Case closed, right?īut bodybuilders don’t train like that. And just like in that first study, the participants who used longer rest times gained twice as much muscle. Anyway, just like in the first study, the participants did three sets with one minute of rest, and they compared that to three sets with three minutes of rest. Schoenfeld was an author on this study too, actually. The Longo StudyĪ few years later, Longo and colleagues published a follow-up study ( study). The classic bodybuilders were onto something. Depending on how much weight you’re moving and how fit you are, maybe that means resting two minutes. You take the time you need to feel fully recovered, or at least mostly recovered.
Nowadays, the standard bulking advice is to rest like a powerlifter.
But it was a debilitating blow, and short rest times have never made a full recovery. It didn’t kill the dogma outright-bodybuilders aren’t so easily dissuaded. The study struck the lifting community like a warhammer. So that means that longer rest times are better, right? Not quite, but a lot of people came away with that conclusion, and it’s easy to see why. But the group using longer rest times wound up gaining twice as much. The group using short rest times built muscle just fine.
Each group did three sets of each exercise. He had the second group rest for three minutes between sets, more similar to how a powerlifter might rest after going up a flight of stairs. Schoenfeld had the first group rest for one minute between sets, which was fairly typical for bodybuilders back then. Brad Schoenfeld published a study that ravaged the landscape ( study). Powerlifters were all about maintaining high performance from set to set, even if that meant spending most of their workouts resting. Bodybuilders were all about training density, blasting through set after set, even if that meant huge drops in performance as they progressed through their workouts. The idea was to recover their strength before demolishing the next set, especially on their compound lifts.įor an example of that, here’s the first workout from Starting Strength, a beginner strength training routine made by the former powerlifter, Mark Rippetoe:īodybuilders and powerlifters were using completely different styles of training. They would often spend about the same amount of time in the gym as the bodybuilders, but much more of that time would be spent resting. They would take longer rest periods and do fewer exercises, even when they were trying to bulk up. Bench Press: 4 sets of 8 repetitions (4×8).Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuildingįor an example of how that looks, here’s the first workout in Schwarzenegger’s beginner bodybuilding routine: Try to keep your rest periods between sets down to a minute or less. If you take 5 minutes between each set, your heart rate slows down, you lose your pump, the muscles get cold, and your level of intensity drops down to nothing. Their heart rates would stay elevated all through their workouts, they’d get killer pumps, and they’d pack in a ton of sets and exercises. They’d lift hard, rest quickly, and then leap back into the next set. Back in the golden of age of bodybuilding, everyone was all about short rest times.