Good and effective bodybuilding depends on many things. These include customized workout plan which suits your body needs, good healthy diet, use of quality supplements and seriousness towards your efforts to build muscles. But we should keep in mind that there is another important factor which contributes a lot to muscle development and that is ‘rest’. Rest is very important and contributes towards muscle development because:
1- It prevents you from overtraining your body. Excess of everything is bad and same is the case with muscle development. Muscles should be trained not more than twice a week because otherwise you may end up damaging them which would lead to more recovery time and slow down your muscle building process. Therefore you should take rest to make your process of building muscles an effective one.
2- Rest is important because it allows your damaged muscles to repair themselves and makes them to grow. Bodybuilding with heavy machines in the gym ruptures and damages muscle tissues which later re-grow during rest period and as a result we get muscles.
3- Most of the people have misunderstanding that muscle growth takes place during exercise but they do not know that it is actually the rest period which stimulates muscle growth. So rest is really important.
Now question arises that how much rest is important? I would say that 8 hours of daily sleep is highly desirable during bodybuilding and a gap of 2 days is also must between similar muscle exercises for same target muscles. A good way to achieve this is to perform compound exercises where you do not focus on individual muscle exercise but you target a set of muscles. As a result, you perform more exercises in less amount of time and get time for rest.
