The 7 Types of Rest and Recovery for Maximum Muscle Gain (Work-Rest Cycle) | Ep 273
Download the Stress Solution Guide now with more detailed strategies to reduce stress (and improve fat loss and muscle gain)
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Are you tired despite getting enough sleep? Are your workouts feeling like a grind?
Learn how the engineering concept of the Work-Rest Cycle combines with the 7 types of rest can be used to maximize your muscle growth and recovery.
Research from Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith reveals why sleep alone isn't enough, and how implementing all 7 types of rest can accelerate your results.
Main Takeaways:
Why proper maintenance is crucial for optimal performance
The 7 types of rest: physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social, and spiritual
How implementing all 7 types of rest can improve results more than additional training or food
Today you'll learn about:
00:58 Why sleep alone isn't enough for complete recovery
02:22 The Work-Rest Cycle
03:15 The 7 types of rest
11:42 How to implement all 7 types of rest
15:16 Using metrics to track recovery effectiveness
17:01 Why rest might be more important than training
18:38 Recap of the 7 types of rest
Episode Resources:
Mastering the 7 Types of Rest for Ultimate Recovery
When it comes to building muscle and maximizing recovery, most people focus on just two things: sleep and taking days off from the gym. But what if I told you that’s only scratching the surface? According to research, your body needs seven distinct types of rest to recover fully, grow stronger, and reach your physique goals. Today, we’re diving into these seven types, framed through an engineering concept called the Work-Rest Cycle, to help you build a smarter recovery system.
1. Physical Rest
This is the most obvious form of rest and includes both passive and active recovery:
Passive Rest: Sleep, naps, and complete relaxation.
Active Rest: Light movement such as walking or mobility exercises on rest days.
Studies in the Journal of Applied Physiology show proper sleep increases muscle protein synthesis by up to 60%, while active recovery can reduce muscle damage markers by 40%. Think of physical rest as maintenance for your body’s machinery—sometimes you need to shut it down completely, and other times, keep it running lightly to prevent rust.
2. Mental Rest
Mental fatigue impacts your workouts and overall performance. Studies published in Frontiers in Psychology reveal that mental fatigue reduces time to exhaustion by 15% and impairs decision-making during exercise. Even a brief mental rest, such as a one-minute breathing exercise, can improve cognitive performance by 26%. If you feel scattered or unfocused during your workouts, chances are you need more mental rest.
3. Sensory Rest
Constant stimulation from screens, noise, and artificial light overwhelms your senses. Research in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism shows that excessive sensory input increases cortisol by up to 50%, which directly impacts muscle growth and fat storage. Reducing screen time by just two hours a day can lower cortisol levels by 20% and improve sleep quality by 35%.
4. Creative Rest
This type of rest isn’t just for artists; it’s about giving your brain the freedom to explore new ideas and perspectives. Studies in Behavioral Sciences show creative activities increase brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein crucial for learning and adaptation. For fitness, this means better movement patterns, motivation, and adherence. Even adding variety to your exercise routine can stimulate neuromuscular efficiency and improve results.
5. Emotional Rest
Unprocessed emotions can act like a pressure gauge ready to burst. Research in Psycho-Neuroendocrinology shows that emotional stress increases cortisol by up to 37% and decreases testosterone by 10-15%, directly impacting muscle growth and recovery. Practices like journaling or talking to a coach can help you release pent-up emotions and restore balance.
6. Social Rest
Positive social interactions can enhance your recovery. According to Behavioral Medicine, they boost muscle protein synthesis by 25% while reducing inflammatory markers. Whether you’re an extrovert or introvert, balancing energizing and draining social activities is key to optimizing your recovery system.
7. Spiritual Rest
Spiritual rest involves connecting to something larger than yourself, whether that’s religion, purpose, or long-term goals. Finding meaning in your fitness journey helps maintain motivation and consistency. Think of it as your body’s mission statement, guiding your actions and keeping you aligned.
Building Your Recovery System
To implement these seven types of rest, start by auditing your recovery patterns:
Identify your biggest rest deficits.
