Don’t skip your rest day. Your body needs to recover and rebuild to become stronger. However, don’t spend your whole “rest day” on the couch eating chips. That’s not the purpose of it. An easy physical activity on a rest day can help boost your mood, speed your recovery and your progress. So take a 20-minute stroll, stretch and restore, work on your flexibility, do some yoga, go swimming – it really helps with soreness, etc.
“So how many rest days do you really need a week?
The number of rest days that you take each week really depends on how intensely you train, especially relative to your fitness level. In a nutshell, this is a good rule; if a muscle group is still sore from a previous workout, do not train it intensely again until it has healed and is no longer sore. For example, if my thighs are sore from a lower body strength workout I did yesterday, I should not train them again today – or the next, if they are still very sore. In this case, it doesn’t mean I have to take a complete rest day; I could train my upper body or core, or stick to light cardio, yoga, stretching, etc, etc. Balancing your workouts to target different muscle groups on different days of the week allows you to take fewer rest days, but even then, you should save at least 1-2 days a week for rest, or at least active rest or active recovery.” – Fitness Blender, How Many Rest Days Do I Need? Rest vs Active Rest; Overtraining Symptoms & How to Avoid Overtraining
No More “I’ll Do It Tomorrow”