Rest Time

How long should you rest between sets?

If you follow our programs and tutorials, you will notice rest times are usually not mentioned. The reason for this is that we are mainly concerned with strength and performance improvement, and rest times will vary depending on different factors explained below.

Please keep in mind that fat loss and muscle growth will be a natural by-product of strength and strength endurance training. Bodyweight training for strength and endurance might even be the best way to build a body that looks fit, lean and proportionate, but that will be the topic of an other article.

As mentioned earlier, we are mainly concerned with performance when we train. This means completing our sets and reps are more important for us than how tired we feel (although sometimes we choose to train until failure, which means exhaustion).

Therefore, we need to make sure we rest just enough to be able to complete our repetitions with proper form. As you know, you don’t feel the same everyday, and you don’t feel the same after your first set and your last set either. This is why setting an arbitrary rest time seems irrelevant to us.

However, there are a few rules you should remember to make sure you never rest too long or too little.

When training strength endurance (15-20 reps), we usually prefer to keep our rest time between 45 seconds to 1 minute 30 seconds.

When training for pure strength (3-5 reps), it is better to make sure our muscles have fully recovered before attempting another set, but without cooling down. Rest time should be around 3 to 5 minutes.

When training for muscle growth, it is better to keep rest periods below 1 minute.

Fat loss will occur when performing all these types of training, and will naturally be accelerated with muscle mass and metabolism increase. Cardio will also be of great help if our goal is to lose fat.

Please refer back to this article whenever you are in doubt about how long you should rest!