Latest / Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40 / The 7 Types of Rest and Recovery for Maximum Muscle Gain (Work-Rest Cycle) | Ep 273

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The 7 Types of Rest and Recovery for Maximum Muscle Gain (Work-Rest Cycle) | Ep 273 · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:02
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 0:12
  Philip Pape: Most people get this completely wrong.
• 0:14
  Philip Pape: They oversimplify recovery as just sleeping more or taking days off from the gym.
• 0:20
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 0:30
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 0:58
  Philip Pape: I'm your host, philip Pape.
• 0:59
  Philip Pape: Now you know that feeling when you get a full eight hours of sleep but you still wake up exhausted.
• 1:04
  Philip Pape: Now you know that feeling when you get a full eight hours of sleep but you still wake up exhausted.
• 1:06
  Philip Pape: Or when you take a rest day but your next workout feels heavier than ever.
• 1:09
  Philip Pape: There's a reason for that.
• 1:11
  Philip Pape: Sleep and physical rest are just two pieces of a larger system that your body needs to recover and grow.
• 1:29
  Philip Pape: How the engineering concept of the work-rest cycle combines with research on seven essential types of rest to create your complete recovery system.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: And before we get into it.
• 1:32
  Philip Pape: I want to share something that will help you implement an improved approach to stress.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: It is an expanded version of my stress solution guide.
• 1:41
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 1:55
  Philip Pape: So to get your free copy of that, just click the link in the show notes.
• 1:58
  Philip Pape: You could always go to witsandweightscom slash free.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: Again.
• 2:01
  Philip Pape: This is the expanded stress solution guide at witsandweightscom slash free or the link in the show notes.
• 2:07
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 2:22
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 2:38
  Philip Pape: Your body operates on the same principle.
• 2:40
  Philip Pape: It is a complex machine.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: It's not like a complex machine.
• 2:43
  Philip Pape: It is a complex machine.
• 2:45
  Philip Pape: It's not like a complex machine.
• 2:46
  Philip Pape: It is one and it needs multiple forms of maintenance to perform at its peak.
• 2:49
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 3:02
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 3:12
  Philip Pape: Eventually, something's going to break, is the point here.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: And this is where Dr Sondra Dalton-Smith comes into play.
• 3:19
  Philip Pape: She is a researcher who identified seven distinct types of rest.
• 3:23
  Philip Pape: I learned about her with a recent guest on the show, allie Shapiro.
• 3:27
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 3:43
  Philip Pape: So I think you're going to get a lot out of this.
• 3:44
  Philip Pape: So here we go the seven types of rest and how they relate to you and your recovery.
• 3:51
  Philip Pape: First is physical.
• 3:52
  Philip Pape: This is probably the most obvious that we are familiar with.
• 3:54
  Philip Pape: This, yes, includes sleep, but not just sleep.
• 3:58
  Philip Pape: We need both passive physical rest, like sleep and complete relaxation and naps, but also active physical rest.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: Like you know, light movement, walking, that kind of recovery you do on your rest day, but you're awake and doing something.
• 4:13
  Philip Pape: So studies in the Journal of Applied Physiology have shown that proper sleep increases muscle protein synthesis by up to 60%.
• 4:21
  Philip Pape: Research in sports medicine shows active recovery between training sessions can reduce muscle damage markers by 40%.
• 4:30
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 4:40
  Philip Pape: Same thing your body needs both forms to optimize recovery.
• 4:43
  Philip Pape: The second type of rest is mental rest.
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: Think of this like rebooting an overloaded computer.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 4:55
  Philip Pape: That usually solves everything.
• 4:57
  Philip Pape: Well, think of your body like that as well.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: You kind of get this buildup of mental stress.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 5:17
  Philip Pape: So we know mental fatigue is not just about in the brain.
• 5:20
  Philip Pape: It translates to your physical and can reduce your performance in the gym.
• 5:24
  Philip Pape: It affects your workout focus, your form.
• 5:27
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 5:50
  Philip Pape: She talked about taking 30 second breaks between meetings or tasks.
• 5:55
  Philip Pape: Even just the 60 seconds of conscious breathing can improve cognitive performance by 26%.
• 6:01
  Philip Pape: So mental rest is incredibly important.
• 6:05
  Philip Pape: Third, we have sensory rest, now your body's sensory systems.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: This is more than just the physical, like the overall sleep and rest that we need.
• 6:14
  Philip Pape: In that sense, these are the actually your senses, right, your eyes, your ears and so on.
