See update at the end.
Or, as this article puts it, only take a rest day when you need it — not necessarily every week.
But can this reduce injury risk?
This seems crazy. Most experts and plans suggest taking a day off each week.
But there is some sense to it.
First, to run every day, you have to run less or slower on some of those days. When you run each day knowing you’re going to have to run the next day, you self-protect.
Second, your body gets used to it. If it knows it has to run every morning, it gets everything ready for the daily start time.
I’ve found myself waking at two in the morning with a noticeable niggle only to find it gone by the time I get up for my run. It’s like the body gives itself a bit of inflammation time during the night when it knows it can before shutting if off in the morning when it knows it will have to run.
Third, even if you run everyday, you still have 22 to 23 hours to recover from your last run. This is a main point in the article linked to above and was an eyeopener for me. That’s a long time to recover. Especially if you don’t have an active job.
But less injury?
According to the article linked to above, more regular training in manageable doses improves recovery capacity. This is apparently even more beneficial as we age as we have less innate recovery mechanisms turned on by default. Training every day can hone the recovery mechanism that haven’t yet faded or maybe even turn some back on.
So perhaps it’s more accurate to say training everyday can lead to better recovery, and this may lead to less injuries.
Update: I now like having a rest day (31/12/20)
After running nearly every day for a year and maybe longer, I’ve gone back to having at least one day.
I did this mainly because I started a training plan that had days off in it, but I’ve come to like having those days off.
Perhaps it is true that we, or I at least from experience, don’t need one rest day every week. But I do need a rest day some weeks.
The problem is, if I’m not taking a week day off every week, I find it hard to drop one in, and I did on occasions give myself niggles I might have avoided if I’d taken a day off.
So a day off may be too much rest most weeks (48 hours instead of 24 hours), but it might be worth having for when you need it. It might save at least a couple of weeks of hampered training getting over a niggle picked up on a would-be rest day.
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