Are rest days necessary for free weight exercise routines?

That's a mouthful.
I do free weight exercises for 40 mins a day, everyday. I really love it, but am worried it might not be having any benefit since I might not be letting the muscles build back. Do I need to rest in between, or does that just apply to heavy lifting? Will I have destroyed muscle in this time? Or am I losing it, at a small deficit and limited calories?

Bah, I feel like crap. I have no idea how to do anything.

I know, I need serious [heavy] weights. I'll get some soon.

You need a rest day for any kind of resistance training. Because you need to give your muscles some time to recover, by doing it everyday your over-loading it...which is not what you want.

Free-weights are fine in my opinion as long as you feel intensity during your.

And don't feel crappy...learn from your mistakes so next time you can do better =]

How much rest you need depends on a whole host of factors: What your actually doing, how intense your workout is, your training history, your current condition, your diet, your genetics, your sleep patterns, your goals, etc.

It's a light-moderate intensity. But that sounds pretty specific. Sleep patterns?

I personally do lifting with 5 min of cardio before and after on M-W-F and do just cardio/HIIT on T-TH to give my muscles the rest.  Read several times about the importance of letting your muscles recover so that's why I do it.

Hi cjkl,

What you're doing, basically, is turning your free weight excercises into aerobic exercise. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but don't expect to get stronger or build muscle in the process.

To get the full benefit from weights, you need to be lifting enough so that you can do only 6-8 reps before failure (after a warm-up set), and then rest for at least two days before lifting again. (I'm assuming you do a full body workout)

By sleep patterns, Flogginsully means the amount and quality of sleep you get. Our bodies need sleep to recover from the stress of workouts. If you don't get enough sleep, you'll need longer to recover.  

Yes,  you need a rest day. When you are lifting weights you are ripping and tearing the muscle. The muscle is not actually built while lifting but the new few days as the muscle recovers from the lifting. If you don't allow for a recovery day or two you will  not see good results and will exhaust  yourself. Three days a week is plenty. Lift hard and heavy those three days and allow a rest day in between. Do something else on your days off. I alternate my HIIT days with my lift days.

As everyone else has said, yes you need a rest days. Getting stronger and building muscle is a two step process. The first is to lift weights. However, this is only half of the equation. When you lift weights, you are actually breaking your muscles down. They repair themselves and get stronger on your rest days. If you lift everyday, you are just repeatedly breaking them down. That is why you always hear the saying "Muscles get stronger out of the gym." So the second step, is taking rest days to ensure they get the time to repair themselves and fully recover.

A great system is doing a full body weightlifting routine like Starting Strength three times per week and doing HIIT cardio on the same day (6-8 hours later). That way you only have to workout three days per week and you leave yourself plenty of time to recover. Iin the past, a lot of people (including myself) would have advised doing HIIT on your non lifting days. However, HIIT is very intense and similar to a weight training session because it is anerobic in nature. So if you are doing HIIT on your off days, you are interrupting your recovery. By doing HIIT on the same day 6-8 hours later, you have regained the energy you need to do the workout, and you get a full day worth of recovery in between your lifting days.