How Long To Rest Between Sets For Muscle Growth?

How long to rest between sets for muscle growth?

Rest times have always been a important variable that I’ve used in my training. Whether I was doing a high intensity resistance circuit or focusing more on muscle growth. When it comes to how long we should rest between sets for muscle growth, The standard has always been that you should rest 1 to 2 minutes between sets for muscle growth and 3 to 5 minutes for strength and this is supported by the American collage of sports medicine.

Today we are going to take a closer look at how long the rest times for muscle growth should be and whether or not this 1 to 2 minute ranged is really the best.

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Most of the time I keep my rest times within the one to two minute range occasionally going with a 5 minute rest between sets when I would do a block of heavier training.

One of the ways I liked to do this, is to set a timer so that it goes of every 2 or 2.5 minutes and every time it goes off I would do a set which would keep my rest times within the one to two minute range and keep me focused on the workout. Recently I have started to move away from this. And the reason is in this video.

There are a large number of things that affect our rest times one of them is our goals, but today we will be focusing just on muscle growth. The next reasons all relate to the amount of weight we are using. As the heavier the weight we use the more rest we will need between sets. So if we are going higher rep we will be using less weight, than if we are working in a lower rep range. I would encourage anyone who is interested in building muscle to periodize their rep ranges and the amount of weight used.

Compound movements are more metabolically demanding than isolation movements and as a result require more time to recover. The amount of time we have available to workout on any given training day is an important consideration.

This brings me to a study that a lot of people point to as proof that we should rest at least 3 minutes between sets for superior muscle growth.

What they did was they took a group of lifters with at least 6 months lifting experience split them into two groups. They both performed the same exercises 7 in total for 3 sets all compound movements and they were done with every set being brought to failure, in the 8 to 12 rep range. 3 times a week for 8 weeks.

What they did different with the 2 groups is one group only rested for 1 minute between sets and the other group rested 3 minutes. With the researchers expecting to find the group with the 1 minute rest time building the most muscle size and the 3 minute group the most strength.

Now this was not the case at all. What they found was the group that had the longer rest times gained the most strength and built the most muscle. As a matter of fact the muscle size gains were close to double. So you can see how people would conclude 3 minute rest times were better.

The biggest difference in the two groups, was the amount of time they spent training. The short rest group spent about 34 minutes per workout. Whereas the 3 minute group spent around 76 minutes in the gym. So they got almost twice the gains but spent over twice the time in the gym. Time is a real world consideration when we are deciding what we want to do with our own workouts.

So if the 3 minute group had cut back the amount of time they spent in the gym to match the 1 minute group would the results have evened out? That study hasn’t been done yet so there is no way to know for sure, but I suspect this would be the case. Now, that doesn’t mean there is no advantage to this information it can help us with programming knowing that longer rest times can be of benefit especially for compound movements. The first thing I would look at is how much rest time we are taking on are less demanding isolation exercises. If you are resting over a minute on exercises like arm curls or Tricep extensions. Then you could take that extra time and add it to the rest in-between sets of your more demanding compound lifts like squats and bench press.

In this study they took every set to failure, now if your not going to failure on every set then your not going to need as much rest time. Understanding this can help us to balance out our rest times based on metabolic demand and how much time we have to train. Controlling our rest times helps to track our progress.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284711582_Longer_Interset_Rest_Periods_Enhance_Muscle_Strength_and_Hypertrophy_in_Resistance-Trained_Men