687 - How Long Should You Be Resting Between Sets? (Research Review w/ Dr. Brandon Roberts)
Choose Hard with Cody McBroom
Cody McBroom
4.9 • 825 Ratings
🗓️ 15 December 2021
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today’s episode dives into what science says about one of the most common training questions we get as coaches… How long should you rest between sets?
Generally speaking, short rest periods reduce the amount of reps you can do in subsequent sets. Longer rests 3 are better for developing strength and when you're training at high intensities to failure. For hypertrophy, you are free to choose your rest interval. You can choose shorter rests, but you have to account for things like:
Study 1: Shorter rest intervals resulted in greater reductions in the number of repetitions completed and higher RPE scores for all exercises - Senna et al., 2011 - compared 1, 3, and 5 minute rest intervals and found that shorter rest intervals reduced total # of reps.
Study 2: A meta-analysis - Grgic 2017 - found that rest intervals > 60 seconds resulted in almost double the hypertrophy of < 60 seconds. However, there weren’t a lot of studies so we have to take that with a grain of salt.
Study 3: Short rest intervals might work better for single joint exercises. - Fink 2016 - found that shorter rest intervals in untrained people caused double the hypertrophy. Caveat is they may not have known how to train hard.
Other Discussion points:
- Training to failure & rest
- Intensity & rest?
- Should we pick based on our own preference? Studies suggest maybe
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the tailored life podcast, the one and only fitness and nutrition podcast that goes way beyond just training and nutrition. |
| 0:14.3 | I'm your host, Cody McBroom, and today with me I have Dr. Brandon Roberts, the chief science officer of tailored coaching method. |
| 0:21.2 | What you were about to hear is this week's research review. |
| 0:24.1 | Every single week, we're going to bring you a short 10 to 20 minute podcast, |
| 0:28.1 | breaking down one specific topic, diving into all the research and teaching as much as possible |
| 0:33.0 | and giving you application takeaways to use this for a science-based approach. |
| 0:38.3 | So stay tuned and get ready for this week's research review. |
| 0:42.4 | All right. |
| 0:43.0 | So today's research review study topic that we are diving into today is rest intervals. |
| 0:49.1 | And this is a really good one because I get asked us all the time, especially that |
| 0:52.3 | because we run the taylor trainer uh training |
| 0:55.8 | app um there are rest periods in there because there's a section for me to put rest periods so i do put them in |
| 1:01.4 | but i always get the question you know like how important is that or or what if i like that's not enough |
| 1:06.8 | time for me or what if like i feel like that's so long and often my my response and I'll |
| 1:11.6 | be interested to see what you pulled from the research in this month usually my response is |
| 1:15.3 | honestly don't overthink it it really doesn't matter that much truly uh conditioning I think is a |
| 1:20.6 | different ball game and we can kind of touch on that in a set because that is a different thing |
| 1:23.3 | but for strength training most of the time what I've found is that it actually is just better to be kind of intuitive and just take your time because you don't want performance to suffer. |
| 1:32.7 | And from what I've dug into, I believe that the longer rest of periods actually outperform short ones most of the time. |
| 1:38.4 | But I could also see the disadvantage of taking too long and then just kind of feeling cold. You know, I know if I, you know, now I was thinking about this day, now that we have a dog |
| 1:46.1 | running around, I was doing sets of squats and then, like, I look over and he's pissing on the |
| 1:50.0 | turf and I'm like, oh, shit. |
... |
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