Pete Wright:
Welcome to Build for Health. I’m Pete Wright. I’m here with Coach Srdjan Injac, and today we’re talking about rest. Training is the stimulus. It isn’t the adaptation. Those are words that I’ve heard around the workplace. You don’t get stronger in the gym. You get stronger in the twenty-two hours after you leave it. And only if those hours cooperate.

And are you doing all the things that you need to do to make those hours cooperate with you? The problem is that we genuinely treat those hours as leftover time. We see it in the words we use: workout, rest day, off day, recovery day. Every one of those words describes an absence. So today we’re going to talk about what’s actually happening in that absence, why the phrase “rest day” covers several different jobs that finish at different times, and how to tell which one you actually need. And it starts with occupational therapy.

Yeah, I bet you didn’t see that coming. Well, you did, because I told you about it.

Srdjan Injac:
No.

Pete Wright:
So I ran across — hi, Srdjan, by the way. Hi. I’m so excited.

Srdjan Injac:
Hi.

Pete Wright:
I just want to jump right in. I ran across a study for other work that I do, and it was published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. It was a study by Sonnentag and Fritz. That’s Sabine Sonnentag from University of Konstanz and Charlotte Fritz from Bowling Green State University, and they were doing a study on mood regulation across job stress recovery.

So they wanted to know if they could come up with a questionnaire that would serve as a measuring stick for how people unwind after they are stressed. And in this case, stressed at work. And to me, it struck me as really interesting.

So I’m going to beg your patience while I talk about why this is interesting to me, and then you could talk about how it applies to the workout stuff, because this is all occupational therapy research that has nothing on the surface to do with training. But I think we’re going to make it feel like it was written for the training life.

Srdjan Injac:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
What they discovered — the puzzle that got them here is to me what the interesting part is. These researchers kept finding that hours off did not predict who came back restored.

Right? Two people take the same weekend, one comes back just fine and ready to go, and another one comes back completely wrecked. So the question for these researchers was not “does rest help?” It’s “what is the active ingredient to productive rest?” And this is where it has just really landed hard for me. They discovered that people need one of four different types of rest. These are not fungible. You don’t swap one out for another. How you are stressed determines the kind of relaxation you need.

So number one, psychological detachment. That says you are mentally off. You’re turned off. The thing that you were stressed about has no access to you. You’re not thinking about work. You’re doing something that is distracting from your effort at work, detached from work.

Number two, relaxation. It’s a tricky word. Low activation, low demand. It is pleasant.

Mastery is defined as challenge and learning. So you’re taking your attention that was pointed at work and you are pointing it at something else.

And control. If you spend all day being told what to do, then you need to have a sense of relaxation that is defined by you being in control. You get to decide how your time gets spent.

The interesting thing is that detachment and relaxation are pretty predictable. If I’m stressed, I go home, I want to relax.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, I know.

Pete Wright:
I want to detach.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
What was fascinating that they found out is that many, many people need a more complicated set of rest elements — that sometimes just laying on the couch, just watching movies, just hanging out and eating all the time does not make for a restful return to stress. That in fact they need to change the way their brain is oriented to the world, and it does not mean stillness. It means you are active, you’re just doing something different.

So mastery, for example, is a complicated one, because rest, like I said, is not defined as standing still. Something hard can count as rest as long as it isn’t the same hard thing that flattened you in the first place at work. You’re working on a really stressful project. At the end of the day, you want to go home and you want to demonstrate that you are mastering something else. Woodworking — that always seems like a go-to. My neighbor loves woodworking. He’s an artist with this stuff. That is a restful state for him.

This was the other piece that came out of the research. These rest categories do not substitute for each other. That’s the whole idea. You can rest all weekend in a way that never actually touches on what drained you in the first place. So if you aren’t doing the right kind of rest, then it doesn’t mean you’re not resting enough. It means that you’ve mismatched your rest to what you were stressed about in the first place. If you are out of control at work, your rest should include an activity that puts you in control at home, which I think is genuinely kinder to ourselves if we think about that.

Again, not exercise science. But as I was working out the other day, it occurred to me that this research applies. We’re essentially borrowing a very well-validated model and pointing it at the gym.

So I have three small studies. I’ve been talking too much already, but I have three small studies. This is all setup, man. It’s all setup. This is good stuff.

