The Definitive Science-Based Guide To Rest Intervals
How long to rest between sets is an important training variable that doesn’t get as much attention as others like how many sets, how many reps, or how intensely you should train.
Fortunately, this topic has been well researched and there are science-based guidelines you can follow to maximize your strength and muscle gains.
There’s no single best rest time between sets. Optimal rest intervals may vary depending on the exercise, your experience level, conditioning, goals, need for time efficiency, and even personal preferences.
That is to say, “it depends.” So let’s look more closely at all the variables that might influence your decision about how long to rest between sets so you can get the best results possible.
First, let’s clarify some definitions.
What Is A Rest Interval In Weight Training?
A rest interval refers to the amount of time you take to recover between sets of resistance training exercises.
Some scientific studies have defined short rest intervals as 1 minute or less and long rest intervals as more than 1 minute. But on a practical level, most people think of short rest intervals as 1 minute or less and long rest intervals as 2 minutes or more.
Many lifters subdivide even further and define 1 minute or less as short, 2 minutes as medium, 3 minutes as long, and 4 to 5 minutes as very long. I think that’s the best way to classify it.
So which rest interval should you choose? You’ll see 8 guidelines for choosing rest intervals below, based on science, plus a few bonus tips at the end.
1. Choose Rest Intervals Based On Your Goal (Strength Vs. Hypertrophy Vs. Conditioning)
Most of the research suggests that using rest periods greater than 1 minute will optimize muscle growth. If you try to rush through your workout too quickly, it can save you time, but have a detrimental effect on your lifting performance. You will have “repetition drop off” with subsequent sets or even need to lower the weight.
However, the optimal rest interval between sets may vary depending on your primary goal. Is it maximum strength, a combination of strength and hypertrophy, pure hypertrophy, or fitness conditioning and fat loss?
Strength athletes and powerlifters take a lot of time between sets – usually about 3 minutes and sometimes even up to 4 or 5 minutes for the main powerlifts and compound exercises.
Here’s why: heavy lifting quickly depletes phosphocreatine – the stored form of energy your muscles use to rapidly regenerate ATP, the fuel for strong, explosive contractions.
It takes several minutes for phosphocreatine levels to build back up again, which is why rest periods of at least 3 minutes allow almost full recovery. With those high-power energy stores replenished, you feel fresh again and can produce maximum force on your next set. That means you gain the most strength.
Bodybuilders typically take moderate rest intervals. A physique athlete’s number one goal is muscle development (hypertrophy), not maximum strength. For that purpose, rest intervals are typically 2 to 3 minutes for compound exercises and 1 to 1.5 minutes for isolation exercises.
People whose goals are general fitness, conditioning, or fat loss often use shorter rest intervals. Rests of a minute or less – even 45 or 30 seconds – are common. Bodybuilders occasionally do this as well if they’re not concerned with maximal strength.
Some people eliminate rest almost completely by doing circuit-style workouts (‘metabolic training’), moving from one exercise to the next with little pause. At that point the weight training becomes very cardiovascular – essentially cardio with weights.
The downside is that when you shorten the rest this much, your muscles don’t fully recover, so you can’t lift as much or do as many reps at a given weight. That’s why circuit-style training is excellent for fitness and calorie burning, but not ideal for maximizing muscle mass or strength.
2. Choose Rest Intervals Based On Type Of Exercise
Another factor in choosing the ideal rest interval is the type of exercise you’re doing. Multi-joint (compound) free weight exercises are more strenuous and produce greater fatigue than single-joint and machine exercises, so they require more time to recover between sets. These are exercises like squats, deadlifts, rows and presses.
The science shows that when you’re doing compound exercises, short 1 minute rest intervals impair protein synthesis compared to rest intervals of 2 minutes or more. The short rest intervals also hurt performance in subsequent sets.
In other words, if you do a set of squats with high intensity and then try the next set 30 or 45 seconds later, don’t expect to do anywhere near as many reps. By your last set, you’ll be wiped out.
This is why the standard advice for rest intervals is to take at least 2 minutes between sets on compound movements. Depending on the exercise, you might need a little longer.
Consider an exercise like squats, especially when you’re doing 10 to 12 reps or more. If you truly work at a high intensity, not only are your leg muscles fatigued, but you’ll also be breathing heavy. It’s not easy to rush into another set only a minute later when you’re out of breath.
