If Pain Builds Character, Why Do Athletes Get Rest Days?

A few weeks ago, I started finding my way back into a regular training routine with Urban Sports Club. It brought me to STORM in Berlin, an immersive, high-intensity indoor cycling bootcamp.

The training was great. The week afterwards was not. For days, every staircase became a negotiation. Sitting down required strategy. Getting back up required genuine commitment.

The irony: I have a Master’s in Sports Science and spent part of it studying exercise-induced muscle damage, particularly eccentric loading. So I knew exactly why I couldn’t walk. Knowing didn’t help though.

I recovered, went back and did essentially the same training again.

And… nothing.

The exercises that had destroyed me the first time suddenly felt surprisingly manageable. Almost no soreness afterwards. There is a name for this: the repeated bout effect. The first time you expose a muscle to an unfamiliar load, the response can be dramatic. Repeat a similar stimulus after recovery and the response is often significantly smaller — even when the workload stays the same or increases. The body learns.

Walking home from that second training, I kept thinking about how closely this resembles something I regularly experience outside the gym. And the more I thought about it, the less this felt like a story about muscles:

The repeated bout effect doesn’t stop at the gym.

You’ve probably been there - The first public miss which can hurt disproportionately.

The pitch that dies in the room.
The idea you fought for that goes nowhere.
The decision you made with conviction that turns out to be wrong.

The first time, you don’t only have to deal with what happened. You also have to deal with not yet knowing what happens after it happens. Can I recover from this? How? What do I need to cancel because I underestimated the consequences? Can I deal with what comes next?

The second time, something is different. You’ve been here before. You know embarrassment passes. You know one bad meeting doesn’t define a career. You know confidence returns. Most importantly, you have evidence that you can recover. You trust your physiology and psychology. And eventually, you start taking bigger risks. And that gradually changes the load.

But there is another part of the repeated bout effect I find even more interesting: Adaptation is specific.Training your legs doesn’t automatically protect your shoulders. And doing a full-body workout doesn’t necessarily give you full-body soreness. Usually, the muscles least accustomed to the load are the ones that make themselves known the next morning.

We often talk about resilience as though it were a personality trait: you either have it or you don’t. But being resilient in one part of your character portfolio doesn’t necessarily make you resilient in another. Someone comfortable making million-euro decisions may be terrified of admitting publicly that they were wrong. Someone who can walk into a brutal board meeting without blinking may still be flattened by one honest sentence from a junior team member.

Different tissue. Different training. Different response.

I increasingly think of resilience as a portfolio of adaptations.

Some are parts are highly trained and producing ROI. Others have barely been considered.. Exposure matters. Without exposure, there is nothing to adapt to. But there is an important caveat…

The usual song goes something like this:

More pressure builds stronger people.
If someone struggles, they simply need more exposure.
Toughen up and push through.

But more is not an appropriate training principle.

Not every stressor is a useful training stimulus. Nor should it be. Load can create adaptation. Too much load, badly applied, creates injury. And no competent coach would look at an injured athlete and prescribe more of whatever caused it. Yet this is surprisingly close to how we sometimes talk about resilience at work and on social media. After all, resilience is in, isn’t it?

We turn resilience into a character test. How much can you take? How quickly can you bounce back? How much pressure can you absorb without showing it? Meanwhile, taking a step back and letting physiology do its job is often the much smarter move.

The right stimulus, at the right dose, followed by sufficient recovery creates results. Which also means our instinct to protect ourselves after something hurt the first time isn’t necessarily wrong.

The question is what, exactly, we’re protecting ourselves from.

The idea was rejected, so next time we keep it to ourselves - Or we get better at knowing when to persist, when to change the argument — and when to change the audience.

We received difficult feedback, so we avoid the person who gave it - Or we learn to distinguish feedback that contains useful signal from feedback that mostly contains information about the sender.

We got hurt taking a risk, so we become a little more careful and risk-averse - Or we become more precise about which risks deserve our courage.

These are important distinctions. Returning to a difficult room can build confidence. Repeatedly entering a room designed to diminish your contribution does not.

Resilience isn’t learning to tolerate everything. And it certainly isn’t proving your character by seeing how much unnecessary damage you can absorb. It’s developing the judgement to distinguish productive discomfort from destructive repetition.

To know when to expose yourself again, when to recover, when to change the stimulus — and when to walk away.

Because a good athlete doesn’t train to tolerate injury. They train for adaptation and progress. And adaptation requires something much more sophisticated than “more”: the right stimulus, at the right dose, followed by enough recovery to actually adapt. That last part matters. Athletes don’t take rest days because they lack resilience. They take them because the training stimulus alone doesn’t make them stronger.

The adaptation happens during recovery.

Revolutionary, I know. Next I’ll reveal that muscles need protein ;)

Without load, there is nothing to adapt to. Without recovery, there is no space to adapt. Maybe that’s what we get wrong about resilience: We admire how much someone can take.

How quickly they get back up. How relentlessly they keep going. Perhaps we should pay more attention to how intelligently they manage the cycle: when to push, when to pause, when to go again — and when a stimulus has stopped being productive altogether.

Which brings me back to STORM.

The first session left me negotiating with staircases for a week. So I waited until I had recovered. Then I went back. Four times by now. What started as 45 minutes has turned into 90, and some days I can even add a second swim session on top. Same body. More load. Less damage. More capacity.

Not because I kept pushing through. Because I didn’t.

I loaded. I recovered. I adapted. Then I loaded again.

Turns out, rest periods aren’t the opposite of resilience, they’re how you build it.

And as for the disappearing corporate padding? Let’s call that a particularly welcome side effect of the experiment.