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Stop Rushing Your Rest Periods (How to Shorten Your Workout WITHOUT Losing Muscle) · Wits & Weights | Strength & Fat Loss Over 40

• 0:00
  Philip Pape: Hey, this is Philip.
• 0:01
  Philip Pape: I have a quick bonus episode for you today on a Saturday, and it's short because the subject of the episode is saving you time.
• 0:08
  Philip Pape: So I want to keep this short.
• 0:10
  Philip Pape: Now, on the last episode 500, I gave you five things that I got wrong.
• 0:15
  Philip Pape: And the pattern that was consistent across those was that I was overvaluing overvaluing a small variable and undervaluing a big one.
• 0:23
  Philip Pape: So here's a real life version of that.
• 0:26
  Philip Pape: And it's really good this time of year because we're in September, past Labor Day or Labor Day weekend when everybody's back into school.
• 0:33
  Philip Pape: So a lot of us are parents, a lot of us are over 40, and your schedule got a little bit tighter, and maybe you're trying to switch up your routine, or maybe you're you don't have as much time in the gym or whatever.
• 0:42
  Philip Pape: And I wanted to talk about rest periods between sets.
• 0:46
  Philip Pape: This could be a game changer for you.
• 0:48
  Philip Pape: Now, you hear a lot of advice or a lot of rules, I'll say, like, hey, you need this many minutes of rest for this type of exercise, or maybe you're wasting time if you rest too long and you'll get a better workout and you can shorten your workouts with less time.
• 1:02
  Philip Pape: But in reality, we've got to balance a bunch of things.
• 1:05
  Philip Pape: We've got to balance our life when we train, how much time we have in the gym, what types of lifts we are doing, our work capacity, you know, all of these things, whether we're in a fat loss phase or not, of how fast we can go through the workout and how long those rest periods can be.
• 1:22
  Philip Pape: And that's why there's so confusion, so much confusion about it.
• 1:26
  Philip Pape: So today I want to just quickly tell you why that number isn't necessarily what you think it is and how to how to approach this instead, depending on how much time you have to work out.
• 1:37
  Philip Pape: So let's start with rest and muscle growth.
• 1:40
  Philip Pape: There was a study of Bayesian meta-analysis in 2024 at a Brad Schoenfeld's group at Lehman, and these guys put out most of the good work related to this, these types of questions.
• 1:53
  Philip Pape: So I read a lot of what they published.
• 1:54
  Philip Pape: They actually pulled nine studies and they compared short rest, intermediate rest, long rest, and very long rest.
• 2:02
  Philip Pape: And the effect sizes across the four buckets, there was a lot of overlap, a lot of overlap.
• 2:09
  Philip Pape: So for muscle growth specifically, it turns out that the duration of your rest period is really not the big lever.
• 2:18
  Philip Pape: And I've talked in the past, like it is.
• 2:20
  Philip Pape: Many people do, like, oh, if you, you know, starting strength does that a lot.
• 2:24
  Philip Pape: They're like, you have to rest at least three to five minutes or more for your compound lifts.
• 2:27
  Philip Pape: Now, that's not the same as saying that rest doesn't matter.
• 2:30
  Philip Pape: So I want to explain the difference because today's Saturday, if you're gonna go into training Monday, this could help you out.
• 2:36
  Philip Pape: What rest is most beneficial for is to help you with your next set.
• 2:42
  Philip Pape: If you come back too soon, if you're not recovered from a either fatigue perspective, but even from a work capacity perspective as well, then you'll end up doing fewer reps at the same load, or you might even have to drop the load to get the reps when you didn't program it that way or wouldn't have done that.
• 3:00
  Philip Pape: And you end up getting either less volume or less intensity than you planned.
• 3:05
  Philip Pape: Now, on the last episode 500, I talked about proximity to failure or effort being the thing that makes your volume actually count.
• 3:14
  Philip Pape: Okay.
• 3:15
  Philip Pape: Well, you can't get close to failure with a meaningful load on, say, your third set if you are still completely gassed from your second set, or if you have some built-up fatigue that hasn't dissipated, even though it can't all dissipate, you know, you have to get some level of recovery.
• 3:33
  Philip Pape: So it's not that rest periods are doing something magic to your muscles, it's just that it's buying you the recoverability and the ability to do the work for the next set.
• 3:42
  Philip Pape: And this tends to matter more for strength than it does for hypertrophy.
• 3:48
  Philip Pape: The time efficiency review that I mentioned earlier puts it at around one to two minutes for beginners and at least two minutes for train lifters, especially on compounds.
• 3:59
  Philip Pape: So that sounds like not very much time, right?
• 4:01
  Philip Pape: And I think the mistake isn't that you're resting too long.
