The Importance of REST for Runners
BY Matt Wickham
Biokineticist at Kings Park Medicine Centre
Rest is a fundamental part of any runner’s training regime, however, it is often overlooked and underestimated.
For some, it may even seem counterintuitive to take a break from running. When we run, our muscles experience physical fatigue and stress, including micro tears in the muscle from the continuous pounding on the road. But that is not the only form of fatigue that runners will experience in a day. On top of that, we experience mental fatigue from the daily work and life stressors. Our muscles need time to repair and rebuild so that we can continue to do the thing that we love: RUN.
The two main ways to implement better rest is through program design and sleep, and guess what – THEY ARE FREE!!
Program design is the easiest way to consciously encourage rest. Incorporating and enforcing rest days into your program is critical to allow for our body to adapt to the load of training. We often forget that it is OK to take a day off here and there and can easily get caught up in the social element of running. Soon runners find themselves running every day, runner further distances, and forgetting what a rest day is – with overtraining being the highest cause of injury in runners.
Rest days should be incorporated weekly into program design to accommodate for the immediate loads of training. Then the occasional “deload week” should be encouraged every 3-4weeks, where we allow for shorter distance runs or a decreased total run time for the week. This allows for recovery from the accumulated load of training over that period.
Sleep is then the second most important way to implement rest. For our bodies to receive a sufficient amount of rest and to adapt to physical demands, we require 8-10 hours of sleep, with the majority of people functioning on only 5-6 hours! With every hour of sleep we miss out on, we increase our risk of injury and added to that our cognitive functioning is poor which means we are not thinking while we run, potentially stepping off the side or a pavement or even into a pothole and picking up an injury. Sleep can also be easily implemented to training sessions on weekends, allowing for a slightly later start or returning from training and allowing for a short sleep to recover.
Other forms of rest are methods such as massage/physiotherapy, saunas or ice baths, compression boots or even recovery chambers such as oxygen therapy or cryotherapy. These methods are really effective and helpful but can, however, be a costly option, especially if you are needing to do it frequently.
It is important for runners to recognize symptoms of fatigue like prolonged muscle soreness, joint pain, increased heart rate, decreased performance, decreased cognitive ability to process daily stressors, brain fog, adrenal fatigue, illness and of course, injury.
So when planning your training for your next race, try to incorporate these methods of rest. Allow your body to recover, adapt and get stronger to strategic rest.
When we implement these factors, our body can start to adapt to load progressions, which means that in time, we could start to run slightly further or faster if properly introduced in the programming.
*For more information contact Matt Wickham at:
Kings Park Sports Medicine Centre
892 Umgeni Road, Morningside Durban
031 303 3874
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