OK, but if I don't rest 8-10 minutes between sets, I might not continue my unbroken endless chain of PRs as a beginner and my ego will be absolutely SHATTERED

I refuse to take less than 5 minutes between sets. How else am I supposed to watch these videos in between sets?

There's no way my second and further sets will be close to having as many reps as my first set, with only 60 seconds rest. But apparently that doesn't matter. Interesting.

1-2 mins?! Mike Mentzer told me to rest 48 hours between sets.

Yeahhhhhh I’m still just gonna take my time between sets until I feel I’m ready to go again…

Nice follow up. Appreciate the fast response to new findings 👍🏼👍🏼

I love how you admit you're wrong. That's so hard to do for many people. This is definitely part of the learning process.

Oh no I rested 2.3 minutes on my second set of squats, my legs are vanishing.

You went over this better than House of Hypertrophy. However, still 2 minutes between squat sets is still challenging (gonna keep it at 3+ mins likewise with deadlifts and even bench press, especially those like to powerlift on the side), but other leg movements definitely less rest times can be utilized.

How close you get to failure adds to the rest time. It is way different leaving one in the tank and actually failing the last rep.

Appreciate you breaking down these findings! 👏

Great to see updated perspectives, as science continuously evolves. Thanks, doc!

10:15 - I did that for 3 years and had a 135x5 bench to show for it. On the contrary, I saw my worst gains (no gains) - You were right and now are wrong and I look forward to the video you admit you were wrong about being wrong about being right 😇

Thank you Doctor. Appreciate your scientific integrity

These takeaways are literally my exact timer presets. I think I'm an oracle that can predict the outcomes of exercise science

Thanks for the updated info. Will be interesting to hear what changes will be coming in the future. Seems like people need to listen to their bodies, train accordingly. Genetics, age, nutrition, rest, sleep quality are all individual.

"...and we could become...." Kayaking buddies? "..coach and client" Aw man.

The thing is the last time I checked the meta-analyses for shorter rest-time programs (e.g. drop-sets, rest-pause, cluster sets) - the hypertrophy was comparable to normal programs, whenever volume was equated. Could you also integrate those information together? Because I could also imagine that a lot of people might be interested in the most effective time-efficient programs

Great video and super interesting study! What did you think of Menno's critiques of this meta, namely the methods of analysis and non-linear findings?

Rest pause training works and it is in direct conflict with the idea that longer rest times are needed.

Speaking as someone who has been lifting consistently for 14 years straight, I highly doubt that for experienced lifters there is a real benefit in reducing their rest periods for compounds in either upper or lower body to 1,5-2 minutes. I deem the costs of accumulated fatigue due to cardiovascular exhaustion as way too high and non productive. If I do a barbell row with 350lbs I´d rather hesitate to do another set after 1,5 minutes, not because of the reduced performance even if I would equate volume for what I usually do, but simply because at set 3 I would be so gased out from a cardiovascular point of view than any subsequent set would just feel like a desperate attempt so somehow getting the weight from A to B. And no it´s not a matter of a lack of stamina if anybody wonders. I do definitely enough zone II cardio to have that at a decent level. The recommendation makes sense, but not for someone who built a substantial amount of strength or muscle who already has to pay attention to a sustainable stimulus to fatigue ratio in their workouts.

Awesome content as always! Looking forward to the app. Do you need any technical alpha/beta testers (intermediate/advanced bodybuilding focus)? I most recently used RP's app.

Very good Video! Are Supersets than also good? I think when you do unilateral supersets z. B for the Arms than its very close to have a rest time between 1 and 2 minutes. Or you must than train complete without rest

These little adjustments make a big difference. I have time for two lifting sessions per week, 90 minutes each. And I try to cram as much as I can in during that time. Shaving a minute off my rest time early in the workout when I’m less fatigued would actually let me sneak another set or two in for important muscle groups. Thanks for clarifying.

Any ideas on why this could be the case? Is it something to do with metabolites or the effective reps model? Is tonnage not as important as previously thought?

I love the thorough analysis of these studies, thank you for this. To be fair mmy rest times was around those you have reccomended , so overall im happy about the findings. Amd gives me something to pass on to my friend who is part of the '45 second rest all you need flr every lift' gang, gotta challenge the muscle mann 😅

Thank you Doctor.

How does this intersect with rep range? Because reducing rest times, and therefore performance, on 5-10 reps is not the same as on 10-20 or 20-30. Do you need to reduce weight to stay within the target range?