Create a recovery schedule that addresses these gaps strategically without adding unnecessary stress.
For example:
Combine sensory and mental rest by walking outdoors without headphones.
Pair emotional and spiritual rest by journaling about your deeper fitness motivations.
Tie these strategies to measurable metrics like workout performance, sleep quality, or stress levels. This data-driven approach ensures you’re continuously fine-tuning your recovery system.
Recap: The Seven Types of Rest
Physical: Sleep and active recovery.
Mental: Clearing mental fatigue.
Sensory: Reducing overstimulation.
Creative: Adding variety and inspiration.
Emotional: Processing feelings and reducing stress.
Social: Balancing relationships.
Spiritual: Finding purpose and motivation.
When you optimize your recovery across all seven types, you’ll amplify your results far more than just pushing harder in the gym. Proper rest isn’t about doing less—it’s about doing the right things to keep your body running like a well-maintained machine.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:02
If you're always tired despite getting enough sleep, or maybe your workouts feel like a grind and you're not getting the results you want, maybe there's something missing when it comes to your recovery. Most people get this completely wrong. They oversimplify recovery as just sleeping more or taking days off from the gym. But research shows that your body actually needs up to seven distinct types of rest to maximize your recovery, your muscle growth, to achieve the physique you want. So today, using an engineering framework called the Work-Rest Cycle, we're going to talk about exactly what these are and how to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique.
Philip Pape: 0:58
I'm your host, philip Pape. Now you know that feeling when you get a full eight hours of sleep but you still wake up exhausted. Now you know that feeling when you get a full eight hours of sleep but you still wake up exhausted. Or when you take a rest day but your next workout feels heavier than ever. There's a reason for that. Sleep and physical rest are just two pieces of a larger system that your body needs to recover and grow. How the engineering concept of the work-rest cycle combines with research on seven essential types of rest to create your complete recovery system. And before we get into it.
Philip Pape: 1:32
I want to share something that will help you implement an improved approach to stress. It is an expanded version of my stress solution guide. So if you've ever downloaded this before, it was a pretty small guide based on some ideas that we had talked about on the previous episode, but I've expanded it with probably three or four extra pages of very detailed strategies for managing stress. So to get your free copy of that, just click the link in the show notes. You could always go to witsandweightscom slash free. Again. This is the expanded stress solution guide at witsandweightscom slash free or the link in the show notes. All right, in engineering because today we like to talk about engineering frameworks and applying them to your body, to your life In engineering we use something called the work rest cycle to maximize productivity while presenting or preventing system failure.
Philip Pape: 2:22
So I want you to think about a manufacturing line that's always running 24-7, producing widgets Doesn't matter what kind of widgets and if you let it keep running forever, if you never have scheduled maintenance periods, machines are going to break down and when that happens, efficiency is going to drop and eventually the whole system is going to fail. Your body operates on the same principle. It is a complex machine. It's not like a complex machine. It is a complex machine. It's not like a complex machine. It is one and it needs multiple forms of maintenance to perform at its peak. And the problem is that most people focus on just one or two types of maintenance and ignore the others, and that's like only changing a machine's oil while ignoring all the other aspects of managing the machine. It's kind of like with your car, like a lot of us we change, we get gas, we fill up the tank, but then we neglect a lot of the other things and then, before you know it, we've got a thousand dollar bill at the auto mechanic. Eventually, something's going to break, is the point here.
Philip Pape: 3:15
And this is where Dr Sondra Dalton-Smith comes into play. She is a researcher who identified seven distinct types of rest. I learned about her with a recent guest on the show, allie Shapiro. She mentioned her on the show the seven types of rest and I looked into it and I said you know, I need to do a podcast on this because I think this is a great way to frame your overall recovery system and each one of them can play a vital role in your fitness and I think we're neglecting a lot of them, myself included. So I think you're going to get a lot out of this. So here we go the seven types of rest and how they relate to you and your recovery.
