#9: How Long Should You Rest Between Sets?
What should we do in between sets? Should we time a precise minute? Or should we pick our nose, send a text, take a selfie and ponder the complexities of life?
Short rest times will affect the performance of your next set (because your muscles would still be fatigued). So resting for, say, 1 minute may sometimes leave your muscles having to cope with a heavy lift without having time to ‘catch their breath’.
That may not necessarily be a bad thing.
Why Do We Rest?
We don’t just ‘rest’ because we’re pussies. We rest to help our bodies recover from the previous set. Because in our previous set, hopefully, we have satisfied three ‘factors’:
We would have taxed the cardiovascular system to the point where it can’t handle more reps.
We would have the temperature within the muscle.
We would have fried our nervous system to the point where motor neurons can’t cooperate.
So For How Long Should We Rest?
The ideal time of rest would be the sweet spot where the above three factors are ‘cleared’. and the ability to lift proficiently is restored.
Smaller muscles can recover in around 30 seconds, generally, whilst larger muscles can take one or two minutes. So that’s a good rule of thumb. to go by But if you’re out of breath or your heart rate has shot up, then maybe give it a little more time.
There’s an additional factor (and it’s a little ‘woo-woo’), but experience teaches you to understand your limits. To acknowledge the effort you made. And in that context, one might even consider extending the rest time a little beyond two minutes.
Why We Shouldn’t Measure Our Rest
Designating a ‘rest time’ of two minutes in between each set might even be counterproductive.
Imagine going to the gym, timer in hand, waiting to finish that set so you can measure two minutes of rest time following a set of dumbbell curls for the biceps. Since they’re smaller muscles, one might recover after as much as 30 seconds. But now you’re screwed because you’re stuck waiting a further 1.5 minutes simply because ‘timer says no’.
Conversely, you could be training a compound exercise (bench press, squat) and lifting beast-level weights, taxing your muscles to the point where they could do with up to five minutes of downtime. And you know what? That’s fine. You absolutely do not need to adhere to a rest time of a strict two minutes.
If you’re lifting weights in the traditional sense, with the scope of packing on some more muscle, one would argue that not resting enough can work against you. I mean let’s be real here. Wouldn’t we want to challenge our muscles with some high-quality reps and sets? Or do we simply want to get back to lifting with fatigue gumming up our form?
