Do You REALLY Need Rest Days?

hey folks Dr Mike here for Renaissance periodization news flash there is no team called team no days off and I'm going to talk to you today about why rest days are Mega important for you to get the most results so I think I have a total of seven points for you today Point number one is to Define what a rest day is here's the definition as I use it and we'll be using it throughout the rest of this lecture a rest day is a day on which no weight training occurs for the purposes of most

of the people watching this channel who weight training is kind of their sport it's their hobby if their activity some cardio is okay if it's easy cardio if it's just activity and getting your 10 to 12K steps a day that's totally cool still counts as a rest day extra cardio is not a good idea and it doesn't make that day count as a rest day anymore but we'll get that in just a second now I'm a big fan of rest days I think they're important I think that training seven days a week is generally fucking

stupid and you should do at least one day off why so that leads us to point number two of what are the actual advantages of rest days what are the benefits first your muscles do not grow in the gym they grow outside of the gym taking an extra day after a crazy hard week of training is a day entirely dedicated to muscle growth that sounds pretty good to me just on paper it sounds fucking sweet second there are two types of fatigue that your muscles and your training can take on one is local fatigue like

your biceps are sore two is systemic fatigue your whole body and brain are a little bit fucked up and they need to cool that system off and drop the fatigue when you train biceps one day the next day you train chest and triceps the day after you train legs your biceps locally are healing the entire time you're doing chest and triceps and legs because they're not being fussed with perfect but what about the system your whole body sure shit isn't healing because it's being demanded to work very hard on both when you train your biceps

and your back chest and triceps and legs it's just boom boom boom so taking a rest day is a unique kind of fatigue reduction because it brings down systemic fatigue that Global fatigue that feels like oh man fuck I never want to train again when it's high enough and when it's low enough feels like Dragon Ball Z lightning bolt energy flowing through your body you're just ready to go crush the gym you want to feel like that second way you're going to want to bring your fatigue down which means you're going to want to take

rest days next psychological fatigue reduction that lightning bolts feeling is physiological in nature but there is a whole other Spectrum on the on the psychology and the psychology is affected by two things one physiology affects psychology when your cortisol stress hormones your fight ORF flight hormones are up and your testosterone is down from too many days without rest too much systemic fatigue just those hormones alone and other nervous system processes on the physiology side actually make your brain think differently and alter your psychology directly that's definitely a thing that happens but there is another side

of psychology the purely psychological side that reveals Itself by the fact that going to the gym and going and really really trying sit on a toilet and try just as hard eat more fiber people it's 2023 or four or five whenever the fuck this video comes out hey Scott the video guy why don't we just do like a video dump of 500 videos that we record in advance all in one day one every minute every minute see if you can keep up so psychological fatigue is something that can accumulate when the grind of having to

try hard all the time is just like oh my God I need a mental break because a mental break is awesome you're relaxing you're recovering for a day maybe two of pure rest but then at the end of that second day you're like bro I don't need to relax anymore I need to shoot energy waves out of my fucking hands and then back to the gym you go so time for muscles to grow systemic fatigue goes down and psychological fatigue goes down which is all lame and whatever it's pussy bullshit to fucking think about fatigue

but to think about another way you're preparing your body and mind to go psychotically hard that next week so you go hard hard hard hard hard and you accumulate fatigue throughout the week you take one two or three rest days at the end of the week and the fatigue comes right back down so you can fucking reload the Cannons of gains brothers and sisters and you know properly site them of course that's the good technique part and then boom fire off for a whole week straight get really tired and repeat the process over again I

Believe In The Lion King they call this The Circle of Life The Lion King was a movie about training right Scott the video guy abely that's what I got out of it hold on to that buffal bro for real and like mandrels and shit like that I don't want to get in the motherfucker faces untrained you feel me have all that red ass you know I don't know where we got with that one they do have red asses though fellas you feel me I ain't lying all right what do you want to avoid on rest

days go could find Dr m you talk me into rest I'm a fucking bitch like you now I need to rest all the time not a warrior Android how do I rest properly and what do I want to make sure that I avoid and screwing up my rest day couple things one doing more cardio or more mental work like your job or your school than usual to make up for the fact that you're not actually training with weights really hard people do this and I totally understand where they're coming from you fucking grind every day

you do some fucking work you do some fucking school you do some fucking heart training you feel like you've earned it you go to sleep with a smile on your face you guys like that that's my my my uh fake Russian smile technically the Russian smile looks like this so we have nothing to be happy about but a fake Russian smile is and your eyes stay the same but your mouth moves look at my eyes I don't know any happiness in any case you smile you go to sleep you wake up repeat I love it

