By: Chris Gates

An aspect of lifting weights that often gets overlooked is the time you take to rest and recover in between sets.

Typically, the focus is on how much weight you’re lifting, how many reps you’re doing, how many total sets in a workout, and how many days you workout each week. And those are all pretty darn important factors of an overall training program.

But what about rest periods?

If you’ve read any of my articles before, you know I’m big on rest and recovery. But we’ve never dialed it in to this level of specificity.

The time you take to rest in between sets is incredibly important. For starters, it can determine how much overall work you end up doing in the gym each day. For people on a tight schedule, this is crucial.

Rest times can affect your progress, too. If you’re not giving your body enough time to rest in between sets, you’re limiting the amount of quality training you can do. Or, if you’re taking too much time to rest, you’re leaving gains on the table and not reaching the level of intensity you could be.

So let’s break this topic down in detail through what the research says and outline some practical ways to apply structured rest periods during your workouts.

Research Says…

There’s some really interesting research on the topic of rest periods, and largely the evidence points us in one single direction.

When it comes to determining how long to rest in between sets, longer rest periods generally tend to elicit better performance. Whether your goal is to build strength, or build muscle, or some combination of both, more rest in between sets is a good thing.

Now, that comes with some caveats. For starters, you can’t spend all day in the gym so the rest periods need to be curtailed to some degree. Also, too much rest in between sets can negatively impacting the intensity you’re putting forth in your workouts. We’ll touch on both of these topics later when we discuss exactly how to set up your rest periods.

But longer rest intervals have been shown to promote greater muscle growth when compared to shorter rest. They’ve been shown to promote added reps when training at high intensities. Another study found increases in overall training volume with longer rest periods (and higher training volumes generally correspond with greater gains). And in terms of strength-specific gains, longer rest between sets have been found to result in training volume increases, which would lead to greater strength gains over time.

That’s a lot of evidence pointing in one direction, but we need to make this practical. Why does this matter? How do we define “long” vs. “short?” How can you apply this information to your own routine?

Let’s dive in.

Why It Matters

In discussing this topic, you might be thinking: “Who cares?”

And I get it. For a lot of people, as long as you get your workout in each day, you’re good. If that’s the case, and you’re just looking to move around and burn some calories, this topic probably isn’t all that important.

If you want to build muscle and/or strength, then this is something you should dial in if you’re serious about your goals. Having a game plan for your rest periods in between sets should be no different than the game plan you outline for each exercise when you carefully plan out the sets, reps, and weight you lift. And the good news is that setting a specific time, or time range, in between sets is easy. Everyone’s phone nowadays has a clock with a stopwatch on it, so hit that timer after your set ends and wait it out.

Without standardizing rest, or at least having an idea of how much rest you take in between sets, your performance can suffer. Here are a couple examples of what I mean.

Example No. 1: The time waster

You’ve got three sets of eight for biceps curls on the agenda for today’s workout. After you finish set No. 1, you play around on your phone for a while and hit up Twitter to see what’s going on. When you get tired of scrolling, you put your phone down and do a second set of eight reps. This process continues throughout the workout.

In this scenario, you’re lifting weights and getting a stimulus for your muscles, but your intensity isn’t anywhere near what it could be. You could be challenging yourself a whole heck of a lot more, but you’re resting anywhere from 5-10 times as long as it takes to do an actual set.

You’re not providing your body with a very high level of intensity, and by wasting so much time you’re limiting the amount of total training volume you actually do in the gym each day. Both of those factors are limiting your progress.

Example No. 2: The speed demon

In this example, we’re basically looking at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Rather than waste time, you’re rushing to get your sets and reps completed. Everything is done quickly, and form and technique take a back seat to simply checking off items on a checklist.

In this scenario, you’re getting some stimulus on the specific muscle groups you’re training, but the work is happening too quickly for it to be high quality. You’re taking less than 60 seconds to recover in between sets — often as short as 15-30 seconds — with the goal of fitting in as much work as you can into a small window of time.

This can happen for a lot of reasons, but two stick out. First, this approach could be due to having a very limited window of time available to train. Second, this could be due to feeling uncomfortable or unfamiliar with weight training.

Neither of these two examples — the time waster or the speed demon — is ideal, and you should try to find a happy medium that promotes quality work so you can make progress from session to session.

Structuring rest times along with your sets, reps, and weight helps ensure that your training is consistent from session to session. It will help you evaluate what type of progress you’re truly making, or if your progress has stalled.

If we go back to the biceps example from above, if you can get in a set of 8, then 8, then 7 one week, and the next week you get three sets of 8, you’ll know you’re making actual progress when your rest times are controlled. It won’t be because you waited way longer this week as compared to last.

Coaching Cues

First and foremost, you need to take a practical approach to structuring rest periods for your training sessions. Many of us only have a certain amount of time each day to train, so we need to make everything fit.

An easy place to start is to give yourself 60 seconds between each set to rest and recover before the next set begins. If you haven’t set a timer between sets, this may ramp up the intensity a bit — often that’s what I find with clients, is that timing rest periods makes the workout more intense. Without a timer, rest periods tend to get longer and longer throughout a workout.

Give 60-second rest periods a try and see what the results are. If your performance dips at all as compared to previous sessions without a timer, you can find ways to adjust. It’s perfectly fine to have longer rest periods for exercises that are more intense.

For example, you might give yourself three minutes of rest between sets of squats as compared to only 60 seconds of rest between lateral raises.

I’m a big fan of the recommendations Greg Nuckols recently published in the MASS Research Review:

• About 1.2-2 minutes for single-joint exercises
• 2-3 minutes for compound upper body exercises
• 3-5 minutes for compound lower body exercises

I think 60 seconds is a good place to start, just to start standardizing your training sessions. As you get more experienced with it, you can customize the rest periods based on how your session evolves and how you progress.

This is something I’ve toyed around with quite a bit. I adhered to 60-second rest periods for a long time, but as the research has painted a better picture of how longer rest can benefit muscle and strength gains, my programming has changed with it.

For smaller muscle groups I prescribe 60-second rest periods, but for larger muscle groups I’ll extend that anywhere from 1:30-3 minutes of rest as needed.

There’s flexibility there, but it still keeps the training session on track and it keeps the results comparable from session to session over time. That is a structure and progression that can work for most people.

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I hope you found this article helpful and informative! If you have any questions about this specific topic, or if there are topics you would like to see me write about in the future, drop a comment below! And if you are interested in online fitness coaching to help you make progress towards your goals, please contact me or visit my coaching page for more information.

Thanks for reading!

CGF