t be training as much as possible and as hard as you can each session and each week to make progress. But you do need to assert yourself and make each exercise and training session feel hard.

Quite simply, training needs to be hard so that your body is forced to build muscle, adapt, and grow.

In order to create adaptations from your training like building muscle and strength, you need to give your body a stimulus that forces it to grow. If you’re just going through the motions, lifting weights, and not really experiencing any type of challenge, nothing about your training is going to cause growth.

But if you’re regularly taking your sets to within a few reps of failure and lifting with adequate training volume, you’ll be taking care of a lot of the necessary items for growth.

Here are some quick recommendations for you to use to make sure you’re training hard enough to build muscle and/or strength:

• Lift with adequate intensity. Take your sets within 1-4 reps of failure.
• Do 10-20 hard sets per week for the muscle groups you want to grow.
• Focus on progressive overload over time. Increase some variable(s) from the beginning of a training block to the end. This can be done by…
  • Adding sets to some exercises
  • Adding one or more reps to some exercises
  • Adding weight to some exercises

The Demands of Weight Training

OK, I outlined all of that to explain this to you…

When weight training is done properly, it’s exhausting.

Honestly, it’s tiring. You’ll feel it, whether it be from muscle soreness or just overall fatigue as the week goes on and you continue to train hard.

How might you notice the demands of weight training?

First and foremost, let’s talk about muscle soreness, because that’s a popular one and probably the most widely understood variable when it comes to weight training demands.

If you train hard, you’re probably going to experience some muscle soreness. And if you’re relatively new to weight training, that soreness can sometimes be pretty vicious.

That soreness (called delayed onset muscle soreness – or “DOMS”) may be related to the microscopic muscle tears that hard weight training causes, and the inflammatory response your body has in response to those muscle tears. The only thing that will reliably alleviate the pain is adequate rest, and often multiple days of it.

That’s not to say you need to take multiple days of rest after each training session. Rather, it means that when you train a specific muscle group, you’re typically going to need to give that muscle group 24-48 hours of rest in order to allow for recovery.

In addition to muscle soreness, you can experience CNS fatigue if you do a lot (or too much) of weight training. CNS stands for “central nervous system” and it essentially means your brain becomes less efficient at sending signals to your body and muscles to perform the exercises. This is a more serious form of fatigue, and it’s a clear sign that you’re overtrained and need a break.

This type of fatigue probably means you should take a break from training entirely, as opposed to just resting specific muscle groups.

But we can manage and/or prevent all of this training fatigue by simply approaching training in a responsible manner. And that’s where we land on the goal of this article, which is to answer this question: how often should you rest from weight training?

How Often Should You Rest From Weight Training?

To start, here are some clear signs that you’re not resting enough and need to add more rest and recovery into your routine:

• You have high levels of muscle soreness after your workouts, which last for 48 hours or more.
• You feel sluggish when you’re training.
• You feel sluggish and tired when you’re NOT training.
• You slip, trip, knock things over, etc. Just generally aren’t sharp while completing regular daily activities.
• You’re losing the motivation to train.
• Your workouts are feeling almost too hard to complete.
• You have nagging aches and pains.
• You’re having trouble sleeping.
• You’ve plateau’d with your training

To be clear, you don’t need to be experiencing ALL or MOST of the things in that bulleted list. Simply experiencing one may be enough of a sign to shut things down and rest, or rethink your training plan and how much rest you’re allowing yourself to have.

In general, if you’re following some type of traditional training split (push-pull-legs split; upper body-lower body split; body part specific training, etc.), it’s going to be important to give each muscle group 1-2 days of rest before training again, assuming you’re training adequately hard and with sufficient volume.

For example, if you train chest, shoulders, and triceps on Mondays, your best move is probably to give those muscle groups until at least Wednesday or Thursday before training them again. And luckily, it’s pretty easy to space your training out in a way that promotes adequate volume as well as adequate rest and recovery.

Here’s an example:

Day of the Week:	Training Focus:	What’s Resting?
Monday:	Chest, Shoulders, Triceps	Back, Biceps, Lower Body
Tuesday:	Back, Biceps	Chest, Shoulders, Triceps, Lower Body
Wednesday:	Lower Body	Upper Body
Thursday:	Upper Body	Lower Body
Friday:	Lower Body	Upper Body
Saturday:	Rest	Everything
Sunday:	Rest	Everything

You’ll notice that the weekend includes two full rest days, which is important for us to discuss as well. From a variety of perspectives, it’s important to give your body multiple days away from training each week.

Training every day isn’t necessary, for one. Second, it’s exhausting. Third, it creates more peripheral and systemic fatigue that, over time, becomes harder and harder to recover from (and you’ll eventually plateau, or get injured, or worse).

Taking full rest days (where you’re not going to the gym) will help your body to fully recover each week, and it will also give you a much needed mental break. Do things on those full rest days that you enjoy outside of the gym, and it will make it that much more exciting to get back into the gym when it’s time to train again.

You can still be active. Going for a walk, or a jog, or a bike ride, or something similar is perfectly fine. Just try to avoid smashing the weights.

Action Items

Alright, so let’s talk specifics regarding how often should you rest from weight training?

You probably noticed I’ve mentioned the word “plateau” quite a bit throughout this article, and that’s because I want it to serve as a motivating factor for you to get more rest.

Oftentimes people are afraid to take rest days, for fear that they’ll lose all of their progress (or won’t make more progress). And we need to be extremely clear about this…

You will not lose progress by taking rest days.

You will actually experience MORE progress by taking rest days.

If you don’t take regular rest days, you’re going to eventually plateau, or get hurt. So hopefully this article has been enough to help convince you that rest is critical and beneficial.

So that’s your first action item — recognize that rest is a crucial piece to the puzzle, and commit to taking rest days.

Beyond that, here are a few other pointers you can use as you move forward in your fitness journey:

1. Give each muscle group at least 24-48 hours to recover from each training sessions.
2. Take 2-3 full rest days each week, where you’re not weight training at all (but you can do more leisurely exercise that you enjoy).
3. Every 4-8 weeks, take a full de-load week.

That last one is a somewhat different concept than what we’ve talked about here, and I’ve written a separate article on the importance of de-load weeks, so check that out if you’d like to learn more. Quickly, a de-load week is a week of time where you scale back training volume and intensity dramatically in order to promote recovery.

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I hope you found this article helpful! As you can see, rest and recovery is extremely important. You have to plan for it, you have to stick to it, and you need to have it structured into your program appropriately to get the most out of it.

If you’re interested in getting some guided help with your fitness journey, I am an online personal trainer and I’d love to help! You can visit my coaching page to learn about online personal training, and if you’d like to discuss your goals and how we might be able to work together, fill out a coaching application form and I’ll reach out to you!

Thank for reading 🙂