hashw workk hardplay hard dope makes for a great Instagram story but some days of all the stuff you do you need to bring it down because recovery occurs when you're under less total stress of every kind because remember there's psychological impact to recovery so if you do more work and more school you'll just be Delirious from that you'll be very accomplished in the short term congratulations but your fatigue will continue to sumate over the many weeks and then you'll fucking fall apart into pieces and have to pull back on training all this other bullshit instead

be smart when you take a recovery day try to make sure that at least a few other parts of your life are on easier mode as well don't make up for it even if it's just going to work like normal just normally go to work you get out at 500 you go to the gym from 5: to 700 you grind at the gym you come home and you I don't know look up hentai that's what I do oh hey Scott shut the fuck up I know you're able to attract actual females you don't need to

look at adult films but some of us were lonely and the Japanese wuss make it so nice am I saying that right fellas you hit me up in the comments in any case if you instead go you know what my wifeu wifeu will be 7 P p.m. anyway but I'm not going to the gym today because it's a rest day I'm G to stay at work for two more hours your boss will love you your landlord will love you any proper Zeppelin owning billionaire trillionaire like myself will love you but you're not actually recover recovering

as much as you could because instead of actually recovering you took the training and the physical stress of it and sometimes the psychological d-stress of training and you put in more psychological stress of work so I say don't have to take the whole day off of work although that's pretty cool to do if especially if it's a weekend that's really good because that'll bring down even more fatigue but even if you just go to work and leave at the normal time those two extra hours because you're not training just go home and well I suppose

get into the hentai early and just sit there because you have nothing else to do no friends not even any hope of making any this is an autobiography icing and heating people think recovery and the again at all is voodoo nonsense ice and heat do not actually help heal you they prevent to some extent or delay to some extent the very recuperative processes that in the short term make you tighter and more sore but in the long term make you more jacked and all this other great stuff so icing and heating is cool for athletes

to use the day before the morning of a game so they never feel tight to begin with from all their practice or the game they had the other night but for all of us who are gym monkeys I shall call us we are cool with being tight and sore and letting those inflammatory processes mediated by the immune system actually heal us and make us more jacked so don't go over there and start doing fucking cryotherapy and heating and shit the exception is if one of those things really psychologically relaxes you if you're strange and you're

from northern Europe and you go into the Finish SAA because that the only SAA that's really work in the swedes they don't know what they're doing now you notice my Finnish and Swedish accent is the same because to my untrained stupid American ears they are the same can you tell someone from Indiana apart from someone from Missouri well those states are further apart than Finland and Sweden motherfuckers in any case my uh digressions into verbally assaulting the northern Europeans are just better than us and everything uh aside if you love The the sauna and it's

super relaxing for you amazing thing to do on a recovery day but if you're in the sauna like I am and you're like f I'm gonna die of fucking heat stroke in here why the fuck am I here at least there's naked dudes oh gotta scratch my knee sorry to look at and they're nice they're naked they're dudes checks both of my boxes unless that is something that turns you on just don't go so remember heat and ice at a physiological level doesn't do dick for you that on a recovery day so if you're doing

a recovery day if you're doing sorry if you're doing a rest day and a recovery day we'll get to what that means in a second you don't need all that shit just be easy sit on the couch take walks eat food Etc and what I would stay away from not as a matter of course not as a matter of principle but I suppose if you're very serious about your training training Ultra serious and this training cycle is super important to you maybe you have a competition coming up or something like that I would consider avoiding

activities that are fun but not relaxing and restful and easy you know 50 Cent can be in the club and still be jacked but the rest of us are mere mortals and not like 50 Cent by the way my dog shit 50 Cent impression is incoming and when I do it it's probably gonna suck but it's not the worst 50 Cent impression in the world and I gotta tell you how do I sound like 50 well fuck it I'll just I'll just do pressure ready Scott video you ready B me in the [Music] club anyway

that's what he sounds like really really pretty good how do I do it 50 c never opens his mouth because he had a shit wired shut I don't even understand how I talk so if you're going to do a 50 c impression my wise words to you just keep your teeth closed the whole time and you're well on your way you're about halfway there so yes it's fun to go to the club and to grind on everyone I'm talking about fine ass bitches I'm talking about bitches that look pretty fucking good I'm talking about bitches