All of these studies lean the same way, and they’re not huge. In the Annals of Internal Medicine, we have a study about ten overweight adults. They were all housed in a metabolic ward — a research unit where participants live for the duration and every calorie in and out is measured by staff. Every person did the same conditions in this nutrition research, so it is a controlled study. They had the same caloric restriction, fourteen days, and they would have eight and a half hours of sleep opportunity versus five and a half.

Total weight loss: about three kilograms both times. No real meaningful difference. Total fat loss: one and a half kilograms on good sleep, 0.6 on short sleep. Fat-free mass loss: 1.6 on good sleep, 2.4 on short sleep. Fat-free mass is everything, obviously, that isn’t fat — muscle, bone, water, organs.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Without good sleep, they lost almost double the wrong kind of weight to lose, because they weren’t sleeping enough.

Okay, study two. Ten young, healthy men, one week of sleeping under five hours a night. Testosterone significantly lower than when rested. This was published as a research letter, not a full paper, but it was peer-reviewed. Testosterone is, as we’ve talked about many times before, one of the things that does the actual building. It’s not about virility. This is like construction crew stuff. And these ten young, healthy men sleeping under five hours a night for a week had significantly lower testosterone than when they were rested.

Study three: eleven Stanford varsity men’s basketball players, sleep pushed toward ten hours a night for five to seven weeks. Sprint times 16.2 down to 15.5 seconds. Free throws up 9%. Three-pointers up 9.2%. Every single player improved on increased sleep. Every player on every measure that they tested. That is awesome, because I like sleep.

This is obviously a pile of small studies leaning in the same direction. It’s not one giant validated study. Just saying it out loud on a podcast does not make it universal truth, but it is indicative, and I find that fascinating.

So I throw all of that at you, and I count on you to turn it into gym speak. How does this kind of stuff influence the way you approach guiding rest and recuperation for training? Go.

Srdjan Injac:
Well, all that makes sense. Everything that you said. And I was thinking about how I recover. What do I do on my days off?

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
When I’m just stressed at work and I just don’t want to be here and I need to get away from everything. And you’re right. I don’t just go home and sit and do nothing and relax. I actually don’t feel that much rested when I come back. I do other things away from the gym that have nothing to do with lifting weights, with the gym. I’m not at the gym. Far away from the gym.

I’m doing other things that I enjoy, that I love. I’ll go swimming. I’ll go to a beach — now that it’s summer, it’s nice. I’ll go to the lake, I’ll go for a hike, I’ll go for a bike ride. Something active. It has to be something active. And doing something, but nothing to do with weights, not lifting, staying away from the gym.

Pete Wright:
I think there’s a—

Srdjan Injac:
And I actually do feel much better. Here I’m always telling people what to do and all that stuff, and sometimes I just don’t want to do anything. And it does help. I do come back a lot more rested and I’m like, now I’m ready to go and tackle this again. So it does make sense. I actually feel a lot better when I do that, and a lot more rested than if I just stay home and sit and lay down and watch TV, watch movies, whatever.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
All that stuff. I enjoy that stuff too, but it’s not me. I feel like I need to be a little bit productive, do something, but I don’t want anything to do with the gym.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. So walk me through what’s actually happening after the session. I finish a hard workout and I walk out the door. What’s going on in my body?

Srdjan Injac:
So the workout might be finished when you leave the gym, but your body is really just beginning that recovery process. During the hard lifting session, you used all the stored energy, you fatigued your muscles and nervous system, and you’re giving your muscle now a reason to adapt. So during the first several hours after training, your body starts restoring energy and repairing the muscle tissue that was stressed during the workout.

This is where nutrition becomes important. Carbohydrates help replenish glycogen, which is stored carbohydrate in your muscle that you use as fuel, while protein provides amino acids that your body can use to repair and build the muscle tissue. Now, muscle protein synthesis — basically the process of building new muscle protein — increases after resistance training and can remain elevated well into that recovery period.

So over the next twenty-four to, I would say, forty-eight hours, the repair and adaptation process continues, and you may also feel sore during this period. But soreness isn’t a perfect measurement of recovery.

Pete Wright:
I mean—

Srdjan Injac:
You can still be recovering without being sore. And I tell people this all the time. Being extremely sore doesn’t necessarily mean you actually had a better workout.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
For me it’s so hard to feel sore all the time. There’s a lot of times I get a great workout, but I’m not that sore the next few days.

Now, the important thing is that you don’t usually build the muscle during the workout. People always think that. The workout gives your body the reason to build it.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
The recovery period is when your body does much of the rebuilding and adapting, during that rest period. And not everything is recovering at the same speed.