Philip Pape: 3:51
First is physical. This is probably the most obvious that we are familiar with. This, yes, includes sleep, but not just sleep. We need both passive physical rest, like sleep and complete relaxation and naps, but also active physical rest. Like you know, light movement, walking, that kind of recovery you do on your rest day, but you're awake and doing something. So studies in the Journal of Applied Physiology have shown that proper sleep increases muscle protein synthesis by up to 60%. Research in sports medicine shows active recovery between training sessions can reduce muscle damage markers by 40%. So sleep and active recovery it's kind of like with a machine which needs to be shut down occasionally and needs some light operational periods while it's running. Same thing your body needs both forms to optimize recovery.
Philip Pape: 4:43
The second type of rest is mental rest. Think of this like rebooting an overloaded computer. You know when your computer starts to crash and Chrome gets really slow and you're like what's going on, I'm just going to reboot it. That usually solves everything. Well, think of your body like that as well. You kind of get this buildup of mental stress. Research in Frontiers in Psychology shows that mental fatigue significantly impairs physical performance and it reduces time to exhaustion by up to 15% and impairs decision-making during exercise. So we know mental fatigue is not just about in the brain. It translates to your physical and can reduce your performance in the gym. It affects your workout focus, your form. You're literally just like running on fumes, right, mental fumes, and you you kind of know when you get to this point, but sometimes you may not realize it because it's that just at just below that, just above that level. But you need more mental rest than that and studies show that even brief mental rest breaks, even a minute of breathing and taking a break and just stopping Again, this was on let's see episode with Molly McNamee recently. She talked about taking 30 second breaks between meetings or tasks. Even just the 60 seconds of conscious breathing can improve cognitive performance by 26%. So mental rest is incredibly important.
Philip Pape: 6:05
Third, we have sensory rest, now your body's sensory systems. This is more than just the physical, like the overall sleep and rest that we need. In that sense, these are the actually your senses, right, your eyes, your ears and so on. They can get overwhelmed, right? Just like on any machine, you could get overwhelmed by constant input from screens, from noise, from artificial light. Research in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism shows that excessive sensory stimulation increases cortisol by up to 50% above baseline. And we know about cortisol, don't we? It directly impacts everything Muscle growth, fat storage, you name it. A 2023 study found that even two hours of screen time reduction per day can lower cortisol levels by 20% and improve sleep quality by 35%. So when we talk sensory rest, oftentimes we're talking about sleep quality, and yes, these all tie together, but I'd like you to think about it as its own form of rest. How do we reduce the sensory overwhelm? And, by the way, I'm going to get to strategies for all of these, but I really wanted to lay them out first and get you thinking about why these are important.
Philip Pape: 7:15
The fourth type of rest is creative rest. Now, in engineering terms, this is like giving your system an upgrade right? A new algorithm, new input, new inspiration, right, a new feature. Research in behavioral sciences shows that creative activities reduce cortisol levels and increase BDNF, that's brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and that is a protein that is crucial for learning and adaptation. Amazing, right. So creative activities, we know, increase that. And for fitness this means better movement patterns, increased training motivation, which means increased adherence and consistency.
Philip Pape: 7:57
Studies show that, for example, just varying your exercise selection this is an argument for variety, right? Argument for variety here. It can improve things like muscle activation and your neuromuscular activity efficiency significantly, compared to something that is repetitive over and over and over again and we kind of know this intuitively. I do argue for some level of variety. I'm I'm, I'm okay or I'm a big fan of a basic but boring approach when you first start training just to get super strong, super fast. But then I think there needs to be a little variety in there, for a variety of reasons. Um, muscle activation is just just one of them. There's a study that I found that linked those together. But there's a lot of other reasons having to do with what might be called creative rest.
Philip Pape: 8:43
The fifth type of rest is emotional rest. Think of emotions. Like your pressure gauges, they need regular release of the emotions to prevent system overload. I never want you to hold your emotions back. We need to express them, we feel them. We can't help it. It's a matter of how we cope with them and research in psycho neuroendocrinology shows that emotional stress increases cortisol by up to 30% or 37% and decreases testosterone by 10 to 15% and that, of of course, directly impacts muscle growth and recovery. And then, conversely, we know that emotional regulation techniques can reduce stress-induced hormonal disruption.
