How long you rest between sets can significantly impact your performance, safety, and long-term progress toward any training goal, whether to build muscle, get stronger, or simply improve your fitness.
So, let’s talk about it.
How Long to Rest Between Sets: Key Takeaways
- Rest for 2-5 minutes for strength and power, 1.5-3 minutes to optimize hypertrophy (muscle growth), and 30-60 seconds between sets for muscular endurance. The ideal rest interval also depends on your available time to train, the exercises you’re doing, and if you’re using an intensity technique like drop sets.
- Timing your rest periods as opposed to going by feel is better because it helps you stay laser-focused and ensures you rest long enough to perform optimally for your goal without spending unnecessary time at the gym.
- Hevy’s automatic rest timer triggers when you mark a set as complete, so you don’t have to guess when it’s time for the next set or complicate things by using your phone’s clock app. You can set a default rest time, adjust it for each exercise, and add or remove time to an active timer in 15-second increments.
Hevy – Workout Tracker
Hevy – Workout Tracker
Create and log your workout with Hevy and track your progress
Intuitive or Timed Rest Periods For Optimal Results?
Intuitive rest periods can work in some circumstances––most notably, for people with enough training experience who can stay laser-focused on their workouts and not get distracted by their phones or people at the gym.
However, even then, timed rest periods would be better, as they allow you to rest enough but not too much to perform optimally without spending unnecessary time at the gym.
Let’s say you’re doing traditional strength training where you should rest longer than usual to maintain your set-to-set performance. If you rest intuitively, you might feel recovered after just 1.5-2 minutes and be tempted to jump into the next set.
However, that could cause your performance to drop, limit your training volume, and affect your progression.
Conversely, let’s say you enjoy scrolling social media or chatting with gym buddies between sets. If you’re not careful, you might rest too long, which would make your workouts unnecessarily long and make it more difficult to stay focused and perform well from set to set.
For example, I use Hevy to log my workouts, and the built-in rest timer works perfectly. I’ve set a global rest interval of two minutes in the settings, and I can adjust it up or down for each exercise I add to my workouts. Then, as I mark a set as complete, the timer starts and I’m notified when it’s time for the next set.
It’s clean and simple and takes the guesswork out of the equation. Plus, I can easily add or remove rest time in 15-second increments. For instance, if I’m about to do my fourth set of squats and the fatigue has piled up, I can tap twice and add 30 seconds of extra rest time.
Rest Time Between Sets for Muscle Growth
Shorter rest periods used to be more popular among people looking to maximize muscle growth. The idea was that by resting less, you could maximally exhaust the muscle group and force it to grow.
However, research from the last few years has shed more light on the subject, and we now know that longer rest intervals tend to work better on average. In one 2016 study, Schoenfeld and colleagues split 21 trained men into two groups: one resting for a minute and the other resting for three minutes between sets.
All subjects did eight weeks of 3x/week full-body training. Following the experiment, performance and body composition tests revealed that the group resting longer between sets saw significantly better muscle and strength gains.
But simply saying “rest for three minutes” is not enough because there is still a lot of nuance in resistance training––the load you’re using, the exercise you’re doing, how close you train to failure, and such.
In general, you should consider these factors before starting each new set:
- Is your breathing back to normal?
- Is the main target muscle relatively recovered?
- Are secondary muscles recovered so they don’t limit you in any way?
- Do you feel ready to do your next set and push hard?
How About Recovery for Drop Sets and Supersets?
First, we have drop sets, where you train close to failure, immediately reduce the weight by 20-40%, and do a few extra reps without rest.
Since the goal with these is to push beyond failure and generate more metabolic stress, you might need to rest slightly longer than usual to maintain your performance between individual drop sets.
For example, if you typically rest around 1:45 minutes between regular sets of bicep curls, you might add 30 seconds between sets for the same movement where you do drop sets.
Second, we have supersets, where you pair two exercises and do them back to back (see how to easily create supersets in Hevy). You can include some rest time between the two exercises to catch your breath if you feel like you’re getting winded and that’s stopping you from performing well on the second exercise.
