Redefining Rest

Why Rest Isn't Stillness (Part One of a Two Part Series)

In the last decade recovery has taken over the health and performance culture. Every third influencer seems to have a sauna and cold plunge. Everybody should take creatine and drink their protein powder. Gray market peptides are all the rage.

As a net orientation, I’m glad to see it. It’s an essential part of the adaptation cycle that deserves legitimate consideration if you want to feel and perform at your very best-especially for the long road. People are paying more attention to rest and recovery more than ever.

But I can’t help feeling a bit uneasy when I talk to athletes and even coaches about this topic. When we talk about recovery, very often we get examples of modalities that are reported to provide recovery or outcomes that signal recovery. But still, some pieces are missing. Pieces that can help athletes and coaches better organize their efforts and expectations around recovery in managing training and more generally stress.

A lot of what gets labeled “recovery” is actually a signal—lower resting heart rate, higher HRV, better sleep, less soreness, better mood. Those are useful indicators, but they’re not the thing itself. In Part 2, I’ll unpack why chasing those signals (and the gadgets that measure them) can quietly distort decision-making. For now, we need a simpler starting point: what rest actually is.

To get to the heart of things let’s start with clear definitions.

What Is Rest?

Rest is what happens when the system narrows its range. There’s less output and fewer swings in behavior.

I was pondering this question recently and it made me think of a rest. As in an object you put a tool on. Rests are commonly used to increase the stability of cutting tools such as lathes and even rifles. The goal of using a rest is to reduce the variability in the system in this case to increase accuracy.

While we aren’t necessarily looking to improve biological accuracy when we rest we are looking to create stability in the system. A key point as we move forward.

In physics and biology a system “at rest” doesn’t stop moving. One thing that seems clear as our understanding of the universe has deepened it’s that everything is moving. Even the most inert seeming objects are being pushing, pulling, and shifting all the time. Nothing stays in exactly the same state even if our measily little senses can’t detect the motion.

To that end something that is at rest, doesn’t stop moving. It’s moving within a narrower range of activity. The same is true of our physiology. When we rest our physiology comes into a smaller and more stable range of activity. This stability provides us with an opportunity

Skilled Rest

Skilled rest is downshifting without shutting down.

It’s the ability to reduce unnecessary tension and attention when the situation doesn’t require it. It might look like breathing, a walk, a nap, or simply leaving the gym without doing one more set for it’s own sake.

Sleep is nature’s daily reset—but skilled rest is what allows you to function when conditions aren’t perfect.

Rest isn’t only what happens at night. It’s also what happens in the five minutes between meetings, between rounds, and between sets. If you can’t rest in small doses, you’re forced to rely on big resets. Those are expensive, inconsistent, and harder to access when life gets loud.

When you think of applying rest technology stay aware of context. Rest doesn’t have to be perfect. Your strategy just needs be effective in your situation. Maybe your newborn baby isn’t allowing you to get a Hubermanesque 8.35 hours of cortisol friendly, solar coordinated, sleep per night. But maybe you can find 5 or 10 minutes to put screens away, breathe, or heaven forbid-just sit quietly.

Is this ideal? No. But then, who was promised an ideal life?

Rather than pushing through rest needs or holding out for optimal we need to identify “good enough” under the current conditions. This will lead to develop robust skills for rest that we can execute with far more consistency over the long haul.

While that’s less sexy, the compound interest adds up.

Ride At Anchor

Sailors have a saying: ride at anchor.

To ride at anchor means a ship or boat is floating in a specific, stationary location, secured by a dropped anchor rather than drifting. It indicates that the vessel is actively held in place, often while waiting out weather conditions or resting in a cove. Water and wind keep moving but the boat is held in place long enough to reset.

Rest doesn’t mean to do nothing. It’s a state of relative stability that provides us with a chance to reboot in preparation for the next effort.

For those who train and work extra hard, this means rest is not a luxury, it’s an imperative. Developing skilled rest means having the awareness to know when you’re spending energy you don’t need to and then using reliable means to shift into a state that allows you to save.

For many people in our culture, the idea of rest still carries a stigma. Even with all the sleep and relaxation technology being peddled, we haven’t fully learned the deeper purpose of rest. Meanwhile, cultures that build in hammock supported siestas seem to do just fine.

I’m not sure if we can extricate overworking from a culture that prides itself so much on innovation and industry but maybe we can get a little better at providing space to come to rest.

Even if it’s just a little breather.

Thanks for reading,

Rob

P.S. Next week in Part Two we’ll define recovery and what practices get us to that golden X!