Why you Shouldn’t Skip Rest Days when Exercising!

One of the most preferred ways for staying healthy is exercising, but can doing too much be bad for you? Well, the answer is yes!

Our expert orthopaedic surgeons at 1 Health Medical Centre regularly treat patients who have developed stress fractures or other injuries related to overuse from working out constantly.

Probably exercise is one of those activities you’ve promised not to miss during COVID-19; all things considered, if you happen to get infected by the virus, being in the best shape and at the peak of your health may help you in making a faster recovery.

Be that as it may, being healthy involves both rest and exercise. It’s important to plan for rest days between workouts that involve moderate to intense cardio exercises, or resistance and weight training. Here are a few good reasons why rest days are important, especially when you engage in high intensity or strenuous physical training.

Soft Tissue Repair

When you start working out aggressively, whether it’s aerobic activity or weight training, your muscles start developing tiny tears. The connective tissues in your body and your muscles are made up of cells called fibroblasts. An important function of your fibroblasts is to assist in healing wounds, and this is exactly what is done during your rest days. The tiny tears that develop in your muscles when engaging in strenuous exercise are repaired by these cells

So it’s important that you give your body time to repair itself after you’ve worked it hard.

Prevent Excess Fatigue

Glycogen is a type of sugar that is formed by our body and can be stored in our muscles. This gives us the energy to engage in vigorous exercises. However, the catch is that it gets easily depleted and we can only store so much of it at one time.

If you engage in resistance training workouts or intense aerobics, whether it’s weightlifting, zumba, or running, you’ll start feeling extremely fatigued when you’ve emptied your store of glycogen. If you try pushing ahead beyond your endurance, your blood pressure may start dropping, causing you to become dizzy, or even faint.

Prevent Overuse Injuries

Giving yourself a day of rest between sessions of weightlifting or aerobic workouts is important, failing to do so may make you more prone to an overuse injury. Instead of focusing on getting stronger, you may be required to take time off so that your soft tissue injury or injured joint can heal. When you overtrain your tendons and muscles, you put them at risk of strain, while putting your ligaments at risk of a sprain

Prevent accidental injuries

When you’ve exhausted yourself from too much exercise, you may not put that much importance on proper form while playing a sport. If you’re exhausted and land incorrectly after a jump, you could probably end up tearing your Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). Feeling excessively tired from working out every day can also be catastrophic, you place yourself at increased risk for various types of accidents, from falling asleep at the wheel to stepping into a hole in the pavement, this happens majorly because you’re not as alert as you would be otherwise.

Make sure to add rest days into your workout regimen, but if you suspect that you may have suffered an overuse injury, call 1 Health Medical centre immediately for an appointment. Our expert orthopaedics and physicians treat patients with such injuries on a regular basis.

Avoiding these minor injuries may be the gateway to many other major injuries in the future. Getting yourself treated early can prevent injuries from getting worse and also aids in faster recovery.