What's That Rash? - Are rest days from exercise necessary_

0:00Norman SwanThis will had come about in the most suspicious circumstances you could possibly imagine. The difficulty with undue influence often is proving it. The person felt like they had no option but it's difficult to prove that.

0:28Norman SwanTo hear, search for The Law Report and look out for Over My Dead Body. Find it on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Tegan, you're my go-to for fitness. Am I? Gosh, I'm so sorry. We're always hanging off a wall.

0:43Tegan Taylordoing something that I could never conceive of doing. Do you do it continuously? It's like you'll do a climb up a wall one day and you'll do it the next or what's your routine? My routine across the week. I tried to do something most days of the week, but I varied across the week. So I might ride my bike. I might go climbing. I might lift weights. I might do yoga. I might go walking. And I'm lucky if I get to do all of those in a week. My plan is to always do each of those things twice, which never happens. And it's probably just as well because if I did, I would probably burn out or injure myself.

1:13Norman SwanYeah, because one of the big debates is should you have a wee rest between these things that you're doing to allow your muscles to recover or is that just a bit of a myth? Having a wee rest is the topic today here on What's That Rash? The show where we answer the health questions that everyone's asking. So today's question comes from Sam. Sam says, do you have to have a rest or as Norman would say?

1:39Tegan Taylora wee rest, i.e. a rest day between gym workouts. Sam goes on to detail that their workout is usually resistance training with some cardio. So we're talking weights, we're talking cardio. Let's talk rest days, Norman. Yes. Or what happens between rest days, which is the exercise bits and then whether or not a rest day makes sense.

2:00Tegan TaylorI think when I'm sort of seeing I do see a lot of fitness content on my social media feed and there's often this sort of understanding of like we do leg day and then you have a rest day and then you do arm day or upper body day and then you might do a full body workout across the week and it's very much geared towards muscle building like strength building or hypertrophy as in like getting bigger muscles and that rest day and structuring that training regime is really important.

2:26Tegan TaylorBut then our physical activity guidelines in Australia say to be active on most days of the week. But there's a difference between maybe going for a brisk walk or lifting heavy weights in an attempt to sort of basically force your muscles to build themselves up higher. Yeah. And it's important to separate the two. So there is evidence that when you do aerobic exercise for 45 minutes in your heart rate, such that it's hard to have a conversation.

2:53Norman Swanfor the next four days your coronary risk actually drops. I mean literally outrunning death. You're outrunning death and you slowly come back up to where you were before and then you take exercise and it comes down. So in other words the effects of physical activity are almost immediate on the body and protective. But relatively short-lived. But relatively short-lived although you are on a track to becoming fitter. In other words over time if you keep on doing it

3:22Tegan Tayloryour general level of fitness improves. Do we need to separate cardio training versus strength training or weights training in this chart? Yes we do need to separate those. We also need to separate in the evidence elite sports people from you and me. Yes and this is a difficulty with the sort of exercise science that we have is that it's often focused on elite sports people. So people who are maybe like gearing up a year out from a fortnight period where they're at the Worlds or that the Olympics or something like that and they're gearing up to peak at a very particular point in time where they're going to be better than basically every other human has ever been in history of humans. Or peaking on a Saturday afternoon if you're playing football. Right, exactly. Versus you and me, both absolute paragons of fitness and virtue Norman, but you know

4:11Norman SwanWe're riding our bikes to work. We're maybe going for a walk or a jog or a hike. We're not breaking, well, I'm not certainly breaking any kind of records out here. But if you go to the gym, there's certainly a lot of people there who are trying to body sculpt, improve their shape either artificially through drugs or through the training regime. And you can see their training regime.

4:35Norman Swanphone out in front of them and they're not looking at Instagram, they're looking at what they're doing. How many reps? They're counting it and counting the reps and the weights and what have you. Whereas I tend to shamble in and I can't remember the weight that I had on the leg stretching, my quad machine. And it takes me a couple of goes to work out where I was at. Oh yeah, that's where I was at, that feels right. And then you work on it from there. So we'll come back to then what the story is for you, me and maybe even Sam in terms of rest days.

5:02Norman Swanand look at the evidence on elite sports people. Well, let's talk about weight training, strength training. Now, we need to refer people back to a previous What's That Rash that we did on muscle training and some of the myths that are attached to muscle training. So there's a myth, for example, that you need to tear muscle fibers in order to get muscle hypertrophy. Muscle hypertrophy is in fact quite hard to achieve, but really what you should be trying to aim for is muscle strength and improving muscle strength.

