Kayla Bonkowski is not naturally good at rest days. She has spent years developing a better relationship with them, and she would not describe that relationship as fully resolved. Rest days still feel, on some level, like something she is giving up. The progress she is making on training days, she is not making on rest days. That feeling is wrong — she knows it is wrong — but it shows up anyway.
This piece is for the people who feel the same way. Not the people who need to be told to train more, but the people who need to be told that stopping is also training, and that ignoring that will eventually cost them.
What Actually Happens on Rest Days
The adaptation you are training for does not happen during the workout. It happens after. When you put your body under physical stress — lifting heavy, doing high-intensity intervals, competing — you create micro-damage in the muscle fibers and fatigue in the nervous system. The workout itself is the stimulus. The rest is where the response occurs.
During recovery, the body repairs the damaged fibers and rebuilds them slightly stronger than before. The nervous system recovers its capacity. Energy stores are replenished. Without adequate recovery time, the stimulus piles up and the response never fully happens. You are accumulating fatigue without accumulating adaptation, which is a path toward overtraining and injury.
Kayla Bonkowski understood this intellectually long before she actually applied it. Knowing the mechanism does not automatically change the behavior, especially for people who have a strong psychological need to feel productive in the gym.
The Athlete Identity Problem
Part of what makes rest days hard for serious athletes is the identity piece. Kayla Bonkowski has written about this in other contexts — the way that what you do becomes part of who you are — and it applies directly to rest days. When training is central to your identity, not training feels like not being yourself. There is a low-level unease that can follow a rest day if you have not developed a way to understand it as part of the practice rather than a departure from it.
The reframe that has worked best for Kayla Bonkowski is a simple one: rest is not the absence of training. Rest is a phase of training. The workout is one phase, recovery is another, and both are required for the adaptation to happen. You are not taking a day off from being an athlete. You are doing the part of being an athlete that happens outside the gym.
That reframe does not eliminate the discomfort entirely. What it does is give the discomfort a context that makes it bearable — and, eventually, meaningful.
How Many Rest Days and What to Do on Them
How many rest days an athlete needs depends on training volume, intensity, age, sleep quality, nutrition, and stress load — none of which are static. Kayla Bonkowski trains in Macomb, Michigan, with a program that includes structured rest, and she adjusts based on how she is recovering rather than following a fixed schedule without modification.
The question of what to do on rest days is worth taking seriously. Complete inactivity is one option, and for people who are genuinely overtaxed, it is the right one. For people who are generally well-recovered but need a break from high-intensity training, light movement — walking, easy cycling, gentle mobility work — can support recovery without adding to the fatigue load. CrossFit Teneo programs active recovery days that serve this function, and Kayla Bonkowski finds them more useful than passive rest days when her recovery is already adequate.
The wrong answer is to treat rest days as training days with a slightly lower intensity. That approach gives you the feeling of productivity without the recovery, which is the whole point of stepping back in the first place.
The Long Game
Kayla Bonkowski has been training long enough to see what happens to athletes who do not rest. They plateau. They get injured. They burn out. The pattern is predictable enough that she treats it as a rule: if you want to keep training at a high level for years rather than months, rest is not optional. It is the mechanism by which the training works.
Getting good at rest days is a skill like any other part of the practice. It takes time, self-awareness, and a willingness to trust the process even when the process requires you to do nothing. Kayla Bonkowski is still working on it. That is true of most athletes who take their training seriously, and it is worth saying out loud.