Rest Time is Training Time

Photo by Derek Liang on Unsplash

I used to work out regularly with a personal trainer, Cam. This was when we still had in-person gyms and the camaraderie of sweating and grunting together. I got a personal trainer to keep me more accountable and to help me with the mechanics of strength training. As I aged, I wanted to build functional muscle strength in my entire body and particularly get stronger in my upper body to build up paddle power for surfing. I didn’t care how much I lifted or achieving personal record (PR) numbers. Or so I thought. It turns out that I’m pretty competitive, even when the numbers largely don’t matter. In our first weeks together, Cam pointed out how obsessed I was with getting my form right and trying to lift heavier weights, also noticing: “You don’t like to rest at all, do you?”

He told me that I needed rest time between the sets of heavy weights doing squats, deadlifts, and bench presses. He taught me that my body needed 1–3 minutes rest between sets so that the muscles could recover and recharge. Ever the skeptic, I didn’t really believe him and fought him for many weeks. Rest time to me, is synonymous with laziness. If we only had 30 minutes to train together, we better be making the maximum use of each minute, and sitting around chatting for 1–3 minutes between sets wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to be productive with every minute of my training. 

Over the months and years of working together, I begrudgingly realized that Cam was right. Cam was always right. I noticed that using rest time made me stronger. When I worked out alone, without the patience to wait between sets, I couldn’t lift as much. When I restrained myself to wait beyond a minute and stopped whining to Cam that it was time to get going, I would inevitably break a personal record that day. 

I’m a skeptic and a rebel. My first instinct is to challenge and push back (and occasionally whine). Yet, I am always willing to give things a try. Inevitably my head and heart would break through the hard shell of skepticism, until I finally accepted and internalized that rest time is for training. 

Last year, in a coach training intensive, I listened to lessons from another coach, Matt Chavlovich, a 2x Ironman and pro soccer player. He shared a number of lessons, and the main one that stood out to me was:

Rest day is a training day.

In training for his Ironmans, he had to build in the rest days. He had to make sure he took the rest days, knowing that muscles grow when they’re not in constant motion. Like me, he was driven to keep training. His need to force himself to rest resonated with my insight fighting my own go-go-go drive when training with Cam. 

Rest Time and Creativity

The design process has a rhythm of divergence and convergence. When starting off a new project, there is a curiosity and openness to anything that can happen. Brainstorming new ideas and possibilities is a divergent process to generate many new ideas. Then at some point, there needs to be a narrowing, a prioritization, and a selection of which ideas to move forward with. This is the convergence. Underlying this design process is having the patience to wait and trust that the ideas will come, and they will hit you when you least expect it. 

Have you ever had the experience of going to sleep wrestling with a thorny problem and then after a night of restful sleep, suddenly waking up to see a brilliant solution? What about having a moment of inspiration in the shower or while taking a walk through the park? Rest time in creativity, similar to rest time in training, allows your brain to process the ideas in a different mode and then eventually spit out something non-linear, different, and potentially brilliant. Rest time generates different thinking that can lead to inspired breakthroughs. 

Allowing yourself to rest and not constantly push forward requires patience and the ability to take the long view. It requires integrating the data and facts around the issue or design problem you’re working with and letting your intuition continue to process while you’re not actively focused on it. Trust that divergence and convergence will work. Trust the process. And rest time is a crucial part of the creative process. 

Rest Time and Ease

I love to surf and often fall back into a performative mode where I want to paddle out at the fiercest, biggest breaks and both 1. make it out to the lineup, and 2. powerfully catch and ride the biggest set wave down the line. I can be laser focused on continuing to single-mindedly take stroke after stroke to make it through the battering whitewash. I can be no-nonsense and fixate on timing the next set to make sure that I select the best possible wave to take off on. 

A couple of weekends ago, I met up with a dear friend in Santa Cruz. We hadn’t spent as much time together since Covid, and in addition to the pandemic, he had also recently become a new dad. It was Superbowl Sunday and not many people were out in the water. The waves were uncharacteristically small that day, especially rare as the Northern California winter tends to have massive, giant waves. I switched out my usual shortboard to borrow one of my friend’s longboards. We bobbed together in the water, basking in the warm California sunshine. On these giant logs, any wave was catchable so we would lazily paddle for the little bumps and have long, pleasant, knee-high rides all the way to shore. In between, we kept up a long conversation, catching up on kids, partners, how we handled the pandemic, and updating each other on our mutual passion for personal growth. 

Longboarding is rest time. This session reminded me of the ease, pleasure, and camaraderie of surfing without the pressure of performance and wave counts. A week or so ago, I was chatting with a semi-professional young female surfer. She was a shortboarder who grew up riding big waves on Ocean Beach. Yet sometimes she would get into a rut. She would keep messing up and not be able to catch waves in her competition heats. She was stuck in the pressure of performative mode and unable to get out of her head. Her coach gave her a technique—get on a longboard for a week and go catch long, effortless rides. After that restful, slow change of pace, she got back on her shortboard. She’d broken the performative pattern with this ease of longboarding, which always cleared her rut. 

Bottom-Line

We can be so overly focused on the hard edge of training. We want to be successful, to perform, to hit our best record, and to win. It’s important to realize that rest time is training time. Rest time provides balance whether it’s for creativity, greater ease, or to make us more performant.