Pete Wright:
Okay.

Srdjan Injac:
So that’s important to know. And this is something people often overlook.

Pete Wright:
Like muscle systems? Like big muscle, small muscle kind of thing?

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. Just because your muscles are sore, or your arms aren’t sore anymore, doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is completely recovered.

Pete Wright:
Oh, right, right, right.

Srdjan Injac:
Different systems can recover at different speeds. Your energy stores may recover fairly quickly if you’re eating enough, especially carbohydrates. And muscle soreness might disappear within a day or two, or it might last longer after an unfamiliar workout, or after you took two weeks off or three weeks off, or you’re coming back from a vacation.

So also, connective tissues like tendons respond differently from muscles. That’s why I won’t judge recovery based on just one thing. Someone might say, “Well, I’m not sore, so I’m completely recovered.” But how does your warm-up feel? How is your strength? When you start lifting, do you still feel those muscles? And how is your sleep? And now they’re lifting — does everything feel unusually heavy?

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Okay. So let’s transition to sleep, because sleep — these last three studies that we talked about were all related to sleep.

Srdjan Injac:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
I’m fascinated by sleep and what happens when I’m asleep, mostly because I’m a guy who’s had trouble with sleep before and figuring out how to get to sleep, how to stay asleep. I’m one of those people who just starts spinning when I’m not sleeping and I know I should be sleeping, because I’m spinning about all the things that my body isn’t doing that it should. Like my brain is unhealthy, my body’s not flushing all the toxins. What about the free radicals, man?

So I look at this and I think, how do you approach it when somebody comes to you? You have a whole bunch of recovery levers to pull. How important is the sleep lever to helping you in the gym?

Srdjan Injac:
Oh, sleep would be the first one, very high on my list.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
It’s also one of those least exciting answers, because people would rather hear about supplements or cold plunges or some expensive recovery devices.

Pete Wright:
I don’t know if we’re making other power to the whole thing. [unclear]

Srdjan Injac:
But if someone’s constantly sleeping four hours a night, I wouldn’t expect a crazy three-thousand, five-thousand-dollar recovery machine to somehow make up for that.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
Sleep affects much more than whether you feel tired. It’s important for your brain and nervous system, immune function, hormone regulation, appetite, decision making, physical performance — everything. So the research on sleep loss also shows that insufficient sleep can negatively affect measures of strength and power, muscular endurance, and neuromuscular function.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
So it’s very important, because it affects everything else that you’re trying to do.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Srdjan Injac:
If you’re exhausted, your workouts may suffer. You’re probably less active throughout the day. Your food choices may get worse. Your motivation goes down. You may rely heavily on caffeine just to get through the day. And I’m guilty of that somehow.

Pete Wright:
I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Srdjan Injac:
Sometimes, I admit. So yeah, improving sleep can create benefits in several different areas at the same time.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. How do you approach it if I come to you and I say, my biggest problem is I can’t sleep? Do you have an answer? Do you have a suggestion? I mean, knowing that you’re not the sleep doctor.

Srdjan Injac:
That’s true. I mean, not everyone can get that perfect eight hours of sleep or ten hours, simply.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
So if I can’t improve their sleep right away, then I would look at what we can actually control. Maybe we’d reduce their training volume. Maybe they don’t need six days in the gym. Maybe workouts become a little shorter.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
We can also make sure that they’re eating enough protein and calories and staying hydrated. So in other words, if you can’t increase someone’s recovery capacity, then you may have to decrease the amount that they need to recover from.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
So that’s really important. I mean, training should fit someone’s life instead of expecting their entire life to fit their training program. It doesn’t always work that way.

Pete Wright:
But also — fair assessment to say that when you get into a regular training program, your sleep will benefit from that? At the end of a day, when I get home after a good session, I am more tired and I don’t have to climb as high of a mountain to get in bed and actually find myself asleep.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, I feel that way too, but I know some people like to do their workouts in the morning because that energizes them.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
And then they feel ready to go. So I’m like, okay, whatever works for you. And that’s how people decide: should they work out in the morning, or do they actually enjoy working out more in the evening? In the morning I have more energy and I like doing my workouts in the morning.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
Possibly before three PM, in the afternoon. But everything after that, I feel like I don’t have the same energy.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
And sleep can dictate that sometimes too. If I do get a good night’s sleep, I feel good all day.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
And I feel like, you know what? I can actually go and do a workout at four or five PM.

