Short VS Long Rest Periods For Building Muscle & Strength
Study breakdown looking at outcomes from different rest periods
Today I’m going to be covering a paper that compared muscle and strength differences between trained men doing the same program, but having differing levels of rest between sets.
Rest periods are often short changed for the sake of time, or let’s be real, because some of us just get antsy and or think shorted rest periods will be inherently better.
But, the key question is “better” at what?
This study examined whether longer or shorter rest periods were better for maximizing muscle growth, maximum strength and muscle endurance.
So let’s take a deeper look!
Methods
23 men were recruited for this study who were between 18–35 years of age. They were “natural” (meaning not on any steroids), had been lifting consistently for the last 6 months minimum and could at least squat their bodyweight.
So they weren’t advanced, but more trained than most people in a lot of studies we cover.
Subjects were pair matched based off initial strength testing and then randomized into one of two groups. This way there wouldn’t be significant differences between groups.
The short group would have 1 minute rest intervals and the long group would have 3 minute restintervals.
They would take pre and post tests of subjects of the following to see if there was differing results from pre to post and between groups.
Then the groups would both carry out the same exercise program for 8 weeks before doing their post study testing. It wasn’t completely clear but it seems they both did the exact same full body session 3 times per week for 8 weeks straight.
One reason to do this is to minimize the amount of exercises that participants had to be familiarized to. But yeah, it probably was a more boring program as a result.
The program is listed below.
Both groups would do this 3 times a week for 8 weeks. Taken each set to failure and adding load when the sets were too easy to ensure progressive overload. Note again that the short group only had 1 minute rest and the long group had 3 minutes rest.
Results
After the 8 weeks and the post testing was done, the results tended to lean in the long restperiods favour.
In terms of muscle thickness, all areas made statistically significant increases in size for the long rest group as where only the quads did for the short rest rest group. Within the anterior quads, the long rest group actually had a significant increase between groups too. Lastly, all effect sizes favoured the long group over the short group in all categories.
You can see results of muscle thickness below:
For strength outcomes, 1 rep max was greater for the long rest group and was actually statistically significant between groups as well as from baseline.
The short rest group did improve from baseline in the squat but not significantly from the bench.
Lastly, the endurance for the bench press was improved from baseline for both groups without a between group significance, but the effect size did favour the long group once again.
You can see these results below:
Takeaways
The main takeaway from this paper is that when it comes to maximizing muscle and strength gains, short rest periods probably aren’t ideal (being 1 minute or less).
With that being said, this is only one study on a small sample size. So we can’t make any big, definitive conclusions.
One more thing to note is that other papers tend to also favour longer rest periods for maximizing strength and a growing body is starting to favour longer rest periods for building muscle too.
For application, you probably don’t need to rest a full 3 minutes for all lifts. Some other papers have shown 2 minutes to also be more effective than say 1 minute.
I would generally say a 2–5 minute rest period is great range for maximizing strength and muscle. With the 5 minute rests being reserved for your most intense sets (like going for a PR or training at maximal loads) and a 2–3 min range for most general exercises.
Although, if you’re just crushing arms, you’ll probably be totally fine to short change it to around 60- 90 seconds.
Lastly, the long rest period sessions took significantly longer. So if you’re crunched for time, you’ll want to be more selective.
This could mean you may take longer rest periods for your big lifts (squats, bench, deadlifts etc) and then superset and shorten rest periods to say 90 seconds for your less complex movements.
An example could be a chest press superset with a one arm row with 90 seconds rest.
So if you’ve been short changing your rest, I challenge you to up it to 2–3 minutes.
If you find you’re good to go after 1 minute, I hate to say it, but you’re probably lifting too light (if your goal is strength and muscle of course).
If you’re lifting at the appropriate loads, you should feel like you NEED that 2–3 minutes.
Here are some additional resources that can help you with your strength training journey:
Five Elements Coaching Exercise Library on Youtube
Article: The Beginner’s Guide to The Squat
Article: The Beginner’s Guide to The Deadlift
Article: The Beginner’s Guide to The Bench Press
Article: Are You Lifting Heavy Enough?
Article: How to Warm Up Without Wasting Your Time
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Cheers,
Coach Dylan 🍻