The Benefits of Tracking Your Rest Periods Between Sets

When you step into the gym, you likely have a clear plan in mind: to push your body, build strength, and achieve your fitness goals. You diligently track your reps, sets, and weights lifted, but there's one often-overlooked aspect of your workout that can make a significant difference in your progress: rest periods between sets. In this blog post, we'll explore the importance of tracking your rest periods and the benefits it can bring to your fitness journey.

The Role of Rest Periods in Your Workouts

Rest periods are the intervals of time you take between sets or exercises during your workout. They serve a crucial purpose in your training routine, affecting various aspects of your performance and results.

1. Muscle Recovery

Rest periods allow your muscles to recover partially between sets. During intense exercise, your muscles accumulate fatigue and metabolites like lactic acid. Adequate rest helps clear these metabolites, reducing muscle soreness and enabling you to perform better in subsequent sets.

2. Strength and Power 

For exercises focused on maximal strength and power, longer rest periods are essential. They provide sufficient time for your nervous system to recover, ensuring you can exert maximum force during each set.

3. Hypertrophy (Muscle Growth)

Shorter rest periods (typically 30-90 seconds) are often employed in hypertrophy-focused workouts. These brief intervals create metabolic stress in the muscles, a key driver of muscle growth.

4. Fat Loss and Conditioning

In workouts aimed at fat loss and conditioning, shorter rest periods keep your heart rate elevated, enhancing calorie burn and cardiovascular fitness.

The Benefits of Tracking Rest Periods

Now that we understand the significance of rest periods, let's delve into why tracking them is so beneficial for your fitness journey.

1. Precision in Training

Tracking rest periods ensures that you adhere to your intended training regimen. It prevents unintentional variations in rest times, helping you maintain consistency in your workouts 

2. Progression Monitoring

Just as you track weight lifted and repetitions, monitoring rest periods enables you to track your progression. Over time, you can reduce rest times as your conditioning and recovery capacity improve.

3. Effective Time Management

Efficient use of your workout time is essential, especially if you have a busy schedule. Tracking rest periods ensures you neither rush nor unnecessarily prolong your workouts.

4. Enhanced Workout Planning

When you record rest periods, you gain valuable insights into your workout planning. You can tailor your rest times to align with your specific goals, whether it's strength, hypertrophy, or endurance.

5. Preventing Plateaus

Plateaus can be frustrating on your fitness journey. By tracking rest periods, you can identify if stagnant progress is due to excessive rest or inadequate recovery between sets.

How to Track Your Rest Periods

Tracking your rest periods is a straightforward process that can be done with minimal effort. Here's how you can incorporate it into your workout routine:

1. Use a Timer: The simplest method is to use a timer. Most smartphones have timer apps that you can set to your desired rest period duration.

2. Wearable Fitness Devices: Many fitness trackers and smartwatches offer built-in timers that you can use during your workouts.

3. Workout Apps: There are numerous workout apps available that not only guide your exercises but also time your rest periods.

4. Traditional Stopwatch or Clock: If you prefer a low-tech approach, a traditional stopwatch or wall clock with a second hand can work just as well.

Tailoring Rest Periods to Your Goals

The optimal rest period varies based on your specific fitness goals and the exercises you're performing. Here's a general guideline:

- Strength and Power: Longer rest periods of 2-5 minutes between sets are ideal.

- Hypertrophy (Muscle Growth): Rest for 30 seconds to 90 seconds between sets.

- Fat Loss and Conditioning: Shorter rest periods of 30 seconds to 60 seconds help maintain an elevated heart rate.

Tracking your rest periods between sets is an often-overlooked yet crucial aspect of optimizing your workouts. It ensures precision, helps you monitor progression, manages your workout time effectively, enhances your workout planning, and can even break through plateaus. By taking this simple step, you can fine-tune your training, align it with your goals, and accelerate your journey toward improved strength, muscle growth, and overall fitness.

There are No Shortcuts

I’m not trying to sell you a shortcut. 

Shortcuts with a healthy lifestyle will NOT get you a healthy lifestyle. They’ll earn you a temporary fix that’ll soon disappear when the work is done.

This is why I’ve never been a proponent of “diets” or time limited programs. I get the incentive behind it. We all want results quickly, but do you want that fast result if it won’t last?

I ask my clients that all the time when they tell me they’re doing something wild.

Are you willing to do this for the rest of your life?

