Study Finally Answers How Much Rest Is Needed Between Bench Press Sets to Build Muscle

For anyone who has ever taken too long between reps at the gym while scrolling Instagram, according to a recent study, you could actually be maximizing your gains. That's right: researchers have found that to build strength and muscle, longer rest periods between reps are actually optimal.

The findings were published in the Journal of Sports Sciences late last year in a paper titled: "Optimizing mechanical performance in the bench press." Over the course of the study, researchers found that for peak performance, rest periods of up to five minutes between sets of bench press exercises provided better results than rest periods of one to three minutes.

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In coming up with the findings, the research team recruited 23 "physically active" participants comprised of 15 men and eight women. The participants were then divided into three groups that were instructed to rest for one, three, or five minutes between sets on a Smith machine bench press.

The participants performed six workouts of four sets each at approximately 75 percent of their one-rep maximum. During the first three workouts, subjects were told to stop bench pressing with about six reps in reserve. For the final three workouts, they stopped at four reps in reserve. To assess the proximity-to-failure, researchers took note of the participants' bar velocity.

What they found was that longer rest periods provided overall better strength training performance than shorter rest periods. However, when lifting lighter weights, researchers found that a three minute rest was still adequate.

"The results suggest that, to maintain bench press mechanical performance, five minute inter-set rest periods are necessary when sets are terminated close to failure, while three minutes may suffice when sets are terminated farther from failure," the study's authors write.

According to Barbend.com, the reason longer rest periods are beneficial when it comes to heavier weights may be due to the fact that the human body relies on different energetic resources for activity sessions with varying durations. And it makes sense that the muscles and central nervous system would require additional time to bounce back from lifting heavier weights, as opposed to endurance-focused sets with lighter weights.

The findings are not far off from what experts have previously suggested, in that different rest periods support different goals such as endurance, hypertrophy, strength, and power.

"When it comes to working out, timing is everything," Joe Stankowski, C.P.T., a trainer in Wilmington, DE previously told Men's Journal. "The amount of time you rest between sets can have a major impact on how the exercise you're doing affects your body."