How Long To Rest Between Strength Training

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Today’s question comes from Rob. Rob asks, “I had a question about the rest, in between my strength training sessions. I’m currently doing one set at a time when I have a strength day. How much rest, if any, should I take between each exercise? For example, how much rest should I take between 30 meters of lateral shuffling and 15 mountain climber doubles?

Rob, that’s a great question. Like in running intervals, rest is a very important component of your training plan. You can do mile repeats, and I’m using running as an example because I’m assuming that most of the listeners here have a better understanding of running workouts than they do strength training workouts, but either way, it kind of goes the same way.

For example, you could be assigned a workout of three, four times a mile and the intensity and the difficulty of that workout, and how fast you’re able to run those mile repeats, is completely dependent upon the rest. If we were to say, do that workout three to four times mile with four to five minutes rest, you’re going to be able to run close to all out speed or near your marks for those three to four mile repeats, but if I only gave you a minute rest in between those repeats, it’s going to completely change how fast you’re able to run. You’re probably only going to be able to run maybe near 8K or 10K pace, in order to keep that rest at one minute. The same goes for your gym training.

Now, there’s a couple of factors that we want to look at when we do this gym training. The first factor, and I think this is the thing that most runners get wrong. I know I got it wrong when I was in college and professionally, before I got educated on the subject. The thing I was doing wrong the most was, I was trying to make my gym session on endurance on aerobic session. I would move from exercise to exercise as quickly as I could, thinking that the harder that I was breathing, the more that I was working, the better that was working for my running.

What we’ve learned from research and what I’ve seen with the examples of strength training experts is that, running should be the time where you work on your endurance; when you work on your aerobic ability. In the gym is not when you’re working on those ability. In the gym, you’re working on improving your strength and improving your form, improving your flexibility, those types of things.

With that goal in mind, taking as minimal rest as possible, isn’t always the best idea because then you sacrifice potentially being able to do more weight, more repetitions, more minutes in holding a particular exercise. You sacrifice that ability in order to have less rest; when you use less rest. The other important factor is that you also potentially sacrifice using good form. The more tired you are, the more likely it is that you’re going to have bad form when you’re doing your exercises.

The most common thing that runners get wrong, when they do strength training whether it be in the gym or core workouts at home et cetera is that, leave the aerobic building, the aerobic work, all of the endurance work for the running. That is when you improve that, during your run. That’s not what you’re working on when you’re in the gym. With that said, how much rest should you take?

Now, when you’re doing strength work, the longer you rest, the more weight you’re going to handle. If the exercises that you’re doing involve heavy weights, for example, if you’re doing stuff in the gym like deadlifts, squats, one legged squats, anything where you’re actually using weight, and the goal is to improve your strength, you’re probably doing rep ranges between six to ten repetitions.

If that’s the case, then you probably want to rest anywhere from 90 seconds to 3 minutes. Again, that’s going to feel foreign in the weight room because everything we do as runners is, you’re out of breath. You start a new interval and a workout and you barely catch your breath and you start again and that’s going to be the complete opposite.

When we talk about strength training, in order to perform our best at strength training, that means we need to let our ATP systems recover completely and that happens between 90 seconds and 3 minutes and so that’s why I give that range there. Because you’re a runner, you’re generally going to recover a little bit faster than somebody who’s not a runner. That’s why there’s that range between 90 seconds and 3 minutes, but it’s not a bad thing especially if you’re doing heavy squats and you’re maybe going for eight repetitions.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to rest for 3 minutes. I know it feels like it is and I still struggle with this today even knowing what I know and knowing that the 3 minutes rest is going to make my strength training session more effective, taking less rest means it’s less effective; all of those things. All that being said, I still have problems taking 3 minutes rest and I’ll usually max out around 2, unless I’m super, super tired. Generally you’re going to want to take between 90 seconds and 3 minutes rest between heavy.

Now, if you’re doing body weight exercises, most of those are going to be a core routine or a hip exercise, those things where you’re not necessarily lifting a lot of weight. The exercise might generally not be too or extremely difficult. In that case, resting between 45 seconds and 90 seconds, a minute being above average, is probably pretty good. You don’t need to jump from one exercise to the next.

Especially in Rob’s example, when he asked how much rest between 30 meters of lateral shuffling and 15 mountain climber doubles, these are exercises that are obviously tasking on your aerobics system, and so you’re probably going to want to gear towards taking a minute or 90 seconds rest. I think that encompasses almost all the strength work. I’ll add one caveat. There are some strength sessions, especially the ones that we assign, the strength training for runners program that are circuit training.

In those cases, circuit training is designed to also work your aerobic system or your metabolic systems. In those cases you would move from one to the next without any rest. In the strength training from runners program, we call them circuit workouts and in the description of the workouts, we explain that we’re working on your metabolic systems, aerobic systems, while also strength training. If you’re using our programs, that’s the indication to you that you’re not taking any rest between the movements that you’re performing.

In other programs, typically if they call it a circuit, generally you want to take no rest in between your exercises as probably it’s designed to be some type of work. In our case, with this strength training for runners program, the reason that we have these circuit training workouts is because we know that a lot of runners, whether they are beginners or injury prone runners, often times we can’t get in the total miles that we’d love to get for the week because of injuries or we’re just not ready to run more.

In those cases, we can do a circuit training session that will hit all the aspects at once. We work on our metabolic systems; we also work on our structural systems by doing the strength work. We have runners that maybe only can run a mile or two before they need to stop, to make sure that their injury doesn’t get worse, circuit training is a great way to increase the total time that you spend working out, making it a 10, 20 minute total exercise time, when you’re only running two miles or something like that or even less.

It’s a great way to incorporate both of those and it’s great for beginner runners who, they obviously want to get more, but because their metabolic systems, so your aerobic system improves at a greater rate than your structural system, combining the two allows us to progress both at the same time and ideally make it so your metabolic system doesn’t get too far ahead of what your structural system is able to handle. That’s why a lot of beginner runners get injured.

You can actually read our full article on the research on that on our site. If you go to our blog, we have a search engine there, runnersconnect.net/blog and if you type in metabolic verse structural changes or something even just metabolic, you’ll come up with that article that comes up with the full research, et cetera. Went on a little bit of attention there, but I did want to get in depth on why the rest in your strength training is important and the two or three different ways that we can manipulate the rest to get you a different type of workout.

Rob, I hope that answered your question for you. If you have questions, you’ll head to runnersconnect.net/daily, click that record button and you can send us those questions. Hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. We’ll be back with you tomorrow answering another question and I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks so much for listening.