• 6:20
  Philip Pape: They can get overwhelmed, right?
• 6:23
  Philip Pape: Just like on any machine, you could get overwhelmed by constant input from screens, from noise, from artificial light.
• 6:29
  Philip Pape: Research in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism shows that excessive sensory stimulation increases cortisol by up to 50% above baseline.
• 6:39
  Philip Pape: And we know about cortisol, don't we?
• 6:42
  Philip Pape: It directly impacts everything Muscle growth, fat storage, you name it.
• 6:45
  Philip Pape: 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%.
• 6:55
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 7:05
  Philip Pape: How do we reduce the sensory overwhelm?
• 7:07
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 7:15
  Philip Pape: The fourth type of rest is creative rest.
• 7:17
  Philip Pape: Now, in engineering terms, this is like giving your system an upgrade right?
• 7:23
  Philip Pape: A new algorithm, new input, new inspiration, right, a new feature.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 7:43
  Philip Pape: Amazing, right.
• 7:44
  Philip Pape: So creative activities, we know, increase that.
• 7:47
  Philip Pape: And for fitness this means better movement patterns, increased training motivation, which means increased adherence and consistency.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: Studies show that, for example, just varying your exercise selection this is an argument for variety, right?
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: Argument for variety here.
• 8:05
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 8:18
  Philip Pape: I do argue for some level of variety.
• 8:20
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 8:29
  Philip Pape: But then I think there needs to be a little variety in there, for a variety of reasons.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: Um, muscle activation is just just one of them.
• 8:35
  Philip Pape: There's a study that I found that linked those together.
• 8:37
  Philip Pape: But there's a lot of other reasons having to do with what might be called creative rest.
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: The fifth type of rest is emotional rest.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: Think of emotions.
• 8:47
  Philip Pape: Like your pressure gauges, they need regular release of the emotions to prevent system overload.
• 8:52
  Philip Pape: I never want you to hold your emotions back.
• 8:54
  Philip Pape: We need to express them, we feel them.
• 8:56
  Philip Pape: We can't help it.
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 9:17
  Philip Pape: And then, conversely, we know that emotional regulation techniques can reduce stress-induced hormonal disruption.
• 9:26
  Philip Pape: The sixth type of rest is social rest.
• 9:28
  Philip Pape: So, just like collaborative systems you know, like think of teamwork or teams working together, they need breaks between intensive, all out brainstorming, right?
• 9:39
  Philip Pape: You ever been in a team in a meeting?
• 9:40
  Philip Pape: You can't just go on and on and on.
• 9:42
  Philip Pape: You're going to eventually burn out.
• 9:43
  Philip Pape: You need a balance, uh, so, similarly, you need to balance socially draining versus energizing interactions in everything you do.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 10:01
  Philip Pape: Research in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine shows that positive social interactions muscle protein synthesis by up to 25% and increase inflammatory markers.
• 10:22
  Philip Pape: And you notice I'm throwing you a lot of numbers and research and everything.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: I wanted to make sure this one tied into some of the findings we actually see associated with these types of rest.
• 10:32
  Philip Pape: There's plenty of science behind it and a lot of it is somewhat intuitive, but it's good to understand these.
• 10:38
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: Now, that's kind of a stretch for an analogy.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: So let's talk about what this means for you.
• 10:57
  Philip Pape: Spiritual rest means connecting to something larger than yourself.
• 11:03
  Philip Pape: That can mean a lot of things to people.
• 11:04
  Philip Pape: It's not just religion or spirituality per se.
• 11:07
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 11:23
  Philip Pape: So, if we're gonna take all these seven types of rest, how do we create a practical system for implementing them?
• 11:31
  Philip Pape: Now, I recently went over these in my group coaching program in Physique University.
• 11:35
  Philip Pape: We had one of our coaching calls.
• 11:37
  Philip Pape: I went through specific actions for each one that people could take to apply to them.
• 11:42
  Philip Pape: But I'm just going to ask you, without without just listing a laundry list of things, start by auditing your current recovery patterns.
• 11:51
  Philip Pape: Like, think about the seven types of rest we just talked about.
• 11:54
  Philip Pape: You can go back and reference them.
• 11:56
  Philip Pape: What are your biggest rest deficits?
• 12:00
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 12:19
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 12:31
  Philip Pape: Please don't take it as that, because that is going to affect your stress and rest in the most ironic way.
• 12:38
  Philip Pape: This means being strategic and efficient, using stacking, combining things and so on.
