Refueling clogged arteries with that processed soybean oil? Eat a banana or something similar not in plastic packaging

I decided to break my 12 year ST hiatus to comment on this-

As someone who hasn’t taken a day off running in 14 years, I can speak with some authority on this-

1. Not taking days off is 100% detrimental to training.
2. The reasons to train every day are clearly psychologic not physiologic.
3. Anybody that tracks their recovery metrics can tell you the benefits of a day off.
4. Anybody that has studied the exercise science literature can tell you the clear benefits of days off.
5. If I was coaching someone, I would tell them to take days off.
6. So given the above why do I run every day? Wouldn’t I be better off performance wise taking days completely off instead of doing my short run? Absolutely.

I don’t pretend this is what will make me the fastest triathlete possible.
But I’ve found my mental health and long term fitness consistency is better off this way. It has helped me keep exercising through the ups and downs, stressful and busy times of life.

7. I obviously don’t think exercising everyday is a horrible thing. But you need to acknowledge and admit to yourself the real reasons you are doing it. It is not because you want to get faster or maximize performance.

Not so much of an artery clogger.

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...articles/PMC6196963/

guess there is a study out there for all we can use to meet confirmation bias

That hypothesis has been largely debunked. Though some "influencers" still promote it.

Man Pop-Tarts have been my pre-race/big workout fuel for years. When I was racing 70.3+ I would add an Ensure for more easy calories (thanks Macca!). But they aren't a staple of my diet unless training gets crazy and I feel myself dropping weight and just need extra easy calories.

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Twitter - Instagram

Seeing this thread is kinda wild for me as I was planning to come to the community with a question related to rest days.

For some background - 56yo male triathlete who trains with a program that does not have rest days as part of the weekly schedule. Their view is that life pressures will mean most people miss a few days training per month and so rest days are not needed to be baked in.

I have been with this training company for about 2 years and have seen solid race results. Since becoming semi-retired at the beginning of the year, I have started to find I am building a lot of fatigue each week as my training is pretty much uninterrupted (I used to travel frequently for work previously). Literally this week, I decided to take Monday off completely and found I felt much more energized and excited about a big day of training on Tuesday (Bike, run and intense weights/plyometrics - total 3 hours).

I was meant to do a 1 hour run yesterday but decided to try a little experiment and take that day off as well. Again, I had much more energy and positive attitude towards another big day of training today (same schedule as Tuesday).

My hope is to swim tomorrow, bike for 2 hours Saturday and do my long run (75 minutes) on Sunday netting me out around the 9-10 hours that is a typical training volume for me anyway.

Appreciating this is just a single week and that there may be other factors at play here, my plan is to start taking Mondays and Wednesdays off each week as I feel much much fresher and strong than I normally would at this point of the week.

I'm curious is many other people have started adding in rest days after a sustained period of 7 day a week training and what the long term effects were.

of course, if you are going to make that statement, you will have something supporting it..

You definitely didn't even bother to read the abstract of the link I posted. Much less the paper.

Welcome back, couldn't disagree more. Well, maybe. If you're taking about health and well being then yes, largely agreed. If you're taking about performance not so much.

There's also the problem of scale. Some will read this and think they need to take days off every week, others will think taking Christmas off yearly is enough.

The preponderance of athletes at the top level of endurance sport train basically every day through the season. A few weeks off at the end of the year, maybe a day off here and there to travel out recover from a Grand Tour.

This guy takes two days off every week and does ok.

https://www.howtoskate.se/...8e271f440bcd45c5.pdf

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Dimond Bikes Superfan

OK, as non-skater I need some help. On page 5, he says: During my last two seasons I regularly skated 240 laps of 30,0 weekly, alone and with lane change. I'm guessing this means 240 laps of the 400m long track??? Does the 30.0 refer to holding 30 sec per lap??? If so, this means 60 miles in 2 hrs which sounds incredibly fast to this non-skater. :)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Maybe pro triathletes but this is completely inaccurate for pro cyclists. I have a number of current and former WorldTour friends and they all regularly take 1-2 days off / week.

