Welcome back to the Barbell Medicine Podcast. I'm Dr. Jordan Figenbaum. I hope you've had a great week.

In this episode, we're going to talk about rest periods and rest days.

In their latest position stand on resistance training,

the American College of Sports Medicine recommends two to three minutes of rest

between sets for core exercises using heavier loads, which they defined as those exercises included specifically to improve maximum strength such as the squat and the bench press.

They go on to recommend one to two minutes of rest between assistance exercises.

Now on its face, these recommendations don't actually seem that bad. one to two minutes of rest between assistance exercises.

Now on its face, these recommendations don't actually seem that bad.

However, in the section preceding these recommendations,

the authors say that strength recovery may not be complete within three minutes of rest

and that lifting performance may be compromised

with one versus three minute rest periods.

Then in the summary of the paper, the authors recommend one to two minute rest periods

for hypertrophy training and three to five minutes of rest for strength and power training.

Though it doesn't seem exactly clear what the ACSM is recommending, though they do make a case that

rest period length is important.

Let's take a look at what the science has to say on rest periods in resistance

training. To start, the purpose of a rest period is to dissipate fatigue that accumulates during the set that was just performed.

Now fatigue represents the subjective experience of a number of exercise-induced changes in the individual such as muscular soreness, muscle damage, tiredness, etc.

That can all lead to reduced force production.

A number of objective proxies to this experience are available,

though they tend not to be very useful when it comes to program design or assessing rest period

...