
When we usually think about strength training for endurance performance, we tend to believe low weight, high reps is the way to go. However, they also discovered that the optimal rest period when aiming for a muscle endurance adaptation to their training was no more than 1 minute between sets. But when it comes to multi-joint exercises like the bench press, the participants responded better to a 4-5 minute rest interval. They discovered that when it comes to single-joint exercises like the machine fly, 3 minutes of rest is sufficient rest between sets. They did it to find optimal ways to create new training adaptations via rest periods, but what they concluded was really profound. They took a group of people and put them through different rest intervals during strength training sessions. (Or rest for the exact amount of time that will allow you to reach your repetition goal for the next set.)Ī study published way back in 2009 has some interesting things to say about this. If your goal is increased muscle endurance… This enables you to burn more calories than you otherwise would just by resting, and it also helps your muscles recover so they can gradually push for more intensity. Essentially, your goal is not to stand still and rest, but to transition from low-intensity movements to high-intensity movements and vice-versa. This means that even while you’re resting, you should still be moving around. Most strength and conditioning experts agree that you have to both (1) keep your heart rate up and (2) give your muscles the oxygen they need to recover properly. If you want to boost your muscular endurance and get in better overall shape, you should keep your rest periods relatively short. That being said, let’s take a look at what you need to know about rest periods based on the results you’re looking to achieve… If your goal is weight loss… When you’ve taken all these things into account, you can get a good foundation of what you expect to be an optimal rest interval.

More considerable factors include your exercise order, your exercise intensity, and things like your current training status (off-season, in-season, etc.) Naturally, movements that require a lot of strength are taxing on the muscles and nervous system, so those are exercises after which you’ll need more rest. What exercises are you doing? The rest interval between two strength exercises will generally be different than the rest interval between a strength and an endurance exercise. The more progress you’ve made, the more stimulus you’ll be able to handle. Consider how much you’ve advanced and how much your strength and endurance you’ve gained since you’ve started your fitness journey. What’s your training history? Forget how long you’ve been lifting. The more fitness experience you have, the more intensity you’ll be able to maintain – in terms of both physical and neural efficiency. What’s your current fitness level? If you’ve been into weightlifting for a while, you’ll have probably advanced to the point where you can sustain higher intensities for longer periods of time. Keep in mind that these vary from training to training, from athlete to athlete, and from person to person. In the list below, we’re going to highlight a few of the most important ones. When it comes to determining your rest periods based on your goal, there are a few things you have to consider. That’s why today, we’re going to put ourselves in a couple of different situations and depending on the goal/perspective we have, we’ll decide on the most optimal rest period (based on science!) Before that, here are some factors we have to consider about rest intervals… training for strength, training for endurance, etc.) Not to mention, they are a big variable to consider when working toward a specific training adaptation (e.g. The fact is – rest periods matter, and they have a massive impact on both your performance *and* how your workout plays out as a whole. The same reason researchers can’t decide on a general rule of thumb for rest periods is the same reason that you can’t go for an all-in-one approach. Well, as you can probably guess, that differs.


So what is the optimal, best amount of time to wait between sets? And how do different rest periods serve our individual fitness/training goals? But as more and more research is being done on this subject, this has been exposed *not* to be the case. As we speak, we have the top strength and conditioning experts in the world trying to figure out a rest period general rule of thumb for your training.įor years, we’ve been told that the more weight you lift, the longer you should wait between your sets.
