The Floating Rest Day
Sunday, June 12, 2011 at 8:30PM I decided to quit doing "rest days" on a specific day of the week this year and have enjoyed great rewards from it.
The problem: Taking a rest day every Monday or Sunday or whatever most people do is not as beneficial as one would hope. Sometimes you feel great on those days and could do a workout, but you can't, because it's your rest day. And then, some days you are beat down, but you have to to go run or whatever because it's on the calendar. Ouch!
The solution: Learn the signs of needing some rest and then take the day off when you need to. If you wake up with an elevated heart rate or you feel the need to sleep in, then rest! You will come back to training stronger than before and continue your improvements faster than if you kept on training, beating yourself down.
Allowing yourself to use floating rest days is a more sophisticated and elegant approach to training. It takes a new level of discipline to "let go" of the calendar and do it, but it is very worth it! I trained with less volume this year and got much faster using this method, and you can too.
Enjoy your training!
