How To Maximize Muscle Growth: Resting Between Sets

Does Resting Between Sets Help You To Maximize Muscle Growth?

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Bobby re-racks the weights after finishing a difficult, focused set of barbell squats. He has shaky legs, a heart that’s racing and he feels lightheaded as he sips from his water bottle. He sets his watch for a 2 minute backward countdown and hits the “start” button.

He’s read that 2 minutes is the perfect time to rest between sets, so he’s decided to time it to perfection. When the alarm goes off, he is going to be back at the squat rack, going for another set.

He walks around, working to catch his breath to get ready for the next battle with the loaded bar.

The alarm goes off.

It’s been 2 minutes. He doesn’t feel 100% yet—his legs are shaking, his heart pounding—but the alarm went off so his time is up and he needs to get to the next set. He’s plowing through, in spite of these warning signs.

He hefts the weight from the rack and squats. It would have been better, he thinks, to have had more time to get ready because his legs still burn something fierce. This set is performed mediocre effort; he puts the bar back and reaches for that timer to give himself another 2 minutes of rest.

Bobby is making a critical mistake in his workout, just like so many other new lifters.

Bobby is really limiting his ability to maximize muscle growth because he has a set rest interval between sets that forces his body to work at an effort level much below what he can actually do.

Your muscles grow and get bigger as an adaptive response to stress. When you are putting yourself in a position to lift a certain amount of weights for a set number of reps, your body adapts to this level of stress. You have to constantly push X and Y to higher levels to maximize muscle growth.

For those who really want to maximize muscle growth, it’s critical to progress in both reps and weight. You need to lift as much weight as possible for the most number of reps possible within a given rep range, and continually striving to improve on these figures.

That means every single set of every single workout has to be performed with maximum intensity. If you reduce the amount of weight you can lift, you are reducing your ability to maximize muscle growth. You make this sacrifice when you do not allow your body to get enough time to rest between sets.

If you want to maximize muscle growth, stop counting the seconds between sets.

Only begin your next set when you can do it with 100% strength potential. Your body will tell you when it’s time to start again; a stopwatch shouldn’t.

One more thing, the “set rest period” theory is flawed because it forgets that certain exercises are much more taxing on the body than others.

A dead lift and a tricep press down clearly are not in the same ballpark. I'll usually rest for at least 5 minutes after a heavy set of dead lifts to failure, sometimes even more. Since a set of tricep press downs is obviously not as taxing, I can move onto the next set in just two and a half minutes.

You need to listen to your instincts, not a timer, to determine when you can best perform your next set at 100% of your strength. When you add this one, simple training technique your ability to maximize muscle growth will improve drastically.

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