The main purpose of rest periods is to allow your breathing and heart rate to reduce. This allows substances that may impede training intensity to clear, while allowing substances that provide energy to restore.
Another important aspect of rest is allowing time for your nervous system to recover. This is especially important when it comes to strength training, specifically when working at maximal loads.
When performing strength training, you need to ensure you are taking sufficient rest periods that allow you to facilitate optimal work on each set, without taking so long that there is zero fatigue from previous sets (you want the sets to have an accumulative effect).
Recommended rest periods:
· Primary lifts – when working above 85% of your 1RM, I recommend taking between 3-5 minutes’ rest.
· Individuals working between 70-85% are usually happy with 2-3 minutes’ rest.
· When working below 70%, and during assistance and auxiliary exercises, I would usually recommend 1-2 minutes’ rest. However, anywhere up to 3 minutes on assistance work is fine if needed. It’s key to remember that rest periods can be dynamic depending on how you feel.
· Dynamic effort work (50-60%) is often performed with 1-minute rest periods.
· Core work is best performed with short rest periods. I tend to programme between 10-30 seconds rest.
Thanks for reading
Jay
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