The importance of inter-set recovery

No matter what type of exercise you are carrying out you will eventually need a rest period to recover. Sports scientists refer to this period as inter-set recovery, when your muscles are able to clear metabolic byproducts and replenish energy stores between sets. In this post I will be breaking down the basics on how to gauge your inter-set recovery to adequately build those adaptations you want after each workout.

Let’s first break down the length of time generally needed to rest between sets on a muscular hypertrophy day. Hypertrophy workouts are used for gaining muscles and typically require 8+ reps per set. You would think the high rep ranges would mean a long rest time is required, but studies back up that 1.5 minutes is the best amount of time needed to recover. It’s also why a lot of casual gym goers prefer to do hypertrophy training. It can allow you to get your workouts done fast and get a lot more exercises in during one workout. Muscular strength is different however.

Strength training puts much more strain on the body with heavier loads and less reps per set. Typically during strength training you won’t go for more than 6 reps per set, and your rest periods should range from 3-5 minutes. This allows your nervous system to more fully recover between sets, allowing you to produce more maximum effort on each rep. On bigger compound lifts like squats and deadlifts this is very important.

Next up we have Muscular Endurance. This type of training has less scientific evidence for the rest times, but what we do know is that you typically can rest for much shorter periods of time while keeping up the same intensity. Any athletes reading this will know that they are given short rest times, sometimes even less than a minute, and are able to still perform. This is the same with circuit style training with 1 minute or less being the optimal rest time.

Over the course of your workouts you should be incorporating at least 2 of the 3 aforementioned training types. The rest times stated above will allow you to fully recover between sets and will maintain your intensity from set to set. This is a rough guideline however and you can vary it about until it suits you. For muscular strength for example, you might feel that 3 minutes is long enough to maintain your squat intensity over 5 sets, but deadlifts may need 4 minutes for you. Not everyone is the same but as long as you’re within this guidelines you will be on the right path to achieving all the goals you want in the gym.