You know you should be exercising, but how often should you take a day off from your workouts? As a personal trainer in Schaumburg, this question comes up often with my clients.
As with most things health and fitness related, the only truthful answer is, “it depends”. How often you take a day off from working out in part depends on:
- What you are doing while you are at the gym
- What your body is currently accustomed to
- What your body is physically able to tolerate
- How well you are recovering from your workouts (i.e. do you feel sore and lethargic or energized and strong in the hours and days following your workout?)
- What your goals are (health vs. performance vs. changing body composition)
- What the timeline is for your goals
**For the sake of creating some context, let’s say your goals are to improve your physical health by lowering your fasting glucose levels and HbA1c score, lowering your resting heart rate and blood pressure, and exercising in a manner that improves your insulin sensitivity and decreases your risk of developing certain forms of cancer.
If your goals are more performance related (i.e. sports or strength) or cosmetic related (changing body composition), I am not going to touch on those. While I have experience in both of these areas, they fall outside of my true area of interest and expertise, which is using exercise to help improve overall physical health and manage and prevent chronic disease.**
Related: The Gold Standard of Exercise
When it comes to improving your health, I want to encourage you to think about your exercise in two different ways: 1) “All The Time” exercise, and 2) “Special Event” exercise. All The Time exercise is physical activity that you are doing throughout the day — walking from your car to your office, walking up stairs, putting away laundry, etc. Special Event exercise pertains more to this question because it is exercise that you set aside a specific time for. You may go out for a run or go to the gym. It usually involves a change of clothes and exerting yourself at a higher intensity than All The Time exercise. Likewise, All The Time exercise may not require a change of clothes and is typically performed at a low intensity relative to a resting state.
Because this question specifically asks about working out, which is typically considered to fall more in the Special Event exercise category, let’s discuss Special Event exercise as it pertains to improving physical health. In this context, the current recommendation is to visit the gym a minimum of three days a week for at least 45 minutes, challenging yourself at a level that you would rate to be at least a 7 out of 10 (Rating of Perceived Exertion – RPE). A 7 out of 10 RPE would be determined as the exertion level at which you can speak only in broken sentences and are breathing heavily.
Now, one of the biggest assumptions that is being made with this recommendation is that your body can tolerate working out three times a week for 45 minutes at a 7 RPE. You may not be able to, in which case you need to slowly progress yourself to this. When it comes to progression, I prefer to use the “Rule of 50%” with my clients.
The Rule of 50% states that if you experience muscle or joint soreness or overall fatigue/lethargy in the hours or days following your workout, the next time you exercise, reduce the challenge by 50%. Either reduce the volume of work that you are doing or the intensity you are working at. Continue to reduce the volume and/or intensity until you do not experience any soreness or lethargy from your workout. Then, slowly increase the challenge, progressing at a rate of 5–10% every 2–4 weeks.
Related: 3 Must-Do’s To Exercise For Quality
It may take a number of months before you are able to workout at a 7 RPE for 45 minutes three times per week, but remember, the context of this advice is improving your overall health, and that’s a long-term game.
So, how often should you take a day off from working out? Ideally, at most, you would take off no more than four days each week. In other words, at a minimum, you should be working out hard three days per week in order to glean some of the awesome health-promoting benefits of exercise. But, again, this is only if your body can tolerate working out at that intensity and frequency. And by tolerate, I mean you do not experience any soreness or lethargy in the days following your workout.
If this conversation were to include All The Time exercise, we would be discussing how you need to be getting physical activity in every day in order to help prevent insulin resistance that can lead to Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. For more on this topic, as well as more details about the how and why of Special Event exercise and All The Time exercise, download our free e-book here (references and citations included in the book).
Please keep in mind the context I created for this response. If you are looking for an answer that is more specific to taking a day off for sports performance, improving your strength, or changing your body composition (i.e. decreasing body fat or increasing muscle mass), the answers may greatly differ from mine.
* This answer was originally posted as a response to a question on Quora.com. Follow all of Charlie’s answers on Quora here!