If im currently resting 3.5 min between sets should I immediately start resting 1.5 min instead or gradually decrease the rest times every week?, and if gradually, how should I do it?

If the threshold for small effect was 0.15 and most rest periods had a difference of less than or close to 0.15, isn't it more accurate to conclude all rest periods are similar? Also, comparing upper and lower body for required rest periods seems to be a poor way to compare exercises that need longer rest. It's more so that compound exercises require longer rest than isolation rather than lower body vs upper body.

1-2 minutes is tough for me because my cardio sucks right now due to surgery recovery and being out for a while. I typically do 3-5 minutes.

What about drop sets? Can we still use them? Do we have studies that compares drop sets to conventional sets?

how would this work for supersets? 1-2 mins after the second exercise?

I did my first years of training with 1 minute breaks. Worked. Just one note on progressive overload and tracking: Do note that shorter rest pauses reduces your performance compared to a longer pause so keep that in mind when tracking progressive overload. Otherwise you are fine. Just progress with your 1 minute pauses and you are fine.

So my 90s is just right. Makes perfect sense to me. If the rest time is too short, meaning you are still winded and heart rate is high, your systemic stress is too high and you cannot perform very well. However you will get a powerful systemic stress response which is good for hormones, especially if you are older. If you rest too long, meaning you could do next set, but you sit around still, your systemic stress level goes too low and you won't get the hormonal benefits which the systemic stress can give you. But you probably can get to PR easier. So what's the right rest time? Like always, it's about balance. Rest just enough until you feel you can perfom the next set well. This could be under 60s for some small muscle groups and over 2 mins for large muscles. This way you get the hormonal benefits and can stress the muscle

do they have any idea on how rest times affect muscle growth and strenght ? What about giant sets ? thank you, great video !

90 Seconds of rest is a sweet spot for upper and at least 120s for legs else you can't walk brah. Thx for the vid gang!

when you change your Mind and plan after each new study

On the one hand, the data says you won’t lose on gains, but we all know for a fact, you’re gonna get many more of those ugly reps with shorter rest time, which are higher injury risk reps, if not just outright lose out on a few reps, which you would have to make up for in an additional set.. so the minute you’re shaving off is not gonna make up for the added 80-120 seconds of rest / 30-60 second newly needed set..

I like to use heart rate monitors for rest times. Once I'm in back in the lower end of zone 2, means time to do the next set. This can be anywhere between 1-4 minutes depending on the intensity of the previous set and overall workout fatigue. Of course the key is an accurate monitor, in my case it's the polar h10 chest strap. Dr. Milo, I would love to hear your opinion on heart rate monitoring for rest time in strength / bodybuilding training context.

I've been resting 90 seconds to 5 minutes between sets before the findings of this meta analysis, I will now rest 90 sec to 5 minutes, after the findings of this meta analysis 😂. I'm sry if this had been mentioned in the video and in the studies, but have the studies taken 'training to failure' into account? Because I can't see myself going for another set in 90 seconds after taking a set of incline bench to 0RIR

Whats the TLDR

If you are aware of your previous weeks performance per set/reps, you can cross reference that with your present days last-set rest time, and use variable rest times to not have a performance drop off while still using the minimum rest time between sets. Doing log-based variable rest times does require keeping workout logs though, and a starting default rest time per exercise. EG: when doing drop sets to failure: set 1: 16 reps (previous week 14 reps) rest 90 seconds set 2: 13 reps (previous week 15 reps) you can infer for the next set, you will need greater than 90 seconds recovery, to keep performance at or above the previous weeks. rest 120 seconds set 3: 17 reps (previous week 14 reps) and so on. It's pretty intuitive. If you didn't have enough gas the previous set for performance, put more in the tank for the next set.

How does the study being volume equated account for differences in strength and the for individual rpe?

A bit unrelated, but I have a question regarding rep ranges. You've said on multiple occasions that doing a variety of rep ranges is beneficial for muscle growth, and because I'm a person that does much better with a smaller selection of different exercises, I was wondering whether this would still apply and be the case for doing the same exercise. For example doing something like bodyweight pullups in the rep range of 12-15, and then doing them weighted for something like 5-8?

What am I missing? At 2:48 the figure shows, as far as I can tell, no statistically significant difference between the 4 rest times.

