What to do on days you don’t workout I Is it bad to exercise everyday
In this conversational, instructional video Eric Roberts explains why rest days are essential for anyone who wants to make progress in strength training or fitness. He starts by sharing his own experience of training seven days a week in high school and seeing little progress, then introduces the stress‑recovery‑adaptation cycle: you must stress the body, recover, and then adapt. Without proper recovery you merely “spin your wheels.” Roberts outlines what a true rest day looks like: keep heart rate in the 60‑70 % range (e.g., a walk, light bike, or elliptical) so you can hold a conversation, and avoid high‑intensity classes or long cardio unless you have exceptional sleep, nutrition, and recovery tools. He recommends at least one dedicated rest day per week, ideally two to three, and shows how a typical week could be structured (e.g., 4 strength days + 3 low‑intensity active‑recovery days, or 3 strength days + 4 active‑recovery days). He then tackles two common questions. First, you generally do not need to change your calorie intake on rest days; your weekly calorie target should already account for activity level, though some people use calorie‑cycling if it fits their preferences. Second, protein intake and most supplements should continue on rest days—protein shakes help meet daily protein goals, creatine, multivitamins, fish oil, etc., are taken daily, while pre‑workout or intra‑workout formulas are reserved for training days. Throughout, Roberts uses a supportive, enthusiastic tone, repeatedly debunking myths (e.g., “rest days make you fat”) and encouraging viewers to view rest as a “bank account deposit” that fuels future performance.
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YouTube, what's going on? In this video, we are going to be talking about what should you be doing on rest days. And why do I feel like this thing is not centered? Probably because it's not. Oh well. What should you be doing on rest days? I'm going to cover everything you got to know about days off from your dedicated workout, your strength training workout, whatever the case may be. All right, so as you can see, we're going to cover a few things here. Me and you are first going to have a conversation. It's going to blow your mind, I promise. I also then am going to talk about literally exactly what you should be doing on rest days. We're going to talk about how many rest days you should be having per week. And I'm going to answer 2 miscellaneous questions about rest days that I just get a ton. So hopefully that'll be at the end that can help you out in terms of should you change your calories and should you still take your protein, your supplements, all that kind of stuff. I'll answer that stuff at the end as well. But first and foremost, number one, there's usually 2 types of camps here. There's people who never take rest days or there's people who take too many rest days. So, I'm going to be speaking right now for the people who do not like taking rest days or think that a rest day is going to ruin your progress or ruin all your momentum or you need to be pushing 6, 7 days a week in the gym. Here's the thing. You need rest days if you want to see progress. If you don't want to see progress, don't take any rest days. And I'm speaking from experience. I was the person who Worked out 7 days a week, 2+ hours in the gym every single day. This was back when I was in high school and didn't actually live a real life and just dicked around all day. Back when I was in high school, I would work out 2 hours a day, every single day, 7 days a week, and I saw the least amount of progress during that period of time. Also, consequently, I was always so run down. I was so exhausted. I was honestly demotivated to train. I only trained because I thought I had to. I only trained because no days off and all that other shit. In the long run, it just backfires. I finally discovered that you make the most progress when you actually recover from your workouts. Remember, when you go into the gym, you don't change your body inside of the gym. You don't change your body while you're working out. You change your body when you recover from those workouts. Okay? The way you create an adaptation, which is like you get stronger, you build more muscle, all that kind of stuff. The way you create an adaptation is you put a stress on your body working out, you recover from that stress, and that then leads to an adaptation. It's a 3-step cycle. If you just do this part, the stress part, and you never recover, the second part, you will never get to the third part, which is the adaptation. Which is like the result that you're actually looking for. You'll never get stronger. You'll never be able to change your physique. You won't ever get the adaptation because you're not getting the second step in the three-part wheel. All these things—you got to put the stress. You got to recover. You adapt. Stress again. Recover again. Adapt. The wheel has to turn. If you're not taking rest days, you are not going to make that wheel turn, and you'll just—you'll be spinning. Spinning your wheels. Get it? You get it? You'll be spinning your wheels, not seeing the progress you want to see, all because you think that you got to work out six or seven days a week. You think you got to push balls to the walls every single day. You think that like rest days are worthless or they're not that big of a deal, or you just again you have to work out every single day. It's just simply not the case. And again, I'm talking from not only experience but also just you know the research and stuff like that. So first and foremost, rest days are a non-negotiable. You you need rest days again if you want to see progress. If If you just want to spin your wheels, by all means, work out 7 days a week and just spin your wheels. But if that's all you want to do, you're