that everybody needs love I'm talking about the bitches that didn't even know they needed love with consent I'm talking about dudes listen it's 2023 whatever you're into it doesn't matter who you're grinding on you're moving your hips up and down you're groov into the music I'm Jewish so I I have an inability to dance or even understand how dance would work in a muscular coordinated manner but I assume it's difficult and the difficulty of that makes you sweat makes you sore makes you tired don't do it if you're very serious in that training phase so

rest day means I know this sounds crazy rest strange all right Dr Mike if that's even your real title you told me what not to do but what are some tips of what to do on a rest day well easy there kind viewer a couple of tips first get as much sleep as you feel like if you feel like sleeping for 10 hours rock on sleep is amazing it is recuperative it's more powerful than any steroid in the book next eat as much as your diet allows which means if you're on a mass ging plan

and you're a lot of 500 calorie Surplus you better be taking that shit if you're on a fat loss phase you can't eat a ton well eat as much as you can definitely don't skimp on the shit a common question that I get is look if I have times when I have training days and other days which are rest but my Renaissance pration diet from the RP diet coach app available in the Apple Store and the Google Play Store and it's for money too and my Butlers they like money it takes my rest days and

it lowers the calor calories but it keeps my training with higher calories is that okay it is totally okay but an advanced tip is if you're training hard you're training six days a week maybe even five days a week on some occasion twice a day on some of those days it's a really really good idea for you to think about elevating your off day calories especially on a bulk to the same as your training day calories because then you get some extra calories in the mix and you really really really allow for that recovery because

some people when they're not training they'll take the calories and drop them like crazy that's okay if you want to lose fat but if you're just eating some proteins and Trace fats on your rest day yes you're resting but you're not recovering as much as you could so it's a real good idea to maximize calories if you train a ton a ton like five six plus times per week with two a days yeah on your rest day like I train six days a week my rest day has as many calories as any other training day

that I do cuz I'm beat up and I need that shit lastly try to do as much relaxing stuff as you can watch Netflix great idea hang out with friends chilling on a ton of crazy movement don't go running around the park or anything like that if it relaxes you massage is a great idea Nuru Massage is an even better idea do you guys know what Nuru Massage is do not Google it at your work computer Scott why are you giggling I was goingon to say some shit that's private Scott but one of our friends

who's not here was you know what I'm saying I was gonna talk that shit but I shouldn't right we maybe knew someone who might have gotten one I've heard of people that I've known who have got newu massages a newu massage is just like any oldfashioned massage Mass you see except the person that's doing it to you is female of reproductive age and appearance entirely naked and completely lathered head to toe in massage oil and she uses both her hands and the rest of her body to massage you and I believe all of those massages

really just kind of end in one way with a happy customer that is give it a shot it's probably dope but what would I know just seen a few people on the internet do it and websites you're not allowed to type in at work for real for real though compassionate touching cuddling all the way up to Etc somewhere in there is just regular massage has a very big effect on reducing fatigue huge effect so if you can get some cuddles in that's a really good idea so find you someone you can cuddle with and no

joke petting and cuddling with pets has a profound measurable relaxing effect on most humans at least the humans that like to do it so if you have a kitty cat or a little bulld doggy this is me playing with their flaps you move the flaps uh then that's actually uh helpful for recovery so you can pick up your bulldog and set him on your lap and he's like and you're like who my big man helped me recover who's the big man and they don't ever say anything back um but that's how baby Talk Works to

pets which I do in every conceivable moment and if you ever meet me in real life and you have a pet on you I will absolutely do baby talk to it now that's rest days but there's another kind of day I wanted to talk to you guys about which is related there's a rest day where you don't fucking train and then there is a recovery Training Day you do train on that day but it's recovery style training training whose purpose is not generally to elevate your Fitness characteristics to make you better at stuff directly training

that has the purpose of increasing your ability to recover it potentiates further recovery generally speaking while there are many different ways to skin the cat you guys ever think about how that actually looks it's fucked up the template I like to start with as a thought exercise at least with recovery days is to take 50% of the load 50% of the weight off the bar only do 50% of the Reps you normally do half the Reps and only half of the sets as usual if you think about it someone who's benching 200 pounds for four

sets of 10 is now doing two sets of five with 100 pounds holy fucking shit that is so much easier it's so easy in fact that that it just barely potentiates through blood flow and stretching and moving and activating the nervous system it barely potentiates it's like uh mini rehab mini physical therapy just a little bit of a dose of exercise to super boost the recovery process while not adding any fatigue and actually subtracting so the biggest quintessential critical thing for Recovery training is for it to be very very easy if it is remotely difficult

