One of the biggest contributors to success in athletics is getting the proper rest between workouts. Too little rest and you risk overtraining, fatigue and injury. Rest too much and you risk losing the gains from all of your hard work.
One of the major factors in determining the amount of rest to take between workouts is understanding how much stress a particular exercise puts on your nervous system. One of the main factors that determine this stress is how much of the nervous system is engaged in different exercises. The more the nervous system is activated, the more likely it is to be stressed and therefore lead to neurological fatigue.
There are of course other factors as well that The Wizard will cover in another segment of the blog such as % of maximum effort, # of repetitions performed, supplementation, rest, etc.
But with that being said, the activation of the nervous system is a good starting point to understand how much neurological fatigue you are undertaking and therefore how much rest you need between workouts.
Below, The Wizard has provided a helpful chart that indicates how much fatigue various exercises contribute, in general, to your nervous system.
In general, the more of your body you are using in an exercise, the larger the muscle that is primarily under-tension and the quicker the more dynamic the exercise - the more neurological fatigue that the athlete is undertaking.
Once you start getting to the moderate to maximum side of the scale an athlete should almost always have at least one day of rest between repeat high intensity sessions, with the most intense sessions requiring at a minimum 2 days of rest up to competition level sessions that may require up to a week or more rest, especially if the athlete recorded a personal record.
Stay tuned for follow-up posts on this topic coming your way soon.