Why your rest day is as important as your workout

What is muscle pain?

So, what’s happening when you exercise? First of all, it’s funny to know that your muscles don’t grow in the gym, but during your rest phase. When you exercise little cracks occur in the muscles. While you rest, your body is busy to recover these cracks and make your muscles stronger. Unfortunately it’s not that the more muscle pain you have, the stronger you’ll get. Look at it as a warning signal of the body. Your muscles are damaged and they ‘hurt’ so that the next day you can’t work out as hard as that day or even can’t work out at all. So, it’s better to train a couple of times per week and not go full ‘beast mode’ than train once a week and go ‘beast mode’. Which means that you absolutely can have muscle pain, but you still have to be able to walk the day after. With a workout once a week you will see less results. For optimal result, you need a perfect combination of exercising, a fitting diet and enough recovery time.

Fasten your recovery time

We get that you don’t want to have injuries or long recovery time, so we have something that will help you a little. STOX Recovery Socks won’t give you only a better, but also a faster recovery time. How it works? The STOX® Energizing Flow provides optimal blood circulation in your legs and maximum oxygen-capacity to the muscles. Experience energetic legs after strenuous exercise. They improve the drainage of blood and fluid, which fastens the healing process of injuries like shin splints, calf and Achilles tendon problems. Next to this, The ‘Moisture Wicking Fabrics’ are more breathable than natural fabrics like cotton. It is the fastest drying fabric available and dries four times faster than cotton.

‘Active rest day’

BUT! Before you plunge down on the couch, it’s important to realize that you don’t have to do nothing on a rest day. Look at it as an ‘active rest day’. So, you can exercise, but on low intensity. Go cycling, rowing or walking, for instance. This even seems to be very good for your mood. You know the feeling when you get a bit grumpy because of muscle pain, because it simply can be painful. When you do exercise on low intensity, you keep feeding your muscles and you create endorphin, so you stay well tempered!

Proteins

As we said before, a well balanced diet is very important. Proteins are also known as building blocks for your body and they’re a source of energy. This sounds complicated, but proteins get disconnected to amino acids. With this your body builds tissue. Next to this, these enzymes keep your metabolism in progress. Proteins also care for the anabolism in your body. This means that they create connective tissue and new muscle tissue. When your body builds more protein in a muscle cell, your muscles will grow.

So, make sure you get enough rest, but also don’t forget to pay attention on the other things we mentioned. It’s always a concatenation of multiple factors.