5:32Tegan TaylorSo there's no evidence, really, very, very little evidence that tearing your muscles, causing pain, produces a better effect than training which avoids the pain. This is like domes, like delayed onset muscle soreness. So not injuring yourself necessarily during your weight session, but that beautiful burn you get a day or two later when you're like, oh yeah, I work to make lutes. So the idea here is that don't believe necessarily that you need pain to get gain. You don't necessarily...

5:58Tegan Taylorneed that. But again, I'll refer people back to that previous episode and we'll have a link in the show notes. So you don't need to tear your muscles in order to actually build muscle strength. Basically the question that we talk to is if micro tears in your muscle aren't the thing that's growing it, then what is? And really what it comes down to is synthesis of protein in the muscle. That's what's maintaining and building that muscle mass. And often triggered by a bit of inflammation in the muscle as well. So not tears, but that you've stressed the muscle and either stressed it with low reps, high weights or high reps, lower weights, depending on what your trainer or your advice is accordingly. Sometimes having a rest day after a weights session feels non-negotiable. Like if you do have pain or your muscles are sore and tired, you're never going to be able to lift the same amount the next day if you've pushed yourself really hard. How much of the idea of a rest day is about just

6:54Norman Swanperformance in that particular session and how much is sort of about building over time. So most of the researches we just said are into elite athletes or people who are recreational exercisers but are aiming to build muscle and so they're taking it pretty seriously and most of the research is actually into small groups of people because it's fairly intense research. So the research suggests that when you look at people who are given maximum weights for a certain number of reps the next day you're not able to repeat that performance from the day before. So then they've said well what is the optimal rest period to even just recover the performance of that day where you did the maximal strength training. And it turns out that about 48 hours is right for that muscle group. Two around 72 hours but after 72 hours

7:49Norman SwanIn fact, you start to get decline in your performance. That's the depressing part of it. You got to keep going. It's such a short period of time that you start to lose performance. It's kind of crazy. It is, but you are building it up. And there's a little bit of evidence, particularly it's a small study, but there's a little bit of evidence that matches what we've just been seeing is that protein synthesis does go up after a heavy resistance training, but it really goes up.

8:15Tegan Taylorafter 24 hours from the training period and is maximally around about 36 hours following a training session. So in other words, protein synthesis does tend to follow that 48 hour gap. So what I'm hearing is when we're talking about muscle strengthening, muscle building, having two to three days between sessions is going to get you performing well and consistently and hopefully gaining that. If you're an elite athlete and doing it seriously.

8:42Norman SwanSure, okay. So rest days for strength training equals. Yeah, probably. Yeah, probably. Yeah, but here's the qualification and it's a qualification for you or why I won't why would I talk for you or talk for me? Look, I try to do my best, but I don't go to the gym every day. So when I go to the gym, I do my and I don't know when the next time I'm going to be able to find time to go to the gym. It might be two days. It might be the next day.

9:07Norman Swanis I will do whole body training as much as I can. So I will exercise every muscle group with high reps to exhaustion. And usually it is a couple of days before I get back to the gym. If I was doing it seriously, I'd do what the other gyms seem to be doing which is that they sit on the bloody machine and stop everybody else getting on it because all they're doing that day is they're quads.

9:30Norman Swandrives me completely nuts because there's not enough quartz machines around. But nonetheless, that's what they're doing. And if you come back the next day, they're at the gym, but they're doing their biceps or their back muscles or that sort of thing. So you're resting that group and coming back to it at a later stage.

9:47Tegan TaylorOkay, so this is really coming to a definition of what is a rest day. So you could have a really, really intense lower body session one day, and then you could go back to the gym again and technically be resting those muscle groups, but be working your upper body very, very hard. You're still asking your body to work hard, but you're doing it on consecutive days. Is there not an argument at some stage that you just need to have an actual rest? Well, coming back to really athletes, coaches and trainers believe there is because

10:16Norman SwanIf you are a high performance athlete with a lot at stake, then there's stress, chronic stress involved, what they call allostatic load involved in the training process, in the workup to games and so on. What's allostatic load? Allostatic load, we've spoken about it a few times, but by another name, chronic stress. It's the idea that there's a lot on your mind, you're not necessarily in control of the situation and it makes you feel lousy. Elite athletes.