Question: for exercises like a dumbbell curl or cable late raise, each arm might take a minute (eg 20x3s). Does that mean basically no rest and just alternate arms, or take a minute between complete sets so each arm actually spends two mins resting. With 3 or 4 mins a set it makes little difference l, but with just 1 min rest per set it's a big difference.

This seems to be another example of hard sets being more important than performance for muscle growth. Whatever brings the intensity up works even if it compromises load. Not always better, but at least as good.

I’m confused why you didn’t include a 3 minute ceiling on some of the rest times in your takeaway, since a lot of the studies you mentioned said 3 min rest was better than 1.

Is Dr. Brad J. Schoenfeld involved is something like 2/3 of all exercise science studies? I am seeing his name on these studies a lot.

Are there optimal rest times for maximizing strength and(or) power?

We need the latest research on pre exhaust technique.

Are there any studies (and if not I’d like your opinion on this) that reflect individuals height re rest time? I’m about 195 cm and I swear that I need more rest than my 5’6 lifting buddy.

The only thing I learned here is be careful with meta analyses… they are typically full of wrong assumptions about the original studies. Crunching everything together results in crunched understanding.

I'm gonna use my personal experience (which is the highest form of scientific evidence) to say that I noticed that during myoreps I need to do more volume in order to get DOMS, for example, I always do 8 sets of triceps pushdowns with an elastic band in my home gym after I'm done with chest exercises, these sets are quite intense and painful so I know that I'm going hard, if I tried to do 8 sets of skull crushers with 2 minutes of rest after training chest I would be much more sore, in my personal experience each set is less stimulative so you need to do more of them. It's good to see though that short rest times are not necessarily bad, in any case you can just do more sets, I always try to do intensity techniques on smaller muscles since it saves time and cardio is not a problem. I paused at 6:30 and it says in that study that those who used 20 seconds rest times had better repeated sprint ability than the 80 second rest time group, but that conversely the 80 second rest time group gained more strength, this makes sense, if you train with low rest times your body gets used to doing many reps and higher rest times gets your body used to pushing harder for each rep, for hypertrophy it doesn't matter since you are not competing.

Do these results apply for strength as well? Also, my lack of cardio ability would make it really hard for me to complete sets of squats for 10 reps @RP9 with only 2 minutes, I usually use 3

What is the optimal rest time when using super sets of antagonistic muscles?

Soooooooo, would you rather us hire you (twice a year for me) or get your app?

For me (and I guess some trainers) the interesting part is set equated as I will not do makeup with more sets and calculate the lost load. That is something for sceintists ad therethicans and not practitioners of weight training.

There is no way you can recover in 60 seconds if you are lifting with any sort of intensity.

My intuition is that my workouts would be significantly less pleasant if I rested less but had to do more sets to make up for it: constantly gassed, not saving any time really.

The biggest implication from this seems to be that most of us would need to reduce the weight for a given exercise, since sets to and beyond might not have enough strength to be up in the desired rep range.

With the decrease in rest times between sets is the strenght output still increasing at the same rate overtime? I mean wouldn't the hypertrophy experienced be leaning more towards the sarcoplasmic rather then the myofibrillar? As opposed to the opposite with longer rest periods?

Well you was more right than you was wrong. And you still mentioned that 👍

Dude what brand is that sweater at 10:58?

If I squat a 10RM I‘m laying on the floor breathing heavily for 5min

Since I train in circuits and opposite muscles I usually dont rest or if I need to, I only do it until I think I’m ready to go

Very interesting and useful analysis, but I don't know about rest times for lower body isolation. You definitely don't need to rest 1.5 minutes between sets for calves, and probably not for leg extensions, either.

I like when the reaserch give me a lot of confirmation.

Maybe I didn't understand, and the following was already accounted for, but could it be that people who took shorter rests tried harder to reach the target rep range (even if failing to get there). Or stated differently, their state of arousal was higher because of their perception of difficulty which lead to getting closer to failure on each set? Would the effectiveness of short rest times diminish as a lifters expectation of how many reps they were going to get adjusted downward?

Well, thanks to your other advice, I built my routine around antagonistic supersets. So therefor...?

I rest 10 seconds just to be safe.

I generally need long rest times, probably more than 3-5 minutes sometimes. I don't feel ready if I rest shorter because I also train for strength. And I don't want to reduce the set quality. Would lower rest times still be more efficient?

