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TRY AS YOU might, you can’t pump out reps forever when you’re working toward building bigger muscles. Eventually, you’ll be too fatigued to complete another rep with good form, a point referred to as “technical failure.” Pushing beyond your last good rep can lead to sloppy lifting mechanics, which can compromise your results or, worse increase your risk of injury. If you find yourself stuck lifting the same weight for the same reps, it may be time to get creative with how you push past that iron hurdle.
One way to head off the siren song of ego lifting is by implementing a planned rest-pause set. It’s an intense lifting technique that requires focus and intention, and as effective as it can be, it shouldn’t be done for every set or even every exercise.
By briefly resting after reaching failure, you can squeeze out a few more quality reps using the same weight. A few extra reps might not seem like a big deal, but they can add up over time, giving your muscles an extra dose of the tension that drives growth.
How to Use Rest-Pause Sets
To do a rest-pause set, you’ll take an exercise to the point where you can’t complete another rep with good form. You’ll then rest for five to 15 seconds—in one MH workout plan, fitness director Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S. recommends taking “three deep breaths” for a pause—then squeeze out a few more reps (expect to be able to do two to four) using the same weight. You can repeat this process, though one additional round of reps is a good starting point.
If you rest longer than 20 seconds, Alexander Rothstein, an exercise physiologist and program coordinator of exercise science at the New York Institute of Technology, says you’re starting to approach a standard rest interval. “If you give yourself that brief moment to… recover, and then you continue the set, you haven’t flushed away all of the waste products, and you haven’t fully recovered your energy stores, but you are still capable of doing a few more high-quality reps,” he explains.
The purpose of a rest-pause set is to push your muscle to complete a few more hard (but high-quality) reps. If you’re aiming to build muscle, it’s those hard reps near the end of a set that are key; a rest-pause set allows you to sneak in a few more of those reps. While lifters of any experience level can perform rest-pause sets, they’re especially useful for advanced lifters who’ve already cashed in their newbie gains and find it increasingly difficult to progress their lifts and add muscle.
Say you’re doing the dumbbell bench press, an exercise on which you’ve been stuck using the same 50-pound dumbbells for sets of 8 to 10 reps for over a month. You get to that 10th rep and, once again, can’t muster another. Instead of calling it this time, you’ll sit up, rest the dumbbells on your thighs for 15 seconds, and then bust out another two reps. Congrats. You just eked out more worthwhile reps, which, over time, should help you progress.
“But isn’t that cheating?” you ask. No—and even if it were, there are times when cheating pays off for muscle gains. And research suggests that traditional sets and rest-pause sets can produce similar gains in strength and muscle. One small study had 18 experienced lifters perform six weeks of traditional sets or rest-pause training with the same relative load. One group completed three sets of six reps; the other did one set to failure and then as many rest-pause sets as necessary to hit 18 reps. Both groups achieved similar strength gains, but the rest-pause group experienced greater increases in thigh muscle thickness and leg-press muscular endurance.
As for how to start using them, pick one exercise per workout—ideally, a move you’re struggling to progress—and do the final set of that exercise as a rest-pause set. This often works best with the final exercise in your workout. The rest-pause protocol can be downright exhausting, and using them too early may compromise your ability to hit your typical reps and weights during subsequent sets.
One note: You can perform rest-pause sets with just about any exercise, but there are two places where they’re especially beneficial. Weight machines are the safest, letting you easily push to fatigue, then take your brief “rest”. Exercises that offer support for stabilizing muscles (think: chest-supported rows) also work well. And many single-joint free-weight exercises, like dumbbell curls are good options. If you’re going to attempt a rest-pause set with the bench press or back squat, have a good spotter on hand.
Rest-Pause Sets vs. Other Intensity Techniques
There’s more than one way to increase the volume of a single set, and these methods are often referred to as intensity techniques. Below, we’ll briefly compare the three most popular ones to rest-pause sets.
Drop Sets
A drop set is when you reach failure on a lift, then immediately reduce the load (often by 10 to 20 percent) and try to squeeze out a few more reps. In many ways, it’s similar to a rest-pause set, but because you’re lightening the weight, you’ll find it easier to maintain good form.
“Personally, I just like the volume approach of drop sets,” Rothstein says. “When you do drop sets, obviously the load is being reduced, so it’s not as potentially strength beneficial as it might be to just do rest-pauses and still lift heavy loads.”
Cluster Sets
A cluster set is when you break up a traditional straight set into a series of mini sets, or clusters, with short rest periods between each. They’re a popular training method among strength athletes, such as powerlifters and weightlifters, who want to accumulate more total tonnage.
Say, for example, you can typically deadlift 250 pounds for eight reps. You could load 285 to 300 pounds on the bar and perform four two-rep clusters, resting 15 to 30 seconds between, to complete the same eight reps with roughly 15 to 20 percent more weight.
The main difference between rest-pause and cluster sets is that cluster sets strategically use rest to achieve a preplanned number of reps, often at a higher weight. Rest-pause sets have you take a few breaths after reaching failure to push past what you can normally do rep-wise. Cluster sets are likely superior to rest-pause sets for building strength.
Forced Reps
Instead of resting and then doing more reps once you reach failure, you can perform forced reps, where your spotter provides just enough assistance to help you complete a few more reps with good form. Forced reps are usually done on exercises where a spotter can easily help; think the bench press or certain machine exercises, not deadlifts or heavy back squats.
While you’re technically pushing past failure, you don’t have control over how much assistance your spotter provides; this can vary from workout to workout or even rep to rep. You can, however, control the eccentric portion of the contraction after the spotter has helped you, so if you’re doing forced reps, it’s a must to lower the weight slowly to get the most from these. Forced reps can be a useful occasional technique if you have an experienced spotter who knows how much assistance to provide; because they’re forcing you to acclimate to increased time-under-tension with a weight that you know is challenging.
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