Dr Norman Swan

speaker

26,995 appearances 288 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2006 last heard 15 Sep

Dr Norman Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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What's That Rash? · Are rest days from exercise necessary? · 25 Aug 2026 podcast

So the idea here is that don't believe necessarily that you need pain to get gain.

You don't necessarily need that.

But again, I'll refer people back to that previous episode and we'll have a link in the show notes.

So you don't need to tear your muscles in order to actually build muscle strength.

And often triggered by a bit of inflammation in the muscle as well.

So not tears, but that you've stressed the muscle.

And either stressed it with low reps, high weights, or high reps, lower weights, depending on what your trainer or your advice is accordingly.

So most of the research, as we just said, are into elite athletes or people who are recreational exercisers but are aiming to build muscle and so they're taking it pretty seriously.

And most of the research is actually into small groups of people because it's fairly intense research.

So the research suggests that when you look at people who are given maximum weights for a certain number of reps, the next day

you're not able to repeat that performance from the day before.

So then they've said well, what is the optimal rest period?

to even just recover the performance of that day where you did the maximal strength training.

And it turns out that about forty-eight hours is right for that muscle group, to around seventy-two hours.

But after 72 hours, in fact, you start to get decline in your performance.

That's the depressing part of it.

You've got to keep going.

It is, but you are building it up.

And there's a little bit of evidence, particularly it's a small study, but there is a little bit of evidence that matches what we've just been saying, is that protein synthesis does go up after heavy resistance training, but it really goes up after 24 hours from the training period and is uh maximally around about 36 hours following a training session.

So in other words, protein synthesis does tend to follow that.

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