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More on Rest Periods between sets.
Discussion in 'Training' started by Zillagreybeard, Nov 18, 2020.You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
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DeusChem replied 17 hours, 8 minutes ago
DeusChem replied 17 hours, 10 minutes ago
lefeve415 replied 18 hours, 5 minutes ago
A common question I receive is how long you should rest between sets. In today’s post, let’s look into the science behind rest intervals and muscle growth!
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When you train with short rest between sets, you temporarily increase human growth hormone levels [1]. Some people see this as a reason to start having short rest intervals between sets. But keep in mind that *temporary* spikes in anabolic hormone levels do not influence muscle growth [2]. Just like the short-term cortisol (stress-hormone) increase that happens after training doesn’t make you lose muscle.
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Instead of focusing on increasing HGH, focus on maximizing performance if muscle growth is your goal. Volume is the main driver of muscle growth [3]. Resting longer between sets allows you to handle more volume and provide more overload. This helps explain why research shows better muscle growth with rest periods as long as 2-3 minutes compared to resting only 1 minute between sets [4, 5].
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For most people, a good guideline is resting 2-3 minutes on heavy compound movements and 1-2 minutes on isolation exercises. If you’re in a hurry when you are at the gym and can’t afford to rest that long, you can consider supersets (alternating between 2 exercises that train opposing muscle groups) to shorten training time.
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References:
1. https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1990.69.4.1442
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3215636/
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27433992
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19077743
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26605807