it's a bad idea you should be resting instead recovery days do uh recovery training does a couple of really cool things during multi-day rest periods if you rest generally for more than about two or three days your body actually starts to recover slower because your metabolism is like fuck that I guess we're done with sport if you do a little bit of light movement and training during a 3 to four day rest period you can actually have better faster and more complete recovery in addition just that minor workload and moving through going through the motions

can save a little tiny fraction of muscle from going away these are tiny fractions but over months and years of training they can add up and because you're still training with the exercises during recovery training and because the exercises are so easy very far from failure very low much lower reps M many fewer sets much less load you're actually able to focus on technique meticulously so recovery training still Tak your Technique very seriously and then it's an extra opportunity to improve your Technique while your fatigue comes down very very very cool when should you use

these a couple there's there are more situations that I'm going to list but I'm going to list probably about 95% of all the situation fall into I think basically three things one when you otherwise have multiple and this I mean three or more days off in a row so if you take a recovery half week you take a D Lo you take an act of rest well yeah all the training days on those are recovery training days roughly half of everything and super easy if you are just taking two days off from the gym don't

take your second day and go in there and do stuff if it's one day off don't you dare go to the fucking gym if it's three day off 5050 maybe the middle day that second day you can go and do recovery training but if it's four five six days off yeah you should probably get your ass in there and do one or two recovery training sessions that's a good idea next it's a really big Advantage these kinds of days when technique optimization is a big factor for hypertrophy trainees such as well maybe you and definitely

me it's not a big deal hyfy technique is not that complicated also you get a shitload of practice because you're doing tons of sets and Reps all the fucking time but if you are a weightlifter or a powerlifter or if you're into SNM which means strongman then you have an opportunity to do all the events and lifts very light and maybe even for a little bit of speed and that promotes recovery and it improves your Tech technique so to a bodybuilder if given the chance between a recovery day and just a day off many times

they'll just take the day off because they don't have a lot of rest days to begin with anyway and because technique doesn't matter much so one of the upsides is a little bit not as big of a deal but for people who are powerlifters weightlifters or stra man competitors or just recreational strength people strong men and strong woman I think women just still call The Sport strongman it's a bit of a archaic term if that's the case man recovery training is actually fucking great because it drops your fatigue so you can get crazy heavy training

after but also makes you more technical so that when you go to that crazy heavy training you're even more fluid and everything's really good and lastly you can use these when you taking away pre-planned hard training days and replacing them with recovery training days if you had just rest days planned like you plann two rest days days and on the second day you're like man I want to go to the fucking gym I didn't have any fucking thing planned here and I'm not supposed to be at the gym fuck it I'll go do a recovery

training session that's not the worst thing in the world but it's kind of fucking stupid because you really two or three days in a row just rest and let the body relax the utility of a recovery training session doesn't really show itself until you do rest for a couple of days that's when it really makes a big difference and if you're layering in more training than you're supposed to to be if you're supposed to train five days a week but now you're adding an extra recovery training session on that sixth day to quote Dr James

Hoffman one of the world's experts in recovery training and RP coach you do not recover by adding shit so if your sixth day was supposed to be hard but you're like way too fucked up to do it replacing it with recovery training great idea five days was the plan six was supposed to be rest but you're like man fuck rest I'll sleep when I'm dead brother dope but you're going to be dead real soon because if you go and do recovery training it's just probably a waste of your time at best and at worst it

actually marginally adds fatigue because of the psychological fatigue of going to the gym and experiencing all that bullshit otherwise outside of the circumstances probably take a rest day now there is a feature to this discussion more advanced of timing your rest days generally speaking if you're training hypertrophy and strength you're going to take somewhere between one and three total rest days per week which is if you train four days a week you take three rest days five days a week you take two six days a week you take one seven days a week of training

is not a serious approach to training if you're a hardcore athlete you want the best possible results you should be training at most six days a week I really do think that because again this whole fucking lecture about how rest days are important so you need at least once per week when you're constructing your plan let's let's say you train five days per week you have a choice you can either intersperse your rest days or you can take them contiguously which means they line up or adjacently one one up to another so you could do

