How long should you rest between sets?

Where to start, and what changes it

Our plans start most sets at about a minute and a half, the big lifts at a minute and a half to two minutes, and small exercises like curls at about a minute. Those are coaching defaults, not lines the research drew. They’re well supported for people new to lifting and a reasonable start for everyone else, and they keep a session inside the 45 to 75 minutes we usually plan for. From there, the rest moves with the set in front of you.

Start with the exercise and how hard the set was. A hard set of squats, deadlifts or leg presses takes more out of you than a set of curls, and it isn’t only very heavy sets that need the time. In one study, trained men did five sets with a weight they could lift ten times. With a minute’s rest, their reps started dropping from the second set; with three or five minutes, from the third. On the leg press, five minutes kept more reps than three. In another study, with sets of 8 to 12 reps over eight weeks, trained men resting three minutes built more strength and more thigh muscle than men resting one. So a demanding set of a big lift can warrant three or four minutes.

Small exercises tend to come back quicker when the weights are heavy: in trained men lifting a weight they could manage three times, a machine chest fly kept its reps on two minutes of rest while the bench press needed three to five, which fits our plans giving small exercises the shortest start.

What you’re training for shifts it too. For the most strength on heavy lifts, a review of 23 studies found that people new to lifting got their full gains with one to two minutes of rest, while experienced lifters seemed to need more than two. For muscle, the aim is to keep your reps up, and in the studies that meant resting more than a minute. For conditioning, short rests are part of the point, at some cost to strength.

And then there’s you, on the day. In our coaching, a tired day or your first week back after being sick is a reason to take a little longer, and that’s fine, while on a day you feel great you may be ready sooner. Rest also tends to stretch as a session goes on: in one study, strength athletes choosing their own rest took about three and a half minutes before their second heavy set and more than four and a half before their last, and lifted just as well as when they were held to three or five minutes.

What moves your rest

None of these numbers is precise science. The American College of Sports Medicine’s 2026 position stand, which pulled together the research reviews on every part of a training plan, found that resting under a minute or longer didn’t change how much stronger people got, and that there wasn’t enough evidence to say either way for muscle. What matters more than the seconds is whether your next set is a good one.

How to tell when you’re ready for the next set

The most useful thing to learn here isn’t a number. It’s a question to ask yourself before each set: do I feel ready to do another good set, with the weight, the technique and the effort I’m aiming for? If the answer is no, take more time. If it’s yes, go, and let the set tell you how it went. If the reps come in well short of what you expected, or your form slips, give the next rest longer.

Your breathing is one clue. If you’re still out of breath, you’re probably not ready. But getting your breath back doesn’t mean the muscle is ready too: in the study of five sets with a ten-rep weight, even the machine chest fly and the leg extension kept more reps with longer rests. So if your curls keep coming up short after a minute, give them longer as well.

Ready doesn’t mean every set has to match the one before. In that same study, reps fell over the five sets whatever the rest, three and five minutes included. Losing a rep or two as the sets go on is normal, and doesn’t by itself mean you rested too little.

If you’re new to lifting, we treat this as a skill you learn, and it takes practice. A timer gives you a starting point while you learn: rest a minute and a half, notice how the next set goes, and try a little more or less next time. That’s how you build a feel for how long each exercise takes to come back. The timer stays useful once you know your rests, mostly to stop a rest from stretching: the phone that holds your timer holds everything else too, and five minutes go quickly in there.

Resting by feel holds up in the research. A 2014 review found no evidence that fixed rests work better than rests you judge yourself, and when the studies were pooled in 2026, people who rested until they felt ready kept their reps about as well as people on a timer. In one eight-week trial, trained men who chose their own rest did more reps than men on a fixed 75 seconds and gained the same strength. They just took longer.

If you’ve played World of Warcraft, you’ve timed a rest like this before. Between fights you sit down and drink to get your mana back, the energy your spells run on, then pull the next group of monsters. Pull at half mana and the fight goes worse. Sit until the bar is full after every single fight and the dungeon takes all night. Rest between sets works the same way, except the bar is invisible, which is what the question is for.

So the person on the next bench resting four or five minutes may be doing exactly the right thing, if they’re squatting heavy. On a set of curls, they could probably go sooner.

Do short rests build more muscle?