Pete Wright:
Right, right.

Srdjan Injac:
So it does make a huge difference.

Pete Wright:
I want to jump around a little bit. Let’s talk about the recovery that you can just throw money at. You are known to indulge in a cold plunge every now and again. Let’s talk about the cold plunge and their ilk. I don’t even know what else would be in that category. So walk me through a little bit about what therapeutic services you use.

Srdjan Injac:
Well, the cold plunges, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Massage, cold plunge, yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
The cold plunge I do a lot, because they can reduce the soreness and improve how recovered somebody might feel. In certain situations that’s valuable.

So part of the reason your muscles grow is because training creates these signals that tell your body, okay, we need to adapt to this. Now, research has found that repetitive cold water — like you do, plunging after lifting — can actually reduce that muscle growth. And some analyses have also found smaller strength adaptations after. So I don’t really do the cold plunges right after my workouts.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
I wait about six to eight hours. There was research that was done with athletes and they said that after six to eight hours it’s more beneficial to do a cold plunge.

But I like to do them before my workouts, and I found that that was actually really helpful. I do get a lot better workouts. I feel less sore.

Pete Wright:
Wait a minute, aren’t you more tight?

Srdjan Injac:
I get better blood flow and everything.

Pete Wright:
Isn’t that riskier?

Srdjan Injac:
No. You would think that. You would think that. But no, it takes even that little bit of soreness away, because it reduces the soreness.

Pete Wright:
And first — yeah, but—

Srdjan Injac:
So anything that’s still a little bit sore, after the cold plunge I feel great.

Pete Wright:
Okay. All right.

Srdjan Injac:
You know.

Pete Wright:
That’s crazy. Well, first of all, that’s crazy. But the other thing — you said something that I think is really important, because my mental model of a cold plunge is that it is designed for injury, right, to stave off injury.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, it can help with that too, yes.

Pete Wright:
But that’s not the primary reason you cold plunge. Because I’ve watched football movies, man. I see people have a hard — they get pummeled on the field and they go in for a cold plunge. That’s what you do in a football movie.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, they do. I know you say that all the time. But now with the athletes, they do that before, not right after the workouts. I mean, it depends. Some athletes will do it right after their training because maybe tomorrow they have a big race, and—

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
—they’re not worried about their muscle hypertrophy. They want to just be less sore and be able to be ready to go. And they don’t want to feel any kind of soreness the next day.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
So they’ll jump into a cold plunge and it will take that away and they will feel much better. And that’s the reason why I actually do it. And I feel like I even sleep better on those nights, on those days when I do cold plunges.

Pete Wright:
Okay, okay. What else besides cold plunge — what else on the market, in the recuperation market, do you feel comfortable throwing money at to help you rest and recover?

Srdjan Injac:
Telling the truth, the most money I’ve really spent is on food. Organic food, the good food, good healthy proteins. That’s what I spend my money on.

Pete Wright:
Oh. Okay.

Srdjan Injac:
It’s not things like massage, saunas, these massage guns. All these other recovery tools can absolutely make you feel much better, and there’s nothing wrong with using them. And if you enjoy them and you can afford them, they’re great. But I would put them in the category of extra, not really necessary — not what you need.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
What you really need is really good organic food, a good mattress so you can have a good night’s sleep. I spent money the other day on a pillow because it helps me sleep. I’m not waking up in the middle of the night. I can get into those deep sleeps. That’s what actually helps me.

All this massaging, sauna, cold plunges — none of it will actually make it better if I don’t get my sleep. When somebody, one of my clients, is sleeping five hours, eating poorly, and then worrying about whether they need a two-thousand-dollar recovery device — get the big things right first. Sleep, nutrition.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
That’s probably the most important thing.

Pete Wright:
I want to wrap up with a question that I have found in talking to my own friends who do not train and don’t have the benefit of a trainer. Which is that they feel like it is way too easy to overtrain — that when they feel sore from training, not from injury, they feel like they have to take more time off, and so they never get into a routine. So I kind of want you to address that issue of how hard or easy it is to overtrain.