10:44Norman Swanfuel that chronic stress and having a day off just to relieve the pressure psychologically can be good for you. So there's different reasons for having a rest day. So what we were just talking about a moment ago was resting a particular muscle group so that it recovers. So you're not wasting your time exercising at the next day when you're actually not able to get back to even the load you had the day before to spending your time on other muscle groups.

11:11Tegan Taylorso that when you have those rested and you come back a couple of days later, you're able to stress them a bit more versus a rest day which is about psychological rest. It's a break. Okay, so that's an interesting concept because I'm thinking about someone who's very fit and active, they're working hard in the gym and maybe the way that person wants to rest their brain is by going for a run or doing a yoga class. Something that for me would be considered a workout but then might be their downtime.

11:40Norman SwanYes, and a lot of elite athletes play golf, for example. So they have a game of golf. And it's simply not because it's going to keep them fit. It's because they enjoy doing it and it's a break. Although why anybody could think that it's not stressful playing golf, I frankly imagine it's the most stressful sport I've ever been involved with. So, okay, so rest is kind of in the eye of the beholder then.

12:03Norman SwanIt is. But we're still really talking, apart from the psychological side of things, and we're talking about elite athletes, we're still talking about muscles at the moment. Yes. Well, let's talk about cardio, because that was one of the parts of Sam's question, and it's also a big part of lots of people's workout regime. There's no evidence that a rest day makes any difference when you're doing cardio. In other words, where you're improving your aerobic fitness. And by the way, A lot of muscle strengthening exercises do involve cardio as well. Just try doing 20 squats and however many seconds and you're out of breath and you're sweating. But cardio requires consistency and frequency. And there's no evidence that your heart benefits from a day off. That is surprising to me. I think I just assumed that...

12:50Tegan Taylorat least a day of rest a week is good. Maybe that is the cultural thing that I was thinking before that, you know, cycling or whatever, something that's very low impact or swimming where you're not necessarily, you're not running, you're not smashing your knees and that sort of thing, but you're still asking your body to perform. No rest? No rest for the wicked, Norman. Well, a day off is not going to do you any harm.

13:12Norman Swantwo days off, probably not going to do you very much harm. Three days off, you start to lose the cardio benefits from three days ago. In other words, the protective element of aerobic activity. Four days off, you've kind of lost that benefit. You've not necessarily lost the fitness that you've got, but you've lost the protective element, which is really the control of your blood pressure, the control of your pulse rate, and so on.

13:36Norman SwanBut what happens with longer periods of aerobic exercise is that you do lose conditioning. You do lose that fitness. So there's got to be a frequency to it. But there's no extra benefit in deliberately taking a day off aerobic activity. How much do we actually know for sure about this though? Because when I've been looking at the research that we've pulled together for this, a lot of the studies seem very small. When they're talking about consecutive days of exercise, they're talking about like three consecutive days. It's not like they've followed someone for a year who has been doing cardio for 365 days of that year and compared it to someone who's done six days a week for that year. No, but there have been enough epidemiological studies on cardiovascular fitness and aerobic exercise to know the general patterns of improvement and how much exercise you need to do to sustain that improvement.

14:34Tegan TaylorAnd it's actually quite a lot in terms of frequency. So thinking about what we're actually trying to protect against when we're talking about taking a rest day, obviously when we're talking about muscle strengthening, we're talking about wanting.

14:45Tegan Taylorperformance, not wanting to decrease our performance in that subsequent session. But we're also talking, I think, broadly about not wanting to be injured, like not wanting someone to injure themselves, not wanting to maybe have too much mental load, like you said, before that psychological recovery, and maybe not just overtraining in general. What do those sorts of things look like? Well, overtraining can be a sign of an eating disorder.

15:13Norman SwanAnd you've got to look at people's motivation. And in boys and in males, it's often considered that exercise is a proxy for eating disorders. And so if you're doing daily exercise at fairly extreme levels and your aim is not to be an elite athlete, you've got to question why you're doing that. And it happens in women as well. So you've really got to question why people are doing this.

15:42Norman SwanAnd so, yes, you can go too far. The most extreme is where you can get muscle breakdown. It's called rhabdomyolysis, bad for your kidneys. It's a potentially dangerous condition. But those are rare conditions. But you can overtrain. You can get injuries. And one of the reasons you get injuries is what we've just spoken about, which is if you go back to the beginning of this conversation and talking about these studies, which I've done will give people maximum reps at maximum weight and then follow them doing those weights again, second day, day after, second day, third day. On the second day, when you're trying to do those same weights, you can't do it. Your performance goes down and therefore if you try to do it quite hard, you are risking injury because you're not up to the performance of the day before. So there is risk in not having a day off when you're really serious about building your muscles.

