When you start exercising, your muscles, brain, and nervous system all work together to facilitate your workout. With exercises like weight lifting, for example, you’re actually creating microtears in your muscles, as certified personal trainer Kathy DeBlasio explained to UNC Health Talk. The healing of these tears is what builds muscle strength and gain. “That’s why it’s important to do strength training every other day instead of every day,” DeBlasio elaborated. “That gives your muscles time to recover and get stronger.”
By engaging in chores that require your muscles to be challenged beyond your time of exercise, you’re essentially overexerting them. This can add to already existent muscle fatigue, and it can even lead to injury. It’s kind of similar to overtraining and its consequences.
Plus, your nervous system, joints, muscles, heart, lungs, and other parts of your body are all exerted during a workout. They all work systematically. When your entire body is tired after an intense workout session, the last thing you should be doing is putting it through more severe activity. But does this mean you shouldn’t do anything around the house when you get back home from the gym? Not really.