Plan active recovery on rest days.
A rest day is not an absence of activity but a deliberately low dose of it. Light movement raises blood flow to recovering tissue, clears metabolic by-products and reduces stiffness without adding meaningful training stress, and the evidence for it over complete rest is reasonably consistent for moderate soreness. The dose has to respect how recovered you actually are, which is why this scores readiness from three inputs that between them predict most of the day-to-day variation: how hard the last session was, how sore you are now, and how much you slept. High readiness supports thirty to fifty minutes of easy cycling or swimming; low readiness — heavy soreness on short sleep — calls for a walk and an early night, because active recovery performed too hard is simply another training session.
Readiness score and active recovery dose
Readiness = 100 - 6 x (RPE - 5) - 4 x soreness + 7 x (sleep hours - 7), bounded 0-100; active recovery minutes = 20 + 0.3 x readiness, bounded 15-50; rest days = 7 - training days
General recovery guidance, not medical advice. Sharp or localised pain, swelling, or soreness lasting beyond about five days may indicate injury rather than normal training stress — stop and consult a qualified health professional rather than working through it.
Usually, for ordinary soreness. Light movement increases blood flow and reduces stiffness without adding training stress. For genuine exhaustion, illness or an injury, complete rest is the better choice.
If you could hold a full conversation comfortably and finish feeling better than you started, it was right. Anything that leaves you breathing hard or feeling worked has become a training session and will delay recovery.
Because most tissue repair and growth hormone release happen during deep sleep. A night short of five or six hours undoes a large part of the recovery a rest day is meant to deliver, whatever else you do with it.