• 12:45
  Philip Pape: For example, you can combine sensory and mental rest by doing your relaxing thing that you like to do.
• 12:56
  Philip Pape: Let's say it's walking outside without listening to a podcast or listening to music.
• 13:01
  Philip Pape: Now you're going to say wait a minute, philip.
• 13:02
  Philip Pape: Haven't you talked about habit stacking, where you can walk or listen to a podcast?
• 13:05
  Philip Pape: Yes.
• 13:06
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 13:19
  Philip Pape: Instead, take advantage of the fact you're outside to look at the sky, the clouds, the birds, the trees, the animals, other people.
• 13:26
  Philip Pape: Just be with your thoughts and get the sensory rest along with the mental rest.
• 13:31
  Philip Pape: And, by the way, you're probably also getting a form of physical rest in recovery.
• 13:34
  Philip Pape: Getting a form of physical rest and recovery all three just by going for a walk out in nature.
• 13:47
  Philip Pape: You can stack emotional rest and spiritual rest by taking a moment to write down or journal or think about your deeper fitness motivations.
• 13:50
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 13:57
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 14:04
  Philip Pape: So I'll give you an example of this.
• 14:06
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 14:18
  Philip Pape: If they're super supportive, they're going to be positive, hopefully, about it.
• 14:24
  Philip Pape: They're not going to question you, they're not going to sabotage you, and they're going to say, hey, that's awesome.
• 14:28
  Philip Pape: And if you've had a bad day and you say this terrible thing happened, they might say, oh, that sucks.
• 14:32
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 14:44
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 14:52
  Philip Pape: Like, say, a therapist or even a coach, right?
• 14:55
  Philip Pape: Or?
• 14:55
  Philip Pape: 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?
• 15:11
  Philip Pape: What haven't you tried?
• 15:12
  Philip Pape: Hey, maybe here's some things to try and you could unburden those emotions in that way, right?
• 15:16
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 15:25
  Philip Pape: To make this very objective by tying that to your metrics, to your biofeedback.
• 15:28
  Philip Pape: By the way, we just did an episode not long ago called the 6-10 biofeedback model, where we talk about different metrics.
• 15:32
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 16:01
  Philip Pape: And I have a lot of ideas where those came from.
• 16:03
  Philip Pape: Again, I didn't want today's episode to be a laundry list and I have a lot of ideas where those came from.
• 16:19
  Philip Pape: Again, I didn't want today's episode to be a laundry list.
• 16:21
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 16:28
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 16:38
  Philip Pape: And that might sound a little bit sacrilegious from coming from me.
• 16:42
  Philip Pape: I say it, however, because a lot of you you've you've started to dial in your training.
• 16:47
  Philip Pape: Your training three, four or five days a week.
• 16:48
  Philip Pape: You started to dial in your food.
• 16:50
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 17:01
  Philip Pape: I bet there's a lot of opportunity with rest and recovery.
• 17:05
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 17:17
  Philip Pape: There's a lot of excuses we make.
• 17:19
  Philip Pape: Let's just be honest, and so I want you to take it at a bite-sized, micro level.
• 17:23
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 17:31
  Philip Pape: A well-maintained machine Think of a car that you actually take into the shop regularly.
• 17:35
  Philip Pape: You don't have to worry about it, like it just runs and runs and runs, just fine.
• 17:39
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 17:51
  Philip Pape: They actually stack on top of each other to the point where you just never get in a rhythm with your routine.
• 17:57
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 18:10
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 18:23
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: Number two, mental.
• 18:38
  Philip Pape: Number three, sensory.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: Number four, creative.
• 18:39
  Philip Pape: Number five, emotional.
• 18:40
  Philip Pape: Number six, social.
• 18:41
  Philip Pape: And number seven, spiritual.
• 18:43
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 18:50
  Philip Pape: Let's be honest.
• 18:51
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 19:02
  Philip Pape: Go to wandweightscom slash physique and you'll learn about everything provided there.
• 19:08
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 19:16
  Philip Pape: 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.
• 19:26
  Philip Pape: Go to witsandweightscom slash free or click the link in the show notes.
• 19:30
  Philip Pape: Until next time, keep using those wits, lifting those weights, and remember that proper rest is much more than just sleep.
• 19:37
  Philip Pape: It's strategic recovery across all seven types of rest we talked about today.
• 19:42
  Philip Pape: This is Philip Hape and you've been listening to Wits and Weights.
• 19:46
  Philip Pape: Talk to you next time.