I am a big believer in rest. Not rest as a reward, not rest as something you earn after you’ve pushed hard enough — rest as a necessary part of the whole thing. Periodization is really just a formal name for that idea. What is Training Periodization? gets into the mechanics of it, but underneath all the structure is something simpler: you have to pull back sometimes. A deload, an off-season, a Sabbath — these are all the same instinct showing up in different contexts.
The culture doesn’t really believe that, though. When I was teaching, I was pushing too hard — way too hard — and I didn’t give myself permission to ease up because stepping back felt like losing ground. That’s the trap. Most people see rest as a loss of productivity, and that framing poisons everything. The Benefits of Laziness actually pushes back on this in a way I find useful — the idea that doing less is sometimes doing more is genuinely countercultural, and it needs to be said out loud. Should You Periodize Your Workouts? The Definitive Answer, According to 26 Studies makes the case with data, but I think the resistance to rest runs deeper than not having enough evidence.
What made me connect the deload to the Sabbath is that they’re pointing at the same gap in how we live. Rest isn’t built into modern culture as something sacred or even necessary — it’s tolerated, at best. The Rise of ‘Slow Fitness’: A Counterpoint to Optimization Culture gets at this tension: even in fitness spaces, rest gets rebranded as “active recovery” so we can feel like we’re still doing something. Periodization Training: Benefits, Uses, and How to Get Started is worth reading just to see how even the clinical framing of rest still has to justify itself inside a productivity logic.
If I took this seriously across all areas of my life, the main thing I would do differently is stop feeling guilty when I need to rest. That guilt is the real problem — it’s what makes people push through when they shouldn’t, and it’s what makes them come back from rest feeling like they have to apologize for it. Avoid Overtraining by Logging is one practical way to keep yourself honest about when you’ve done enough. But the deeper shift is just trusting that the off-season is part of the season — not an interruption of it.