January 26, 2026 //
Lori Becker //
Blog //
5 min read
One of the most important factors in successful goal-reaching surrounding fitness is your routine. Trying to get a faster running time? You’ll need to incorporate running or sprinting practice into your routine. Trying to lose weight? You’ll want to ensure that your routine has a weight loss focused blend of cardio or HIIT and strength training. Trying to gain muscle? You’ll need to incorporate strength training while ensuring that you give yourself enough time to avoid muscle fatigue.
Whatever type of exercise you’re doing to reach your fitness goals, recovery is going to be an absolutely crucial part of your routine. Most research will indicate that you need around 48-72 hours of muscle recovery, and to avoid working the same muscle groups more than twice weekly, ensuring you’ve had that proper rest time in between. However, these general guidelines vary incredibly depending on goals, age, and biological sex.
Homeostasis & Stress
Your body is always striving towards homeostasis, the internal regulation of your body’s systems so that they function correctly. Stress–whether it be physiological, chemical, environmental, psychological, emotional, or social–is a stimulus that overcomes your ability to maintain homeostasis.
When you get that email from your boss asking you to finish up one quick (which we know is not-so-quick) task before leaving for the day, you experience stress, and your body releases hormones like cortisol as a response. This pushes you out of homeostasis. After the stress passes, this hormone should decrease, and your body should return to its normal, homeostatic state.
Working out is no different: during aerobic or resistance training, you’re placing your body under physiological and chemical stress. When we exercise, our body experiences an increase in physical demand: not just the weight we are lifting, but the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which causes an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing.
As a response, our “fight or flight” mode is turned on, and our adrenal glands release stress hormones, including catecholamines and cortisol, which help the body meet the increased energy demand. Simultaneously, it mitigates this stress by releasing endorphins and dopamine, increasing levels of beneficial neurotransmitters, and modulating the stress response system.
Although it sounds intense, these acute yet intense bouts of stress are generally considered to be good for us. We learn to manage and mitigate stress by training the body to respond to stress in a certain way. After time, our body also learns to downregulate its stress response, and releases less cortisol. However, this all depends on us giving our bodies proper rest after stress, allowing us to return to homeostasis.
What is Recovery and Why do we Need it?
Recovery from exercise is a process that includes recovery is a process that includes rest, refueling through nutrition, rehydration, regeneration (repair), resynthesis, reduction of inflammation, and restoration that ultimately returns the body to homeostasis.
Rest days help your body return to its normal state by restoring energy stores, balancing hormones, and allowing your nervous system to recover from the stress of exercise.
Rest days are also absolutely crucial for muscle growth. Muscle growth, also known as muscular hypertrophy, occurs when your muscle fibers are subjected to stress. This is because the stress causes micro-tears in your muscle fibers, triggering a repair process. New protein filaments are then synthesized to increase the size of your muscle cells, leading to both strength and volume increases. Without proper rest, your body cannot adequately repair these tears, and you lose out on the gains you worked hard for.
Maximizing Your Recovery Days
Getting enough sleep is absolutely crucial to recovery. During sleep, your body is actively working to repair and grow your muscles. Sleep also helps you to regulate hormones, boost your immune system, and strengthen your overall mood.
Proper nutrition is also a key component to recovery. To focus on refueling your body after exercise (even on your rest days), incorporate protein for repairing and building muscle, carbohydrates to replenish energy stores, and healthy fats and omega-3s to reduce inflammation.
How Many Recovery Days Do We Need?
The amount of rest we need is variable—it depends on our age, biological sex, the type of workout we are doing, and a whole host of other factors, like nutrition and lifestyle. However, a general guideline is that men need about 48-72 hours of rest. If you are more commonly completing full-body workouts, such as HIIT and Crossfit training, this could look like building two to three rest days between each workout into your schedule. As your body becomes more accustomed to working out and recovering from this stress, these rest days can be swapped for active recovery or moderate-intensity training.
Women, on the other hand, need less recovery time (both between sets, and after workouts) than men. During workouts, women fully recover from intervals of training faster than men do. Likewise, research has indicated that women may need less recovery time between training sessions. While there isn’t enough research to form solid recommendations about recovery time for women, it may be useful to consider active recovery, or even decreasing a day of rest compared to male counterparts.
Overall, listen to your body! If you’re feeling super sore, tired, and moody, it’s likely that you aren’t fully recovered. If you’re feeling energetic and physically strong, it’s likely that you have. Give yourself and your schedule some flexibility to change along with your fitness needs.
