Why Rest Is Not A Mental Health Strategy. It Is A Training One.
May was Mental Health Awareness Month, and the message coming from almost every corner of the wellness and fitness space is some version of the same thing: rest more, do less, be kind to yourself. Which is well-intentioned. But framing rest as self-care — as a kindness you extend to yourself when you are struggling — misses something important about what rest actually is and why it matters.
Rest is not a mental health strategy. It is a physiological requirement for adaptation. When you remove it, your body and brain pay the price in ways that are measurable, documented, and directly relevant to your aerial training. Understanding the science of what happens when you do not rest enough is, I would argue, more motivating than any amount of wellness messaging — because it reframes rest not as a concession to limitation, but as a non-negotiable component of intelligent training.
What Overreaching Actually Does To Your Sleep
Sleep is where adaptation happens. It is where your nervous system consolidates motor learning, where your connective tissue repairs, where your hormonal systems reset. Most aerialists know this in theory. What is less well understood is how quickly and measurably training load can disrupt the sleep that makes all of that possible.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis by Murphy, Svansdottir, Dupuy and Louis, published in PLOS ONE, examined the effect of overreaching from training on sleep quality. The findings were unambiguous: overreaching led to a significant deterioration in objective sleep efficiency — actual, measurable sleep architecture, not just how rested you feel. The effect was large enough to be clinically meaningful, and it occurred within the timeframes that many aerialists would consider normal training blocks.
This matters because disrupted sleep is not just a recovery problem. It is a mood problem, a cognition problem, and a nervous system regulation problem. The mental health effects of poor sleep are well-established and significant. When training load disrupts sleep, the downstream consequences extend far beyond physical fatigue.
Overtraining Syndrome Disrupts Your Hormonal System In Ways That Are Directly Relevant To Perimenopause
For aerialists navigating perimenopause, the hormonal consequences of insufficient recovery deserve particular attention. Research by Cadegiani and Kater, published in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation in 2019, examined the hormonal profile of athletes with overtraining syndrome compared to healthy athletes. The findings were striking.
Overtraining syndrome was associated with reduced cortisol, growth hormone, and adrenocorticotropic hormone responses to stimulation. It lowered the testosterone-to-estradiol ratio by 43%. It worsened mood, increased tension, and reduced vigour. It affected immune function. And critically, it could be triggered by dietary patterns — insufficient protein, carbohydrate, or overall caloric intake — independently of training volume.
For an aerialist who is already navigating shifting oestrogen levels, altered recovery capacity, and the motivational fluctuations that come with perimenopause, adding the hormonal disruption of overtraining syndrome is not a theoretical risk. It is a compounding one. The body is already managing a significant hormonal transition. Insufficient recovery adds another layer of dysregulation to a system that is already working hard to find its new equilibrium.
Your Brain Pays The Price Too
The cognitive consequences of overreaching are as consistent as the physical ones. A systematic review published in Sports Medicine Open in 2023 examined the relationship between overtraining and cognitive function in endurance athletes. Across all seven studies included in the review, cognitive performance declined when athletes were overreached or overtrained. Reaction time slowed. Processing speed dropped. The effect was consistent enough that the researchers suggested cognitive testing could be used as an early marker for non-functional overreaching.
This is relevant to aerial training in a specific way. Aerial is a cognitively demanding practice. The proprioceptive processing, the spatial awareness, the sequencing of complex movements — all of these require a brain that is functioning well. When cognitive performance is compromised by insufficient recovery, the quality of your training degrades even if the volume stays the same. You are putting in the hours but getting less back from them. And the risk of injury increases, because the neurological systems responsible for balance, coordination, and spatial awareness are operating below capacity.
The central nervous system's role in overtraining has been documented since at least the late 1990s, when Meeusen's work established that the endocrine and nervous systems work in concert to regulate movement and physiological processes — and that when the balance between training and recovery is disrupted, it is the CNS-endocrine axis that bears the consequences. This is not new science. It is science that has not yet made its way into the mainstream conversation about aerial training.
The Adaptation You Are Looking For Happens In Recovery, Not In Training
This is perhaps the most important reframe in this entire post, and it is one that the fitness industry consistently gets wrong. Training is a stimulus. It creates the conditions for adaptation. But the adaptation itself — the strength gains, the skill consolidation, the nervous system changes that make you a better aerialist — does not happen during the session. It happens in the recovery window after it.
When you remove or compress that recovery window, you are not training more effectively. You are applying stimulus without allowing the response. You are asking your body to adapt without giving it the resources to do so. The result is not faster progress. It is slower progress, higher injury risk, compromised cognitive function, disrupted sleep, and a hormonal environment that is increasingly hostile to the very adaptations you are trying to create.
Rest is not the absence of training. It is the mechanism by which training works.
The Smarter, Not Harder Philosophy Is Not A Slogan
The Smarter, Not Harder approach to aerial conditioning is sometimes misread as a softer approach — as if prioritising recovery and intelligent programming is a concession to those who cannot handle the demands of serious training. It is the opposite. It is the approach that takes the physiology seriously enough to work with it rather than against it.
Building rest into your training structure as a non-negotiable — not as something you do when you are exhausted, but as a planned and protected component of every training block — is not a sign of insufficient dedication. It is a sign of sufficient understanding. You are not resting because you cannot train. You are resting because you understand that training without recovery is not training. It is depletion with a fitness aesthetic.
If you are chronically fatigued, hormonally disrupted, sleeping poorly, and finding that your cognitive sharpness in training has declined, you are not in a training deficit. You are in a recovery deficit. And the solution is not more training. It is the thing that the wellness industry is accidentally right about for entirely the wrong reasons: rest. Not as self-care. As physiology.
What This Looks Like In Practice
Intelligent recovery for aerialists is not complicated, but it does require intentionality. It means planning rest days with the same deliberateness as training days. It means adjusting training intensity based on where you are in your hormonal cycle rather than following a fixed programme regardless of physiological context. It means treating sleep as a training variable — something to be protected and optimised, not sacrificed to fit more sessions in. It means eating enough to support the training you are doing, because as the research on overtraining syndrome shows, nutritional insufficiency can trigger the same hormonal disruption as training excess.
And it means developing enough body literacy to recognise the early signs of insufficient recovery — the declining motivation that is not laziness, the flat sessions that are not mental weakness, the sleep disruption that is not stress — and responding to them with intelligence rather than pushing through.
Your body is not your enemy in this. It is giving you accurate information. The question is whether you have the framework to interpret it correctly.
References
Murphy, C., Svansdottir, S.A., Dupuy, O. & Louis, J. (2024). Does overreaching from endurance-based training impair sleep: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0303748
Cadegiani, F.A. & Kater, C.E. (2019). Novel causes and consequences of overtraining syndrome: the EROS-DISRUPTORS study. BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation. DOI: 10.1186/s13102-019-0132-x
Sports Medicine Open (2023). Impact of Overtraining on Cognitive Function in Endurance Athletes: A Systematic Review. DOI: 10.1186/s40798-023-00614-3
Meeusen, R. (1999). Overtraining and the Central Nervous System. In: Lehmann, M., Foster, C., Gastmann, U., Keizer, H. & Steinacker, J.M. (eds) Overload, Performance Incompetence, and Regeneration in Sport. Springer, Boston. DOI: 10.1007/978-0-585-34048-7_15
