Building muscle comes down to one thing and that is progressive overload. You may have the best coach writing you the best program, but if you don’t overload your training over time, you will not make the kind of progress you should be making. Progressive overload can be achieved in several ways. In this post, I’m going to compare two of the most common methods that can be used to progress with your training. The first method is to simply increase the weight over time. The second method is reducing rest periods over time. This means that if you initially started out working out with 3 minutes rest between your sets, you’ll try to cut down the rest period to 60-90 seconds over time.

What’s common in both the methods mentioned above is the fact that they both indicate you got stronger and made progress in some form or the other. If you add 5 pounds to a lift, you have progressed. If you shorten the rest time in your exercises, you have progressed. So which way of progressing is better if hypertrophy, i.e. growth of muscle size in layman terms, is the goal?

Thanks to years of bodybuilding wisdom being embedded in our brains, we all feel that a workout is ‘effective’ only if we sweat it out, feel a crazy burn and see a massive pump. To achieve these sensations, bodybuilders leaned towards taking short rest periods. But is this really the best for optimizing hypertrophy?

While on one hand, we have people who favor short rest periods, on the other hand, some barely break a sweat in their workouts. They feel that long rest periods are beneficial to their training and the only way to go.

The people who favored longer rest periods had a valid reason. If you have been training even for the shortest amount of time, you will know that you cannot lift as heavy or perform as many reps in the set following a short rest interval when compared to a longer one.

In the same way, the people who supported shorter rest periods defended their claims by saying that the shorter rest periods resulted in more ‘metabolic stress’. In simple terms, metabolic stress is the burn. They just pointed towards Dr. Brad Schoenfeld’s 2010 study which showed that metabolic stress is one of the main drivers of muscle growth.

Since both sides had a valid argument, the situation just got even more confusing. What was better for hypertrophy? Was it achieving more metabolic stress with the short rest periods or was it performing more volume with longer rest periods?

It wasn’t long enough until further studies were undertaken and finally a conclusion was made. In 2016, another study was published by Dr. Brad which discussed this situation in detail. People were split into two groups for this study; those who took short rest periods and those who took longer ones. To be precise, the short rest periods were 1 minute long while the long rest periods were 3 minutes long. This study lasted for 8 weeks and the following was its conclusion:

The individuals who took longer rest periods saw more muscle growth and strength gains than those who took shorter rest periods.

Another study from 2016 had similar conclusions where the subjects saw the best results when they took rest of at least 3 minutes between heavy compound movements.

Crazy, right?

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Thus, in the tradeoff between volume and metabolic stress, choosing to perform more volume led to better gains.

If you think you could counter this problem by performing more volume with shorter rest periods, here’s why it wouldn’t work so well. Not only would it negatively impact your strength, but it would also end up causing a higher amount of Central Nervous System (CNS) fatigue.

Yes, you fatigue your CNS either way. But since shorter rest periods are more aerobically demanding, the fatigue caused on the CNS is more. If you start your next set while experiencing high levels of CNS fatigue, you will not be able to achieve full motor unit recruitment in your muscles, which in turn won’t allow you to maximize hypertrophy.

This is why longer rest periods are the winner here. But that doesn’t mean short rest periods can never be used. The type of exercise and the intensity (how heavy it is) play a big role in determining the appropriate rest times. Compound movement versus single-joint movement and heavy weight versus light weight are just a few of the factors that make it difficult for us to make exact guidelines for our rest periods. For example;

Again, these are just guidelines and they are not set in stone!

You have to consider your body’s response to exercises and training as well while making such decisions. But, if you are natural, you need to have at least some exercises in your program that utilize long rest periods. If you don’t, you risk leaving out some gains on the table.

Whether you use this information for your programming own training, or you are a coach wanting to help your clients make the best progress, make sure to include so longer rest interval work into the routine.

Now that we know longer rest periods are more beneficial than shorter ones, we can finally answer the question at the start of this post. Would it be better to increase the weight or to decrease the rest periods for hypertrophy? Based on the given data, I’d say increasing weight is the right way to go. Strength and size show a very high correlation if you’re natural!

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References

• BJ, S. (2010). The mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy and their application to resistance training. - PubMed - NCBI. [online] Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20847704 [Accessed 17 Oct. 2019].

• Schoenfeld BJ, e. (2016). Longer Interset Rest Periods Enhance Muscle Strength and Hypertrophy in Resistance-Trained Men. - PubMed - NCBI. [online] Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26605807 [Accessed 17 Oct. 2019].

• Senna, G., Willardson, J., Scudese, E., Simão, R., Queiroz, C., Avelar, R. and Martin Dantas, E. (2016). Effect of Different Interset Rest Intervals on Performance of Single and Multijoint Exercises With Near-Maximal Loads. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 30(3), pp.710-716.

• Ethier, J. (2018). How Long to Rest Between Sets to Maximize Muscle Growth. [online] Built with Science. Available at: https://builtwithscience.com/rest-between-sets/ [Accessed 17 Oct. 2019].

• Beardsley, C. (2018). Do short rest periods help or hinder muscle growth?. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@SandCResearch/do-short-rest-periods-help-or-hinder-muscle-growth-7859e0c4adfd [Accessed 17 Oct. 2019].