• 4:05
  Philip Pape: There's nothing wrong with resting longer, right?
• 4:08
  Philip Pape: It's just going to take more time.
• 4:10
  Philip Pape: I mean, that is the big the best thing.
• 4:12
  Philip Pape: The first thing everybody reaches for when they're trying to save time is often shortening their rest periods.
• 4:18
  Philip Pape: I get this all the time: like, hey, is it okay if I just rest for shorter amounts of time to shorten my set?
• 4:24
  Philip Pape: And I don't think that is the best lever to pull.
• 4:26
  Philip Pape: I'm gonna give you the best one in a second.
• 4:28
  Philip Pape: Before I do, I have to tell you about my app, Fitness Lab, because it is tied to this subject very relevantly right now.
• 4:38
  Philip Pape: We just released a huge update with a new and improved workout logger.
• 4:42
  Philip Pape: And the way that we designed rest periods into the app is actually pretty cool.
• 4:46
  Philip Pape: It's very adaptive.
• 4:47
  Philip Pape: I don't, I haven't seen any other app on the market that does this.
• 4:50
  Philip Pape: In Fitness Lab, when you fat Fitness Lab, when you finish a set and you log it, a rest timer starts, shows you the time before your next set.
• 4:57
  Philip Pape: Okay, great.
• 4:58
  Philip Pape: A million apps have that.
• 4:59
  Philip Pape: You know, there's not a timer during the set itself.
• 5:02
  Philip Pape: We're not a guided workout in that sense.
• 5:04
  Philip Pape: We're not going to time you before you start.
• 5:06
  Philip Pape: None of that stuff matters, right?
• 5:07
  Philip Pape: You might be waiting for the rack, you might be talking to somebody.
• 5:10
  Philip Pape: We don't care about that.
• 5:11
  Philip Pape: We want you to have some good work in your training session.
• 5:14
  Philip Pape: But for the rest period, there's often confusion about how long I do that.
• 5:18
  Philip Pape: So the way we design this is compound lifts get the longest rests and isolation lifts get fewer.
• 5:26
  Philip Pape: So the smaller the lift, the shorter the rest period.
• 5:29
  Philip Pape: But cooler than that is if your session is shorter, like if you say, hey, I only have 30 minutes to train instead of 60 or 90 minutes, we actually scale those a little bit.
• 5:38
  Philip Pape: We actually scale them down a little bit.
• 5:40
  Philip Pape: Now, the app is smart enough to know that if you're only doing, say, three lifts and you've got a full hour, there's no need to scale it down.
• 5:46
  Philip Pape: But if you're trying to fit in a bunch of lifts and you only have a certain amount of time, the app is going to scale the rest periods down, but within reason, within still the window that it needs to give you adequate rest, if that makes sense.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: Right.
• 5:59
  Philip Pape: So that is pretty cool.
• 6:00
  Philip Pape: Now, the app will also simply remove movements or working sets to help meet the time.
• 6:06
  Philip Pape: It'll do a bunch of smart ways to give you the right program.
• 6:10
  Philip Pape: It doesn't squeeze the rest periods to be shorter than necessary just to make the math work, just like the research says, you know, we don't want to do that.
• 6:17
  Philip Pape: And that is what the app does.
• 6:19
  Philip Pape: So the app's actually on sale right now.
• 6:21
  Philip Pape: The public sales 20% off the first payment, but I'm actually giving a special deal to my email subscribers of 30% off permanently.
• 6:31
  Philip Pape: But you have to join my list to get that.
• 6:33
  Philip Pape: So all you have to do is go to witsandweights.com slash email and join my list.
• 6:38
  Philip Pape: And the welcome email right now will actually mention the exact link to go get that 30% off permanently.
• 6:44
  Philip Pape: If you're already on my list, just reply to any of my emails and say, hey, I want the 30% off deal.
• 6:49
  Philip Pape: You should be hearing about it anyway in your inbox over the next couple weeks.
• 6:53
  Philip Pape: The sale is good from September 1st through September 13th.
• 6:57
  Philip Pape: This is a Labor Day sale.
• 6:58
  Philip Pape: We're celebrating all of us who work hard and we want to train and we want to be consistent this time of year.
• 7:04
  Philip Pape: So again, go to wits and weights.com slash email join my list and then just look for the welcome email with that discount.
• 7:11
  Philip Pape: If you don't see it, just reply and let me know.
• 7:13
  Philip Pape: And that is for the latest and greatest release of Fitness Lab with the all new workout logger.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 7:19
  Philip Pape: So the better lever, I think, instead of just shortening rest periods, is to change what you do during the rest periods.
• 7:27
  Philip Pape: What do I mean by that?
• 7:28
  Philip Pape: Well, let's talk about supersets.