probably not watching this video still. You probably actually want to see progress. And so, number 1, rest days are kind of a non-negotiable. They need to happen. Now, number 2, what's funny is, what should you do on your rest days? Well, it's going to shock the shit out of you, but you should actually probably just rest on your rest days. And let me explain what I mean. Again, when you go into your rest The entire purpose of a rest day is to rest and recover. Let me go back to what I just said. When you work out, you put a stress on your body. Like, physically, you working out is a major stress that your body's going under. Remember, your body doesn't know that you want to get stronger or build muscle or lose fat or any of these things. It just knows stress. It doesn't know stress from You getting chased by a mountain lion. It doesn't know stress getting placed on from a dumbbell or a barbell or a cable machine or whatever the case may be. It just knows stress. And so your body is getting stressed on those days. And so if you are not then recovering from that stressful scenario, what's going to happen? Your stress is just going to keep rising and keep rising and keep rising and keep rising and keep rising. And there's There's this term that's— it's called overtraining. I don't think actually much people overtrain because if you were actually overtraining, like, you just— you actually wouldn't be able to leave your bed. Your body would hurt so bad. Like, it would be very bad. What most people do though is they under-recover because of this reason right here. And if you're somebody who you're always feeling exhausted, you're always feeling tired, you're always feeling fatigued, you have very little motivation to go work out, Even when you do go work out, your workouts kind of suck ass. You're always getting injured. You're super tired, super hungry. Cravings are through the roof. Your willpower is going down. You can't really stick to your diet. All of these are signs of under-recovering. Now, of course, there could be other things going on, right? But I will tell you, a lot of these other things that are going on can oftentimes be solved by you just actually taking the proper rest days and actually recovering from the stress that you put on your body. Because remember, This is not just about stress from workouts. Yes, it's about stress from workouts, but hey, guess what? Like, I'm sure you listening to this, all you do every single day, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure not all you do every single day is eat, sleep, and train. Eat, sleep, and train. Um, you probably have a job, you probably have kids, you're probably in school, you probably commute, you probably have a social life. All of these things are probably playing a role. There's stress from those things as well. So all of these things get put on top of you, and if you don't allow yourself to recover and you're, you know, kind of experiencing those, like, I guess you can call them symptoms, this This is probably why, because you're not recovering. You are under-recovered. You're not properly recovering. If you don't properly recover, you're going to get all those negative symptoms that pop up and you'll never actually make progress because all you're ever trying to do is recover back to baseline. Your body is just like, my God, can we just recover back to normal, let alone make progress? You're fighting against yourself all this time if you're not taking rest days. That is number 1. Again, you actually rest on rest days. It's fucking crazy to think about, right? Now, number 2, on your rest days, and again, I mean like not days that you are intensely working out, and we'll talk about how many of those you should have here in a second. But on those days, you should try to keep your heart rate around roughly 60 to 70%, roughly somewhere in between there. Here's where a lot of people go wrong. They'll— let's say you're doing 4 days a week of weight training, right? You work out Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. What a lot of people will— where a lot of people will go wrong is they will then do like, oh, okay, that means on Wednesday I'm clearly doing a HIIT bootcamp class, and then on Saturday I'm clearly doing a, you know, fucking 15-mile run, and on Sunday I'm clearly doing a full-body HIIT workout, bodyweight, to get my heart rate super high and get super sweaty. This is, yet again, a perfect recipe for under-recovering. Unless you are— and even then— but unless you're sleeping 9 to 10 hours per night, unless you're in a calorie surplus, unless you are just dialing in your nutrition to the T, Unless you're getting like massages every single week, like, you have to do so many things to be able to actually recover from that. That like, and again, I've seen that so many times where people will just fill their rest days with a 60-minute spin class where you go get your heart rate through the fucking roof. Like, that's not a rest day. That's— you're still working out that day. I promise you, you're still— that's, that's still considered strenuous exercise. So on your rest days, You want to try to keep your heart rate around 60 to 70%. And so what does this mean, right? If you're trying to keep your heart rate around 60 to 70%, what does this mean? Hey, why don't you go for a walk or do some very, you know, if you don't like going for a walk or it's cold where you are or whatever. All right, cool. If you really want to do something, just, you know, hop on the treadmill or the elliptical or the bike or whatever and like, you know, go for 20 minutes at, you know, 60% heart rate, like nothing super crazy. You should be honestly what you should be doing is whatever you do on your rest days, you should be have be able to have a conversation. You should be able to keep a conversation like you and I are right now, and that will let you know your heart rate is in a