16:36Tegan TaylorAnd also, I think what we're asking our bodies to do when we work out is adapt. And they take time to adapt. So you might kind of be like, well, I ran five Ks last week. So I'll run 10 Ks this week. And your body's like, my friend, no, you have to build up to this slowly. Yes, we can be too much of a rush to get there. But progressive training, which we've also spoken about before on Watch That Rash, is really important that when something starts to feel easy, you've got to try and make it harder.

17:05Tegan TaylorSo if we're looking at some rules of thumb in terms of how to split your exercise up across a week, no matter what that looks like for you, how do we structure our week? Well, you've got to be realistic and what you can achieve and whether you've got time to go to the gym. But if you're only going to manage the gym three times a week, two or three times a week, probably the thing to do is actually whole body training. In other words, you try and train as many muscle groups as you can while you're at the gym.

17:34Norman SwanYou're unlikely to be back the next day. You're going to be back two or three days later. You do the same thing again. And at the sort of level that the average person is going to do, you're not going to see yourself any harm and you're going to do yourself a lot of good. So I think of thinking about rest days when you're the average person who can't go to the gym every day is not relevant. You don't worry about those rest days. You just work hard on the days that you're able to go to the gym. Remembering that you've got to add

18:01Tegan Tayloraerobic activity into that, too, on the rowing machine, on the bike, or even better, a jog. Jogging is probably one of the best exercises that you can do for improving aerobic fitness. I hate jogging. I hate it. All right, well, I know just to point people back to... Well, I wish I could jog at the moment, but, you know... Yeah, I know, I know. And I mean, every day is a good day to point people towards the Australian Physical Activity Guidelines, which say...

18:26Tegan Taylor30 minutes or more on most days of moderate to vigorous intensity physical activities, two sessions a week muscle strengthening, three days or more a week on functional activities, things like mobility, balance and coordination. And, and this is a newer addition in the last year, several hours of light intensity physical activity daily, which I think Norman speaks to the fact that the vast, vast, vast majority of Australians I'm not Sam, a question asker. They're probably not coming close to that and building towards it is the play. But what about Sam? Sam's asking us about rest days. What do we say? So if you're Sam, you sound as if you're serious about it. And if you're serious about it and you're doing science based muscle strengthening, which is based on reps and weights.

19:13Tegan TaylorThen two days off is what you want. You want 40 hours between sessions for that muscle group. Well Sam, thanks for the question. All the best in the gym. Let us know how you're going to go. And if you have a question you want us to take a look at, our email address is thatrashatabc.net.au. And lots of responses to our crying program.

19:32Tegan TaylorOh, so many people emailing in about Crying Norman and truly choosing which responses to share with the class was very, very hard. But Oliver emailed in with a really interesting observation. Oliver said, I wanted to add a comment on the topic of crying that is perhaps not widely recognized by cisgender folks about how much hormones affect one's ability to cry. Oliver says it's a phenomenon noted among trans men and trans mask folks who once they begin taking testosterone find that crying becomes much harder to do. Yeah, that one can feel all the elements build up which would have previously resulted in a good cry but sometimes frustratingly the tears

20:14Tegan Taylordon't want to come out. And Oliver says they've heard that on the flip side, a trans woman friend said she cries much more and finishes saying for a few reasons I take a lower dose of testosterone than I did at the start. So I think I've found my sweet spot and can cry when necessary. Thanks, Oliver. Fascinating.

20:33Tegan TaylorOne more email from Karen, writing from Canada, saying, as a Scott, perhaps Norman can explain why bagpipes reduce me to tears every time. Karen says, I was recently in Spain and you guessed it, more bagpipes. I cried every time. And it's not because they're out of tune, I take it. Like I'm not Scottish. Bagpipes still make me cry as well. I don't know what it is, Norman. It strikes directly at my heart. There is quite something quite emotional about bagpipes.

21:01Norman SwanI tend not to get emotional watching something like the military tattoo. I find that just too much, too performative. But if I see a kid's pipe band or I'm in Scotland and you're at a Highland Games and you hear a pipe, I do get emotional. I do get a bit choked. Oh yeah, kids playing instruments and child choirs. Absolute waterworks for me every time. Very cute. Well, if you have an email, you would like to send us our address. Again, is that rash at abc.net.au.

21:29Norman SwanAnd we'll see you next week. See you then.