Good rest time between sets how to#

Good rest time between sets how to#

That means that to keep our muscles growing all week long, we need to train them every few days-at least twice per week.įor more, we have a full article on how to train for muscle growth.

Challenge each muscle at least twice per week.A challenging workout stimulates a few days of muscle growth.

The same is true when you cut your rest times short, starting your next set before you’ve regained your strength. You may need to do 2–3 drop sets or rest-pause sets to get the same stimulus as a regular set. With that said, short rest times can be great for building muscle, just keep in mind that they stimulate less muscle growth per set. If you’re trying to build more muscle with every set, resting 2–5 minutes is often best. Anywhere from 4–40 reps will stimulate muscle growth, but sets of 6–20 reps are more efficient, allowing you to build more muscle with every set.

Lift within the hypertrophy rep range.

Stopping 1–2 reps away from failure often works best.

Take your sets close enough to failure.

For example, deep bench presses for your chest, front squats for our quads, and deadlifts for your glutes and hamstrings. Lifts that challenge your muscles through a deep range of motion tend to stimulate more muscle growth. There are a few things you can do to get more muscle growth out of every set that you do: That’s why we need to talk about the ideal kind of volume before we can talk about the ideal amount of volume. Now you’re training efficiently.īecause these two ways of training stimulate a different amount of muscle growth per set, we can’t weigh them equally. Now let’s imagine that you’re doing 10 sets of skull crushers, that you’re doing 12 reps per set, and that you’re bringing those sets within 1–2 reps of failure. That training style isn’t an efficient way to build bigger triceps. But let’s say that you choose an exercise that isn’t great at working your triceps (such as the bench press). If we’re defining training volume as the number of challenging sets we do, we need to make sure that the sets we’re doing are similarly efficient at stimulating muscle growth.įor example, let’s imagine that you’re trying to build bigger triceps, so you decide to do 10 sets for your triceps every week. For example, if you do 5 sets of the bench press on Monday, 5 sets of push-ups on Wednesday, and 5 sets of dips on Friday, then the weekly training volume for your chest is 15 sets. Training volume is best defined as the number of challenging sets you do per muscle per week. (I think this idea was popularized by Nathan Jones.) Since challenging sets stimulate similar amounts of muscle growth regardless of how much work we’re doing, a better way to measure our training volume is to simply count the number of hard sets we’re doing.

When training for muscle mass, we don’t need to know how much work we’re doing, we just need to know how much muscle growth we’re stimulating.

That’s not particularly useful information when trying to build muscle, though. For example, if we’re trying to improve how much overall work we’re doing per week (work capacity), then the first definition is better.

For instance, if we did 5 challenging sets of front squats on Monday, 5 more on Friday, the training volume for our quads would be 10 sets per week.īoth of these definitions are correct, and both can be useful, too. Training volume = number of challenging sets per muscle per week.For example, if we did 10 sets of front squats for 5 reps each, with a load of 225 pounds, our weekly squat volume would be 11,250 pounds. Training Volume = total pounds lifted per exercise: number of sets × number of reps × weight lifted.The Minimum Volume Needed to Build Muscleīefore we can talk about the ideal training volume for building muscle, we need to define what training volume is, at least in the context of hypertrophy training.Does Doing More Sets Build More Muscle?.