pretty good spot. So whether that's from walking, whether it's from the elliptical, whether it's from swimming, whether it's from going on a bike ride with your kids, whether it's from whatever, you should be able to do that while you are doing whatever. And again, there's nothing wrong with moving your body every single day. I'm a very big advocate for moving your body every single day. I tell all the clients I work with, like, you know, they ask me about cardio. I'm like, hey, just get 5,000 to 10,000 steps per day. If they want to go do extra cardio, obviously I'll give them guidelines of like, I'm basically telling you right now, I tell my clients the same thing. Okay, cool. Go get some steps. I'm like, you're like, move. Never. I don't want to say go be a sloth all day, which I don't know. I guess there are times where you can do that, but like you can move your body. That's okay. I don't need you going to do a 60-minute HIIT bootcamp where your heart rate is 90% for an hour straight. That's not a rest day. You're not going to recover from that. That's putting again, it's just putting that much more stress on your body that your body is going to have to recover from. You going to do a 60-minute spin class is that's not a rest day. And I'm not saying you can't do those things if you don't, if you enjoy them, if you enjoy them, listen, yes, I would love for you to work those into your schedule. But again, like for example, if somebody comes to me and they really want to do, I don't know, let's call it Zumba and they really want to do, I don't know, a HIIT boot camp one day or whatever the case may be. Great. But maybe instead of strength training four times. Now you got to make sure you strength train 2 to 3 times a week. So then you can then work in these other modalities of exercise you like to incorporate, because if you do too much, it is going to backfire on you in the long run. So you can absolutely still work these things in, but you have to make sure your week's worth of workouts allows you to actually properly recover. So do what you enjoy. But again, the majority of the time, your rest days are— should be days where your heart rate stays relatively low. You actually facilitate facilitate recovery and you can actually again recover from the stress you're putting on your body, then go back and hit it hard the next day. And just last thing I'll say on this is if you're somebody who thinks that like rest days are gonna, I don't know, you're gonna get fat or you're gonna lose all your progress or you won't make progress, remember you recover so that the next time you go to push yourself, it's actually there. I think of it like a bank account. Like if you don't, if you don't put money back into your bank account, What the fuck is going to happen? You're going to have nothing to pull from. You're going to have overdraft, like you're going to have nothing to pull from. So if you don't put money back into your bank account, when you go to try to pull it, there ain't gonna be nothing there. So your workouts are going to suffer. You're going to lift less weight, you're going to do less reps, you're going to have less intensity, which is going to— all of this is going to lead to less results and progress over time, which is what I talked about spinning your wheels. So those 2 things, Really quickly, that's the synopsis of, you know, what you should be doing, how you should be doing it, all that kind of stuff. Now let's quickly dive into how many rest days should you be having per week. Here's what I will say: you should be having at the very least 1 pure dedicated rest day per week. At least, at least the bottom line, at least 1 rest day. Honestly, I would say at least 2 to 3 rest days. If you're somebody who, again, you sleep 9 hours a night and you know, you, you, your, your nutrition is dialed in and all this and your training programming is very, very good, you might be able to get away, get away with 1 day. But even then, I still don't think that's optimal. I strongly encourage you to have at least 2, if not 3 rest days per week. So again, like for example, let's say you're following a program where you're strength training 4 days and you're resting 3 days. Perfect. You have four days on, three days of rest. On those three days of rest, let's say one day you just simply walk ten thousand steps with your kids. Let's say the next day you go into the gym and you just do twenty minutes on the elliptical just because you want to. And again, let's say the third day you just simply go outside and get some extra steps at lunchtime. That and you strength train the other four days out of the week. That would be a phenomenal week's worth. Of workouts. That weekly workout schedule would be phenomenal and it would be more than enough to see progress. I've had plenty of clients as well who they all, quote unquote, all they do is strength train 3 times a week. They have 4 rest days. On their 4 rest days, they're getting steps and they're being active and all this kind of stuff. But like they strength train 3 days a week of intense exercise. They have 4 days a week of quote unquote lesser intense exercise, lose tons of body fat. Get strong as hell, live a great life, live a very flexible life where fitness and working out doesn't have to take over your entire life. It can simply be a part of your life, which is what I think a lot of people who are going to watch this actually want. I don't think you want fitness to be your entire life or you would be making this video and I would be— and somebody else would be watching you. You want fitness to be a part of your life. And so working out 3 to 4 days a week is a phenomenal clip. That allows you to be very consistent, see great progress, and not have fitness and working out completely take over your life. Rather, you can simply fit it in and make it a part of your overall life. So that's how many rest days you