Philip Pape: 9:26
The sixth type of rest is social rest. So, just like collaborative systems you know, like think of teamwork or teams working together, they need breaks between intensive, all out brainstorming, right? You ever been in a team in a meeting? You can't just go on and on and on. You're going to eventually burn out. You need a balance, uh, so, similarly, you need to balance socially draining versus energizing interactions in everything you do. Whether you are more of a loner type or more of a social type, we all need relaxation and periodization between being with people and not being with people. Research in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine shows that positive social interactions muscle protein synthesis by up to 25% and increase inflammatory markers. And you notice I'm throwing you a lot of numbers and research and everything. I wanted to make sure this one tied into some of the findings we actually see associated with these types of rest. There's plenty of science behind it and a lot of it is somewhat intuitive, but it's good to understand these.
Philip Pape: 10:38
Finally, number seven the seventh type of rest is spiritual rest, and in engineering, this is like having a clear mission, operational purpose, what I'll call a user story or a requirement for your machine. Now, that's kind of a stretch for an analogy. So let's talk about what this means for you. Spiritual rest means connecting to something larger than yourself. That can mean a lot of things to people. It's not just religion or spirituality per se. It could be finding deeper meaning, finding purpose, finding why you are doing this in the first place on the long arc of life, and this maintains your long-term motivation, your long-term consistency, versus just having short-term reasons for doing this. So, if we're gonna take all these seven types of rest, how do we create a practical system for implementing them? Now, I recently went over these in my group coaching program in Physique University. We had one of our coaching calls. I went through specific actions for each one that people could take to apply to them.
Philip Pape: 11:42
But I'm just going to ask you, without without just listing a laundry list of things, start by auditing your current recovery patterns. Like, think about the seven types of rest we just talked about. You can go back and reference them. What are your biggest rest deficits? Right, most people are severely lacking in at least one or two, if not three, of these seven areas, so identify the ones that need the most attention, and then I want you to have a recovery schedule that hits all of these. Now, some of the things are going to be things you're already doing and some will be to address the one or two that you identified as the biggest low-hanging fruit, and this doesn't mean adding more to your day and doing more. Please don't take it as that, because that is going to affect your stress and rest in the most ironic way. This means being strategic and efficient, using stacking, combining things and so on.
Philip Pape: 12:45
For example, you can combine sensory and mental rest by doing your relaxing thing that you like to do. Let's say it's walking outside without listening to a podcast or listening to music. Now you're going to say wait a minute, philip. Haven't you talked about habit stacking, where you can walk or listen to a podcast? Yes. However, if you're constantly stimulated, if when you're indoors, you're always on a screen or have something in your ears, and then you go for a walk and you still have something in your ears, that could be a problem and you could be overloaded and you don't have sensory rest. Instead, take advantage of the fact you're outside to look at the sky, the clouds, the birds, the trees, the animals, other people. Just be with your thoughts and get the sensory rest along with the mental rest. And, by the way, you're probably also getting a form of physical rest in recovery. Getting a form of physical rest and recovery all three just by going for a walk out in nature.
Philip Pape: 13:47
You can stack emotional rest and spiritual rest by taking a moment to write down or journal or think about your deeper fitness motivations. If you haven't done that in a while, right, that's tied to your spiritual rest, but it's also emotional because it lets you get out on paper what you're thinking and feeling. This is where, when you're working with a coach, you can be super helpful when they're prompting you, when they're asking questions from a objective, unbiased sense. So I'll give you an example of this. Many of you, you probably share things with your loved ones or family or friends, even someone who's very supportive, and you tell them hey, I'm tracking my food or I'm lifting weights or I'm focusing. If they're super supportive, they're going to be positive, hopefully, about it. They're not going to question you, they're not going to sabotage you, and they're going to say, hey, that's awesome. And if you've had a bad day and you say this terrible thing happened, they might say, oh, that sucks.