Monday Tuesday rest Thursday Friday Saturday rest and then come back or you could do Monday through Friday training and then Saturday Sunday rest contiguous adjacent days and then Monday back to training by a small margin I think most of the time and I mean like 6040 contiguous training days sorry uh definitely training days contiguous adjacent rest days if you have more than one are usually a good idea at least two in a row at one point during your week you can drop a lot of fatigue in one day you really can with a great night

of sleep but two rest days in a row get you Jazz the fuck up for psycho training like none other there's something special to that and if you're a bodybuilder hypertropin is not that hard you might be able to do just one rest day or not even do the contiguous ones maybe five days a week but you split it up no big deal but you're a strength athlete you're a strong man you're a powerlifter I highly recommend taking two days off in a row it can be a GameChanger at least try it and see how

you feel now within all that context whether or not you do the contiguous days there are a few timing options you can choose from and they both have their upsides and downsides one intelligent way to take a rest day let's say you're a bodybuilder is before your big priority day or days let's say that you have two rest days a week and this mesocycle fuck this whole training block three mesocycles in a row Like Chief four to six months of training you want big back gains you were at the club and you were like hey

I noticed you from across the room but she's like I'm going to cut you off she had my exact tone of voice she's like when you came over here I thought you were fucking hot but then you turned around to look back at your friends and I noticed you have the back of what looks to be a literal vagina and I'm not interested in you talking to me when you come back to me when you B to fucking meat on your godamn spine and then she takes a shot and fucks off you're like first of

all that bitch was rushing for sure second of all damn her voice is weird but she was so so hot she had these horns on her head from growth hormone abuse are they still there Scott yes I love him you need a big back you're like fuck that I'm never getting dist at the club like that I'd have fucking knocked a motherfucker out but I would hit women but I'd also can't knock her out because my back's not big enough what are you going to do we got two rest days a week a smart thing

to do is to take take your rest days before your big two back training sessions of that week Tuesday you train back Friday you train back odd but Monday and Thursday are your rest days which means that you show up Tuesday and Friday for back training you can't fucking wait to rip the bar into pieces you're fed you're rested and you're going to put every fucking ounce of pain and brutality and embarrassment and just never having become the person you were supposed to be that fucking worked out for me and I'm gonna take all that

shit and I'm G to put it in the goddamn weights very good idea another compelling idea also exists instead of taking the rest days before your training to gear up for it take the most important training for you in that bezel cycle which is in your case because you got dissed at the club the back and put it put the rest days after the back training you get in the gym tired not tired grind but then you get a day off after what do you do during the day you fucking rest and you sleep and

you relax and you eat what happens to your back it grows and grows and grows because you will not see higher growth rates in any muscle in any time during the week other than the time directly after training it especially that day after that's when you get a ton of growth you might as well line it up because if you do another workout that day there's some interference it could not be large but it will absolutely be interference so if you're really serious about bringing up some kind of muscle group that you've been uh offended

about at the club by a female Russian speaking woman then either taking a rest days or rest day before that big priority muscle group or after they're both fine options ideally it would take before and after then you're training like twice a week and that doesn't make any fucking sense lastly there is another compelling case where you take your off days on weekends why because weekends generally for all of life stress work school your parole officer keeps calling you shit in my life that I have to deal with on the weekends it happens less so

the weekends are already a low stress time why not maximize the fuck out of that by taking those as rest days you're working like a dog Monday through Friday anyway so if Thursday's your rest day you're at fucking work the boss is yelling at you you're at school your professor's yelling at you show up to your parole officer she's yelling at you and then she's like have you been a bad boy she's got handcuffs B is pretty dope Scott the video guy when you were on parole for that one crime series of crimes crime spree

that we won't talk about did you ever get SNM by your female poal officer be with her baton a lot oh I see you're like look I'm not into the seduction part I'm into pain just beat me with your baton mercilessly she's like oh okay having fun you're like yes in any case that's gross folks this is a family channel okay you got to ask you know what I'm saying so weekends are awesome because a big cool down and they take that rest that you're trying to remember the point of rest is to recover and

they maximize your ability to recover concentrated loading consolidation of stressors into one part of the week consolidation of rest into another Sport Science approved it sounds like I said a bunch of things and you're like well certainly I have to hit one of these if I arrange my rest days you could not you could say chest is really important and you train your chest Tuesday and Frid Friday and on Monday and Thursday you're training legs and back together and fucking Wednesday and Saturday you're training shoulders and arms like crazy it's like okay well you'll just

be tired on both sides for your chest good job and then it turns out that you take your off days some fucking way or other than that that's not the weekend and then so like you fucked up everything you can totally fuck up most of this or not all of this so if you have priority muscle groups try to rest either before or after and and if you don't try to rest in the weekends no this is minor stuff it's not mandatory but if you want to make a little optimal is kind of program then

download the RP hypertrophy app link in BIO no description description I can YouTube but for this stuff think about your recovery to maximize it to try to do the best as you can and that's it folks that's all I have go rest and come back and don't watch any of our videos until you're wel arested doctor's orders see that