how many rest days should you take in crossfit

It’s crazy how one weekend of shenanigans (aka eating and drinking my way through Charleston) can take a toll on your workouts. Last week I just felt slow and weaker than usual, so I’m excited to go back to “normal” this week.

And I have a confession to make. I broke my #NoRunNovember goal this weekend and partook in a 5k mud run with obstacles along the way. To be honest, I wasn’t really looking forward to it, but we had a big Iron Tribe team doing it together so it ended up being really fun and more social than anything else.

The reason I wasn’t looking forward to the mud run is because I’m still trying to figure out how many rest days my body really needs to recover, so I wasn’t planning on doing any workouts this weekend. Lately I’ve realized I can either get 6 mediocre workouts in a week or 4 awesome workouts in a week. Obviously, I’d rather have 4 awesome workouts, but sometimes taking rest days is difficult for me mentally. This is because A. I truly enjoy working out (WOD fomo is real), and B. I have a very sedentary job, so it feels awesome to start the day with a lot of movement. I’m still changing things up and trying to figure out what works best for me, but I know recovery is a really important part of training. I think we (myself included) forget to think about recovery as a part of our training. Just like we try to “get in” our workouts, we also need to try to get in our recovery days (whether that involves complete rest or a long walk), too, because they’re just as important.

Anyway, here’s what this week looked like on the workout front:

Monday: Kickboxing Class

Tuesday: Iron Tribe
“Armistice”
11 min AMRAP (as many rounds as possible) of the following:
100m Sprint
11 Sit ups
11 Air squats
100m Sprint
22 Sit ups
22 Air Squats… (Add 11 Sit ups and air squats each round)

2 min. rest/reflection

11 min AMRAP:
100m Sprint
11 Push ups
11 Box Jumps
100m Sprint
22 Push ups
22 Box jumps (add 11 push ups and box jumps each round)

Wednesday: Kickboxing Class

Thursday: Iron Tribe
15 min AMRAP of the following:
2 Power Cleans (I did 105#)
2 Pull ups
2 Kettlebell front rack lunges (53/35#)
2 Power cleans
4 Pull ups
4 KB front rack lunges
(2 power cleans each time, add 2 pull ups and 2 lunges each round).

Friday: Iron Tribe
For time (25 min cap):
Row 1200m
50 Double-unders
25 Wall balls (20/14#)
Run 800m
40 Kettlebell swings (53/35#)
20 Burpees
Row 400m
30 Double-unders
15 Wall ball
Run 200m
20 KB Swings
10 Burpees

Yep…this workout was the death of me. I barely finished in under 25 minutes.

Saturday: Swamp Buggy Mud Blast!
This was a lot of fun. Lots of walls to climb over, swamp water to get through, monkey bars and more obstacles. It wasn’t anywhere on the Tough Mudder level, but I was more than ok with that! Plus we had such a fun group of people to do it with.