16/11/2025
A well-known study of over 400 high-level endurance athletes (Ristolainen et al., 2014) found something important:
🔹 Athletes who took fewer than 2 rest days per week had a 5.2× higher risk of overuse injury.
🔹 Athletes who trained more than ~700 hours per year had roughly 2× the risk.
Pretty striking… but here’s the nuance you rarely see in social posts 👇
🧠 What This Really Means (Not Just “Take 2 Days Off”)
Before you panic about having exactly two rest days — let’s break it down intelligently.
The study suggests:
Athletes who never create space for recovery accumulate load faster than their tissues can repair.
Overuse injury risk rises when training is continuous and high-volume with no meaningful down-regulation.
BUT…
“2 rest days” doesn’t mean two full couch-bound days every week. It means two days where the global load drops enough for your body to recover.
For many endurance athletes, a “rest day” may be:
✔ Active recovery (easy Zone 1 spin, swim, or walk)
✔ Technique-only sessions
✔ Mobility, conditioning, or strength at low load
✔ Sleep + nutrition-focused day
✔ A day off running but light cross-training
The spirit of the finding = you need structured, deliberate recovery — not perfection.
🔍 Study Limitations You Should Know (Because Context Matters)
Even though the headline finding is useful, here are the caveats:
1. Retrospective + self-reported — athletes recalled symptoms and weekly rest days after the fact, which introduces memory bias.
2. “Rest day” wasn’t standardised — we don’t know if that meant total rest or light activity.
3. Group = Finnish high-level athletes aged 15–35 — findings may not generalise perfectly to recreational athletes, older athletes, or people with different training structures.
4. Training volume measured broadly — not broken down into intensity distribution, surface, monotony, or spikes in load.
5. Overuse injury was based on questionnaires, not clinical diagnosis — so definitions might vary between athletes.
In other words: the direction of the message is strong, but the exact numbers aren’t gospel.
🏁 Practical Takeaways for Real Athletes
As a physio working with endurance athletes every day, here’s the real-world interpretation:
1️⃣ You need recovery days — but they don’t all have to be full days off.
Aim for two days each week where intensity and load are meaningfully reduced.
THIS CAN AND MUST CHANGE AS YOUR TRAINING AND RACING CHANGE!!
2️⃣ If your volume is high (or you’re older, busy, stressed, or in a heavy block), you need more recovery, not less.
Life load = training load.
3️⃣ Watch for consistent soreness, sleep disturbance, rising resting HR, or performance drop.
These are earlier signals than injury.
4️⃣ Consistency beats bravado.
Skipping recovery doesn’t make you tough — it increases your injury risk.
5️⃣ Think long-term athletic durability.
Recovery is a performance enhancer, not a sign of weakness.