• 7:30
  Philip Pape: There was a meta-analysis last year of 19 studies with 313 people on supersets.
• 7:34
  Philip Pape: And what I mean by that is you pair up two exercises back to back and then take your rest after the pair.
• 7:42
  Philip Pape: Now, you could superset a warm-up for a lift while you're working in between the sets of your previous lift.
• 7:51
  Philip Pape: That's another way to superset where you're not really supersetting the working sets, but you're supersetting the warm-up of the next set.
• 7:57
  Philip Pape: And I love to do this for smaller movements like biceps and triceps, for example, or leg extensions and hamstring curls.
• 8:04
  Philip Pape: And what they found in the research is that supersets, of course, they cut your duration of your session.
• 8:09
  Philip Pape: They save you a bunch of time.
• 8:10
  Philip Pape: In some cases, close to half, which makes sense.
• 8:14
  Philip Pape: You're doing two instead of one at the same time, but without compromising your training volume, your muscle activation, perceived recovery, long-term strength, hypertrophy outcomes.
• 8:24
  Philip Pape: And we've seen this in a lot of recent research.
• 8:26
  Philip Pape: That is very, very powerful and could have a huge effect on your actual life if you're trying to save time.
• 8:32
  Philip Pape: Now, the P the thing where people screw it up is they pair the wrong exercises.
• 8:36
  Philip Pape: You've got to pair exercises that don't really compete with each other if you want to get the most out of this and the minimum fatigue.
• 8:43
  Philip Pape: Now, you might pair exercises that are similar on purpose.
• 8:46
  Philip Pape: That's a different thing, but just in the interest of saving time without compromising anything, you might pair a push with a pull, a row with a press, upper with lower, you know, a biceps or triceps, right?
• 8:57
  Philip Pape: Agonist or antagonist muscles, they call them, because that way you're not hitting a tired muscle already.
• 9:04
  Philip Pape: It's fresh for both.
• 9:05
  Philip Pape: All right.
• 9:06
  Philip Pape: So supersets are a great way to do that.
• 9:08
  Philip Pape: Now, there are some, I'll say, trade-offs with supersets.
• 9:12
  Philip Pape: One is that they do feel harder because you've got this higher perceived exertion, potentially a little more muscle damage, but that's that's kind of a side thing that I'm not as worried about.
• 9:21
  Philip Pape: Possibly more recovery needed before the next session, but I really minimize most of those things because I've seen for most people it's just a practical savings in time.
• 9:30
  Philip Pape: You might need a little more work capacity, you might be a little bit more out of breath.
• 9:34
  Philip Pape: You can still take a little bit of rest period.
• 9:35
  Philip Pape: You don't have to just go bam, bam, bam, bam.
• 9:37
  Philip Pape: You could still take 30 seconds, but you're you're saving, you know, one, two, three minutes each set and it really adds up.
• 9:44
  Philip Pape: So I wouldn't superset like major movements, like a squat with something.
• 9:48
  Philip Pape: Again, unless you're just supersetting the warm-up of the next period.
• 9:51
  Philip Pape: So if you want to get a good amount of quality work into like, you know, 30 minutes, but really get a lot of intensity in there, this is a great tool for that.
• 9:59
  Philip Pape: And I wouldn't do with everything, I would do it with a couple pairs of exercises.
• 10:02
  Philip Pape: So again, if you're looking at rest periods, I would still keep them long enough to recover to be able to go hard on your next set.
• 10:08
  Philip Pape: And the only time I would shorten them is for special cases, like if you are deliberately trying to work on your work capacity or speed work, or in the case I just said here to save time but without really compromising anything because you're overlapping exercises.
• 10:21
  Philip Pape: So you're essentially getting the rest period built in when you're working on the other exercise.
• 10:26
  Philip Pape: All right, before you go, the Labor Day deal and Fitness Lab closes September 13th.
• 10:30
  Philip Pape: If you want the special email subscriber deal 30% off for life, for life, I want you to go to witsandweights.com slash email, join my list, and then you'll see it there in your welcome email.
• 10:44
  Philip Pape: If you don't see it, or if you're already on the list and you haven't seen this, just reply to me and say, hey, Philip, give me the 30% off for email subscribers, and I will give it to you.
• 10:53
  Philip Pape: And by the way, people always ask that there's a free trial.
• 10:56
  Philip Pape: You can cancel within the first seven days.
• 10:58
  Philip Pape: So you can cancel your subscription in the first seven days.
• 11:01
  Philip Pape: It's essentially like a free trial.
• 11:03
  Philip Pape: Go to wits and weights.comslash email for that.
• 11:06
  Philip Pape: All right, that's it for the bonus episode.
• 11:08
  Philip Pape: I kept it short, and I will talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.