Why are rest days important for athletes?
Roxane Heaney
2025-06-14 18:10:26
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: 15
They push their bodies during training and competition, which is why rest days to recover are so important. It’s necessary to allow our physical bodies time to rest and replenish. Rest brings relaxing refreshment and the recovery of our strength. After time away of true rest, we can come back and be restored to a regular level of activity. The word “rest” is part of the word “restore.” To rest means you cease work, relax, refresh yourself and recover strength. To restore means to renew, to re-establish, bring back into use. To be restored, we must enter into rest. There is power in slowing down and trusting God to handle things while you set aside a time to rest. Balanced health grants opportunity to not only perform well in all spaces, but it grants greater capacity for relationships with our family, work and sport.
Carley Kutch
2025-06-06 14:02:35
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: 7
Rest is where the magic happens. Without proper rest, young athletes miss out on potential growth, performance gains, and mental sharpness, as well as increasing their risk of burnout and injury. Rest builds stronger muscles, as training causes tiny tears in muscle tissue, ligaments and tendons, and rest is when the body repairs this damage leading to stronger, more powerful bodies. No rest = no growth. Rest prevents injury, as overuse injuries like Severs disease and Osgood-Schlatters Disease are very common in growing athletes, and rest days reduce the constant stress on growing bones and joints, allowing them to recover between bouts of training or competition. Rest supports mental health, as young athletes need breaks to reset their minds, reduce stress, and stay motivated. Rest improves sleep quality, as without recovery, the body remains in a high-alert “go mode”, and well-rested kids perform better in school and sport.
Zetta Adams
2025-06-06 12:29:14
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: 8
Where rest becomes incredibly important is that the adaptations that mean we become better athletes, require rest to actually occur. As we continue to stress ourselves with training we create more fatigue metabolites, more free radicals and reactive oxygen species, greater cortisol levels etc, and if these are left unchecked, we actually reduce our performance due to the damage of chronic exposure to these fatigue factors. This is why overtraining is such an issue as more often than not, athletes will see a plateau or reduction in performance and believe that they need to train more, whereas in reality they likely need to rest. When we rest or reduce our training load/stress, either by decreasing volume or intensity, we give the body the chance to create the adaptations to training. Without implementing rest appropriately, we wouldn’t be able to optimise our training to create the stimulus required to generate the adaptations that make use faster. We also would allow these adaptations to occur if we never rested.
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