Adjusting Rest Times

During a set, both your muscles and your central nervous system (CNS) become fatigued. With every rep, this fatigue increases, which can lower the quality and force you can produce in the next set.

For muscle growth, it’s crucial to generate high mechanical tension in as many sets as possible and to recruit as many motor units as possible (including the large, high-threshold fibers). That works best when you rest long enough to achieve roughly the same load and rep quality in the next set.

​Important: Full recovery between sets is neither necessary nor ideal—some residual fatigue will always remain and even contributes to the training stimulus. Longer rests help reduce fatigue enough to accumulate more “fresh” reps with high mechanical tension. Shorter rests primarily increase metabolic fatigue (e.g., burning in the muscle), which is used mainly for strength-endurance goals.

Rest allows your muscles and CNS to briefly recover and regenerate between heavy working sets. The goal isn’t full recovery. Without rests, you’d perform worse in the next set and leave potential gains on the table. Rest times should be adjusted to your training goal.

That depends on your goal. If you want to improve maximal strength, rest 3–5 minutes to enter the next set highly recovered. If your focus is strength endurance, aim for longer working durations and shorter rests—30–60 seconds is typically enough.
If your goal is hypertrophy, an optimal rest duration usually falls somewhere between 60–180 seconds.

If your next set trains a muscle group that wasn’t used in the previous exercise—or acts as an antagonist—you can shorten or even skip the rest. This applies, for example, to supersets or circuit training, because the target muscle can recover while you train the other muscle. Still, listen to your body. Every exercise stresses the CNS; if you never give it a break, you’ll notice a much higher heart rate and rapid breathing.

A common, sensible superset is an isolation biceps exercise paired with an isolation triceps exercise. CNS fatigue remains manageable. Theoretically, you could also superset squats with bench press, since they involve different muscles. However, CNS stress is high due to complexity and the involvement of many muscles. If you perform both as a superset, your CNS will likely become the limiting factor, your technique may suffer, and you’ll create less muscle stimulus—so we don’t recommend this combination.

With unilateral movements, only one arm or leg is loaded at a time. After finishing one side, you can in principle switch directly to the other side and then start your set rest.
However, unilateral exercises also stress the CNS and can leave you out of breath. If you notice faster breathing and an elevated heart rate when switching sides, take a short 15–30 second pause—just long enough for your breathing to normalize.

After you finish a set, the rest timer starts automatically. When 10 seconds remain, the “get-ready” alert sounds so you can get back into position. Once the rest is over, the “end-of-rest” alert plays and you should begin the next set.

After the final set of an exercise, no rest timer starts. In most cases, you’ll switch to a different exercise—and often a different muscle group. Breaking down the previous setup and preparing the next one usually provides enough time.

The suggested rest time is based on several parameters. We differentiate between larger and smaller exercises, and your available training time also plays a role.

Our algorithm suggests a rest time based on exercise size, number of sets, and your training time. You can adjust it at any time to personalize your training.

You can increase or decrease the rest timer in 10-second steps. Just tap the timer and set the duration that feels best for you. The timer will be applied to the upcoming sets of this exercise and, next week, to the same exercise on the same training day.

You’ll find both alert sounds in the Training tab under Training settings. There you can adjust the volume or set them to silent.