Personally, when I was more serious about bike racing, if I didn’t need a day or two off per week then I wasn’t training hard enough.

Similar experience here, though slightly different demographic. My coach generally takes the 'take day(s) off as needed, as fatigue and life dictates' approach rather than programming them in advance, which makes sense as most of his athletes are the general 30-50's age grouper demographic that end up with a decent amount of 'incidental' time off through family holidays, work stuff etc. That worked okay for me and I was improving steadily, but eventually we started noticing a pattern of weeks where I was relatively a bit crap or key workouts where I wasn't as fresh as I'd like, which fell about where you'd expect in a typical load/deload pattern characteristic of most 'traditional' plans.
We put it down to being in a similar situation to you. I'm single and in my 20's, so my free time is largely my own, and it's fairly uncommon for me to have to adjust anything due to conflicting responsibilities- I'll pretty much just go until I'm tired. (I also tend to race more often and have a longer 'season', since I've got more freedom to focus on that throughout the year.)
We both felt including more planned time off was an improvement- I was previously pretty good at pulling things back before I got too cooked so I usually didn't need more than a couple of days here and there to bounce back, but anticipating that ahead of time meant less of that overall, as well as having less fatigue impact on important sessions- better quality, better consistency, and mentally a lot easier/more enjoyable.

I think it's pretty easy to get caught up in the relative merits of different approaches in an ideal system, but ultimately being able to recognise patterns in how you respond to training and adjust things relative to your own situation is probably closer to the definition of 'optimisation,' or at least a more workable one.

I think so. He talks about only skating at WR race pace and alone in race conditions. His 10k WR is 12.5 minutes (roughly 30 MPH). 5k WR is like 6 minutes. Specificity to the extreme during race season. All the rest of his aerobic work he seems to do on the bike.

If his 10K WR is 12.5 min, then that is 30 sec/400m, or the same pace as he is maintaining in practice for 60 mi (96K). This does not seem right???

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

It's 240 laps per week, so spread out over 5 days. That's about 50 laps/25 minutes of work per session. He then follows that up with 2-3 easy hours on the bike. He gives some example workouts and a weekly layout on page 12.

I did. Trust worthy study author? https://ussoy.org/author/mmessina/

OK, after reading through page 12, I see what you're saying. However, I still think he is being inaccurate on page 5 b/c he says:

During my last two seasons I regularly skated 240 laps of 30,0 weekly, alone and with lane change. I believe that I am the only skater ever to be able to do that continuously.

He says he's doing 240 laps at 30.0 continuously, but apparently not. In any event, I appreciate your help in understanding this. I'll chalk this up to him being a great athlete but not the best writer. :)

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"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."

Just to be sure, when you say "days off" do you mean zero activity days? No riding, running, crosstraining, just around the house, nothing that you'd call exercise -- or do you mean a day off as in a short EZ ride, or a quick run, or 30 min of some kind of crosstraining?

I don't follow a ton of WT guys on Strava but they seem to take a day off (of tracked activities) after hard races but infrequently otherwise. Not never, but not 2 days per week every week. [This could very well be a selection bias of the type of rider who uploads to Strava].

But 99.9% of us are not pro athletes with elite genetics and multiple 1000hr+ training years. We have much poorer recovery due to work or for those that are retired age. What's good for them is not necessarily good for most people.

At least that's what their socials show. That's where the sponsors' money goes - to keep those posts & images coming. Heaven forbid you finish a workout and neglect to put something up & get a mention of #ShoeSponsor #FuelSponsor #HydrationSponsor #KitSponsor in there

And that's just for a Runner; cyclists have add #DrivetrainSponsor #BrakesSponsor #SeatSponsor #WheelSponsor #TireSponsor #etc --- kinda like @NASCAR

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

Fair point. More frequently it’d be easy active recovery with minimal metabolic cost. The coach I used (who worked with a number of WT guys) gave the option for completely off the bike as well.

If that's the metric for days of then I'm 100% in agreement