@Wolfcoach What do you think of the RP rest times model which consists of 4 factors: Are you still out of breath? Is any other muscle (not the one you are trying to train primarily) going to limit you on your subsequent set? Do you feel ready to work the muscle hard again (psychological drive)? Will you be able to hit at least 5 quality reps on the set? Obviously the answers would have to be: no, no, yes, yes in this model to start your next set. But this could mean you are resting for longer than 2 minutes on some exercises and probably a lot less on other ones like a calf raise... Do you think this model is valid in practice?

How do you pair this with rep-ranges? Do you just not care and work with much wider ones ? Because if I rest 1.5 minutes on a heavy upper body compound that I take close to failure, there is no way I will get even close to the same reps. Atm I rest 3 min for upper coumpounds and 3-5 for lower body compounds and I still hit the bottom of my rep ranges and lose 2-3 reps on average (typically I lose the most reps between first and second set and then slightly less between 2nd and 3rd). I would say for me, lengthened bias exercises are substantially harder to maintain performance on between sets compared to others. Doesn't the data somehow gives credence to effective reps theory assuming at least minimum >1min rest?

I think I do best going off of feel. I usually get in 2 sets per 4 min song, and sometimes 3. I’m glad I’ve been verified as being probably good enough in practice

how much rest for unilateral exercises

the science keeps changing, lots of studies revealing contradictory results. All of these flip flops just point me to focusing on golden era trainers' advice and not think give into all of these conflicting studies. In Arnold's Bodybuilding Encyclopedia he recommends 90 seconds between sets. We keep going in circles and end up admitting that golden era bodybuilders, even though they were not following the science, knew what they were doing.

So you are saying that although you thought you were right before you were wrong, and now you are again saying that you are right? Is that right? Or am I wrong?

Awesome as always. Will 100% be getting the app

I tried 1 min, 2 min, 3, 4... Now i just listen to my body and go for next set when i feel ready

I do only 3 sets and 60s rest between and I always get sore after my workouts and have been progressing very well. I make up for the low sets with the reps, I do an exercise to failure on 1st set (also do warm up set before), then on sets 2-3 I try to match the 1st set, if I stop beforehand I just rest for 12-15 seconds and get back to it and finish the set before resting 60s before next set.

What if you just prefer long rests (say 3 mins)? You aren't missing much according to the evidence.

Interesting. Is that mean metabolites are more important than we think?

Appreciate your unbiased nature! I always found it odd how shorter rest times were seen as subpar, yet myo reps were seen as a great intensity technique.

Of note: that 20s vs 80s study took 24 minutes for the 20 second group and 46 minutes for the 80 second group

I don’t time my rests I just go off feeling, if I was to time them I reckon 45-90 seconds typically. I don’t see massive drop offs between set performance, typically it would be something like 15,14,11.

Basically in the real world, as long as the overall reps and weights and overall intensity match, doesn't really matter much how long you rest. If you rest less than 1 min, make up with more sets. If you rest for 3 mins, push hard as well.

Vince Gironda’s 8 x 8 or FST 7 review please!

There is a question about resting I would like science to find out though, I am doing a big super set, for example 1 set of chest + 90-120 sec. rest 1 set of pull downs + 90-120 sec. rest 1 set of leg squat + 90-120 sec. rest and then I go back to the chest and start over again, resulting 8-10 min. rest between chest, back or legs sets. Does this hurt hypertrophy?

The Magic words are: Not peer reviewed !!!

My guess is Whole range of rest of times is good. Shorter rest times more cardio, and longer more strength. And hypertrophy probably could benifit from both long and short rest times.

7:46 its 80s rest on average (like it says on the note) vs 120s i also dont understand why the hypertrophy favored DI. the difference between pre vs post for CI (CSAA) is 8.8 & DI (CSAA) is 9.5 but for CI (CSAT) is 28.6 & DI (CSAT) is 27.5. shouldnt it be DI favors arm and CI favors thigh? 7:57 same average of 80s rest. basically the same test but with creatine. out of the three studies, 1 favors 180s rest, 2nd is mixed and the last one favors decreasing interval

Watching this on my 3 min rest between sets of dumbbell shoulders press

Worrying about rest times is majoring in the minors. Just do what you prefer and what your schedule allows. I'd be worried about form breakdown doing 2 min rest between deadlift or squat sets lol.

we be competing with the rp app

2 mins is not enough for lower body compound

1:25 typo, it's "if resting

Myoreps are back

Great