Today, we’ve got an article about most climbers’ least favorite topic: rest days.  Listen, we get it.  Climbing is a lot more fun than not climbing.  However, EVERYONE needs rest.  Additionally, while rest days are important for all climbers, they are even more important when you are training hard or pushing yourself to the limit outside.

To highlight just how important rest days are and give you some tips for making them as effective as possible, here’s an article from the Evo Rock + Fitness blog by Liz Haas.

“When you train, you break down your muscles and tax your tendons, thus you need rest days to allow your body rebuild itself into stronger machine. Yup, you read that right: You get stronger on your rest days, not training days. Don’t want to believe me? Well, without rest you’ll quickly find yourself either climbing like garbage, perpetually fatigued and struggling on the warm-ups you cruised four days before when you were fresh, or, worse, injured and forced to take way more days off than your training plan originally called for.” – Liz Haas

How to Make the Most of Your Rest Days

As Haas notes in her article, resting may seem like a simple activity, but climbers often manage to do it ineffectively.  When you take a rest day, you want to make it count.  We couldn’t agree with Haas more when she argues this means NO climbing, NO strenuous physical activity that will affect your next climbing day, and NO skimping on properly fueling your body’s recovery by not eating nutritious meals.

Click through below to read Haas’ full article.  She does a great job of differentiating between exactly what counts as rest and what doesn’t.  Additionally, she provides tips for productively making your rest day fly by so it doesn’t feel like an eternity before your next climbing session.  Whether you think you are good at resting or not, this article is a great reminder of just how important it is and how being proactive about resting can make a huge different in the quality of your recovery.

Full Article: Rest Days by Liz Haas

(photo courtesy of evorock.com)

Other Articles You Might Like:

• Rock Climbing Nutrition: Rest Day Guidelines
• The Truth About Rest Days – Galina Parfenov
• Training: Efficient Rest Days
• Resting, the Strategic Way