How Long Should You Rest Between Sets When Lifting Weights?

How Long Should You Rest Between Sets When Lifting Weights? Rest periods are a hugely important and equally under-appreciated part of your training session. 9 times out of 10 you'll walk in with your focus solely on the weight on the bar, or sometimes more of a rep target, but more often than not you'll have little to no plan on how you're going to space your sets and reps out. Even worse (in my opinion), current fitness trends are leading people down the path of doing things as quickly as possible. "AMRAP". "For Time". "Chipper". You know what I'm talking about. All of these session formats take the clients focus away from resting and towards constantly working. Never stopping and breathing. Never taking a moment to consider the intent of what they're doing other than "get this done as fast as possible". It has it's time and place, but I can have a good guess that the time and place isn't in YOUR workout if your goals are getting strong, building muscle and being more athletic. Your rest periods are really important. Let's get into why, and what they should be in your workouts. What Does The Science Say? When looking at the research, we want to look at it with regards to performance, because that's what you're looking to improve. You don't (or shouldn't) care about how much you sweat, how hard your session felt, or your time on a leaderboard. You do (or should) care about whether your workout actually made you better. Is it going to make you stronger, more powerful, or more athletic? When it comes to the research in this regard, there is a solid consensus that more rest is better. When it comes to strength, longer rest periods have been shown to result in increases in training volume, leading to greater strength gains over time. Longer rest periods have been shown to result in added reps at higher intensities in this study, and also result in greater overall training volumes in this study. This would also support the findings that longer rest periods have been shown to promote greater muscle growth when compared to shorter rest periods when muscle gain is the goal. This is due to longer rest promoting a higher session volume load. Great news! Let's take really long rest periods all of the time and make epic gains. Job done. Well not quite... Real World Application Even though the research points heavily towards longer rest being beneficial for strength, volume/load and muscle growth, we need to apply that knowledge to the real world. The real world where you don't have the time to spend 90 minutes + in the gym. You probably barely have 60 minutes to spend in the gym when you take into account your travel and shower time. So taking the longest rest periods between every set of every movement would drastically reduce the amount of training that you would actually do in your three 60 minute sessions each week. We need to find some middle ground between optimal and applicable. We need to find something that lets us be time efficient and productive at the same time. Power/Strength/Hypertrophy/Endurance When writing programs for clients, I'm usually juggling the four qualities above. And each one of those four qualities have different requirements when it comes to rest periods. To improve power, you need to move powerfully. That means fast, explosive, forceful movements. These cannot be done under fatigue. Fatigue will very quickly limit the speed and force needed to effectively train power, so rest periods must stay longer. If the rest becomes too short you WILL move slower. Strength is similar. To effectively train strength you need to lift heavy weights. Again, you can lift very heavy weights under fatigue. If your rest is too short the weight has to come down, and you no longer train that strength adaptation. So for power and strength we need to work closely in line with the scientific recommendations, with only slight compromise for time limitations. Hypertrophy (muscle building) however has a few components to it. As the research said, higher training volumes lead to better gains, but there is a metabolic component to hypertrophy too. If we reduce rest times here a little bit, we can maintain most of our training volume, promote a build up of metabolites in the muscle, and get a largely effective hypertrophy stimulus. Then finally endurance is endurance. It is moving continually without rest, so rest times here can be minimal to non-existent depending on the specifics of the clients needs. So How Long Should You Rest When Lifting Weights? Now let's go back to the original question, how long should you rest when lifting weights? Power Exercises: Long Rest (3-5 minutes) Strength Exercises: Long (3-5 minutes) Hypertrophy Exercises: Medium (1-2 minutes) Endurance Exercises: Short (0-1 minute) Which may look like this in typical Ian Wood session: Warm-Up: 5-10 minutes Power Work: 4x3-5 w/ 3 minutes rest (15 minutes total) Strength Work: 4x3-5 w/ 3 minutes rest (15 minutes total) Hypertrophy Work: 3x8-10 w/ 90 seconds rest (10 minutes total) Endurance Work: 5-10 minutes w/ minimal rest. Total: Approximately 60 minutes work for 21-30 work sets. This will generally give you the majority of the benefits of each stimulus, while being able to stay efficient with your time, and lots of flexibility to prioritise different qualities or exercise selections. That is how long your should rest between sets when lifting weights (but only if you want great progress from time efficient workouts...). Thanks, Ian.