Hello. I have a question to anyone out there who could help concerning rest periods between sets. Now, I'll admit right off the bat up front that I don't know much about exercise or weight lifting and never have, although I am seriously making an effort to learn about these disciplines with as much research as I can do on here and other places online in hopes of changing my life in that respect. Anyway, there seems to be a lot of very knowledgable people on here, and I figured this would be the best place to ask a probably very simple question.
The thing I've never been able to understand in exercising was how to determine rest periods between sets of any given exercise (strength or cardiovascular). How much time should be given to rest between sets of a particular exercise, and how much time should be given to rest between two different sets of exercise sets? For example, if you are doing 3 sets of ab crunches or something, how much time should you wait between finishing one set and beginning the next? Is it better to trade out directly from one set of exercises into a set of different exercises to still be working out and yet still allowing the first target area to rest? Does it vary from one type of exercise to another? I'm sure this is probably the simplest, stupidest question of all time, but I swear, I have looked up and down the Internet, and while I can find descriptions of every exercise imaginable, no one explains just how much time should lapse between exercises. I'm totally in the dark on this one, so if anyone could explain this to me or help shed some light on the subject, I would be extremely, EXTREMELY grateful. Thank you! MATT

hi,

the rest period depends on how you feel.

A common rest period is 60 seconds, as the goal in the gym is to fatigue the muscles as quickly as possible, so hanging around for 5 mins is no good.

But if you are using very heavy weights (e.g. doing 6 reps to failure), i would advocate 2 mins rest, or until your heart rate returns almost to normal (depends on you, could be 3 or 4 minutes).

i personaly use 2 mins rest. (I do 4 sets of 6-8)

-Alex

xander is right. you can start with 2 minutes and try to work your way down.

Another way to gauge rest periods is to rest long enough that you can do the same number of reps as the previous set. I often superset opposing muscles (chest/back,triceps/biceps) to allow one to rest longer while I'm doing a set of the other. Similat to what others have said above, I tend to rest 2-3 minutes when I am doing heavy sets of basic compound exercises and 1 minute when I am doing assistance exercises or single joint exercises.

no break!! suck it up!! work! work! work! ... or 30 - 60 seconds is good ... ur choice ... a lot of people train with a partner and swap in and out sets ... i think that can be too long of a break if u rn't lifting too heavy-a-weight