Day off strictness?

[Loukesy88]

How strict are people about having a rest day between runs? What’s your reasoning for your answer?

[Tasha99 Graduate]

Your legs will be tired if you don’t take at least one rest day. You’ll feel it in the next run. The tiredness will increase the more rest days you miss. Risk of injury increases too. I watch my heart rate now and it increases when I run before I’m fully rested. When you get to at least 6 months of running, you can try running on adjacent days if you must but even then it’s tough. Once you’ve been running over a year it becomes easier to do.

[IannodaTruffe Mentor]

Welcome to the forum.

This guide to the plan is essential reading healthunlocked.com/couchto5...

and includes advice on minimising impact, stretching after every run, hydration and strengthening exercises, all of which will help.

When you run, the impact creates microtears in your muscles, which repair and strengthen on your rest days, not while running. Without rest, repair and strengthening are compromised and injury risk increased.

If you want to be the best runner that you can be, then do non impact cross training on your rest days, which will be far more beneficial than running every day. It is not recommended for new runners to run on consecutive days until they have a minimum of six months regular running on their legs.

Please take your rest days.

Enjoy your journey.

[AgingMetalHead Graduate]

During C25K? Rest days were simply compulsory to me. One, two maybe three days. At these early stages you need those days to recover and I listened to my body, my legs and just walked on those days. The risk of injury was just too great.

Actually I tell a lie. I did a one km speed trial the day before W9R3! But that was it.

I only really started running 2 and sometimes 3 days in a row 18 months after graduation (just as lockdown started).

[Heath-Wellness]

From w1-w3 I didn’t use the rest days often. Although I had never run before it was common for me to hike a few times a week so felt I had a better baseline than “couch” as soon as it got further into the program I started using the rest days & now really enjoy them. I’ll somethings do back to back (on week 6 atm) but that’s rare. Figure out the rhythm that works for you.