You don’t typically need longer rest intervals between supersets because the two exercises should train different muscles, so there won’t be that much localized fatigue.
Plus, when done as intended (pairing isolation exercises or a compound lift with an isolation activity), the total fatigue shouldn’t be much higher than a standard set of one exercise taken close to failure.
I currently do one superset in my arm workout and have a brief 20-second break between the exercises. However, the rest interval once I complete each superset is 1.5 minutes––enough for the target muscles to recover and my breathing to mostly normalize.
This allows me to stimulate the target muscles maximally and do 12 productive sets in around 15 minutes without experiencing a drop-off in my performance.
Keep in mind that being slightly more out of breath is okay since the goal is to be more efficient with your time. So long as the involved muscles recover well enough, don’t rest unnecessarily long.
How Long Should I Rest Between Sets for Strength?
Training for maximal strength requires performing at your best on each set, which means:
- Lifting the prescribed weight
- Doing all reps on each set
- Not being too close to failure
Doing so allows you to maintain good technique, develop neuromuscular efficiency, and improve your skill on the specific exercise and within a particular loading range. As a result, you can gradually add weight to the bar.
To achieve this, you need longer rest periods––typically 3-5 minutes between sets. Your cardiovascular system won’t typically require that much time to recover, but the fast-twitch muscle fibers, the ones producing the most force, also take the longest to recover.
The 2016 study by Schoenfeld and colleagues mentioned above also found that longer rest intervals (three minutes) are better for strength gains than one-minute breaks.
You might feel recovered enough on shorter rest intervals, but you will likely perform worse from set to set: doing fewer sets, forcing yourself to reduce the weight, or relying on compensatory movement patterns to continue hitting your rep target.
How About Recovery for Power Training?
The same rest interval rules apply since this is also a performance-oriented goal. You should take longer to recover between sets to do each rep with maximum velocity, recruit as many fast-twitch fibers as possible, and ensure that fatigue doesn’t affect your performance.
For light, low-RPE work (say, dynamic bench training @ 60% of 1RM for 2-5 reps per set), you could take around 2 minutes to recover between sets. For heavy, max-effort explosive sets (say, Olympic lifting @80+% of 1RM), you might need close to five minutes to recover between sets.
Rest Interval Length for Muscular Endurance
The goal of resistance training for muscular endurance is to stress the target area for an extended period and make it better able to resist fatigue.
This helps improve the lactic threshold, aerobic (with oxygen) energy production, glycogen utilization, and slow-twitch muscle fiber force production and size. As a result, the target muscles become better at high-rep training, which can transfer to various sports and activities, including football, track and field, and swimming.
To help force these chronic adaptations, it makes sense to keep rest intervals brief––ideally, around 30-60 seconds.
Conclusion
As with other training details, paying attention to your rest times is an effective way to stay on track during each workout and ensure you’re recovering enough but not too long.
Hevy’s automatic rest timer makes it effortless because you can set it and forget it. Adjust your global rest timer in the settings and then increase or decrease the duration on some of the exercises you add to different workouts.
The timer starts once you mark a set as complete and notifies you when it’s time to do your next set.
Plus, you can see how much longer you should rest on the live activity screen (so you don’t even need to have Hevy open) and can easily increase or decrease the active rest timer in 15-second increments.
So, download Hevy today or click here to learn more about the app’s features.
FAQ
1. Can I use different rest intervals in the same workout?
Since rest intervals depend on the exercises, loads, effort, and other factors, it makes sense to have different recovery periods. For instance, you can rest longer between early sets of a workout where you lift 75-80+% of your 1RM, and gradually shorten the intervals as you transition into light, isolation work close to the end of the session.
2. Is a 1-minute rest between sets a good average?
It’s a good average when training for muscle endurance or doing light (15+ reps) sets of isolation exercises. However, it’s not enough when doing traditional strength or hypertrophy training.
3. Is there such a thing as resting too long between sets?
Yes, you can rest too long between sets. This can affect your momentum, make it more difficult to focus, and even cause your muscles to cool down, directly affecting your performance.