Srdjan Injac:
The thing about taking the time off doesn’t have to mean you’re going to come back stronger.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
And I know a lot of people have taken some time off because they feel they’re overtrained, and they take some time off and they’ll come back stronger and all that stuff. And people sometimes think that if they’re tired, taking that entire week off means they’re going to turn into Superman, and because of it all the fatigue has disappeared.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
But strength is also a skill. You’re practicing movements, coordinating your nervous system, and staying accustomed to handling those heavy weights. So completely removing the whole stimulus can temporarily make someone feel a little rusty when they return.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
And that’s what happened. It doesn’t mean rest weeks are bad. If someone genuinely needs the time away, physically or mentally, then taking a week off isn’t going to erase the years of progress that you made.

But I don’t think anyone needs a mandatory full week with absolutely no lifting every four, six, or maybe eight weeks of lifting. So deloading can simply mean turning the volume down instead of turning the training completely off and taking the whole week or two weeks off.

Maybe you normally do four sets — maybe you do two or three. Maybe you normally train closer to failure. Now you can stop several reps earlier. Maybe you reduce the weight slightly. But you keep moving and practicing these exercises, and you dramatically reduce how much fatigue you’re getting in.

So that’s what I would do sometimes if I feel overtrained. Sometimes I’ll just tone it down, change my training a little bit.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
I wouldn’t completely stop.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. So there was the last study that I didn’t bring up, and I think I should, because it’s an interesting counterexample, but it also describes exactly what you’re talking about. This was a study that took thirty-nine trained lifters across a nine-week program, and they were doing ninety sets a week. That’s pretty brutal.

Srdjan Injac:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
That’s a lot of training.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
And so then half of those people took a full week off completely, right in the middle. The other half trained straight through.

In terms of muscle growth, just sheer size, it was about the same for both groups. The straight-through group did better on strength. In all the testing, both one-rep max and isometric testing, there was a cleaner strength measure for those who trained straight through. The week-off group reported more soreness, less motivation, described coming back and feeling out of practice rather than refreshed. And when asked if they felt they needed a break after nine weeks of the hardest training of their lives, almost nobody said yes.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, yeah.

Pete Wright:
So I think there are a couple of interesting things in there. In this study, deloading was total cessation. They did not lift a single heavy thing. And what I’m hearing you say is nobody recommends that. That’s an artificial thing for the study, to look at extremes and see how that feels.

And also, we have this other stack of evidence that says recovery is not cessation of activity. That recovery is cessation of that activity and actually turning on a different activity to stay moving and stay active, even if you deload a little bit on the actual workouts.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Is that a fair way to think about what it means to rest related to the gym?

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah, definitely. I agree with that a hundred percent.

Pete Wright:
I just can’t stop. I go back to that initial study, the Sonnentag and Fritz questionnaire — just this idea of saying detachment is not thinking about training, but it’s going out and getting on a bike. That relaxation is not easy cardio that actually turns into a workout, it’s going out and going for a good hike. That mastery is like learning to play the guitar or a language or whatever. That control is a rest day where I get to do something completely different. Those things I think are going to help me reframe how I rest, and not to be afraid of soreness.

Srdjan Injac:
Yeah. I mean, people need to realize that recovery isn’t something separate from training.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
Recovery is part of that training. You go into the gym and all that stuff. So the goal is to give your body enough training stimulus to improve, and then enough recovery to actually make that improvement happen.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Srdjan Injac:
It’s all part of that training. You can’t do one and then focus on the other one and expect the results. It’s not going to happen. So you really have to think about that whole twenty-four hours from when you train, and then what you do after training, and then sleep and everything else. It can all affect the way your body works. It’s fascinating.

Pete Wright:
It is fascinating. Well, thank you for indulging me in my occupational therapy research today. I hope somebody listening to this who has their day job has actually learned something about their own ability to de-stress when they’re not at work too. It’s not just at the gym. This stuff was really impactful to me. I think it’s fascinating.

Links in the show notes. One of the researchers put the entire paper for free on their website, so I’ll put a link to that so you can actually download it. If you’re into academic journal reading, maybe you’ll find that interesting.

Otherwise, links to ELEV8 Fitness PDX if you want to work with any of the trainers at ELEV8 Fitness. And do you want to just see Srdjan in action? You could just drop by and peer in a window and see what goes on. We’d love to have you there. Check out all the links in the show notes.

So glad you joined us today. If you’ve got questions about training or recovery or rest, recuperation, or how to make strength work in your life, we want to hear them. Again, in those show notes there’s a link that says you can ask a question, and you can send that right in. We’ll answer it on an upcoming episode. Don’t forget to subscribe and share. This is how we grow stronger together. Thanks for listening to Build for Health, and we’ll catch you next week in the gym.