If not, you haven’t found a solution that works for you.

Don’t search for the shortcut, search for the SOLUTION.

I’m here to do the work with you.

I believe that every single person can create a healthy lifestyle.

A lifestyle that:

✔️ has you working out consistently 

✔️ has you eating well 

✔️ feels balanced

All without feeling like you’re sacrificing.

I believe it so fervently that I do the work right beside you, so we can hold each other up and encourage each other along the way.

Don't Waste Your Time

There is nothing more annoying than walking out of a workout thinking “that wasn’t hard enough, I need to do something else.”

You’ve been there huh?

Cuz I know I have and GEEZ it is SO frustrating.

It’s not like you’ll have more time during the day to workout. The time you have is the only time you have, and there’s no worse feeling than wasting it.

I tell my clients all the time that they can eye roll me or let out the dramatic sigh, but I know they keep coming back because they know it’s time and money well spent.

They know that even though the workout is going to be challenging, it’ll be worth it.

When time is our most valuable resource because it’s non-renewable, the last thing I want is for you to leave a workout feeling like you just wasted it.

All that’s going to get you is more fuel for your excuses to not show up tomorrow.

Which leads to an even bigger waste of time because not showing up will lead to a complete regression on whatever progress you’ve made.

This is why you need to push yourself. Not to the point of breaking but to the point of inherently know that your time has been well spent.

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Tabata

12 rounds

Alternate exercises each round

Swings

Headcounters

Russian twists

Consistency is Key

Maybe you’re just starting a new routine. Maybe your routine is on point.

Keep showing up. 

Grab Your Dumbbells!

$0.00

Even when it gets sticky. 

Even when it gets hard and you want to quit.

On the mornings you would rather stay in bed, on the afternoons when work and being a part time chauffeur to all your kids’ activities is taking up all your time.

Especially on the days you don’t feel like it. 

That’s what will get you the change, the results, the transformation you’ve been working towards.

Not the best workouts everyday, but the consistent workouts.

Reality is that not every workout is going to be the best workout. It’s not going to feel like Disneyland.

If you’re pushing yourself, it very rarely ever will. 

But at the end of the day, what matters the most is you showing up regardless of all that extra noise and all those things you think are holding you back.

AMRAP 

6 minutes

8 seated overhead tricep presses

8 bridge hip taps

12 Russian twists

Peace Out A$$hole

I’m gonna sweat out my inner critic today. 

Wanna join me?

It’s amazing to me, not just as a trainer but as an athlete as well, how hard we can be on ourselves.

It’s like as soon as the hard part of a workout kicks in, we immediately start beating ourselves up. Sure, sometimes we go to the “this sucks” line of thinking but more often than not, we go to the “I can’t do this” line of thinking.

I’ve been training people for over 10 years, and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, as soon as that thought creeps in, your body won’t be able to do whatever you’re telling it to do.

When your head goes to that spot, it becomes super easy to get discouraged and then it becomes even easier to just not show up.

I mean, why show up if it’s not going to go well in the first place right?

Some days though, the last person I want to deal with is that negative voice. Sometimes I just want to bust through a workout and not worry about my opinion of it.

I’m determined to shut that noise out today. To show myself that MY best is more than enough and my strength is not just some dream but my reality.

Save this Workout 

5 rounds

10 reps each round

10 swings

8 single arm push press

8 single arm cleans

Get Moving, Get Motivated

Action first, motivation later.

I know…you’re thinking you need the motivation first. 

Here’s the hard truth: if you were already motivated, you would ALREADY be consistent with your workouts.

Consistency is what I hear most of my clients wanting. You don’t want to fall off the bandwagon of working out anymore. You know it’s important, you know you feel better when you do it, but you can’t seem to hold a habit longer than a few months.

It’s the falling off the bandwagon that makes you lose the little motivation you had. You’re falling off that bandwagon because you’re going too crazy too fast.

Kind of like how you work an interval.

If you push to your max effort the first couple minutes in, you’ll burn out fast. You burn out, you want to quit and before you know it, you’re back at your starting point.

Except you feel way worse because hey you tried…but you failed.

When your failure isn’t because you couldn’t do it, it’s because you weren’t realistic in the first place.

Reality: every workout you get through, cute or not, reinforces that you CAN get through it and gives you the motivation to show up again.

Save this Workout 

4 Rounds

10 reps each exercise

Lateral lunges

Sumo squats

Deadlifts