How Long Should I Rest Between Workouts?

How Long Should I Rest Between Workouts?

Muscle recovery between workouts is an essential part of the workout and muscle-building process. If you don’t give your muscles enough time to rest, then they will not be able to grow properly. The amount of time you should rest between workouts can vary between each person and depends on many different factors.

Let’s explore how long it takes for your muscles to recover between workouts, and how to speed up your recovery time to give yourself optimal chances of muscle building.

What Is The Muscle Rebuilding Process After A Workout?

Your body’s muscles have fibers attached to them. When you work out, these fibers are broken down. The harder the workout the more fibers are broken down.

If your muscle fibers don’t get enough time to rest, and nutrients supplied to them, they will not heal properly. This can cause you to be in pain, and this will have a counterproductive effect on you reaching your goals, as you will be in too much pain to work out.

Giving your muscles the right time to rest and heal will help you reach your goals of growing bigger muscles. Rest is an essential part of your workout regime, and knowing how to balance a workout and rest time is fundamental to getting stronger muscles.

How Long Should I Rest Between Workouts For Muscle Recovery?

The average recommended time to rest after a workout is 48-72 hours. However, this time depends on several factors, such as your diet, strength, physical activity, and body composition. Some people may be able to do daily workouts at a lower intensity, others may be able to do high-intensity workouts every other day. Higher intensity workouts lead to more muscle damage than lower intensity workouts, meaning a longer recovery time may be needed.

Making sure your muscles are fed enough nutrients also depends on the amount of time you need to let your muscles recover. Finally, learning how to split up your workouts so you work different muscles on different days has many advantages.

For example, if you have a leg day one day, and then the upper body the next workout, this will give your leg muscles more time to recover than if you do 2 leg days in a row.

How To Speed Up Muscle Recovery Time

That being said, there are some ways you can speed up your muscle recovery time to ensure that you are well rested and completely ready for the next workout. This will prevent you from working out muscles that aren’t fully recovered and damage them, preventing you from working out in the long term.

Here are some ways to speed up your muscle recovery time:

Understand Your Daily Calorie Intake

By calculating your daily calorie intake, you can understand whether you are eating too much or too little when working out.

You can know your calorie intake by calculating your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) which is the energy you need to perform daily activities such as muscle recovery. Through this, you can estimate your daily caloric intake.

Macronutrients

Macronutrients are carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Ensuring that your body is eating enough calories before and after workouts will help your muscles recover faster.

Having a protein shake to indulge in straight after your workout is a common thing that athletes do to ensure their body is being taken care of.

Active Rest

Working out and then being completely sedentary is not great for your muscle recovery. Learning how to take part in active recovery will help restore the balance between your muscle usage and muscle growth. It also helps your muscles speed up the removal of lactic acid.

Active rest is not another workout, but is rather a very light set of movements to keep the blood flowing around your muscles, but without damaging any of the recovering fibers anymore.

Examples Of Active Rest

  • Some examples of active rest are:
  • Walking, or cycling at a low-medium intensity
  • Lifting lighter weights than you normally would
  • Yoga or stretching classes

CBD Oil & Medicinal Mushrooms For Muscle Recovery

You may have heard the benefits of CBD oil for sleep or anxiety, but did you know that CBD oil can be used to help your muscles recover quicker?

CBD oil, whether placed on top of the skin or ingested orally, reacts with the endocannabinoid system to reduce muscular inflammation, restore muscle function, prevent the loss of locomotor activity and promote the maturation of muscle cells.

In addition to this, Chaga mushrooms, Cordyceps mushrooms, and Reishi mushrooms support oxygen flow around the body, avert damage to skeletal muscles, reduce muscle mass loss and enhance muscle regeneration. This helps to target muscles that need help in recovery to reduce pain and promote a full recovery between workouts.

Where To Find CBD Oil For Muscle Recovery

Rather than searching for CBD oil and functional mushrooms for recovery separately there is a simple alternative for this. Here at Cannabotech, we created a unique M²CBD formula that contains both CBD oil and functional mushrooms. We understand the power that both CBD oil and functional mushrooms have individually, and we have combined them together to provide you with a holistic, natural, and non-addictive formula to solve your biggest problems.

Our formula has been applied to all of our products in different ways, with varying amounts of CBD oil and functional mushrooms. We have a whole line just for unwinding after a workout, known as the ‘Unwind products’.

Our Unwind products are all designed for muscle recovery from workouts, physical jobs, or anything that brings your muscles pain. There are 3 types of products that are all slightly different:

  • Unwind Drops - to be ingested under the tongue
  • Unwind Tablets - to be taken with water. They contain the same formula as the Unwind drops, but at a stronger concentration
  • Unwind Muscle Rub - to rub onto your muscles from the outside, that penetrates deep within the skin to reach your muscles

You can also purchase the Unwind Drops and Unwind Muscle Rub together with the Unwind Dual System to support your muscles from both the inside and the outside.

Frequently Asked Questions

How Long Do Muscles Need To Recover?

On average, muscles need between 48-72 hours to recover from an intense workout and to regrow the fibers that were broken down. This depends on your diet, your body composition, and your strength. Read above about the many ways to speed up your muscle recovery to shorten this time.

How Can I Speed Up Muscle Recovery?

Taking CBD oil combined with Chaga, Cordyceps, and Reishi mushrooms can help you speed up your muscle recovery. The CBD oil targets the endocannabinoid system, and the functional mushrooms target muscles to improve oxygen flow and enhance muscle regeneration.

Can I Workout With Painful Muscles?

If you try and work out with painful muscles this is usually a sign that your muscles aren’t fully recovered, and doing a high-intensity workout during this time will only damage your muscles more. Learn how to help your painful muscles recover with CBD oil and functional mushrooms above.

Bea Lyus

Bea Lyus is an experienced Naturopathic Nutritional Therapist. She is a member of the British Association for Applied Nutrition and Nutritional Therapy (BANT), the regulatory body for Nutritional Therapists and is registered by the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC).