Strength By Fitness
How do you spend your gym free rest days?
Welcome to another fact-based article from Strength by Fitness.
OUr mountainous hike on our gym free saturday, but how do you spend your rest days?
Saturday is one of our weekly gym-free recovery days. This means that we prioritise ‘us’ time, chilling, relaxing, recovering, eating healthy high-protein foods supplanted with plenty of whole plant-based foods and doing nonexhaustive activities that are done for adventure, fun, family, relationship, calm, rejuvenating and quality of life time.
This doesn’t translate to not doing any physical activities at all, however.
This past Saturday was another non-exhaustive and tranquil and beautiful rest day, as we spent roughly 3 hours hiking through a serene mountain area lush with vibrant forest and nature. This is not a surprise being us, we spend our gym free weekends doing wonderful little adventures like this. It´s our non-exhaustive, enjoyable and health promoting way to recover fully from gym and work.
Nature all by itself provides healthy benefits for us humans. Nature-rich areas expose you to far less traffic-related air pollution for instance. Which makes the health impact of physical activities better than doing it in areas with heavy traffic.
Spending time in nature provides ample health benefits in body and mind.
Something that has been demonstrated in studies even inside the same city, such as London.
Run near a road, or do it in a bigger green city park and the difference in health impact is easily measurable.
But that’s not all.
Most people ( not all, but most ) feel a lot less stressed in nature. Calmer and more at ease. Which all by itself provides health benefits in a day and time where far too many are relentlessly battered by stress.
Hava explained high-protein & satiety in such a good way in the above video. so give it a look because this is how i will explain it to you too.
Nature’s beauty provides other benefits for the body and soul too. Humans enjoy natural beauty. It makes us happier, and happiness provides benefits for our wellbeing and quality of life.
Add to that the small act of continuous walking and climbing up and down rock, stone and forestry obstacles, creeks, valleys, fallen trees and flowing water and you have easy health wins for body and mind.
What’s exhaustion?
That’s relative to your fitness level and capacity for recovery.
So on your recovery days, you do what is non-exhaustive and enjoyable for you while still eating enough healthy high-protein foods that are nutritionally complete so your body, muscles, brain and biological processes all can recover in full, adapt and progress.
the apps that inhabit our health & fitness lives.
Samsung Health, which is my step tracking app choice, is a free health app and a decent step counter.
So both me and my wife use it to track our steps and for how long we walked in time and distance. But that’s all it does good enough.
Its estimate of total calories is not accurate. Samsung has no idea what you do as far as other activities go. Neither does my phone know how tall I am, or even my body weight, not to mention my lean muscle mass, and even if I bothered to provide that information it’s still a non-complete estimate thats never going to be perfectly accurate.
And yes, you can logg your foods too.
But for me it’s a rough step tracker and nothing more.
The important takeaway when it comes down to apps, however, is to view whatever data your apps give you as just that, a rough trajectory metric for a relative sense of some of your metrics and trajectories, no matter if you track your food, steps, speed, sleep, zone levels or whatever.
Most importantly, however, is to remember that there are no apps that provide a complete picture of your progress, wellbeing, health, and fitness level, capacity and performance.
So, if we use sleep tracking apps, as a short example. Good enough quality sleep is a powerful metric for our health, fitness, body composition, and ageing process, across our entire health-span. But it is not about hitting a magical, all-time high 7 hour sleep score in your sleep tracking app.
All available science, and hundreds of millions of truly healthy fit humans progress and outcomes all make it clear that healthy quality sleep happens inside of a sleep window of 6 to 8 hours. So, if that is you, it does not matter if your app isnt perfectly happy with your sleep. Neither will stressing out about your sleep tracking data improve your sleep at all.
Use the apps that actually improve life, health, and wellbeing and disconnect from the rest. Health, wellness, and lifelong fitness is built with the big pillar foundation. Focus on that and the miniscule details will all sort themselves out over time.
What do you do for your health, wellbeing and recovery on your exercise free recovery days?
This article is also available over at our paywalled Medium publication.
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