Rest days / non training days

hey all,

just a quick question:

last week for example i trained 6 days on 1 day off - i felt really pumped to train each day - loads of energy and loved it! training sessions lasted between 45 mins and 1h15mins each day.

but this week, i trained for only 30 mins on monday as i felt tired, 40mins on tuesday coz i felt tired again, i rested yesterday, and the way i feel today - i'll be resting today too.

i know rest days are important, but i hate not training - i go for 1-3 rest days a week - depending on how i feel.

the question - how often do you rest or take days off training??

i sleep for 7 - 9.5 hours each night, and eat the same every day. - i might need a little work on my pre,mid and post workout nutrition - i've read slizzardman's post on that - and will start to follow as best as i can..

I train similarly to that or sometimes even 7 days a week. But If I keep up that intensity, then I always have a day every now and then that is very light. Probably only 40 percent. I learned this from a post Ido made and I feel like it really helped me from the boredom of rest yet not burn myself out. Still even with these rest days, remember to take a day off every now and then. It seems like working harder all the time would be better but that must be built up to. Think of your workouts as working hours at your job and the rest days as the days where you actually get your check!

Nutrition will increase recovery time as well as enough sleep. If you are going to be training that hard then the sleep needs to be there too. When I train a full week, I spend around 9 hours sleeping.

It really doesn't matter what other people are doing because you would need to know their whole program in order to know if the same makes sense for you. Currently, I train reasonably low volume, 3x a week. If I miss a day I stagnate sometimes, because my loading is not really concentrated. In actuality, probably not enough volume. It doesn't sound like you are using steady state, either. If you are really beating yourself up (constantly adding more weight, going to failure often. Feeling weak the next workout.) in training, deload phases are pretty much a necessity. If you are recovering fully by next week, as I am, deload makes little to no sense. From my memory, Ido favored a 3 week push, followed by a 1 week deload (typically cutting volume by 50%). I have never used that format, but it is a common strategy.