All big compound exercises are fatiguing. After a set of deadlifts or heavy barbell rows, you might need 3 or 4 minutes before you’re ready to do another set with the same weights and the same reps.
But after a set of bicep curls – a single-joint isolation exercise – you could feel ready to go again in one minute or at most 75 to 90 seconds because single-joint isolation exercises don’t build up much cardio fatigue.
3. Choose Rest Intervals Based On Intensity of Effort
Yet another factor that influences your choice of rest interval is how hard you’re training. When your exertion level is maximal or near maximal, a longer rest interval is always necessary to maintain your performance in the sets that follow.
If you do a set to failure or within a rep of failure, and you rush into the next set without enough recovery time, your performance on the next set will fall. You’re almost certain to see repetition drop-off.
For example, with a short rest interval after a high-intensity set, you might hit 10 reps on the first set, but due to inadequate recovery, on your second set you only get 8. If you do it again on the third set, you only get 6.
A little bit of repetition drop off is normal, but if you had taken long rest intervals, you might have gotten 10 reps on all three sets. The result of rushing is that you only got 24 reps over 3 sets when you could have gotten 30.
Therefore, you should consider intensity of effort as another factor to help you decide how long to rest between sets. After high-intensity sets, you need to rest longer compared sets where you left a few reps in the tank.
4. Increase Time Efficiency With Supersets
A technique used often by busy people is supersets, where two exercises are performed with little or no rest in between. This technique is an exception to the regular rules about rest intervals.
In a superset, no rest is taken between exercise A and exercise B in the superset, but there is a normal rest break taken after the superset (1 to 2 minutes).
Superset Example (compound exercises):
Exercise A: Bench press (no rest, go directly to):
Exercise B: Bent over row (rest 2 minutes)
That’s 1 superset… repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 sets (3 supersets)
Superset Example (isolation exercises):
Exercise A: Barbell curl (no rest, go directly to):
Exercise B: Tricep extension (rest 1 minute)
That’s 1 superset. Most people repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 supersets.
When you pair opposing muscles like this – known as an antagonist superset – it saves time. You can cut workout length by a third or even a half. A huge advantage is there’s little to no compromise in muscular performance.
The research shows that antagonist supersets maintain or improve strength performance. They don’t harm hypertrophy and may even enhance force output through PAP (post-activation potentiation). And they don’t interfere metabolically, unlike other superset types.
5. Increase Time Efficiency With Progressive Density Training
Another method for time efficiency and progressive overload is density training. It’s a little-known method, even though it goes back to the bodybuilding golden era of Hollywood trainer Vince Gironda.
This is where you reduce rest intervals between straight sets more than normal, and progressively aim to do the same work in less time or more work in the same time.
During a month of density training, week one might use the normal 2 minute rest intervals between sets, but then week two, decrease to 1 1/2 minutes, week three to 1 minute, and week four to 30 seconds.
The trick to making this work for muscle growth is to maintain the total volume load of the workout.
As we’ve discussed, the problem with short rest intervals is that if you cut them too much because you’re trying to save time, it forces you to reduce the weight or do fewer reps with the same weight (weight times reps equals volume).
But modern research (Singer et al 2024) confirmed that if you can avoid that volume drop, then shorter rest intervals can be equally effective for hypertrophy. It’s only less effective for strength goals, which is why this is strictly a bodybuilding technique.
If you can manage to do more work in the same time, or less time, density training is actually a method of time efficient progressive overload too.
This might appear to contradict the research because it has been an almost universal finding that when rest intervals are really short, your total workout volume drops.
However, the newer studies have shown that when you cut rest intervals gradually over a number of weeks, your body can adapt as you get more conditioned.
Researchers found that even with rest periods under 60 seconds, you can build the same amount of muscle as you can with longer rest intervals if you preserve the volume load.
6. Choose Rest Intervals Based On Need For Time Efficiency
Some people have busy lives – kids, full-time jobs, commuting, and a dozen other obligations stacked on top. It’s not that they’re unwilling to train; they want to train.
But when a fitness authority tells them they must rest 3 minutes between every set or train for 90 minutes a day, they feel defeated before they’ve even begun.
If you’re short on time, it’s perfectly fine to use the lower end of the rest-interval range – around a minute.
Although density training is an option, rather than cutting rest even further and compromising strength, the technique I recommend most often is antagonist superset training.
It’s extremely time-efficient, and unlike circuits or straight sets with very short rests, it doesn’t compromise muscle or strength gains. It’s a method every busy person should take advantage of.
