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>> It used to be believed that if your goal was to build muscle mass, you should limit your rest periods between sets. Doing so, it was said, would maximise production of hormones that could facilitate muscle growth. As a result, it was long recommended to rest for three to five minutes between sets if your goal was to increase maximal strength, but limit your rest to just 30 to 60 seconds between sets if you wanted to build muscle mass.
While this sounds exciting on paper, it’s known as ‘acute research’. It examines changes in the short-term, such as measuring hormones after a single workout, but it doesn’t measure long-term changes to muscle growth, which is what we actually care about.
Rest assured
To see whether short rest periods are actually best for muscle growth, one research study split participants into two groups. Both followed exactly the same training programme, with only one differentiator: one group rested for three minutes between sets; the other rested for just one minute. As we would expect, the longer rest periods were better for strength gains (if you rest longer, you are more recovered for each set, so you can lift more weight). However, surprisingly, they were also better for muscle growth.1
This is not to say that all research points in the same
