Rest is rest.

There is a common theme amongst athletes: They don’t work hard enough when they are supposed to and they don’t rest properly when they are supposed to.

You get a lot of “slogging”, instead of short, sharp hard, focussed sessions, followed by adequate rest and recovery.  This is a key cause of overtraining:long, slow monotonous training, with insufficient adaptation. Worse still, none of this actually helps improve sporting performance.

As a Coach it is impossible to control what your athletes do out of your sessions, instead you have to try and influence.  A recent study on NCAA II athletes shows that 50% of them suffered from exhaustion at any one time! 

This is ridiculous, and your first thought may be that the Coaches work them too hard. There are strict rules in the US colleges to prevent this from happening. But, looking at the report,  the athletes did an additional 3.78\ 4.43 hours of leisure\physical activity each week. This encroaches on their rest time and will of course lead them to being fatigued.

Getting the athletes to work harder and more specifically is a first step to improving performance, equally important is getting them to manage their recovery properly.