7. Choose Rest Intervals Based On Training Style Preference
When choosing rest intervals, you should also consider your personal preference in training style.
But just as you may have tried different sports and hobbies when you were a kid, as you gain experience and try different resistance training systems, you ultimately find something you really enjoy, and you may gravitate to that training style and community.
A lot of people tell me it drives them crazy to “sit around doing nothing” for even 2 minutes between sets, let alone 3 minutes or more. It’s not their style. They prefer to stay engaged and limit the rest during sets to a minimum.
Again, there’s a trade off involved with short rest periods or circuit training, but there are upsides. It gives people a more challenging workout from a conditioning point of view. They also find it a more fun and engaging workout, which is what they wanted. That leads to better adherence.
This is also why we start every program with goal setting. Goals aren’t just for motivation – they tell you which training parameters make sense. When you’re clear on your goals, it becomes easy to choose a training style and a rest-interval approach that fits you.
8. Use Autoregulation (Personal Judgement) To Choose How Long To Rest Between Sets
Lastly, instead of using fixed, predetermined rest intervals, studies show that you can simply use your judgement to decide how long to rest with excellent results.
Do your muscles feel recovered enough to do the next set with full strength without your reps falling off a cliff? Have you recovered your breathing rate after a hard compound set? If you feel ready to go to the next set, physically and mentally, then trust your judgement and go ahead.
We call this autoregulation. Back in the old days bodybuilders called it instinctive training.
It may seem unscientific, but there’s a large amount of research (Desallles et al 2016) showing that lifters with experience are surprisingly good at self-selecting rest intervals.
3 Bonus Tips Based On Science
Before we wrap up, here are three final tips that most people don’t know about.
Tip 1: Creatine
Creatine is one of the few supplements backed by more than three decades of solid research. What most people don’t realize is that creatine monohydrate also improves recovery between sets. This can help offset some of the negatives if you choose shorter rest intervals.
Tip 2: Women vs. Men
Shorter rest intervals may be more acceptable for women than men because research shows women have better fatigue resistance and faster inter-set recovery.
Tip 3: Beginner vs. Advanced
Newer research suggests that both shorter and longer rest periods work well for untrained beginners whose goal is hypertrophy. However, longer rest intervals are usually more advantageous for experienced lifters seeking maximum muscle gain.
So now you know how long to rest between sets
Follow these guidelines and tips – taking your personal goals into account – and you’ll get the best muscle and strength gains possible.
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Scientific References
Ahtiainen J et al, Short vs long rest period between the sets in hypertrophic resistance training: Influence on muscle strength, size, and hormonal adaptations in trained men, Journal of Strength and Conditioning research, 19:3, 572-582, 2005.
Buresh, R, et al, The Effect of Resistive Exercise Rest Interval on Hormonal Response, Strength, and Hypertrophy With Training, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 23:1, 62-71, 2009.
Campos, G. et al. Muscular adaptations in response to three different resistance-training regimens: specificity of repetition maximum training zones. Eur J Appl Physiol 88, 50 – 60, 2002.
DeSalles B, Effects of fixed vs self suggested rest between sets in upper and lower body resistance exercise performance, European Journal of Sport Sciences, 16:8, 927-931, 2016.
Fink J et al, Effects of rest intervals and training loads on metabolic stress and muscle hypertrophy, Clinical Physiological Functional Imaging, 2016.
Grgic J, Schoenfeld B et al, The effects of short versus long inter-set rest intervals in resistance training on measures of muscle hypertrophy: A systematic review, European Journal of Sport Science, 17:8, 983-993, 2017.
Ratamess N, et al, The effect of rest interval length on metabolic responses to the bench press exercise, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 100:1, 1-17, 2007.
Schoenfeld, B et al, Longer interset rest periods enhance muscle strength and hypertrophy in resistance-trained men. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 30:7, 1805–1812, 2016.
Singer A et al, Give it a rest: A systematic review with Bayesian meta-analysis on the effect of inter-set rest interval duration on muscle hypertrophy, SportRxiv, 2024.
Tacito P, De Souza J, et al, Comparison between constant and decreasing rest intervals: Influence on maximal strength and hypertrophy, Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 24:7, 1843-1850, 2010
Villanueva M, et al, short rest interval lengths between sets optimally enhance body composition and performance with 8 weeks of resistance training in older men, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 115:2, 295-308, 2015.
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