How many rest days a week do you need?

The building happens after the workout

The workout is the signal: you ask your muscles to do more than they’re used to, and that tells your body it needs to adapt. Most of the building happens afterwards. Your body’s muscle-building rate climbs after a hard session and stays up for a day or two, while you eat, relax and sleep.

That’s why I say, half joking and with a wink, that being a gamer and going to the gym is the best combination in the world. You lift heavy stuff, you work your ass off, and then you go home, sit down, let your body relax and let it rebuild itself, so you can go again.

So rest isn’t time off from training. It’s the other half of it. The only question is how much of it each muscle needs, and when.

Rest is counted per muscle

When you train your chest, it’s your chest that needs to recover. Your legs couldn’t care less. If I trained my chest yesterday and today I’m training my back, I’m barely using my chest, so it’s resting, even though I’m in the gym.

What we usually recommend is about 48 hours before you train the same muscle hard again. For most sessions, a day or two is roughly what a muscle needs to get back to full strength, so 48 hours makes a good default, whether you train two days a week or five.

It’s a guide, not a stopwatch. A session where you pushed every exercise until you couldn’t do one more takes longer to bounce back from than one where you stopped well short of that. Your first few weeks hit harder than later on, because everything is new to your muscles and they haven’t adapted yet. And an easier session takes less out of you. Forty-eight hours sits sensibly in the middle of all that.

If the worry about getting hurt was part of why you asked, it’s worth knowing that strength training is safe for healthy adults, and it brings no more aches and niggles than cardio does. Spacing it out like this helps each muscle turn up ready for the work.

So how many rest days is that?

Now the answer to your question depends on how your week is set up, and there are two common ways to set it up.

A “full-body” program trains all your main muscles in every session: legs, chest, back, shoulders and arms. Because everything works every time, you want a day off in between. Three full-body sessions a week, say Monday, Wednesday and Friday, gives every muscle its 48 hours and leaves you four days with no training at all.

A “split” program, or just “a split”, divides your body across different days. The simplest is a “two-split”: you alternate between two different sessions, usually upper body one day and lower body the next. Because the muscles take turns, you can train on back-to-back days and every muscle still gets its rest. Upper on Monday, lower on Tuesday, upper on Thursday, lower on Friday: every muscle gets trained twice a week with at least 48 hours in between, and you have three rest days.

The same idea works if you want to train most days. Upper, lower, upper, lower across six days means each muscle is trained every other day. It still gets its 48 hours, and your week has one rest day. So if you’ve ever seen someone training six days a week and wondered when they rest: they do, just not everything at once.

Four rest days, three, or one can all be right. The number isn’t the point. The point is that no muscle gets trained hard again before it’s had its time.

How many days should you train, then?

That turns the question around. The real decision isn’t how many days to rest, it’s how many days to train.

A lot of coaches swear by full-body programs for new clients, two or three times a week, and that’s it. We flip it. We ask how many days you’d actually like to train, and how many days you actually have. If you’re completely new and you tell me you want to train four days a week, that’s fine: you’ll get a two-split. What we look at is what’s realistic for you, and how many days a week you can commit to.

The research gives you that freedom. When the total amount of training is the same, spreading it over more days or fitting it into fewer builds about the same amount of muscle. Training at least twice a week tends to build more strength than once a week, but past that, how many days you use is mostly up to you.

Where I’d step in is when someone who has never trained wants to go every day. Six days a week can be done with a two-split, since each muscle still gets its 48 hours. But in the beginning, three or four days a week will get you about as far. When you’re new, your body responds to a fairly small amount of training, and past a certain point each extra bit of work you add gives you back less than the bit before.

And if you haven’t set foot in a gym yet and you’re picturing two hours every single day, we’ll talk it through with you first. That’s probably not realistic, and you have to think about the long term.

Is it okay to take an extra rest day?

Yes, now and then. An extra day off here and there, because you’re tired, busy or just not feeling it, won’t cost you anything you’d notice. Muscle and strength don’t fade that fast, and even after a few weeks off, what you’ve lost tends to come back quickly once you start again.

Where it starts to matter is when the extra day becomes your normal week. If three planned days keep turning into one, that isn’t extra rest any more, it’s a smaller plan. One session a week can be enough to hold on to what you’ve built, but to keep getting stronger, two or more will do more for you.

Can you train when you’re still sore?

That stiff, tender feeling in the days after training (you’ll often see it called DOMS, short for delayed onset muscle soreness) is most common when you do something your muscles aren’t used to. That’s why it’s usually worst when you’re starting out, and why it can come back however long you’ve been training, whenever you start a new exercise or do a lot more than usual.

Being sore doesn’t mean you can’t train. How sore you are isn’t a reliable sign of how much your muscle still needs to recover, and training a muscle that’s still a bit sore doesn’t seem to add to the damage or slow the healing down. Moving it usually eases the soreness for a while, too.

If a muscle is so sore that you can’t move it properly, that’s a good day to train a different muscle, or go lighter on that one, and give it the extra time. That’s the same thing a split does for you anyway.

What a rest day looks like

A rest day is a day off training, not a day off moving. A walk, getting your steps in, an easy bike ride, playing with your kids: light movement like that doesn’t slow your recovery down.

The one thing to watch is when “something active” is really another workout. A long run or a full football match works your legs hard, so count it when you’re giving your legs their 48 hours.

Do you need rest, or are you just not feeling it?

Some days you’ll get home after a long day of work that took all your concentration, feel completely flat, and wonder whether that’s your body asking for a rest day.

Often it’s your head more than your muscles. Mental tiredness makes exercise feel harder than it is. Your muscles are as ready as they were; the effort just feels bigger, and that mostly shows up in long, steady efforts rather than in how much you can lift.

Sleep works a bit differently. One bad night barely touches your strength. Several short nights in a row are when the big lifts that use a lot of muscle at once, like squats, can start to suffer.

The sign that you genuinely need more rest is that it lasts: your lifts going backwards over weeks rather than on one off day, feeling worn out all the time, your mood dropping. One flat evening isn’t that.

So if it’s your head that’s tired, your body is ready, and the session will probably just feel harder than usual. Go, or take the extra rest day: either is fine now and then. If it’s the lasting kind and it doesn’t lift when you ease off for a while, talk to your doctor, because tiredness that won’t go away isn’t always about training.

Putting your week together

1. Decide how many days a week you’d like to train, and how many you really have.

2. Pick the setup that fits. If you’re training two or three days, full-body sessions with a day in between fit neatly. If you want four or more days, or back-to-back days, use a split.

3. Check that each muscle gets about 48 hours before you train it hard again, and a bit more after a really tough session.

4. The days left over are your rest days. Move on them, eat, sleep, and let your body do the building.

5. If you need an extra one now and then, take it.

Count your rest per muscle, not per calendar, and your rest days take care of themselves.