Most pages about rest give you the same chart: 30 to 90 seconds between sets for muscle, two to five minutes for strength. The muscle half comes from an older idea. Short rests make your body release more of some hormones right after a workout, testosterone and growth hormone among them, and the thinking was that the spike builds extra muscle. A 2009 review suggested 30 to 60 seconds for muscle growth for that reason, and the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s 30 to 90 seconds rests largely on the same kind of research.

When researchers measured the muscle itself, the idea didn’t hold up. In a small ten-week study of men new to lifting, the ones resting a minute had the bigger hormone response in the first week, but the ones resting two and a half minutes grew more arm muscle, and by the end the hormone difference was gone.

A 2024 review pooled nine studies that compared rest times and measured muscle growth. Resting more than a minute came out slightly ahead of resting a minute or less. Past about a minute and a half, the review couldn’t show any further gain, and the authors call that part unsettled: for the thighs, the longest rests, three minutes or more, came out a little ahead, but with too much uncertainty to count on. Most of those studies lasted five to ten weeks and were in young people new to lifting, so the picture for experienced lifters is thinner.

What the longer rests protect is the next set’s reps, and one study shows what those are worth. Twenty-eight people new to lifting trained one leg exercise twice a week for ten weeks, each leg with its own rest time between sets. Legs resting three minutes grew about 13 percent, and legs resting one minute about 7. Legs that rested one minute but did extra sets to make up the lost work grew about 13 percent too, and legs that rested three minutes but were held to the smaller amount of work grew about 7. Strength went up about the same in all four. So the rest wasn’t what built the muscle. The work it made room for was. It’s one small study on one exercise, but it tests the idea directly.

Put together, that turns the old chart into something simpler. Short rests aren’t better for muscle, and a minute doesn’t ruin anything either: it costs you some reps, and the reps are what seem to count. Resting longer than a minute and a half hasn’t been shown to add muscle on its own, but that isn’t the same as being pointless. Whenever a longer rest gets you a better next set, it’s doing its job. And if you like resting a minute, that leg study points to the fix: add a set to make up the reps.

How to save time without cutting your rest

Do a second exercise while the first muscle rests. Two exercises done back to back, with the rest after the pair, are called a superset, and the kind that saves time pairs muscles that don’t overlap: a set of chest presses, straight into a set of rows, then rest and go again. Your chest rests while your back works, so each muscle still gets its time, and you spend less of the session standing around.

And it holds up in the research. Across 19 studies that compared supersets with ordinary sets, people got through about the same number of reps in less time, and the few that ran for weeks found about the same gains in strength and muscle. A review of time-saving methods puts the saving at roughly half the session. Most of that research is in young men who already lift, but in a study of 30 adults new to lifting, the ordinary session took 60 percent longer than the superset one, and two in three said they’d rather train with supersets.

The cost is that it’s harder. People rate superset sessions as tougher, and their heart rate runs higher. In one ten-week trial of whole-body supersets twice a week, the superset group made somewhat less progress on the lat pulldown than the group doing ordinary sets, and about the same on the leg press and the bench press, with the same changes in muscle and fat.

On our full-body workout plan, that means pairing the chest press with the seated row, and the lat pulldown with the shoulder press, and keeping the two leg exercises as ordinary sets with their full rest. The leg exercises are the ones that leave you out of breath, and both of them work your butt, so they’d be competing for the same muscle. At home, the dumbbell bench press pairs with the one-arm row, and the chest-supported row with the shoulder press. Start with about a minute’s rest after each pair, and take longer if the first exercise isn’t ready again. By the time you’re back on it, that muscle has rested through the second exercise and the minute, about two minutes in all.

A circuit is the same idea with more exercises: one set of each, one after another, then round again. With more exercises in a row there’s even less standing around, and circuit training builds strength and muscle compared with not training at all. Just keep some real rest in it. In a five-week study of women doing the same high-rep workout, the ones resting 20 seconds between sets gained less than half as much leg strength as the ones resting 80, though their sprint fitness improved more. With almost no rest, a circuit leans toward a conditioning workout.

If a session still won’t fit, the next thing to change is the week itself, which our page on choosing a workout split covers. And if you’d rather have a coach build your week around the time you actually have, rest included, that is what we do at Gains For Gamers.