should be having. And again, let's say for example, you want to work out 3 days a week. And then again, let's say you do 1 day of spin class and you do 1 day of some bodyweight HIIT class like that. That might potentially be okay. Again, there's other factors that come into play there with like nutrition, sleep, recovery, all that kind of stuff. But like, For example, that'd be 5 days of higher intensity exercise and then 2 days of lower intensity exercise. Boom, perfect. You're good to go, right? So something like that could be set up as well. Now, hope you're learning a lot from this. And the last 2 things we're gonna talk about is number one, should you change your calories on your rest days? For the most part, no. Um, all of this is gonna come back to though your specific plan and kind of how you set up like Your weekly calories and things like that. Like, you know, if for example, if you were trying to be in an overall calorie deficit, you should have already taken into consideration your activity level before coming up with how many calories you should be eating and that kind of stuff, which if you need help with that, feel free to check out some of my other YouTube videos. Um, but unless like your plan specifically calls for higher calories on your workout days and lower calories on your rest days, I see no reason to change the amount of calories you are eating on rest days or workout days. Now with that being said, you could set it up where, for example, some people will be hungrier on their workout days and less hungry on their non-workout days. So you could set this up to where you could have a calorie cycling approach. Let's say one day you have 1,850 calories on your workout days. On your 4 workout days you have 1,850 calories. On your 3 non-workout days you have 1,600 calories. If that's the way you want to set it up and at the end of the week you get to your weekly overall calorie deficit, perfect. Like that's fucking awesome. If that works for you, rock it out. But it's not like, oh well, because I'm not having intense exercise, I gotta cut my calories. No, that's not what this is about. That's not what I want for you and it's not going to help you in the long run. So you don't have to lower your calories just because you're not working that day. If that's how you end up setting it up with your calories, awesome. But if not, You don't have to not eat. And again, think about like the overall relationship with food that's starting to create, like just because you don't work out that day, you have to eat less calories. It's like, what are you, a dog like trying to earn a treat? Fuck no. You know what I mean? Like you're good. Like just eat the same amount of calories you were and you're good to go. Now second, let's talk about like protein/supplements in general. Um, number one, should you be taking like protein shakes on your rest days? Yes, absolutely. Yes. If you want to help yourself hit your protein goal because A protein shake—it's not like magically going to help you build muscle. A protein shake is just a simple way to get more protein into your diet. So if yes, like it's just like saying should I eat a chicken breast on my workout day and then on my non-workout day? Yeah, both. Like it's just fucking chicken, right? It's the same thing with a protein shake. Whether you work out that day or not, it's just extra protein that you can get into your diet for that day. So that's a very simple answer. Yes, and you know I know. Some people think they're like, oh, protein is going to help you. Protein shakes help you build muscle. Well, they do, but because they're a part of your overall protein goal for that day. That's the most important part. It just helps you get more protein for that day. So that's number 1. And number 2, should you still take your supplements on that day? I think it would depend on which supplement you are taking. I've done an entire YouTube video on supplements, so please feel free to go check that out. Um, but like, for example, if you're talking like a pre-workout, well, No, probably not because you're not working out that day, right? So you don't need to take your pre-workout on your non-workout days. Um, let's say creatine for example though. You should be taking creatine on your non-workout days because you want to make sure you continuously get the creatine into your body to elevate your creatine levels and to keep your creatine levels elevated so you can get the benefits of that particular supplement. So if it's things like a pre-workout or an intra-workout or stuff like that, like Or, and I'll say a post-workout, but it depends on what's in the post-workout because again, if you're having like a post-workout protein shake, you can have that any time of any day and you should because it's just literally extra protein. But if it's like a pre-workout supplement where it's like caffeine and da da da and this and that and you improve your endurance and your strength and da da da, like, okay, probably just leave that for your workout days, right? If it's creatine, definitely want you taking that every single day no matter what. If it's supplements like Like, your multivitamin, or your fish oil, or your vitamin D, or your magnesium, or that kind of stuff, yes, you should be taking those on your non-workout days as well. Again, it'll kind of depend on what supplement you're talking about. Again, if you want to check out that video I did on supplements, it's very in-depth, so please feel free to go check it out. But for the most part, yes, you should be still taking your supplements on rest days. And that was the video, guys. Thank you so much for watching. I appreciate it. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop them below. If this helped you in any way, please feel free to leave it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and share it with a friend, why don't you? All right, thanks, man.