Philip Pape: 14:32
Now, some of us need that, but in some cases, that may not give you emotional rest because it didn't allow you to unburden the emotion in a full way, in a complete way. What I mean by that is a really good friend is going to empathize with you, but they're not necessarily going to help you process or move through it. Like, say, a therapist or even a coach, right? Or? Or someone in a community, like a Facebook community you're in who doesn't have a personal stake with you, but they still want to help you, and so they, they're listening, they allow you to vent, you can share the challenges you've had, and then, if you ask for help, they can say, okay, tell me more, what have you tried? What haven't you tried? Hey, maybe here's some things to try and you could unburden those emotions in that way, right?
Philip Pape: 15:16
So really get creative about each of these types of rest, and then you could, of course, make this very objective by tying that to your metrics. To make this very objective by tying that to your metrics, to your biofeedback. By the way, we just did an episode not long ago called the 6-10 biofeedback model, where we talk about different metrics. So, whether it's your workout performance which translates into, say, energy, recovery, motivation, right, all of that stuff, all of those metrics, and of course, the direct ones like sleep, stress and all the things you like to measure with your rings and your watches and everything which I do as well, you can then get that as feedback and see what's working and what's not, and then you can adjust your recovery schedule, your rest ratios, so to speak, based on these indicators. And I have a lot of ideas where those came from. Again, I didn't want today's episode to be a laundry list and I have a lot of ideas where those came from. Again, I didn't want today's episode to be a laundry list.
Philip Pape: 16:21
A few other things that come to mind would be if you normally are listening to music while working out try not listening to music, just silently work out. Think about a lot of this is that rest and recovery is probably going to build more muscle for you than your training and your food. And that might sound a little bit sacrilegious from coming from me. I say it, however, because a lot of you you've you've started to dial in your training. Your training three, four or five days a week. You started to dial in your food. You know, maybe you're tracking, you're kind of understanding a little bit how macros work and energy balance, and there's still something a little bit holding you back or maybe the progress isn't as much as you'd like.
Philip Pape: 17:01
I bet there's a lot of opportunity with rest and recovery. That's the one that people neglect so often, and sometimes we throw up our hands and we say you know, I just don't have the mental capability here, I don't have my life doesn't allow for it, because I don't have enough time. There's a lot of excuses we make. Let's just be honest, and so I want you to take it at a bite-sized, micro level. Pick one of the seven types of rest right and focus on it, because you want to be a well-aimed machine, well-maintained machine. A well-maintained machine Think of a car that you actually take into the shop regularly. You don't have to worry about it, like it just runs and runs and runs, just fine.
Philip Pape: 17:39
But one that gets neglected is constantly going to have problems, and all those problems which you could translate to being injuries or sicknesses, or you're way too tired or whatever burnout. They actually stack on top of each other to the point where you just never get in a rhythm with your routine. But if you take the time now to actually think about getting your body rest across all seven areas, that is going to amplify your results far more than pushing harder on any single dimension. Right, and this is why some people get better results doing less, like training three days a week instead of four or five, because maybe they're resting more and then they're getting rest across all the dimensions and and and right. And so if I'm going to recap real quick the seven types of rest which, again, I encourage going back and listening through the episode for the details Number one, physical.
Philip Pape: 18:38
Number two, mental. Number three, sensory. Number four, creative. Number five, emotional. Number six, social. And number seven, spiritual.
Philip Pape: 18:43
All right, it's a pretty cool concept, this whole idea of work rest, um, where we don't pay attention to the rest enough. Let's be honest. And if you, by the way, if you want to see the full uh workshop that we did, where we went over all the details and gave you specifics for each, you could join physique university Anytime. Go to wandweightscom slash physique and you'll learn about everything provided there. But part of that is the regular coaching calls where we cover topics like this in detail and give you specific actions and frameworks to apply them. All right, I mentioned before, if you want to have a little bit more help with managing stress and some strategies, you can download my expanded stress solution guide. Go to witsandweightscom slash free or click the link in the show notes. Until next time, keep using those wits, lifting those weights, and remember that proper rest is much more than just sleep. It's strategic recovery across all seven types of rest we talked about today. This is Philip Hape and you've been listening to Wits and Weights. Talk to you next time.
