Taking it Slow... Our Favourite Exercise Tip

It can be hard to find the right balance between work, your social life and that all important "me" time. Making sure you're feeding your body the right nutrients and working on getting (or staying) fit is a top priority for most of us but it's often difficult to know how to maximise your exercise and diet unless you commit to a personal trainer and nutritionist. So today we thought we'd key you in on this exercise tip we swear by to achieving a more balanced and healthy lifestyle through practicing less exercise.

Gym, REST, Repeat!

For those of you who burn it out in the gym relentlessly it may of interest to you that recent research has found that back-to-back workouts could be doing more harm than good by limiting your body’s ability to repair and recover.

It’s crucial to build recovery time into any fitness regime. If fat loss is part of your fitness goals, working out without adequate rest can sabotage those goals. Your body has protective mechanisms in place to protect against physical threat and if you work out too hard, too frequently with no rest, your body may perceive your exercise as an unwanted physical stressor and conserve its stores to preserve your lifeforce – in other words, you may be doing more harm than good. Providing your body with adequate rest will allow you to store and preserve energy so that you can keep pushing yourself, without your body’s protective mechanisms inadvertently halting your progress. 

Any kind of physical activity, especially strenuous exercise can cause changes in the body, including fluid loss, muscle tissue breakdown and depletion of muscle glycogen. Thereby, experts recommend to rest your body to allow it to bounce back to a rejuvenated state. 

Of course it's important to remember that when it comes to rest, it doesn’t have to equate to no exercise at all – every body’s needs are individual, so how much rest you require will depend on your normal activity levels and your base level of fitness – and these needs will change as you become more or less fit.