This time I’m answering the question ‘Does the rest time in between sets during your workout play a huge role?
How often do you workout?
If often then you know that you can’t design a strength-training (or weight-training) program without knowing the meaning of these two terms: rep and set.
A Rep (repetition) is one complete motion of an exercise. A set is a group of consecutive repetitions.
For example, you can say, “I did two sets of ten reps of squats.” This means that you did ten consecutive squats, rested, and then did another ten squats.
Got it? Awesome!
Now that you know what those terms mean, you’ll soon come to know how important the rest time between your sets are.
Im in the gym a lot so believe me when I say 90% of people underestimate the amount of time their rest periods play in their overall workout. There are a lot of factors that go into muscle growth, and rest periods are one of them.
Rest periods can be broken down into three categories:
Short rest periods – about 30 seconds
Long rest periods – 2 minutes to 5 minutes
Moderate rest periods – about 60-90 seconds
The amount of rest time you take between sets should depend on what you’re aiming for as regards to your body. Let me break it down for you some more.
- Short Rest Periods
The key to getting your muscles bigger by weight training is tiring them out. Yes. By limiting your rest periods to about 30 seconds between sets of strength training exercises, you’ll do just that. But the disadvantage of very short rest periods sometimes is that you won’t be resting long enough to maintain sufficient strength. If strength can’t be maintained, then the weights that you’ll be able to lift with shorter rest won’t be heavy enough to help your muscles grow.
- Long Rest Periods
The primary advantage with long rest periods is that, because they’re long enough to almost fully restore your strength, you can use near maximum weights that result in some monster gains in strength over time. The drawback to long rest periods, however, is that you often don’t tire your muscles enough, which is a draw back if you’re looking to pack on size.
However, by increasing strength, you’ll be able to use a much heavier weight, and you’ll be able to access more muscle fibers every time you lift. Your next option? Somewhere between short and long periods and that brings us to
- Moderate Rest Periods
When it comes to moderate resting time you actually don’t want to fully recover between sets, because building muscle requires tiring them out, but you also want to rest long enough that you can repeatedly use a weight heavy enough to stimulate muscle growth. That’s why moderate rest periods hit the sweet spot of building muscle mass: the weights lifted are still heavy enough to target the muscle fibers with the greatest potential for growth.
So my advice would be to keep your rest time on a moderate level. This plays a huge role in your workout. In order to see adequate muscle growth, you want to keep your rest periods relatively moderate so anything between 1 minute and 2 minutes is enough.
Here are a few more tips using this information to take your muscle mass up a notch:
- If you’ve been training consistently for 3 to 6 months:
Assuming you’ve developed good exercise technique with your big exercises (bench press, chinups, shoulder press, squat, deadlift, etc.), focus on getting stronger in the next few months. Your goal is to activate as much muscle as possible at any one time.
Perform 3-5 sets of 3-5 reps of big exercises with longer rest periods.
- If you’ve been training consistently for 6 months to a year:
At this stage in training, your goal to increase your volume of exercise which will help build your muscles.
Perform 2-4 sets of 3-5 reps with longer rest periods. Follow this with 2-4 sets of 6-12 reps with moderate rest periods for the same muscle groups
- If you’ve been training consistently for 12 to 18 months:
You’re at the point where you’ll need a stronger stimulus to get big, so you’ll need to focus on either strength or muscle size development.
You should alternate training programs, going from focusing on strength for 4-6 weeks, then on size development for another 4-6 weeks. Perform 3 sets of big exercises, on your strength weeks using big weight you can only lift 1-5 times, and on your size weeks, using weight you can lift 6-12 times
Don’t let all this information scare you. It’s very simple! And don’t let the idea of ‘muscle mass’ scare you away from lifting weights ladies. To get that toned body look you have to add weights to your workout. To get the best results, keep your rest time on the moderate side.
Hope this helps 💕
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