Day 8

Rest days, how many days a person needs a week is variable. But there’s a cultural glorification of working too hard: “Train twice a day.” “You must be training 8 hours a day.” “Sleep is for the weak.” etc.

Yes, you could do those things, but a lot of the fatigue accumulated in skill-based training is not acute but chronic. It builds up slowly, often undetected, until eventually something goes. That’s when the bad things and actual long term injuries happen. You push your tendons too far to the limit for too long, masking natural inflammation with ibuprofen until *snap* and then you have to deal with it.

To avoid this, learn to back off, take the foot off the gas. Take an actual rest day, or two, or three. Everyone will have outside factors that influence their training schedule, start with that as your constraint. Are you a performer? Easy, just actually rest on your days off, or at least the day before or after a performance. Have a normal 9-5 workweek? Make getting over the midweek hump easier by taking Wednesdays off of training. You a weekend warrior? Smash it on Saturday and Sunday, then rest up at your desk on Monday and Tuesday. Ultimately you’ll need to gain an understanding of yourself and your outside influences to determine your optimal rest periods.

But even the seven day week gets unjustly glorified in some ways. Everything we talked about above has to happen on seven day schedules. But you could find out that, using strength training as an example, deadlifting heavy once every ten days is what works for you, anything more leads to performance compromising DOMS.

Same with handstands. If you train them too often, the training days become unproductive. So it’s better to space those days farther apart so you don’t plateau, or even worse degrade your other skills, by relentlessly spinning your wheels while running on fumes.

Basically, don’t prioritize quantity at the expense of quality. Just as you need to be fresh between sets to get quality reps, you need to be fresh between sessions to get quality sets.

Now I’m sure you’re thinking to yourself “But we’ve been training every day!” That’s why we’ve been selectively rotating in flexibility days to give your hands a break. Today we’re easing off the gas even more with a gentle wrist rehab routine taken from our free Grip forearm conditioning program.